Next Year Country

SFL Calls on Provincial Government to Reject Harper Pension Cuts

2012-01-31T17:53:00.000-06:00

Saskatchewan Federation of Labour
Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Thousands of Saskatchewan people are concerned today about looming changes to Canada’s universal pension plan, specifically Old Age Security (OAS). Despite the nation’s strong economic position, especially in relation to the US and Europe, and despite the Harper Government’s fondness for dolling out tax breaks to corporations, the Prime Minister has indicated that he intends to make cuts to Canada’s highly-regarded pension program. The SFL is calling on the provincial government to stand up for the people of Saskatchewan and to oppose any cuts that the Harper Government proposes for pensions.

“What we see in Ottawa is a government that is willing to spend money on tax cuts for big corporations, but not on pensioners across the country who are trying to make ends meet,” said Larry Hubich, President of the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour. “If the Harper Government’s priorities are going to continue to be corporate profits over people, then we need a provincial government that is willing to do the right thing and stand up to Ottawa.”

The Prime Minister’s announced intentions to cut OAS benefits for Canadian seniors come even as our economic position continues to be among the strongest in the world. The cuts further illustrate how far the federal government’s priorities are out of sync with those of average citizens.

“Stephen Harper and his government would rather spend our money on expensive fighter jets and gold-plated pensions for themselves than on meager pensions for struggling seniors. For Mr. Harper to cut pensions is not consistent with the values that we hold in Saskatchewan, and the provincial government should do its part oppose his plan.”

Unions must change quickly to survive, says secret report by CEP/CAW

2012-01-28T09:11:00.003-06:00

BY DAVE CHIDLEY
The Canadian Press
January 26, 2012

Ken Lewenza

Unions must overhaul themselves dramatically — and fast — or face a slow death, says a secret report by the two groups contemplating the biggest merger in Canadian labour history.

In a surprisingly blunt assessment of organized labour’s current difficulties, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers (CEP) union say in a discussion paper that they must become a lot more relevant to working people, not only in contract bargaining, but for social change.

The paper, titled “A Moment of Truth for Canadian Labour,” says the economic pressures of globalization, growing employer aggression, hostile government policy and public cynicism have weakened unions significantly during the past two decades.

“If unions do not change, and quickly, we will steadily follow U.S. unions into continuing decline,” says the paper, which is marked “confidential.”

“We must reverse the erosion of our membership, our power and our prestige.”

Statistics show union membership in the private sector in Canada has slid from about 30 per cent in the early 1970s to 17.4 per cent — or 1.92 million employees — excluding farm workers. Public sector unionization remained at about 75 per cent in the same period.

U.S. union membership in the private sector has plunged from 30 per cent to 7 per cent over the past four decades. Public-sector unionization south of the border has stayed at about 37 per cent.

In Canada, employers such as Vale, U.S. Steel and Caterpillar have taken a hard line and demanded major concessions that has bruised organized labour and left workers wondering whether unions can be effective.

To help turn the trend around, the paper calls for the CAW, which represents 190,000 members, and CEP, which has another 130,000 members, to create a “brand” and “visibility for a new kind of national Canadian industrial unionism.”

“This improved brand image will be essential for attracting more individual workers to want to join a union,” says the paper, written by key strategists in the two unions and distributed at the highest levels of both groups.

The paper, which has received the support of CAW president Ken Lewenza and CEP president Dave Coles, is the springboard for talks between the two unions for a possible merger next year. The two unions announced the formation of a “proposal committee” and an extensive consultation process this week.

“We have to be thinking outside of the box,” Lewenza said in an interview Wednesday.

The paper says unions are experiencing a significant generational change as senior workers who fought for improvements retire and organizers struggle to appeal to younger employees.

Furthermore, the public perception of unions has grown more negative, with many believing that unions are primarily self-interested and outdated, according to the paper.

The paper says that if organized labour wants to reverse its demise in power and influence, unions will have to be innovative in how they organize workers and provide and improve services for them.

“The formation of a new union must be founded on a desire to and willingness to modernize our practices, to innovate with new models of organizing and servicing, and to rebuild our image with workers,” the paper adds.

“A new union would aim to spark a ‘culture shift’ among staff and local union leadership, to go beyond ‘servicing’ and view their work as movement building.”

Organized labour has not adapted well to changing workplace circumstances in the pursuit of people in industries such as the media and technology sectors. In response, unions could resort more to the “hiring hall” concept that’s used in the construction industry, where contractors contact a central agency for organized workers when they need skilled labour, said one insider familiar with the paper.

CAW and CEP insiders say a new union would look at new ways to open its doors so people like laid-off workers could join or become affiliated, to become more effective in pushing for better employment opportunities and social programs. Workers in non-unionized plants could also be more welcome in a union that’s pursuing social change in a community.

Unions also need to use new technology and social media to “educate, agitate, organize and mobilize,” said CAW economist Jim Stanford, who helped write the paper.

“The overall challenge is to reboot the ‘brand’ of unions in the minds of workers, so that we are seen once again as a movement that fights for fairness and security for all working people,” he noted.

The hard-hitting paper acknowledges that the labour movement has failed to restructure or to address the longstanding issue of too many unions and locals. It also points to the movement’s inability to initiate and lead effective campaigns or co-ordinate services.

Alluding to the Canadian Labour Congress and some provincial labour federations, the paper also criticizes umbrella union groups for “paralysis and dysfunction.”

Food as a Commodity

2012-01-26T00:17:00.000-06:00

By Fred Magdoff
Monthly Review
January 2012

Food is one of the most basic of human needs. Routine access to a balanced diet is essential for both growth and development of the young, as well as for general health throughout one’s life. Although food is mostly plentiful, malnutrition is still common. The contradiction between plentiful global food supplies and widespread malnutrition and hunger arises primarily from food being considered a commodity, just like any other.

For many millennia following the origin of our species, humans were hunters and gatherers—an existence that one might think of as tenuous. However, judging from archeological evidence as well as recent examples, hunters and gatherers generally ate a diverse diet that supplied adequate nutrition. For example, studies in the 1960s and ‘70s of the !Kung of southern Africa, foragers for literally thousands of years, indicate that although they ate meat that they hunted, about two-thirds of their food was plant-based—nuts (supplying more than one-third of caloric intake), fruits, roots, and berries—and their diet provided approximately 2,400 calories a day. The groups of hunter-gatherers were egalitarian, with everyone participating in the provisioning of food.

Read more HERE.

Farmers standing up to Harper's anti-democratic rule

2012-01-24T16:58:00.001-06:00

No Nukes
January 24, 2012

After squeezing a majority government out of the Canadian electorate Harper is ratcheting up his assault on our democracy. One of his first acts was to ram through Bill C-18 which undercuts the farmer-elected Canadian Wheat Board (CWB). A Federal Court judge found Harper had breached his “statutory duty to consult the CWB and conduct a vote”, a requirement under Section 47.1 of the 1998 legislation. Harper barreled on and now former CWB directors have called for an injunction on Bill C-18; and a class action suit is seeking compensation for damages to farmers. As Bruce Johnstone so rightly asked in the January 14, 2012 Leader Post: “What gives this government the right to seize farmer’s assets, sell them and pocket the proceeds, without paying any compensation to farmers?”

Farmers need a lot of financial support in their efforts to draw a line in the sand and show Harper that he can’t trample on the rule of law. The line may have to be drawn one community meeting at a time.

And this is starting to happen. On January 22nd nearly 100 people gathered in the Raymore Elks Hall to show their support for standing up for the rights of farmers. CWB members, a diversity of political party supporters and a wide-range of community leaders from 30 communities packed into the small hall. Ralph Goodale, Minister when the CWB was changed to give farmers a say, spoke last and spoke passionately. After speeches, questions, debate, lots of learning and a great supper, many people started donating $1 for every acre they farm to the farmer’s defense fund.

ANTI-DEMOCRATIC LEGACY

I was asked to talk about Harper’s assault on democracy, to look at the pattern of his rule since 2006. I was dumbfounded by the growing list of undemocratic acts. There was the proroguing of Parliament before the Vancouver Olympics to suppress information about complicity in Afghan torture. Bullying was already happening, as Harper warned the Law Clerk to conduct himself “according to government interpretation”. There was a constant misleading of Parliament to impose his rule: cuts to KAIROS, a long-stand ecumenical and international development group, were done deceitfully. Minister Oda claimed KAIROS failed to meet CIDA’s new guidelines; it was later found that someone in her office had inserted “not” onto the grant form reversing CIDA’s actual recommendation. Basic honestly was beginning to erode. Then Harper’s 2006 and 2008 Campaign Manager was accused of making “false and misleading statements” regarding overspending for attack ads used against the Leader of the Opposition.

Harper wasn’t just suppressing information required for a functioning Parliamentary democracy, he was starting to repress the inherent rights of Canadians. The government squandered $1 billion on the G8 and G 20 meetings; 20,000 police were brought in, 1,100 Canadians were arbitrarily held in detention centers, the vast majority of whom had no charge laid or were there under false arrest. Harper made Canada look like a banana republic.

The list continues. Harper obstructed international attempts to negotiate a climate treaty. Under his rule Canada became the only country to not repatriate its citizens from Guantanamo Bay. When Harper tied to get Canada a seat on the Security Council, his hostility towards international law was already well known. Canada, a pioneer of the United Nations, was soundly defeated by Portugal.

Harper steadily centralizes power. Though using populist rhetoric about accountability and transparency, he appointed an unelected party supporter to his Cabinet, eliminated an Access to Information database (CAIRS), and fired the head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission for trying to regulate nuclear safety at Chalk River. The Chief Statistician at Stats Canada was driven out because he spoke the truth about how the qualitative information from the Long Census Form was required for good governance.

Harper established rigid controls over Cabinet and civil service contact with the media. After taking $10 million in public subsidies for his election campaign, he threatened to abolish the per-vote public subsidy that keeps Canadian politics from being in the pockets of the rich, as in the U.S. Harper was found to be in Contempt of Parliament prior to the 2011 election. This was a first for any Prime Minister in the Commonwealth, yet another blight on Canada.

ONE-MAN RULE

With the economic uncertainty following the 2008 financial crisis, Harper was carefully marketed as an Economic Strong Man who could rule decisively. This helped deflect attention from the $10 billion dollar surplus becoming a $50 billion deficit, the largest in our history. Harper branded the federal stimulus package, Action Canada, as a Conservative vote-getting machine and was trying to rebrand Government of Canada departments as those of the “Harper Government”. Most Canadians didn’t fall for this, but with 4 of 10 not voting and the opposition vote split several ways, Harper gained enough seats, mostly from suburban Ontario, to get his majority.

Harper is sometimes referred to as Teflon Man: nothing sticks. He has deflected criticisms of his anti-democratic legacy mostly by playing the politics of fear. He has barged ahead with his extravagant plan to build super-jails in a time of a lowering crime rate and a plan for super-jets (The F-35 Stealths) without any rational bidding process. This is perhaps a $40 billion combined cost, at a time when the government says it will cut $8 billion in spending.

Harper preemptively undermined the UN climate treaty process by announcing he would withdraw from all commitments to the Kyoto Accord, which had previously been endorsed by Parliament. Following a similar pattern, he preempted the National Energy Board’s hearings on the Northern Gateway pipeline by attacking opponents as “foreign-funded radicals”. NGOs and First Nations were demonized while multi-nationals who would export thousands of jobs to China were in “the national economic interest”. This brings us back to the CWB, where the benefactors of Harper’s squashing of the rule of law will be the grain and transportation corporations to which farmers will be more beholding.

POLITICS AS WARFARE

While others in the world struggle and in some cases die to create democratic space for progressive reform, Harper systematically shuts down and closes off democratic processes so he can force through his corporate agenda. He skillfully manipulated the electoral system using attack ads, wedge issues like gun control and immigration, suppression of opponents and outright deceit. He’s no democrat in any sense of the term. What characterizes his politics is preemptive attacks: Syria’s dictator labels his opponents as “foreign-supported terrorists”; Harper’s slams his as “foreign-funded radicals”. It’s semantic warfare.

Harper and his circle of ideologues are angry at democracy for its tolerance for dialogue and compromise. They are angry at those who would dare oppose them; they prefer to strike first, with no apologies. Harper’s past political adviser, Tom Flanagan, has spoken of elections as “war by other means”; you fatally wound your enemies. Flanagan actually called for the assassination of Wikipedia activist Julian Assange. What kind of model is this for upcoming generations?

Harper sees politics as war. He sees sport as warlike. He wants the military to be at the centre of our political culture, while he undermines the very freedoms for which we ritually thank the military. Politics is not rivalry among citizen politicians; it’s not about political participation by farmers, workers, environmentalists, indigenous or other peoples to find the best methods of governance. It is a zero-sum game where winner takes all; where you rule by law not by the rule of law.

Saskatchewan Farmers have now drawn a line in the sand. The majority of Canadians do not like Harper’s anti-democratic rule. Will others soon join the farmers who have said “enough is enough”?

For more info or to donate go to: www.friendsofcwb.ca

Tommy Douglas for Robbie Burns Day

2012-01-24T15:36:00.000-06:00

Tommy Douglas
Videos by Doug Taylor.

It is a flat world when it comes to wheat

2012-01-24T08:35:00.002-06:00

Canadian Wheat Board Alliance
January 23, 2012

In the November 24 Western Producer D’Arce McMillan argues that “ending single desk won’t change realities of wheat market.” However, it was the problems created by those realities that the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) was created to address. Without the CWB it will be the same old market Canadian farmers and consumers have been insulated from since farmers founded the Wheat Board in 1935.

From a consumer point of view, the contention that the mixture of wheat Canadians eat will not change once the single desk Board is gone is unrealistic. Here is why:

When it comes to commodity trading the world for all intents and purposes is flat. In the absence of orderly marketing, the private trade arbitrages all prices to a lowest common denominator almost automatically.
Part of that flat world is made possible by low-cost ocean transport. The Baltic Dry Index measures how expensive it is to move things by ship. Larger and more fuel efficient vessels have lowered unit costs by two thirds in the past five years.

Once a commodity is on an ocean freighter it can go anywhere in the world. This results in some odd things happening. For example, eastern Canada imports most of its oil from the Middle East half way around the world rather than pay the high overland shipping costs to get oil from western Canada.

Wheat also travels on the sea. So contrary to Mr. McMillan, that is why it is entirely reasonable to expect that without the CWB a lot of eastern Canadian flour will be milled from wheat coming in by ocean-going ships, rather than rail car from western Canada or even from south of the border.

Processors pay a premium for a reliable supply of a consistent quality grain. With the single desk the CWB is the only grain dealer on the planet with the logistical ability and the financial incentive to make a speciality of providing reliable supplies of premium grain. Along with a policy of encouraging domestic processing by having a uniform price, this gives domestic processors an incentive to use western Canadian wheat while still leaving a premium on the table for farmers.

However, if Harper removes the CWB single desk, processors will no longer have access to a reliable and consistent supply of wheat, not because the wheat disappears, but because the cost of assembling and delivering supplies will no longer be provided by the CWB and the logistical costs of assembling the required volumes will increase. This is exactly what is being reported by Reuter’s news service:

”Canadian millers, who include Archer Daniels Midland and P&H Milling Group, have said they may tap U.S. wheat to manage risks around no longer being able to secure all their supplies through a single supplier.”

The largest processors will also demand, and get, bulk discounts from the private trade, and the smaller processors will seek operational economies by sourcing cheaper grains elsewhere.

Without a single desk supplier like the Wheat Board, ultimately all sizes of processors will seek the cheapest source of grain, regardless of where it comes from. That is where the flat earth comes in. Like oil, grain from off shore will be cheaper than grain transported over thousands of miles of roads or rails from western Canada.

Many of those ships carrying wheat will come from two deep water ports. One will be the Piranha River which allows ocean-going vessels to travel up the center of the Argentinean wheat growing region. The other port is Odessa, the deep water Black Sea port that started the world’s wheat trade after the defeat of Napoleon in 1812.

Chernobyl sits just 600 very flat kilometres north of Odessa in part of the Eurasian wheat belt. Historically, it is grain grown in this area that was shipped around the world. The declining cost of ocean freight along with killing our Wheat Board means this area can again start shipping grain to Eastern Canada’s food processors just like eastern Canada’s refineries process Middle Eastern oil.

Without the CWB looking out for their collective interests, western farmers will find the world is as flat as the prices they can expect from a truly globalized wheat market.

Incidentally, for those who like to eat, the scientific literature is full of articles documenting contamination of grains from this area with radioactive materials from the Chernobyl accident. The good news is that 25 years later contamination levels in grains are lower and some mitigation efforts have reduced levels by a third on small test plots. The bad news is soil contamination levels are not appreciably lower.

So the evidence, on many levels is not as reassuring as some writers would have western farmers or their customers believe.

Have Social Democrats surrendered?

2012-01-24T08:10:00.002-06:00

BY GEORGE IRVIN
Social Europe
January 24, 2012

Some years ago, Europe’s social democratic parties replaced the red flag with a red rose. Now they appear to have abandoned progressive politics altogether and raised the white flag of surrender to the politics of austerity.

After the 2008 crash, social democrats briefly rediscovered Keynes; a few even talked about the imminent demise of neoliberal ideology. But as the strength of the centre-right grew and neoliberal parties were returned to power in the wake of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, ‘austerity’ politics triumphed. Social democracy, fearful of being deemed insufficiently prudent, appears to have capitulated to the logic of balanced budgets and cuts in welfare provision.

In Italy, the PD supports Monti’s so-called ‘technocratic’ government; in France, François Hollande has led the PS into battle under the banner of fiscal responsibility; in Germany, the SPD derides Keynesian-type remedies; in the UK, Ed Balls announces that if Labour comes to power he will not reverse the cuts. Never mind Spain, where Zapatero’s ill-fated PSOE failed to generate jobs, or even The Netherlands, where the PvdA until relatively recently held Ministry of Finance in a right-wing coalition.

For several years, the EU centre-right has successfully ridden a wave of fear and xenophobia. As austerity bites and jobs, pensions and benefits become less secure by the day, the right consolidates its grip on power by blaming the crisis on profligate politicians who tax away the money of hard-working citizens to the benefit of undeserving foreigners. Deeper austerity reinforces such views and worsens the situation.

The average voter has been conned into accepting austerity for two reasons. First, he or she faces a choice between cutting spending and going into greater debt—typically at usurious rates of interest. With jobs scarcer and employment less secure, the prospect of greater personal debt is quite terrifying. Crucially, voters have been sold the view that the government budget must balance just like a household budget, a view that most European social democratic politicians have failed to challenge—with disastrous consequences.

This Micawberesque view of state finances is utterly misleading. At a time when domestic households and firms are trying to rebuild savings (deleverage), unless there is a miraculous export boom, increased government savings can only be compatible with lower national income; ie, with even greater unemployment and uncertainty. As the Japanese economist Richard Koo (RWER 58 ‘The world in balance sheet recession’) has warned, if Europe is not to follow the Japanese down the path of 20 years of stagnation, massive economic stimulus is required.

Social democrats know that three issues are of utmost importance: finance, jobs and global warming. A reckless financial sector which caused the crisis continues to reward itself with outrageous pay, while dergulation and the bonus culture has made the EU (starting with the UK) more unequal. Next, high unemployment has been endemic in the EU since well before the 2008 financial crisis; it cannot be cured by supply side measures, by a ‘deregulated job market’. And although climate change seems a longer term problem, if we are to contain it action must be taken now.

These issues are linked. More jobs can be generated by a massive public works programme aimed at energy conservation and new sources of sustainable energy generation. Additionally, the impact of global warming on poorer countries must be addressed through an international transfer of resources.

How can such a programme be financed? Consider only two measures: an FTT and more efficient tax collection. First, the EU has started to take seriously the notion of a Tobin (or Financial Transactions) tax—once an FTT is implemented, the revenues could be used as a massive boost for public investment and overseas transfers. The European Commission (EC) estimates annual revenue to be of the order of €57bn per annum, assuming securities transactions involving an EU-based financial institution were taxed at 0.1 per cent and all OTC derivatives deals at 0.01 per cent. (Using an across-the-board tax of 0.1% on all euro trading globally, I estimated the upper bound on revenue to be €200bn per annum, so the EC estimate appears to be very cautious.)

In addition, there is a serious tax gap in Europe —the difference between what should be paid by law and what is actually paid. Total EU GDP is approximately €12tr per annum, and one recent and comprehensive source puts the tax gap at 8% of Europe’s combined GDP. For VAT alone, another study puts the gap at €100bn, so an upper bound estimate for the total gap would be in the region of €1tr. On the assumption that the tax gap will not be closed oversight, taking half this figure, or €500bn per annum, as available for economic stimulus seems reasonable. (Note that I have said nothing about expanded public borrowing, jointly backed Eurobonds, or even quantitative easing—all of which could be used to generate further funds for expansion.)

In short, there is no financial constraint on creating new EU jobs and greening Europe through public investment.

How would such a stimulus be viewed by the financial markets? Until recently, the answer would have been negative; indeed, fear of the financial markets has been one of the main reasons why economic policy in Europe has been so conservative. But times are changing, and as the IMF has argued recently, ‘austerity’ is no longer to be welcomed. Indeed, some argue that financial markets are turning against austerity and Merkosy-style ‘governance’, which is seen as a most serious threat to the EU’s wellbeing.

The lesson for social democrats is that their real fight is with those seeking to impose further budgetary austerity on Europe. To paraphrase my old colleague Howard Reed, it’s time to put an end to the suicidal economic policies currently wreaking havoc with our economic and social fabric.

Spain: Trial of Judge Baltasar Garzón ‘a blow to human rights’

2012-01-24T00:52:00.001-06:00

Hugo Relva
Amnesty International
20 January 2012

Judge Baltasar Garzón

The Spanish Supreme Court’s pending criminal trial of a pioneering investigative judge is a threat to human rights and judicial independence, Amnesty International said today.

Judge Baltasar Garzón, 56, faces trial in Madrid on 24 January on charges he abused his power while leading an investigation into crimes under international law committed during the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War and the ensuing decades of dictatorship under General Francisco Franco.

The judge is renowned for opening investigations into public officials and others suspected of committing genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture in other countries – most notably Chile’s former military ruler Augusto Pinochet.

“Given Judge Baltasar Garzón’s success at investigating and prosecuting crimes under international law around the world, it beggars belief that Spanish judicial authorities would seek to prevent him from investigating such crimes in Spain,” said Hugo Relva, Legal Adviser at Amnesty International, who is in Madrid to observe the trial.

“The charges against him must be dropped, as they represent a blow to human rights and efforts to obtain justice.”

Two other criminal trials have been brought against Garzón over allegations he received bribes and facilitated illegal wire-tapping of prisoners’ conversations with their lawyers. He has denied any wrongdoing. Amnesty International takes no position on the merits of these criminal investigations.

A conviction in the trial that begins on 24 January could lead to him being disbarred for up to 20 years, effectively ending his career as a jurist and scuppering his Franco investigation.

Garzón’s investigation, launched in 2008, was the first to look into crimes under international law during the Spanish Civil War and the early years of Franco’s rule. It covers more than 114,000 cases of enforced disappearance that took place between July 1936 and December 1951.

In May 2010, Spain’s General Judicial Committee suspended Garzón after the Supreme Court accused him of wilfully breaking a 1977 amnesty law.

The law has been interpreted as preventing the investigation of crimes committed up to 1976.

Amnesty International supports Garzón’s position that Spain should set aside the amnesty law, as it interferes with obligations to investigate and prosecute crimes under international law.

“Under international law there are no statutes of limitation for enforced disappearance, torture and other crimes against humanity, and Spain has an obligation to investigate and, if there is sufficient admissible evidence, to prosecute the suspects and to provide full reparations to the victims,” said Hugo Relva.

Amnesty International has evidence that several other recent investigations into past crimes in Spain have been prevented from going forward pending the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Garzón trial.

“It seems the search for truth, justice and reparation for past crimes under international law in Spain is being held hostage to this trial based on outrageous charges,” said Hugo Relva.

“The Spanish authorities should instead focus their efforts on revealing the fate of the thousands of victims of enforced disappearance, torture, extrajudicial executions and other crimes under international law committed during the civil war and Franco’s rule, and bring those responsible to justice.”

Rigoberta Menchu to Investigate Murders of Women in Honduras

2012-01-23T22:22:00.000-06:00

Alternavox
January 23, 2012

Rigoberta Menchu

Nobel Prize winners Rigoberta Menchu (1992) and Jody Williams (1997) will arrive in Honduras to boost the investigation into the murders of several women in Honduras, said the executive director of the Women Rights Center, Gilda Rivera.

“They arrive in Honduras on January 25, on National Women´s Day, the day in which Honduran women won, after many battles, their right to vote and take part in the decisions made in our country, though in practice that is not accomplished,” said Rivera.

During their stay, both women will meet with police authorities and leaders of pro-women´s rights in the country, which has the world´s second highest rate of women killings.

Honduras has the second highest rate of feminicide after Guatemala, where more than 1,750 cases have been reported in the last 6 years and 80 percent of the cases have not been investigated adequately.

Menchu and Williams will be heading a campaign to stop the hundreds of killings of women in this country, during which they will hold talks with those who have to investigate such acts and try to implement measures against those acts.

Fighting corporate propaganda with guerrilla art warfare

2012-01-23T22:07:00.000-06:00

By Nadim Fetaih
Roar
January 24, 2012

It is time. Throughout history, art has been the heart and blood of society. In recent years, artists have had to sell their talents in order to feed themselves. When before, art could inspire emotion, movements, and even revolution – now, most art is used to subdue and brainwash the masses.

Art has been connected to intellectual movements of the past (e.g. surrealism mirroring the growth of questioning the power of the mind). It has been used as a means to show beauty in the most benign (e.g. Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings). Since the rise of the Soviet Union, though, there has been a growth in the manipulation of inspiration – a bastard child of art was formed: propaganda.

After this, thousands of years of artistic technique and gained knowledge of artistic “rules” have been turned against the very people art always sided with. Whether it is the films and music used as propaganda to help enforce Hitler’s ideals, to advertisements used to continue the cycle of consumption in the capitalist world, propaganda has manipulated the thoughts and actions of people while at the same time stiffening artistic integrity and creativity.

This is the front line of the war for freedom. This is where the corporate powers have their hold upon the masses. Their ads, movies, music – all meant to ensure the stability of the “American Dream”. Its message is clear: Consume. Consume. Consume. And all those who stand in the way of consumption and economic control will be seen as a terrorist of the state, needed to be fought by the “heroes” of capitalism.

It is time. It is time to fight fire with fire. A new revolutionary tactic is born: Guerrilla Art Warfare. Inspired by decades of beautiful guerrilla art. Inspired by Banksy and all the filmmakers in the world who refuse to abide by film laws.

Let us bring art back into the hands of the people. To the artists around the world, I beg you: take charge, spread emotion in an increasingly cold and grey world. Teach citizens to feel again. Spread your message. Fight propaganda — not with your own, but with true art that speaks to the average person.

Inspire the masses. Take down ads, replace them with universal truths; corporations are NOT people; ads are taking over our schools, our public space, our free-time, our clothes, even our news; consuming traps us in a prison with invisible bars.

Attached is a video of a small group of people who have decided to bring a message to the masses in a way that only they could. What is your message? How will your art portray it? Choose your weapon, be it paint brush, camera, charcoal, tools, a pen, pencil or a spray paint canister.

German Intelligence Watching Left Party Politicians

2012-01-23T22:01:00.001-06:00

Spiegel Online
January 23, 2012

More than one-third of the Left Party's parliamentarians are under observation by Germany's domestic intelligence agency, SPIEGEL has learned. Much larger than previously thought, the operations cost nearly 400,000 euros a year. Critics worry it's disproportionate to surveillance of the right-wing extremist NPD party.

Germany's opposition far-left Left Party is under more intense surveillance from domestic intelligence than previously thought, SPIEGEL has learned. Information from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) reveals that 27 Left Party parliamentarians are being observed -- more than one-third of the party's 76-strong parliamentary group.

Another 11 members of state parliaments around the country are also being watched, SPIEGEL has learned. The agency has declined to release the politicians' names, as it would "run counter to the operative aims of the observation."

Concern about the Left Party's democratic pedigree is not new. The party formed in 2007 when a successor party to the East German communist party joined a leftist group from Western Germany. There have been numerous reports since then of party figures who were affiliated with the East German secret police, the Stasi, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The BfV is reportedly watching not just radical party members, but also a number of more moderate members, including almost all of the Left Party's leading figures in parliament. Among the targets are leader Gregor Gysi, deputy chairwoman Sahra Wagenknecht, and members of the party's parliamentary committee Dietmar Bartsch and Jan Korte.

But it's the inclusion of Steffen Bockhahn, a member of the parliamentary committee that oversees the country's intelligence agencies' budgets, that is raising eyebrows. His surveillance is particularly sensitive because in December 2011, the parliamentary research service determined that "because of the special job description of the committee … only very extraordinary circumstances could justify the surveillance of a member."

'Questions About Proportionality'

According to a Jan. 4, 2012 document from the Interior Ministry, the BfV employs seven workers for the "handling of the Left Party" with personnel costs of some €390,000 ($504,000) per year. By way of comparison, more than 10 domestic intelligence agents are conducting surveillance on members of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), at a cost of some €590,000 each year.

