By Alison@Creekside
h/t Waterbaby
That’s very good, isn’t it? “Kinder Morgan has solved the NIMBY problem by taking the backyard.”
I also liked his debunking of the attempt to de-legitimize protest itself — the argument that “protesters undermine the rule of law by claiming to speak for the whole community.”
Hey, here’s one now from the senior editorial board of the Vancouver Province!
Mountain mob don’t speak for the rest of us
The Province senior editorial board wonders why the protesters are available to protest in the middle of the day and aren’t at work “generating taxes,” and whether the protesting “clever university professors” understand where their salaries come from.
My personal fave here — Are their tents made from oil products? Oh, the hypocrisy!
This one is akin to the argument that First Nations should only have “preferential fishing rights” if they are restricted to using 14th century tools.
But then of course the protesters don’t speak for you, Province editorial board, because you’re already speaking for your editorial partner CAPP, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.
And a bang up job you’re doing of it too – introducing Postmedia stories that “CAPP needs to bring to the forefront of Canadian consciousness.”
Last month, backed by its major shareholder, New York hedge fund GoldenTree Asset Management, Postmedia added to its stable of CAPP-promoting opportunities with its purchase of Sun Media and 175 more newspapers and websites across Canada, including the 24 Hours daily.
At left is the before and after effects of the buyout – just another day of tarsands-friendly media concentration in your backyard.
Fun story: Seven years ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry was pushing to build the Trans-Texas Corridor, a quarter-mile-wide swath of truck-only toll lanes, railway lines, and multiple traffic lanes rolling from Mexico to the Oklahoma state border. The prime bidder was Cintra SA, Macquarie Infrastructure Group’s partner in the Ontario Highway 407 ETR 99 year lease, of which Australia’s Macquarie is the largest shareholder.
To many Texan ranchers and farmers, Perry’s superhighway just looked like a royal pain in the ass and opponents of privatizing roads came out against it in the thousands. All up and down the proposed route, ads and editorials critical of the proposal ran in the local newspapers.
Macquarie bought those local newspapers out. All 40 of them.
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Update: On Burnaby Mountain, RCMP act as Kinder Morgan’s private security force, protecting a foreign corporation against the municipality of Burnaby and the people protesting in a public park who actually live here.