Canadian Dimension | Articles

Web Exclusive: Morbid Symptoms, Current Healthcare Struggles

Colin Leys — 2009-11-20T21:11:29+00:00

Leo Panitch and Colin Leys have just brought out the 2010 annual volume of the Socialist Register, Morbid Symptoms: Health Under Capitalism, published by Merlin Press in London, Monthly Review Press in the US and Fernwood Books in Canada. The book provides a path-breaking assessment of health under capitalism, providing a systematic account of the antagonistic relationship between capitalism and human bodies, of how modern healthcare has been deeply penetrated by neoliberal capitalism, and the ways in which healthcare workers, activists and socialists are struggling and pursuing alternatives paths of solidarity in human health.

Socialist Project recently asked Greg Albo to interview Colin Leys about the book and about current healthcare struggles.

SP: Colin, the latest Socialist Register, Morbid Symptoms: Health Under Capitalism, is gaining great accolades from health activists and practitioners, and from sections of the Left that have not traditionally been focussed on health. How did you and Leo come to focus on this issue as important for a Register audience? And how does it fit within your personal evolution as a Left intellectual in terms of your long-standing concerns with states and development in the ‘third world’, especially Africa, on the one hand and states and parties in the advanced capitalist world, especially Britain, on the other?

CL: Given the crucial importance of health in people’s lives it struck us that there was a major lack of critical left thinking about it – about how neoliberalism was undermining the health gains of the postwar years, about what was happening to health care as a field of employment, and above all how health care was becoming a massive new field of capital accumulation, with dire implications for population health – and for democracy – everywhere. The best contribution the Register could make, we felt, was to help develop a historical materialist analysis of health under capitalism. Over the last 30 years a handful of progressive health experts, such as Vicente Navarro in the US, and Lesley Doyall and Julian Tudor Hart in the UK, have laid the groundwork for this, but the left in general has not taken it on board as much as we should have. And the extent to which the mainstream health policy literature fails to confront the neoliberal agenda is frankly shocking. Dependence on government funding for research plays an obvious role there. With some honourable exceptions everything is presented as if the political-economic determinants of ill health are a (regrettable) given. We wanted to break decisively with this pattern, foregrounding the centrality of the capitalist health industry in policy-making, and showing how ruling-class interests are served by it.
And yes, my own previous work in Africa and on development did give me a special interest in the theme. The routine normality of painful illness and early death in the global ‘south’ is so shameful, when we know that it is largely preventable; we also know that no amount of ‘aid’ is going to prevent it under the existing power relations of global capitalism. The determinants of poverty and ill-health, and of the lack of health care for all in the ‘south’, are the same ones that are now driving the restoration of inequality and the dismantling of social protection in the ‘north’. My work on British political economy under Thatcher and Blair took health policy as a test case of the way global market forces were driving domestic policy. What this revealed was a process that has ended in an amazing phenomenon – the British Labour Party, which 60 years ago set an example of universal and comprehensive health care that was followed all over the world – including in Canada – is now busy dismantling the integrated National Health Service and recreating a healthcare market – relying heavily on US advisers and US health multinationals to make it happen.

SP: What are some of the key themes of the new Register?

CL: There are really two core issues. One is the need to focus on the militant campaign that is now being waged by capital – the health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, and big healthcare provider companies – to break up state-funded and provided healthcare systems in every country that has them, and turn them into fields of accumulation. In middle- and high-income countries we are talking of potential markets worth from 7 to 12% of national income or even more. The power of the corporations moving in on public health services is huge, and growing. In Canada and the UK and other advanced capitalist countries they are major actors in the restructuring of states on neoliberal lines that has been pushed through to a greater or lesser extent in all countries over the past 30 years. They are increasingly installed at the heart of government policy-making. Health ministries and departments have been downsized and policy development has been handed over to private sector personnel as consultants, or appointed to government posts, while ministers and career civil servants leave to take lucrative jobs in the private health sector. The boundary between public and private interests is increasingly blurred, especially in relation to health. This is not nearly as well understood as it needs to be.
The second core issue is the fact that health care, important as it is, is not the most important thing: the crucial determinants of health, wherever you live – India, Canada, South Africa, the US, it makes no difference – are good food, good shelter, safety at work and protection against infections, so whether you and your family are healthy or not is above all a matter of equality. The poorest countries have the worst health, and so do the poorest people in all countries, including rich ones. Unless public policy is geared towards equality, even in rich countries most people’s health will remain a lot worse than it should be. But the more neoliberal a government is, the less policy is concerned with equality. In the US and the UK, where inequality has been dramatically increased, it is condemning growing numbers of people to pain, disability and early death. The same is true internationally. As Meri Koivusalo shows in her essay in the volume, effective control over international health policy has been steadily transferred from the World Health Organisation to commercially-oriented and unaccountable organisations such as the Gates Foundation and the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, Even the WHO depends on ‘voluntary’ contributions from a range of sources for over four-fifths of its budget, as opposed to its core funding through UN member states. The bulk of health aid is thus increasingly controlled by agencies with links to corporate interests, especially those of big pharma. The WHO’s 1978 commitment to promoting ‘health for all’ via comprehensive primary care has given way to aid targeted at specific diseases largely chosen by these other agencies. The aim of improving people’s health is compromised by the aim of making money.

SP: How have health care and all its associated activities and sectors become integrated into neoliberal capitalism and its global dynamics? Are there any particular contradictions that this volume of the Register reveals?

CL: There is an objective contradiction between capital’s need for a workforce capable of providing reliable labour-power, and therefore being healthy enough to do so, and the compulsion on individual capitals – on companies – to constantly seek to pay less for it, well below what is needed to keep workers healthy. But this contradiction is less in evidence at present because of the huge pool of labour that is now available in China and India and other countries of the ‘south’; so far global capital has not found itself obliged to help keep this labour force healthy, and it has not.
But there is also an immediate contradiction between health care’s role in making capitalism acceptable to workers – its legitimation function – , and healthcare capital’s drive for profits. An important essay in the volume by Shaoguang Wang shows that in order to maintain political stability the Chinese government has felt obliged, for the sake of social stability, to give up its market approach to health care and at least aim to restore universal access to health care. Whether western electorates who have come to take universal access to health care for granted will accept seeing it converted back into a commodity, very unequally available, is a question that the left needs to focus on as a matter of urgency. Will people be ready to accept the idea that it is no longer the responsibility of governments to keep everyone well?

SP: It is striking that the volume is coming out in the midst of the U.S. healthcare struggle. Even as a Bill passes the House it seems it will be blocked and transformed in the Senate. What is your assessment of this struggle and what insights does the new volume bring to it?

CL: Yes, the struggle over healthcare reform in the US it shows just how deeply access to health care goes to the heart of politics today. But it’s also very significant that Obama and many Democrats in Congress felt unable to win what they had previously supported – a ‘single-payer’ (i.e. tax-funded) system, doing away with the grossly inefficient and rapacious health insurance industry. On top of that they then even proved unable to secure their alternative, extremely weak, market-friendly option – a public insurance plan that would compete with the private ones. Only a taxpayer-subsidised adjustment to the existing private sector oligopoly will – perhaps – be allowed to pass. What the story shows above all is just how far the private healthcare industry controls senators and congressmen by funding their campaigns. The health industry also devotes enormous resources to influencing public opinion against any form of ‘state medicine’. In spite of that, in this instance public opinion supported a single payer system - but Congressmen have again proved more answerable to capital than to voters. The book had to go to press before this story had run very far, and we are still waiting to see the outcome; it’s a measure of the quality of Marie Gottschalk’s analysis of the US situation that her essay stressed the severe limitations of the ‘public plan’ and assessed what was likely to happen very accurately. The lack of an anti-capitalist movement in the US that could mobilise a powerful response has again denied the American working class what it voted for. It should and could prove to be a catalyst for change in this regard, as the consequences become clear.

SP: Colin, another big issue right now is the H1N1 pandemic. This is being portrayed in the most narrow of terms as a public health issue to be managed by cleanliness, on the one hand, and mass vaccines, on the other, with other dimensions going unmentioned. One wonders whether we might see similar dynamic to that of a few years ago with respect to AIDS, which began as a technical issue seen as a minority problem butt led to great struggles about social inequalities, sexuality and big pharma. Is it any more rational to treat swine flu as simply technical issue separate from the inequalities, institutions and dynamics of capitalism, or should we be looking at the linkages between the two?

CL: If it does develop as a serious killer disease like AIDS we will surely quickly become aware of those linkages. It spreads easily and affects everyone more or less equally and so can’t be attributed to ‘lifestyle choices’ the way sexually transmitted diseases or lung cancer often are. But given that those most liable to become seriously ill and even die from it are those whose health is already compromised, and that these are typically poorer people than the average, the class dimension of it will be there to see if it becomes more lethal. The issue of who gets the vaccine first has already revealed class privileges in Canada and elsewhere. A related question is whether the price charged by the big pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline who are supplying the vaccine to governments is right: how far should collective protection against a collective threat yield windfall profits for capital?

SP: The IMF has now called for a decade of austerity in the public sector and in wages and benefits for workers. This comes on top of a long period of struggles against healthcare privatization and the working conditions of healthcare workers. You have been engaged in a lot of these struggles with the NHS in Britain and have, no doubt, kept up with some of the struggles in Canada given your frequent visits and continuing close contacts here. What do you expect might be coming in the way of confrontations?

CL: This is a very important issue. In OECD countries other than the USA (where health is still treated as a commodity) people have been resisting – with varying degrees of success, depending on circumstances – the privatisation of the publicly-funded and managed healthcare systems that were established after WWII. In Canada, for example, the reality of the American healthcare market is there to be seen just across the border. Many Canadians have relatives there and know all about it. They didn’t need to see Michael Moore’s film ‘Sicko’. Many Canadians are also relatively recent immigrants who are keenly aware of the ‘freedom from fear’ of illness or accidents that the universal healthcare system in their adopted country gives them. On top of this the labour unions have put resources into the fight to defend Canadian health care: the Canada Health Coalition has a high media profile and widespread support. The result is as near unanimity as you can ever get on anything in a free and democratic country – a recent poll found 89.9% of Canadians support or somewhat support universal health care.
In spite of this massive public endorsement, the Canadian healthcare system has also been subjected to the application of neo-Taylorism in hospitals, to contracting out of the ‘ancillary’ work of hospital cleaning, laundry and cooking, and to the offloading of health care to the unpaid labour of families, and especially women. This comes across clearly in the essay by Pat and Hugh Armstrong on struggles for control in the Canadian healthcare workplace. The call for more public sector cutbacks and assaults on the rights of public sector workers will undoubtedly worsen these trends, but as the Armstrongs also show, there is a growing potential for alliances among ancillary workers, nurses and even doctors to confront further attacks.
In England, where the assault on the public system has gone much further, campaigners against it are handicapped by the fact that it has been pushed through not by the Conservatives (who of course are happy to see it happen), but by a Labour government – and the trade unions are affiliated to the Labour Party. Even UNISON, the main health service workers’ union, is unwilling to attack Labour’s marketisation of the National Health Service publicly, even though its members are overwhelmingly opposed to it. As a result, while the NHS remains the most popular institution in the country there is limited understanding of how far and fast it is being broken up and privatised. Now that all the main political parties have signed up to the idea that everyone must just put their hands up and pay for the bankers’ greed by accepting a decade of cuts in public services, it will be interesting to see what happens when the cuts start to make a major impact on health services. There is an urgent need – and a major opportunity – for the left to make the connections clear. The impact of austerity on health services could and should force the unions to finally detach themselves from their subservience to the neo-Thatcherite Labour elite, and encourage new political forces to coalesce around the need to reassert the right to health care as a basic political right, a component of equal citizenship.

SP: Do you see the book as a handbook for healthcare activists?

