Civil Disobedience, Anyone? It's Not Just a Nice Idea Any Longer.

 "The only way to prevent our extinction

 is through mass participation civil disobedience"

That bit of wisdom from one of the founders of Britain's Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam.

Whether it's a mass demonstration snarling transportation in our city core or blocking Justin Trudeau's pipeline to oblivion, we have no choice but to push back against the forces of extinction, our own governments.

The fact of the matter is finally settled. Not the fact that if we do not stop putting carbon into the atmosphere our children will starve. That was settled three decades ago. Rather that the only way to prevent our extinction is through mass participation civil disobedience – thousands of people breaking the laws of our governments until they are forced take action to protect us. In less than a year Extinction Rebellion has gone from 15 people in a room to creating the biggest organised civil disobedience campaign in British history. In the past two weeks more than a thousand people have been arrested and as a result the climate and ecological crisis is finally on the political agenda. Everyone from the Labour party to the Sun newspaper is accepting we are right – we face the destruction of the next generation unless immediate emergency action is taken. For millions of people this week the penny has finally dropped – this is real and it’s terrifyingly serious.

Drawing on the groundbreaking research of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (Why Civil Resistance Works), we came to the conclusion that the only way to overcome entrenched political power is through extensive campaigns of large-scale nonviolent direct action. In January this year I produced a 30-page paper for XR which formed the basis of the strategy of the past two weeks of mass disruption in London. The document has now been made into a booklet. The strategy is based upon three observations. Firstly that only through disruption, the breaking of laws, do you get the attention you need. Secondly only through sacrifice – the willingness to be arrested and go to prison – do people take seriously what you are saying. And thirdly only through being respectful to ourselves, the public and the police, do we change the hearts and minds of our opponents, which makes it easier for them to negotiate with us.

Specifically the strategy – the “civil resistance model” as we call it – needs to involve several key elements in order for successful outcomes to be optimised. Firstly you need a lot of people – thousands need to be involved. You need to go to the capital city because that is where the rich and powerful are – the government, big business and the media. You need to break the law – sit in the road or glue yourself to the entrance of a building and such like. Unlike A to B marches this is what gets attention. You have to stay strictly nonviolent. Indulging in violence and aggressive language excludes vulnerable groups – the old and young – from participation. Crucially it has to go on day after day. Like a labour strike you have to impose economic and reputational damage on the opponent over an extended period. Finally it has to be fun – many more people are attracted to celebratory cultural spaces than narrowly political ones.

Push them off the hill. Lay claim to the moral high ground. Keep the light on just who and what these people are whether they're Liberal or they're Conservative or even demonstrably feckless New Dems. The irony is they'll throw you in jail when they're to blame for exposing the population to ruin and worse. Beat them into submission, day by day.

Extinction Rebellion Canada

Extinction Rebellion Vancouver

Extinction Rebellion Vancouver Island

Extinction Rebellion Ontario

Extinction Rebellion Alberta

Extinction Rebellion Nova Scotia

Extinction Rebellion Quebec

Trade, Trade, Trade

I recall an interview with prime minister Trudeau at the 6-month mark of his ascent to power. He told the interviewer that his overarching responsibility was to be an agent of trade. Trade to grow the economy. Trade to generate prosperity.

Trudeau's Harperesque pursuit of CETA and TPP demonstrates that he means business. This goes straight back to those mandate letters he issued to his freshly minted cabinet ministers as they were sworn in. Even Catherine McKenna's marching orders stipulate that her priorities are to be the economy and the environment. There's no doubt that she meant it when she said she was "as much an economic minister as an environmental minister."

Trade it is then. But, if you're going to make trade your priority, your dominant responsibility, then surely you have to accept full responsibility for the fallout from that pursuit. That's on you, Slick.

One element of that fallout is the rise of Canada's homegrown "precariat." It's a term used to describe the future this free-trading government has bequeathed to our youth. In case you're wondering, that's a future fraught with insecurity and economic peril.

Earlier this week, Trudeau finance minister, Bill Morneau, delivered the bad news telling Canadians that they would just have to get used to "job churn" - a future of intermittent employment and a constant scramble for the next job, that essential paycheque to meet the rent and heat the apartment.

Morneau defined his government's focus will be to train and retrain and retrain regularly laid off Canadians as they're tossed "from job to job to job."

What Morneau avoided was any mention of why he's consigned Canada's most vulnerable to a nomadic working life, always wondering when the current job will end and where they'll find the next temporary spot, how long it will take to find and how they'll avoid falling through the floorboards when that inevitable dislocation happens again and again and again.