The BfV stresses that the Left Party politicians are not "under surveillance," but being "observed," during which no "intelligence service methods" are used. Instead, only public sources such as newspapers or speech manuscripts are analyzed, it says.

Still, Left Party parliamentary group leader Gregor Gysi reacted angrily to the news. "The parliamentarians are there to control the domestic intelligence agency. It is shameless that they think they can monitor a third of the parliamentarians in the Left Party faction," he told daily Mitteldeutsche Zeitung on Sunday. "Now it has finally become clear that the domestic intelligence agency is nuts."

The environmentalist Green Party has also expressed concern over the BfV measures, as the agency has recently come under fire for investigative errors in the case against the Zwickau neo-Nazi terror cell, which is thought to have murdered at least 10 people since 2000.

Comparing BfV efforts against the far-left and far-right inspires "questions about the sense and proportionality of the measures," said Volker Beck, a senior member of the Greens' parliamentary group. "The measures seem disproportionate when compared to the expenditures for measures against the NPD."

"What the Hell do We Want Anyway?"

2012-01-23T18:23:00.003-06:00

John's Speech to Occupy Regina on 22 October 2011

By John F. Conway
January 23, 2012

Some very powerful and influential people are very, very unhappy with what you are doing and saying.

John Manley, CEO of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives – the group which designed the blueprint for the mess we are in – calls you “ridiculous” and just a bunch of “wanna-bes.” He speaks for the 150 largest Canadian corporations with assets of $4.5 trillion and annual revenues of $850 billion. They are the real rulers of the business dictatorship that now oppresses us.

Some of the movers and shakers in the media have been reasonable, though careful and equivocal, but many more have not.

The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente, after a brief visit with the Toronto occupiers, concluded, “So much for the voice of the oppressed masses. They need pacifiers.” She opines that they are not to be taken seriously until they attract as many people as the New York Halloween parade or the Toronto Marathon.

Our very own John Gormley also thinks you are not to be taken seriously since an acquaintance of his visited your campsite at 8 am one morning and found you still sleeping. Meanwhile the bankers and financial manipulators were up at the crack of dawn, presumably looking for more pension funds to loot and finding new ways to increase our debt slavery.

In the US Occupiers have been referred to as “mobs,” “anti-American” and are described as “jealous” people who should “get a job.”

The biggest recurring rant from our corporate aristocrats and their political and media puppets has to do with what the hell we want. Just what will make you shut up, go home and roll over?

The fact is they know what you want and they are worried, very, very worried. And they are getting more worried as the occupation goes on and as the world, the world they have constructed in last thirty years, erupts. There is a dangerous political virus loose and it must be stopped. They are searching desperately for an antidote before the political epidemic gets bigger and perhaps spins the world out of the crushing embrace of their less than tender tentacles.

We want to take away their power to rule and give it back to the people. We want to replace this business dictatorship with the democratic rule of the people.

Oh yes, they know what we want. And we know what we want. We want everything to change. It was most succinctly put on a hand-made poster carried by a student on Wall Street in New York: “Unfuck the world.”

They want details? Here are a few.

First, we want an end to the economic terrorism that haunts us all every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year…and doesn’t end until we find peace in our graves. Yes, we want a quite different War on Terror.

What is this economic terrorism?

The terror of those whose pension funds have been looted, of those who have seen their jobs shipped out of the country to a low wage area and see their once vibrant neighbourhoods, cities and towns turn into war zones of despair, of those who struggle to meet their mortgage payments and fear foreclosure and homelessness.

The quiet terror of the young couple with a new baby who look to a future with little hope, of the debt ridden university graduate who can’t find a job let alone the career they were promised, of the welfare recipient or the unemployed whose food budget runs out early and then faces the degradation of food bank line ups and going cap-in-hand to private charities.

The terror we all share in this society where if you lose your job, your house or apartment, sufficient income to live with dignity…then you begin to be remorselessly excluded from full membership in civil society and the right to a life with dignity.

Second, we want a new social and economic morality to guide our system…and we want laws to enforce that morality. People should come before profits. The environment should not be raped and pillaged by the profit seekers. The public interest should trump all other interests. Our food and drugs should be regulated and rendered safe. Our public infrastructure should be funded and inspected so that bridges don’t fall on our heads and natural gas lines don’t blow up in our neighbourhoods. These rules should be law and those who break them should be put in jail and stripped of their power over others.

Question: why did it take American laws to put Conrad Black in jail. Answer: the US has slightly stronger laws relating to white collar corporate crime. Well, we want some tough laws and a war on corporate crime and wrong doing.

Third, we want a better life….good well funded schools and day cares, a universal public health system and an end to the nibbling delisting and privatization that continues, universal access to university education, secure jobs with benefits and pensions, the ability to live in an apartment or house within our means, a future for our kids – a future our efforts will make better for them than it was for us….need I go on? We all want this…and we were working slowly towards it before the corporate wrecking crew took power in the 1980s.

Fourth, not only do we want a better life in the future, we want it now. We want the lives that have been torn from those over forty restored to them intact. We want them made whole again. We want the promised future lives of those starting out on their working lives in their 20s and 30s to be restored and the promises fulfilled. And we want a massive investment in our children….this is a wealthy society and if we plan it properly and fairly and democratically, it could be the New Jerusalem the old CCFers talked about.

Finally…the big one…we want to turn today’s world upside down, just as the corporate coup in the 1980s turned our world upside down for 30 years. We don’t need a plan…the business lobby provides us with one. We just do the opposite of what they did starting in the 1980s. In fact, it is a good rule of thumb in democratic politics…when the business lobby asks for something, it is a pretty good bet that the public interest is best served by doing the opposite. That was my guiding principle while I was on the public school board.

Here was their agenda, and ours today:

Theirs: cutback on social spending to erode the social security net.
Ours: increase social spending to expand the social security net.

Theirs: attack the incomes of wage and salary earners and increase the total share
of the society’s wealth flowing to capital and its servants.
Ours: increase the incomes of wage and salary earners and dramatically decrease
the total share of the society’s wealth flowing to capital and its servants.

Theirs: weaken the central government and avoid national programs.
Ours: strengthen the central government to ensure national programs with national
standards can be delivered.

Theirs: deregulate, privatize public assets and move to free market forces as the
engine of social and economic development.
Ours: regulate, develop public assets and democratically plan our social and
economic development in the public interest.

Theirs: free trade with the US and Mexico
Ours: withdraw from the free trade agreement and negotiate sectoral agreements
that do not take away our sovereignty and democratic rights to govern ourselves.

Theirs: hamstring and discredit governments with huge annual deficits and
crippling debt, while shifting the tax load from the rich and the corporate
sector to the middle and working classes.
Ours: take our governments back into the hands of the people and use them as tools
to realize the public interest; create a fair and progressive tax system; impose a tax on financial transactions; take public debt out of the private sector and use the Bank of Canada for all public borrowing.

Theirs: smash trade unions any way you can; change the laws to give employers’
big advantages in preventing unionization; make it hard as hell to organize a union; take away the right to strike.
Ours: encourage the organization of unions; make it easier to organize; strictly
enforce better labour standards and labour relations laws; prevent
employers from blocking unions through threats and intimidation.

The main tool used now against the movement is ridicule – it is essential to delegitimize the movement in the public’s mind. It deeply worries our masters that a recent poll reported that 54 per cent of Americans supported Occupy Wall Street.

So far ridicule has not worked – the movement is a disorganized rabble; they don’t know what they want; they are a bunch of trouble makers on a lark; a mixture of entitled middle class brats, disgruntled unionists and aging hippies…and on and on it goes.

Then there is the more elaborate guilt trip. Just what are you whining about? You live in the richest society in the world with the highest standard of living. The poorest of the poor in North America live better than most of humanity. Just look at the misery around the world…why are you complaining?

Well, that red herring is not working either. Oppression is not just about starvation, or about living under a brutal dictatorship – oppression is simply the imposition of unjust burdens. And that is what has happened here – an accumulation of unjust burdens over the past 30 years and a future where we are told it will only get worse.

It is a question of justice, of right and wrong. And this society is unjust and morally wrong in the way it has organized and distributes social, political and economic power. And the reality is, as we all know, you can only change the world in which you live and work.

A measure of our life’s work is can we change it for the better for those who come after us?

Co-ops in Saskatchewan and Quebec: A Comparative Analysis

2012-01-23T13:10:00.000-06:00

GLOBALIZATION, SOCIAL INNOVATION, AND CO-OPERATIVE DEVELOPMENT: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF QUÉBEC AND SASKATCHEWAN FROM 1980 TO 2010

By Mitch Diamantopoulos
July 2011

Workers bottling milk, Saskatchewan Co-operative Creamery, Moose Jaw (Ca. 1950s)

This study examines the development gap that has emerged between the co-operative sectors of the Canadian provinces of Québec and Saskatchewan since 1980. It harnesses historical research, textual analysis, and semi-structured interviews to better understand how some movements are able to regenerate their movements in the face of crisis.

The study finds that the regeneration of the Québec movement reflects the concertation (concerted action) of social movement, sector, and state actors. Deeply rooted in a collectivist tradition of cultural nationalism and state corporatism, this democratic partnership supported the renovation and expansion of the co-operative development system in a virtuous spiral of movement agency, innovation, and regeneration. Concertation of social movement and state actors created momentum for escalating orders of joint-action, institution-building, and policy and program development.

By contrast, the degeneration of the Saskatchewan movement reflects the decline of the agrarian economy and movement and a failure to effectively coordinate the efforts of emerging social movements and the state for development action. This has yielded a vicious spiral of movement inertia, under-development, and decline. Although green shoots are in evidence, regeneration efforts in Saskatchewan lag Québec’s progress in rebuilding the foundations for effective democratic partnership.

The study concludes with a detailed comparison of these diverging movements, offering conclusions and recommendations for the repair of the Saskatchewan development system and the regeneration of its co-operative movement.

Read paper HERE.

Front de Gauche: a dynamic that disturbs

2012-01-22T15:29:00.001-06:00

By Sébastien Crépel
l’Humanité
Translated Friday 20 January 2012
by Henry Crapo and reviewed by Bill Scoble

The progress that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is making in the opinion polls, which bodes well for the advancement of the Left, is disturbing to the bipartisan scenarios prepared in advance.

“Something is happening around the candidate of the Front de gauche. It isn’t l’Humanité that is saying this, but now the quasi-unanimity of commentators, such as the political commentator for France Inter and leading journalist of Point, Anna Cabana who, yesterday morning, on the airwaves of the public radio station, evoked “a dynamic, a chemistry, a crystallization, as one says about love — the opposite of what is happening around François Hollande”.

In fact, the candidate of the Front de gauche is gaining likely voters: an increase of 1.5% in the most recent polls by Ifop and LH2 (see l’Humanité for yesterday), with respectively 7.5 and 8.5%. But it is especially the electoral potential that Jean-Luc Mélenchon holds in this election: 23% of voters would “certainly” or “probably” vote for Jean-Luc Mélenchon according to BVA (and not “will vote”, as erroneously reported in our edition yesterday).

This progress for the candidate and his program comes at a moment when the team of Hollande-Sarkozy seems to be stalled in the public opinion. “For April 2012, everything seemed to be written in advance. A four-way match (with Bayrou and Le Pen), or rather Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen as scare-crow. This film of the presidential election didn’t find its public,” rejoices Olivier Dartigolles, spokesman for the PCF and member of the campaign council of the Front de gauche.

Who can complain if, thanks to the dynamics growing within the Front de gauche, there at last emerges a citizens’ debate on the present alternatives?

However, this is not what emerges from commentaries that accompany this rise of the Front de gauche. It is presented rather as a menace. “The electoral potential” of Jean-Luc Mélenchon could “dangerously erode the first ballot position of the socialist candidate”, writes Gaël Sliman of BVA. And the commentator of France Inter explains that “Mélenchon does a service for Sarkozy by prospering at the expense of Hollande”.

This is a short-sighted analysis because, if one looks closely, the danger for the Left is the continuous erosion of intended votes these past three months, essentially profiting François Bayrou. And the attempts at rapprochement with the latter have not reversed the tendency — quite the contrary.

From this point of view, the advance of the Front de gauche is actually a real chance for the Left: in the context of the stalling candidacy of François Hollande, and even a collapse for Eva Joly (Green) who gets barely 3%, the only dynamic that pulls all the Left toward the top today is on the side of the Front de gauche.

200,000 pageviews... thank you readers

2012-01-22T13:58:00.000-06:00

- NYC

That is an additional 100,000 over the past seven months. Thanks!

Iraq’s Palestinians in Syria: Another Chapter of Dispossession

2012-01-21T19:17:00.002-06:00

By Amal Shahine, Anas Zarzar
Al Akhbar
January 20, 2012

Graffiti in Yarmouk camp in Damascus, Syria.

When Saddam Hussein’s regime fell, several thousand Palestinian refugees in Iraq were forced to flee to Syria where they live in a state of legal limbo and at the whim of international aid agencies.

Often it seems like Palestinians are faced with barriers or struck by ill fortune wherever they try to settle and build their lives anew. Take for instance some Iraqi Palestinians who fled the hell of Iraq to seek yet another refuge, this time in Syria. They much prefer living in poverty in their new home as opposed to risking the endless spiral of sectarian killing and constant threat of death they faced in Iraq.

The story began in 2003 with the US occupation of Iraq, which turned out to be a turning point not only for the Iraqis but for Palestinians living there too.

In 1948, a number of Palestinian families fled to Iraq, settling in various cities and provinces. Their population in Iraq reached about 35,000 before the US occupation.

Since 2003, these Palestinians have been forced to move a number of times as they fled Iraq’s sectarian death machine. More than 400 Palestinian families have had to leave Baghdad as a result of sectarian threats, hatred, old racist grudges, or for strictly financial reasons.

Iraqi citizens are able to enter many other countries legally in the event that they are subject to persecution, repression, and harassment. Palestinians on the other hand, have to be smuggled through the desert as they are not allowed to enter any country legally, except in rare individual cases.

Some of the Palestinians of Iraq, like countless Iraqis, fled to Syria. Palestinians who went to Syria from Iraq are divided into two groups. The first, came to Syria as Palestinian refugees and were housed in camps along the Syrian-Iraqi borders. The second, entered Syria with fake Iraqi passports that the Syrian authorities seem to have ignored.

Abu Musa is one of the earliest Palestinians to flee from Iraq to Syria, only to find his refugee status was “suspended.” He and others in his situation, are not recognized either as Iraqi or Palestinian refugees because they are not registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). This is due to the fact that Saddam Hussein refused to label them as refugees, considering them “guests” and “brethren” instead.

Abu Musa told Al-Akhbar: “We asked the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) for some kind of verification of our rights and legal status because the Syrian government is not concerned with us politically or organizationally. The only body that is directly responsible for us is the PLO.”

Abu Musa said he met with many Palestinian officials and leaders of several organizations as part if his efforts to explain to them the circumstances of about 3,000 Palestinians who fled Iraq. He adds however that “none of these officials have responded to our needs.”

The suffering of “Iraq’s Palestinians,” as they have been labeled, has doubled after the political crisis in Syria escalated. Merely leaving their homes to walk around or run errands could lead to them being picked up by the Syrian security forces. Once in detention, such Palestinians in Syria could remain there until their situation is explained and their reasons for violating Syrian residency laws are understood.

Abu Waad, a Palestinian who has been questioned by Syrian security, says: “When we got to Syria through al-Hasaka governorate, the Syrians gave us official al-Hasakah papers even though we did not settle there. These papers help us to move around normally, but do not grant us legal status.”

Abu Waad explains that the real problem occurs when “a policeman or a security man stops any of us. Our papers are not seen as legal. They are meaningless ink on paper, especially during this period that Syria is going through now.”

The lack of safety and security is not the only problem that the Palestinians of Iraq have to contend with. Their living conditions pose a major obstacle that is hard to overcome.

Abu Musa who is an activist in the Volunteer Committee for the Palestinians of Iraq says: “70% of the Palestinians of Iraq – out of a total of 3,000 – live in miserable conditions, whereas we used to have a decent life in Iraq.”

Another aspect to this tragedy is that rent for any room in the Yarmouk Refugee Camp is no less than 7,000 Syrian pounds (SYP) – about US$100 – especially after a wave of price hikes hit Syria.

Families in the camps have five members on average. The UNHCR gives each family SYP6,000 (US$85) per month and SYP24,000 (US$342) every four months. This means that the average family receives about of SYP12,000 (US$170) per month.

“Under these conditions, what is to become of us and our children?” wonders one refugee camp resident.

Work is another challenge for Iraqi Palestinians in Syria and is no less difficult to come by than education. Whoever is lucky enough to find work, earns half the wage of a regular worker because he does not have proper papers and is easily exploited.

To make things worse, the food and financial aid provided by the UNHCR are subject to international political conditions being favorable, according to Abu Musa. He and other Palestinians are at the mercy of politicians and international and regional events.

Palestinians even need passports and official papers after they have died, in order to be buried in the cemetery.

According to Abu Musa: “When one of our friends died, we could not get him an official death certificate from the hospital or mayor, so we smuggled him into the cemetery and buried him illegally in the very early morning to avoid being seen.”

Canada's Wealthy: They're richer than you think

2012-01-21T18:20:00.001-06:00

By Stephen LaRose
Planet S
January 2012

Whether it’s Greek mythology, Shakespeare or Mickey Mouse stealing his master Yen Sid’s robes in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, one common element in drama is that protagonists — heroes as well as villains — are often humbled by their own pride, greed and stupidity.

No one will confuse studies with titles like Why Have Poorer Neighbourhoods Stagnated Economically while the Richer have Flourished? Neighbourhood Income Inequality in Canadian Cities, or Currents: Western Canada’s Economic Bulletin, or even Canada’s CEO Elite 100: the 0.01% with Antigone, Julius Caesar or Fantasia.

But you can’t read through the three recent reports — by the Canadian Labour Market and Skills Research Network, the Canada West Foundation and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, respectively — without feeling that the Canadian economy is in the first stage of an economic apocalypse.

First things first. The CLMSRN report, released last August, studied the gap between rich and poor Calgary neighbourhoods between 1980 and 2005. During that time, the mean after-tax income for Calgary’s richest neighbourhoods increased 75 per cent. Most of those people had jobs in the oil industry or related fields.

In Calgary’s poorest neighbourhoods during the same period, after-tax income increased by a mere five per cent.

Most of those poorer Calgarians held lower-paying white-collar or blue-collar jobs in 1980, but with the decline in unionization, more outsourcing of work and the elimination of many light- and heavy-industry jobs, they drifted into service industry McJobs.

Back in 1980, most of those residents thought they could work their way to a better life. Today, they don’t.

The Canada West report says that while western Canada’s poor haven’t gotten poorer (at least in real dollar amounts), “those who are neither rich nor poor — the middle 60 per cent — are feeling the pinch.”

It continues: “Income growth for the 60 per cent in the middle has significantly lagged behind the richest 20 per cent and the poorest 20 per cent in western Canada.”

So, if the lowerand middle classes aren’t benefitingfrom the expansion of the Canadian economy, then who is?

Step right up, Hugh Mackenzie of the CCPA. Mackenzie’s report says the poorest of Canada’s top 100 chief executive officers had an annual pay of $1.85 million in 2007.

The average full-time annual wage for a Canadian in the same period? Mackenzie reports it was $44,366.

The CEOs’ wages also went up during the 2008-09 recession — butthe average Canadian wage didn’t, “resulting in a dangerous mix: Canadians are feeling the squeeze of shrinking disposable incomes, a rising cost of living, and record high household debt,” Mackenzie’s report says.

The report, published on the CCPA’s website policyalternatives.ca, is accompanied by a graphic counter comparing CEO salaries to average Canadian wages. When we checked on Tuesday afternoon, top CEOs had collected over $207,786 in 2012 while regular Canadians had earned $1,003.55.

Hey, what happened to “the rising tide lifts all boats”? Weren’t round after round of tax cuts, business deregulations and free-trade agreements supposed to unleash the power of capitalism, giving everybody jobs and a new enlightened age?

“Put it this way,” says the executive director of the CCPA’s Saskatchewan office, Simon Enoch, “the last time the Canadian economy saw income disparity to the extent that we’re seeing today was in 1929. And we all know what happened in 1929.”

Enoch says it’s no coincidence that Canadians, and people in most western economies in general, have felt their earning power slip away.

“It pretty much started in the 1970s, when wage increases were decoupled from productivity,” he says. “With that, the productivity of workers increased, but they didn’t share in the benefits — workers didn’t get paid more for their productivity, but their employers got more money from the workers’ productivity.”

Secondly, Enoch says, the attacks on the trade union movement and the social safety net have eroded the confidence people had in the economy a generation ago.

Much of what’s passed as economic growth in the past couple of decades is the result of an expansion of consumer credit and a housing “bubble,” Enoch says. (In Saskatchewan and Alberta’s case, things may be a bit different — our economies depend on the exploitation of non-renewable resources. It’s not particularly more egalitarian though, since our governments collect royalties far below market value to boost resource-sector profits.)

Meanwhile, governmental fiscal and tax policies are designed to shift taxation away from big business and onto consumers.

“If people have a strong social safety net, people are less apt to be intimidated by employers when it comes to issues such as pay disputes,” says Enoch.

That’s why, he says, the attack on trade unions to organize workers is just as important to the entrenchment of a neo-liberal economic agenda — the one we have now — as the dismantling of social programs.

Ironically, the outcome is a stressed-out workforce whose members are less productive than they were before these cuts, says Enoch.

“First of all, you have more stressed people: worrying about their finances, worrying about their futures, retirements, what they’re leaving to their children, that sort of thing. The end result is that you have a lot more mental health issues, manifesting in, for example, depression, anxiety disorders and the like. People feel powerless, especially when it comes to their financial state.”

Income disparity’s effects, says Enoch, blow a big hole in the boat of democracy.

“First of all, politics becomes a rich person’s game: the middle class and poor can’t participate in it because they have to work for a living,” he says. “The rich are the only ones who can take part in the political process apart from voting in elections — [that’s why] the rules get drawn in ways that benefit the rich.”

Such as? “Well, you have, increasingly, a larger attitude being expressed by those in the one per cent category that the universality of health care and education isn’t necessary,” says Enoch. “They can afford their own, and they think what they can access will be better than they could get under the public system, and they don’t care about what will happen to anybody who can’t afford what they’re willing to pay.”

And what’s the end result? People who have already maxed out their credit, have no hope that their McJob will lead to anything better and who worry they’re one illness or missed paycheque away from financial catastrophe.

They don’t sound like the kind of people who are willing to spend money to kick-start an economic recovery.

Especially when the one per cent regard themselves as beyond the reach of governments (and the people they’re supposed to serve).

Ironically, without a reorientation in political and economic thinking, that same one per cent may well be brought as low as any tragedy’s protagonist — or those who lost everything in the 1929 stock market crash.

“One good thing about the Occupy movement is that the issue of income disparity has returned to public discussion,” concludes Enoch. “Governments might not want to talk about it, but that movement is an expression of disenfranchisement with what’s passing for public discourse on economic and social policy today.

“Once the issue of income disparity is mentioned in public, political parties have to talk about that issue. They haven’t had to before,” he says.

“At least, that’s progress.”

How Harper seized control of pipeline and health-care debates

2012-01-21T18:13:00.001-06:00

BY JENNIFER DITCHBURN
The Canadian Press
Jan. 20, 2012

Building a storyline that sticks helped the Conservatives sink two successive Liberal leaders and they are using the same strategy early in 2012 on a pair of major policy debates facing Canadians.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's team has attempted to leap out in front of its opponents and shape the narrative on the hot-button issues of health-care funding and oil pipeline construction.

When Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver came out guns blazing over “environmental and other radical groups” and foreign interests who he said were trying to hijack the domestic debate, discussion immediately shifted away from the very concerns environmental groups have been voicing.

Critics and stakeholders were left struggling to poke holes in the government's logic – the involvement of Chinese interests in the process, for example – rather than leading the debate themselves.

Jim Armour, a vice-president at Ottawa public relations firm Summa and a former communications director for Mr. Harper, says the government cannily played a Canadian sovereignty card.

“I think by making this about foreign interests, U.S. money, not allowing ourselves to be held hostage by the U.S, the government's been very smart and been able not only to take advantage of an opportunity, but also take advantage of something Canadians are thinking anyway,” Mr. Armour said.

On the issue of federal health-care funding for the provinces, Mr. Harper caught the premiers flat-footed. Without warning or consultation, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced a new formula for health transfers into the future. Then, Mr. Harper really put the premiers on defence as he rejected their baleful, uncoordinated pleas for additional funds.

As they began a first ministers meeting this week, they were left reacting to Mr. Harper rather than setting the agenda for the debate themselves.

“I think it was incredibly well handled. The federal government and Minister Flaherty pretty well took health care off the agenda before any of the health stakeholders or even the provinces got to the table,” Mr. Armour said.

“If it was a bar fight, it was all over before anyone got their coat off.”

Ottawa lobbyist Geoff Norquay, who also once worked for Mr. Harper, agrees.

“[It] completely sidestepped everybody's expected narrative, and everybody's expectations as to how this particular issue would play out, and over many years,” Mr. Norquay said, noting Mr. Harper put the division of provincial-federal powers front and centre in the discussion.

The communications strategy bears some similarity to how the Conservatives handled the more strictly political issue of how to critically maim their opposition opponents.

Former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion was hobbled by the “Not a Leader” ad campaign, and his successor Michael Ignatieff was never able to recover from the “Just Visiting” motto that labelled him an arrogant dilettante.

Those portraits were painted by an ad campaign funded by the formidable Conservative Party war chest before Mr. Dion or Mr. Ignatieff ever had a chance to make their own first impressions on voters.

Mr. Armour says the Conservatives have put three main principles at the centre of their communications strategy: message discipline, acting on insight and opportunity.

The message control has been well documented. The insight comes from properly reading and analyzing the landscape and the players, and the opportunity is the moment that presents itself to act.

Mr. Harper's summit next week with Canada's first-nations leaders will be another big communications challenge for the Conservatives on a complex, sensitive policy issue.

Unlike with the pipeline and health-care funding stories, Mr. Harper was forced to react defensively to the crisis in Attawapiskat after it exploded in the media. The unified message that emerged from government was that it was dealing quickly with financial mismanagement on the reserve.

Human-rights lawyer Paul Champ, who represents some first-nations communities, said that despite some key underlying facts about Attawapiskat, the Tories managed to shape the story about the situation.

“Even those Canadians who don't see themselves as being racist or having racist stereotypes, I think the are definitely susceptible to that frame that first nations mismanage money, or that first-nations bands are irresponsible or are wasting money,” Mr. Champ said.

“I think those are regrettably very deeply rooted stereotypes in Canada. This government played on that.”

Wall Strikes Out on Fiscal Federalism

2012-01-21T15:53:00.001-06:00

By Erin Weir
Progressive Economics Forum
January 21st, 2012

Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall recently issued a statement exhorting his fellow Premiers to blaze largely unspecified new trails on healthcare, Employment Insurance and Equalization. Unfortunately, he misses the ball on all three issues.

Greg Fingas and Verda Petry have already refuted Wall’s call for further healthcare privatization.

On Employment Insurance, Wall implies that eastern Canadians are collecting excessive benefits funded by western Canadians. He goes even further than the old Lotto 10-42 stereotype, alleging that people can work for just over 10 weeks and collect almost 52 weeks of benefits.

The number of benefit weeks available depends on the regional unemployment rate and on how many hours the unemployed individual had paid EI premiums. As far as I can tell, Wall or his staff picked out the minimum number of insurable hours and the maximum duration of benefits from the highest-unemployment regions. Of course, as I point out in today’s Regina Leader-Post, someone with just the minimum hours would not get the maximum benefit:

No labour shortage

As reported in the Jan. 11 story “Wall wants health innovation cash,” Premier Brad Wall stated that federal Employment Insurance (EI) “discourages Canadians from moving here” despite “a serious labour shortage.”

Far from a labour shortage, Saskatchewan has thousands of job seekers who cannot find work. The provincial unemployment rate has jumped to 5.2 from 4.1 per cent since October.

Wall inaccurately claimed, “In some regions, a person can work just over 10 weeks and receive almost a year’s worth of EI benefits.” In regions with the highest unemployment rates, including northern Saskatchewan, the minimum threshold to qualify for benefits is 420 insurable hours (10.5 full-time weeks). But someone with just this minimum could not collect benefits for the maximum of 45 weeks.

Most unemployed workers do not get EI. The percentage receiving benefits is 34 in Saskatchewan and 39 nationally.

Rather than making EI more accessible to Saskatchewan workers, Wall’s stated goal is to make it even less accessible elsewhere to prompt more migration. How small a minority of jobless workers does he think deserve benefits?

The premiers should endorse the Canadian Labour Congress proposal to lower regional eligibility thresholds to a common national standard. Doing so would help the growing number of unemployed workers, reduce provincial welfare costs and remove the supposed incentive to stay in regions with high unemployment.

Erin Weir, Toronto
Weir is a Saskatchewan expatriate and economist with the United Steelworkers union’s Canadian National Office.

