On his second day in office as president of the United States, Barack Obama issued an executive order to make good on his promise to shut down the Guantánamo Bay incarceration facility in Cuba. Nearly at the end of his second term as president, Obama has not yet realized his promise. The act of holding rendered people continues.
It is hardly surprising to the people when their political representatives fail to make good on their pledges. It is all too common in a system that the ruling classes bill as “democracy.”
North of the border the political process plays out much the same. Nearing one year in office as Canada’s prime minister, by granting approval for the Pacific NorthWest LNG terminal and its pipeline, Justin Trudeau has managed to obliterate two major campaign promises in one stroke: to curb Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions and to honor a “sacred obligation” to the First Nations.
Corporate-state media seemed to focus on what the Pacific NorthWest LNG terminal and its pipeline would mean to Trudeau’s commitment to tackle climate warming. Fracking is an environmentally disruptive method of injecting pressurized water to retrieve bottled-up natural gas. Combusting the fossil fuel releases more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The Northern Gateway pipeline project to bring tar sands oil to the northwest coast is currently in limbo.
Concern for the preservation of the environment and the ecological system underlies opposition to the…