Morneau won't mention how his own government and its predecessors laid the foundation for this upheaval and uncertainty through its obsessive pursuit of neoliberalism and global free trade, the constant downward spiral. He won't explain why, when even the World Bank and International Monetary Fund can no longer remain silent on the social and economic damage inflicted by globalism, his government remains a faithful adherent to this toxic ideology.

I'm sorry Morneau and you too, Trudeau, but, when you tell Canadians to forego their hopes and resign themselves to a future in the precariat, what you're really telling them is that you won't change course and liberal democracy be damned.

It wasn't always this way. Here are a few observations from two real American Idols - Lincoln and T. Roosevelt.

Let's begin with Abraham Lincoln who declared:

“I hold that while man exists it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind.”

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

If it is, indeed, man's duty "to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind," how is he to do that when his government consigns him to the precariat and tells him to "get used to it"?

If Labour is "the superior of capital" how is it that your government chooses to stack the deck so that capital prevails at the direct cost and damage to labour and our society?

Now let's turn to Teddy Roosevelt who observed:

"In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows."

"At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth."

"Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled."

"There is a wide-spread belief among our people that, under the methods of making tariffs which have hitherto obtained, the special interests are too influential. Probably this is true of both the big special interests and the little special interests. These methods have put a premium on selfishness, and, naturally, the selfish big interests have gotten more than their smaller, though equally selfish, brothers. The duty of Congress is to provide a method by which the interest of the whole people shall be all that receives consideration."

"Of conservation I shall speak more at length elsewhere. Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation."

"Now, with the water power, with the forests, with the mines, we are brought face to face with the fact that there are many people who will go with us in conserving the resources only if they are to be allowed to exploit them for their benefit. That is one of the fundamental reasons why the special interests should be driven out of politics. Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on. Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation. Let me add that the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the national government must bear a most important part."

"The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good. The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare. Understand what I say there. Give him a chance, not push him up if he will not be pushed. Help any man who stumbles; if he lies down, it is a poor job to try to carry him; but if he is a worthy man, try your best to see that he gets a chance to show the worth that is in him. No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough so after his day’s work is done he will have time and energy to bear his share in the management of the community, to help in carrying the general load. We keep countless men from being good citizens by the conditions of life by which we surround them."

"The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so long as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens. Just in proportion as the average man and woman are honest, capable of sound judgment and high ideals, active in public affairs, — but, first of all, sound in their home, and the father and mother of healthy children whom they bring up well, — just so far, and no farther, we may count our civilization a success."

Now, I know these passages carry a certain homespun-ness that can seem awkward but I dare you to tell me - whether you're a Conservative, New Democrat, Liberal or Green - would you really prefer a government that doesn't embrace every one of these principles? What would you give to have a government that did, a genuinely progressive party?

Climate change is, or should be, a non-partisan issue. It's the ultimate scientific question spanning the gamut of Earth sciences - geology, climatology, atmospherics and meteorology, hydrology and oceanography, physics, agronomy, epidemiology, on and on and on. Those disciplines are all separate voices. They have their own scientific focus, their own scientific history, and they each test the "hypothesis" against the best research, analysis and knowledge of their own discipline. Discipline, by discipline, by discipline - without exception - they have all tested the theory of climate change against their own strictures and found in that ever more corroboration.

Progressivism, like climate change, can and should be a non-partisan issue. You shouldn't have to be a Conservative or Liberal or, even, New Democrat to reach out and grab these precepts and notions. Even Edmund Burke wrote of matters progressive.

And so how do our Latter Day Liberals and Conservatives justify so abandoning the Canadian people and, especially, our younger generations? Who elected them to give the future the finger?

This, of course, brings us back to Morneau's finger to young and future Canadians to just "suck it up." If you were one of those kids, you might look at us and the governments we imposed on them as truly predatory acts.

I can only defend some of what we've done by claiming "we didn't know." We really didn't know the scope or the nature or the self-destructive qualities of neoliberalism. But we've had our eyes opened now,  at least other than those who chose to turn their heads, and we don't have any excuse to keep tolerating the Morneau's and the Trudeau's and Harper's of this world who see no obligation to ensure the Canada bequeathed to our young and future generations won't be a much degraded remnant of the country we have exploited for our ease and comfort.

