- Update : Familiar tactics, Patrick Doyle, Metro (The Canadian Press), May 20, 2010: “They may have been shadowy figures in black masks, but the vandals who firebombed an Ottawa bank branch seem familiar to terrorism experts.” See also : Urban Guerrillas in Greece Face Scrutiny, Joanna Kakissis, The New York Times, May 20, 2010.
The G8/G20 meets again in Canada next month, and state authorities have been busy preparing in the same manner they always do. See : Police Visiting Toronto G20 Activists / ‘Intimidation’ and ‘Harassment’ Claimed (Geordie Gwalgen Dent, Toronto Media Co-op, April 24, 2010).
Wankers.
Anyway, a bank in Vancouver was set on fire the other day, and those responsible have apparently released a communique explaining their action. A typically laughable analysis is provided by “former CSIS agent, now with Northgate Group, Michel Juneau-Katsuya” for the benefit of Canadian talk radio here. You may remember Juneau-Katsuya from such posts as No issue is single just because they say you’re paranoid (May 5, 2008). Note that:
These summits are also a massive payday for the security industry. At the last G8 summit on Canadian soil – Kananaskis in 2002 – security perimeters were established cordoning dissent into established ‘free-speech’ zones as far away as Calgary. F-18 fighter jets flew sorties over the region, backing up thousands of police and military personnel who outnumbered demonstrators six to one. In the end, the whole charade cost over $200 million dollars, making it the largest peacetime security operation in Canada to date, only to be outdone by the 2010 Olympics.
The G20 last met in Pittsburgh, where police arrested a man for tweeting about protests against the summit. In April 2009, the G20 met in London where, among other things, a handful of officers used well-placed elbows, raised their batons only in response to vandalism, and also killed Ian Tomlinson (see : Go Delroy! LOL, April 1, 2010). The G20 meeting in Melbourne in 2006 resulted in widespread rioting and the deaths of thousands hundreds scores dozens several one none, although the window on a police van was broken, and in the case of one unfortunate officer, a pre-existing injury (tennis elbow) was apparently exacerbated. See also : The Guardian. G8. Genoa. (July 20, 2008) | FCUK the G8! (July 16, 2006).
Direct Action in Ottawa
May 18, 2010The Vancouver Olympic games are over, but a torch is still burning.
Royal Bank Canada was a major sponsor of the recently concluded 2010 Olympics on stolen indigenous land. This land was never legally ceded to colonial British Columbia. This hasn’t stopped the government from assuming full ownership of the land and its resources for the benefit of its corporate masters and to the detriment of aboriginal peoples, workers and the poor of the province. The 2010 Winter Olympics increased the homelessness crisis in Vancouver, especially the Downtown Eastside, Kanada’s poorest urban area. Since the Olympics bid, homelessness in Vancouver has nearly tripled while condominium development in the Downtown Eastside is outpacing social housing by a rate of 3:1. The further criminalization and displacement of those living in extreme poverty continues apace.
“Royal Bank Canada is one of the planet’s greenest companies” according to one of its own brochures. Coporate Kanada saw fit to include RBC as one of the top 50 in a competition dubbed Canada’s Greenest Employers, which purports to recognize organizations that have created “a culture of environmental awareness.” Yet RBC is now the major financier of Alberta’s tar sands, one of the largest industrial projects in human history and perhaps the most destructive. The tar sands, now the cause of the second fastest rate of deforestation on the planet, are slated to expand several times its current size.
The games in Vancouver are now over, but resistance continues. An RBC branch can be found in every corner of Kanada.
On June 25-27 2010, the G8/G20 ‘leaders’ and bankers are meeting in Huntsville and Toronto to make decisions that will further their policies of exploitation of people and the environment. We will be there.
We pass the torch to all those who would resist the trampling of native rights, of the rights of us all, and resist the ongoing destruction of our planet. We say: The Fire This Time.
FFFC – Ottawa
at the corner of Bank Street and First Avenue.
See also : Ann Hansen, Direct Action: Memoirs Of An Urban Guerilla (AK Press, 2002) | Ann Hansen in conversation with Peter Steven, 2001 | Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP).
