Roger’s note: this is not really news to us Canadians or anyone else who has been paying attention.

But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.

“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”

“My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”

The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.

Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.

Those who seek to discredit this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful of the other. Wave the flag. Sing the national anthem. Swell with national hubris. Be vigilant of the hidden terrorist. Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines, wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” were trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups and said that “if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”

No matter that in both Canada and the United States suing the government to seek redress is the right of every citizen. No matter that the opposition to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines has its roots in Canada. No matter that the effort by citizens in the U.S. and in Canada to fight climate change is about self-preservation. The minister, in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry like the energy czars in most of the other industrialized nations, seeks to pit “loyal” Canadians against “disloyal” Canadians. Those with whom we will build this movement of resistance will not in some cases be our own. They may speak Arabic, pray five times a day toward Mecca and be holding off the police thugs in the center of Cairo. Or they may be generously pierced and tattooed and speak Danish or they may be Mandarin-speaking workers battling China’s totalitarian capitalism. These are differences that make no difference.

“My country right or wrong,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote, is on the same level as “My mother, drunk or sober.”

Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were masters of this game. They recruited local quislings to carry out policies and repression that were determined in London or Paris or Rome. Popular anger was vented against these personages, and native group vied with native group in battles for scraps of influence. And when one native ruler was overthrown or, more rarely, voted out of power, these imperial machines recruited a new face. The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.

This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is important. It targets the center of power—global financial institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris. The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere. Leah Henderson is not only right. She is my compatriot.

Roger’s note: I am no fan of the Obama health care legislation, which gave away the store to the health insurance industry and by no means provides free healthcare to the poor; but this image is a perfect antidote to the mean spirited and  hypocritical “Christian” Republicans, to Ron Paul and the other Ayn Rand worshipers.

Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald.More Glenn Greenwald

Roger’s note: given the outrageous and obscene salaries that some elite athletes make, it might be tempting to dismiss the concerns of sports professional from a labor point of view.  This would be an error.  The vast majority do not make those multi million dollar salaries, and even if the average player is well paid in comparison with other classes of workers, the same issues are involved with respect to working conditions, benefits, etc.  And one should not forget the physical beating that professional athletes take and pay for the rest of their lives.  In other words, the principle of worker rights is most definitely in play with respect to professional sports.  The NFLPA executive director put it most succinctly: “First and foremost, it’s important that our young men understand that they are just like every man and woman in America who works for a living. The minute that any sports player believes for whatever reason that they are outside the management-labor paradigm, I guarantee you that the minute you start thinking that way is the day you will start to lose ground.”

DeMaurice Smith: First and foremost, it’s important that our young men understand that they are just like every man and woman in America who works for a living. The minute that any sports player believes for whatever reason that they are outside the management-labor paradigm, I guarantee you that the minute you start thinking that way is the day you will start to lose ground. Our guys get their fingers broken, their backs broken, their heads concussed and their knees torn up because they actually put their hands into the ground and work for a living, and I would much rather have them understand and appreciate and frankly embrace the beauty of what it is to work and provide for their family.

[On this issue] we are in lock-step with organized labor. I’m proud to sit on the executive council of the AFL-CIO. Why? Because we share all the same issues that the American people share. We want decent wages. We want a fair pension. We want to be taken care of when we get hurt. We want a decent and safe working environment. So when you look at proposed legislation in a place like Indiana that wants to call it something like “Right to Work,” I mean, let’s just put the hammer on the nail. It’s untrue. This bill has nothing to do with a “right to work.” If folks in Indiana and that great legislature want to pass a bill that really is something called “Right to Work,” have a constitutional amendment that guarantees every citizen a job, that’s a “right to work.” What this is instead is a right to ensure that ordinary working citizens can’t get together as a team, can’t organize, can’t stand together and can’t fight management on an even playing field. From a sports union, our union, our men and their families understand the power of management and understand how much power management can wield over an individual person. So don’t call it a “right to work.” If you want to have an intelligent discussion about what the bill is, call it what it is. Call it an anti-organizing bill. Fine. If that’s what the people want to do in order to put a bill out there, let’s cast a vote on whether or not ordinary workers can get together and represent themselves, and let’s have a real referendum.

DZ: What would you say to someone who says, ‘Well, people who support this type of right to work legislation, they are just doing it to protect unions. They don’t care about the majority of workers who aren’t in unions”?

