STOP FORTRESS NORTH AMERICA!!!!

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

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Sunday July 20th 5 pm
Westin Bayshore Hotel
1601 Bayshore Drive
(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; 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

Organized and supported by No One Is Illegal, La Surda Latin American
Collective, Council of Canadians BC/Yukon Office, Anti Poverty Committee,
Olympics Resistance Network, Komagatamaru Heritage Foundation, Canadian
Arab Federation, Siraat Collective, Latin America Connexions Collective,
Building Bridges Human Rights Project- Vancouver, Stopwar.ca

For more information call 778 885 0040.