Afghanistan under the knife and hammer
by Richard Seymour, from Lenin's Tomb, July 3, 2008.

The procedure is quite simple. Choose a country in the world that seems to be suffering, in some way dysfunctional, ripe for 'intervention'. Perform some 'surgical' air strikes and, after a quick and painless stitch-up, auction it off to the highest bidders. Having done that, so the theory goes, you can return home and contemplate your good deeds. But, sticking with the medical metaphor for a second, you are not a doctor and you wouldn't know the hippocratic oath if it was printed in reverse lettering on your forehead. Whatever 'illness' you were supposedly dealing with has metastasized while the body is resisting your implants. In fact, the 'patient' keeps trying to kick your ass every time you come near him. Time to give up? Hell no. While Bush sends more troops to Afghanistan, Gordon Brown has insisted that there will be no 'artificial timetable' for British troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Okay, but how about a real timetable?

By Gary Kinsman

AN INSPIRING AND broad-ranging queer historian, Allan Bérubé died at the age of 61 on December 11, 2007. He left us with major contributions of exciting historical work, but also important unfinished work that needs to be continued.

Bérubé’s allegiance was not to the academy but to the movement and community. Bérubé’s histories, as he put it, were about the lives of ordinary lesbians and gay men. He was not formally trained as a historian. Instead his remarkable skills grew out of his decade long involvement in the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project and the broader grassroots queer history movement based on developing ways to return our history to our communities.

Some of his earliest work with the History Project was on women who cross-dressed and passed as men. Bérubé’s historical work, while centering on gay and queer experiences, always examined the ways in which sexuality, class, race and gender relations are made in and through each other. Sexuality, for him, was thought and practiced in relation to class, race and gender.

Marching To A Different Drummer

Harper's Free Trade Mantra: Hush, Rush, and Sign
Written by Dawn Paley
Tuesday, 01 July 2008
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1356/1/
This January, after little more than 6 months of negotiations, the
Canadian Government announced the completion of negotiations of the
Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland.

Six months later, on June 7, 2008, Canada announced that negotiations
for a controversial Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Colombia were
finalized.

The negotiations with Colombia were controversial from the get go: the
country has the worst human rights record in the hemisphere, and the
government of Alvaro Uribe is riddled by ongoing scandals that have
revealed proven links between Uribe's allies in Congress and
paramilitary death squads.

In a corruption scandal that would most certainly bring down a
Canadian Prime Minister, Uribe himself is the subject of a recent
Sentence by the Colombian Supreme Court. The justices condemned him
for buying the key vote of Congresswoman Yidis Medina in exchange for
political favours, a crime necessary for the constitutional changes
that opened the door to Uribe's re-election in 2006.

On June 26th, Medina was sentenced to 3 ½ years of house arrest for
accepting bribes from the president. The president promptly responded

Introductory remarks for Indigenous Struggles Solidarity Day, June 28 in Sudbury

By Clarissa Lassaline

Good morning. Bonjour. Anni. Welcome everyone.

Today’s activities have been initiated by a local group called Sudbury Against War and Occupation (SAWO). We are a mixed group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous folks concerned with all forms and consequences of war and occupation. While this includes working against Canadian involvement in war and occupation all over the world, SAWO sees it as central to recognize that Canada itself exists as an occupation of First Nations’ territory and that struggles of Indigenous Peoples against that occupation must be supported. There is an urgent need to support communities standing up for their lands and for their sovereignity and understand how non-indigenous people are a part of and contribute to the continuing violations of that soveriegnity. Mohawk activist of Tyendinaga, Shawn Brant, called for a different way of doing things on National Aboriginal Day last year when he cried out: “We bury our children in this country every day. We have to force them to drink polluted water. We’re sick and tired of it. It’s going to end-June 29 is going to mark the time when First Nations people are going to be in a different relationship with the rest of the country.”

