Day: July 8, 2018

North America

Podcast: First they came for the immigrants….

In Episode 13 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg deconstructs Trump’s executive order ostensibly ending the policy of family separation on the southern border, and demonstrates how it actually lays the groundwork for indefinite detention of migrants on military bases. The Central American peasantry, expropriated of its lands by state terror, CAFTA and narco-violence, is forced to flee north—now into the arms of Trump’s new gulag. Immigrants are the proverbial canaries in the American coal-mine. The Trump crew are testing their methods on them because they are vulnerable, and banking on the likelihood that non-immigrants will say “not my problem.” But if they get away with what they are doing now to a vulnerable and isolated population of non-citizens, it sets a precedent—and ultimately nobody is safe. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Passamaquoddy language and culture survive

At Campobello Island, Franklin D. Roosevelt's summer home in New Brunswick, now jointly administered as an international park by the US and Canada, a display about the local Passamaquoddy Indians is in three languages: English, French and transliterated Passamaquoddy. Passamaquoddy chief Tomah Jospeh was a childhood friend of FDR. Photo in bottom left of display shows adult FDR shaking hands with Joseph's sucessor, Chief William Neptune, pictured wearing a Plains Indian war bonnet (a bit of a culturally inappropriate cliché for the camera). Photo by CounterVortex.

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North America

Bay of Fundy flashpoint for US-Canada war?

In what the New York Times somewhat hyperbolically calls a “clash,” US Border Patrol vessels have over the past two weeks stopped at least 10 Canadian fishing boats in the Bay of Fundy between Maine and New Brunswick. Canada has responded by beefing up its Coast Guard patrols in what is being termed a “disputed gray zone” between the two countries’ territories. The maritime dispute dates back to the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution, and is one of several between the US and Canada—including fishing waters at Dixon Entrance between Alaska and British Columbia, and areas of the petroleum-rich Beaufort Sea, near the Arctic Ocean. (Map: ResearchGate)