by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
Jan. 30, 2012
Image by G20 Protest Photos via Flickr
What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.
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 Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation.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.
[…]
via Truthdig
Copyright © 2012 Truthdig
Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His latest books are Death of the Liberal Class, and The World as It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.
see
Michael Moore, Chris Hedges, Kevin Zeese & More: Occupy 2012: Battle for our Freedoms
Democracia Real Ya: Spain’s “Indignados” and the Globalization of Dissent
Dandelion Salad 
This article confirms perceptions I already had before I read it.
It is undeniable the people’s “Representative system” had been highjacked by Corporate and big money interests.
Tahir Square that morphed into the Global Occupy Movement is the people’s attempt to develop some sort of Direct Democracy. It is messy, chaotic and disorganized as any new beginning would be, but practice makes perfect.
Direct Democracy demands the individual govern themselves first in the recognition we are all our brother’s keepers.