DS: Well take a look over the last 100 years. I used to say that we have forgotten a lot of the lessons from organized labor over the last 100 years, but I’m now convinced that we never learned them. Whether your talking about fire escapes outside of buildings or sprinkler systems inside of buildings, fair wages for a days work, laws that prevent child labor, things that led to the abolishing of sweatshops in America, let alone management contributing to healthcare plans or a decent pension… all those things over the last 100 years were not gifts from management. Someone in a corporate suite didn’t decide one day that they would bestow that wonderful right upon a working person. The way those rights were achieved was through the collective will of a group of workers who stood together and said, ‘This is what we believe is fair, and we are all going to stand together and demand that those things be provided to us. We’ll do it as a collective group. You may be able to pick off one of us or two of us or five of us, but you will not be able to pick off all of us.’ When you look at legislation that is designed to tear apart that ability to work as a team… that is not just anti-union. That is anti–working man and woman, and that’s why we weighed in on this one.

DZ: When you put out a statement like this, does it also goes out to every player so they’re aware of this campaign?

DS: It goes out to the players, the board, and the executive committee, and here in this case, we actually reached out to former Indianapolis Colts, former players who went to college in Indiana, and those players who live in Indiana, and asked them if they’d want to sign on. So we have a very impressive list of players. Rex Grossman is a local player who signed on. Jeff George, former quarterback for [among other teams] the Indianapolis Colts, also signed on. I’m proud of our guys who signed off on this because I do think that they appreciate and understand that in the same way that those things that we were talking about things that have been changes for good for ordinary workers in America, there isn’t a player in the National Football League who shouldn’t understand that every benefit that we have in the collective bargaining agreement is one that was negotiated by a collective of players standing together. Coming out of this lockout, perhaps it was the first time some of our young men understood what the collective bargaining agreement is all about. [Author’s note: De Smith said after the interview that Tim Tebow was behind the NFLPA 100 percent during the lockout. Given some of my own critiques of Tebow’s politics, I felt obliged to include that nugget.]

DZ: The news this week was that this bill was rammed through committee, so it is advancing through the Indiana State House. Has there been any talk about what else the NFLPA might do? Any follow up to the statement that you put out?

DS: I wrote an op-ed that has been placed in the main Indianapolis newspaper. If the issue is still percolating by the time of Super Bowl, I can promise you that the players of the National Football League and their union will be up front about what we think about this and why. Look, we have players who played in Indianapolis obviously, but I made no secret coming into this fight that the lockout, organized and implemented by a group of owners, was not only designed to hurt players but all of the people who work in and around our stadium: the hospitality network, the network of restaurants, bars, all of those things that are connected and touch our business were affected by the lockout that we frankly did not want to happen. So there is never going to be a day where players are going to divorce themselves from the ordinary people who work around their sports, and we’re sure as heck not going to divorce ourselves from the fans who dig our game.

DZ: If the legislation is still percolating, there will be people who will be doing legal, nonviolent protests around the Super Bowl game to try to leverage the spotlight of the Super Bowl to raise the issue for a national audience, and I know that they’re getting various union endorsements to do so. Is that something the NFLPA would support, the idea of a demonstration, a legal, nonviolent demonstration outside the Super Bowl?

DS: Yeah, possibly. We’ve been on picket lines in Indianapolis already with hotel workers who were basically pushed to the point of breaking on the hotel rooms that they had to clean because they were not union workers. We’ve been on picket lines in Boston and San Antonio. So, the idea of participating in a legal protest is something that we’ve done before.

We’ll have to see what is going to go on when we’re there, but issues like this are incredibly important to us. If we can be in a position just to make sure that we raise the level of the debate to the point where it is a fair and balanced discussion about the issues, I think that is something that our players can help do. Obviously, players have a very high profile, and I think its important for them to take on issues which are important to them and be in a position to talk about them, raise the level of consciousness about them.

If we do one thing by making this statement, and it is raising the level of the debate, and to have real people ask real questions about it, we’ve served our purpose.

By Judd Legum  on Jan 26, 2012 at 3:25 pm, www.thinkprogress.org

After resisting for months, Mitt Romney finally released one year of his tax returns this week. Here’s what we learned (click to enlarge):

Mitt Romney’s father George released 12 years of his taxes when he ran for president in 1968, stating, “One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show.” Please sign our petition and help us put the pressure on Romney to follow his father’s example.

Guatemala’s former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, center, sits between his lawyers as they listen to prosecutors in a courtroom in Guatemala City on Thursday, Jan. 26, 2012.  (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)  

Roger’s note:  I am reminded of those four words that contain almost everything one need’s to know to understand our crazy world: No Justice, No Peace.  The charges against Montt are a good precedent, there are many others who should be facing the same justice, including Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and the rest of the American war criminals.  And need I mention that the brutal Guatemalan dictatorship not only had the full support of the United States government but was in fact heir to power in Guatemala as a result of the CIA directed coup d’etat in the mid fifties that deposed a progressive elected president (as with Pinochet in Chile, etc.)?

