Oil versus Life

Notley versus Horgan or Oil versus Humanity?

The power of oil is absolute.  It's based on money. If you have enough money to buy lawyers and politicians the outcome is predictable.

If the social climate is indifferent to injustice and to the environment, if we are unable to care about what sustains and what threatens and we are simply in awe of new gadgets and fashions we have traded our family for novelty.

If we are unable to see the dire prediction we are in we are addicted to diversion wherever we may find it. The Olympics, TV dramas, Netflix, gambling, alcohol, sex and drugs.

News headlines may present different arguments for saving the economy or saving the environment, from different experts, and may run to mass shootings, bombings, cruelty and evil deeds, but it all comes down to the same thing: do we care enough to be engaged.

Do we care if so many bad news stories indicate the madness of our so-called leaders versus the vulnerability of courageous minds attempting to defend justice?

Would we rather sound clever, knowledgeable, powerful, in our conversations rather than admit to our vulnerability?  Would we rather laugh and cheer on the bully that cannot lose rather than admit we are part of his/her dinner?

Council of Canadians has offered changes to the NAFTA agreement that doesn't protect the rights of the oil industry over and above the rights of the people who live near the pipelines. Here's your own toolkit https://canadians.org/nafta.

Canada poised to pass anti-terror legislation despite widespread outrage

Guardian:

Widespread protest and souring public opinion has failed to prevent Canada’s ruling Conservative Party from pushing forward with sweeping anti-terror legislation which a battery of legal scholars, civil liberties groups, opposition politicians and pundits of every persuasion say will replace the country’s healthy democracy with a creeping police state.Prime Minister Stephen Harper is looking forward to an easy victory on Tuesday when the House of Commons votes in its final debate on the bill, known as C-51. But lingering public anger over the legislation suggests that his success in dividing his parliamentary opposition may well work against him when Canadians go to the polls for a national election this fall.No legislation in memory has united such a diverse array of prominent opponents as the proposed legislation, which the Globe and Mail newspaper denounced as a a plan to create a “secret police force”.


Megan Drysdale, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression:

Here are six ways that Bill C-51 could affect your day-to-day life:

1. Your private information will no longer be private

2. Innocent words can be interpreted as terrorism

3. Online posts will be censored

4. Protesting could put you under government surveillance

5. Your travel may be restricted without explanation

6. Your material possessions may be seized

Here is our world according to Chris Hedges:

Extraction industries, like wars, empower a predominantly male, predatory population that is engaged in horrific destruction and violence. Wars and extraction industries are designed to extinguish all systems that give life—familial, social, cultural, economic, political and environmental. And they require the obliteration of community and the common good. How else could you get drag line operators in southern West Virginia to rip the tops off Appalachian mountains to get at coal seams as they turn the land they grew up in, and often their ancestors grew up in, into a fetid, toxic wasteland where the air, soil and water will be poisoned for generations? 

And the more vulnerable you are, the more the jackals appear around you to prey on your afflictions. Those who suffer most are children, women and the elderly—the children and the elderly because they are vulnerable, the women because they are left to care for them.