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Bulletins and News Discussion for December 11th to December 17th, 2023 - What's Yours is Mine - COTW: Canada

Image is of the Cobre Panama open-pit copper mine, located 120 kilometers west of Panama City.

Canada is a prolific mining country, hosting many of the world's top mining corporations. Some of its extraction is local - for example, Saskatchewan is the world's largest producer of potash, a critical agricultural nutrient. Much of the extraction is abroad. Naturally, this means that Canada has cut a bloody, but often ignored, path through the global periphery, extracting minerals and causing environmental degradation.

A notable recent example is that of the Cobre Panama copper mine, which is owned by First Quantum Minerals, one of the largest mining companies in Canada. The company earned $10 billion in revenue in 2022, of which the Cobre Panama mine generated $1 billion. Protests in Panama about this mine have gone on for over a decade, urging for a greater share of the profits, protection of indigenous people, and stronger environmental protections. Canada has maintained a stoney silence (pun somewhat intended) on these movements.

On October 20th, the president of Panama, Cortizo, renewed the company's mining concession for 20 years, after a halt in production since the end of 2022 due to negotiations and reform. Everybody hated this. In October, protestors took to the streets in sufficient numbers that Cortizo was forced to halt new mining approvals, and announced a public referendum on whether the contract with First Quantum should be repealed. This was immediately cut down, but the government decided to invalidate the new concession anyway in late November, calling it unconstitutional, and closing down the mine.

First Quantum Minerals has lost about half its market value since October. Various international banks have said that Panama could lose its investment-grade credit rating next year due to the income hit - the mine generated 5% of its GDP. The international arbitration process which First Quantum has initiated against Panama could last years.

The book Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination handles Canada's role as an imperialist, anti-indigenous, extractive state throughout its history, and is on our geopolitical reading list.

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1.3K comments

  • “Stop murdering thousands of children,” said the evil, crazy Nazi.

    “It’s bad to murder children,” the monster added. “Children should not be slaughtered at mass scale with powerful military explosives, they should be allowed to remain alive and happy and healthy.”

    What would lead someone to say something so hateful and depraved? What disgusting conspiratorial anti-semitic online rabbit holes must this freak have slithered down in his path toward radicalization to say something so profoundly evil? One can only guess.

    “We should not incinerate children and blow their guts out of their bodies with bombs,” the world’s worst person continued. “Zero children should die by incineration, and their guts belong on the inside of their bodies.”

    I’m just as shocked and dismayed as you are. I thought we were beyond this. I thought we as a civilization had left this kind of genocidal rhetoric behind us with the end of Nazi Germany. But, apparently, Adolf Hitler still lives on.

    This fiendish enemy of all things good and righteous went on to say that all Palestinians are human beings just like everyone else, and they should accordingly be given human rights instead of exterminated like insects with some of the most sophisticated weaponry ever devised.

    “I just don’t think someone having a certain ethnicity makes it acceptable to butcher them in massive numbers with modern war machinery and drive them off the land they wish to live on,” said the ghoul, adding, “I kind of think we ought to treat others how we ourselves would wish to be treated.”

    Now, I’m as liberal as the next person and I absolutely support free speech, but this kind of repugnant blood libel is exactly why we need to be having some serious conversations about how far the right to free speech ought to go. We can’t have deranged fascists running around our society fomenting genocidal violence by spouting extremist rhetoric like “Don’t drop bombs on babies” and “It’s wrong to intentionally assassinate journalists.”

    It makes me feel unsafe when people say such things, because I do not agree with the things they are saying. And, as we all know, the universe revolves around me and how my feelings feel. I therefore fear we have reached an unfortunate juncture in our society where we’ve no choice but to censor the internet, prohibit pro-Palestine demonstrations, ban TikTok, and make it illegal to be a Zoomer. The only alternative is to allow horrifying radicalization like what we just witnessed here to continue.

    Caitlin Johnstone on twitter

1345 comments