Wall goes on to argue that, by subsidizing poorer provinces, “Canada’s Equalization system works similarly to discourage labour mobility in a way that hurts the national economy.” There may be some legitimate technical debates about how the Equalization formula measures hydroelectric revenues and the property tax base. But Wall’s attack on the program is a bit strange given that the Saskatchewan government was receiving Equalization until the relatively recent run-up in global commodity prices.

His claim about labour mobility also misses the issue of fiscally-induced migration. Imagine someone offered jobs paying $50,000 in a rich province and $55,000 in a poor province. The national economy would be best served by them taking the higher-paid job (which would be more productive in a neoclassical economic model).

But what if the poorer province must levy 20% taxes to fund its public services, while the rich province can charge only 10%? The financial incentive would be to take the lower-paid job in the rich province ($45,000 vs. $44,000 after-tax). By allowing all provinces to provide roughly comparable services at roughly comparable tax rates, Equalization helps ensure that migration is based on actual economic opportunities rather than on fiscal differences between provinces.

There may be problems with “the same old dynamics of federalism,” but Wall does not hit them.

Co-operatives in Saskatchewan

2012-01-18T23:12:00.001-06:00

Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan

George and Mary Farnsworth proudly display Co-op products, Admiral, Saskatchewan, August 1950.

Everett Baker (Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society)

Like its counterparts in England and Europe, the co-operative movement in Canada arose from a sense of exploitation. On the prairies, farmers were frustrated by the high prices being charged by bankers, railroads, elevator companies, implement manufacturers, and shopkeepers. Individuals had little control over what they paid for goods and services, or the prices they received for their products. The formation of the first co-operatives was thus fuelled by the desire of farmers to gain control over their local economies, coupled with a shared sense of the necessity for collective action.

While agitating for change in the political arena, farmers at the same time began to use co-operatives to supply themselves with goods and to help them take control of handling and marketing their produce. They formed buying clubs to make bulk purchases of farm supplies and basic commodities, and in 1906 banded together to establish the Grain Growers’ Grain Company to market their grain. In 1911, farmers launched the Saskatchewan Co-operative Elevator Company, with the aim of building an elevator system owned and controlled by farmers.

The heightened demand for Canadian produce during World War I created a favourable environment for the growth of producer and consumer co-ops, but although hundreds of co-operative associations were formed over the next few years, many did not survive the post-war depression. The successful formation of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool in 1924 encouraged livestock, dairy, and poultry producers to form their own marketing organizations a few years later.

Surprisingly, the hardships of the 1930s strengthened the co-op movement, and co-operative methods were used to meet a wide variety of needs, including marketing, banking, insurance, the refining of oil, and provision of farm implements. That decade witnessed the birth of Consumers Co-operative Refineries, credit unions, and Canadian Co-operative Implements, at its peak one of North America’s largest farm machinery co-ops. It was also during the 1930s that the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool gave up its marketing function to the Wheat Board and developed its expertise in grain handling.

The sector made major strides during the next decade, beginning in 1940, when the western co-op wholesales came together to form Interprovincial Co-operatives Limited (IPCO). IPCO facilitated the marketing, under the familiar CO-OP label, of commodities produced and processed by co-operatives throughout the sector. In 1941, the Saskatchewan Co-operative Credit Society (today’s Credit Union Central) became English Canada’s first central credit union system. In 1944, the provincial government created the Department of Co-operation and Co-operative Development to support new and existing co-ops. That same year witnessed the amalgamation of the Co-op Refinery and Saskatchewan Co-op Wholesale into a single organization known as Saskatchewan Federated Co-operatives Ltd. (SFCL). This merger was an important step towards the establishment of an integrated co-operative retail system.

Like the 1914–18 conflict, World War II brought expanded opportunities for all types of co-operatives. Farm production co-ops were formed by veterans returning from the war. Ventures that had taken root during the Depression grew stronger and diversified, often through amalgamations. SFCL merged with the other western wholesales to form Federated Co-operatives Ltd. (FCL); the western wheat pools became members of IPCO; the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool began to diversify through joint ventures with other co-ops; and the Dairy Pool and Saskatchewan Co-op Creameries came together to form Dairy Producers Co-op. The formation of the Co-op Life Insurance Company, Co-op Trust, and the expansion of the credit union system contributed to substantial growth in the co-operative financial sector over this period. During the 1960s, health care and other community-service-based co-ops took on a more formalized structure, and by the 1980s there were co-operative organizations in almost every sector of the economy.

Although urbanization has eroded its rural base, the co-operative movement in Saskatchewan remains strong, vibrant, and innovative. And as they have done since their earliest stages, co-operatives continue to play an integral role in the social and economic development of the province. Initial forms of co-operation have evolved into an extensive network of co-operatives engaged in a wide range of activities, including agriculture and resources, community development, recreation, child care and education, wholesale and retail, financial and community service, housing, and employment.

Co-operatives play an important role at every level of the economy. A major statistical analysis done in 1998 revealed that the 1,306 co-operatives in Saskatchewan generated revenues of nearly $7 billion and controlled assets of more than $10 billion. Capital investment totalled $372 million, and they had a surplus amounting to $208.9 million. In addition, co-operatives employed 15,046 people and paid wages of $458.7 million.

Two of Saskatchewan’s three largest businesses are co-operatives, as are four of the province’s top twenty firms. Large organizations, such as the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool (SWP), Federated Co-operatives Limited (FCL), and Credit Union Central (CUC) wield significant economic power in the provincial economy. Although smaller co-operatives seem insignificant in comparison, they are major players at the community level, and two of the largest—FCL and CUC—exist primarily to serve the needs of a network of smaller retail and financial co-operatives.

Saskatchewan is home to a broad range of co-operative organizations that vary greatly in size, scope, and operational focus. Not surprisingly, agricultural and resource-based co-operatives comprise more than one-quarter of the total. Other areas in which co-operatives play a major role include retail and wholesale, finances, community development, recreation, child care and preschool, and community service. There is a small group of other types of co-operatives that provide services to members in areas such as housing, real estate development, employment, publishing, film production, and transportation.

The diverse nature of the organizations that are able to function successfully according to co-operative principles is a testament to the flexibility of this business model. Co-operatives clearly possess characteristics that have enabled them to address problems experienced by their members and the communities in which they live. Their impact on communities is substantial, especially in the smaller centres, where the co-op may be one of the few remaining businesses in town. In these cases, co-ops supply not only a wide range of goods and services that might not otherwise be provided, but also employment, thus contributing significantly to the survival of the most vulnerable communities. Co-operatives have a long track record in Saskatchewan and are engaged in organizational renewal that will allow them to continue to make crucial contributions to sustainable economic development in the province.

Catch 22: War satire still bites in the age of Fallujah and Helmand

2012-01-18T22:31:00.002-06:00

Catch 22, by Joseph Heller, reviewed by Matt Owen
Red Pepper
January 2012

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, called Catch 22 ‘the only war novel I’ve ever read that makes any sense’. Readers of a certain sensibility – of which the record would suggest there are many; the book has sold more than 10 million copies – clearly understand what she meant. Joseph Heller’s novel marked its 50th anniversary in November, and despite the fact that it was first published in a very different era – at the height of the cold war and the beginning of large‑scale US involvement in Vietnam – its caustic satire of war, militarism and bureaucracy has barely aged.

A fluid, non-chronological narrative that flits between a preponderance of characters, Catch 22 defies straightforward synopsis. The novel mainly follows Yossarian, an American B-25 bombardier (Heller himself occupied this role during the second world war), as well as a number of other airmen of the fictional 256th squadron. Most of the events take place on an air base on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean, moving inland during the latter (and much darker) stages of the novel.

The novel’s central conflict – at once the source of both the great humour and profound pathos of the text – stems from the imagined piece of military code that gives the novel its title and has since been absorbed into the English language as a popular idiom. Within the text, Heller explains it thus:

‘There was only one catch and that was Catch 22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to.’

Now part of common English as simply an idiom for a ‘no-win situation’, the catch itself reflects the central theme of the novel: the ludicrous reality of thousands of men setting out to try to murder one another every day because those are their orders.

Catch 22 is full-blooded in its satire; much of the action is almost slapstick, and the dialogue sometimes borders on all-out absurdity, especially in the earlier stages of the novel. However, like all good satire, the heart of the text has more than a ring of truth to it, which remains every bit as applicable 50 years later as it did in 1961.

After all, is First Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder’s bombing of his own squadron to make an extra buck all that far removed from the corporate war profiteers of today, who rely on their own nations being in a perpetual state of conflict in order to sell their hardware? Is Captain Black’s exaggerated, blinkered patriotism all that far removed from the chest-thumping rhetoric employed by consecutive US presidents in a bid to win support for their military designs? Is Hungry Joe dying at the hands of his nightmares all that far removed from modern reality, when one considers that a comparable number of soldiers have committed suicide after serving in recent wars as have died while fighting them? The madness of the Italian Front is the madness of the Vietnamese jungle is the madness of Fallujah and Helmand.

Ultimately, Catch 22 is the perfect anti-war novel because it eschews anything that could be considered pious pacifism in favour of a bold examination of what war-making actually amounts to. Heller stated that the central question of the novel was ‘What does a sane man do in an insane society?’ If there is an answer, then it is surely ‘stay alive’. Throughout the text, the overbearing background character, lurking beneath every joke, casting its shadow over every scene, is death. And it is death’s most perfect application – war – that, in a novel lacking a conventional hero, emerges as the arch-villain.

Mark Twain once said that ‘the secret source of humour is not joy but sorrow’. In no piece of literature is this better exemplified than Catch 22. Classicism drew a sharp distinction between tragedy and comedy; Heller’s novel erases this distinction absolutely. Frequently cited as one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century, Catch 22 hardly needs any more praise, or exposure, but when one has just finished re-reading it, it’s hard not to give it anyway.

Sadly, we still live in a web of insane societies. But Heller’s novel may at least console you with the notion that – somewhere, behind the dehumanising monoliths of militarism and unending war – the sane still exist.

Catch 22...

Yossarian: Is Orr crazy?

Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: Of course he is. He has to be crazy to keep flying after all his close calls he's had.

Yossarian: Why can't you ground him?

Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: I can, but first he has to ask me.

Yossarian: That's all he's gotta do to be grounded?

Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: That's all.

Yossarian: Then you can ground him?

Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: No. Then I cannot ground him.

Yossarian: Aah!

Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: There's a CATCH?

Yossarian: A catch?

Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: Sure. Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat isn't really crazy, so I can't ground him.

Yossarian: Ok, let me see if I've got this straight. In order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I'm not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying.

Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: You got it, that's Catch-22.

Yossarian: Whoo... That's some catch, that Catch-22.

Dr. 'Doc' Daneeka: It's the best there is.

Climate Justice Movement in Saskatoon

2012-01-18T19:46:00.002-06:00

Climate Justice Movement in Saskatoon

We are seeking to revitalize the climate justice movement in Saskatoon and bring climate issues to the minds and hearts of Saskatchewan! With the vision of creating a local and dynamic group, we are looking for passionate people from all walks of life to help us develop a strong grassroots movement in order to combat the climate crisis in a manner that addresses inequality, colonialism, racism, sexism and all other forms of oppression.

Whether you are a seasoned "activist", a newbie to environmentalism or just someone who recognizes the gravity of our current situation and wants to make a difference - we want you! We are striving to create a varied group with respect for a diversity of ideas and tactics. The climate crisis is not going to be solved by our current government and it is up to us to begin to voice our dissent and develop alternatives!

For more information, please contact: Karen Rooney: karen-rooney@hotmail.com or Mark Bigland-Pritchard: mark@lowenergydesign.com.

Harper seems determined to turn Canada into anti-union paradise

2012-01-17T16:15:00.002-06:00

BY LINDA MCQUAIG
Toronto Star
January 17, 2012

Hundreds of shivering factory workers locked out of their plant by manufacturing giant Caterpillar in London, Ont., might well draw some warm comfort from -- of all things -- the sayings of Newt Gingrich.
Of course, the conservative Republican presidential contender is no friend of labour or social justice; he recently proposed that poor children be schooled in the ways of free enterprise by being hired to clean school washrooms.

Nonetheless, Gingrich, one of the stars of the Republican freak show, is desperate to defeat front-runner Mitt Romney. With the mitts off, Gingrich is denouncing Romney's background as a Wall Street corporate raider, accusing him of practising a form of capitalism where "you basically take out all the money, leaving behind the workers."

The multi-millionaire Romney showed his empathy for working people by noting, in a discussion about private health care, that "I like being able to fire people who provide services" and insisting that comments about the rich having too much money should be confined to "quiet rooms."

All this has unleashed an unexpected and fierce debate about the brutality of unbridled capitalism -- a debate the Republican establishment is scrambling to sweep back into the quiet rooms as quickly as possible.
Here in Canada, Stephen Harper has tried to head off a similar debate, dismissing the relevance of Occupy Wall Street on the grounds that "we have a very different situation here than the United States."

In fact, under the Harper government, the slightly milder Canadian version of capitalism is rapidly giving way to a more virulent U.S.-style variant, with even greater wealth concentration and fewer protections for working people.

Indeed, Gingrich's depiction of a capitalism where "you basically take out all the money, leaving behind the workers" seems like a perfect description of what's going on in London, where the highly profitable U.S.-owned Caterpillar is demanding its Canadian workforce accept a 50-per-cent wage cut. When the workers declined this take-it-or-leave-it offer, they were locked out on New Year's Eve.

If this isn't ruthless, heartless capitalism -- enough to make even Newt's blood boil -- it's hard to imagine what is. Yet, as the 500 London workers have bundled up in the cold, the Harper government refuses to get involved, sitting silently on the sidelines as Caterpillar brings its notorious anti-union fervour to Canada.
In fact, the Harper government is involved, having played a key role in bringing about this disaster for the London workers by approving the sale of the company, Electro-Motive Diesel, to foreign-owned Caterpillar in 2010, after supposedly investigating whether the deal was in Canada's interests.

The Canadian Auto Workers, which represents the locked out workers, believes Caterpillar purchased the plant with the intention of gaining technology and market share and then moving operations south.

The Harper government also approved a foreign takeover by another notorious union-busting company, mining giant Rio Tinto, which has now locked out 800 workers in Alma, Que.

The Canadian Labour Congress is demanding that Ottawa strengthen its foreign takeover laws to make the secretive review process more open, with public hearings in affected communities and publication of the conditions imposed -- if any -- on foreign owners.

Ironically, the Harper government has complained forcefully about "foreign" interference from outside environmentalists protesting a proposed pipeline across the Rockies. But when it comes to foreign companies stripping Canadian workers of half their wages and then moving operations out of the country, the government hasn't a negative word to say.

Harper is of course staunchly pro-capitalist, and has aggressively lowered corporate tax rates, while refusing to link lower taxes to investment or job creation.

But his anti-union stance, evident in disputes at Air Canada and the post office last summer, has been particularly provocative. He seems determined to turn Canada into an anti-union paradise -- prompting the Ontario Federation of Labour to call for a mass rally at the Caterpillar plant in London this Saturday.
As the PM gears up for his coming battle against federal public sector unions, he will no doubt draw inspiration from Mitt Romney's stirring words: "I like to be able to fire people who provide services."

Do Social Democratic Parties Have a Future?

2012-01-17T15:52:00.001-06:00

By Katerina Svickova
Left Eye On Books
January 8th, 2012

In light of the popular movements of today and the debate on democracy they triggered, we don’t even know if traditional party politics will be the most adequate vehicle to address the challenges related to globalization, financial capitalism, inequality or the environment. But, thanks to “What is Left of the Left?” we have a better grounding and knowledge about where the Social Democratic parties stand and the path that they have covered so far.

To state that the political left is searching for its soul is not particularly revealing to informed left-leaning readers. A look at the political map of Europe these days shows that the electorate is not convinced about the capacity of the left to steer their societies through this economic downturn. In the United States too, support for the Democratic administration and the Democratic Party is low. Numerous books, including “The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism,” reviewed on this site, are asking why neoliberalism gained such a grip on power and on the minds of decision makers, opinion makers and large shares of the general public. So where to has the Left (seemingly) disappeared? What is left of the Left?

“What is Left of the Left?” is also the title of a volume edited by James Cronin, George Ross and James Shoch, three distinguished U.S. scholars. Cronin is a historian specializing in modern British and European history, Ross is a political scientist with rich expertise in European studies and Shoch is a professor of governance with a publication record on American economic, trade and industrial policy. Accordingly, the volume is a sound piece of academic work and a very matter-of-fact exploration of the ups and downs of the left since the 1970s. It offers well researched and well presented insights into the struggle of the European and U.S. left-wing parties to get a grip on major challenges facing them since the ’70s.

These challenges include: the end of capitalism’s “golden age” and loss of faith in Keynesian policies, the collapse of Soviet communism and its disenchanting effects, the globalization of the economy, the acceleration of the trend towards post-industrial employment and shifts in social structure and demography. The assessment of how European and U.S. left-wing parties coped with these challenges is conducted from two perspectives. Several chapters trace the development of Social Democratic parties in specific places (U.K., France, Sweden, U.S. and Central and Eastern European countries) while other compare responses of left-wing parties in several countries to particular issues (new social risks, immigration and European integration). Further, the volume contains chapters that ground these contributions in a longer term account of the fate of the left. Lastly, the well written introduction and conclusion distill and bind together insights from the individual contributions to ensure that the volume is not just a set of disparate chapters.

What are some of the overarching insights? First, mainstream left-wing parties today are more center-left than left. The contributions in the volume make this clear and underpin empirically the shift of socialist parties to the center over time. This shift was particularly profound in the U.K. Labor Party as Cronin shows. However, it is also visible in the Swedish Social Democratic Party, still the bastion of true Social Democracy as Jonas Pontusson argues. Also in France, starting with the famous U-Turn under President Francois Mitterand (from a socialist economic program to a strongly neoliberal policy), the center-left became not so different from the political center-right in economic policy and the direction of reforms. A chapter on the left in the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, now all Member States of the European Union, also indicates that most of the left-wing parties are left-wing largely just in proclamations but not in action. They became advocates of the same economic policies — liberalization, privatization and marketization — as the center-right. However, it would be simplistic to assign a common, universal underlying reason for this shift. The chapters show the specific challenges that the left was facing in their particular national contexts and to which the parties then tailored their responses.

The second overarching message is that the challenges lying in front of the left — in the form of globalization and shifts and changes it brings along — are not the first ones of such profoundness. The chapter by S. Brenan on “Social Democracy’s Past and Potential Future” shows the learning process and the internal discussions and divisions in Europe’s socialist parties since the end of the 19th century. Back then, as now, socialists also had to find a response to globalization. And they were not spared difficulties after that, including the need to find a response to the catastrophe of the World War I, the economic depression and the carnage in the wake of World War II.

Brenan argues that the adaptation and response was successful when Social Democrats managed to thwart the orthodox Marxist doctrine, which condemned them to passively waiting for capitalism’s end and accompanying class conflict. Instead, they had to accept that capitalism was not dying and that it generated much desired wealth, albeit while causing a lot of dislocation. An important lesson learned was that rather than waiting until capitalism discredits itself and collapses, a more appropriate and more electorally rewarded response was activism, regulation of capitalism and the protection of vulnerable from the negative consequences thereof. Rather than conflict, cross-class cooperation offered a better ground for the acknowledged need to control the economic forces by political ones. Capitalism and markets were to be tamed rather than defeated or abandoned. This shift in the vision of Social Democrats could be also epitomized by the words of French poet Paul Eluard, “There is another world, but it is in this one.”

However, this shift, and finding appropriate concrete responses to concrete issues, has not been an easy process, as the studies of individual countries demonstrate. It was accompanied by internal fights, a superficial embrace of new ideas on creative reformism of the markets or, conversely, becoming too comfortable in the mixed economy. In such situations, cynicism within the party transposed into a public perception of the party as emptied of a vision, becoming a status quo defender that protects vested interests. This is, however, not inevitable, as the chapter on the Nordic model by Jonas Pontusson demonstrates. In the Nordic countries and in Sweden in particular, Social Democracy flourished and managed to influence the whole atmosphere and thinking, including that of the right-wing parties. Pontusson argues that the social democratic Nordic model remains viable under the conditions of globalization and liberalization and supports his argument by empirical evidence showing superior performance of Nordic countries in terms of economic growth, employment or educational attainment compared to liberal market economies, like the U.K. and U.S., and the continental social market economies, like Germany. He shows how the egalitarianism of the Nordic countries contributed to their success. A crucial message is thus that social solidarity, equality and economic growth are not contrasting goals but can go hand in hand.

The third important point that the volume makes regards the difficulties of nationally based parties to cooperate and coin policies at the transnational level. This is probably no revelation but a case study written by Ross on the left parties’ response to European integration helps to explore the facets and roots of the challenge and to understand the barriers involved.

The insights of the volume do not only apply to European Social Democratic parties. Three chapters of the book explore the situation of the Democratic Party in the U.S. The chapters address directly the challenges identified in the introduction of the whole volume. R. Teixeira presents an analysis of the evolution and transformations in the Democratic coalition — the various social groups that form the electorate of the Democratic Party. If the insights and conclusions of the author are correct, the outlook of Democrats in prospective elections is a positive one as demographic developments and social changes seem to be in their favor. C. Howard provides a fine-grained analysis of the American welfare state. Howard paints a more complex picture of U.S. social policy whereby both Republicans and Democrats support welfare but within the overall frame of mind of distrust in big government. He shows how Democratic officials changed their approach in recent decades, shifting from social insurance to tax expenditures and social regulations. In his account, the American welfare state is larger than generally perceived in terms of the level of spending (because he also adds tax-related measures). Yet it achieves relatively little in reducing poverty and inequality as it is designed mostly to cater to the middle class and upper middle class, i.e. to the most active members of the polity. This suppression of the issues of poverty and inequality has now, though, returned with a vengeance through the Occupy movement, which rightly calls for putting the issue of inequality back on the public and government agenda. Finally, the third chapter presents the ambivalent response of the Democratic Party to issues related to globalization and, specifically, free trade.

So overall, what can we say, after reading the volume, about for what the current center-left stands? The response can be boiled down, in brief, to recognition of the “variety of lefts.” The analyses have shown that in each country, the Social Democratic parties target differently composed constituencies, face historically and contextually influenced problems and identify their own solutions. There is no simple pattern and no one-size-fits-all recipes to the individual and overarching challenges. Jane Jensen very nicely illustrates this in a chapter on new social risks, showing the diversified responses of Social Democratic parties in Sweden, Germany and the U.K.

From a volume of this type, one could always ask for more depth, more comprehensiveness or for other comparisons. A reader concerned about the fate of the leftist policies might also yearn for more clues about where the left could go and what responses it could present. Yet the book does not do this job for the social democratic parties or movements. It does not suggest a vision that they should consider. Moreover, it does not diminish the challenges standing in front of social democratic parties. So even having read the volume, we still don’t know where the left should concentrate its effort and how to re-kindle the enthusiasm and inspiration among people as the left used to do. In light of the popular movements of today and the debate on democracy they triggered, we don’t even know if traditional party politics at the national level will be the most adequate vehicle to address the challenges related to globalization, the excesses and dislocations of financial capitalism, social transformations, inequality or the environment, or whether the future of the leftist ideas lies in alternative movements or more cooperation at the transnational level. But with this volume, we have a better grounding and knowledge about where the social democratic parties stand and about the path that they have covered so far.

The insights from the volume can help us set more adequate expectations from what political parties and party politics can and cannot achieve. Despite being very straightforward about the challenges, the volume carries also a positive message. Left-wing parties already stood in front of tough challenges and managed to find viable solutions. It has traditionally been the job of the left to show that a better world is possible and to activate, mobilize people around this vision. In the past, it managed to do so. So chances are that today and tomorrow, it ultimately will be able to do so, too.

Katerina Svickova holds master degrees in European Studies, European Economic Integration and International Relations from the University of Economics and Charles University in Prague and the Central European University in Budapest. She has worked in the non-profit sector supporting social enterprise. She currently works for the European Commission. Opinions presented in her posts and articles represent strictly her personal, and in no way an institutional, perspective.

Torture as Acceptable Government Policy: USA, NATO and Canada

2012-01-17T15:33:00.001-06:00

By John W. Warnock
Act Up in Sask
16 January 2012

On January 5 Afghan President Hamid Karzai declared that within one month the U.S. government and NATO must hand over control of the Parwan prison at Agram Air Force Base north of Kabul to the Afghan government. An Afghan government commission investigated and reported that the there is systematic abuse of those held in this prison.

Gul Rahman Qazi, head of the commission, told the press that only 300 of the 2700 mainly Afghans held at the prison had been charged with any offense. The remainder “were being held without charges or evidence of guilt” and should be released. The vast majority of detainees had “no access to the courts” or family members. Many of those who had been charged in court and released, or who had served enough time in the jail to cover their sentences, were still being held by NATO authorities on the grounds that they were suspected of being insurgents.

In addition, the Afghan commission charged that detainees were being subjected to practices that were widely understood to be torture. These included beatings, various techniques of sleep deprivation, being held in small cells with no light, no heat and inadequate clothes and blankets, and being stripped and given intrusive body searches. Some of those who had not been charged were held for long periods of time in solitary confinement.

The U.S. and Canadian governments rejected Karzai’s demand arguing that the abuse of detainees at Afghan prisons was widespread and unacceptable. They would not transfer detainees to Afghan facilities. The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission stated that President Karzai’s government did not have the finances or ability to operate the Parwan prison. Those held in the NATO prison would be better off to stay where they were.

In October 2011 the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan released a report which concluded that there was widespread abuse of detainees in the prisons run by Afghan authorities. President Karzai’s secret police was accused of systematically using torture. But there is no recognition by NATO governments that torture takes place in NATO facilities.

The U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay

At the beginning of the US war on Afghanistan, the administration of President George W. Bush established a new detention prison at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Many of those captured by U.S. forces in the war were sent there as “enemy combatants.” This was a calculated strategy so that the detainees would not have access to basic civil rights and the courts under the U.S. Constitution or as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. Those eventually charged would be tried by Military Tribunals, which deny many of the basic civil rights which are the normal practice in civilian courts.

It is now widely known that prisoners at the Guantanamo site have been beaten, given the cold water treatment, subjected to various sleep deprivation techniques, held in wire cages with constant bright lights and loud music, stripped and mishandled by women agents, forced to stand naked for long periods of time, held in painful stress positions, and subject to 24 hour straight interrogations. Those of a Muslim faith experienced religious humiliation. These techniques were also used in the early days of the facility at Parwan.

One of the controversial techniques used by U.S. officials has been waterboarding: a suspect is fastened to a platform or board, a heavy cloth is placed over the face, and water is then poured on the detainee. It produces the effect of drowning, inducing terror and resulting in long term physical effects. It is now recognized that the CIA used waterboarding on certain detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, believed to have planned the 9/11 attack on the USA, has been waterboarded 183 times by U.S. officials. This torture technique was used during the Inquisition as well as by British forces on IRA suspects in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. The U.S. government hanged Japanese soldiers for waterboarding U.S. captives during World War II.

President Obama’s war

The war in Iraq was seen as George Bush’s war. The Democrats in Washington and Barrack Obama insisted during the 2008 presidential campaign that the war in Afghanistan was “the good war” as it was against the perpetrators of 9/11. President Obama pledged to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay during his first term of office, but has refused to do so. The number of detainees has fallen from the peak of 775 under Bush to 171 today. Only one detainee has been charged and convicted.

When George Bush left office there were about 600 detainees at Parwan. Under President Obama, the number has risen to a high of 3,000. In May 2010 the International Committee of the Red Cross revealed that the U.S. government also maintains one of their secret “black jails” at Parwan. The Obama administration takes the position that Afghanistan is a “war zone” and thus detainees have no access to U.S. constitutional guarantees.

Canada and the use of torture

All the NATO governments are bound by the United Nations Convention Against Torture. The prohibition covers “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for the purposes of obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession...” Torture is never justified. Extraordinary rendition, which has been used by the Canadian government, is prohibited. The Canadian government has ratified all the international conventions which prohibit torture.

Torture is also banned under the Canadian Criminal Code. The description of torture is the same as in the UN Convention. Being ordered by a superior officer or a public authority is no defence. No information gathered using torture is admissible as evidence. So why is it that the U.S., Canadian and NATO governments engage in torture?

The use of torture in imperialist wars

The international law against the use of torture was developed in Europe during the 17th century. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), a Dutch protestant theologian, is often identified as “the father of international law.” In 1625 he published the three volume work, The Law of War and Peace. International law was viewed as a “natural law” which was to be followed among civilized, Christian countries. It had a utilitarian basis as well: we won’t torture your soldiers if you don’t torture ours.

But it was never intended that these international laws would apply in the relations between the European imperial powers and their colonies. Those who were colonized were not Christians and were judged to be barbarians. Grotius himself was a strong supporter of Dutch imperialism and even worked for the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch denied basic human rights to those they colonized and employed torture as part of colonial administration, as did the other European imperial powers.

