During the Vietnam war, American draft resisters found refuge in Canada. Those days are long gone. I’m not con-vinced that it’s just be-cause Canada has a Conservative Prime Minister that the country has emulated so much of our Homeland Security provisions, extending them to cover domestic dissent.

Whatever the reason, this much is certain: Canada is now more than ever an extension of the United States, and while it is probable that the North American Free Trade Agreement has something to do with it, the more deeper reasons are more worrisome. Sooner or later, the conflictive situation with Mexico will make it part of a North American Colossus – a desperate but probably futile effort to meet the challenges of China, India and Brazil.

What should make us take notice is that this is part of a larger conflictive situation: the grass roots of the world (no longer the workers or proletarians of the world), are finally getting it together. As it reports on efforts of the G8 and the G20 in Toronto to save the world economic system, the American media ignores the fact that 15,000 people are camping in tents in the industrial wasteland of Detroit, a predominantly black city that is finding new ways to live with the newly liberated land. Much less are Americans aware of similar experiments going on across their country – and nost others.

Today, in the tight credit market, CNN revealed to its viewers the existence of micro-finance, a concept for which a Bangladeshi, Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank that makes loans to peasants, mainly women, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Only ten years behind, CNN! Bravo! A few weeks ago your founder, Ted Turner, long ago ousted, was given a tour of the Atlanta headquarters after a remake, and when he was asked by your friendliest anchor, Fredricka Whitfield, whether he had any unfulfilled wishes, he said he had always wished that CNN would cover more foreign news. Alas!

The fact that political junkies can turn to the internet hardly makes up for the failure of the Mainstream Media (or MSM as it is known), to bridge the oceans that have for two hundred years complacently separated Americans from the rest of the messy world. Why? Because even the most highly regarded on-line resources such as Huffington Post, Truth-Digg, Common Dreams, to name but a few, are mainly concerned with who said what to whom on the domestic front.

I’m lucky to receive internet newsletters and blogs in other lan-guages that I read, and although many of these, like their American counterparts, are mainly concerned with national issues, there are a growing number of on-line news publications that have an international focus, and some of them make the effort to publish in several languages.

This is not where I meant to go with this blog, so the names of these multi-lingual newsletters will have to wait for my next blog. I want to get back to the idea of a North American colossus, in which Mexican manpower plays a similar role to that of China’s rural population.

The two sides in the immigration debate are irreconcilable as things now stand: But one could imagine the creation of a political entity similar to the European Union, that would link the U.S. with Canada and Mexico in such a way as to get around that problem and create a more competitive economy. One would have to hope that such an entity would not more closely resemble the authoritarian Chinese regime than the European.

My head is spinning. The amount of evidence pointing to the com-plete discombobulation of the world that one receives from just an hour of TV is overwhelming.

Today, I was fresh from the viewing, last night, of the new documentary Gasland, by Josh Fox, whose family is offered $100,000 for the gas rights under their Pennsylvania portion of the Marsellus Shale. This is a must-see film that reveals a continent-wide landscape studded by hydraulic fracturing towers for the extraction of liquid gas, a sight which is disturbingly similar to the thousands of drilling rigs studding the Gulf of Mexico.

Realizing how much is being put over on us, on land and on sea, I turn on CNN to learn that the day’s subject of burning (sic) concern is the first anniversary of the death of Michael Jackson. The networks continue to ignore the 15,000 people gathered since yesterday for the second US Social Forum in Detroit, emblem of industrial decline and the citizen-propelled sustainable renewal who are trying to show that “Another World is Possible, Another US is Necessary”.

At noon, tuning in to Democracy Now on the Drexel University channel (which has recently taken to loping off not the last five minutes, but the last ten or twelve minutes of the hour-long show), I’m just in time to hear Amy Goodman describe the unprecedented security walls erected in Toronto for the meetings of the G8 and the G20. Last night the BBC gave only a passing mention to the automobile stuffed to the gills with arms and gasoline that was stopped, quoting the police that there was no evidence that this vehicle, whose closed roof rack was also stuffed with arms, had any link to terrorism.

Today on the Toronto river bank, a police vehicle drew up as a Montreal-based political activist was telling Amy Goodman that the police sought information about him even from artist friends, and just as I was picturing in my mind’s eye a medieval walled castle, the young man said: “We’re living in a world of walls, the Berlin Wall, the Mexican border wall, the Israeli wall, etc.” And I thought: ‘We haven’t made much progress since the Middle Ages.’

In those days walls were to keep out rudimentarily-armed soldiers, while today walls are to keep in – or out – unarmed civilians. And our media walls are keeping other, unarmed civilians from knowing about the concrete and barbed wire walls governments increasingly use to keep us in line.

As our corporate leaders mindlessly scrounge for the last vestiges of fuel for economies devoted to the consumption of largely unneces-sary products, imperiling water supplies and arable land, people across the globe are banding together (as in primitive times?), determined to wrest control of their lives from the techno-monster, that rules us, creating community vegetable gardens on Detroit’s abandoned lots, housing communities in its abandoned factories, meaningful lives for the handicapped, and a host of other bottom-up initiatives that the G8 and the G20 try to pretend are irrelevant.

To remain sane, the rest of us have to tell ourselves that thanks to our combined efforts, like the kings and counts of yore, our robber barons will some day become irrelevant.