CL: We certainly hope it will be, and the essay by Sanjay Basu on what activists can learn from HIV/AIDS mobilizations to build a comprehensive public health movement is very important in this respect. But the book is aimed at a wider readership as well. One of the problems to be overcome is that what is happening to health and health care is so poorly reported and analysed in the media. The owners of most newspapers, magazines, TV channels and radio stations are part of the neoliberal order. This means that health features in just two ways: amazing stories about medical ‘breakthroughs’ in individual treatments, usually in surgery; and failures and scandals – and never the successes – of publicly-funded and managed healthcare systems. On the other hand editors working for public-service broadcasting or more critical newspapers tend to see health policy as too complex for most viewers and readers. Even medical students get shockingly little exposure to issues of health policy. Most medical training pays scant attention to the social and economic context of disease and its treatment, or to what forces are determining health policy, or how far current health policies fall short of reflecting what medical science tells us. You don’t need to be a socialist to see that this is wrong. You just need to have a concern for scientific evidence and the welfare of the society you live in. Morbid Symptoms should be read by medical students and doctors and nurses and everyone in the caring professions – in fact by everyone who thinks health matters.

SP: The Socialist Register has always tried to have a vision of practical utopias for socialist struggles. This is something we have encountered as a problem in Canada in relation to health care – the need to go beyond just blocking any further erosion of public health. What contribution does the new Register add to practical utopias today and a programme for the Left in terms of health?

CL: The principles that a socialist health programme should rest on come across clearly enough from the volume. In general, a socialist health policy would aim at making economic policy serve the goal of making everyone as healthy as possible, rather than making a few people as rich as possible. As Hans-Ulrich Deppe, an eminent German professor of medicine, says in his essay on the nature of health care, health is a universal need that should be a universal right, and this means that every aspect of health policy must be grounded in the principle of social solidarity. What this means in practice will vary widely, depending on the health system that already exists, public attitudes to health and medicine, country-specific variations in need, etc. And it can only be worked out in practice; blueprints made in advance are not going to help much. But a more democratic health policy, which must be the starting-point, will always imply some striking changes. For instance Julian Tudor Hart’s powerful closing essay in the volume points out that in advanced capitalist countries an amazing third of all adults experience a mental health problem of one kind or another, but only a tiny fraction of the misery that this represents is even acknowledged, let alone treated – even in health systems that are supposedly equally accessible by all. A socialist health policy must obviously confront this, implying some major shifts of attitudes and resources, and a radical change in the social conditions that cause so much of the problem. It would aim to bring medical priorities into line with the findings of medical science – a very different thing from the priority now assigned to high-tech medical care for conditions that represent a tiny fraction of the burden of disease among the population at large (not to mention the populations of the global ‘south’).
Thinking through what a socialist health policy would look like in any given society in fact opens up several extremely exciting vistas. It also opens up the possibility of new alliances in the struggle for socialism generally. For example, once it is recognised that good health depends more on social and economic equality than on health care – crucially important though health care is – healthcare activists thinking about the kind of politics needed to secure good health for all find they have natural allies in a whole range of movements struggling for equality – for labour, for women, for the unemployed, for undocumented people, and for minorities of many kinds. In the same way, envisaging the kind of state, and the kinds of democratic accountability, that could ensure that maximising people’s health became and remained a core commitment of society, is a powerful way of focusing on the kind of state needed for achieving other solidaristic goals.
Health is a deeply emotive matter, and the left has every reason to make it a core issue of its own. And not just in defending publicly-provided, universal-access health care, but in a more radical sense too, as Leo and I suggest in the Preface to the book: the contradiction between capitalism and health should become a pivotal dimension of a revitalised socialist strategy.

In addition to co-editing the Socialist Register Colin Leys is the author of various books including Underdevelopment in Kenya, Politics in Britain: From Labourism to Thatcherism, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, and Market-Driven Politics: Neoliberal democracy and the public interest.

Web Exclusive: Historic Victory as Jerzees de Honduras workers win break-through agreement

Kevin Thomas — 2009-11-20T16:28:53+00:00

On November 14 an unprecedented agreement was struck between Russell Athletic and the union representing unjustly laid off workers at its former Jerzees de Honduras (JDH) factory.

Russell has agreed to open a new facility in the Choloma area, re-hire and provide substantial economic assistance to the 1,200 former JDH workers, institute a joint union-management training program on freedom of association and commit to a position of neutrality with respect to unionization, which will open the door for union representation at all of Fruit of the Loom’s Honduran facilities (Russell Athletic is owned by Fruit of the Loom).

“This agreement represents one of the most significant advances for fundamental workplace rights in the twenty-year history of apparel industry codes of conduct,” said Scott Nova of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), which conducted independent investigations into violations of freedom of association at JDH. “It is hard to overstate the significance of this breakthrough.”

“For Honduran workers this agreement represents real hope, especially in the midst of an unemployment crisis in our country,” said Evangelina Argueta, Coordinator of the Honduran General Workers’ Confederation (CGT) in Choloma, which spearheaded the fight for the former JDH workers. “The fired workers haven’t had income to support their families. Now they can be assured that they will have a job – this is the most valuable thing to come out of the agreement.”

Russell Athletic was under serious pressure to repair the damage caused by its decision to close the JDH factory last January, which was widely condemned as an attempt to destroy a newly formed union (for background, see http://en.maquilasolidarity.org/jerzees). At the urging of students, unions and labour rights organizations, including United Students Against Sweatshops and MSN, over 100 universities in Canada and the US that have adopted ethical purchasing policies either withdrew their licensing agreements with the company or threatened to do so unless it took action to remediate the violations. Retailers and other Russell consumers were also approached.

Talks between the union and the company finally began after Russell Athletic’s membership in the Fair Labor Association (FLA) was put on “Special Review” status last June. An FLA investigation carried out in response to a complaint filed by the CGT, the Clean Clothes Campaign and MSN confirmed the WRC’s finding that the presence of the union was a significant factor in the FLA member company’s decision to close the JDH factory.

The FLA told the company it had to negotiate remediation with the local union (SITRAJERZEESH) and the CGT, and engage with MSN and the WRC.

Fruit of the Loom is the largest private sector employer in Honduras, owning eight factories that employ over 10,000 workers, making the impact of this agreement extremely significant.

“The partnership being created between a large private employer and an independent union federation is unprecedented in the history of the apparel sector in Honduras and in Central America,” said Nova.

Implementation of the agreement will be monitored by a joint union-management committee, with an agreement to enter into binding arbitration in the case of disputes over implementation or interpretation.

“We feel that the company acted in good faith during the negotiations, and this has to be recognized,” said Argueta. “Relations between workers, the union and the company have been strengthened, and this will be reflected when the new factory is opened.”

“All the support we received from groups like the WRC, MSN and from all of the university students was fundamental and we are very grateful,” said Argueta. “The support of international organizations is very important.”

Web Exclusive: Cuban dissidents make noise—oops, news

Saul Landau — 2009-11-19T15:51:54+00:00

U.S. government hypocrisy has grown so pervasive over the last decades that it provokes yawns and glazed looks. Senators denounce government interference in health care while partaking in their own top of the line government health insurance that they designed at taxpayer expense. Secretary of State Clinton demanded Pakistani leaders remove terrorists from their streets while self-proclaimed anti-Castro terrorists parade down Miami’s thoroughfares as freedom fighters, of course.

Duplicity in language coincides with stupidity of policy. In Afghanistan (which costs a million dollars per year per soldier to keep Hamid Karzai in the president business), U.S. and NATO troops pursue a vague anti-terror mission in which they have caused immense death and destruction — with few or no results. “Send more troops to fight for the Karzai government,” scream John McCain and his ilk, while Karzai vies for a place in the Guinness Book of Records for corruption. He retains legitimacy among those who benefit directly from his theft and the U.S. government.

Hypocrisy repeated at top levels Goebbels called it the “big lie” tends to make journalists weary and turn them into stenographers who no longer seek to reveal the dishonesty of official-speak.

Consider press coverage of two alleged human rights cases. Last year, Saudi religious police arrested an American woman “for sitting with a male colleague at a Starbucks coffee shop in Riyadh.” The woman was beaten, “strip-searched, threatened and forced to sign false confessions.” (Independent, February 8, 2008)

The State Department ignored this and similar stories as Saudi internal matters. But State Department officials got their knickers in an instant twist over their favorite Cuban blogger, Yoani Sanchez.

En route to a demonstration in Havana ‘against violence,’ Yoani told the Havana Reuters correspondent that three non-uniformed men had grabbed her and two companions and thrown them into a car. She said nothing about being ‘beaten.’ Reynaldo Escobar, Sánchez’ husband, “told El Nuevo Herald she’s walking with a crutch and taking medicines for a backache, the result of being thrown head-first into a car and punched in the back by the three men in plainclothes who detained her for 20 minutes.”

Shortly after her Reuters interview, Yoanni told AP the men had brutally beaten her with such professionalism that they left nary a visible mark on her skin. “No blood, but black and blues, punches, pulled hairs, blows to the head, kidneys, knee and chest,” Yoani’s husband told El Nuevo Herald. “In sum, professional violence.” Yoani posted no photos on her blog of the ‘professional beating,’ strange for someone whose blog contains lots of photos. (Nov. 6, 2009)

Unlike the response to Saudi (our ally) mistreatment of women, the U.S. government “strongly deplores the assault” on Yoani. The State Department “expressed to the Cuban government our deep concern … and we are following up with inquiries … regarding their personal well-being and access to medical care.” (Miami Herald November 14)

Neither the media nor the U.S. government explained why Cubans would rally against violence abroad. Non-government sources on the island could not figure out the object of the demonstration. Some demonstrators, however, held ‘Sumate’ signs. (The name of the Venezuelan group that led anti-Chavez campaigns in 2004 and the name adopted by the Bolivian opposition to Evo Morales)

The Yoani incident brought new attention to this “courageous journalist,” especially in Miami. Her blogs report the basic street whine in Havana, but offer no prescriptions for changing inefficient or unjust procedures; nor does she attempt to understand, much less analyze, the causes for the malfunctions that beset daily life in Cuba. She has perfected internet complaining, practically converting it into an art form.

Anti-Castro Cubans and journalists throughout the western press adore her and festoon her with awards and prizes (John Moors Cabot in New York and Ortega y Gassett in Spain). The fan club, however, does not include other “dissidents.” Representatives of Martha Beatriz Roque, a less cyber-savvy dissident now in second place among the female ‘Disidencia,’ told the Miami Herald her diabetes cause her serious problems. Two weeks into a hunger strike, she has fortunately not lost a critical amount of weight.

Roque and Sanchez are battling for headlines in Miami papers, radio and TV. The Martha Beatriz faction has criticized Yoani, who receives more attention in Washington, where the money comes from. Washington policy, immune to facts and consistency, has caused suffering, denying Cubans goods, and credit; yet it condemns Cuba’s government and accepts Yoani’s contradictory claims and righteously demands Cuba respect human rights while debating the fate of prisoners it holds (some without charges) in its Guantanamo base on Cuban territory. Boring old hypocrisy again!

Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow. His films are on DVD and can be purchased through roundworldproductions.com.

Once Upon a Waffle

Mel Watkins — 2009-11-12T18:41:23+00:00

The Waffle is long dead and little remembered. Forty years ago, at the very tail-end of the fabulous decade known as the 60s — if you missed it, too bad — it burst on the scene as a radical grouping within the NDP with a Manifesto calling for an independent socialist Canada, no less, and did so to media attention the likes of which the Left has yet to match.

The 60s were already in trouble, Richard Nixon having been elected president of the United States and leader of the free world in 1968. Here at home, by 1972 the NDP establishment, an alliance of party and trade union brass, was unwilling to tolerate the Waffle talk inside and outside the party.

It was even less willing to tolerate the Waffle walk as it pushed the choice of David Lewis as federal leader in 1971 to a fifth ballot, and joined strikers on picket lines whether or not the union was affiliated with the NDP.

Too weak to win and too strong to be tolerated, the Waffle was, in effect, turfed out of the party. It struggled on, like a dead man walking, and by 1974 was no more. By then the 60s were also truly dead and buried.