Today, the international law of torture is said to be jus cogens, an international standard of behaviour to which all countries are obliged to comply, even if they have not adopted the international conventions. But there is the reality of the gross discrepancies in power, now between the advanced capitalist states in NATO and the less developed countries. Some have noted that the Afghan and Iraq wars have again featured the Christians against the non-Christians. How many people with white skins are detained in the prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Parvan? Why would NATO governments find it useful or necessary to invoke the UN Convention Against Torture? Against whom?

John W. Warnock is retired from teaching political economy and sociology at the University of Regina. He well remembers the course in international law that he took from Professor William V. O’Brien at Georgetown University.

Canadian Labour At The Crossroads?

2012-01-17T09:48:00.005-06:00

By Doug Nesbitt
Socialist Project Bullet
January 17, 2012

A wage cut of fifty per cent. An elimination of pensions. Cuts to benefits. These demands have inevitably led to a major showdown at a locomotive factory in London, Ontario between the 700 unionized workers of Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD) and Caterpillar, a massive U.S.-based corporation. The workers, members of Canadian Auto Workers Local 27, responded to the employer's demands with a positive strike vote of 97 per cent. The employer, Progress Rail, a subsidiary of Caterpillar, locked out the workers on New Year's Day.

In addition to facing down a notorious anti-union employer who hammered the American United Auto Workers in the 1990s,[1] there are plenty of rumours about Caterpillar closing the London plant and moving operations to Muncie, Indiana. EMD workers in London make $36/hour while their counterparts in Muncie are paid only $12.50-14.50 (Cdn)[2]. Indiana is also on the cusp of becoming the first rust-belt state to introduce a “Right to Work” law, a notorious form of anti-union legislation made possible by the even more infamous Taft-Hartley law of 1947, the long-standing crown jewel of American anti-union legislation.[3]

All Out January 21

The response of organized labour to the lockout has been swift. The Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) is coordinating a mass rally in London on January 21 with buses coming in from numerous cities across the province and as far away as Sudbury and Ottawa. The OFL is anticipating at least ten thousand protesters.[4]

Mainstream media coverage has also been extensive and the shocking nature of Caterpillar's demands have so far ensured that coverage has been neutral and even supportive of the workers. The story is being covered by all major Canadian dailies, prime-time news hours on CBC and CTV, and has received coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and now the European and Australian press.

Not surprisingly, the federal government has stayed silent. Since they won their first majority government in May, the Tories have gone to war with organized labour. In June, postal workers were locked out by Canada Post, the state-owned crown corporation. The Tories responded with back-to-work legislation which called for pay increases lower than the employer's last offer.[5]

Federal Labour Minister Lisa Raitt went further, twice threatening to legislate Air Canada flight attendants back-to-work, even though Air Canada was privatized in 1988. From a party espousing government non-intervention in the economy, Raitt's reasoning behind intervening in the private sector was that Air Canada was essential to the economy.[6] This absurdity was repeated in October when Raitt floated the idea of defining the “economy” as an “essential service,” thus providing some pseudo-legal justification for further interventions.[7]

The government's hypocrisy goes further. In March 2008, on the very shop floor of EMD London, Prime Minister Harper announced a billion dollar tax break to industry in 2008, $5-million of which went to EMD London.[8] Two years later, EMD London was purchased by Caterpillar.

Despite its record high revenue and profits in 2011, stemming from sales of its machinery to a booming resource sector (tar sands, mining), Caterpillar is attempting to destroy a union.[9] In addition to their anti-union stance, the threat of roughly two thousand jobs being lost in London,[10] and their profiting off environmental disasters like the tar sands and mining operations around the world, Caterpillar supplies Israel the bulldozers it uses to carry out house demolitions in occupied Palestine.[11]

High Stakes Clash

This leaves labour – and all the political allies of labour – at a crossroads in this high profile, high stakes clash between workers and state-blessed corporate power. The implications for other workers – such as Toronto municipal workers, the locked-out steelworkers of Alma, Quebec, the York Region Transit workers, and all other workers, union and non-union – couldn't be greater. Since the Tory victory in May, employers, public and private, have received the message loud and clear: the federal government is siding with them in a sustained attempt to hold down wages and benefits, slash them where possible, and break the ability of workers to resist these moves by breaking their only means of defence: unions.

Is labour up to the challenge? The OFL has already moved the rally's location from the picket lines outside the factory, to downtown London's Victoria Park eight kilometres away. The move is explained by the OFL as ten thousand being too many for it to be “safe” on the picket line.[12] What nonsense is this? Fifteen thousand pickets peacefully shut down the Port of Oakland last November in an Occupy-initiated general strike.

Holding the rally in Victoria Park will ensure that is a symbolic display of opposition and nothing more. Only a few hundred of the ten thousand will likely take up Local 27's invite to the picket lines after the rally. Thousands of protesters will be boarding buses after the downtown rally to head back home and won't have time to make it to the picket lines.

If you're having deja vu, you're not alone. Last year, ten thousand people from across Ontario attended the Hamilton Day of Action against U.S. Steel held January 29, 2011.[13] On the steps of Hamilton City Hall, union leaders and labour politicians denounced the lockout and backed the steelworkers refusing to see their pensions gutted by U.S. Steel. A short march made it around a few cold and deserted downtown blocks before returning to City Hall. As one of the hundreds who lined up for union-sponsored buses back to their respective hometowns, I later realized that we had marched past the old Stelco building, U.S. Steel's Hamilton office, without even stopping to do anything.

Bolder Action?

The days of action in Hamilton and London may boost the spirits of locked-out workers, but what will it accomplish beyond this? In the wake of Occupy as well as the Capitol Building occupation in Wisconsin last year against the stripping of public sector bargaining rights, the time seems ripe for bolder action. Bold action could galvanize thousands of Canadians angry at the Tories and the one per cent, could overturn the limited range of Canada's political debates, and maybe just put employers and the Tories on the back foot for once.

The battle at EMD might be lost, but it could still be a turning point for labour by showing a new determination to take more controversial but increasingly necessary actions to counter the “race to the bottom” overseen by an entrenched federal government keen on hammering workers and dismantling hard-won social programs.

Drawing on the Occupy movement, the Spanish Indignados, and the Republic Windows and Doors occupation in Chicago from late 2008, occupying EMD London should be on labour's agenda. In this sense, moving ten thousand pickets away from the factory is a lost opportunity for initiating the occupation. If this sounds too radical, Egypt and Occupy have changed what's possible – an occupation could be a galvanizing moment for Canadians and become a worldwide beacon of resistance. And the story of EMD London exposes so clearly the intertwined problems of corporate greed and tax breaks, the war against workers, failing democratic institutions, environmental destruction and imperialism. And what better union than the Canadian Auto Workers, founded on the plant occupations in Flint and Oshawa in 1936 and 1937, to carry this out?

Even if an occupation doesn't happen but the demand is shouted loud enough – “Occupy EMD!” – it normalizes the idea among networks of workers and activists and lays the groundwork for occupations taking place in inevitable future labour disputes.

The decision to occupy will have to be taken by EMD London workers themselves. But solidarity actions can be carried out across Ontario and beyond. Caterpillar owns Battlefield Equipment Rentals with over 30 locations in Ontario, two in Manitoba and five in Newfoundland. The activist networks built up by the Occupy movement could link up even more with trade unionists to spread the resistance to Caterpillar far beyond London itself. This is what Americans did last August when dozens of Verizon Wireless stores across the country were picketed in solidarity with the communication workers strike against Verizon. The union, Communications Workers of America, even launched an “adopt-a-store” campaign for local activists to show their support, leading to many weekly pickets of Verizon Wireless stores.[14]

Where Battlefield Equipment Rentals can't be found, pressure can be put on the 166 Tory MPs riding offices in every province, highlighting government complicity with the corporate tax breaks to EMD London. Ottawa labour activists already showed this could be done when they occupied John Baird's riding office during the postal worker lockout.[15]

In short, the Canadian labour movement needs to reinvent itself and abandon the long-standing attitude toward conciliatory relations with employers, hopeless appeals for government intervention, and a general neglect of the wider, non-union working-class. The lockout in London makes this reinvention both necessary and possible. London could be the place where the labour movement – or at least a substantial minority of activists, union and non-union – recovers a tradition of militancy on behalf of the whole working-class and sees itself as a collective force for economic and political justice and transformation. •

Doug Nesbitt is Co-Chief Steward of PSAC 901 representing Queen's University Teaching Assistants and Fellows. He was born and raised in London, Ontario and now lives in Kingston pursuing a PhD in History at Queen's. He also co-hosts Rank and File Radio, a weekly labour news program on CFRC 101.9FM.

Endnotes:

1. Lance Selfa, “When Illinois was the war zone,” Socialist Worker, October 15, 2009.

2. Scott Taylor, “London versus Muncie,” London Free Press, January 16, 2012.

3. Shaun Harkin, “Indiana's war on labor,” Socialist Worker, January 4, 2012.

4. Jonathon Brodie, “Rally moves to Vic Park,” London Community News, January, 12, 2012.

5. Vanessa Lu, “Tory bill legislates Canada Post wage rates,” Toronto Star, June 21, 2011.

6. Jane Taber, “With economy in mind, Raitt plays hard ball in Air Canada dispute,” Globe and Mail, September 16, 2011.

7. “Raitt suggests economy should be 'essential service',” CBC, October 21, 2011.

8. Jonathan Sher, “Workers urged to fight for jobs,” London Free Press, January 16, 2012.

9. “Caterpillar profit climbs 44%,” Globe and Mail, October 24, 2011.

10. “Amid Electro-Motive talks, time not on London's side,” London Free Press, December 27, 2011.

11. David Heap, “Caterpillar destroys homes from Ontario to Palestine,” Rabble, January 13, 2012.

12. Jonathon Brodie, “Rally moves to Vic Park,” London Community News, January, 12, 2012.

13. Doug Nesbitt, “The People vs U.S. Steel,” The Leveller, February 24, 2011.

14. For details, see Steve Early's August 24, 2011 interview at Against the Grain.

15. CUPW solidarity - occupation of John Baird's office,” Media Co-op, June 23, 2011.

CWB battle not over

2012-01-16T15:32:00.002-06:00

BY BRUCE JOHNSTONE
The Leader Post
January 14, 2012

According to Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, it's all over but the crying for supporters of the Canadian Wheat Board's single desk.

"It's a done deal, folks,'' Ritz told delegates at the Western Canadian Wheat Growers convention in Moose Jaw last week, referring to the legislation to eliminate the CWB's monopoly over wheat and barley exports Aug. 1.

Then in Saskatoon this week, Ritz dismissed the threat of a class-action lawsuit by Regina lawyer Tony Merchant as "a bit of comic relief '' and reiterated that the Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act "is now, and will continue to be, the law of the land.''

While Ritz sounds confident, even cocky, it has a certain whistling-past-thegraveyard feel to it.

It's almost as if by repeating the phrases "specious'' and "baseless" often enough, Ritz will make the mounting legal challenges facing his government disappear.

Unfortunately for Ritz and company, the legal challenges are real and they're not going away.

In fact, in all likelihood, they're going to multiply in the weeks and months ahead.

The first challenge is the federal court ruling Dec. 6 that says Ritz's actions in pushing through Bill C-18 in clear violation of the Canadian Wheat Board Act (which requires a producer plebiscite if major changes are made to the single desk) were an "affront to the rule of law.''

The federal government is appealing that decision to the federal court of appeal. For his part, Ritz dismissed it as a "declaration'' that has no legal effect.

If that's the case, then why is the federal government appealing the decision?

But if the government is taking the federal court ruling seriously, why is it proceeding to implement the legislation?

Shouldn't the government find out whether its actions were legal or not before implementing Bill C-18?

That's why former elected directors of the CWB are calling on the federal court to quash the Harper government's appeal of the federal court ruling.

"We believe that the Harper government should have to choose - either the government moves ahead to dismantle the CWB without a vote of farmers, or they continue with their efforts to reverse the decision at appeal - but they should not be able to do both at the same time," said Bill Toews, a former CWB director.

Another legal obstacle for the Harper government is the application by eight former directors of the CWB for a court injunction to suspend Bill C-18 until its legality is determined. That application will be heard in Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench in Winnipeg next week.

Finally, the aforementioned Merchant class action, which seeks $15.4 billion in damages for Western Canadian farmers resulting from the loss of the single desk and the assets accumulated by the CWB. This elicited a chuckle from Ritz, since Merchant is a well-known Liberal and the lone plaintiff is Duane Filson, a twicedefeated Liberal candidate for Cypress Hills-Grasslands.

Ritz can laugh all he wants, but the Merchant class action (assuming it is certified by a court) poses another thorny legal problem for the Harper government.

Assuming Bill C-18 is a legal act (a big assumption at this point), can the government confiscate the assets of the CWB, remove its monopoly, manage the business for a few years, then sell the assets to a third party, without paying a single penny in compensation to farmers?

Let's not forget the CWB is not a conventional Crown corporation. It receives no ongoing support from the federal government (or at least it didn't until the Harper government took it over) other than a federal guarantee of the initial payments to farmers. The assets have been financed by farmers, who pooled their grain and used the proceeds from the sale of their crops to finance the CWB's operations and pay themselves.

What gives this government the right to seize farmers' assets, sell them and pocket the proceeds, without paying any compensation to farmers?

And the Merchant class action promises to be the first of several such lawsuits. The Friends of Canadian Wheat Board and Canadian Wheat Board Alliance are just two of the groups considering similar legal action.

As Yogi Berra famously said: "It ain't over 'til it's over."

New book critiques Wall policies

2012-01-16T11:33:00.000-06:00

By David Hutton
The Star Phoenix
January 13, 2012

Saskatchewan’s economic momentum will dissipate if the provincial government doesn’t install stronger public policies geared toward social problems, a number of University of Saskatchewan professors argue in a new book.

The book — New Directions in Saskatchewan Public Policy — is the first academic critique of Brad Wall’s Saskatchewan Party government, analyzing and suggesting solutions in areas of immigration, taxation, climate change, urban affairs, poverty reduction, labour, aboriginal affairs, and health.

“The government is riding the economic boom and not making social investments,” said University of Saskatchewan political studies professor David McGrane, the book’s editor, at a campus press conference Friday.

“The government needs to invest in social infrastructure to create long-term benefits. Good public policy is needed to ensure our economic prosperity continues beyond what may be a short-term economic boom.”

In his chapter, McGrane argues the Saskatchewan Party government should hold the line on taxes and install a carbon tax and a harmonization of the federal and provincial sales tax that provides rebates.

Thus far, the Wall government has rejected the idea of installing a harmonized sales tax, which has caused political turmoil in British Columbia, where it was voted down in a referendum last summer. The tax shifts a portion of the burden from businesses to consumers and imposes a tax on many items that weren’t previously subject to PST.

McGrane said it could be installed alongside rebates for low-income people.

“If you’re going to do it in Saskatchewan, do it now and you’ll have four years to sell it to people,” he said.

Ryan Walker, a professor of urban planning, focused his critique on urban growth and the province’s sprawling cities. Walker said the provincial government could play a lead role in how the province’s big cities, Saskatoon and Regina, develop through a provincial growth management strategy. The time is now, during a period of fast growth, to tackle the issue, Walker said.

The major cities are currently sprawling at an unsustainable pace, he said.

“One of the problems is if we don’t focus on how we’re growing we could end up with an enormous tax bill,” Walker said.

Revenge of the Pawns

2012-01-15T10:40:00.001-06:00

By Jamie
New Left Project
09 January 2012

Wonderful little film by Erik Olin Wright, made in 1968, about the dilemmas of revolution.

He explains:

"The key idea in this animated film was this: the pawns revolt against the 'ruling class' pieces, sweep them from the board and then dance an American square dance on the board. In the end, however, they start a new chess game, but this time the pawns are on the back row moving like Kings and bishops and the like, while the old aristocratic pieces occupy the pawn row and move like pawns. The message of the film was that the pawns failed to make a revolution because they thought it was sufficient to depose the old elite. They neglected to remove the board itself. The chessboard, then, was a metaphor for underlying social structure that generates 'the rules of the game'. A revolution, to be sustainable, has to transform that.

Now, this idea is not a uniquely Marxist idea. In a sense it is the foundational idea of much structurally oriented sociology: people fill “locations” in social structures — sometimes called roles — which impose constraints and opportunities on what they can chose to do. This doesn’t mean that human practices or activities are rigidly determined by roles. Intentions and choices still really matter. Agency matters. But such choice occurs in a setting of systematic (rather than haphazard) constraints.

The Marxist form of this general idea is to make a claim — a pretty bold one when you think about it — that the key to understanding this structural level of constraint is the nature of the economic structure in which people live, or even more precisely, the nature of the “mode of production”. In my little film there was no production, no economy. The chessboard was a completely open-ended metaphor for social structure. So it is in that sense that the film was not specifically based on a Marxist framework.

As for its inspiration, I think the film grew out of the concerns for radical, egalitarian social change that were part of the intellectual culture of the student movement, the American civil rights movement and Vietnam War era anti-war movement. I participated in various ways in these social movements of the 1960s and was very much caught up in the utopian aspirations of the times, but I also felt that the task of constructing emancipatory alternatives was more arduous than many people thought. It is not enough to attack the establishment and remove its players. Constructing an alternative is a task in its own right. And that is what the film tried to convey."

World Peace Hanging by a Thread

2012-01-14T12:43:00.002-06:00

By Fidel Castro Ruz
Cuba Debate
Jan 14th, 2012

Yesterday I had the satisfaction of having a pleasant conversation with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I had not seen him since 2006, more than five years ago, when he visited our country to participate in the 14th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement of Countries in Havana. During the summit, Cuba was elected for the second time as president of the organization for a three-year term.

I had become gravely ill on July 26, 2006, a month and a half prior to the summit, and could barely sit up in bed. Many of the most distinguished leaders who participated in the event were kind enough to visit me. Chavez and Evo visited me several times. One afternoon four visitors came by whom I will always remember: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; an old friend, Abdelaziz Buteflika, the president of Algeria; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran; and the vice minister of Foreign Affairs and current Foreign Minister of China, Yang Jiechi, on behalf of the leader of the Communist Party and the president of China, Hu Jintao. It was really an important time for me; I was in the midst of intense physiotherapy on my right hand that I had seriously injured when I fell in Santa Clara.

With all four I spoke about some of the difficulties facing the world at the time; problems that have become progressively more complex.

During our meeting yesterday, I noted that the Iranian president was absolutely calm and tranquil, completely unconcerned about the Yankee threats and, fully confident in the capacity of his people to confront any aggression and in the effectiveness of their arms —which, in large part, they produce themselves— to inflict an unpayable price on its aggressors.

In reality, we hardly spoke about the topic of war. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was focused on the ideas he had presented at the Main Hall of the University of Havana during his conference on the struggle of humankind: “Moving towards reaching and achieving peace, security, respect and human dignity as a fundamental desire of all human beings throughout history.”

I am convinced that Iran will not commit any rash actions that might contribute to setting off a war. If a war were to be unleashed, it would inevitably be completely as a result of the recklessness and congenital irresponsibility of the Yankee Empire.

I believe that the political situation surrounding Iran and the associated risks of a nuclear war that involves us all —regardless of whether one possess nuclear weapons— are extremely delicate because they threaten the very existence of our species. The Middle East has become the most troubled region on the planet, the same region that produces the energy resources vital for the world’s economy.

The destructive power and the mass sufferings caused by some of the weapons used in World War Two led to a strong movement to ban weapons such as asphyxiating gas and others. Nevertheless, conflicting interests and the huge profits made by arms manufacturers led to the production of crueler and more destructive weapons; modern technology has now added the means and material to build weapons that if used in a world war would lead to extinction.

I support the opinion, undoubtedly shared by all those with a basic sense of responsibility, that no country big or small has the right to possess nuclear weapons.

They never should have been used to attack two defenseless cities such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing and irradiating with horrible and long-lasting effects hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, in a country that had already been militarily defeated.

If fascism indeed forced the allied nations against Nazism to compete with this enemy of humanity in the production of such weapons, once the war ended and the United Nations was created, the first duty of this organization should have been to prohibit nuclear weapons without exception.

However, the United States, the strongest and richest power, forced the rest of the world to follow its lead. Today, they have hundreds of satellites that spy and monitor the entire world from outer space. Their naval, air and land forces are equipped with thousands of nuclear weapons; and they control the world’s finances and investments at their whim via the International Monetary Fund.

Analyzing the history of each Latin American nation, from Mexico to Patagonia, by way of Santo Domingo and Haiti, one can observe that each and every country, without exception, have suffered for 200 years, from the beginning of the 19th century up until today. And, in one way or another, they are increasingly suffering the worst crimes that power and force can commit against the rights of a people. Brilliant Latin American writers are emerging in an increasing number. One of them, Eduardo Galeano, author of the book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent that describes the aforementioned, has just been invited to open the prestigious Casa de Las Americas Awards as a recognition to his outstanding body of work.

Events happen incredibly fast; but technologies report them to the public even faster. On any given day, like today, important news comes out a dizzying pace. A cable report dated from January 11 states: “The Danish presidency of the European Union confirmed on Wednesday that a new series of more severe European sanctions against Iran, because of its nuclear program, will be discussed on January 23. The new sanctions will not only target the oil industry but also the Central Bank.”

During a meeting with international journalists, Danish Foreign Minister Villy Soevndal said that “We will increase sanctions against the oil industry in addition to sanctions against financial structures.” This clearly demonstrates that, in order to impede nuclear proliferation, Israel can go on accumulating hundreds of nuclear warheads while Iran is not allowed to produce 20% enriched uranium.

Another article, from a respected British news agency, states that “China gave no hint on Wednesday of giving ground to U.S. demands to curb Iran’s oil revenues, rejecting Washington’s sanctions on Tehran as overstepping …”

The sheer tranquility with which the United States and civilized Europe carry out this campaign with incredible and systematic acts of terrorism is enough to shock anybody. Just look at these lines reported by another important European news agency: “The murder on Wednesday of Iranian nuclear specialist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan [a scientist at the Natanz nuclear plant] was the fourth attack to kill a leading scientist in the country in almost exactly two years.”

On January 12, 2010: “Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physics professor at Tehran University is killed when a booby-trapped motorcycle explodes outside his home in the capital. “

On November 29, 2010: “Two attacks target leading Iranian nuclear scientists on the same day. Majid Shahriari, a key member of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, is killed in Tehran by a limpet bomb attached to his car. His colleague Fereydoon Abbasi Davani is also targeted by a bomb attached to his car, but escapes.” The car was parked in front of the Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran where both men worked as professors.

On July 23, 2011: “Gunmen shoot dead Dariush Rezaei-Nejad, a senior scientist who is reportedly associated with the defense ministry, and wound his wife as they waited for their child outside a Tehran kindergarten.”

On January 11, 2012 —the same day that Ahmadinejad travelled from Nicaragua to Cuba to give a conference at the University of Havana—, scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, “a deputy director at the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, is killed in a car bomb blast outside the [Allameh Tabatabai] University in east Tehran.” As in previous years “Iran once again accused the United States and Israel.”

The killings represent a systematic and selective slaughter of brilliant Iranian scientists. I have read articles by known Israeli sympathizers who write about crimes carried out by Israeli intelligence services in cooperation with the United States and NATO as if they were the most normal occurrence.

At the same time, Moscow news agencies report that “Russia warned that in Syria a similar scenario is developing as to that in Libya, and added that this time the attack will be launched from neighboring Turkey.

“The secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said the West wants to ‘punish Damascus not as much for repressing the opposition, but because it is unwilling to sever ties with Tehran.’”

“…NATO members and some Persian Gulf states, operating according to the Libya scenario, intend to move from indirect intervention in Syrian affairs to direct military intervention…This time the main strikes forces will not be provided by France, the U.K. or Italy, but possibly by neighboring Turkey.”

“Washington and Ankara are now assumed to be negotiating a “no-fly” zone over Syria, where Syrian armed insurgents can be trained and concentrated, added Patrushev.”

News is not only coming out of Iran and the Middle East, but also from other parts of Central Asia near the Middle East. These reports show the great complexity of the problems that can arise from this dangerous region.

The United States has been led by its contradictory and absurd imperial policy to get involved in serious problems in countries such as Pakistan, whose borders with Afghanistan were drawn up by the colonialists without taking into account culture or ethnicities.

In Afghanistan, which defended its independence against English colonialism for centuries, drug production has multiplied in the wake of the Yankee invasion. Meanwhile, European soldiers, supported by drone airplanes and armed with sophisticated US weapons, carry out deplorable massacres that increase the people’s hatred and ward off any possibilities of peace. All this and other dirty actions are also reported by Western news agencies.

“WASHINGTON, January 12, 2012 – US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called the actions of four U.S. marines who urinated on corpses in Afghanistan “utterly deplorable” The video of the act was circulated in the Internet.

“’I have seen the footage, and I find the behavior depicted in it utterly deplorable…’

“’This conduct is entirely inappropriate for members of the United States military and does not reflect the standards of values our armed forces are sworn to uphold…’”

In reality, Panetta neither confirms nor denies the action, and anyone, including the Secretary of Defense himself, may harbor doubt.

But it is also extremely inhumane that men, women and children, or an Afghani combatant fighting against the foreign occupation, be murdered by bombs dropped by drone planes. Another very serious incident: dozens of Pakistani soldiers and officials who safeguarded the country’s borders have been killed by these bombs.

Afghani President Karzai stated that the outrage committed against the bodies was “simply inhumane.” He asked for the US government “to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”

Meanwhile Taliban spokespersons declared that “over the last ten years, hundreds of similar acts have been carried out that were not reported…”

One even feels sorry for those soldiers, thousands of kilometers away from their family, friends and country, sent to fight in countries that they might not have even heard of during their school days, where they are assigned the task of killing or dying to enrich transnational companies, arms manufacturers and unscrupulous politicians who each year squander funds needed to feed and educate the uncountable millions of hungry and illiterate people around the world.

Many of these soldiers, victims of the trauma suffered, end up taking their own lives.

Is it an exaggeration to say that world peace is hanging by a thread?

Canada to revive anti-democratic “counter-terrorism” powers

2012-01-14T09:43:00.001-06:00

By Vic Neufeld
WSWS
14 January 2012

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has repeatedly vowed that in the coming year he will use his Conservative Party’s parliamentary majority to push through major changes in socio-economic policy. His government has also made no secret of the fact that it is determined to strengthen the coercive powers of the state.

Although the press has accorded it little attention, the Conservatives have proclaimed their intention to push through legislation reviving the police’s power to detain terrorism suspects without charge and compel persons deemed of “interest” in a terrorism investigation to provide them information.

Both these measures were included in the Chretien Liberal government’s Anti-Terrorism Act, which was rushed through Parliament in the weeks immediately following the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US.
That legislation broke with several key tenets of British-Canadian jurisprudence—tenets historically developed through the struggle against arbitrary and unfettered executive power. It created a new category of political crime subject to significantly harsher penalties, included a catch-all definition of terrorism that could potentially be used to suppress strikes and other forms of political protest, and eliminated important restrictions on the police’s use of electronic eavesdropping.

The Anti-Terrorism Act also imposed a pro-active legal obligation on all persons in Canada to inform the police of any information they have about financial transactions involving a government-designated “terrorist organization,” whether the information pertains to themselves, a friend or an acquaintance. Failure to do so makes one liable to a ten-year prison-term.

But it was preventive detention and the police’s new power to coerce suspects and witnesses into providing information through “investigative hearings” that were especially criticized by civil liberties groups and sections of the legal establishment as an unjustified expansion of the powers of the state—one that could soon be extended to cover other sorts of crimes.

The police have long been able to detain a person without charge for only 24 hours. Under the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act, police were empowered to detain persons for up to 72 hours without charge, and could do so based on “suspicion” as opposed to “reasonable grounds to believe” that the detainee was in some way involved in an impending terrorist act.

In the name of the “war on terror,” the Liberals also overturned the right to silence—a right rooted in opposition to torture and other forms of coerced testimony. They granted the police the power to convene an “investigative hearing” to compel, under the threat of imprisonment, anyone they deemed of interest in a terrorism investigation to answer their questions and turn over any documents or other material the police considered relevant.

Because of the public concern over the preventive detention and investigative hearing provisions, the Liberals amended the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act prior to its adoption, making these provisions subject to a “sunset clause.” If parliament did not expressly vote to extend them, the provisions would lapse after five years.
In 2007, the newly-elected minority Conservative government did introduce legislation extending the two controversial provisions, but the opposition parties balked.

By 2007 there was growing public anger over how the Canadian and US governments had used the so-called “war on terror” to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and a vast expansion of the coercive powers of the state. Canadians, moreover, had been shocked and outraged to learn that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) had colluded in the US rendition of Maher Arar to Syria for interrogation by torture.

The opposition parties, including the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), refused to mount a campaign to expose Canada’s complicity in torture. Under the direction of first the Liberals and then the Conservatives, Canada’s national security agencies had fingered Canadians traveling abroad for prolonged detention and torture by Mid-East dictatorships, then participated in their “muscular” interrogations.

But the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois did believe it in their interests to oppose the extension of the sunseted provisions. Canada’s principal dailies, including the Globe and Mail and the National Post, have gone on record as supporting the Harper government in reviving these antidemocratic provisions.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, have declared that they intend to make the lapsed provisions permanent.
While the NDP has said it will oppose their revival, the Liberals have indicated that they may well support the government in overturning the right to freedom from detention without charge and the right to silence. The retired Liberal cabinet ministers who played the principal role in stampeding the Anti-Terrorism Act through Parliament in 2001—then-Justice Minister Anne McLellan and Foreign Minister John Manley—have both voiced their support for reviving preventive detention and investigative hearings.