It's not unfair to say that Morneau's dystopian vision is, in a word, revolting. That's "revolting" as in justifying resistance, civil disobedience, perhaps even upheaval. If this government isn't leaving our young people and generations to come the best possible future it can provide, if it isn't even attempting to fix this crisis of our own making, why should any young person accept it? Why should they find any legitimacy in such a government?

If I stumbled across an act of civil disobedience underway today, I would be very tempted just to look the other way. This form of governance is not legitimate to me either.

Beware the Saviour-Industrial Complex

If you've been a bit leery about online "change" merchants like Change.org, for example, your caution might have been well grounded.  The Guardian's Oscar Rickett explains there's little real change to be had at the click of a mouse button.

We're living in the age of "change" as an all-purpose concept. What do you want to change? Something. Anything. What matters is that a better world is just an e-petition away and all we have to do is say "Yes we can" and we will. Will what? I don't know – petition sites, enthusiastic high-street drama school graduates and for-profit organisations are selling us the idea of grand change on a small, case-by-case basis. What's the issue? Dude, there are issues plural, across the world and we can solve them all.

We can do it because together, they say, as part of a Facebook group, email action or online petition, we are stronger. If enough people in the west get together they will form a righteous team of Davids and will, with high-speed wifi connections, topple all the Goliaths out there. If enough teenagers really care, then that bad man Joseph Kony will be caught by those good Christian people at Invisible Children and Africa will be saved.

Sites like Change.org and 38 Degrees are said to empower people to do anything from fix a road sign to save the NHS. Change.org, a profit-making operation, claims to have curbed corruption in Indonesia, fought caste discrimination in India, and shut down ex-gay torture clinics in Ecuador. The site may well have helped play a part in all these things but it has essentially followed Facebook's formula, which goes like this: establish credibility before making cash. Last year, its founder and chief executive Ben Rattray talked about "true empowerment" in a company-wide email which was leaked to the Huffington Post. The email set out a change in advertising policy to allow for solicitations from anyone – however unprogressive – who was willing to pay. Rattray's "true empowerment" essentially boils down to being empowered to harness the righteous anger of liberals to build a platform, before, like a good Zuckerberg-style free-marketer, opening up that platform to people with real money.


Earlier this year, the writer Teju Cole tore apart what he termed the "white saviour industrial complex". In one post, he wrote: "The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm." In the next, he said: "This world exists simply to satisfy the needs – including, importantly, the sentimental needs – of white people and Oprah." This banal sentimentality and desire to be patted on the back are behind many of the charity appeals and petition demands we are confronted with today. Facebook pages mean that people don't even have to give money anymore. They can just click "Like" and feel the approval of their peer group wash over them in an awesome wave.

Perhaps these small urges and interest-specific appeals are simply distracting us from bringing about significant societal change. Internet activism is not an extension of resistance; it's an expression of benign idleness. In The Society of the Spectacle, the French theorist Guy Debord wrote of "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing". "Liking" a page or putting your name to an unverified petition is "merely appearing".

Young Oscar makes the point that change, real change, remains a hands-on business.

The recent imprisonment of the Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond is an example of this. He has been sent down for 10 years for his part in revealing some of the shady and unpleasant aspects of the corporate intelligence industry. In a statement, Hammond said: "Could I have achieved the same goals through legal means? I have tried everything from voting petitions to peaceful protest and have found that those in power do not want the truth to be exposed."
 
Like Chelsea Manning, whom he mentions in his statement, Hammond took real risks to expose bad corporate practice and for that he is being rewarded with jail. Signing an e-petition is perfectly understandable and maybe good things occasionally come of it, but Facebook is not going to catch Joseph Kony and we won't tweet our way to peace in Syria. The business of "helping people" has become slicker and slicker but it patronises us, divides us and ultimately benefits the same old elites.

Keep this in mind when the time comes, as it probably will, when we will have to resist the excesses and abuses of our own governments.   Every potential resistor they can get waylaid in social media protests is a win for them.  It's another hundred or another thousand or ten  well-intentioned citizens hived off from what they truly fear - direct confrontation.

When Rallies, Flyers and Public Forums Won't Work

They call themselves Deep Green Resistance Vancouver.    They're a group of local environmental activists calling "for militant action - including sabotage - to defend the environment."

Although they emphasize that as an aboveground organization they’ll only engage in nonviolent actions, one of the group’s stated objectives is to “shift public opinion toward supporting an underground resistance that exists or may come to exist”.