By Angela Scappatura, The Sudbury Star

Indigenous and non-indigenous people gathered at Victory Park to assert their support for the struggles of aboriginals in Canada on Saturday.

Heavy rain did not prevent more than a dozen people from attending the day-long event, which included a drumming workshop, personal stories and musical performances.

The event was organized by Sudbury Against War and Occupation and was designed to raise awareness of aboriginal issues.

Gary Kinsman is a member of Sudbury Against War and Occupation and said the inaugural event displays solidarity between both indigenous and non-indigenous people.

"I think it's important because what we're showing is that the government's apology around residential schools was not enough," he said while standing beneath a tarp protecting a barbeque and food from the rain.

"The government policies around indigenous people are, in general, pretty bad."

Many of the day's events highlighted the group's concern surrounding First Nations land claims. Kinsman, who is not an aboriginal, said there needs to be justice for the community.

On June 21, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) took over a downtown Toronto park for and with the homeless. We were able to create a short lived space where destitute victims of social cutbacks and urban redevelopment could stand together and raise a voice of resistance. Nine years previously, we had done the same thing in the same park. At that time, Mike Harris was in power at Queen's Park and Mel Lastman was the Mayor of the City. This time, we confronted an attack on the homeless that is far more brutal and effective than that of a decade ago. We were also dealing with a 'progressive' municipal regime, under Toronto Mayor David Miller (and supposedly a similar government under Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty), that took a much more hard-line position on our park takeover than the right wingers on city Council in the late 1990s had done. We held the park in the face of a direct ban by the City on our staying there overnight and a police force that had been given a green light to attack us by City Hall. And attack us they did!

Note: this list is still under construction. Please be patient.

UTA is available at the following bookstores in Canada and the US.

Chicago

• 57 St. Bookstore
• Heartland Café
• Women and Children First Bookstore

Halifax

Toronto

Toronto Women's Bookstore
Habord St.

Sudbury

Vancouver

Hamilton

Guelph

Montreal

Regina

By Priyamvada Gopal, Z Net, June, 29 2008
[This is a longer version of a piece carried by the Guardian June 27th.]

Over forty years ago, as Africa commenced the long and arduous process of decolonization, one of its foremost liberationist thinkers issued a prophetic warning. Frantz Fanon, himself a freedom fighter, wrote that the national leader in the postcolonial era should not ‘fall back into the past and become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch leading up to independence.' His powerful descriptions of a once effective leader who gradually secedes from reality and betrays the people who entrust him with their future has resonances for the tragic situation in which Zimbabwe finds itself today. Having reduced a once significant anti-colonialism to a self-serving dogma, Robert Mugabe is the kind of fallen leader Fanon cautioned Africa against. Hesitant African leaders who are being called upon to intervene might want to reread his classic essay, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness' from that classic liberationist text, The Wretched of the Earth.

To the people of Mexico:
To the EZLN:
To the Other Campaign:
To the International Community:
To the media:

As members of diverse collectives and organizations in different corners of the World, we wish to express our outrage and complete repudiation of the renewed military invasion of Zapatista communities on June 4th 2008.

Numerous reports from the International Civil Commission of Human Rights Observation (CCIODH), the Centre for Political Analysis and Socio-Economic Investigations (CAPISE) and Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center have raised concerns regarding the continued and increasing hostility from the Mexican Government towards the Zapatistas. In these investigations it is clear that this dirty war relies upon a system that involves paramilitary organizations, institutions such as the Agrarian Reform Secretary (SRA) and both Federal (PAN) and State (PRD) Governments, as well as the military occupation surrounding Zapatista territory since 1994.

Barriere Lake Algonquins Occupy MP Office!
by Lia Tarachansky, Dominion Weblogs, June 26, 2008.

GATINEAU- On Thursday, June 26th, Algonquin representatives from Barriere Lake and allies assembled outside the Indian Affairs government building across the river from Ottawa. Their demonstration was a diversion, intended for a peaceful occupation in Birmingham, QC of Lawrence Cannon's office, the MP for the Barriere Lake region. The Algonquins demand a meeting with the MP to discuss the recent government ousting of the Customary Chief and Council as well as a re-election monitored by outside observers.

