- please forward widely. EMERGENCY ACTION -

CONFRONT THEIR ECONOMIC REGION:
Demonstration Opposing the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region (PNWER)

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Sunday July 20th 5:00 pm
Westin Bayshore Hotel
1601 Bayshore Drive, Vancouver
(two blocks east of Denman and one block north of West Georgia)
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From Sunday July 20th to Friday July 25th, the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region (PNWER) Summit will be meeting in Vancouver. (check out www.pnwer.org)

The PNWER is a northwest US-Canada forum to "encourage global economic competitiveness" and like other current regional and national free trade frameworks like NAFTA, SPP, and TILMA, it is all about furthering an agenda of corporate free trade, border militarization, privatization and theft of indigenous land and resources, ecological destruction, repression in the name of national security, impoverishment and displacement, and cooperation in war and occupation.

Specifically the 2008 agenda highlights border security, oil/gas mining, and 2010 Olympics. In the words of Minister Stockwell Day, “[PNWER] has had a profound impact on policymaking.” In PNWER’s own words, it serves as a “cross-border forum for unfiltered dialogue that capitalizes upon the synergies between business leaders and elected officials.”

PNWER reinforces the idea of "Fortress North America", whereby the rich and privileged live in gated communities and gentrified cities, protected by police and security, with easy movement for capital between borders; for the rest, there's border fences, reserves, ghettos, factory assembly lines, prisons, surveillance, increased precarity, and empty rhetoric about democracy and human rights.

In the next few years, so-called British Colombia (unceded Indigenous territories) will be at centre of a commercial and resource boom, with unprecedented expansion in: the tourist and recreational sector leading to the 2010 Olympics; pilot projects for border surveillance and US-Canadian military training cooperation under the SPP;n mineral and gas mining in the interior and North; resource extraction and privatization including water and forestry products; and infrastructure development for resource transportation including tarsands pipelines.

We do not believe in lobbying the PNWER leaders and we encourage actions over the four days to raise awareness about, reject, protest, creatively resist and/or disrupt this agenda of colonial and capitalist pillage.

"You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker."
- Malcolm X