In Canada, as in all the major capitalist countries, the terrorist attacks of September 2001 have been used to justify imperialist war abroad, a vast expansion of police powers and the national security apparatus, and the criminalization of dissent.

On the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the liberal-social Rideau Institute issued a report, titled The Cost of 911: Tracking the Creation of a National Security Establishment in Canada, that documents the explosive growth of state expenditure on Canada’s military and national-security apparatus.

According to the report, expenditure on CSIS has tripled, rising from $170 million in 2000-01 to $509 million in 2011-12. Expenditures at the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness (formerly the Solicitor General) have quintupled in size since 2000-01 (290 percent inflation-adjusted), from $83 million in 2000-01 to $415 million currently. Overall, the cost of Security and Public Safety programs have nearly tripled in size, from $3.9 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars to $8.7 billion in the current fiscal year.

The Miners' Hymns

2012-01-13T16:27:00.002-06:00

By Bill Morrison
Purchase HERE.

This elegy, in film and music, to the coal mining history of north east England, is the product of an exceptional creative collaboration between renowned filmmaker Bill Morrison (Decasia) and acclaimed musician and composer Johann Johannson.

Collaged from archive film footage and drawing on the region's brass music culture, the Miners' Hymns celebrates the labour, endurance, vibrant community and rich culture that characterised the lives of those who worked underground.

Romania: Forgotten miners in the Valley of Tears

2012-01-13T16:05:00.002-06:00

By Keno Verseck
Press Europe
13 January 2012

In Ceausescu's times thousands of Romanians, drawn by high wages, flocked to the coalfields of the Jiu Valley. Today many of the mines in the valley are closed and the miners have been left to fend for themselves. Many are sliding into criminality.

A narrow path heads up the steep slope. The ground is a greyish black and scuffed smooth. Tattered plastic bags lie about. “I just put the coal in a plastic tub and let it slide down the slope,” says Mihai Stoica, a man in his mid-thirties.

He climbs on up the slope. As the hill is so steep, he clings to branches and shrubs. Halfway up, a mighty beech lies toppled. Just beneath the exposed roots is a depression in the earth. “A collapsed tunnel,” Stoica remarks laconically and keeps climbing. Soon he's at his “own” tunnel.

It's quiet in the forest at this season, and from the distance comes the murmur of a creek. Some coal seams in the valley almost reach the surface, and Stoica has found one. His tunnel is well hidden. If something were to happen to Stoica and he were on his own, no one would find him.

Cautiously Stoica enters the low tunnel. Eight metres long, it has no pit propping whatsoever. As he chips coal off the wall and into a plastic bag, every now and then he stops to listen to the soft creaks and groans from the tunnel walls. “The mountain is unpredictable,” he says. Now that it's getting cold, he's coming here more often.

Stoica is not his real name. He is afraid to reveal his real name, because what he's doing here is not only dangerous, but strictly prohibited. Illegal mining. But Stoica is taking the risk, to keep himself and his family from freezing in winter.

Stoica was a miner. He has been unemployed for a long time, and at home he has a wife and three children: five people who have to live on the equivalent of €50 in social assistance and child benefits each month. “Wood is very expensive. We haven't the money for it,” Stoica says. “So I'll chip coal out of here. Otherwise we wouldn't have any heat. Yes, it's against the law, but I do it because I have to.”
“They promised that they would create jobs"

In the Ceausescu era, 50,000 miners worked the coal pits of the Jiu Valley. Lured by high wages, the largely unskilled labourers came from all across Romania to dig out the huge amounts of coal Ceausescu needed to feed the country's enormous metal production factories and power plants.

After the fall of the dictator, the miners remained a pampered clientele of the communist rulers who stayed on in power after 1989. In 1997, though, the first coal mines began to be shut down. Two years later, a miner's revolt brought Romania to the brink of martial law. As thousands of desperate miners marched towards Bucharest to overthrow the government, the rulers rolled out the tanks. Romania narrowly escaped bloody clashes, as once again the miners got a reprieve. But then the colliery closures continued.

Today the Jiu Valley is Romania's most worrisome social flashpoint. Some 6,000 miners are still at work in the seven remaining coal mines. By 2018, the government wants to close those too. There are no long-term social programmes. The laid-off miners and their families, though, no longer rise up in rebellion. They waste away in their decaying ghettos, and almost none have found new work in the area.

A tragic yet absurd situation, given the chances that Romania has had to fight poverty. Many billions of euros in funding from EU coffers are available to the country, in particular for regional and economic development. But Romania has hardly touched the money. Of all the EU states in eastern Europe, it has submitted the lowest number of project-funding applications that comply with the EU rules. After 2015, the funding that is not used will no longer be available.

Stoica comes originally from a village in southern Romania. His parents were poor farmers and had nine children. In 1992, when he was just eighteen, he came to the town of Uricani in the Jiu Valley and started working at the local mine. In 1997 he barely survived carbon-monoxide poisoning in a mining accident. His wife urged him to quit. The government had just begun to close mines in the Jiu Valley and was giving out relatively generous redundancy payments. Stoica gave notice. “They promised that they would create jobs in furniture factories and in tourism,” he recalls. “Everything was going to be a lot better.”
"We can't pick and choose where we live"

The Stoicas used the severance money to pay off their electrical bills and bought a new refrigerator. Unable to find a steady job, Stoica supported his family with odd jobs. He was a salesman and street cleaner, a labourer on farms and construction sites, and gathered mushrooms and forest fruits – like many of the people of Uricani. Today 830 people still work in the town's mine. Unemployment is at 70 percent. “I believed all the promises back then,” Stoica says. “Now I regret quitting.”

The Stoicas live in one of the many dilapidated 1950s housing blocks in Uricani. The facades are crumbling and rain comes in through the ceilings. Moulds and fungi grow up the walls. The Stoicas' flat looks as though the family is only living in it temporarily. There is a bed, a couple of chairs, a table, and a television. The walls have no pictures. The five-year-old son sleeps with his parents in their bed, while the 12-year-old daughter and her eight-year-old brother fold out the couch in the living room every night.

Stoica's wife Ioana stands by the stove frying potato wedges, today's lunch. Smiling, with a proud indifference, she talks about her life. “Many call the Jiu Valley the Valley of Tears,” she says. “But we can't pick and choose where we live. We want to offer our children a good education, but we can't think beyond today.”

It has begun to rain, and the flat cools. Mihai Stoica goes down to the cellar, where the coal he has brought down from the mountain is stored behind a screen of boards, and scoops some up into a bucket along with some wood splinters. A coal fire is soon glowing in the stove. Sometimes, when the Stoicas have no money to refill their propane bottle, they cook in the stove's oven.

Mihai Stoica stares into the fire. He will try to go to Spain to find work in agriculture, but he does not know how he is going to scrape together the money to get there. “These are difficult times,” he says. “The social security of Romania's people no longer counts for anything. So much has been promised, and nothing has been done. We feel cheated.”

Saskatchewan: Nuclear waste dump?

2012-01-13T14:42:00.002-06:00

Uranium Development Project

NWMO comes to Saskatchewan looking to sell us nuclear waste from New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario... and then the rest of the world. This film is about the 7000 Generation Walk (900km) from Pinehouse to the legislature in Regina, expressing opposition to a radioactive waste repository in our north.

(For more on Saskatchewan's Nuclear Wonderland, visit: www.captainpower.ca )

Nuclear Wonderland is a creative new media work by filmmaker and graphic artist Myek O’Shea and economist Brett Dolter. This film exposes the nuclear record in the prairies and captures a direct democracy ignored by mainstream media.

Wall of Silence on Canpotex

2012-01-13T13:58:00.002-06:00

By Erin Weir
Progressive Economics Forum
January 13th, 2012

Saskatchewan’s newspapers reported today that BHP Billiton intends to sell the province’s potash outside of Canpotex, the marketing board that helps to maximize the price for which Saskatchewan potash is exported offshore.

BHP executive Tim Cutt stated, “We will not market through Canpotex. We talked to the premier (Brad Wall) about that. He understands that.”

Concerns that BHP would undermine Canpotex were a major objection to its takeover bid for the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan. Indeed, Premier Wall’s speech rejecting BHP’s proposal invoked “Canpotex” ten times in eight pages, as a source of pricing power for Saskatchewan’s resource and of jobs in British Columbia’s ports (as opposed to BHP’s plan to use the port of Vancouver, Washington).

It seems strange that Wall would now be happy to accept BHP’s plans to circumvent Canpotex. Maybe BHP is willing to develop the Jansen Lake mine only if it can bypass this agency? Perhaps the benefits of developing this new mine outweigh the costs of eroding Canpotex’s pricing power? If Wall has come to that conclusion, he should say so rather than allowing BHP to speak for him.

The next generation of land defenders

2012-01-13T03:44:00.007-06:00

5 young people step up against nuclear waste

By Briarpatch Staff
Briarpatch magazine
Jan 1, 2012
All photos: Debby Morin

In summer 2011, several people from communities in northern Saskatchewan walked 820 kilometres from Pinehouse to Regina to raise awareness about the storage and transportation of nuclear waste in the province, and to oppose a proposed nuclear waste dump near Pinehouse.

Youth played an important role in the walk. Among the core walkers were five courageous young people who gave up a good chunk of their summer vacation to stand up for their communities and for future generations.

Geron Paul accepts an offering from Marie Campbell.

Geron Paul, age 19 and from Beauval, walked for the full three weeks. At the rally at the Saskatchewan legislature in Regina at the end of the walk, Paul had his public speaking debut when he addressed the crowd of hundreds about the dangers of nuclear waste. “I am proud of our natural resources. I am proud to say I live by one of the most beautiful lakes in Saskatchewan,” he said. “If I have to give up an ‘unparalleled economic opportunity’ to keep it clean, I am willing to live with the consequences.”

Rueben Roy

Rueben Roy, age 16, of English River First Nation also participated in the whole walk. Roy is concerned about the impact that nuclear waste storage could have on the natural environment surrounding his community, including the animals and water. “Walking on the road instead of driving it allows you to see and feel more with nature,” he notes. “We want to see a north that is not polluted.”

Marissa Favel accepts water from the S. Sask. River

Marissa Favel, age 17 and in Grade 10 in Ile-a-la-Crosse, says she joined the walk “for everyone in this world, but especially for the children.” Favel has two younger brothers and considers the storage of nuclear waste in her community a threat to their future. In this photo she is accepting a gift of water in the group’s buffalo horn from the driver of the Batoche ferry that took the group over the South Saskatchewan River.

Shayna Paul

Shayna Paul, age 17 and in Grade 11 in Beauval, also had her younger siblings and cousins in mind when she decided to join the walk. “I don’t want them to have this stuff in their backyard,” she says. A powwow dancer since the age of two, Paul danced the walkers into the cities of Prince Albert and Regina. She says she felt proud to be able to do this and also enjoyed the opportunity to connect with the elders and other youth in the group as they walked.

River Cote

River Cote, the youngest of the group at 13, was so inspired by the walkers when they stayed at his home in Saskatoon that he persuaded his mom to join them for the remainder of their journey. Cote gave up a much-anticipated trip to Saskatoon’s Exhibition to attend the walk. “It was amazing to get out of the city and walk,” he says. And besides, he continues, “the Exhibition comes every year, but this opportunity just comes once in a lifetime. If they bury [nuclear waste] up there and something happens, everywhere around will be a disaster.”

2012: The Year the Canadian Housing Bubble Will Burst

2012-01-13T02:31:00.002-06:00

John W. Warnock's Blog
January 6, 2012

This is the time of year when all economists (and some political economists) are called upon to make their forecasts for the year which is beginning. From the recent data it appears that the USA will have a very modest increase in economic growth, not enough to significantly reduce the number of people who are unemployed, working part time while wanting full time work, or who have given up looking for a job and have left the work force. The European Union has an enormous pile of debt to deleverage, is already in a double dip recession, and all forecasts are for an overall negative growth rate for the year. This can only be bad news for the economies of the USA and Canada.

The housing issue

However, it does seem likely that the average price of a house in the USA will finally reach the bottom of the collapse of their housing bubble. As I write this prices have fallen back to where they were in 2000, the beginning of the formation of the bubble. We can see this in the graph of the trends in house prices tracked by the most respected sources of data, reported here by Calculated Risk.

As most people know by now, the housing market in the USA took off when the government deregulated the finance industry, drastically reduced the interest rates on mortgages, lifted the requirement for buyers to have 20% equity when buying a house, and instructed the federal chartered housing corporations (Fannie May, Freddy Mac, Federal Housing Authority, etc.) to insure all the marginal mortgages. This created what became known as the “sub-prime” mortgage market.

These very risky mortgages were then bundled together into mortgage backed securities (MSBs) which were then sold on the bond markets around the world as top rated investments. This Ponzi scheme collapsed when many of the new homeowners could not keep up the payments. There are still over four million houses in the USA in some phase of the foreclosure process.

Canada: “The housing market is different here.”

But as we are told over and over by our political leaders, the spokesmen for the housing industry, the banks, the mainstream economists and the mass media, Canada is fortunate that this did not happen here! There is no housing bubble in Canada! But is this really true?

Since the end of World War II the price of a house purchased in Canada (and the USA) has averaged between two and three times annual household income. When it rises higher than this ratio, owners become “house poor;” they cannot keep up with all the costs of owning a home and have enough income left over to lead a normal middle class life style.

Furthermore, our economy cannot function as it should when the average price of a house rises so high that the average family cannot afford to buy. In North America around 65% of families and individuals prefer to make monthly payments to bankers rather than landlords. This ratio rose to over 70% in the USA during the housing boom and has now dropped back to the 65% level. In Canada the option of ownership is still at the 70% level.

So where are we now? The average price of a house in the USA is $175,000, and the median family income is $50,000. In Canada the average price of a house today is $362,000 and the median family income is $65,000. So the average price of a house today in Canada is over five times the median family income. But all the powers that be in Canada insist that there is no housing bubble.

Government policy and the Canadian housing bubble

To a very large extent it has been government policy which has promoted the housing bubble. In the 1990s most of the advanced industrialized countries sought to boost their economies by expanding the private housing market. It was hoped that the expansion of the housing industry would help to offset the decline of the manufacturing industry.

In Canada in December 2006 Stephen Harper’s government introduced 40 year mortgages with no money down. These policies were directly aimed at first time buyers. Interest rates were reduced, and the cost of carrying a mortgages fell significantly. A five year fixed mortgage can be purchased today with an interest rate cost of only 5%. Since World War II mortgage interest rates have averaged a bit over 8%.

As part of the change in policy, those who bought a house with less than the traditional 20% down payment were required to get mortgage insurance. This was the task of the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). The risk of default on these mortgages was shifted from the banks and other lenders to the Canadian taxpayers, who own and bankroll CMHC. In 2011 the average first home buyer had only a 7% equity in the purchased home.

Today first home buyers can still purchase a home with 5% down and a 35 year amortization. Furthermore, banks have allowed some first time buyers to borrow the 5% down payment. The results have been as expected. In the United States, the federal agencies holds mortgages worth around $1.3 trillion. In Canada, CMHC has acquired and insured $600 billion of our “sub prime” mortgages. CMHC bundles up these mortgages into mortgage backed securities (MSBs) and sells them as bonds on the international market, 100% guaranteed by the Canadian government. Canada is different, Eh?

There are signs that the housing bubble in Canada is starting to break, even in some of the key markets like Vancouver and Toronto. Canadian households seem to have finally become concerned over their very high ratio of debt to income. So it is my projection that this is finally the year when our housing market will begin its path down to the normal level. But not in Regina, due to the influx of population. This would change if the oil and potash industries were to follow the general decline now evident in world commodity prices.

Marx, Marxism and the cooperative movement

2012-01-12T18:57:00.002-06:00

By Bruno Jossa
Cambridge Journal of Economics
Vol. 29,No. 1, 2005

2012 has been declared the International Year of Cooperatives by the United Nations. NYC will be posting articles relating to cooperatives and the socialist movement throughout the year. The paper below kicks off this series.

Introduction

On several occasions Marx declared himself strongly in favour of cooperative firms, maintaining that their generalised introduction would result in a new production mode. At different times in his life, he even seems to have been confident that cooperatives would eventually supplant capitalistic firms altogether. Lenin also endorsed the cooperative movement and, in a 1923 work (entirely devoted to this subject), he went so far as to equate cooperation with socialism at large. More precisely, besides describing cooperation as an important organisational step in the transition to socialism, he explicitly argued that ‘cooperation is socialism’ (Lenin, 1923). All the same, ever since the time of the Paris Commune the cooperative movement has received little attention from Marxists.

One argument we intend to put forward in our analysis is that this scant attention for the cooperative movement is due at least in part to the kind of cooperative—a firm in which workers are ‘their own capitalists’ (Marx, 1894, p. 571)—that has asserted itself in history, because this tends to endorse the view that a system of producer cooperatives is not a genuine form of socialism.

However, modern economic theory has shown that the pure cooperative is Vanek’s LMF (see Vanek, 1971A, 1971B), which does not self-finance itself and whose workers can consequently not be correctly described as ‘their own capitalists’. And this consideration disproves the arguments of thoseMarxists who maintain that cooperatives are, by their very nature, an intermediate form in between capitalism and socialism.

But what are the implications of the above reflections? Once we have made it clear that Marx looked upon cooperation as a new production mode superseding capitalism, Marxists fall into at least two distinct groups: those who maintain that in Marxian terms socialism must be identified with a system of self-managed firms and those who equate socialism with a state-planned command economy.

Read more HERE.

NASA says Canadian prairies in "hot spot" of ecological change

2012-01-12T16:58:00.006-06:00

Prairie grasslands and boreal regions to shift north by 2100

By Mychaylo Prystupa
CBC News
Jan 12, 2012

Praying for ecosocialism

A new NASA study predicts massive ecological changes for Canada's Prairies and boreal regions by the year 2100.

Those areas are in "hot spots" highly vulnerable to massive environmental changes this century due to global warming, the study states.

Much of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba is predicted to see major shifts northward of plant and animal species.

"By about 2100, the climate change projections that we have today would suggest that there would be pressure on that grassland so prevalent in [the Canadian Prairies] to move further northward — and at the expense of the forest moving further northward as well," said NASA climate scientist Duane Walliser, who spoke with CBC News from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Walliser said that all across the globe, whole ecological zones such as deserts and tundra will be on the move because of "unprecedented" warming at a pace faster than at any time in 10,000 years.

But Western Canada will be among the areas hardest hit.

Researchers said the areas are vulnerable because they have wide transition zones where grasslands meet boreal regions.

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'It is much easier for plants and animals to migrate or adapt to this level of climatic change over 10,000 years than it is over 100 years.'—Jon Bergengren, global ecologist
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"So anywhere in Canada where you are currently at what's called an 'ecotone,' or the transition zone between the prairie plant communities and the boreal forest plant communities, that's where the greatest change will be observed," said NASA collaborator, Jon Bergengren, a global ecologist and earth systems scientist.

The Saskatchewan Research Council is reaching similar conclusions.

One of its scientists, Jeff Thorpe, published a report last May suggesting the Prairies will see fewer trees, a loss in wetlands, and an invasion of species dependent on open grassland.

"Some of the grasslands species that we don't have yet, they're down in the United States, we expect them to shift northward into Canada," said Thorpe from Saskatoon Wednesday.

Some wildlife will not survive

The NASA study says 37 per cent of Earth's land surface will transform from one major ecosystem zone, or biome, into another, while 49 per cent of land surfaces will see at least some changes in plant species.

Bergengren said some wildlife will not survive these transformations.

“Obviously, it is much easier for plants and animals to migrate or adapt to this level of climatic change over 10,000 years than it is over 100 years,” he said.

The NASA model used a global temperature increase of two to four degrees this century, as predicted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The confines of compromise: Does the labour movement encourage resistance, or contain it?

2012-01-12T15:36:00.001-06:00

By Dave Bleakney
Briarpatch magazine
November 1, 2011

Canada Post is a public sector success story. As a steadily profitable state-owned enterprise, it provides postal service to communities across the country as well as roughly 54,000 jobs with mostly decent wages and benefits for workers. Its profits over the past 15 years have totalled almost $2 billion. Yet Canada Post, with the support of its friends in Parliament, proceeded this year to eviscerate the wages, benefits and pensions of postal workers, with changes amounting to an 18 per cent wage reduction for new hires, reduced job guarantees and weaker sick leave provisions, to name a few.

After two weeks of rotating strikes by postal workers in June, Canada Post locked out its workers and suspended mail delivery countrywide, prompting the federal government to introduce back-to-work legislation. Despite assurances by the labour minister that an experienced person with a labour relations background would be appointed to arbitrate, a retired judge with no known experience in the field was chosen. Questions to the minister about his experience have gone unanswered.

After hours of NDP filibustering, wages and other terms of the employment contract were imposed by an act of Parliament. While some locals passed resolutions to defy the legislation, in the end this was not the option postal workers chose. Governments have become clever, ensuring that defiance will no longer mean jail time (and there is no shortage of workers willing to defy under those conditions) but rather economic terror in the form of massive daily fines ranging from $1,000 per day for rank and file members to $100,000 per day for the union.

This downward spiral of workplace austerity and declining bargaining power is not limited to postal workers. Similar neoliberal austerity programs are being implemented with ideological fervour across Canada in response to the failures of global capitalism. The rights of workers to resist these measures by collective bargaining, or through tactics such as the strike, are under sustained attack. Collective bargaining has increasingly become a hollow shell, a theatre, a staged moment in which the rights of workers steadily deteriorate. This has placed trade unions in a reactive and survivalist mode of operating. Whether intentionally or otherwise, some have become comfortable with this mode of operation.

Postal workers (and most workers, for that matter) are in a bind. The rules have changed, but have we as a labour movement? For 65 years, the Rand formula has provided union structures and bureaucracies with a steady flow of revenue and recognition. It has also brought a kind of labour peace for bosses in which a narrow window of collective bargaining power for workers is permitted in return for management control of the work process. The notion of downing tools to settle a workplace dispute in the moment is mostly gone. Rank-and-file members no longer look to each other to deal with workplace harassment, but rather to legal advocates and meetings in offices far away from the source of the problem.

These rules were put in place not to benefit workers, but to confine and manage dissent and resistance. But now, even this process has been chipped away at so as to become almost meaningless. Perhaps it is time for us to revisit that post-war arrangement, just as bosses and politicians have. There are tough, and perhaps unpopular, questions that we must confront, and choices that we, as a movement, must make.

What lessons can be learned from the 2011 postal strike-turned-lockout in evaluating where we are as a movement?

A periodic opening

For workers, a strike is a traumatic affair. It’s also something of a roller-coaster ride. On the one hand, there are beautiful moments of community, defiance and celebration. But the bills remain, as do a host of other economic pressures.

Rank-and-file workers are at their most active when on strike. Those who never go to union meetings are hungry for more information. Members read bulletins, ask questions, show up on picket lines and engage in discussions. They demonstrate, and even join occupations.

Unions seem to miss this point, and continue to position themselves in the traditional, and largely outdated, striker-scab framework. While workers are on the lookout for non-existent scabs (now called “replacement workers” in some labour circles), how might these periodic and emotional openings be used to increase member participation, analysis and militancy? What space is available for discussion among membership during this crucial time? Isn’t what happens after the strike equally or more important as what happened before and during the strike?

Strikes provide us with rare opportunities to build new models and more empowering practices in which people are meaningfully engaged, and where the labour movement can move beyond reproducing its defensive practices and its position as a victim of neoliberalism. The strike is not an end that we work toward, but another beginning. Harvesting the rare collective empowerment of such moments has to be a priority. What discussions can happen with rank-and-file members after the strike that do not limit us to placing our hopes in the judicial and parliamentary process?

Directly following the end of a strike there is a window of opportunity to hold these deeper and more critical discussions, to talk about the trauma, the uncertainty, the high moments and, most importantly, how we move forward. If we are to exercise our collective power over the long haul, we must ask tougher questions of ourselves and our practices while creating new spaces of engagement.

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) developed a discussion module for rank-and-file members for this purpose. Only two locals out of more than 200 tried to use it. Why would they? Our practice and history has been mostly to react. Once the terms of back-to-work legislation or a negotiated settlement have been declared, we go back to work, file grievances, complain, and wait until the next big fight. And so the cycle continues.

Rather than meaningfully evaluating where we are at as a movement, we become victims, complaining again and again about what they are doing to us. Being a victim is very righteous; it absolves us of any responsibility and reduces the debate to one of bad guys and good guys. But does our self-victimization and our faith in parliamentary and judicial processes not ultimately serve to reproduce our own obedience? How can we act as proactive agents, defining and articulating our own demands, strategies and tactics, rather than retreating to reactive and survivalist politics?

From isolated victims to collective actors

What might have happened if the modules designed by CUPW were used to provide space for these discussions to take place? And what might happen to the broader labour movement should our stifling structures and practices open up? Experiences in both Winnipeg and Edmonton indicate that when the calls were made, even at the last minute, postal workers showed up. In Winnipeg I attended a series of discussions where over 100 rank-and-file workers, some with less than one day’s notice, showed up for assemblies. Many had never been to a union meeting. They were caught up in the emotion of the moment, which was not about facts and details or talking heads but about their experiences, critiques and questions. It was a space for them to talk, and not just listen, to a union leader.

Spaces such as these exist outside the domain of the local membership meeting and its hierarchical processes, expressions of power and internal bickering. Members of the union – the critical and the not-so-critical, including those who feel out of the loop, angry, or fearful about union meetings – can come together in a circle as a class of equals, where every word matters and differences of opinion are not silenced. These moments for open discussion are too few, but critical if we are going to grow a movement capable of fighting back.

In Edmonton, several hundred members attended a mass session in which they forced a resolution from the floor calling for defiance of back-to-work legislation through a general strike, and refusal to submit to the forced arbitration process. In other words, postal workers were willing to accept fines to raise the offensive. This is not insignificant. How could traditional labour serve to accelerate resistance and fearlessness such as this, rather than managing or avoiding it? Or do we believe the status quo actually works for us?

And what might have happened had community supporters – those who showed so much support and solidarity to postal workers – also been invited to these sessions? How could these moments have been used to broaden our base of support, and to support others in the community?

In some locals, members did not just remain on the picket lines but went door to door. They asked people to put up signs of support. Halifax was awash in CUPW support signs in windows and on lawns. Even mailboxes were decorated with public messages of support. It happened because union members used this moment to make direct contact with people in small businesses and communities. They chose not to strike in isolation from the larger community. They realized that face-to-face engagement can undo much of what the corporate media and ingrained myths deny us.

According to sociologist Heidi Rimke, “the left appears unable to understand the workings of power; it is a force relation rather than something that can be possessed or assigned, such as social status or class position. Power is not an object or something one holds, but something one does. Exercising individual and collective agency expresses power in multiple forms. The social relations of community are not based on sitting inside homes in physical isolation from one another, but rather talking to one another on the streets and anywhere that provides an opportunity to interact face-to-face.”

At times such as strikes, the need for support and solidarity from the community is clear. But what are we doing to foster these relationships in between moments of crisis? And what is the labour movement, in turn, doing to support the communities that we are all part of?

Why do we not have a labour movement that stands with G20 prisoners, rounded up and brutalized in what has now become a rote activity of police repression at summits everywhere? Why do we celebrate the culture of Aboriginal peoples, the drumming and the ceremonies, but not their militant struggles? And when we talk of “green jobs,” what are we saying to small farmers around the world who see our environmental problem as a systemic destruction that cannot be recovered through greenwashing, or by maintaining economic hegemony in rich countries? Why are we fearful of having such discussions?

Rather than permitting ourselves to be categorized and divided, maybe it’s time for us to re-examine the notion of sectoral bargaining in isolation from other unions, and from non-unionized workers. Why should unions act as sectors rather than as a class? Union local meetings are an important place to do union business, but this should not be our only venue. What would alternative forms of organizing, such as workplace and community assemblies, look like?

We have seen too many rallies and demonstrations through the years where the protesters and passers-by are in two separate worlds – the general public looking apathetic to protesters and protesters looking like some kind of cult to the passing public. Engagement in these moments is critical, something postal workers know very well. When we fight, we must fight for the community too. We can’t allow these to be separate or unrelated struggles.

With heads up high

At the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) convention in May 2011, there were dismally few hours of debate, accompanied by an uncomfortable air of conformity, fear, theatre, spectacle and self-censorship in the room. Incidentally, this was, according to CLC president Ken Georgetti, “one of the best CLC conventions ever.” Contrary to the staged assemblies of labour aristocracy as the vanguard of worker aspirations, 21st-century unionism will require something more organic, where communities and people will no longer be organized in segregated units and sectors in competition and isolation. It will refuse to reproduce the same systems of division and denial that CEOs use to rob us. It will no longer pretend things can remain as they have been, or that a social democratic government could resolve our problems in a global economy.