The Barriere Lake Solidarity Collective, based in Montreal, as well as Algonquin representatives from Barriere Lake itself have vowed they will not leave the office until their demands are met. They have been threatened with arrest, and are welcoming support from anyone who is willing or able to assemble in Buckingham, QC.

by Eliza Ruiz Jaimes, translated by Kristin Bricker
Noticias Voz e Imagen de Oaxaca, June 21, 2008

Supporters of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO in its Spanish initials) were hit with rocks thrown by a group of thugs hired by the municipal president of Zaachila, Noe Pérez Martínez, as well as municipal police, who used stones, firecrackers, and firearms.

With barricades, residents prevented the state governor, Ulises Ruiz Ortiz (URO), from entering the community, where he was supposed to tour.

The protesters accused Natalio Pérez Tomás--father of the current municipal president--of having fired a weapon: "He fired directly at the crowd, fortunately he didn't hurt anyone." The tension between the groups was brought under control after assistant Secretary of State Joaquín Rodríguez Palacios' appeal to the APPO to control itself.

The governor had to cancel the signing of the State-Municipal agreement and the start of public works in the municipality. Various people were wounded during the violence, including Asrael Torres Carmona, 71 years old, who believes that the repressive force is concentrated in the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI in its Spanish initials).

Today (Monday) we went to City Hall to demand that Mayor David Miller immediately restore shelter beds in the downtown east side. We've lost over 350 shelter beds in the downtown core, and tens of thousands of meals over the past year, and the City has done nothing.

"They closed University Settlement for renovations today, so where am I supposed to sleep now?" asks Chris. "I'm sleeping in parks, under bridges. They got empty rooms here in City Hall tho, maybe we should stay here?"

On our way in to City Hall, security and 52 division cops arrested Gaetan Heroux— in a pathetic attempt to quash the protest, but we continued in to Miller's office demanding to speak to the Mayor [Gaetan was released from 52 division two hours later]. Instead we got the dregs of Miller's PR department, someone with zero decision-making (or even scheduling) authority, nor anything interesting to say, so we went to Council Chambers to confront Miller and Council directly.

"Last February when a man died on the streets, you told us you would
address this crisis," Danielle Koyama told the remaining sheepish city
councillors. "You patted yourselves on the back for replacing 60 of the
350 shelter beds lost. Well now we've lost another 65, so thanks for

On a quest for secular piety: Reviewing Tarek Fatah's Chasing a Mirage
by Justin Podur, ZNet, June 22, 2008.

Tarek personally asked me to review his book, Chasing a Mirage: the tragic illusion of an Islamic State (CM). With a book being favorably reviewed in the Canadian (and US and UK) media, including the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Huffington Post, the UK Guardian, and the Asper-family owned newspapers (Ottawa Citizen and National Post, which also published long excerpts of CM and frequently runs op-eds by Tarek), CM hardly needed a review from me to get attention. I therefore took the request as a signal of a serious desire to engage with people who might disagree about the ideas of the book.

CM's basic thesis is that religion and politics should be separated in Islam. Although it has major flaws, it also has many attributes of interest and will be thought-provoking on the relationship between religion and politics, and between Islam and the West.

A flawed book with some thought-provoking ideas

Upping The Anti, a journal of theory and action, seeks artists to
contribute to the upcoming and future issues of UTA. We seek artists
whose work aligns with the anti-capitalist, anti-oppression, and
anti-imperialist politics of the journal.

In particular, we seek work relevant to themes and issues covered in
our upcoming issue, which will feature several pieces on Palestine and
Palestine solidarity organizing. To see the type of artwork UTA has
published in the past, please visit uppingtheanti.org (each journal
features a piece of artwork on the back cover, and a small piece of
that work on the front cover).