By ROMINA RUIZ-GOIRIENA , www.huffingtonpost.com, January 27, 2012

GUATEMALA CITY — The defense lawyer for former dictator Efrain Rios Montt said Friday that a judge violated due process when she issued

unprecedented genocide charges against Rios Montt for conduct during Guatemala’s bloody civil war.

Danilo Rodriguez Galvez said Judge Carol Patricia Flores was supposed to issue her decision only after hearing testimony on allegations that Rios Montt was involved in hundreds of murders, human violations and the displacement of 29,000 people during the three-decade war.

Flores charged Rios Montt with genocide and crimes against humanity late Thursday, hours after he appeared in court but refused to testify about the allegations.

It’s the first time a Latin American court has charged former president with genocide.

Flores first lectured Rios Montt for an hour on the allegations, citing witness testimony, before issuing her decision, Rodriguez said. He said that her conduct resembled a conviction and that he would file a formal complaint next week.

“The judge’s duty was to report the resolution. The fact is that she talked for an hour as if the case had already been prosecuted,” Rodriguez said.

Flores said Friday she would not comment because the complaint had yet to be formally filed.

Rios Montt, who ruled Guatemala in 1982-83 after a military coup, is accused in 266 incidents that resulted in 1,771 deaths, 1,400 human rights violations and the displacement of 29,000 indigenous Guatemalans.

The war ended in 1996 with the signing of a peace accord between the government and leftist guerrillas. The conflict left more than 200,000 dead and missing, 93 percent of them by state forces and paramilitary groups, according to a U.N. report. Hundreds of Mayan villages were largely wiped away.

“I understand what the prosecution is saying and I won’t respond,” Rios Montt said before the judge, later adding: “The point is to do justice, not vengeance.”

He had immunity from prosecution as a member of congress, but it expired Jan. 14.

After hearing daylong testimony, some by victims and witnesses of atrocities, Flores deliberated for three hours before issuing her decision. Rios Montt faces prosecution on charges he was the mastermind of the abuses in his roles as head of the military and Guatemala’s equivalent of the secret service.

“Unfortunately there are cases like this where people have been waiting 29 years for justice,” Flores said during the testimony.

The next step is for the prosecution to present the formal case against Rios Montt before the court.

He was ordered to be held under house arrest and to pay a $64,000 bond.

The former dictator was also told not to communicate with others accused in the case, which also involves country’s first genocide charges against retired generals Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez and Hector Mario Lopez Fuentes, the army chief of staff under Rios Montt.

Crimes against humanity charges were suspended earlier this month for retired Gen. Oscar Humberto Mejia, the defense minister for Rios Montt who later deposed him to take over the presidency. The court determined Mejia doesn’t have the physical or mental faculties to go to trial.

Rodriguez and Lopez have also claimed health conditions have kept them from court proceedings. All are in their 80s.

Prosecutors argued Thursday that as de facto president, Rios Montt was responsible for the army’s “scorched earth” policy in communities where there was potential support for the leftist rebels.

Prosecutor Manuel Vasquez also accused him of authorizing massacres of ethnic Ixil Maya as well as sexual assaults on the women.

“The politics that caused the massacres started in 1965 and continued throughout,” Rodriguez argued on behalf of Rios Montt. “You can’t ascribe authorship of that long-term political policy to Rios Montt.”

Zury Rios, the former leader’s daughter who heads the Guatemala Republican Front political party, said the case against her father came from outside interests.

It was first brought in 2000 by the Center for Legal Action for Human Rights based on testimony of victims and their families.

Guatemala’s 1992 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Rigoberta Menchu, also has accused Rios Montt of genocide in a Spanish court.

The country’s recently inaugurated president, Otto Perez Molina, was a top military officer during the war and has long insisted there were no massacres, human rights violations or genocide in the conflict.

But his close advisers have said he supports meeting the conditions set by various U.S. congressional appropriations acts for restoring aid that was first eliminated in 1978 halfway through the civil war. Among the required steps is reforming a weak justice system that has failed to bring those responsible for wartime abuses to justice.

The unprecedented genocide trial has continued since Perez took office earlier this month.

Falsifying history in the service of Empire

The Pentagon has decided that U.S. Marines who killed 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha, Iraq on Nov. 19, 2005, will serve no jail time.

By Brian Becker, National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition

If only Private Bradley Manning had slaughtered innocent Iraqi civilians he would have been set free by the Pentagon. The Pentagon brass has kept Manning locked up for 21 months. They say that he leaked the 2007 video of a U.S. helicopter gunship massacring Iraqi civilians and journalists. Manning is facing life in prison for allegedly releasing classified documents and information to WikiLeaks that revealed U.S. war crimes.

In contrast, the Pentagon decided on Jan. 23, 2012, that there will be no jail time for any of the U.S. Marines who systematically and deliberately slaughtered 24 Iraqi civilians in their homes in Haditha, Iraq on Nov. 19, 2005. This was not a battle. They entered the homes of unarmed civilians at night and murdered children and their moms, dads and grandparents. The murdered were in their pajamas.