In this economic roller coaster – one that only goes down for most of us – we must ask ourselves the question: do we wish to live in a society where we are jackals picking over the scraps? Or can our reactive culture, expectations and rhetoric be transformed into something more permanent and reflective of a larger movement? And can all of us, as national president Denis Lemelin said of CUPW members, “hold our heads up high”?

Dave Bleakney is a member of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the national union representative for education (Anglophone). On matters of anti-capitalism, the dude abides.

Honduras: "Libertarians" Model Cities and the Resurrection of William Walker

2012-01-12T06:25:00.003-06:00

OFRANEH

January 4, 2012

This past December 10th, the British magazine, "The Economist" published an article that makes a reference to a memorandum of understanding between the government of Honduras and two United States firms regarding the construction of Model Cities (Charter Cities) in Honduran territory, without notifying the Honduran people up to now of the planned transactions.

The attitude assumed by the current regime to maintain “its business” with utmost secrecy , is part of the disdain held by the power elite of the country toward its subjects, a situation that worsened with the judicial-military coup in 2009 and the subsequent failed state that prevails in Honduras.

The companies Future Cities Development Corporation, known before as Seasteading Institute and Free Cities Group, will apparently be constructing model cities framed by “libertarian” ideology.

The Future Cities Development Corporation, was founded by Patri Friedman, grandson of economist Milton Friedman, known in Latin America as the father of neoliberalism, the economic theory associated with the impoverishment of the majority of the continent’s population and with authoritarian regimes that have offered themselves to boost the accelerated enrichment of the power elite.

Patri Friedman has shown his repudiation for democracy as a form of government in an article published by the extreme-right Cato Institute and sees a great potential in Model Cities under the libertarian regime that he hopes or plans to build in the failed state called Honduras.

Paul Thiel (founder of Paypal), another person involved in the construction of libertarian cities in Honduras, declared in an article written for Cato Unbound, that democracy and liberty are not compatible.

After the coup d’état in 2009, Honduras has suffered at the hands of the current National Congress—composed by a large majority of the same actors that participated in the downfall of democracy—the approval of a series of neoliberal-style laws that completely annihilated the meager social gains obtained in the 20th century. Concepts such as national sovereignty, food security, and human rights have been converted into obsolete terms by Honduran “legislators.”

In fact, the political and social deterioration occurring in this country, converts it into a paradise for economic adventurers and reactionary politicians, whose ideologies are based in individualism and economic Darwinism.

From the American Phalange of the Immortals to the Banana Coast

In the mid-19th century, filibuster William Walker invaded Central America with a band of self-declared “American Phalange of the Immortals,” who succeeded in taking over Nicaragua, where Walker acted as president from 1856-57. In his last incursion he was captured by the British who handed him over to Honduran authorities, who proceeded to execute him with a firing squad in the city of Trujillo in 1860. A New York Times editorial the same year mentions that the filibuster stated that other Walkers would rise from his blood.

Half a century later, Sam Zemurray financed an invasion and a coup d’état in Honduras (1911), perpetrated by Manuel Bonilla, who landed in the country coincidentally in the place where Walker was shot. From this point on, the Banana Republic was reaffirmed, a term coined by the writer, O’Henry, seven years before the felony committed by Bonilla.

Days before the coup d’état, the Canadian investor known as the “porn king,” began a series of illegal land purchases in the Bay of Trujillo, designated to create a tourist empire in an enclave known as the Banana Coast. During the mandate of Big Boss satrap Roberto Micheletti, the porn king consolidated the appropriation of a Garifuna community on the Rio Negro located in the city of Trujillo, demolishing a large part of the community under the pretext of constructing a dock for the Panamex cruise ship.

The Failed State and the Libertarian’s Paradise

According to the Washington Post, Honduras has become the most dangerous country on the planet, in addition to being the epicenter of drug trafficking between South America and the United States. The collapse of institutional pillars such as the Ministry of Security and the judicial apparatus, have converted the country into a true failed state.

It seems that Peter Thiel and his follower Patri Friedman, want to take advantage of the existing failed state of Honduras to recreate the pages of the novel Atlas Shrugged, in which the Russian-American author Ayn Rand, idol of libertarians, creates a science fiction novel that makes clear her philosophy that writer Gore Vidal described as “almost perfect in her immorality.”

Libertarians have converted themselves into a synonym of factions of enormous economic power in the United States that reject the supposed exaggerated intervention of the State, exalting the liberty of individuals over supposed government coercion. Although some anarchists of the 19th century were self-defined libertarians, the current movement in the United States finds itself linked with ultra-right groups like the Tea Party, Cato Institute and the Free State Project, among others.

It just so happens that the first week of December, the National Congress selected the Board of Notables in charge of Model Cities: George Akerlof, Ong Boon Hwee, Harry Strachan, Nancy Birdsall, and of course the artifice of the neo-colonial maneuver Paul Romer. But unfortunately in Honduras the media has opted for a discreet silence on the matter, while its news is dedicated to distill the blood that runs and impunity that rules in the country.

It is to be expected that the libertarian dignitaries and their millions of dollars will be successful in imposing their conditions on the Congress of a failed state. There is nothing strange that in imitating the ideas of the libertarian bible, Atlas Shrugged, they implement the “death ray” a sophisticated torture weapon, from the delirious book, which will probably be used against the undesirable hordes that try to cross the electrified fences of the paradise in the middle of the hell that they have imposed on us.

Written by OFRANEH (Organizacion Fraternal Negra Hondureña) and posted on January 4, 2012. Translated into English by the Witness for Peace Nicaragua Team. For the original Spanish version please visit OFRANEH's blog.

Progressive renaissance and the newest left

2012-01-12T05:57:00.002-06:00

By Thomas Ponniah
Rabble.ca
January 11, 2012

When a great general was once asked to detail his military strategy, he replied, "I have no strategy." In other words, he knew all the strategies, but also knew that his choice of tactics depended on the situation. Progressives have much to learn from this insight. It is more important to have multiple options for each context than to have a fixed commandment for every state of affairs. The goal in any struggle is to maintain a position of maximum flexibility. The general understood that freedom means being in a position where one can advance along any line of the compass -- north, south, east or west -- to achieve one's objectives.

The progressive aptitude for flexibility has expanded substantially over the past generation. The most influential event of our era was not 9/11 -- the attack on the Twin Towers -- but 11/9: November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall was torn down. The latter event marked not only the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union but the breakdown of the dominant left statist projects of the postwar period: the dismantling of the welfare state in the First World, the dissolution of the USSR in the Second World, and the disillusionment with national liberation governments in the Third World. The weakness, failures and monolithic thinking of these vanguardist projects opened the door for a triumphalist, neoliberal globalization.

As is often the case in history, however, the consequences of an event are never understood in its genesis: unintended effects regularly turn victory into failure and calamity into possibility. The last two "post-communist" decades have seen progressives imagine, innovate and produce a diversity of alternatives such as the cultural success of feminism, the participatory budget process of Porto Alegre, the autonomous organizing of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the open-space method of the World Social Forum process, the powerful anti-poverty efforts by leftist Latin American governments and, most recently, the expressivist tactics of the Occupy movement.

The participants in these diverse experimental processes may not necessarily align together. In fact they may even view each other with a curious antipathy. The philosopher Alain de Botton in his Essays in Love has noted the analogy between revolutionaries and romantics. Progressives often have the same coercive impatience as lovers when it comes to dealing with the passionate views of others. This mutual chagrin is evident in the occasionally hostile debates that we see between statists and autonomists, reformers and radicals, and secularists and cultural pluralists.

Despite their variety and reciprocal frustration, however, today's progressive social and political movements do share a common theme: they all resist the economic, cultural and political inequalities that have been amplified by neoliberalism. This diversity of movements actually represents a renaissance on the left -- an explosion of creativity -- that will undoubtedly demonstrate its effects over the next generation. The key principle that the progressives of the age should retain is that that while romantic monogamy may be far-sighted, political monogamy is not. The innovation of the newest left will lie not in any one given approach but instead in its evolving ability to access multiple democratic strategies when confronting the unexpected.

Thomas Ponniah is a professor in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at George Brown College and an affiliate of Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

A race to the bottom

2012-01-12T05:45:00.001-06:00

By Anne Jarvis
The Windsor Star
January 11, 2012

If you worked for a gigantic and extremely profitable company, and that company, in the middle of negotiating a new contract with your union, abruptly and unilaterally took an axe to your wages, would you object?

Of course you would.

That's what Caterpillar Inc., which owns Electro-Motive Canada in London, did. Electro-Motive tabled its final offer. The Canadian Auto Workers rejected it. The company locked out the workers. On New Year's Day. Happy New Year.

The final offer: slashing wages by 55 per cent. The majority of the 465 workers, who manufacture locomotives, were making $34 an hour.

That would plummet to $16.50 an hour. Could you support your family on $16.50 an hour? You're darn right it would be hard.

And it doesn't stop there. Cost-of-living adjustments were eliminated. Retirement benefits were eliminated.

Health care benefits and pensions were cut.

It's so preposterous that the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune and even the Australian Herald have all carried the story. By the way, these workers' wages were frozen under the last two contracts. They haven't had a raise in six years. They took concessions in vacation and health care then, too.

Caterpillar, which acquired Electro-Motive in 2010, is the biggest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment in the world. It raked in record sales and profits in the third quarter - profit of $1.14 billion, a 44 per cent increase in quarterly profit. Backlogged orders were at a record high. It hired 4,800 people. And it predicted sales will grow up to 20 per cent in 2012.

"We're having a great year in 2011, and 2012 is shaping up to be better," Reuters news service quoted CEO Douglas Oberhelman.

Oberhelman made $10.6 million in 2010, according to Forbes.

Yet my colleague, Chris Vander Doelen, calls the CAW's reaction to Electro-Motive and to Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne's demand in November for concessions (Marchionne repeated this week that labour costs in Canada must fall to match those in the U.S.) "hard-line." He calls it "playing chicken" and "sabre-rattling," an "allor-nothing stance."

It is all those things - by the company.

This company has demonstrated monstrous disdain for workers.

Essex MP Jeff Watson joined the lecture against the union, calling it's reaction "insane."

Could Watson support his five children on $16.50 an hour? Fortunately for him, he doesn't have to worry. As an MP, he makes at least $157,000 a year. And when he's no longer an MP, he'll get one of the most lavish pensions in the country, indexed to inflation, paid for by taxpayers, including the very workers he thinks should shut up and accept a rich corporation slashing their pay in half.

Watson cites the European economy on the brink, the stilted and fragile recovery in the U.S. and weak consumer confidence.

There's also this: Employers have all the cards now. Membership in private sector unions has declined, high unemployment continues, and the federal government ordered or threatened to order back to work employees at Air Canada and Canada Post last year. With advantages like these, employers like Electro-Motive are going for the jugular. Like Marchionne, Caterpillar says wages and benefits at its U.S. plants are lower. This is starting to look like a race to the bottom. And with 9.6 per cent unemployment in London, who can afford to fight?

"It's not like we haven't bargained responsibly," Tim Carrie, president of CAW Local 27, which represents the workers, said in an interview. "We recognize there are difficult economic conditions. We're not living in a box."

Workers at Electro-Motive just want to hang on to what they've got, he said. Is that so outrageous?

What's outrageous is that Prime Minister Stephen Harper went to the plant in 2008 to announce $5 million in tax breaks for companies that buy Electro-Motive's locomotives and a $1-billion tax break on investment in industry. Low taxes are the best way to ensure jobs in Canada, the government says. Workers remember him shaking their hands and telling them they had a great future.

In 2010, when U.S.-based Caterpillar bought Electro-Motive, the government vetted and approved the acquisition.

Eighteen months later, it doesn't look like Caterpillar is much interested in keeping Electro-Motive here. And where is the government now? That's a good question.

The government doesn't intervene in the actions of private companies, federal officials have told the media. Except it did, last year, in the case of Air Canada, a private company.

Predator Drones Quietly Patrol Canada's Southern Border

2012-01-12T04:50:00.001-06:00

By John W. Warnock
Act Up In Sask
10 January 2012

Last week the U.S. government announced that the ninth Predator Drone will be deployed protecting the borders of the United States against the infiltration of terrorists, criminals, drug traffickers and economic refugees. Six of these unmanned attack aircraft are based in Arizona and Texas and operate along the border with Mexico. The other three operate along the northern border, between Minneapolis and Seattle. They are stationed at the Grand Forks, ND U.S. Air Force base. When the program of U.S. government monitoring the “undefended border” began it had the full support of the Harper government.

The Predator drones operate high in the sky and cannot be seen or heard from the ground. They are active far from the bases where they are stationed and directed. They can monitor individuals well across the border into Canada. The U.S. government insists that so far they have not been armed with missiles. President Obama’s favourite weapon.

President Barack Obama’s first act as President was to authorize the regular use of U.S. Predator drones within the borders of Pakistan. Attacks in that country rose from special cases of one or two a year to 33 in 2008, 53 in 2009, and 118 in 2010. Most recently, President Obama directly ordered the CIA to use a missile from a Predator drone to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, who was in Yemen supporting radical Muslims who oppose U.S. military presence in the Middle East.

In the Iraq and Afghan wars, the U.S. government has widely used the drones to launch missile attacks on individuals and groups who opposed the U.S. war. Often these were missile attacks on the houses where the suspects were assumed to be living. The U.S. government and its NATO allies have played down the deaths of innocent civilians. However, at the local level protest demonstrations have been the norm.

Drone attacks have been widely used in the war inside the borders of Afghanistan. In one case a brother of President Hamid Karzai was killed by a U.S. drone missile attack. The Afghan government has demanded that these attacks cease, but they have not.

In Pakistan the Human Rights Commission conducted an on-the-ground investigation of drone attacks in 2010. They investigated 111 attacks which resulted in the reported deaths of 957 civilians. The Conflict Monitoring Centre in Islamabad, which follows local news reports of drone attacks, reported 134 strikes in 2010 which resulted in over 900 civilians killed. The U.S. government denies these claims and insists that virtually no civilians were killed. With the development of new smaller drones and missiles, the Obama administration argues that they have given up the practice of launching attacks on the homes of suspects.

Support for the surveillance state

Last December it was reported that a sheriff in North Dakota called on the U.S. Air Force to use one of the Predator drones to help in the arrest of an anti-government farm family. Three of a neighbour’s cows and their calves wandered onto the Brossart’s farm, and they refused to return them. The local sheriff and his deputies were hesitant to move on to the farm as the Brossarts were known to be heavily armed.

The drones were used to follow the movements of the members of the Brossart family during the resulting 16-hour standoff. Eventually the Brossarts put down their weapons and surrendered to the sheriff without firing a shot. But this event has now been cited as the precedent for the use of the drones within the United States in support of local police authority in actions against its own citizens.

For more information on the use of drones for the assassination of “suspects” see Voices for Creative Non Violence, which leads the movement in the United States to have the weapon system banned. [http://vcnv.org]

Hungary's government lurches further to the right

2012-01-11T01:41:00.001-06:00

By Emile Schepers
People's World
January 9 2012

Members of Hungary's Jobbik party

The right-wing populist government of Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, of the Fidesz Party, has been taking measures that many fear will not only move this country of 10 million people further to the right, but will also give the state authoritarian powers that will let it ride roughshod over all opposition.

Fidesz won a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Hungarian parliament in 2010. The previously governing Socialist Party had suffered a massive loss of public prestige after it came out that former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsanyi had lied to the public about the country's economic situation. The 2010 election also saw the rise of an extreme right-wing party, Jobbik, which has worked to legitimize various reactionary ideological trends that have a long history in Hungary, including anti-Semitism and anti Ziganism (prejudice against Roma, or Gypsies), as well as belligerent nationalism.

Hungarian right-wing nationalism has its roots in the period between the two world wars.

In the First World War, Hungary was part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, with a large amount of internal autonomy, though the emperor of Austria was also the king of Hungary.

After the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918, large pieces of Hungary's land and population were divided up among its neighbors, Romania and two new states that came out of the war, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The old regime in Hungary, which was dominated by landholding aristocrats and urban bankers and industrialists, was swept from power. But first a liberal regime (under Mihaly Karolyi) and then a short-lived communist one (under Bela Kun) were unable to solve the country's internal problems or successfully resist pressure from the victorious Entente powers, especially Romania and France.

As a result, not only did Hungary lose territory in the Trianon Treaty of 1919, but as many as a third of the Magyars, or ethnic Hungarians, ended up outside Hungary's borders. There was a special resentment of the fact that Transylvania, formerly an autonomous principality with a large Magyar population, went to Romania.

In 1919, reactionary forces grouped around Admiral Miklos Horthy de Nagybanya swept into power, displacing Bela Kun's communist-led government. Their project of repressing communists, socialists and trade unionists inspired the promotion of a right-wing nationalist ideology that could justify such measures. The right-wing slogan "nem, nem soha" ("no, no never"), which referred to the loss of Hungarian territory and people, dates from this time.

Hungary once more defined itself as a monarchy, with Admiral Horthy as "regent" in place of an absent King Karl, who was kept out of the country by force. A series of governments dominated by conservative aristocrats made sure that communists and socialists were repressed, trade unions limited in their scope, and nationalist ideology taught in the schools. At the same time, fascist groups challenged the regime's grip on power with an even more right-wing ideology increasingly attuned with those of Mussolini and Hitler. This, and the promise of getting back lands lost in the Trianon Treaty, eventually brought Hungary into World War II on the Axis side.

The war was an unmitigated disaster for Hungary. Admiral Horthy made belated efforts to disengage a defeated Hungary from its alliance with Germany and make peace with the Western allies and the USSR. This led to a Nazi-sponsored coup, the arrest by Germany of Horthy and members of his government, and even more brutality and bloodshed, as Jews were hunted down. Much of Hungary, including the streets of Budapest, became a gruesome battleground during the last desperate days of the war.

In 1948, a socialist government came to power, supported by the USSR. In 1956, there was an anti-communist rebellion, which was put down. Hungary remained socialist from 1948 until the collapse of the Soviet and Eastern European socialist systems at the beginning of the 1990s.

During the socialist period and for a while thereafter, the right-wing nationalist ideology epitomized by the "nem, nem soha" slogan was not allowed to flourish. But it is now revived full force. Orban's government has revived the idea that Hungary has a special right and responsibility to speak out in representation of the Magyar minorities in neighboring countries, a stance that has alarmed the governments of Slovakia, Romania and Serbia.

Prime Minister Orban and the Fidesz party have taken advantage of the supermajority they gained in the April 2010 election to ram through drastic modifications of the constitution.

They have withdrawn government recognition from a number of religious communities, including Muslims, Buddhists and Methodists. They have managed to criminalize the Communist Party (Hungarian Communist Workers Party) and its slogans and symbols, officially and legally equating it with fascism, and making possible the prosecution of former members of the socialist regime. They have reduced the power of labor unions, and worked to bring the press and cultural institutions under their political control so as to promote their right-wing, nationalist-populist ideology. On the other hand, Orban has so far held back from imposing the austerity measures being implemented in Portugal, Greece and Spain, and, to the alarm of the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, made an assault on the autonomy of the Hungarian central bank.

But Hungary is in bad shape economically. Both unemployment and the public (equivalent to the entire Gross Domestic Product) and private debt are sky high. Although it is not a member of the Euro currency zone (while it is a member of the European Union and NATO), Hungary has been heavily dependent for credit on the selfsame European Union banks that are currently threatened by the crises in the poorer Western European countries, the so-called "PIIGS" (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain).

And two weeks ago, the Fitch bond rating agency followed Moody's and Standard and Poors in lowering Hungary's sovereign bonds to junk status, just as Orban's government was making a desperate plea for a bailout loan to the International Monetary Fund. It seems that Orban may back off his effort to bring the central bank under his control rather than endanger the proposed IMF bailout.

Orban's Fidesz Party government has suffered a massive loss of public support, and large-scale demonstrations against its policies are beginning to take place. However, it remains to be seen if it will respond to this by backing down from some of its right-wing positions, or if it will now move to play the fascist card in an even more forceful way, taking advantage of the disunity of the left.

Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America

2012-01-08T10:38:00.003-06:00

Verso Books
Order HERE.

The first book to explore the Occupy movement in depth, with reportage and analysis.

In the fall of 2011, a small protest camp in downtown Manhattan exploded into a global uprising, sparked in part by the violent overreactions of the police. An unofficial record of this movement, Occupy! combines adrenalin-fueled first-hand accounts of the early days and weeks of Occupy Wall Street with contentious debates and thoughtful reflections, featuring the editors and writers of the celebrated n+1, as well as some of the world’s leading radical thinkers, such as Slavoj Žižek, Angela Davis, and Rebecca Solnit.

The book conveys the intense excitement of those present at the birth of a counterculture, while providing the movement with a serious platform for debating goals, demands, and tactics. Articles address the history of the “horizontalist” structure at OWS; how to keep a live-in going when there is a giant mountain of laundry building up; how very rich the very rich have become; the messages and meaning of the “We are the 99%” tumblr website; occupations in Oakland, Boston, Atlanta, and elsewhere; what happens next; and much more.

A Temporary Suspension of Exile in Chile

2012-01-05T22:12:00.003-06:00

An Interview with Former MIR Militant Hugo Marchant

By Ramona Wadi
Upside Down World
Thursday, 05 January 2012 13:27

Hugo Marchant

Chile’s supreme court of appeals has temporarily suspended the exile sentence imposed upon an ex-militant of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR). Hugo Marchant was detained in 1973 for distributing leaflets containing anti-Pinochet propaganda and later became a member of the (MIR) while in exile. Marchant entered Chile clandestinely in 1980 as part of a guerilla group opposing Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Accused of involvement in the killing of Santiago General Carol Urzúa Ibáñez, Marchant and his family were arrested and tortured by Centro Nacional de Intelligencia (CNI) agents. Following nine years of imprisonment, Marchant’s sentence was commuted to exile during Patricio Aylwin’s presidency. Founded in 1965 by left-wing students, MIR quickly established support in Santiago, especially from working class neighborhoods. MIR supported Salvador Allende; however the group expected more radical social reforms. nevertheless, prior to the military coup, MIR began contacting junior officers within the army, urging them to support the civilian elected government. With Allende overthrown by Pinochet’s military dictatorship in 1973, MIR were targeted and thousands of members, including the leaders, were arrested and killed, with those surviving the clampdown fleeing from Chile.

Marchant's previous attempts to enter Chile were quickly repudiated by the Chilean authorities. Now nearing the end of his first exile sentence, Marchant’s renewed attempt to enter Chile brought about a legal triumph. Upon presenting his passport, Marchant found himself detained by the police and subsequently deported to Buenos Aires, where he awaited the final decision of Chile’s supreme court of appeals. Echoing Marchant’s adamant opinion that legalities were in his favour, the judiciary declared the temporary lifting of the exile, granting Marchant fifteen days, starting on December 29, 2011 at 9:30am, to visit Chile and be reunited with his family.

The appeal has garnered a lot of media attention as well as support from human rights and activists groups. It is estimated that between 1500 – 2000 MIR militants have been killed, exiled or disappeared by the Pinochet dictatorship. A few ex-militants remain exiled; their sentences will be nearing completion between 2012 and 2014.

The supreme court declared that Chile had transgressed the 1993-1994 American Convention of Human Rights (Article 22:5) and the Pact of Civil and Political Rights (Article 12:4) which specifically states that no one can be banished from national territory and no one can arbitrarily prevent anyone from re entering one’s own country.

Ramona Wadi: How did you become involved in MIR?

Hugo Marchant: I was a member of Frente de Estudiantes Revolucionarions (FER) during my years as a student at the military high school. FER was the students’ social front of (MIR). In 1977 I entered the party while in exile.

RW: What was your role within the movement?

HM: I was to enter Chile clandestinely in November 1980, as part of the Central Force in the area of logistics.

RW: At what point during Pinochet's dictatorship were you and your family arrested?

HM: On Tuesday September 7, 1980 at 13:45pm I was stopped by a score of Central Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI) agents in the San Pablo con Bandera province. My family was arrested by the same intelligence body in Serrano. The agents arrested my wife, Silvia Sepulveda Aedo, my daughter Javiera who was eight months old, and my son Pablo, aged 4. My son, Simon, was hidden by neighbors for three days in the attic of a neighbouring house. My wife held Javiera in her arms while Pablo played with a little car in a cell at the CNI headquarters. The memory of these moments – the interrogation and torture, is so horrendous I cannot bear to talk about it.

RW: How did your memory of Chile alter during the nine years in prison and the subsequent nineteen years exiled in Finland?

HM: The nine years of imprisonment and nineteen years of banishment, exile, have not alienated me from my country or the struggle for Chile. Through the press, the reading of several testimonies has allowed me to retain the reality. The cruelty of this enforced exile is the emotional upheaval. I cannot walk with my kids and my wife through the streets which witnessed our struggles. I have been unable to mourn at the graves of my fallen comrades in battle. I failed to attend my mother’s funeral. Exile has prevented me from standing with the Mapuche people who are under military occupation of their land by the government in power. I have also been unable to accompany the students in their struggles. And during each day which passes in exile, I know I am suffering a wrongful conviction since fighting injustice and oppression is a legitimate cause.

RW: Did the Valech Commission* report have any effect on your case?

HM: The Valech report notes the violation of human rights committed in Chile and supports our defense. However, a new trial never materialized for me.

RW: What was the response from the government with regard to your case?

HM: The government’s response was a resounding 'NO'. Not even the unanimous decision from the Commission of Human Rights in parliament, neither the authorisation allowing us time to file an appeal at the Appeals Court, were an impediment for the government to express its hatred for our history.

RW: Has your case created more awareness about the plight of exiled political prisoners in Chile?

HM: The strategy of attempting direct entry into Chile through the airport has been effective in demonstrating the injustice of exile. The laws of the state are in our favor, however the government reacted violently and expelled us. The publicity generated by the media garnered the attention of various social and political groups both nationally and internationally, effectively extending our campaign to terminate this exile. Social movements in Chile have expressed support in a concrete way for our cause. On an international level, a complaint is being filed with the Inter American Court of Human Rights since the state of Chile is violating international treaties to which it is supposed to adhere to.

RW: What do you think will influence the final decision of the appeal? The government or the judiciary?

HM: This is clear – a look at the history of political prisoners and judicial proceedings will show that the judiciary is the only way through which the political confrontation between the popular sectors in struggle and the state of domination or governance can be expressed. With our campaign, political facts have been installed in the political scene. Therefore if we continue accumulating the social and political support with our campaign, we will achieve a force that allows us to realize major actions. Meanwhile our people’s advances in pursuing the fight for human rights will change the legal results. At the international level it is important to perform specific tasks to raise awareness and opposition, such as sending letters to the Judiciary, the Ministry of Interior, The President of the Republic and repudiating manifest injustices such as banishment, exile and forced exile. Collection of signatures should be sent to Comite Fin Al Destierro Ahora – our committee which campaigns to end exile. Every initiative in favor of human rights, every stand against banishment, is a necessary initiative.

*The Valech Commission report is a record of abuses committed in Chile between 1973 - 1990, documenting over 38,000political prisoners - most of them tortured.

Ramona Wadi is a freelance writer living in Malta. Visit her blog here.

Caterpillar and Rio Tinto lockouts force unions into underdog fight against global capital

2012-01-05T21:45:00.002-06:00

By Fred Wilson
rabble.ca
January 5, 2012

In Alma, Quebec, and London, Ontario, workers are standing together on picket lines against the cold and winds of January. They have strong unions and solidarity to raise their spirits -- but these workers are underdogs against massive economic power and the ruthless force of global capital.

How it goes for them will shape economic outcomes for many other Canadians. But not just labour relations hang in the breach of these first labour battles of 2012. The reaction to these conflicts by Canadians will set a tone for the social and political climate well beyond this “Winter of Discontent.”

In both cases these fights are picked by the employer -- lockouts. Perhaps not so coincidentally, they throw down the same challenge to Canadian labour. They are each foreign owned global corporations with a history of confronting and breaking union power, and their lock outs are to force substantial concessions that will result in lower wages and lesser benefits.

Significantly, these two situations are also linked because each foreign owner recently purchased the Canadian operations and required approval from the Harper government that their acquisition was in the Canadian interest.

Needless to say, these 1260 locked out workers can expect no help from their government and are on their own against global finance capital, with only the help and solidarity they receive from other unions and their communities. They are the face of the 99 per cent in Canada this winter.

In Quebec, 800 members of United Steelworkers (Metallo) are locked out by Rio Tinto Alcan, the former Canadian aluminum company since 2007 owned by Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. Rio Tinto has assets valued at over $80 billion and recorded over $14 Billion in profits in 2010.

The principal issues at the Alma (Lac St. Jean, Saguenay) aluminum mill are wages, seniority and an employer demand to eliminate contract language restricting the sub contracting of jobs. Contracting so called “non core” jobs is a blunt instrument to reduce labour costs and weaken the local union.

In Ontario, 465 members of the Canadian Autoworkers are locked out by the world’s largest mining and machinery manufacturer, Caterpillar -- CAT. It is hugely profitable and in its worst recent year, 2010, still topped the Dow Jones Industrial index with a 53 per cent increase in its share values. Profits last year soared 44 per cent and sales this year are up 31 per cent.