A Vibrant Sovereignty Movement

Forty years later, does the Waffle have anything to show for its brief but luminous existence? Its discourse was that of left nationalism, of opposition to foreign ownership, and of calls for public ownership, particularly in the energy sector. In the 70s, the Trudeau government went tentatively down that road and Wafflers could imagine they had had some influence, but the Mulroney government undid it all and tossed in a free trade agreement with the U.S. to boot. (I wonder who paid Mulroney in what hotel room to do that?)

Nothing to take credit for there, you say, and you’re right, except that the concern about Canadian sovereignty, got a huge jolt of energy out of the 60s, so the Waffle can claim some credit. That rejuvenated nationalism, in its turn, though unable to stop free trade, made it a very close thing and has since been able sufficiently to sustain itself to keep us out of the Iraq war and the missile defense system.

The Waffle should be judged as part and parcel of the still vibrant sovereignty movement: think, for example, of the Council of Canadians, Parklands Institute, Polaris Institute, and the Rideau Institute — and the growing self-confidence that Canadians have about Canada’s survival independent of the United States.

There are two specific and substantial matters on which the Waffle showed remarkable prescience. The Manifesto insisted that Canada consisted of two nations — there was no notion then of the rights of the First Nations and the Waffle was as bad as the rest on the issue of aboriginal rights. Even two nations was one too many for then Prime Minister Trudeau, yet it is now embraced even by Harper. James Laxer, in his campaign as Waffle candidate for federal party leadership in 1971, courageously made Quebec’s right to self-determination a centrepiece. Even many English Canadian nationalists would not buy that at that time.

And then there was the matter of the very real contradiction that existed within the NDP where Canadian nationalism was lauded everywhere except in the trade union movement itself. The Canadian labour movement, unlike any other trade union movement in the known world, was dominated by unions domiciled outside the country, namely, so-called international unions with headquarters in the U.S.

The Waffle deserved its name because it waffled on this issue: the Canadianization of the Canadian labour movement. It was not even mentioned in the Manifesto. But there quickly emerged within the Waffle a Labour Caucus of militant trade unionists supporting independent Canadian unions.

The Pull Between the Party and the Movement

The movement to purge the Waffle was led by the Canadian leaders of these branch plant unions. Yet in a matter of two decades, almost all these Canadian branches of international unions had broken with their American masters and Canada had, for the first time in its history, a sovereign trade union movement. I note simply that, again, the Waffle was on the side of history and, again, good history.

From the days of the CCF down to today, there has been constant discussion about the “party” and the “movement.” The CCF, at least in the West, was able to put these together, but the creation of the NDP out of the CCF was in some part intended to purge the movement.

The Waffle was in the party but, with its commitment to day-to-day activism, acted like a movement. It activated riding associations. It organized around issues relevant to Canadian workers without deferring to union leaders, notably in the case of the auto-workers. That, more than anything else, pushed the leadership of the Canadian auto workers to lead the charge against the Waffle. To its great credit, after the CAW was created as a breakaway from the UAW, it apologized for its role in the killing of the Waffle.

The point was often made, particularly by critics of the Waffle, that it mostly consisted of university students and young professors. That was an overstatement, but it’s hardly surprising that the Waffle had a strong campus orientation given that that was true overall of much of 60s activism.

In the longer-run, there was the considerable virtue that Wafflers, then and later, made a significant contribution to the creation of the New Canadian Political Economy, a paradigm that has left its stamp down to the present day on numerous academic disciplines.

The case can be made that the most important movement that came out of the 60s was women’s liberation. Again, to its discredit, the Waffle Manifesto was silent on this issue, but a Women’s Caucus emerged early on and played an active role.

The Waffle died. What happened to the Wafflers? Some left the NDP for good. Others, like myself, drifted back over time. Some became active in the newly emerging social movements.

I was out of the party for a decade and returned because I loved politics and felt sidelined. I twice ran, in 1997 and 2000, as a federal candidate in what was thought to be a winnable riding but turned out not to be. I was sometimes asked how a radical like I was could now run for the NDP.

I like to recall what Cheddi Jagan said. He had been a Marxist chief minister of then British Guiana and was pushed out with a little help from the CIA. Years later, he was elected president of an independent Guyana as a social democrat. When asked by a reporter why he had changed, he said “I haven’t changed but the world sure has.”

A question that no one has ever asked me but I will answer anyway is: If I were writing a manifesto today, what would I write about? The Waffle Manifesto railed against American imperialism and called for public ownership to counter it, but was silent on environmental matters like almost everybody else, though there were voices within the Waffle, which the rest of us chose to ignore.

Today’s manifesto should rail against corporate globalization and call for the building of viable local economies, both in their own right and to lessen carbon emissions and mitigate the global warming and climate change that now haunt us.

This article appeared in the November/December 2009 issue of Canadian Dimension magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW to get a refreshing and provocative alternative delivered to your door 6 times a year for up to 50% off the newsstand price.

Media as Insurgent Art

Chris Webb — 2009-11-02T18:06:31+00:00

Last July I visited the Pueblo of El Mozote in the highlands of El Salvador. The village is wedged between rolling hills amidst some of the most pristine wilderness in all of Central America. Beside the town square the midday sun falls on the back of a campesino in a characteristically wide-brimmed hat shovelling soil — two children stare at him through a barbed wire fence. Dogs lie panting in the shade of the village’s small store, and the tranquil scene could easily exist in any quiet Salvadoran village.

Our guide, Serafin Gomez — a former guerilla with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front — points to the church across the square. “That’s where they took the children. They cut off some of their limbs and tortured them. The babies were caught on soldier’s bayonets.”

Twenty-eight years ago the Atlacatl battalion — a U.S. trained and financed squad of Salvadoran soldiers — entered El Mozote and told men, women, and children they were guilty of supporting guerillas and communism. They proceeded to kill every last person and razed the village to the ground. A year later Reagan testified before congress that President Duarte’s government in El Salvador was improving the country’s human right’s record. His testimony cleared the way for an additional $65 million in economic and military aid.

The ravages of the Reagan years are well documented. What makes the massacre at El Mozote all the more tragic is the media war and cover up it spurred. The largest massacre in Latin America remains, to most, largely unknown and its victims have been exiled to the rubbish bin of history.

The first reporters to break the story of El Mozote were Raymond Bonner of the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post. “In some 20 mud brick huts here, this reporter saw charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned out roofs, beams and shattered tiles,” Bonner wrote in the breaking Times article. Articles by both reporters immediately raised serious questions in congress regarding the huge flows of money from Washington to San Salvador. President Duarte claimed he was losing the propaganda war in the U.S. press, and what ensued can only be described as a media witch hunt reminiscent of McCarthyist purges.

In July 1982, the conservative press watch organization Accuracy in Media (AIM) published a report insinuating that Bonner’s article was motivated by political sympathies. Reed Irvine, an AIM editor, declared that Mr. Bonner was “worth a division to the communists in Central America.” Thomas Enders, then Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs attacked Bonner and Guillermoprieto before a congressional committee, saying “no evidence can be found that government forces systematically massacred civilians.” The Wall Street Journal jumped on the bandwagon in a lengthy editorial titled “The Media’s War.” They singled out Bonner as being “overly credulous” and called his guerilla escort to El Mozote evidence of a “propaganda exercise.” Bonner went on to publish a book on the massacre in 1984, but both the New York Times and Washington Post had long since buried the story. Both reporters had to wait 10 years before a Times article read: “at least 794 people were killed, the bones have emerged as stark evidence that the claims of peasant survivors and the reports of a couple of American journalists were true.”

Today, not all nosy journalists are lucky enough to receive a full-scale attack by state and media interest groups. But perhaps the suppression of information, particularly dissenting opinion isn’t as Orwellian as before. Today a barrage of official sources, experts, and press releases dominates media coverage. Nowhere is this more acute than in embedded war journalism. Reports by Anderson Cooper and Christie Blatchford are still deemed as “from the front lines” albeit protected by our guns and from our perspective. Few doubt reports of military casualties because there is an official press release to accompany it. It’s the stickiness of civilian casualties that remains trepidatious ground for reporters. No case illustrates this better than El Mozote, where the U.S. supposedly found that no more than 300 people lived in El Mozote. So who counted the dead at El Mozote, and who was right?

Illiterate peasants presented the two reporters with a list of more than 700 names that they had gathered from relatives and friends. The Salvadoran government dismissed these body-counters as subversives. Do we count the dead as recorded by their families and community or do reporters have to wait for state confirmation? If political modernity entails the state’s monopoly on violence, then post-modern journalism is built upon a monopolization of information by state and official sources.

The coverage of El Mozote marks a truly lamentable era in reporting of human rights disasters. The continuation of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the slow slaughter of Palestinians demand independent investigations by reporters. The next generation of war reporters must move beyond official body counts and not be afraid to use civilian testimony. In the Salvadoran civil war the U.S. embassy counted casualties based on newspaper reports, while Human Rights Watch gathered their numbers from peasants, media, the church, and guerillas.

Scholar Mahmood Mamdani writes of the twentieth century’s wars: “although the magnitude of this violence is staggering, it does not surprise us.” Media reports detailing the most shocking atrocities may fail to surprise us, but, as El Mozote proves, they can still affect foreign policy.

Review: The Global Fight for Climate Justice

Derrick O’Keefe — 2009-10-29T19:45:22+00:00

“The world is accelerating towards a climate catastrophe, United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon warned yesterday, urging rapid progress in talks to cut greenhouse gas emissions and tackle global warming. ‘Our foot is stuck on the accelerator and we are heading towards an abyss,’ the UN Secre¬tary General said in a speech to the world climate conference.” Globe and Mail, Sept. 4, 2009.

This latest dire warning about global warning was buried in the bottom corner of page A9 of Canada’s “newspaper of record.” The front cover of that day’s paper featured a 30cm, full colour head-to-toe photograph of the First Lady with the accompanying headline, “Michelle Obama’s style secret sets its sights on Canada.” Just another day in the myopic world of this country’s mainstream media, which, like the rest of the globe’s political and economic elite, fiddles while the world burns.

Fortunately, in recent years, a new generation of social and environmental activists has begun to emerge to confront the climate emergency and its root causes. This summer, for instance, a delegation of indigenous people from Canada joined the climate camp in the UK and brought a crowd to Canada House in London’s Trafalgar Square, in order to highlight the destruction caused by Alberta’s tar sands.

Even the corporate media had to reluctantly report this bold action against “the biggest environmental crime on the planet,” as the activists accurately described the tar sands. There’s a great picture on CTV’s online news report of delegation members at the climate camp standing in front of a banner that reads, “Capitalism is crisis.” This is one indication of a growing trend — a “green left” — that views the struggle to save the planet as inextricably linked with the fight against global capitalism.

All those engaged in these vital efforts will benefit greatly from the publication of The Global Fight for Climate Justice, a collection of essays, statements and declarations edited by Ian Angus. Bringing together 46 “anti-capitalist responses to global warming and environmental destruction,” this is not leisurely reading. Ideally, in fact, it should be read collectively, in discussion groups or as background reading for a series of classes or forums. Contributors include Joel Kovel (Enemy of Nature) and John Bellamy Foster (The Ecological Revolution), who have both written extensively about the ecologically destructive essence of capitalism.

Anti-imperialist voices from the Global South are highlighted in their own section of the book, and a number of selections highlight the centrality of the new indigenous movements in the fight to save Mother Earth. Evo Morales, Bolivia’s indigenous president, offers an ecological “Ten Commandments,” while legendary Peruvian revolutionary Hugo Blanco challenges common notions of “progress.”

For some greens, no doubt, the idea of Fidel Castro the first contributor in the book — as an ecological leader will be entirely new. Sadly, the title of the Cuban leader’s 1992 speech to the Earth Summit in Rio, “Tomorrow Will Be Too Late,” is still apt.

We can mourn the years the locusts/capitalists have eaten, but we must also fight like hell for the future. This book will us fight more intelligently. It should be read, shared, discussed, and debated preferably on buses and trains en route to the next climate camp or rally for climate justice.

