“Freedom” is subjective when we’re all subjects
We know everyone is suffering under the Tories - but the Canary is a vital weapon in our fight back, and we need your support
The Canary Workers’ Co-op knows life is hard. The Tories are waging a class war against us we’re all having to fight. But like trade unions and community organising, truly independent working-class media is a vital weapon in our armoury.
The Canary doesn’t have the budget of the corporate media. In fact, our income is over 1,000 times less than the Guardian’s. What we do have is a radical agenda that disrupts power and amplifies marginalised communities. But we can only do this with our readers’ support.
So please, help us continue to spread messages of resistance and hope. Even the smallest donation would mean the world to us.
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“Free Press”?! …. Even our mainstream news-media support Big Fossil Fuel’s interests! Most notably, Canadian media conglomerate Postmedia is on record allying itself with Canada’s fossil fuel industry, including the mass extraction and export of bitumen, the world’s dirtiest and most consequentially polluting crude oil.
Also, a then-publisher of Postmedia’s National Post said: “From its inception, the National Post has been one of the country’s leading voices on the importance of energy to Canada’s business competitiveness internationally and our economic well-being in general. We will work with [Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers] to amplify our energy mandate and to be a part of the solution to keep Canada competitive in the global marketplace. The National Post will undertake to leverage all means editorially, technically and creatively to further this critical conversation.” [Source: “Mair on Media’s ‘Unholiest of Alliances’ With Energy Industry”, Nov.14 2017, The Tyee].
Additionally, a few years ago, Postmedia had acquired a lobbying firm with close ties to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney in order to participate in his government’s $30 million PR “war room” in promoting the industry’s interests. Furthermore, in May of 2021, Postmedia refused to run paid ads by Leadnow, a social and environmental justice organization, that exposed the Royal Bank of Canada as the largest financer of the nation’s fossil fuel extraction.
Seriously, how can allying itself with such an environmental monstrosity possibly be considered ethical journalism?! Unless, of course, it has become so systematic thus normalized — i.e. the ethical (and sometimes even the moral) standard has been further lowered — that those who are aware of it, notably politicians and political writers, don’t bother publicly discussing it.
Still, other concerned people would’ve worded it even stronger: “I would argue that what little ethical and moral foundation the country has is deeply threatened by the crumbling discipline of a fossil-fuel-based economy and the politics it spawns. Nothing requires government supervision in so many areas (and nothing has anything like the influence on government) as this industry. It follows that no other industry remotely requires the amount and kind of honest, wary media surveillance this one does,” the late Rafe Mair aptly wrote in his 2017 book Politically Incorrect, in which he forensically dissects democracy’s decline in Canada and suggests how it may be helped.
“What has the media, especially but hardly exclusively the print media, done in response to this immense challenge? It’s joined fortunes with the petroleum industry. And a very large part of it has done so in print and in public. The facts are that the rest of the media have not raised a peep of protest at this unholiest of alliances and that governments contentedly and smugly pretend all that favourable coverage they get proves their efficiency — not that the fix is in and they’re part of that fix. Let me just comment that the difference from 1972 to 2017 in the media’s dealing with governments and politics takes the breath away!” …
Maybe there’s an informal/unspoken agreement amongst the largest mainstream news-media: ‘Don’t dump on me, and I won’t dump on you.’
Maybe mainstream journalism has largely become a profession that’s motivated more by a buck and a byline — i.e. a regular company paycheck and a frequently published name with stories — than a genuine strive to challenge the powers-that-be in order to truly comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable in an increasingly unjust global existence.
Environmental Activists need to stop fucking about with protests which achieve nothing.
Unless you can stop ALL London traffic for a week. Or permanently. Also this pisses off the Joe and Jane in the street.
If you are committed to fighting to Save our World from Fossil Bosses KILL Fossil Bosses.
Also high executives. Tory Ministers and MPs who are slave to Fossil Bosses.
Target oil factories etc and blow them sky high.
The World is at War NOW fir the future of our planet. The time for protests is over.
The time for revolutions is here.
Time to take out the Garbage.
Right wing celebrities.
Prominent Right Wingers.
Any spokesperson for big oil/fossil
It is our children who will have to wear a spacesuit like hazmat suit with it’s own air tank if they can afford it in 50 years time whenever they go out of their airlocks from home. It is our children who will be lucky to be alive in 50 years. Firm action is meeded now. Yes it is necesary to be involved in politics but ALL parties are seriously flawed and the Tories are completely insane.
We need a strong movement but it must be a movement of action and deed.
We need organised mass civil disobedience.
We need an organised revolution.
We need this to have it’s trained and armed brigades.
We need this to happen now so that the revolution can follow very soon.
Anything less than this is a waste of time.