Please send sketches, portfolios, and ideas to
uppingtheanti@gmail.com, with ARTWORK in the subject.

We look forward to hearing from you.

PS: We hope you are enjoying UTA #6. If the articles inspire or enrage
you, if they have been useful (or not) in your organizing work, or if
you have something to contribute to an argument on our pages, please
consider writing us a letter. We print 1,000-word letters and reserve
to the right to edit for clarity, spelling, and grammar. Email
letters to uppingtheanti@gmail.com.

Saturday, June 28, 11am to 5pm

Learn about John Moore’s struggle against racism in the criminal justice system.

Find out more about the importance of First Nations land claims and struggles with Ed Sackaney.

Participate in workshops on Native Music with Eric Landry; on the Native Youth Movement; and on the questions that settlers interested in supporting indigenous people need to address.

Hear Shadakii drum. From Atikameksheng Anishnawbek (Whitefish Lake First Nation)

Hear speakers, watch videos, and listen to music by Eric Landry. Food and refreshments will be available for lunch, as a fund-raiser for John Moore’s campaign for justice.

Myths and Mirrors
in Victory Park off Frood Road,
north of Kathleen
Myths and Mirrors is the painted building (a community artspace) located in
Victory Park in the Donovan. It is between Dupont St. and Schevchenko Ave.

All Are Welcome

Initiated by Sudbury Against War and Occupation
with the support of Myths and Mirrors Community Arts.
For more information, call 705 675-8479 or email sudburyawo@gmail.com

*Please forward widely*

Friday, August 22 to Sunday, August 24, 2008
Chiefswood Park, Ohsweken, Six Nations Territory

The third weekend in August will witness a historic gathering of the
people of Six Nations and their allies from across Ontario and Turtle
Island. From Friday, August 22 to Sunday, August 24, hundreds of people
will gather at Chiefswood Park in the town of Ohsweken, Six Nations
territory for a three day festival of friendship and solidarity.
The vision for this event was inspired from the work that has been
accomplished by the people of Six Nations in the spirit of the Great Law
of Peace and the good minds that have been tireless in moving this
vision forward. Many have lent their voice, strength and support to
building greater awareness, understanding, friendship and solidarity
between our peoples. The Peace and Friendship Gathering will facilitate
the opportunity for and all of us to learn, be inspired, and gather a
greater understanding and respect of the relationships that indigenous
and non-indigenous people have.

The primary focus of the festival will be a series of workshops, talks
and presentations related to indigenous sovereignty, environmental
politics and issues of anti-racism and social justice. In addition to
talks and workshops, we will also be holding a series of cultural events

OPENINGS AND POSSIBILITIES: The Meaning of Obama
By KAZEMBE BALAGUN and HANK WILLIAMS
From Left Turn

How does the Black left engage and understand the historic presidential campaign of Barack Obama? This question is in the hearts and minds of African-American radicals around the country.

With the nomination of Barack Obama increasingly likely, there seems to be a significant block forming within the Black left community agreeing to lend a kind of “critical support” to his campaign. Activists Bill Fletcher and Danny Glover -two principal authors of the widely circulated Progressives for Obama (PFO) statement-as well as other notables such as Amiri Baraka see Obama’s candidacy as an opening to reinvigorate social movements and the see possibility of pushing him to the Left. The PFO call argues that the emerging movement, “even though it is candidate-centered…is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined.”

As anarchist communists, it is only logical and consistent with our principles in the struggle for a free humanity that we support the personal, cultural, and institutional fight against patriarchy, hetero-sexism, the gender bi-nary system and all other struggles for queer liberation both in themselves and in their intersectionalities with capitalism, the state, white supremacy, and all other forms of human oppression.

by Thomas Giovanni, NEFAC - Boston Local Union

Anarchist communism is- and has always been- against all oppression and exploitation of people over people including any system where a person or group of people has privilege or power over any other person or group politically, economically, socially or otherwise.

