Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Susan Sontag’s speech online

wood’s lot links, via The Literary Saloon, to The Guardian which yesterday published Susan Sontag’s acceptance speech for the peace prize of the German Book Trade, delivered at the Frankfurt Book Fair last week. [See my entry from October 12, too, for additional damning perspectives on Daniel Coats (not that he needs them, but he probably deserves them...)].

Sontag’s speech is amazing. The American press appears to be revealing its profound complicity with unfreedom and censorship by not reporting and debating her words.

BC branded, and other follies

Dawn Paley of the sparklin weblog has put a succinct article she recently wrote online, outlining the BC Liberals’ agenda and its effects. Although I live in a city and almost never venture into the wild, I found these facts the most telling:

Believe BC, a high budget advertising campaign initiated by the BC Liberals to brand BC, highlights the splendor of natural beauty in British Columbia. Simultaneously, changes to the functioning of BC parks means that BC is now the only jurisdiction in North America, save Mississippi, without interpretive services in parks. All services have been removed from 45 provincial parks and those that continue to have services now have those services contracted out to private companies.

The BC Liberals have withdrawn support from the avalanche warning system, making Canada the only country in the world that promotes mountain tourism without publically funding an avalanche warning program. Environmental regulations have also been scrapped as the Forest Practices Code was eliminated in favour of industrial self-policing, fish farms that have popped up all along the coast are operating on the same modicum of industry self policing, and offshore drilling is being re-explored as a possibility for economic development in BC. Gordon Campell has publically denounced Canada’s commitment to ratify Kyoto. [More...]

To me, this illustrates how retardataire Liberal policies actually are. The mentality is to rely on exploiting the land and its natural resources in the most primitive way imaginable: namely, through using them up. Presumably, this will phenomenally enrich a limited, relatively small, group of people who may or may not actually live here. Somehow their wealth is then supposed to trickle down to others? I doubt it. Those with wealth will invest it in international companies that, beholden to their anonymous shareholders, will feel obliged to outsource skilled manufacturing as well as IT jobs to …China and India. Excellent trickle down strategy, that.

PS: Dawn starts her article by noting that the Liberals were elected in 2001, claiming 77 out of 79 seats in the Legislature, despite the fact that many people voted against them. I’m not sure exactly how this works here, but BC has a flawed “winner takes all” system of elections. That is, those who vote against a party effectively get no representation at all. As far as I can tell, this accounts for some of the wild swings in politics here: somewhat leftwing NDP one year, Socreds another, neo-Libs next, etc. There was a drive to change the system, but it didn’t get enough signatures. Maybe next time.