The superior officers of the rampaging Marines in Haditha lied and covered up the crime. The Pentagon brass, then under the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld, knew about the massacre and covered it up as well. A Pentagon statement issued just after the Haditha massacre described the incident as an insurgent ambush on a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol that left insurgents, civilians and U.S. troops dead.

If only Private Bradley Manning had slaughtered innocent Iraqi civilians he would have been set free by the Pentagon.

That the Pentagon lied about this war crime should be understood as the norm and not an exception. All Iraqis were seen as the enemy or potential enemy. Indeed, Iraqis from across the political and religious spectrum opposed the occupation of their country. As in the Vietnam War, rampant racism allowed occupying forces to treat the occupied people as less than human. For those involved it was just one more war crime in a criminal war.

The truth about the massacre came out when investigative journalist Tim McGirk broke the story in Time Magazine in March 2006. McGirk had been in contact with an Iraqi human rights organization that provided a video of the aftermath of the massacre. The evidence revealed the bodies of bloodied children in their pajamas, killed in their homes by grenades and direct gunfire.

The trial of the Marine unit’s leader, Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who was facing life in prison for the massacre, came to an abrupt end this week when he accepted the Pentagon prosecutor’s plea offer. In return for pleading guilty to negligent dereliction of duty, Wuterich was demoted in rank and will have his pay level reduced. Earlier, six other Marines had their charges for their roles in the massacre dropped, and one was acquitted. Those who carried out this known and documented war crime will suffer no real punishment at all.

Even if these individual Marines had been convicted, however, the big shot war criminals—both in and out of uniform—who ordered the invasion and occupation of Iraq, who authorized and institutionalized torture, secret prisons and targeted assassinations, have never been charged for their crimes.

This is part of an unspoken bipartisan agreement between the two parties of imperialism. Both Republican and Democratic administrations are unofficially immunized for any crime committed in the service of the U.S. global empire.

Exposing Pentagon lies

Iraq was torn apart by the U.S. war of aggression. No one knows for certain how many Iraqis perished, but it is minimally in the hundreds of thousands, and probably well over 1 million. Many more suffered grievous wounds. More than 5 million became internal and external refugees. A whole generation of Iraqi children suffered the trauma of living through a decade of war. Every family faced the fear and terror of simply driving up to a U.S.-staffed checkpoint in their own city or town. The rules of engagement for nervous U.S. soldiers was “shoot first, ask questions later.” After all, U.S. casualties inflamed anti-war sentiment at home, while Iraqi casualties were not even a brief media blip.

U.S. crimes in Iraq are being whitewashed inside the United States. Not only were Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld shielded from prosecution by the Obama administration, but the semi-official narrative of the war can only be described as an example of falsification and national chauvinism.

When President Obama spoke to announce the removal of U.S. troops from Iraq in December 2011, he chose to speak at the military base in Fort Bragg to thousands of assembled soldiers. The speech was widely publicized and his version of history was designed to reach into homes throughout the United States.

He paid tribute to the suffering of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, but did not say anything about the Haditha massacre, the destruction of the city of Fallujah, the torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib prison, or the multiple other episodes that are permanently imprinted on the consciousness of the Iraqi people. That comes as no surprise. But President Obama’s speech did not include even one word about the suffering of Iraqis from the war.

He said, “We know too well the heavy cost of this war. More than 1.5 million Americans have served in Iraq—1.5 million. Over 30,000 Americans have been wounded, and those are only the wounds that show. Nearly 4,500 Americans made the ultimate sacrifice—including 202 fallen heroes from here at Fort Bragg—202. So today, we pause to say a prayer for all those families who have lost their loved ones, for they are part of our broader American family. We grieve with them.”

The attempt to omit from history the pain and suffering—as well as the heroic resistance—of the Iraqi people must be challenged and contested. This falsified history is a prescription for promoting national chauvinism in the broader population. Such consciousness is useful for the Pentagon and the Military-Industrial Complex as they continue the era of endless imperialist war. We need to tell the truth about Iraq and expose the lies of the Pentagon.

Instead of endless war and occupation on behalf of capitalism and imperialism, we promote a program of international solidarity. Millions of people in the United States recognize that the war and occupation are great crimes. They support the demand that Iraq be paid reparations by the U.S. government for the wanton acts of death and destruction inflicted by the invading forces.

Also read: The Logic of War Crimes in a Criminal War, written by Brian Becker and Mara Verheyden-Hilliard in 2006.

The ANSWER Coalition is organizing every day all over the country against war, racism and economic injustice. Please make an urgently needed donation now to support this critical work.

 

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