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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to halt new mining approvals, and announced a public referendum on whether the contract with First Quantum should be repealed.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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  • An Extension of Nazism: How Did Zionism Collaborate With Hitler to Establish ‘Israel’?

    "Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the relationship between Nazism and Zionism is the disconnect between Zionism and the Holocaust during World War II. Zionism was not interested in the massacres of Jews and rescuing them as much as it was in the facilitating the emigration of Jews to Palestine. And those Jews who did not emigrate to Palestine before the establishment of the “state” in 1948 were not a matter of concern for Zionism, whose conviction was limited to the fact that the solution to the Jewish question was solely related to the establishment of a state, and that anything else was irrelevant.

    This is confirmed by Egon Redlich in his diaries, Memoirs of a Zionist: The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich in which he confirms the sacrifice of tens of thousands of Jews who were eliminated and sent to their deaths through deals that Redlich himself felt ashamed of, in exchange for false promises. He wrote: “The Zionist movement in Czechoslovakia sent thousands of Jews to Nazi extermination camps in exchange for Nazi promises to send a few dozen or hundreds of Zionist leaders and financial figures to Palestine.”

    Abdul Wahab Al-Masiri, author of the eight-volume Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism and Zionism, mentions that Adolf Eichmann succeeded in his mission thanks to the cooperation of the Hungarian Jew Rudolf Kastner, who convinced members of the Jewish community in Hungary that the Nazis would relocate them to new places where they would settle, or to vocational training camps for rehabilitation, and not to the concentration camps which were their true destination.

    In exchange for this, the Nazi authorities in 1941 allowed over 1,700 Jews from a concentration camp to be sent to Palestine, “Jews of the best biological material,” according to Eichmann."

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