It is for a cooperative and free social order aimed at the equal freedom of all humanity achieved through: directly-democratic decision-making, a social/cultural value system actively opposing domination, privilege, oppression and exploitation and a classless economy where all contribute according to their ability and receive according to their needs.

Fray Bartolome de Las Casas, Human Rights Center
San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas on June 11, 2008

Military and police accompanied by civilians enter indigenous communities in Chiapas and Guerrero.

Aggressions against residents and persecution of members of dissident social organizations during the incursions are reported
Since the beginning of this year, this Human Rights Center has received denunciations of military and police incursions in various communities in Chiapas and Guerrero in a logic of counterinsurgency owed to the fact that said operations operate in a manner of mixed military and police forces along with civilian actors from the same communities, establishing deployment tactics in the territories inhabited by a civilian population organized around just social demands. The testimonies of the assaulted residents are clear and permit the documentation of the harassment of the civilian population, by means of unlawful entry into properties, physical and verbal aggressions, as well as videotaping and photographing of people and places in the assaulted communities.

Mohawk Grandmothers Attacked by Canadian Border Services Agency Guards
No-One Is Illegal-Montreal, June 17, 2008.

This past Saturday, June 14, 2008, around 2:30pm, a vehicle with two outspoken Kanion’ke:haka (Mohawk) activists, writers and grandmothers was stopped at Akwesasne while crossing into "Canada" from the "USA". Akwesasne is a Kanion’ke:haka Indigenous community that includes parts of so-called Ontario, Quebec and New York, and community members routinely cross between "states" and "provinces”.

Katenies lives in Akwesasne, with her mother and near her daughter and three grandchildren, who reside on both sides of the "border". Kahentinehta, also a grandmother, is from Kahnawake. Katenies and Kahentinehta publish Mohawk Nation News and were delegates to the Indigenous Peoples Border Summit in San Xavier, Tohono O'odham Nation (Arizona) in November 2007.

Lakes across Canada face being turned into mine dump sites: Lakes are in B.C., Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Northwest Territories and Nunavut

by Terry Milewski, CBC News

CBC News has learned that 16 Canadian lakes are slated to be officially but quietly "reclassified" as toxic dump sites for mines. The lakes include prime wilderness fishing lakes from B.C. to Newfoundland.

Environmentalists say the process amounts to a "hidden subsidy" to mining companies, allowing them to get around laws against the destruction of fish habitat.

Under the Fisheries Act, it's illegal to put harmful substances into fish-bearing waters. But, under a little-known subsection known as Schedule Two of the mining effluent regulations, federal bureaucrats can redefine lakes as "tailings impoundment areas."

That means mining companies don't need to build containment ponds for toxic mine tailings.

CBC News visited two examples of Schedule Two lakes. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the Vale Inco company wants to use a prime destination for fishermen known as Sandy Pond to hold tailings from a nickel processing plant.

Emergency Exit Collective, Bristol, Mayday, 2008

zero

The authors of this document are a collection of activists, scholars, and writers currently based in the United States and Western Europe who have gotten to know and work with each other in the movement against capitalist globalization. We’re writing this at the request of some members of No! G8 Action Japan, who asked us for a broad strategic analysis of the state of struggle as we see it, and particularly, of the role of the G8, what it represents, the dangers and opportunities that may lie hidden in the moment. It is in no sense programmatic. Mainly, it is an attempt to develop tools that we hope will be helpful for organizers, or for anyone engaged in the struggle against global capital.

I

It is our condition as human beings that we produce our lives in common.

II

Racism in the Tar Sands: exploiting foreign workers and poisoning indigenous people

By Macdonald Stainsby, June 12, 2008, reposted from Oil Sands Truth

The giant corporations that are determined to exploit the Alberta tar sands face a major problem — a serious shortage of local labour to do the actual work. So the Canadian and Albertan governments have a plan, ideal in their eyes, to solve the crunch.