Regardless, this company is demanding wage cuts of up to 50 per cent, eliminating the defined benefit pension plan and slashing other benefits. CAT is notorious for its treatment of workers. In the 1990s, the company used scabs to break two lengthy and bitter strikes by over 13,000 members of the UAW in the United States. In 2009, the company laid off 11,000 workers on one day.

The fingerprints of the Harper government are all over the London lockout. In 2008 the Conservative government gave the London diesel locomotive maker Electro-Motive millions in tax breaks and subsidies, and PM Harper used the occasion for a political photo-op. Then in 2010, the Conservatives approved the sale of the plant to CAT. CAW President Ken Lewenza has called for a review of the acquisition under the Investment Canada Act. The union believes that CAT purchased London to get technology and market share and has had a plan from the outset to move production to a new, non union plant in the U.S.

CAT is infamous for never blinking in labour disputes and using hard ball tactics to starve out workers. As Toronto Star columnist David Olive put it this week: “Even Wal-Mart Stores Inc. can’t match Caterpillar’s resolve in dictating terms to its workers. The firm has a practiced skill at ‘taking a strike’ for as long as required until workers straggle back to work across their own picket lines.”

Rio Tinto calculates that, like Vale Inco last year, it can also out last workers at just one of its global operations in a dispute that will only marginally affect its revenues. In addition it has announced that it will operate the aluminium mill at one third production. The USW claims that helicopters are already bringing scabs into the mill to backstop the local managers.

But lets not call these fights too early, because in both cases there will be a spirited fight back with a lot of solidarity from the community to the global labour movement.

At Rio Tinto, the USW is likely the most advanced of all trade unions in shaping global unionism and fighting across borders and continents. With the USW's strong global connections to unions representing Rio's aluminum smelter workers in France and the United Kingdom and the company's mine workers in the US and Australia, the global corporation will not be able to simply put Alma on ice until the workers give up.

Another factor in Quebec is that province’s labour laws prohibiting scabs -- laws that USW/Metallo already claim are already being violated. It took only a day for the company to secure injunctions moving picket lines back from its gates, but that is also a sign that it will not be easy to maintain production against a strong picket line and Quebec’s anti-scab law.

There are no laws to stop scabbing in Ontario, but CAT will not be able to send in scabs to run the locomotive plant with the same impunity that allowed them to prevail against their US union. The Ontario Federation of Labour has declared that there will be mass picket lines if scabs are brought to London.

There is also a political factor in these disputes that runs counter to the business narrative that money always wins and that the (labour) market decides. These lock outs present a “which side are you on” public relations problem for the Harper Conservatives when they invite global corporations like Rio Tinto and CAT into Canada. The NDP and the Canadian Labour Congress have already jumped on demands for change to the Investment Act to protect Canadians in foreign takeovers. If Canadians get angry over the manner in which these corporate interlopers treat workers and communities, pressure will grow for acceptable compromises.

That anger can add a dimension to these struggles that Rio Tinto and CAT are not expecting. Usually labour disputes are communicated through the narrow prisms of media conference statements and brief images of hooded workers huddled around oil can fires. But what if this time a lot of Canadians connect in a human and personal way to these workers on winter picket lines. What if Canadians who are uncertain of their own futures, pissed off at the entitlements of elites and corporations, and looking now for a way to continue the spirit of Occupy -- take inspiration from the courage and sacrifice of the CAW and USW picketers and join their fight. This Canadian winter could yet become a long one for global capital, and an early spring for the rest of us.

‘We have to learn about our own holocaust’

2012-01-05T21:35:00.001-06:00

U of R student fights for mandatory indigenous studies course

By Lauren Golosky
The Carillon
January 5, 2012

Fuelled by her own experience with racism as a young aboriginal woman growing up on the Prairies, University of Regina student Julianne Beaudin-Herney is working to put a stop to systemic racism, an “an invisible set of ideologies that have been built into Canada, such as patriarchy, ethnocentrism, euro-centrism.”

Her prescription is education.

In November, Beaudin-Herney began circulating a petition to make indigenous studies a mandatory course for all degrees, certificates, and diploma programs at the U of R. So far, the petition has collected over 400 signatures from students, faculty, and community members.

“The whole idea of [the petition] is not to bring up issues, but to address the things that have affected the relationship between non-aboriginals and aboriginals in the past to help bring forward awareness in the issues,” Beaudin-Herney said. “That way we can start working on the accumulated debt of this stigma we have towards each other, where we just kind of assume we don’t like each other just because we were raised this way.”

Beaudrin-Herney has not only the support of hundreds of students behind her but also the support of important figures around the university. Students’ associations, such as the University of Regina Students’ Union, Luther University Student Association, and the Indigenous Students’ Association, have pledged their support to this cause. Beaudin-Herney has also gained the support of external organizations, including the Turtle Island Performers Initiative, the production group of which she is the secretary.

But the support doesn’t end there.

“I’ve been talking to some people at the First Nations University and I’m going to make an appointment with some of the deans, because yes, Vianne Timmons is important in this, but it’s also moreso about the academic part of the house,” she explained. “I’m going to take a meeting with Rick Kleer, who is head of the arts department, and kind of converse with him. He’s already been talking to a few people I know and he is in favour of it, so that helps me out.”

But where there is support, there is criticism, and Beaudin-Herney has met with much of that too.

“People don’t want to pay for an extra class,” she explained. “They don’t want another core class. This doesn’t affect [them]. There’s no issue. Canada’s not racist. They just like believing that they’re not part of the issue.”

Beaudin-Herney takes the criticism mostly in stride, as she believes that most of it stems from societal ignorance. This ignorance comes partly from a serious lack of education on issues of both historical and contemporary standing.

“Think of things such as the Indian Act, the Doctrine of Discovery, [and] the White Paper from Trudeau, which is really important because Trudeau, in Canadian history class here, is emulated as a Canadian hero,” she explained. “But he created the White Paper, which clearly addressed to wipe out everything First Nations – to save the Indian, to save the savage. This wasn’t that long ago.

“We learn about the Holocaust and everything else, but we have to learn about our own holocaust; this is the same thing.”

By addressing the issues that surround First Nations people in Canada, other social problems may be addressed, such as problems of gender and religion. Beaudin-Herney asserted that indigenous studies is all-encompassing, and that by addressing aboriginal issues, issues such as violence against women will also be addressed.

“There are more people than just First Nations and non-aboriginals, and I know that there are other minorities out there,” she said. “I’m not ignoring them. If we tackle this issue, we can tackle them all.”

As an indigenous person herself, Beaudin-Herney has encountered racism, both direct and systemic. Her personal experiences with racism encouraged her desire for change and prompted her to create this initiative.

An encounter with an “Indian princess” Halloween costume made an impresson on Beaudin-Herney just before she authored the petition.

“I felt really objectified,” she said of seeing the costume. “…It’s just an objectifying image of Pocahontas, and being dehumanized and sexualized and romanticized.”

Beaudin-Herney believes that, in Canada, the appropriation and misrepresentation of First Nations culture as costumes – the “Indian princess” outfit, as well as the Internet-notorious “hipster headdress” – is based in cultural misunderstanding of the indigenous people of Canada. Beaudin-Herney wants U of R students to consider this issue. In a region whose aboriginal population is expected to skyrocket in the next 30 years, good communication between the majority and the growing First Nations community is essential.

“I believe that if you believe you’re Canadian, and if you’re going out into the workforce, then you should know how to communicate with your neighbour,” Beaudin-Herney said. “It is just understanding each other, being able to have a straightforward conversation … instead of tiptoeing around the things you can’t say.

“We want to have a harmonious relationship, but how are we able to do that when we’re just sweeping issues under the rug and we’re not getting anything done?”

Although she’s secure in her identity, many of her peers are not. Many of them lack her pride and are actually turned off by First Nations culture, a problem Beaudin-Herney refers to as “whitewashing.” She also believes that whitewashing is a symptom of systemic racism.

“[First Nations people] think that First Nations people are disgusting, therefore they don’t date First Nations people,” she said. “They marginalize First Nations people and it is terrible; it’s getting worse and worse.”

She has encountered this in some of her personal relationships, such as with her ex-boyfriend and even within her own family.

“I try to keep my family informed, and they have learned a lot from this,” she said proudly. “I whipped my brother in shape like nobody’s business.”

Beaudin-Herney is proud of her journey so far, as she’s educating others and herself. Beaudin-Herney, who is transferring her major from visual arts to indigenous studies, said she’s learned a lot about how the university operates and how to co-operate with administration to produce change. Despite any criticism, Beaudin-Herney’s experience with the initiative has proved to be a positive one for her.

“I’ve made a lot of new friends, and I’m more involved in my own community,” she said. “But I’m not forgetting about the friends I had before; I’m just balancing them both.”

But her work is not done. Expect to find Beaudin-Herney and her petition in the Riddell Centre sometime in the weeks to come. The petition may eventually make its way to all universities across Canada.

Will Shell Oil save Saskatchewan birds?

2012-01-04T23:12:00.008-06:00

NYC

Kill some birds here, save another one in Sask.

Greenwashing is a form of spin in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that a company's policies or products are environmentally friendly. But what do you call it when oil companies sponsor NGOs to save wildlife in one place while destroying it elsewhere? Dead-bird blood money? Oil-covered albatross money? Oil-washing?

Nature Saskatchewan is one of many environmental groups lined up to receive funding from Shell's "Fuelling Change" promotion. Shell's environmental record is dismal and it keeps adding up, most recently in the Nigerian oil spills.

Many must roll their eyes at just how easily mainstream environmentalism is compromised. Running hat in hand to oil money that is made through destroying ecosystems and causing catastrophic climate change is just not right or ethical. Surely it isn't to much to demand that we expect more from them and refuse to accept oil money.

No oil on this cute owl

Road Maps, Dead Ends, and the Search for Fresh Ground: How Can We Build the Socialist Movement in the 21st Century?

2012-01-04T20:09:00.002-06:00

By Dan DiMaggio
Cultural Logic, 2010

“It is easy for good to triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the Mafia.” – Kurt Vonnegut

For the past seven-plus years I have devoted much of my life to effort to build a socialist movement in the United States. As a member of one of the many tiny socialist groups on the U.S. left, I have organized dozens of anti-war, labor solidarity, immigrant rights, and other rallies and campaigns.

I have toured the country to speak at college campuses about socialism. I have set up numerous study groups and conferences and written and edited hundreds of articles for socialist publications. Most people might say, “Dan, you’re crazy if you think that socialism can be achieved in a country like the United States!” But despite the challenges, I hope to continue doing this for the next 50 or so years.

Lately, though, I’ve started to wonder just how the **** a viable socialist movement can actually be built in the U.S.

Read more HERE. (pdf)

Chile rising

2012-01-04T16:35:00.000-06:00

Fault Lines follows Chile's student protest movement and examines the underlying issues driving the anger.

Al Jazeera
January 3, 2012

Chilean students have taken over schools and city streets in the largest protests the country has seen in decades.

The students are demanding free education, and an end to the privatisation of their schools and universities. The free-market based approach to education was implemented by the military dictator Augusto Pinochet in his last days in power.

The protests are causing a political crisis for Sebastian Pinera, the country's president. But what are the underlying issues driving the anger?

As the demonstrations in Chile coincide with protests erupting globally, Fault Lines follows the Chilean student movement during their fight in a country plagued by economic inequality.

A Movement Without Demands?

2012-01-04T16:21:00.001-06:00

By Marco Deseriis and Jodi Dean
Possible Futures
January 3, 2012

The question of demands infused the initial weeks and months of Occupy Wall Street with the endless opening of desire. Nearly unbearable, the absence of demands concentrated interest, fear, expectation, and hope in the movement. What did they want? What could they want? Commentators have been nearly hysterical in their demand for demands: somebody has got to say what Occupy Wall Street wants! In part because of the excitement accumulating around the gap the movement opened up in the deadlocked US political scene—having done the impossible in creating a new political force it seemed as if the movement might even demand the impossible—many of those in and around Occupy Wall Street have also treated the absence of demands as a benefit, a strength. Commentators and protesters alike thus give the impression that the movement’s inability to agree upon demands and a shared political line is a conscious choice.

Anyone who is familiar with the internal dynamics of the movement knows that this is not the case. Even if some occupations have released lists of demands, the entire question is bitterly contested in New York, where only independent organizations such as labor unions have released their own demands. In this essay, we claim that far from being a strength, the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement. We also claim that demands should not be approached tactically but strategically, that is, they should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking. Accordingly, in the second part of this text, we argue that this strategic view should be grounded in a politics of the commons. Before addressing the politics of the commons, however, we dispel three common objections that are raised against demands during general assemblies, meetings, and conversations people have about the Occupy movement.

First, demands are said to be potentially divisive as they may alienate those who disagree with them and discourage newcomers from a variety of backgrounds from joining it. The argument is that insofar as Occupy aspires to be a movement that expresses the views and interests of the vast majority of the social body, every attempt to define it through a politics of demands entails a reduction of this potentiality. We call this the anti-representational objection. Second, it is argued that demands reduce the autonomy of the movement insofar as they endow an external agent—notably, the government or some other authority—with the task of solving problems the movement cannot solve for itself. This second objection is usually accompanied by the argument that the movement should focus on “autonomous solutions” rather than demands. We call this point of view the autonomist objection. The third common objection, which stems from the second, is that by meeting some demands the government would be able to divide and integrate (parts of) the movement into the existing political landscape, thus undermining the movement’s very reason for being. We call this the cooptation objection. Some counteract this third objection with the idea of releasing “impossible demands,” i.e. demands that cannot be met without igniting a radical transformation of the system. The very impossibility of the demands is said to demonstrate the rigidity of the system, its inability to encompass much needed change. Impossible demands thus cannot be co-opted. This proposition is in turn rebuffed by pragmatists who argue that if demands are to be issued they should focus on attainable objectives so as to show that the movement can achieve concrete and measurable changes.

Let us first consider the anti-representational objection. The objection begins from a basic and unspoken assumption about OWS, namely, that the movement is an organic and undifferentiated bloc comprised of people from all walks of life, and all racial, cultural, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. From this perspective, the slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” is seen not as a rhetorical strategy and political fiction but as the designation of an existing sociopolitical entity that would define itself in opposition to the 1 percent.

The anti-representational objection takes two primary forms. In its first, it insists that it is too early for demands. Because the movement is still young, it is argued, there has not been sufficient time for the 99 percent to reach consensus on the issues most important to it. Introducing demands now would hinder the organic unfolding of a collective discussion whereby the movement can articulate its own interests and desires. In the second (and more radical) form, the anti-representational objection argues that it is never the right time for demands. Demands always and necessarily activate a state apparatus apart from and over and against society. For example, anarchists and libertarians in the movement have repeatedly blocked proposals for introducing taxes on financial transactions and stronger oversight of the banking sector on the grounds that such proposals would expand the size of the government and the scope of its intervention.

Both the not now and not ever versions of the anti-representational objection obfuscate the fact that the 99 percent is not an actual social bloc. It is rather an assemblage of politically and economically divergent subjectivities. The refusal to be represented by demands is actually the refusal or inability to make an honest assessment of the social composition of the movement so as to develop a politics in which different forces and perspectives do not simply neutralize each other. Such inability is further obfuscated by emphases on democratic processes and participation. In order to avoid conflicts and pursue the myth of consensus, the movement produces within itself autonomously operating groups, committees, and caucuses. These groups are brought together through structures of mediation such as the General Assembly and the Spokes Council, which struggle to find a common ground amidst the groups members’ divergent political and economic positions. In other words, the emphasis on consensus, the refusal of demands, and the refusal of representation may well have served the purpose of inciting political desire and expanding the social base of the movement in its first phase. Nonetheless, it has installed in the movement a serious blindspot with regard to real divergences, a blindspot that has high costs in terms of political efficacy as serious proposals get watered down in order to meet with the agreement of those who reject their basic premises.

Nonetheless, there is a truth in the anti-representational objection: demands are divisive. They animate distinctions between “for” and “against” and “us” and “them.” This is the source of their mobilizing strength insofar as the expression of a demand provides not something that people can get behind but something that they must get behind if they are part of a movement or on the same side in struggle.

The autonomist objection is certainly better founded than the anti-representational objection. For autonomists (and anarchists), the practice of occupation and the very mode of existence of the movement are themselves prefigurative of a new, more democratic and more egalitarian world. The modes of action and interaction associated with occupation attempt to “be the change they want to see in the world.” Participants work to act in accordance with the ideals of mutuality and egalitarianism animating the movement against exploitation and inequality. The autonomist approach, then, emphasizes the creation of autonomous structures and new political organizations and practices. From this perspective, the problem with demands is not only that they provide life support to a dying system, but that they direct vital energies away from building new forms of collectivity ourselves. Demands focus the movement’s attention outside when it should be focused inside.

As with the anti-representational objection, the autonomist objection proceeds as if the multiplicity of political and economic interests of the 99 percent could immanently converge. Yet where the anti-representational objection ignores political differences, the autonomist objection overlooks economic ones. The practice of occupation that the autonomists imagine is full-time. It demands total commitment—living, breathing, and being the movement. The politics of remaking the world is anchored in supporting the occupation, primarily logistically. Many of the activities of logistical support, however, of necessity are not prefiguring at all but rather require interaction with dominant arrangements of power. Legal support involves lawyers, permits, injunctions. Someone has to pay for and someone has to make the tents and sleeping bags. Someone has to do the work of growing and preparing food. So the very practices of prefiguration in fact rely on infrastructures, goods, and services that are by and large provided, maintained, and distributed through capitalist means and relations. Additionally, many who would like to support the movement work to earn an income. With needs, debts, and responsibilities of their own, they want to participate in the movement yet not give up their jobs. Bluntly put, their economic position doesn’t give them the time that the practice of permanent occupation demands.

Both the anti-representational and the autonomist objections fail to recognize two key features of demands. First, we can make demands on ourselves. Second, demands are means not ends. Demands can be a means for achieving autonomous solutions. When demands are understood as placed on ourselves, the process of articulating demands becomes a process of subjectivation or will formation, that is, a process through which a common will is produced out of previously divergent positions. Rather than a liability to be denied or avoided, division becomes a strength, a way that the movement becomes powerful as our movement, the movement of us toward a common end.

If the truth in the anti-representational objection lies in its insight into the divisive nature of demands and the truth of the autonomist objection lies in its emphasis on making the world we want to live in, the truth of the co-optation objection is its recognition of antagonism and division. The problem is that the objection as it has been raised in the movement misconstrues the location of the division that matters. The co-optation objection presents the problem as between the state and the movement rather than as a division already within, indeed, constitutive of, the movement itself. Instead of grappling with the multiplicity of different positions in the actuality of their economic conditions, the fear of co-optation posits that the strength of the movement comes from a kind of unity of anger and dissatisfaction that will dissipate in the face of any particular success. Thus, the anti-co-optation argument initiates a discussion about particular proposals, playing out their pros and cons. Will the demand for a national jobs plan mean that the movement has been co-opted by the unions? Will a push for a constitutional amendment to eliminate corporate personhood fold the movement into the Democratic Party? And isn’t the support of partisan organizations such as MoveOn a symptom that this co-optation is already under way? In pursuing such a discussion, the co-optation objection obscures actual and potential connections among different proposals. It thus reinforces, in the attempt of preventing it, the very fragmentation that has long plagued the contemporary Left.

The problem that cuts through all the objections to demands is the movement’s inability to deal with antagonism. So the very question of demands brings to the fore the fact of division within the movement, a division that many—but not all—have wanted to deny.

Fortunately, the truths animating each of the objections suggest a way forward. In order to metamorphose from a protest movement into a revolutionary movement, Occupy will have to acknowledge division, build alternative practices and organizations, and assert a commonality. The set of ideas and practices built around the notion of the commons fulfills this function. The commons is a finite resource whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by the community of its users and producers. The finitude of the commons enables us to address social inequality and environmental limits to capitalist development in their dialectical unity.

Against those who claim private rights and particular interests, then the idea of the commons asserts the primacy of collectivity and the general interest—an idea found in Aristotle’s emphasis on the common good as well as in the work of contemporary theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, Iain Boal, Elinor Ostrom, Eben Moglen, Slavoj Žižek, and others.

A politics of the commons acknowledges division in that it begins from the shocking recognition that the commons does not exist. Destroyed and privatized by over two centuries of capitalist enclosure and “accumulation by dispossession,”1 what Elinor Ostrom calls “common-pool resources”2 have been reduced to tiny pockets of the world economy. To be sure, informal economies and communal practices such as worker-owned cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, community gardens, occupied and self-managed social centers and houses, free and open source software, are diffused at a molecular level everywhere. Yet the natural and social resources such practices mobilize are quantitatively irrelevant when compared to the wealth that is appropriated and exploited by capital. For instance, while cyber-enthusiasts such as Yochai Benkler point to the Internet as a vast repository of knowledge accessible to everyone and often managed in common by the Internet users themselves,3 these same technophiles overlook the fact that industrial production and agriculture rest by and large in private hands. Further, the apologists of the information commons often fail to recognize that such commons can be, and in fact is, functional to capitalist development as long as their fruits are productively reintegrated within the capitalist cycle. (One may think of the use of Linux in the public administrations of several developing countries and the adoption of open source software by corporations and military.)

If this is true, then the first question that stems from a radical politics of the commons is “how can truly anti-capitalist commons be created, recreated, and expanded”? It goes without saying that such a question points directly to the centrality of private property to capitalist accumulation—an issue that looms so large that most activists prefer to avoid it altogether. Demanding the creation and expansion of commons that are not subject to the imperative of accumulation and profit would make the divisions that are latent in the 99 percent apparent. Weary of the historical failure of actually existing socialism—and lacking large-scale models of alternative development—most Occupiers seem to content themselves with a neo-Keynesian politics that begins and often ends with demands for fiscal reform and government investment in strategic sectors such as infrastructure, green technologies, education, and health care. As we have noted above, however, these demands cannot be properly articulated as they meet the opposition of anarchists and autonomists who reject demands and focus instead on communal processes of self-valorization and self-organization. For the autonomists, the organizational forms of the movement are already functioning, in many ways, as institutions of the commons. Such a perspective fails to recognize that the vast majority of the resources managed by the movement are produced and distributed according to capitalist logic.

In this respect, while neo-Keynesian and socialist positions downplay and overlook existing processes of self-organization, the autonomist perspective cannot address the issue of the long-term sustainability of the movement insofar as it fails to recognize that the massive accumulation of wealth in the private sector is a major obstacle for an expansive politics of the commons. In our view, the autonomous organization of the movement and a politics based on radical demands have to go hand in hand if durable transformations are to be achieved. Once an expansive politics of the commons is adopted as the centerpiece of the movement’s strategy, demands become tactical devices in the service of such strategy rather than floating signifiers power can use to divide and conquer. From this perspective, every attempt the state makes to co-opt the movement through concessions enables an expansion of the communal management of common-pool resources—setting in motion institutional transformations whose political and symbolic power should not be underestimated.

Because a broad-based politics of the commons does not yet exist (even as the conditions are ripe for it) and will not emerge over-night, the tactical use of demands creates opportunities for testing and learning from experiments in managing the commons. For example, what if the environmental movement against hydraulic fracturing were to envision a national campaign to declare the ground waters a commons? This not only would prevent gas companies from putting at risk the lives of millions, but it would immediately empower water management boards elected by local communities with unprecedented powers. How would these governing bodies be constituted and how would they be run? Following this logic, we may also ask similar questions in regard to education, health care, and the production of energy. In each of these sectors, we may have to design solutions to manage these resources not as commodities but as goods whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by the community of their users and producers.

Such questions are only the beginning of a larger investigation that takes the commons not as a one-size-fit-all solution but as a mobile concept that can and should operate at different levels of granularity and on different plateaus. As a preliminary exploration, we suggest that a politics of the commons should operate on three levels: 1) the management of land and natural resources; 2) the production and reproduction of social life (including care work, housing, education, and labor); 3) the production and allocation of energy, knowledge, and information. Because these three layers interpenetrate one another, multiple conflicts arise as soon as one attempts to set priorities. Yet it is also clear that there are elements that cut transversally across these areas, namely, the understanding that the commons is a finite resource that can not only be extracted but needs to be actively reproduced. Such a notion, we believe, marks a decisive break with the capitalist system of production. This system has been thriving by constantly overcoming the limits to its own expansion—with the result of producing an unprecedented demographic explosion while bringing the life support systems to the brink of total collapse. The Occupy movement is an extraordinary opportunity to rethink this model. But in order to do so, the movement has to dispel the illusion that all proposals and visions are equivalent as long as they are democratically discussed, and begin to set priorities on the road to a truly transformative and visionary politics.

David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). ↩
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ↩
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). ↩

China’s coming crises

2012-01-04T16:03:00.001-06:00

Patrick Bond
Triple Crisis
January 4, 2012

With economic crashes and ecological calamities so prevalent in 2011, concluding with a do-little November G20 meeting in Cannes and a do-nothing December climate summit in Durban, January has opened with intense fear of eurozone deterioration. In this uncertain context loom the two most potent forces shaping the period ahead: China’s capital accumulation process and class struggle.

Because of the country’s uneven and combined development, within an extraordinary boom we can see the beginnings of a potentially world-scale bust, plus prodigious socioeconomic battles from below alongside brutal attacks on the environment such as coal-fired power and the Three Gorges Dam (notwithstanding exceptional ‘green economy’ advances).

Some observers of China are optimistic, but they’re mostly from the Bretton Woods Institutions. Six weeks ago, opined World Bank Chief Economist Justin Yifu Lin, “China can continue its dynamic economic growth for at least another 20 years,” and six months ago, the International Monetary Fund’s Executive Board Assessment “noted that China’s near-term growth prospects continue to be vigorous and are increasingly self-sustained, underpinned by structural adjustment.” After all, “A broad-based recovery is well in train and there has been a hand-off to private investment as the stimulus winds down.”

To receive such praise from Washington should set off warning sirens. Triple Crisis bloggers Jayati Ghosh and C.P. Chandrasekhar are more sober: “As the housing bubble in China is pricked and real estate prices fall, this will have negative multiplier effects on all related activities.” Added Paul Krugman in The New York Times last month: “China’s story just sounds too much like the crack-ups we’ve already seen elsewhere.”

My guides on a mid-December trip to south and central China were Professors Wen Tiejun of Renmin University and Lau Kin Chi of Lingnan University. We began at the South South Forum in Hong Kong, whose core theme reflected the Chinese ‘New Left’ perspective: “Mainstream scholars and commentators, purposefully or unconsciously at the service of vested interests, have often been too eager to attribute developmental experiences to generic and reified concepts such as marketization and globalization.”

To debunk mainstream stories requires understanding state (especially municipal) power to shape China’s capitalist development trajectory. In central China, the world’s fastest-growing major city, Chongqing, has since 1997 enjoyed self-management status equivalent to Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin. With 7 million urban residents (rising a million a year), this is where China best marries efficiency and equity. The historian Philip Huang argues that a ‘Third Hand’ – the municipal corporation, between socialism and capitalism – is creating Chongqing’s extraordinary landscape.

Elsewhere in China, the vast speculative housing boom, part state-driven but then joined by private investors who overbuilt, created vast ghost cities with tens of millions of empty apartments at a time worker housing was unaffordable. In contrast to the developers’ over-priced, for-profit housing, Chongqing is building 700,000 low-cost public units for two million people in just seven years. This is critical to both labour supply management (generously state subsidised at the point of reproduction) and consumer demand, especially for appliances and other household goods.

Behind this is the model for ‘nonmingong’ migrant workers, operating similarly to what Southern Africans refer to as ‘articulations of modes of production’: male workers in capitalist firms are reproduced through gendered superexploitation because they lack urban citizens’ rights, relying instead upon rural women for childcare, healthcare for sick workers and old-age care. That apartheid-like system helps explain China’s persistently low wage rates (alongside a state-controlled, low-value currency).

A crucial factor in rearranging Chongqing’s social and economic space over the last four years is the role played by Bo Xilai, son of a former deputy premier who has the vision, determination and raw power to cut through bureaucratic red tape. He has crushed protests but also made concessions such as much higher land payments to the rural dispossessed, as well as public housing – because so far, state profits from rising land prices provide the needed subsidy.

Most estimates of annual protests in China are in excess of 100,000. University of California geographer You-Tien Hsing explains how the system can be challenged from below, to increase the compensation given via social protest of the type underway recently in Wukan. “What this new regime of social stabilisation has brought is the commodification of citizens perception of justice and rights… Constrained by the limited political space, in their struggle, cash became the goal of their struggle and the measure of justice.”

In sum, it strikes me that five ‘s’ contradictions are rising that even the finest Chinese managers will probably not overcome. First, subsidies flow from central government to select industrial sites – about $15 billion to Chongqing annually – and into the transport system, but can these continue?

Second, surpluses earned from the proletariat – which in China are unusually high, as migrants push reproduction costs back to women – may not be so easy to realize when exporting to shaky world markets. (Chongqing’s take has been $30 billion/year.) Can the model shift quickly enough from dependence on foreign trade?

Third, structure/struggle dialectic means that from above, on the one hand, sociopolitical leadership from the likes of Bo Xilai is rare, and required a sustained attack on Chongqing’s strong mafioso elements – but how replicable is this leadership? And on the other hand, from below, massive social unrest continues from peasants and workers – but can it link beyond the current localized grievance expressions and pay-outs?