Review: Energy Security and Climate Change: A Canadian Primer

Terisa E. Turner — 2009-10-29T19:35:12+00:00

On 16 September 2009 some 25 Greenpeace activists from Canada, the USA and France shut down Shell’s 125,000 barrel per day Albion oil mining project an hour north of Fort McMurray in the Athabasca tar sands. While Green¬peace displayed a banner accusing Shell of climate crimes the petroleum transnational claimed that it was in the forefront of environmental stewardship and energy efficiency. For support Shell cited a 2007 study by Alberta’s Pembina Institute. The deep background to this confrontation at the world’s largest industrial project is richly excavated in Cy Gonick’s collection, Energy Security and Climate Change: A Canadian Primer. Not only are NAFTA-dictated oil and gas exports depleting Canadians’ scarce reserves, but the tar sands also account for half of the country’s Kyoto emissions gap and make serious emissions cuts impossible. The tar sands negatively impact water, forests, wildlife, the ways of life of indigenous peoples, and the viability of small farmers. And through pipelines, natural gas extraction, refining, combustion emissions, and land-fill, the tar sands affect everyone else.

Petr Cizek’s chapter exposes the co-optation of NGOs such as the Pembina Institute that are addicted to corporate money. Pembina’s economist Anielski falsely represented Canada’s boreal forests as significant carbon sinks whereas in fact they were net carbon emitters, “largely due to increases in forest fires and pest outbreaks, all related to global warming” Cizek suggests that Anielski’s “deceptive conclusion that the boreal forest is now absorbing carbon and not actually producing it” fits nicely with his claim that the carbon absorbed each year was worth $1.85 billion, “which could presumably be used to ‘offset’ carbon emissions from the tar sands.” Cizek adds that the Pembina Institute “just happens to make money selling “carbon offsets.” An employee of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, an environmental NGO, reported that the Canadian Boreal Initiative (funded by the 24.95 Suncor-Sunoco Pew Charitable Trusts’ series of shell operations including Ducks Unlimited in Nashville and its Winnipeg branch-plant) is “reviewing and vetting their draft press releases.”

A pattern of corporate co-optation helps to explaining why most ecology organizations are more conservative than are Canadian citizens. While Canada’s energy workers’ union supports “public interest ownership,” a Leger poll in 2005 showed “that 51 percent of Canadians with an opinion supported nationalizing the oil corporations, including 60 percent of the young” (Laxer). Gonick’s contributors explain this massive NGO-citizen divide as arising from the capture of the Alberta and federal governments by largely U.S. corporate power. As Warnock points out, Canadian energy policy “is the result of the overall political commitment of Canada to the support of the Anglo-American political alliance to dominate the world.”

The “Canadian primer” succeeds brilliantly in presenting historical and factual narratives of two ramifying realities of our time: climate chaos and the transition from carbon (oil, gas, coal) to solar energies. The authors challenge the obscenity of mainstream “help the polluters profit” discourse. Their 18 chapters are short, provocative, and ideal as tools in popular and student education. The primer addresses the reality of climate change and peak oil, the imminence of drowned cities, climate refugees, starvation, more intense resource wars, and the trickery of green capitalists and their funded NGOs such as the Natural Resource Defense Council and Ducks Unlimited. Beyond these crucial themes the reader is given a list of 12 time-buying steps to combat climate change and an endorsation of eco-socialism.

Digging for Gold, Mining Corruption

John Lasker — 2009-10-29T19:22:23+00:00

In the heart of Africa, did a Canadian mining company cut a deal with an infamous and violent African militia that played a major role in the Rwandan genocide of 1994? According to one expert of the militia, known as the “FDLR,” or the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda, the mining company has no other choice if it wants to safely dig up billions-of-dollars worth of gold for themselves and their investors.

The mining company with the fever for African gold is the Banro corporation of Toronto. It owns four mines relatively close to each other in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Specifically, the mines are located in the eastern DRC province of South Kivu, a rugged landscape of jungles, volcanoes, and millions of poor Congolese. Still in an exploratory stage, Banro believes that 10 million ounces could be extracted, and if gold stays around US$950 oz., that’s roughly $10 billion.

Now Banro is trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars via the Toronto Stock Exchange so they can begin mining this bonanza, calling it Africa’s last great gold deposit. Banro also boasts about the tax-breaks they’ve been given by a country the UN states is ranked 177th out of 179 on its Human Development Index, which measures life expectancy, annual GDP (in the case of the Congolese, $300 a year), literacy rate, and number of school-aged children being educated.

Banro’s Third World adventure is a familiar quest Canadian mining companies have undertaken during the last 20 years. Increasingly restricted by newly enacted environmental legislation in its own home¬land, a Canadian mining company leaves for a nation where the environmental laws are weak and the politician’s cheap. Funding for Banro’s African dig flows easily from the Toronto Stock Exchange. And like a lot of foreign labour, it is also dirt cheap in the eastern DRC—- where artisanal miners gladly work for just a few dollars a day.

According to CorpWatch.org, 60 percent of all the world’s mining companies are based in Canada, generating $50 billion a year for Canadians. “The Toronto Stock Exchange is the number one (generator) for mining capital in the world,” says Jamie Kneen of MiningWatch Canada, an Ottawa-based mining industry watch-dog group. Taking your operation overseas also saves your country from dealing with the mess: 20 tonnes of waste rock comes from the creation of one gold wedding ring.

But the story of Banro in the Congo has a twist. A risk actually, that some believe could turn into another African nightmare for all involved. The eastern regions of the DRC have been stricken by a decade-long “resource war” — a moniker that former Prime Minister Tony Blair and the UN has used to describe the conflict that has laid siege to the eastern DRC. This resource war has cooled of late, but the threads of peace and stability in the eastern DRC have always proven to be fragile. Thus the possibility of another western-based mining company taking billions of dollars right out from under the feet of the Congolese could create a spark that re-ignites this war.

In the late 1990s, so strong was the lure of eastern DRC gold, casserite, and coltan, that neighbouring countries of Uganda and Rwanda invaded with proxy militias and their own armies. In 2000, the Rwandan military and connected politicians, for instance, made $250 million moving coltan out of eastern DRC to Western-based mining companies and metal traders who then sold the resources to companies that manufactured parts for the likes of Sony and Motorola. Coltan, when processed becomes the powder tantalum, which is used in the making of capacitors — capacitors needed to make cell phones, video game consoles, and computers so valuable to western personal technology.

This conflict, waged in part so the West can have its personal electronics, cost the lives of three to five million Congolese and other Africans, according to many NGOs.

In the Neighbourhood

While Banro’s mines are not directly in the heart of where this resource war was waged the fiercest, their mines are awfully close. Indeed, one of the biggest players in the resource war was the FDLR, which owes its existence to illegal mining. According to FDLR-expert Hans Romkema, director of Conflict and Transition Consultancies of the Netherlands, each of Banro’s four mines are just a few miles from territory control¬led by the militia, which is an estimated 6,000 strong. Romkema has monitored the militia in-country on several expeditions. He says the FDLR, for the most part, is the only military and political force near Banro’s mines — a force that exploits natural resources, controls trade, collects taxes, and dominates the local population. The FDLR is composed of Rwandan Hutus who escaped into the neighbouring eastern forests of the DRC after the 1994 Rwandan genocide and alleged to have played a major role in murdering 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The FDLR aims to overthrow the current Rwandan government, but several FDLR leaders use the movement to protect themselves because they are wanted by the U.S. government and the International Criminal Tribune for crimes committed in 1994.

Romkema reported in 2007 that some Congolese civilians are undergoing military training so the FDLR can indoctrinate them as “Interahamwe” — those who committed genocide. Romkema believes Banro’s mines are too big and no militia “will have the guts to take control over one of those mines.” Thus no Canadian troops or any western-based private army will ever have to be flown into central Africa — hopefully. Over the past 12 months, Congolese and Rwandan government troops, along with UN Peace-keeping forces (there to enforce a peace treaty), have conducted numerous operations to oust the FDLR once and for all. The FDLR are clearly agitated, some fleeing toward Banro’s mines, reported the UN.

“There are widespread reports … of atrocities including accusations of murder, rape, and torture, on the part of the FDLR rebels,” said UN spokesperson Ron Redmond to the newswire Agence France-Press late last summer. Last May, the FDLR struck back, attacking a village in South Kivu killing 60 civilians and 30 government troops, according to the UN. On its website, the FDLR has denied any involvement.

The risk seems too great for any mining company to take the chance, but to hedge their bets, Banro may have no choice but to play “by the rules” of the eastern DRC, Romkema says. Meaning they will have to bribe or make some type of off-the-books agreement with both the Congolese government and whatever militia controls the territory their mine is located in, he says.

“In my view, Banro cannot work, neither in their (mines) without having had some contacts with the FDLR,” says Romkema. “Those contacts can have occurred through an intermediary. But somebody must have passed the message to leave the miners alone.”

Banro’s Martin Jones, a spokesperson from Toronto, refutes Romkema’s claim. “He’s not going to find any FDLR in the neighbourhood,” he said referring to the forests 20 to 40 miles south west of Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu, where one of Banro’s mines are. Three years ago an FDLR column passed nearby without incident, which prompts Jones to say the militia is not the concern the NGOs make them out to be.

Exposing the Mine

Nevertheless, the presence of another Canadian mining company near the killing fields of a past conflict waged so the West can have its technological toys raises a potent question: Can Banro reverse the deadly trend of resource-driven wars in Africa by putting millions back into a community which is also heavily employed by Banro?

Jones says Banro is not just interested in Congolese gold. They’ve invested into the area by building several schools, roads, and a potable water system for a region in desperate need of such infrastructure. They also said they will spend $13 million to relocate a small village of 750 Congolese, while also finding work for 800 Congolese miners who are digging “illegally,” as Banro says, near the same mine.

Romkema says if Banro operates in the same way other Western mining companies have in the past in the Congo — illegally and secretly moving resources out of the country and bribing corrupt DRC officials — “They’ll help to maintain the illegal networks that have characterized the DRC for so long and that entirely destroyed the Congolese State.” The FDLR has been part of illegal networks for many years, networks that usually end at Western-based metal brokers, such as Britain’s Afrimex, Bangkok’s Thaisacro, and Belgium’s Trademet, as uncovered earlier this year by Global Witness, a British-based NGO.

Calling out the Companies

When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled through the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) this summer, she railed against the sexual violence that has victimized Congolese women. She also lambasted corrupt DRC officials, calling for more government transparency and accountability. But something was inexplicably missing in her Congo roundtables, even though Congolese journalists tried to prod her about the issue. There was hardly any atonement for the Western-based mining companies and metal brokers who have helped fuel the DRC resource war of the last ten years.

“The future of Africa is up to the Africans. The future, ultimately, of the Congolese people is up to the Congolese people,” she said to journalists.

Someday that may hold to be true. But without question, the recent past of the Congolese was partially dictated by Western-based mining companies and metal brokers. A significant number of them are Canadian, as revealed by a 2001 UN investigation titled “The illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the DRC.” One of the Canadian companies named in the report was Banro while others included First Quantum Minerals and Tenke Mining Corporation, both based in Vancouver. Simply put, these Canadian mining companies and metal brokers are accused of stealing resources from a nation, its people and government, which were overwhelmed by war.

Plundering resources from a nation in the grip of war is in violation of OECD guidelines for multi-national corporations, a voluntary set of moral standards for working in another country established by the think-tank the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, based in France. But the Canadian government — like many Western governments — are not bound to enforce OECD guidelines.

“The U.S. government was one of the most determined to quash the UN Panel’s reports but this is also true of Canada, the UK and Belgium,” says Tricia Feeney, executive director of the London-based Rights and Accountability in Development or RAID. “All (companies) were exonerated. The UN Panel said the cases had been resolved.”

Just because the UN laid down, says Feeney, doesn’t mean the companies are innocent. “Essentially the UN was forced to drop the case but as they explained (in their reports), ‘resolved’ didn’t mean that the initial allegations were unsubstantiated,” she says. “The (U.S. and Canadian) companies have tried to hide behind the technicality of ‘resolved’ but the UN itself made clear that this classification didn’t mean that the companies had not behaved in the way described in the UN reports.”