Currently, employers desperate to find needed hands, backs and minds for the vast production targets of the “Gigaproject” are flying workers from the Maritimes from their homes for shift stretches and then back again, but that effort faces limits in terms of workers available. Nary a day goes without a business page article somewhere in Alberta bemoaning the lack of workers. Many of the Newfoundlanders who would have come out this way in the past will now work in Newfoundland premier Dany Williams’ new off shore oil and gas ventures, using skills learned in Fort McMurray, Alberta.

Power to the Brown People

By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, ColorLines, May/June 2008

IT WAS AN IMMIGRANT RIGHTS ORGANIZER’S dream come true.

On December 10, 2007, with just a few hours notice, close to 2,000 South-Asian Canadian immigrants flooded Vancouver International Airport. They paralyzed the international departures section and surrounded a cab taking a severely disabled 48-year-old Sikh refugee, Laibar Singh, to his deportation flight. The crowd did what no other protest in North America had done before—using civil disobedience, it stopped a deportation proceeding in its tracks.

The protest prompted a tense, hours-long standoff at the airport. Officers of the Canadian Border Services Agency announced, a bit nervously, that they were unwilling to wade into the crowd. And after eight hours, the cab—well, it just started backing up. Someone helped Singh climb out of the cab, and he was ushered back to the Sikh place of worship (a gurdwara), where he has sought sanctuary while awaiting a resolution of his legal challenge to stay in Canada.

By Ward Churchill, Briarpatch Magazine, June/July 2008

Responding to the Canadian government’s establishment of an Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Churchill argues for the need to situate the formation of this commission within the broader history of indigenous/settler relations in North America, and within a legal understanding of the crime of genocide.

What does the Mohawk cultural resurgence at Tyendinaga have to teach us about Aboriginal youth suicide prevention?
By Jonah Gindin, Briarpatch Magazine, June/July 2008

When it’s truly alive, memory doesn’t contemplate history, it invites us to make it. -Eduardo Galeano.

On June 29, 2007, Mohawks from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory near Belleville, Ontario, erected blockades on the Canadian National rail line, local Highway 2, and Highway 401-the busiest thoroughfare in the country. This marked the second time in six months that the community blocked the rails in defence of their land. In the days before June 29, which had been declared a National Day of Action by the Assembly of First Nations, Mohawk spokesperson Shawn Brant explained to the CBC why the community could no longer wait on distant negotiations. “We bury our children in this country every day,” he said. “We have to force them to drink polluted water. We’re sick and tired of it. It’s going to end-June 29 is going to mark the time when First Nations people are going to be in a different relationship with the rest of the country.”

A Review of Peter Hallward's 'Damming the Flood'

By Justin Podur, June 14, 2008, Z NET
Review of: Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. Verso 2007.

Haiti has never had a period without interference in its sovereignty. Indeed Haiti's history could be seen as one long, heroic struggle against such interference: first to overthrow the slavers and colonizers of France (and the rest of Europe), and then to fight for sovereignty against the US, which viewed Haiti as part of its domain, to dispose of according to its own whims.

Canada-Colombia FTA: When Democracy Gets in the Way, Just Sign It, eh?
By: Michèal Ó Tuathail
http://canadacolombiaproject.blogspot.com/2008/06/canada-colombia-fta-when-democracy-gets.html

On June 7 2008, less than one year after Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the beginning of bilateral free trade talks with Colombia, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade announced the conclusion of negotiations.

While the US-Colombia free trade agreement has been stalled in the US, due mainly to the grave human rights situation in Colombia and, some say, a US election campaign, Canada has offered transnational capital an opening through the back door.

Canada-style, eh?

"The Government of Canada is delivering on its commitment to open up opportunities for Canadian business in the Americas and around the world," stated the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade David Emerson, revealing the true beneficiaries of this agreement. Emerson went on to note that "the free trade agreement will expand Canada-Colombia trade and investment, and will help solidify ongoing efforts by the Government of Colombia to create a more prosperous, equitable and secure democracy."