“It was born out of necessity,” Jason Doherty said about the concept of “deep green resistance” during a phone interview with the Straight. “A lot of environmental groups play a vital role in protecting the environment. However, if you look back at the track record of these organizations, you’ll find that a majority of them are dealing with a fairly dismal track record in terms of the actual destruction that they’ve prevented.”

 Joe Foy has been involved in the Canadian environmental movement since the mid ’80s, and the national campaign director of the Vancouver-based Wilderness Committee is familiar with the thinking behind direct action.

“I understand the philosophy and, certainly, when one looks at the loss of species, the decline of the oceans, the destruction of farmland, and especially the changing climate, an argument can be made that environmental protection would necessitate actions that may damage equipment or put people at risk,” Foy told the Straight in a phone interview. “I disagree with that. I think that if we are trying to build a society worth having, we should maintain the peaceful and respectful society that we have here in Canada and try to improve on it, not go the other way and create a society where decisions are made by who can wreak the most damage on the other. I reject that notion.”

But according to Daniel Whittingstall, an organizer with Deep Green Resistance Vancouver, the mainstream environmental movement has “only put a Band-Aid” over the deteriorating health of the planet.

It's not difficult to grasp the frustration that fuels the Deep Green movement but it can only play straight into the hands of unprincipled charlatans like Harper and Oliver who will hold them up as proof that those who oppose their bitumen scam are eco-terrorists.

The time to act will arrive plenty soon enough and that will be a time for truly large-scale but non-violent civil disobedience.   As plenty of native and non-natives alike have shown in British Columbia and elsewhere, we can close roads, we can stop trains from running, we can stop ferries from sailing.   We can keep trucks from rolling, excavators from digging.   We can shut the whole damned thing down and make Harper be the one to resort to violent confrontation.   Even then there'll be nothing to lose and much to gain if we refuse to respond in kind.

Let's Make a Deal

What worries me whenever I see a poll suggesting that the Harper Cons might be toppled in 2015 is how far off that day is and what impetus that gives Harper to finish his dirty deeds.

Long have I suspected that Harper has calculated that, like a sneak thief, his days are numbered and thus knows that he has to get his agenda finished, if at all possible, within a single majority term in office.

First and foremost that means completing the CPC Triad - the Conservative Party of Canada, the Calgary Petroleum Club and the Communist Party of China - linking the Athabasca Tar Sands to Beijing via the Northern Gateway pipeline/supertanker trade route.

Harper has been working overtime to expedite that.   He has hammered out a Canada-China trade deal that leaves this country, its provinces and its people at China's mercy.   He has gutted our fisheries and navigation protections along the West Coast.   He's shuttering our Coast Guard stations.  He has exterminated entire departments at Fisheries & Oceans that were responsible for monitoring fish stocks and our coastal waters ecology.  He has uprooted the West Coast emergency oil spill response centre and relocated it to Quebec.  He has even assigned the pipeline operator, Enbridge, with a senior liaison section of the Department of Fisheries & Oceans.   He has streamlined gutted the environmental assessment regime.   He has villified as disloyal Canadians determined to safeguard our coast against his chicanery.   He has created a secret police agency comprising the RCMP, Calgary and Edmonton police and even our national spy agency, CSIS, to spy on pipeline opponents.

These are not the actions of someone who is anything but intent on forcing the Northern Gateway straight down our throats and very quickly.

There's not much the Libs and NDP can do to thwart Harper.  Harper has a majority and rules by fiat.   But that doesn't mean they get a pass on this either.

If Harper and Enbridge and China are to be stopped, it's going to take civil disobedience - ordinary, law-abiding citizens crossing the line, breaking the law, as many times as need be.   And since we'll have to do what the Libs and NDP can't, we need their undertaking, their promise that, once Harper is swept back into the gutter he came from, they will expunge all criminal records for non-violent civil disobedience in resisting the Northern Gateway.

So Tommy and Justin, what's it going to be?   Let's make a deal.

A Prisoner of Conscience - Banged Up for 2 Years By a Corrupt State

Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher has been sentenced to two years in prison. His crime? He attended a government auction where he bid on oil and gas leases to derail what was a manifestly illegal sale.

Before the judge put DeChristopher away the young man made what is unquestionably the greatest, most inspirational submission I have ever heard from a condemned defendant. Tim DeChristopher may have become the ultimate champion of civil disobedience. Do yourself a huge favour and read his remarks in which he puts his country's venal government and judicial system in the prisoners' dock.