Which way will the Canadian government look?

In Ottawa, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada keeps watch on homeland mining companies working overseas. Spokesperson Laura Dalby stated in an email they are closely monitoring Banro’s four mines using trade commissioners based in the DRC capital of Kinshasa. “Canada encourages and expects Banro Corporation to respect all laws and international standards, to operate responsibly, transparently, in full consultation with the DRC government and the local community in which they are conducting their operations,” she wrote.

What’s more, Banro continues to receive “full cooperation and support” from the DRC’s central and provincial governments, she stated. The department is hoping Banro finds a way to boost the eastern DRC out of its war-torn malaise.

“We hope to see positive outcomes as a result of Banro Corporation’s investments and Corporate Social Responsibility activities in the DRC. This is meant to drive forward the country’s industrialization and create new and income-earning opportunities for the fast-growing population,” she wrote.

Just four years ago, however, MiningWatch’s Jamie Kneen said the Canadian government essentially looked the other way following a massacre in which a Canadian mining company played arole. In October of 2004, Anvil Mining, the leading copper producer in the DRC, had to shut down production at their Dikulushi Mine when a so-called “rebellion” took place in a nearby village a rebellion of “10 to 12” villagers that had nothing to do with mining, said Kneen. Congolese Armed Forces (FARDC), of the DRC government, proceeded to seize the town, says Kneen, then went door-to-door “raping and pillaging.” Between 70 to 100 civilians were killed including women and children. Kneen said the DRC forces had Anvil’s “full cooperation.” Anvil claimed the DRC forces basically put a gun to their chest. Anvil nevertheless offered up trucks and logistics, says Kneen; trucks that transported troops and dead civilians.

In the aftermath, the Canadian government “refused to investigate because there’s no legal mechanism in place,” says Kneen.

In 2002, Toronto’s Barrick Gold, Canada’s biggest gold miner, was accused by NGOs of making mining agreements with two eastern DRC militias, which at the time were in the midst of murdering hundreds of civilians. In return for the mines, the militias were given housing and trucks, among other appeasements. When some of the rebels were apprehended by government forces, Barrick paid for their lawyers. In December of 2008, a Barrick Gold mine in Tanzania was overrun by hundreds of angry locals, ceasing production. Millions of dollars of damages was reported.

“If the people are not improving their lives as a result of the gold exploitation, it will be easy for rebel groups to recruit amongst the region’s youngsters,” Romkema says of Banro. “I never had the impression that the population (near Banro’s mines) is benefiting anything from the exploitation (or mining) of minerals.”

End Times in Copenhagen

Joel Kovel — 2009-10-29T19:03:40+00:00

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the upcoming December meetings at Copenhagen, Denmark, set up by the UN for the purpose of renegotiating the climate protocols set forth in Kyoto, in 1997 and due to expire in 2012. These latter were greeted with a certain modicum of hope and a small offsetting of skepticism. As Copenhagen looms, the skeptics have been proven right in spades, those who thought something good would come out of Kyoto stand revealed as fools or liars and charlatans. In the sober words of Nature from 2007, the Kyoto protocols, which demanded of wealthy countries that they reduce carbon emissions by 2012 to six-to-eight percent below 1990 levels, have “produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth.”

The reason we cannot afford to have the results of Copenhagen go the same way is known by many but taken seriously by few: The best science tells us there is a rapidly closing window for turning climate change around before irreversible positive feedback loops set in, e.g., methane freed from beneath melting tundra, or the loss of albedo reflectivity from seas once covered with ice. Once this sets in (it may already have begun), climate change, awful as it now is, will likely spiral rapidly downhill with consequences catastrophic beyond belief and comprehension.

And yet the numbers of those who do not take this brutal truth seriously include the main forces geared up for Copenhagen. You may, if you turn to the voluminous reports circulating on the internet and elsewhere, learn a great deal about what is planned for Copenhagen and the numberless players in its scenario. You will wear your eyes out and confuse yourself to distraction as you try to pick your way through the bulletins and pontifications of the experts who have been given their proverbial “seat at the table” that is being set in the lovely Danish capital. But you will not discover there any serious attention paid as to why Kyoto has so abysmally failed, nor indeed about the fundamental truth about climate change and the whole ecological crisis of which it is the most spectacular manifestation.

Class and Climate Change

Class forces palpably drive the crisis of climate change with the ruling class of capitalists, along with the capitalist state structures that regulate their world, responsible for the gathering nightmare. After all, the vast bulk of carbon spewed into the atmosphere is there because of decisions made by capitalists and not ordinary people. It follows that the climate crisis also introduces the profound question of the survivability of the dominant capitalist mode of production. We have been told of the “inconvenient truth,” as the largely forgotten Al Gore has put it, that rising atmospheric carbon threatens the survival of civilization. But who speaks of the much more inconvenient truth: that controlling carbon levels to the point where breakaway climate change can be arrested will almost certainly entail a structural contraction of the capitalist economy, which, as any student of capitalism knows, means the end of the capitalist system. Basically a simple choice looms: We can have either capitalism with no hope for the future, or get rid of capitalism and have a fighting chance for a future.

The global bourgeoisie understands this. They might not understand it consciously, but they know viscerally that the ecological crisis is their Armageddon, and this conditions their responses at meetings like Kyoto and Copenhagen. These do not fail because of stupidity but from existential reasons. Capitalism is the life-process of the bourgeoisie and profit is its blood; thus survival for the bourgeois means to pump profit through the arteries of society. The appeal of mechanisms like the cap-and-trade regimen that has ruled Kyoto and will most likely continue after Copenhagen is not that it solves the dilemmas of carbon accumulation. Indeed, it is essential to understand that capitalists do not want to solve the dilemma of carbon accumulation, because this would mean their suicide as a ruling class. Instead, they substitute what they know — the accumulation of capital, which is to say, its expansion — and, secure in their power, they delude themselves into thinking this can also solve the climate crisis. Cap and trade creates new commodities and markets for them, gardens where capital can grow. Trillions of dollars, we are told, await the financiers who will command these new markets: a blinding sun that completes the building of delusion. Thus the ruling class is quite willing to sacrifice nature, and therefore humanity itself, including, it might be added, their own children and grandchildren, so that their profits keep rolling in.

Where is our Turning Point?

And the rest of us? Are we going to accept this madness from the pundits, the officials and the police, panels and bureaucracies who represent capitalist reality? Are we going to petition our governments, as the liberal press urges us to do, bowing down to beg: “Please, my liege, be sensible, and slow down the rate of carbon accumulation … give us another generation before the hammer of nature descends.” Are we going to respect Barack Obama, who will be telling us with his pleasant demeanour and rhetorical skill, that compromising is the best we can do given the way the world is set up?

Or will Copenhagen be the great moment of refusal that the world has been waiting for? Will we take the opportunity afforded by the tenth anniversary of the Seattle uprisings to complete their work?

Plainly, these meetings will be a turning point. The question remains as to the direction taken, whether toward eco-catastrophe or hope for life. I do not think it will be possible to deal a fatal blow to the carbon system in this one place. Reality is not set up to accommodate fantasies of instant transformation. But we should do our best to non-violently impede the meetings so long as they serve capital. More important, it will be possible to use the moment to energize and begin to pull together the vast array of spontaneously emerging movements that have sprung up on every continent over the past decade, chiefly under the rubric of “climate justice.” We can build a “movement of movements” from below, harbingers of a transformed world: a movement to reveal the murderous betrayal of life by the capitalist class, and centered around the principle of keeping the sources of carbon in the ground as we build ecologically socialist way of production.

The system massed at Copenhagen will have its day. But the day after can belong to us all.

“You can’t fool the environment any of the time”

CD Editorial Collective — 2009-10-29T18:57:03+00:00

The climate change threat presents at least four unique difficulties. The time frame: Unlike other dire threats to human existence, such as nuclear war or military-industrial dictatorships, climate change has a finite time frame. Reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions cannot wait for innumerable agreements, accords, and conventions that minimize the problem, and it cannot wait for the entrenched wheels of bureaucracies to budge. The worst-case predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models are now being exceeded, leading the IPCC to establish that the maximum level of emissions should not go beyond 350 ppm. Emissions are now 390 ppm and government leaders are astonishingly talking as if 500+ppm is acceptable. The MIT Integrated Global Systems Model projects that warming will be double the previous estimates, in the range of 5.2 °C by 2100 leading to a possible 90 percent extinction.

Our Sick Planet

Climate change is occurring against an already diseased planet. Economic practices since at least the 1950s have privatized, polluted, and depleted irreplaceable fresh water supplies. Water scarcity indicates that private cars and the proliferation of electronic devices are not sustainable: It takes 400,000 litres of water to manufacture one car, and in the U.S. alone the computer industry produces over 300 billion litres of wastewater each year. The agro-industrial practices of mono crops, “green revolution,” and GMO’s destroy the irreplaceable topsoil, fungi, and insects that subserve our food supply. For a not yet determined reason, honey bees, necessary for fruit and vegetable production, are disappearing. De-regulation and trade policies favouring multinational corporations have almost eliminated Canada’s public grain and energy reserves. Multinational corporate forestry and agricultural practices result in unprecedented species extinction.

The Democratic Deficit concentrates power in an international oligarchy that now acts with complete impunity. The new rules of urban warfare, surveillance technology, and walled enclaves provide a model that will leave billions of people worldwide vulnerable to the premature death that comes with competition for food and water. Climate refugees do not have any rights or protections as they do not qualify as political refugees. Wealthy countries are insidiously buying up sizable amounts of fertile land in Africa.

The corporate university, and education in general, seduces students, researchers, faculty from their traditional role of critical research and reality testing. The psychological paradigms of behaviourism, North American psychiatry, and alternative self-help models further distract people from reality by defining stress, guilt, and malaise as unnecessary, undesirable states of being rather than as realistic reactions to the state of the world that requires action and engagement.

Emperor’s New Clothes

Unlike other threats of extinction (nuclear war, genocide, comets), there is almost uniform evasion of the threat posed by climate change. Even in highly critical and knowledgeable reports, there are statements about the end of civilization or of capitalism (such as in the articles by Joel Kovel and Keith Stewart in this issue of CD), but not of human existence. With all the evidence of the tar sands qualifying as a crime against humanity, there are calls at best for a temporary moratorium but not for an immediate and permanent cessation. This, despite the fact that scientists continually warn of an imminent, irreversible tipping point, a point of no return.

Environmentalism is lovely pastel shades of green and polar bears on ice caps, landscapes without people and clean technologies. This is a wild and irresponsible distortion. There is so much that is left out: that the military is the largest single consumer of oil, that it is acceptable to talk about reducing the birth rate in Africa but not of eliminating the private car (see Jeffrey Sachs), that the wealthiest 10 percent of Canadians create an ecological footprint 66 percent higher than the average Canadian household (not to mention the negligible per capita emissions of many developing countries), and, that outsourcing manufacturing to China and India should count as our emissions.

This is a call to acknowledge reality, to summon forth all the revolutionary zeal, energy, knowledge, rage against the dying of the light, in order to maintain a constant concern for all human beings, to save our species and our potentially beautiful planet.

Web exclusive: The wrongs of the immigration system!

A statement by No One Is Illegal - Toronto — 2009-10-25T19:56:11+00:00

Some believe that the Canadian immigration system is fair and generous. It isn’t. And Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney are swiftly making it even worse.

They are underhandedly taking apart the so-called ‘objective’ points-based system. They are moving quickly to get rid of its ‘humanitarian’ part, the refugee process. In its place, they are setting up temporary work programs that are designed to push most migrants in to vulnerable, precarious and temporary jobs without access to services or the ability to unionize.

In 2008, for the first time, more people arrived on exploitative temporary work programs than people with some access to permanent residency!

