Interview: The GW Community Plan Disaster

This is a 27-minute interview I taped this afternoon for David Berner’s show on Shaw TV.  We covered the future of Commercial Drive, the failure of the Community Plan process, the sham that is the Citizens’ Assembly, and what needs to be done now.

Hope you enjoy it!

American Taliban Redux

My earlier blogs were significantly more concerned with foreign politics than is this one.  In fact, one of the reasons I started Jaksview3 was to escape from the vicious madness of rightwing bloggers who had targeted me to the extent that my family and I were threatened with phyisical violence for expressing views with which they disagreed.  You could say I allowed the rowdy fascists to “win” by withdrawing from the field, and I would be unable to disagree: Sometimes discretion really is the better part of valour.

However, during the time I was fully engaged in battle with these thugs, I had written and published “The American Taliban: The Closing Down of America“.   Written in late 2004, it is a study of the surveillance culture spawned by Bush and Cheney and the underlying patriarchal fascism of the so-called “religious” right.  I have recently re-read this piece and it seems to stand the test of time.

Although I was never a fan of Obama (no more than I am of 99.9% of US politicians), there did seem some hope that the Obamacrats might pull back from the worst excesses of the Bush-Cheney regime. That has proven to be as false as fool’s gold.  In fact, the Obama regime has intensified and strengthened the surveillance and internal intelligence machinery of the US government and its corporate allies well beyond the wildest dream of even the fanatical Dick Cheney.

Moreover, the disgusting and highly disturbing policies that shackle women and their reproductive rights to the primitive fundamentalism of unstable rightwing zealots has broadened, deepened, and in every way gotten worse since Obama was elected (I am not blaming him, rather positioning this in time).  Every week I read of more excesses, and there seems nothing the progressive forces can do about it.

And do not let us pretend that we in Canada are somehow immune from these anti-democratic, anti-personnel, and anti-women threats.

If you are interested in this stuff (and I truly believe we all should be), please take a read of “American Taliban” on the understanding that the situation is now ten years more desperate than I painted in in 2004.