But it wasn't a single day, nor a slew of days were the skies heaved and the rains of trouble fell. This was like a storm that began to pick-up midwinter, only to find itself blowing stronger into hurricane season. The g20 - and all the events that had come before that - budget cuts to womens groups, decrying global warming; a tough-on-crime campaign that played up our fears of 'identity theft' and 'terrorism', while corporate crime was rewarded.
Did you know the G20 was invented in 1999!!!
That's right, 1999 by Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, and Lawrence Summers - an American, of course ('kinda makes all that talk about a unified North America sound plausible, eh? You should look up the SPP sometime - these fuckers are not our friends.)
So, the G20, invented out of the blue a decade earlier, now 'saves us' from the Recession of '08 (ironic since Lawrence Summers was making a point of not regulating global markets and permitting the 'too big to fail banks' to get so big that they were 'too big to fail'), and is now committed to a course of austerity measures, slashing the global defecit by 50% by 2013. Twenty. Thirteen. In three years, the government will retract funding in every which way possible (save for prisons, christian reform schools, and military 'exploration' of the arctics vast resources - don't worry; it becomes increasingly cheaper as global warming melts the arctic ice), and that means social security, education, and health care - that means heritage and language, that means social services and immigration assistance. That means disaster.
So, the banking crisis, now our crisis, engineered by the same people who have managed to ensure that their benefits are insured (while ours aren't), are hosting the G20 - and running the table. Canada, at the insistence of Stephen Harper, pushed these austerity measures sought to make these austerity cuts the number one issue, at the expense of Western wars in the middle-east (Afghanistan, Iraq, eventually Pakistan and Iran) and Climate Change (industrial society's war on the Earth's environmental water, food, temperature-regulation, and air systems). These austerity measures are known as "Greek style" (Be careful when you google that one kids) and will be fierce, and will not be concerned with high unemployment or low consumer confidence. Canada hid the effects of these measures, what the people on the street were protesting about (in many cases), behind the 'window dressing' of a concern for child and maternal health - this, of course, is a crock on the basis of the government recently taking initiatives to close Status of Women offices, to kill prior efforts at a national childcare program, and have made clear where their ideals lay in the land of a woman's choice through their ideologically-driven funding selections for overseas aid. (In case you didn't know, those that supported abortion and being pro-choice had their funding cut).
Sorry, meandering; I bet this sounds like the ramblings of one of those crazy traumatised types you see in action/thriller/horror movies. those 'survivors'; a little shell shocked, a little shakey - but still kicking it out, telling the important narratives that make the plot twist...
Well, that's distracting, I'm a little stoned, and so mildly discombobulated, but I'll hold it together. Back to the helicopters.
The helicopters circled Toronto and security forces patrolled the streets, allowing for theatrical violence to peak and swell, and real violence to be shamelessly undereported by the newspapers. Not until later when a public outcry was made and some journalists began to see and decry the pattern of political-terrorism did the public begin to hear it. The helicopters circled overhead, and the police stormed on the ground, and people I know and love were kidnapped off the ground - when I say kidnapped, I mean not shown a warrant or read their rights, nor told what they were being detained for, but actually grabbed and thrown in a van by plain clothes police officers, who for all intents and purposes really could have been kidnappers - people i know and love were stolen before, during, and after the g20 because they stood up to this corporate-conservative-liberal mess. They still get kidnapped - happened just the other day.
So, my summer vacation (see, there is a point to this) has fundamentally been watching my country, my world, a latticework of communities, stand up to financial murder and blood-resource extraction, and then knowing that they're getting punished for it, knowing that those who aren't immediately harmed are immediately engaged with trying to help, and then knowing that its only gotten worse since then.
The government has just passed a law granting police and federal prosecutors invasive new powers, allowing them to arrest and search and wire-tap more freely than ever before. This government, one saying that it is essential to reduce spending has now committed billions more dollars to prison construction on the pretext of unreported crime. After all, Canadians need to learn to report these 'unreported crimes', a.k.a. to snitch on their neighbors, to the police who are now more free than ever simply to invade your life (when conveniently we are building new jails to fill).
Ladies and gentlemen, people who reject gender binaries, this shit is fucked.
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