Major changes have been sneaked through a budget bill and other seemingly disconnected regulation announcements. Bill C-50 and Bill C-45 gave powers to immigration minister and officers to arbitrarily decide who can come in to Canada and who cannot. The family reunification program has been modified to actually deter reunification. Visas have been imposed on Czech Romas and Mexicans. Deportations have increased with moratoriums on return lifted for many countries. Only people in 38 professions can now immigrate to Canada - everyone else is banned. A new clause within the Temporary Foreign Worker manual means that migrants are permanently temporary, they can stay indefinitely in Canada without having to leave to renew their work permit but are unable to apply for permanent residency.

Kenney is bent on breaking the already dysfunctional refugee system. Refugee acceptance rates have dropped each year, halved in the last two decades. Now the Harper government is ‘revising’ this system. For the first time, Canada could fast-track rejections of refugee claimants from ‘safe’ countries. These ‘safe’ countries are mostly those which Canada has trade relations with. The proposed changes follow a months-long, carefully orchestrated xenophobic campaign, led by Kenney.

Even those granted citizenship are seemingly never fully recognized as Canadian. They are excluded and ignored in and by Canada. Maher Arar, Abou Soufian Abdelrazik and Suaad Haji Mahmood are three of the many citizens in whose torture and abuse Canada is complicit.

Canada champions itself as a beacon of progressive immigration and settlement policy as it moves towards a temporary immigration system. But, migrants of color earn 40% less than their white counterparts. In Toronto, the number of immigrants who are poor has grown by 125%, and almost 60% of poor families are from racialized groups. Immigrant neighborhoods are underserved and marginalized. Immigrant families have little access to recognition of credentials or good jobs, or to services such as affordable childcare.

Many immigrants sacrifice themselves and their aspirations for the betterment of their children. But often second and third-generation immigrants remain in exploitative jobs, pushed out of schools and universities, unable to fully access opportunities promised.

Even more than immigrants, temporary migrants like farm workers, live-in caregivers, construction workers, others, face exploitative and precarious work and living conditions. They pay taxes and build communities but are unable to access the most basic services. Migrant workers are not allowed to bring their families.

During the recession, attacks against migrants have greatly increased. In the last year, immigration enforcement has carried out large workplace raids and forcibly deported people. The enforcement arm of immigration targets non-status people that it considers most vulnerable - women at shelters and people at community gardens. These tactics push already vulnerable undocumented people into situations where they face greater risk and exploitation.

The changes to the Canadian immigration system are a violent continuation of exclusion of migrants. The present Canadian immigration system, set up by settlers on colonized land engages with migrants, mostly of color, only to exploit their labor. As we fight against the recent and coming regressive changes by Harper and his cronies, we must challenge the entire exclusionary basis of the immigration systems themselves.

Join the fightback!

-Visit nooneisillegal.org. Sign up at for the no one is illegal newsletter.

Find out more yourself!

About the refugee system:

Canadian Council for refugees website
Refugee board patronage appointees will follow political directives — The Harper Index
Bar condemns Conservatives’ treatment of refugee board by Cristin Schmitz — The Lawyesr Weekly

About Canadian mining companies and displacement:

Path of Destruction: Canadian Mining Companies Around the World — The a-info radio project

About poverty and racialization

Colours of Poverty — fact sheets

About workplace raids

Protests respond to Ontario immigration raids by Syed Hussan Kamal Chris Ramsaroop — Rabble.ca

About Jason Kenney’s lies

Jason Kenney’s Doublespeak Exposed:Tories Unleash Canada Border Services on Migrants — by S.K. Hussan and Mac Scott — The Socialist Project

About temporary work programs

Foreign workers exploited by temporary job plan: critics — The Edmonton Journal via Canada.com
Canada’s Temporary Immigration System by Kristyn Stevens — UNivrsity of Alberta law blog
Justica for Migrant Workers website

About changes to temporary work programs

Bill C-45 targets foreign exotic dancers, but could also affect caregivers by Carlito Pablo — Straight.com
OCASI deputation on changes to IRPA under Bill C-50 — Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants

About changes to the refugee act

Ottawa readies fast-tracking of refugee claims from ‘safe’ nations by Norma Greenaway — Canwest News Service

Obama, the Blockade against Cuba and Democratic Reform

Karine Walsh — 2009-10-25T19:49:46+00:00

As part of the Quebec Social Forum about fifty people gathered at Cégep (junior college) du Vieux Montréal to attend the conference in French “Obama, the Blockade against Cuba and Democratic Reform,” by Arnold August on behalf of the Table de concertation de solidarité Québec-Cuba. August is a journalist and author of “Democracy in Cuba and the 1997-98 Elections” and is currently working on a forthcoming book to be published in the fall of 2010 and entitled “Cuba: Participatory Democracy and Elections in the 21st Century “.

In April, as the Obama Administration was announcing some changes in Washington’s policy towards Cuba, he put forward preconditions to the lifting of the financial, economical and commercial blockade that the US government has applied against Cuba for 50 years. In doing so, Obama spread disinformation about Cuba, this requiring urgent rectification. August reminded the audience about Obama’s statement: “The Cubans are not free…It is important to send a signal that the issue of political prisoners, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and democracy [are] important ….” Obama had emphasized the need for grass-roots democracy in Cuba.

Even if the internationally recognized principles that all nations have the right to self-determination, non-interference and sovereignty, therefore excluding any other state such as the United States to judge the political system of Cuba, August tore apart in detail the accusation of democracy being absent in Cuba. He provided the audience with the reality in the socialist island and pointed out to Obama: “Grass-roots democracy in Cuba started way back after the Batista coup d’état in 1952, the fascist coup which put the military into power and that was immediately supported by the United States. The seeds of a grass-root movement were sown in 1953, as exemplified when Fidel Castro led a small group of revolutionaries to attack the Moncada Barracks. Grass-roots democracy developed even further in the period of 1956 to the end of 1958 where throughout the island, starting from the Sierra Maestra, the people gathered around the leadership of Fidel Castro and the revolutionary July 26 Movement, giving themselves political power on January 1st 1959. If Mr. Obama wants an example of the development of grass-roots democracy he should look at Cuba from 1953 to January 1, 1959 and everything that has happened since then. Therefore democratic reform in Cuba started, as far as the most recent period is concerned, in 1953.”

Since Obama gives himself the right to make judgments about the Cuban system, supposedly an undemocratic one, August thought it appropriate to remind the audience of the electoral fraud which first allowed the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and his re-election in 2004, courtesy of the Diebold computerized voting machines. In terms of freedom of expression, August related to the audience the misadventure of an American “twitter” who was arrested at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh in September for having warned the demonstrators of police movements and deployments. The lecturer also stressed the lack of importance that the mainstream media, namely CNN, gives to coverage of events since the military coup in Honduras last June 28. A complicit silence from them on the real causes of the opposition to President Zelaya and the lack of outrage at the repression and violence perpetrated by the military at the service of the coup government, testifies to the fact that the denunciation of human rights violation is far from being the real concern of the Western media.

In the case of so-called political prisoners in Cuba, August said that as far arbitrary and unfair detention is concerned, this issue rather points to the current case of the Five Cuban patriots imprisoned in the United States for fighting terrorism organized from Miami. For over 11 years, Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Labañino, Fernando González, René González and Antonio Guerrero have been deprived of their freedom for having gathered evidence against criminals now protected by the U.S. government and for having remained loyal to their socialist ideals.

In a comparing the current democratic situation in Cuba to the one existing before the 1959 triumph of the revolution, August recalled that before 1959 the media were largely controlled by the US-Cuban oligarchy; the ambassador of the United States was known to be the most influential man in Havana.

While a person in the audience expressed a desire to do something concrete in support of the Cuban people’s struggle against the blockade, August proposed to the participants a vote by applause in favour of a collective request in the form of an open letter to the president of the United States, Barack Obama. Following an enthusiastic response from everyone present, August was therefore mandated to submit this collective request to the new Nobel Prize winner and thereby offering him an opportunity to prove the sincerity of his promise for change in foreign policy.

Karine Walsh is a social justice activist and member of the Table de concertation de solidarité Québec-Cuba. She hosts a French-language radio show on Cuban reality called Dimension Cubaine on the Montreal community radio station Radio Centre-Ville (Quebec). This article was part of a speech at Arnold August’s conference at the Quebec Social Forum, October 10, 2009

Web Exclusive: Covert memories from Miami

Saul Landau — 2009-09-25T15:24:32+00:00

In Miami, several retired U.S. officials remembered the early 1960s, when the CIA sent hundreds of employees to join other government bureaucrats to process and recruit thousands of Cuban exiles to destroy the Cuban revolution. Assassination plans abounded, from poisoned cigars and wetsuits for Fidel Castro, to a sniper rifle smuggled in by his comrade to a sophisticated poison pill. The capsule’s designer imagined the pills dissolving in Fidel’s chocolate milkshake, which he drank regularly at the former Havana Hilton Hotel’s ice cream bar. These Hollywoodesque creations came from the CIA laboratory of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the Agency¹s ghoulish technology maven. Most of the plotters and erstwhile assassins of that era, like Gottlieb, have died.

One long-retired Air Force officer told me of his plan to undermine Fidel among Cuba’s guajiros (peasants). Given the shortages of consumer goods, it made sense to clandestinely drop tens of thousands of rolls of toilet paper on the island. On each leaf the guajiro would see a photo of Castro and Khrushchev together. “That would have given the guajiros a good laugh,” the perpetrator told me. “But the White House nixed it.” Perhaps Kennedy might have thought that if he approved such a prank, some joker in the U.S. could put the President’s and Bobby’s faces on toilet paper and sell the product throughout the United States; legal under the First Amendment.

Most Cubans who arrived in the days preceding what became the April 1961 Bay of Pigs ‘fiasco’ assumed the U.S. government would deal with Fidel and his communists. Washington had never allowed such flagrant disobedience to go unpunished. By the summer of 1960, the Cuban revolution had the gall to seize property belonging to the mighty oil companies (the Cuban government nationalized Texaco and Esso after they refused to refine Soviet crude oil on orders from Washington). Such defiant behavior challenged the essence of the Monroe Doctrine: ‘Latin America is ours.’

Few inside the hub of operations questioned the premises. “It was the height of the Cold War, after all,” several retired officials explained as if this statement summarized the justification for everything. The West faced a relentless enemy of great power and U.S. agencies had to stop its expansion. Indeed, most of the world would have agreed, at least, that Cuba informally belonged to the United States, no matter what most Cubans thought of that assessment.

The secret plots to overthrow the revolutionary government had become the world’s most open secret. Miami became Planning and Operations Center for the CIA’s largest station (JMWAVE). One man, now in his late 50s, told me how a CIA official — a Mr. Bishop — had recruited his father in 1959. Their family moved to Miami along with hundreds of thousands of Cuba’s rich, professional and propertied middle classes. His father worked from a two story building in Miami Beach, one of hundreds of CIA properties in the area. Nearby, ships from the CIA’s navy would dock, load up with provisions (arms and bombs) and set off to the Cuban coast to wreak havoc or just drop or pick-up agents whose job was to subvert the new government. “It was routine, every day and sometimes twice a day.”

“I thought the invasion would come in October of 1960,” he told me, “or at least that would be the start of some intense guerrilla war. Everyone speculated if a full-scale invasion would occur or if men would be sent to the Cuban mountains to do what Fidel did to Batista.”

Eisenhower had obvious misgivings about the plan and passed the ball to Kennedy, who then suffered the ignominious defeat. Publicly, he accepted responsibility (“Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan.”). Privately, however, he sought revenge: the overthrow of the Castro government. His brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, directed a war of terror against Cuba: assassination attempts and sabotage, propaganda and economic war against an island of 6 million people.

In December 1960, I was on a tour with a group of students going to Cuba. Arriving at the Miami airport, we learned the pilots of our Cubana plane (each hour Pan Am and Cubana flew to Havana) had defected. While waiting for a new crew to fly over from Havana, a ‘spontaneous demonstration’ erupted. Angry Cuban exiles screamed at the college students; some protestors threw punches and began to spit at the students. One asked a demonstrator: “If Cuba is so terrible, you should want us to go. Then we’ll return and tell lots of people how awful things are.” The protestor looked puzzled. He turned to the team leader and asked for instructions. “Don’t talk, just spit,” he sneered. It appropriately summed up U.S. policy for fifty years.

Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow and filmmaker (DVDs available through roundworldproductions.com)

Web Exclusive: Today, can we believe in change?

Arnold August — 2009-09-14T14:53:13+00:00

Eleven years ago today five young Cubans, Gerardo Hernández, Ramon Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, René Gonzalez and Fernando González, were arrested after infiltrating extreme right-wing Cuban American groups based in southern Florida in an attempt to prevent further terrorist attacks against the Cuban people. Tried in 2001 during a judicial process in Miami in the biased and threatening anti Cuban environment, they were condemned to harsh and disproportionate sentences.

Before and since your election to the presidency, you have travelled not only throughout the USA, but also to many countries in the world including Canada, vowing that your administration is in favour change. When it comes to international affairs, you put accent on the need to respect other countries and deal with other nations on an equal footing, rejecting human rights violations so characteristic of your predecessor. Your message has been and is that people can and should believe that this change is possible.

There are many ways for you to prove it.

Today, seeing as that it is an important but regrettable anniversary, I would like to draw your attention to the case of the Cuban Five. You have the constitutional power, and I would add the moral obligation, to free the Cuba Five right now. You have just recently eased restrictions for Cuban-Americans to visit their families on the island. If you really believe in family values, how can you refrain from exercising your prerogative to free the Cubans so that they can return to their families at home? By keeping the five innocent men in prison, you are insulting over 11 million Cubans who over this eleven-year period have grown to adopt the Cuban Five as part of their very own Cuban families. By maintaining their jailing, it is tantamount to imprisoning part of Cuban society right in US territory. How can you even hope to establish improved relations with Cuba while Washington is keeping an element of Cuba in US prisons? You know very well that this is a political case and that they are political prisoners whose freedom has been demanded by innumerable personalities, heads of states and international organizations from every continent.

You also know about Luis Posada Carriles. He is responsible for many crimes such as the terrorist attack on September 4th, 1997, in a Havana hotel. This caused the death of a young Italian-Canadian visitor to Cuba. At the time of his assassination, he was residing in my city, Montreal. His name is Fabio Di Celmo. The Cuban Five infiltrated the Miami-based terrorist group precisely in order to stop these types of actions. Fabio Di Celmo¹s assassin, Carriles, is today walking the streets of Miami with the protection of the US authorities. How can one explain this flagrant anomaly: anti-terrorists in prison, while terrorists are in liberty? If you really are interested in the people of the world believing that your administration is for change, there are many ways to prove this. Perhaps the most convincing way is to free the Cuban Five now.

Arnold August is a writer and member the Comité Fabio Di Celmo pour les 5 of the Table de concertation de solidarité Québec-Cuba and of the International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban Five.

Suffocated by the steel giant

Stan Gray — 2009-09-10T16:48:38+00:00

Tony Buttaro is a Hamilton steelworker who injured his back at work. He later became a supervisor who had compassion for his workers. Tony paid dearly for these two things. He ended up physically and mentally traumatized. The retirement he had long dreamed about was destroyed.

In 1968, 21-year-old Tony started working in the foundry at Dofasco, a major steel producer, non-union. He was injured four years later when lifting a heavy steel plate. Tony recalls experiencing an “explosive” pain across his lower back and hip. He immediately hit the ground, unable to breathe. He was off work for a while. When he returned, the pain was still there. The pain was constant and unremitting: it plagued him all day, every day and is still with him 37 years later. Spinal movements became stiff and difficult. Further workplace recurrences added to that distress.

Some time after the injury, Tony was given modified work as a janitor in Dofasco’s cleaning services department. He was later promoted to supervisor, and then to Department Foreman. John Tompa, a cleaner who worked under him at the time, told me that Tony was a “people person,” saying “he treated everyone with respect and dignity.”

But that was Tony’s problem. In the mid-1990s, the steel giant was eliminating many of its injured workers. The methods included on-the-job harassment, increased workloads, pressure to take severance packages, and outright firings.

The company often pushed injured employees to come back to work early, before they had properly recovered.

All this went on despite provincial laws that required employers to accommodate their injured workers. Many employers viewed accommodation as something that cost too much.

When workers get injured make them wish they were dead

Tony was told by higher management to give disabled employees work beyond their capabilities. He was also told to apply stress techniques to break them. At one point, the company compiled what Tony described as a “hit list” of injured workers targeted for termination.

Tony could not go along with this. He told the higher-ups that these practices were unsafe and could cause injuries. Tony was then demoted to shift foreman. In February 1995 he was taken out of supervision entirely because of a dispute over Dave, a worker who died on the job. Dave had a heart condition that was vulnerable to stress. When he fell to the floor one day a co-worker tried to resuscitate him, a technique he was familiar with. Dofasco’s job trainer stopped him, saying they had to wait for the medical department. When the medical department arrived, however, Dave could no longer be revived.

Tony came upon the scene as Dave died. Seeing that threw him into an emotional turmoil from which he never recovered. He asked for an investigation. Instead, management told him to cool the workers, who were upset about the incident. Tony wouldn’t do it. He kept pressing for an inquiry, but he was told to drop the matter. He became depressed and started having panic attacks. He imagined that he was lying on the shop floor, with managers standing over him, laughing. He went off on stress leave. When Tony returned, he was told he was no longer in supervision. He was told that he was not a “team player,” and that he should have got over the death of Dave.

Getting the shaft

I met Tony in May 1995 when he had just gone off. He asked me to help him with the company, whom he feared was about to fire him. For the next fourteen years I represented him at the compensation board and appeals tribunal, the labour board, and the human rights commission. I came to admire his understanding, his integrity, his compassion for people, and his sense of humour.

At the labour board, Tony got a partial remedy that gave him some job security protection. He kept on working as an hourly employee, writing up job procedures. He joined an activist group of Dofasco injured workers who had been fired or treated unfairly, called SHAFT. Later, he was part of a plant committee that tried to unionize Dofasco, which was unsuccessful.

Unfortunately, Tony reinjured his back in October 1999 when a company bus he was on jolted up and down on a curb. “My life ended that morning,” he said. He described his pain as like a knife going into his hips, going up his back and taking his breath away. He doesn’t know where the pain will “fire next.” It shoots 24 hours a day, every day.

Tony also injured his neck and his left knee while at work. As a result of all these accidents, he can no longer do what he used to do. He stopped the things he had enjoyed, including working the backyard at home, going out on the lake in his boat, walking the dog, and cooking. And he could not sleep properly. He became morose and irritable. He started seeing a psychiatrist.

Tony’s life was dominated by pain and disability. He spent a lot of time seeing doctors and attending pain treatment clinics. He received regular nerve blocks. He underwent surgery to relieve the pressure on his neck.

All of this helped, but only a little. At work, the pain gradually worsened over the course of the shift. He had to get up and walk around every ten minutes. His concentration faltered. By noon “I was done.”

The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) had never recognized Tony’s 1972 back injury as a permanent impairment. It denied him a wage loss pension for it. It belittled his other injuries. We appealed, and these matters eventually ended up at the highest appeals tribunal. Called the Workplace Safety and Insurance Appeals Tribunal (WSIAT), it is inde pendent of the lower level WSIB. The hearings went on for many days, spread over a three-year span. Dofasco hired a major Toronto law firm, expert in compensation, to fight the appeal.

Tony testified at the hearings, as did co-workers. One of whom Dofasco disciplined for submitting documents that contradicted the information provided by the company.

Eventually, the parties reached a settlement through the mediation of the three-member appeals panel. Tony’s back injury was recognized, going back to 1972, including later recurrences. He was granted an ongoing 100 percent wage loss award. The neck injury was not recognized because an accident while traveling to treatment on company time was deemed to be non-compensable.

As a result of the decision, Tony received over $200,000 in arrears, tax free, as well as a full monthly pension. That allowed him to retire from Dofasco, which he did in September 2003, with a good ongoing income. He looked forward to relaxing, at last. Everyone rejoiced.

There was a fascinating moment on one of the hearing days. Two members of the compensation board’s governing body sat in to learn what went on at the appeals tribunal. At the first break in the morning, the business representative came over to me. He said he was shocked to learn what had happened to Tony. He said that this kind of thing should never come to the appeals tribunal. The WSIB should have straightened it out at the start. He vowed to ensure that this would never happen again.

Money isn’t everything

But that was not to be. A few months after the decision, the compensation board whacked Tony again. It took away the wage loss pension he had won at the tribunal, citing a minor technicality. That move was completely illegal. Lower bodies cannot override higher appeals decisions.

Tony was stunned, “kicked in the teeth,” as he put it. His long-sought retirement was suddenly taken away. He had repaid loans and made expenditures for his family based on the wage loss pension he was awarded. Now, with that regular income gone, he found himself in debt that he could not repay. Tony’s earlier exhilaration turned into a nightmare. He went into a long and dark depression.

I complained and complained about the illegality of what the compensation board had done, to no avail. We ended up again at the appeals tribunal -three years later. The tribunal was shocked by what had happened. It ruled that Tony’s full wage loss pension had to be restored.

The pension was then restored, but the damage was done. Tony was now a broken man. He sits in his room all day, in severe pain, sad, and ruminating about all these events.

As Tony thinks about the past, he re-experiences the despair, anxiety, and anguish he suffered at the time. He has post-traumatic stress disorder, with regular flashbacks and nightmares. He dreams that hit men from Dofasco are chasing him. In some dreams he and his friends are killed, with blood splattered all over. He often dreams that he is tied down in a prison within Dofasco’s melt shop. Managers put him into the oven, whereupon he wakes up screaming.

In other dreams, injured workers are taken to the oven where their bodies are melted down. Tony is forced to watch, as the managers taunt him and laugh at him. Out on the street, Tony is always on the lookout for company cars he thinks are spying on him.

Tony is a different person than the one I met years ago. He says he has lost interest in everything. He looks down; his bounce is gone. He says his retirement is a living hell. Though he left six years ago, the steel mill won’t leave him alone. These events torment him day and night.

Just this year, Tony started to improve with the help of a new psychologist. He wants to pursue compensation for traumatic mental stress. Despite everything Tony has been through, the fighter in him is still alive.

Unfortunately, Tony’s experience is not unique. Everywhere the ugly corporate-government machine continues to grind down injured workers. With the current recession, it is doing that more easily, and more often.

This article appeared in the September/October 2009 issue of Canadian Dimension magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW to get a refreshing and provocative alternative delivered to your door 6 times a year for up to 50% off the newsstand price.

Israel’s critics will not be silenced!

Edwin Janzen — 2009-09-01T00:00:42+00:00

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” − Mahatma Gandhi

When public figures of the status of multiculturalism and immigration minister Jason Kenney and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff deem it prudent to attack Israeli Apartheid Week, a grassroots series of events organized every March on university campuses by a constellation of rag-tag student groups, we can say with fair certainty that the Palestine solidarity movement has arrived at the “fight” stage.

When the big guns are shooting at you, nervous airmen have observed, you’re probably flying right over the target. Consider the fact that top-level politicians are now taking time to remind us about things that used to be received as wisdom in these parts (Israel is good, Palestine activists are anti-Semitic kooks). Call me a nut, but our movement may be having an impact.

Let’s be more forthright: We are having an impact — principally, though not solely, owing to the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. The impact may even be larger than we can know. Writing in February in the Israeli publication, The Marker, economic correspondent Nehemia Strassler referred to a “concealed boycott,” wherein even companies not formally signed on to the BDS campaign might quietly drop their Israeli providers to steer clear of controversy. Typically, business people are more liable to avoid a stink than cause one, so the size of this “concealed boycott” could be significantly larger than the ledger of organizations actually signatory to BDS.