Fourth, the maniacal speculation in real estate required for ever-increasing municipal revenue appears now to have peaked, threatening even Chongqing’s model.

Fifth, sustainability in ecological terms is failing, with severe air and land pollution, climate change and water shortages. Beyond the fast trains, massive tree-planting and vast solar panel production, the broader western fossil-fuel model of accumulation needs questioning.

The extraordinary accomplishments made possible by a strong state taming capital accumulation may not withstand such contradictions. Given the troubles above and turbulence below, it is overdue for China’s emerging New Left to take its critiques to scale and connect these dots.

Three Sask. CEOs make top 100 list

2012-01-04T01:37:00.004-06:00

CBC News
Jan 3, 2012

Three of Saskatchewan's top executives have made the list of the highest paid 100 CEOs in Canada, ranked by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The highest paid CEOs in Saskatchewan in 2010 are Potash Corp.'s Bill Doyle, Cameco's Gerry Grandey and Viterra's Mayo Schmidt.

Schmidt: Only $4,548,711/year

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Doyle was eleventh on the list with a salary of $11,601,796. Grandey was fifty-fifth making $6,826,500. Schmidt came in eighty-ninth with a total of $4,548,711 a year.

Grandey: Laughs to the bank

Though Doyle's salary didn't change much from what he was reported to have made in 2009, Grandey topped his yearly salary by more than $2-million, while Schmidt took a hit of about $200,000.

Doyle: Makes ends meet

The average CEO yearly salary in Canada was reported to be at about $8.38 million in 2010.

Privatizing Education in Saskatchewan

2012-01-04T01:18:00.002-06:00

Green Party of Saskatchewan
January 3, 2012

Mother Theresa Middle Jesuit school benefits

Regina, Saskatchewan - Green Party leader Victor Lau called on Education Minister Donna Harpauer today to reverse the government's recent decision to privatize basic education.

"Public funding of private religious schools is piece-meal privatization. A select few will benefit from extra money to supplement their private tuition fees. The students in the public system will continue to lose ground."

"The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has shown continually through their Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) that broadly funded public education systems tend to create the best education outcomes. Minister Harpauer's refusal to follow best practices in basic education is jeopardizing our children's future."

"The Green Party promotes decentralized decision making within the public system. Parents, particularly those without means to afford private tuition, need more control over educational choices for their children. Creative solutions that give more local control can be found in other provinces; we should follow their example. One Saskatchewan means great education for everybody."

In the Year of the Pig (full movie, 1968)

2012-01-02T22:06:00.000-06:00

Yahoo movies

Celebrated and controversial documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio made IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG, criticizing American involvement in the Vietnam War, during the height of its intensification in 1968.

Like his other constructed documentaries, de Antonio takes newsreel and archival footage, along with existing interviews, and uses them to explore the history of Vietnam between the Second World War and the civil war that America would become involved with. Using the very words of those who escalated the conflict against them, de Antonio's film condemns the American involvement in the war by providing disturbing footage of its terrible consequences.

IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG is the forerunner to the political documentaries of the George W. Bush period.

Is Socialism Utopian?

2012-01-02T21:51:00.001-06:00

By Bill Fletcher Jr
Ask a Socialist
December 15, 2011

“Utopian” has almost become a put-down or a suggestion that one is being unrealistic, if not naive. But I would argue that socialists must be utopian, not in the sense of expecting fundamental change instantaneously, but in the sense of holding in their very being the deep desire for the realization of a world completely unlike our own. It is that for which generations have fought and it is that ideal that has kept many a freedom fighter going despite tremendous adversities.

What is especially interesting about the history of capitalism is that with its rise there also emerged the impulse towards alternatives. These alternatives were not necessarily elaborated as eloquently as were the theories behind capitalism and, specifically, democratic capitalism, but they were nevertheless important. The oppressive and often criminal nature of rising capitalism brought with it revolutionary movements that challenged either the system itself or components of the system. These revolts took various forms, such as the slave revolts that spanned the entire period of the African slave trade.

Peter Linebaugh’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic offers a glimpse into the world of the North Atlantic and the development of capitalism. It was a world of significant resistance carried out by men and women; slaves and the free; mutinies and worker conspiracies. And in most cases there was a deep desire, sometimes elaborated, toward a not-always-defined freedom from the exploitation and oppression that accompanies capitalism.

With this as a backdrop, one can see that the desire for a utopia has always been a component of progressive and revolutionary anti-capitalism. Utopia was not simply a dream, but it represented the ideological and spiritual outlines of the ideal alternative. It became something for which movements fought. For many, that utopia took the name “socialism.”

In the 19th century, there were two diametrically opposed approaches to the question of socialism. On the one hand, there were the formations of local communities based on ideal socialist principles, such as equality and shared work. These were generally referenced as examples of “utopian socialism.” These communities attempted to live side-by-side with capitalism, hoping to demonstrate a viable alternative. Yet in their failure to tackle the system itself, these communities were strangled by the ever-growing amoral beast of capitalism.

In contrast, there were revolutionary movements, initially based in Europe, that sought to gain power for workers through struggle. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were only two of those associated with this approach. These movements also co-existed (and usually not very well) with revolutionary anarchists who envisioned the immediate end of not only capitalism, but any governmental/state system.

It was also during the 19th century that the first great experiment in the creation of a worker’s state took place during the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871. This urban uprising of the dispossessed shook the world and suggested that worker power was more than a slogan.

The 20th century was the moment for the great socialist experiments, beginning with the Russian/Soviet Revolution in October 1917, and continuing on with China, Vietnam, Cuba and numerous other locales. Time and space do not permit anything approaching an exhaustive look at the twists and turns of the socialist experiments of the last century and the many conclusions that we could draw. For the purposes of this essay, let us say that revolutionary transformation proved to be far more difficult than the overthrow of a particular state structure.

Among other things, capitalism is not simply about a ruling class of capitalists, but about toxic practices, many of them day-to-day, which people have learned over generations and, as the great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci would say, have come to be accepted as “common sense.” These practices and expectations operate like the ghostly hands of demons in a graveyard reaching out and placing often unexpected constraints on the ability to break free of such haunted spaces.

We also discovered that socialism was about far more than economics. It must be about the expansion of democracy and the actual control over the lives of working people by the workers themselves. This means that there will be mistakes, setbacks, and detours. But the people themselves need to take these on, since there is no omnipotent individual or organization that can ensure success in a process that knows no guarantees.

Socialism, then, is not a utopia but a step in a process that takes us in the direction of an idea- that is, a society free of all exploitation and oppression, and with the elimination of all oppressing and oppressed classes. For me, it is summarized not in the text of a great socialist treatise, but, ironically perhaps, in the words of a fictional character, Captain Jean Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise, in the film Star Trek: First Contact. In explaining to someone from the 21st century the economics of the 24th century, he says, “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves…and the rest of humanity.”

Such an era, however, is a very long way off, and humanity will have to earn admission to that new historical epoch through the trials and tribulations associated with transforming the way that we live our lives and the way that we treat the planet.

Each day we must struggle to get one step closer.

Germany: Neo-Nazis Target Left Party Officials

2012-01-02T13:12:00.001-06:00

By Markus Deggerich
Spiegel Online
January 2, 2012

Barely a week goes by without a neo-Nazi attack on politicians from Germany's far-left Left Party. Extremists smash the windows of offices or private homes, daub graffiti on walls, cut car brake cables and make anonymous death threats. In response, authorities are beefing up security for senior party officials.

Gregor Gysi, the parliamentary group leader of the opposition far-left Left Party, feels surrounded by neo-Nazis whenever he visits his constituency office in the Berlin district of Niederschöneweide. The area is a bastion of right-wing extremists who have been renting more and more office space and shops nearby. "They want this to become 'their' street," says Gysi, adding that they damage or daub graffiti on the windows of his office almost every night. "But I won't let them drive me out," he vows.

Right-wing extremists have set their sights on left-wing politicians. Left Party members and the police have been counting at least four or five attacks a month nationwide, and it's often more than that. Windows keep getting smashed, fireworks explode in letter boxes, and cars, offices and apartments are damaged in arson attacks.

The most recent example was a smashed window in the Hamburg district of Hamm. Unknown assailants hurled stones at the office of Hamburg politician Tim Golke during the night of Dec. 25.

In addition, the lists of addresses found among the possessions of the suspected neo-Nazi terrorists known as the Zwickau cell contained many names of Left Party officials.

Extremists have also been attacking members of other parties, as well as foreigners, homosexuals, homeless people and police officers. But they have been targeting the Left Party with striking frequency, and with particular aggression.

It isn't just because both sides are to some extent competing for the same voters -- disenchanted people who feel they have been let down by society. Many neo-Nazis evidently can't forgive the Left Party for mobilizing resistance against far-right demonstrations and propaganda.

The security policy spokeswoman of the Left Party in the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament, Ulla Jelpke, has for years been submitting regular questions to the government, such as why there are so many holes in the statistics on victims of far-right crimes. She also asks where skinheads hold their concerts, and what the domestic intelligence service, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, is doing about the far-right threat.

Steel Balls Fired Though The Window

Jelpke's archive in is high demand as a source of information, and the neo-Nazis are aware of this. Attackers have fired steel balls through the window of her constituency office in Dortmund, hurled a paving stone through the door, smeared graffiti on the walls and sprayed acid into the office. There were four such attacks last year alone. Jelpke has long since given up trying to find an insurance company that will cover her premises.

Figures compiled by the Left Party show there were well over 100 attacks on Left Party politicians and offices in the period from January 2010 to summer 2011, mostly in North Rhine-Westphalia and eastern Germany. Anonymous threats ("We'll get you all") are the most harmless cases.

Jörn Wunderlich, a Left Party Bundestag member from the town of Limbach-Oberfrohna in Saxony, was at home when neo-Nazis smashed his ground floor windows with iron bars. Luckily for him, they left without entering.

In the night of Feb. 18, 2010, the car of another Left Party official, Lutz Richter, who represents the party in the Sächsische Schweiz region of eastern Germany, was set on fire. The homes of his mother and his partner were daubed with threatening graffiti.

The car of Evrim Sommer, a member of the Berlin regional assembly, went up in flames outside her apartment almost two years ago. In the south-western town of Göppingen, someone tampered with the brakes on local councilor Christian Stähle's car and set fire to his letter box. The office of Left Party national treasurer Raju Sharma in Eutin, northern Germany, has been attacked seven times since February 2010.

Security Being Beefed Up

The Left Party leadership is disappointed at the lack of response from other parties. They are annoyed that the Left Party is to be left out of plans by the conservatives and the center-left Social Democrats to set up a commission to investigate mistakes made in the hunt for far-right terrorists.

"We of all people are being treated as parliamentary lepers in the fight against the far right," said Left Party MP Petra Pau, vice president of the Bundestag.

However, security precautions for senior Left Party politicians are being increased. Several dozen officials were informed that they were on the lists of the Zwickau cell. But their names were not made public, in order to prevent copycat attacks.

It is impossible to provide comprehensive protection. In most cases the police just take down the details and eventually drop the investigation. Regional and local party officials in particular will have to go on living with the threat.

Arson and Severed Brake Cables

Bodo Ramelow, Left Party parliamentary group leader in the state of Thuringia, has seen it all. Arson attacks against his office, a burglary, severed brake cables, loosened nuts on the car wheels of his deputy, death threats. Ramelow has been talking about far-right networks in Thuringia, where the Zwickau cell trio grew up, since the 1990s. "I would like to have been wrong," he says today.

His name is on the Zwickau list. "I would like to have spared my children the need to be trained in security measures by government agents," says Ramelow. He says he has nightmares and wakes up at night seeing the faces of Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, two of the alleged members of the Zwickau cell who died on Nov. 4, 2011.

He already met the two neo-Nazis in the 1990s, before they went underground. They attended the trial of a neo-Nazi at which Ramelow had been called to testify as a witness for the prosecution.

The two men had posted themselves at the entrance to the courtroom like bodyguards to show their support for their friend Manfred Roeder, who was in the dock. When they sat down in the public gallery behind Ramelow, he recalls feeling that they "were a silent threat breathing down my neck."

Music in the struggle: Chile 2011

2012-01-02T12:50:00.000-06:00

Chilean students take on the government with a million strong march

This Year, Put the Country Ahead of the Party

2012-01-02T06:13:00.002-06:00

May I suggest a resolution for 2012? Defeat Stephen Harper's government.

By Murray Dobbin
TheTyee.ca
2 January 2012

As we enter the new year, the prospects for defeating the Harper government in 2015 seem uncertain at best. And yet if those who care about the country were musing over a new year's resolution, that would be it, a dedication to this single overarching purpose. Even if Harper is soundly defeated in the next election, it will take a decade to reverse the damage he has already done. If he wins a second majority, it will take a generation or more.

There is a deep malaise in Canadian democracy rooted, it seems, in a profound alienation from politics and radically lowered expectations of what is possible from government. Much of this is the result of a deliberate strategy of voter-suppression employed by the Conservatives, a strategy of making politics so offensive and good government so unimaginable that millions of people simply tune out, as if it has nothing to do with them.

For those who thought that this was a temporary attitude of the Harper anti-government, that there would be more civility with a Conservative majority, the evidence is in. This is a permanent strategy to keep the party in power. It will not diminish with time or with the advancement of the Harper agenda. This was never about Harper being frustrated with his minority status. It is about who the man is, a malignant political rogue, contemptuous of his own country. It is about what his agenda has always been -- a right-wing libertarian remaking of the nation.

That this is an extraordinary, indeed unprecedented situation facing our democracy can scarcely be doubted, and many commentators normally supportive of the status-quo (like Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail) have identified pieces of the picture, denouncing Harper for particular policies, or outrages against democracy and the rule of law. Yet the true magnitude of the crisis we face is rarely declared. Until we begin to see the country -- and talk about it -- as if it has been occupied by a foreign power, we will not create the political atmosphere needed to save the nation.

Don't wait for proportional representation

So far, we aren't even close to achieving this political framing of the task ahead. While it is true that there is a strong push for proportional representation -- which would have prevented a Harper majority from happening -- it is a long way off, given that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives support it. In the meantime, politics as usual is still being practiced by the main opposition parties. The NDP and the Liberals are still playing the game whose rules allowed Harper to gain the power he has. Blind to the deadly threat to the civilized nation built by several generations of Canadians, these two parties still behave and plan as if they are in a simple competition for seats in a normally functioning Parliament.

Yet with the election of Stephen Harper, everything changed. No prime minister in Canadian history has come to power with such a ruthless determination to implement an agenda so at odds with the interests of the country and the values of its citizens. This involves not just a set of policies aimed at eliminating the social and economic role of the federal government. It includes, on a parallel course, a determination to change the political culture of the country to one that either supports or acquiesces to that policy agenda. (The Governor General's Christmas message was about volunteerism and philanthropy, Harper's long-term replacement for the state.) Working in tandem, these two political streams, if allowed to proceed for any length of time, could effectively change the country permanently -- or at least for all currently living generations. Harper aims for nothing less.

If the NDP and the Liberals continue to do politics as usual, as if Harper is just another political adversary in a normally-functioning system, Harper is almost certain to win again. His voter suppression tactics, permanent campaigning, financial advantage, vicious attack ads against opposition party leaders, and the care and feeding of his loyal base will again give him at least a minority and likely (given redistribution) another majority.

Myopic opponents to Harper

Canadians, whether they are party members or not, must force these two myopic political parties, both trapped in an old paradigm, to recognize the new reality and put the country ahead of their own narrow interests. They must find a way of cooperating in the next election -- along with the Green Party, which is already on side -- to rid the country of this quasi-dictator. But they won't do it on their own. Ordinary citizens will have to convince them.

Bob Rae of the Liberals is hard at work trying to convince himself and his party that they are back on the road to becoming the natural governing party. But this is sheer delusion. One more victory for the Harper Conservatives and the Liberal Party will fade from the national scene, joining the Socreds in history's dustbin. He avoids the issue of cooperation with the other opposition parties by setting up a straw man: the idea of a merger between the NDP and the Liberals. That is simply never going to happen; Rae knows it, and thus continues to flog this particular dead horse so that he doesn't have to consider practical proposals.

As for the NDP leadership contenders, only Nathan Cullen seems to understand the new political dynamic in the country, telling the Georgia Straight newspaper that Harper is a "clear and present danger to this country." His proposal is an interesting one. He wants his own party to allow its riding associations in Conservative-held ridings to hold joint nominating meetings with the Greens and Liberals. Whichever standard bearer wins the nomination, their party runs against the Conservatives while the other two agree not to run candidates. The assumption is that enough voters will be concerned enough about another Conservative victory that they will cast ballots for the opposition party even if they would not normally do so.

Cullen's plan is not the only possibility, and it may be too much to expect from the inward-looking institutions that political parties have become. He says he was inspired by Vision Vancouver. That's the centrist civic party which has won two landslide victories by attracting Greens, Liberals and NDPers -- defeating the right-wing business party that governed the city for decades. The argument is pretty simple: provide a mechanism to unite those who support the Canada we want, and those who wish it gone will be defeated.

Some of Cullen's other policy suggestions, like a referendum on the monarchy, undermine his credibility. He is unlikely to win the leadership. But his belief that the NDP must put the country ahead of its potential seat count is an important contribution to the leadership debate and the political debate in general.

Political parties being what they are, it is unlikely that such a major shift will come exclusively from their own membership. But if enough Canadians concerned about the rapid devolution of their country and its democracy pressure both these parties -- or join them to do so -- anything is possible. A movement to demand such cooperation, and a commitment to proportional representation as part of it, may be the only thing that can save the country. The time for that movement is upon us. If we wait until 2014, it will be too late.

Cuba Va! January 1... the 53rd anniversary of the Cuban revolution

2012-01-01T22:50:00.002-06:00

“The present is struggle. The future is ours.” - Che Guevara

The End of the Strike?

2012-01-01T22:36:00.003-06:00

What is the future of labour’s time-honoured tactic?

By Hans Rollman
Briarpatch magazine
Nov 1, 2011

Less than two months into their majority mandate, the federal Conservatives passed legislation that left the Canadian labour movement reeling.

The Harper government’s use of back-to-work legislation to force an end to labour disputes at Air Canada and Canada Post was just the latest blow, however, to the labour movement’s most time-honoured tactic: the strike.

The use of strikes by unions to pressure employers in labour disputes has been steadily undermined in Canada in recent decades, not only by the use of coercive legislation to end – and at times pre-empt – strikes, but also by the increasing presence of transnational corporations (TNCs) with sufficient economic power to sit out strikes in a given country, or import replacement workers when local regulations allow.

In Newfoundland and Labrador – Canada’s most highly unionized province – workers have responded to the gradual erosion of the strike as an effective tool of the labour movement in a number of ways, ranging from civil disobedience and defiance of government legislation, to creative proposals to transform traditional collective bargaining structures.

In this sense, the North Atlantic’s labour movement demonstrates some of the creative ways workers are striking back against government efforts to smother their hard-won labour rights.

Domestic norms, international condemnations

Use of government legislation to interfere in or terminate labour disputes is not new, but it has been used with growing frequency since the 1980s. A 2008 study revealed 179 cases where provincial or federal governments had passed laws that interfered with bargaining rights between 1982 and 2008 (85 of those were back-to-work legislation). And the legislating has intensified in recent years.

Leo Panitch has been following this trend with interest and concern. A professor of political science at York University in Toronto, he wrote, together with Donald Swartz, what’s become a classic study of the phenomenon.

Their work puts Canada’s record in international context. Since 1981, they observe, more complaints have been filed against Canada by its unions than any other country in the world. Since the International Labour Organization’s Freedom of Association Committee was created in 1951, only four countries – Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Greece – have faced more complaints than Canada. By 1991, more than one-third of all international labour complaints against G7 countries were filed against Canada. Many of these were the result of back-to-work legislation.

Use of back-to-work laws has become so commonplace in Canada that governments and the public alike are often oblivious to the singular reputation Canada has garnered internationally by disregarding global labour standards.

Panitch and Swartz coined a term for this: permanent exceptionalism. What was meant to be an exception – legislating workers back to work – has now become the permanent norm. “The result,” says Panitch, “is a permanent dampening effect on the use of the strike.”

Defying the law

Newfoundland and Labrador’s government has used back-to-work legislation a total of nine times since joining Canada in 1949. In many cases, this legislation has been met with defiance.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of union leaders, strikers and even sitting legislators served jail time for resisting and refusing to obey back-to-work and other restrictive legislation. One notable case was during a public sector strike in 1986. Passing legislation only made the strike more turbulent, as striking unions opted to defy the legislation. Hundreds were arrested, leading to justice department concerns that provincial prisons and police forces would be unable to handle the militant strikers if arrests continued.

Peter Fenwick was head of the provincial New Democratic Party and a member of the house of assembly during the 1986 strike. When back-to-work legislation was tabled by the provincial government, his party opposed it, much like the federal NDP opposed back-to-work legislation for Canada Post earlier this year. Unlike the federal NDP, however, he joined strikers in defying the legislation, knowing the act of civil disobedience could earn him a prison sentence. And it did.

“They had a prison full of public employees,” he said, reflecting on the events 25 years later. “It seemed to me that the most effective way to protest was to join them on the picket line and help turn the sentiment against what the government was doing.”

After his arrest, Fenwick was sentenced to two months in jail but was released after 20 days, remaining on probation for a year.

25 years later: a more complicated world

Lana Payne is the current president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Labour. She says today’s governments have made it tougher for unions to make the sort of principled protest that sent Fenwick to jail in 1986.

“In the past, labour leaders have defied legislation and gone to jail, but now governments have become smart. It’s not the leaders they go after; it’s the individual workers who get fined and charged. That’s a difficult scenario for unions to deal with. It’s hard for unions to expect their members to take this on individually,” says Payne. “In the good old days it used to be the labour leader who faced the time and faced the fine.”

But Payne raises another important point: being militant doesn’t just mean getting arrested on a picket line.

“There are different types of militancy,” she points out. “Brigette DePape was pretty militant, and she just stood up with a ‘Stop Harper’ sign in Parliament. She didn’t put up a picket line. Militancy can come in all kinds of forms: it can come on a picket line, it can come in the workplace. It’s about taking opportunities and being smart about the kind of campaigns that we have around strikes so that it’s not just us and the employer. How do you bring in the public and the community? How do you find other ways to pressure employers? Militancy is not just going to jail. There’s all kinds of ways to express your power.”

Expressing that power has taken a number of creative forms in Newfoundland and Labrador. During the sealers’ strikes of the early 1800s, poor sealers, masked and under cover of darkness, stormed and destroyed the boat of a merchant who was trying to force them to give up cash payment and accept credit notes for their dangerous and back-breaking work.

In 1956, union organizers rented planes and parachuted into remote logging camps, bypassing company security blockades in order to reach and unionize the workers. Organizers used every possible strategy on land, sea and air to organize labour’s power, with an enthusiasm that led a visiting Canadian labour representative to declare, shortly before Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, that the capital of St. John’s was “the most organized [unionized] city I have ever seen.”

In 2005 the Fish, Food and Allied Workers (FFAW) organized almost two straight months of protest over policy changes to the fishery that included occupation of government offices and harbour blockades. One of the highlights of that strike occurred when a Portuguese trawler tried to cross the blockade. The blockading union vessels pursued and surrounded it, holding it at sea for four hours in what they dubbed a “fishermen’s arrest.” Combining the charged public issue of foreign overfishing with the union’s demands helped the union boost public support. Even normally conservative local media applauded the move, and ratings for wildly popular premier Danny Williams dropped to their lowest levels.

“For over 20-odd straight days, we blockaded the house of assembly,” recalled FFAW staffer John Boland.

“There was a fair bit of civil disobedience. I think we probably pushed the line with a lot of it. At one time, we had seven or eight court injunctions out against us. My wife said to me, ‘One day pretty soon, when you wake up the only place you’ll be allowed to strike is at home!’

“At one point we blocked a shipping lane and had 14 ocean-going oil tankers just stranded at sea, unable to land. We had a blockade of St. John’s Harbour on the go for five or seven days.

Unfortunately a lot of people said that’s against the law, and I guess it is, but when times get tough we roll up our sleeves. If I look at the history of the labour movement, it wasn’t built on workers being nice people. Nice people were set aside and ignored.”

Transnationals: the new challenge

In addition to increasingly coercive governments siding with employers, the growing presence of transnational corporations, many of them headquartered outside of Canada, has also contributed to undermining the power of the strike.

Steelworkers employed by Brazilian mining giant Vale in Voisey’s Bay, N.L., learned that in 2009. Workers at the company’s mines in both Voisey’s Bay and Sudbury, Ont., went on strike that year, and for the Labrador workers it was a strike that lasted two years.

It was only after the Newfoundland and Labrador government launched an inquiry into the reasons for the ongoing strike that a settlement was reached. The Newfoundland Federation of Labour had denounced Vale’s use of replacement workers as a violation of free collective bargaining, and called on government to use other tools in the Labour Relations Act – such as use of mediators – to bring it to a close. When these failed to bear fruit, the government inquiry was launched.

The resulting report, known as the Roil Report, called for significant changes to labour relations in the province. It cautioned that TNCs disrupt traditional labour relations models since they have such disproportionate power compared to unions. It also recommended that government implement new rules to regulate labour relations with TNCs: mandatory arbitration boards and imposition of collective agreements where existing labour relations methods have completely failed (while protecting the general right to strike), quicker grievance hearings, and further research on the role of replacement workers, or “scabs.” But probably its greatest impact lies in giving public voice to the fact that labour relations need a level playing field.

“Roil is a very good summary of what happens in jurisdictions where TNCs have incredible power,” says Payne. “How do you change laws to ensure the rights we believe we have are still there and have the same meaning as when they were first introduced? That’s really the challenge, because the economy has changed substantially in the last three decades, but the laws have not changed to keep up with the economy as it is now, which is one with TNCs. And they are really game changers. We don’t have the same balance of power at the bargaining table when they can close a workplace down for a year and it has very little impact on their bottom line because they have operations around the world.”

Panitch finds the report’s conclusions interesting, but cautions that every situation is different. “Some have argued that with TNCs, if you strategically strike in one place, you can shut the whole operation down.”

Whatever unions do, Panitch says, they’re going to have to do it quickly. “I think the smashing of public sector unions is on the agenda. And I don’t just think it’s Canada. It’s everywhere.”

Instead of picket lines, work-ins?

In a creative article published last year, Sam Gindin, York University Packer Visitor in Social Justice, and Michael Hurley, vice-president for the Ontario wing of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), argued for a novel idea. As part of a wider range of tactics designed to expand collective bargaining, they suggested workers stage “work-ins.” For instance, health- or long-term care workers could pick a day to all come in to highlight worker shortages. Social workers could meet with welfare recipients to discuss their mutual frustrations with how programs operate. They note that the Public Service Alliance of Canada did this when employment insurance rules were recently tightened. They prepared pamphlets to inform recipients about how to avoid being cut off.

Such acts would improve service and demonstrate very clearly what unions have been arguing: more public service workers means better public services. Moreover, workers themselves would organize these tasks and thus start taking control of the workplace out of the hands of employers and putting it back into the hands of the workers. If employers don’t like it, their only option would be to kick out the workers, reducing the quality of service and generating public backlash against the employer – not the striking worker.

Panitch thinks the idea is one that should be taken seriously. “It raises the question not only of showing up at work, but also beginning to take responsibility for the labour process. A lot of workers don’t like to do this because they think that’s management’s job. But a work-in could show how much better services could be if there were additional staff, how many fewer accidents there would be in nursing homes, how much better patients in hospital would feel about being there, and what have you.”

Panitch feels part of the problem is that strikes have become associated almost exclusively with wages, and that’s not all of what it should be about. “It isn’t just about getting more in order to keep up your standard of living. It’s that, but it’s also an expression of frustration with regard to the lack of interest and control over one’s work. And it’s always been that. But the easiest thing to bargain is wages. It’s much harder to transform the deeply authoritarian nature of the workplace.”

Is there any point?

With governments so willing to intervene in favour of corporations, is there still any point to going on strike?

Panitch thinks there is, but warns unions need to recognize public attitudes toward strikes and be strategic in their use. “There are smart strikes, and there are dumb strikes. And you choose times that are good to strike and bad to strike. And you need to conduct strikes in such a way that you’re not alienating the populace of the city. I think even if you know that you’re going to be legislated back, if it’s part of a mobilizing strategy where it’s going to carry your members’ notions of consciousness and solidarity and understanding of the state further, it may be worth doing.”

On the other hand, he points to the CUPE municipal workers’ strike in 2009, which he feels contributed to the strengthening of right-wing sentiment in Toronto and the election of Rob Ford and other conservative candidates to city council.

Ultimately, he says, unions need to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. “I don’t think there’s ever a ready recipe for every instance. I think people do need to make sacrifices sometimes if they think it’ll have a galvanizing effect.”

Payne also feels that striking remains an important form of action for unions. “We’re facing a government that declared a war on the labour movement,” she says. “We have to keep doing what it is what we do, and always be looking for ways to step it up.”

Hans Rollmann is a writer and activist based in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. He has a background in radio broadcasting and is currently a reporter, columnist and opinions editor for theindependent.ca.