Economic-warfare-from-below may be non-violent, but it’s still warfare. “War is hell,” William Tecumseh Sherman observed. While violent warfare is the most hellish, non-violent warfare takes its own casualties. Today perhaps more than ever, as Palestine solidarity activists become more organized and successful, they are finding themselves targeted by Zionist individuals and organizations seeking to provide cover for Israeli aggression.

In March, for example, administrations at York University, Carleton University, and the University of Ottawa took public stands against IAW, banning posters and targeting activists. Despite such setbacks, IAW was a huge success, featuring well-attended lectures, packed film screenings, and respectful debates in thirteen cities across Canada.

Minister Kenney had better luck bullying the Canadian Arab Federation, announcing on March 14 that the organization would have to “adopt a more moderate stance or risk losing federal funding,” accusing it of promoting “hateful and extreme views” and apologizing for Hamas and Hezbollah. The media portrayed Kenney’s threats as a response to CAF president Khaled Mouammar’s description of the minister as a “professional whore who supports war.” While Mouammar’s comments were regrettable — if also, perhaps, not untrue — a more likely reason for Kenney’s threat is the CAF’s frequent criticism of Israeli apartheid and human-rights violations. On April 1, Honourable Justice Kelen of the Federal Court rejected the CAF’s request for an injunction, but also found that the minister probably “breached the duty of fairness” and that the CAF “may be entitled to commence an action for damages.” Go get ’em!

In 2007, media giant Canwest launched a lawsuit against activists Mordecai Briemberg, Gordon Murray and Carel Moiseiwitsch for publishing a parody of The Vancouver Sun intended to satirize Canwest’s pro-Israel bias. The Seriously Free Speech Committee was formed to defend the activists, and its campaign has received widespread support. Last year Canwest dropped its suit against Briemberg — who called it “a significant victory” — but the campaign is to continue until Canwest drops its suits against Murray and Moiseiwitsch, too.

Free Speech for Some, Hate Laws for Others Zionist organizations often employ the tactic of misapplying Canadian hate laws to criticism of Israel. This June, for example, the B’nai Brith took aim on a York University conference scheduled for late June, “Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace,” branding it a “virulent anti-Israel hate fest” and claiming that “several of the speakers are actively engaged in Holocaust denial, rationalize terrorism, and are infamous anti-Israel propagandists.” Minister of State (Science and Technology) Gary Goodyear took the B’nai Brith’s ball and ran with it, pressuring the conference’s main funder, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), to initiate a second peer-review process in hopes of slashing the conference budget. Thanks in part to a lively letter-writing campaign in support of free speech on campus, no second review took place, and the conference went forward without losing its support. Canadian Association of University Teachers executive Jim Turk has called for Minister Goodyear’s resignation, citing his “direct political interference in a funding decision made through an independent, peer reviewed process.”

Artists critical of Israel often become targets of Zionist free-speech opponents. Take Caryl Churchill’s play, Seven Jewish Children, billed as “a ten-minute history of Israel, ending with the bombing of Gaza.” Despite a storm of controversy ignited by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland, representatives of London’s Royal Court Theatre resolutely defended the play, which debuted on February 10. Churchill allows anyone who wishes to perform the play to do so for free. You can watch the play on YouTube.

Being Jewish won’t protect you from the pro-Israel gang, as artist Reena Katz found out when Toronto’s Koffler Centre of the Arts earlier this year announced it was “disassociating” itself from her work, each hand as they are called, part of a group show called Wrecking Ball. The show went forward — contracts had been signed — but the Koffler’s announcement was generally considered a blackballing. Some of the other artists in the show, including Ed Pien, Gwen McGregor, Sharon Switzer, and Yvonne Singer, boycotted the June 18 opening in solidarity with Katz. The Koffler’s decision also raised questions about what constitutes proper conduct for an institution that receives annual public funds of more than $100,000. “We’re taking it very seriously,” Claire Hopkinson, the Toronto Arts Council’s executive director, told the Toronto Star.

Another move often played by Zionist activists is the “liberal card.” This July, for example, B’nai Brith executive vice-president Frank Dimant applied pressure to Pride Toronto, seeking to get the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid banned from Pride events. In a media statement, Dimant contrasted gay rights in Israel with the lack of such rights in Arab countries. One might therefore assume that Dimant would approve of this year’s parade grand marshal being a progressive Muslim; but El-Farouk Khaki, a refugee lawyer, found himself in B’nai Brith’s line of fire, described in Dimant’s statement as “part and parcel of the anti-Israel machinery that continues to churn out hateful and divisive propaganda.” Happily, Dimant’s gambit was a failure, as more than 200 QuAIA members marched in the parade.

This list could go on much longer, space permitting. Let us therefore end with the case of Dimension’s own Lesley Hughes, whose Liberal Party candidacy in the last federal election was cancelled by then-leader Stéphane Dion after representatives of the B’nai Brith and the Canadian Jewish Council persuaded him that Hughes was anti-Semitic and not fit for public office. But what goes around comes around: both organizations and four of their senior members — together with Tory MP Peter Kent, who said in a media release that Hughes held “extreme, anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories” — have been named in a lawsuit filed by Hughes.

Indeed, today is a good day for hope. We have a long way to go before we reach Gandhi’s “Then you win” stage, but we’re winning as many as we’re losing, and that’s a substantial improvement on past conditions. Here’s the next fight for Canadian activists: A coalition of Canadian MPs, with representation from all major parties and led by Kenney and Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, is pushing for legislation to criminalize criticism of Israel by equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Israel’s recent massacres in Gaza precipitated worldwide condemnation and boycott of Israel as never before, and Zionists around the world will try to put that genie back in the bottle. It is up to us to stop them — not only for our own sakes as Palestine solidarity activists, and not only for Palestinians, but for Israelis, too, and for anyone in the world who loves justice and freedom.

Addendum

Since this article was published a few days ago, two prominent examples emerged that we believe continue this discussion.

Joining the BDS campaign, Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, has voluntarily removed this film from the Toronto International Film Festival. You can see the rationale in his official statement located here (PDF).

Alternatively, his film can be streamed on Vimeo for the duration of the festival at this link.

The second example is York Professor David Noble and his upcoming public hearing on the reprisals he endured as a result of a successful campaign questioning the practice of canceling classes for all students during Jewish religious holidays.

His public statement can be read here.

Economics For Everyone

Simon Black — 2009-08-26T20:36:35+00:00

On the cover of Jim Stanford’s book Economics For Everyone there is a blurb by Naomi Klein that reads, “Stanford is that rare breed: the teacher who changed your life. He has written a book — both pragmatic and idealistic — with the power to change the world.” Anyone who scoffs at Klein’s description is not familiar with the work of Jim Stanford. For Stanford is anything but a dismal scientist: in his economic writing he makes clear complex concepts and processes, cuts through the ideology of the ruling class and their servants in the economics profession, and empowers the everyday people upon whose labour our economy rests. And he does this mercurially through a variety of mediums, whether in his column for The Globe and Mail, appearing on CBC television and radio, or in his work for the Canadian Auto Workers union. He’s Canada’s answer to American public intellectuals such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz — only more radical — and indeed our most formidable political economist since John Kenneth Galbraith migrated south so many years ago.

It’s only fitting then that Stanford would undertake the sorely needed task of writing a popular introduction to modern capitalism. Such books face a dilemma: do they provide a thorough but lengthy guide to the subject or risk dumbing down the material in the cause of accessibility? To his credit, Stanford has written an accessible but methodical introduction to the economics of capitalism which explicates the subject from the ground up, beginning with a discussion of the basics (work, tools, and profit) to the complexity of globalization, financial markets, and the causes behind the peaks and troughs of our volatile economic system. The book’s conclusion, A Dozen Big Things To Remember About Economics, is an excellent capstone which lays bare the absurdity of neoclassical economics. The witty illustrations of Tony Biddle that accompany Stanford’s text make the most serious and demanding subject matter a little more bearable.

Socialists might be somewhat disappointed with the space that Stanford devotes to a discussion of alternatives, but the absence of a blueprint for a democratically controlled socialist economy is less a comment on the author than it is on the current impasse of socialist politics and thought. With the current economic crisis, the book may be in need of a second edition. While the imbalance between the real productive economy and the speculative paper economy that has been a theme of Stanford’s work for years gets decent treatment, Economics For Everyone was published just prior to the global meltdown of the capitalist economy. However, a great addition to the book is the accompanying website (www.economicsforeveryone.ca) which contains lesson plans for educators, including a sample course outline, lecture slides, and a comprehensive glossary of terms. While the lesson plan section of the site is not complete, it is due to be finished in the near future.

All in all, Economics For Everyone is an invaluable book and a necessary addition to the library of popular educators, trade unionists, activists, or any person trying to make sense of the conundrum that is modern capitalism. And as Stanford makes clear, the first step to transforming the system is knowing how it works and for whom. To this end, Economics For Everyone has made a vital contribution.

Canada’s 1960s

Henry Heller — 2009-08-26T20:31:49+00:00

Canada in the 1960s was deeply affected by the civil rights and anti-war struggles in the United States. It was likewise caught up in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements that swept the world. But in this new and commanding work, Bryan Palmer demonstrates that Canada had its own 1960s which left a deep mark on our history. At the beginning of that decade the ideology of British imperialism or the colonial-settler mentality of Canada’s ruling class and its most powerful ethnic group was still in place. The upheavals of the 1960s led to its collapse. Nothing emerged to replace it.

The Tory prairie populist John Diefenbaker was in power as the decade opened. Diefenbaker’s government was undermined by a crisis of the Canadian dollar, the fiasco of the Avro Arrow, and the Bomarc missile affair — all three of which revealed the growing influence of the United States and the waning of the British connection. The “No sex, please, we’re British” posture was shaken by the scandal of the Gerda Muntziger affair that marked the beginning of the end of the Diefenbaker government. Palmer masterfully uses the ludicrous cause célèbre of the German “adventuress” Muntziger and the doomed career of the great Canadian white hope, the Croatian heavyweight boxer George Chuvalo, to suggest how increasingly difficult it was to uphold the straight-face of the traditional British imperial ideology in the face of an influx of millions of new immigrants into Canadian society in pursuit of different agendas.

Sex reared its head in the body politic in the Muntziger case. It came nakedly into the open in the selling of Pierre Elliot Trudeau as Liberal leader and prime minister of Canada. Trudeau’s renewed federalism and bilingualism, it was hoped, could contain Québec separatism and provide a new integrating national ideology in the face of a waning British imperialism. Lessons in creating the Trudeau image were taken from the master intellectual spinmaster of the decade, Canada’s Marshall Mcluhan, with his notions of “the medium is the Mussolini.”

But Liberal/liberal offerings of sex, maple leaf flags, Expos, and the opportunity of bilingual conversation could not hold back a rising tide of discontent among youth, workers, women, Québec nationalists, and Aboriginals. Establishment unease over juvenile delinquency gave way to panic as youth hi-jinks and discontent came to focus around more and more riotous annual outbursts against that most British and imperial of holidays, Victoria Day, in both Ontario and Québec but especially in the latter. From the early sixties youth rebellion increasingly assumed political and cultural forms. By 1967-68 nihilistic rioting was transformed into be-ins, sit-ins, and love-ins in the quest for new forms of identity which challenged that ancient British convention-the Puritan work ethic.

Young male workers, chafing like the rest of youth at the bit of authority, led the way in a rash of wildcat strikes in the years 1964-66. The target of this labour unrest was not merely management and government but a labour bureaucracy which had been co-opted into the Keynesian compromises of the 1950s. Unrest in the labour sector merged with militant nationalism in Québec. It issued in a series of nationalist breakaways from the old-guard internationals in both Québec and English Canada which were under American control.

The new Left, which took form in English Canada by the mid-sixties, was at first not discernibly different from its American counterparts-participatory politics, grassroots organizing, and anti-war and pro-civil rights campaigning. Palmer emphasizes that it is impossible to capture the great diversity of this movement as it evolved in the late 1960s. Nonetheless three themes capture his attention: Marxism, left nationalism, and feminism. The late sixties and early seventies witnessed a mind-boggling explosion of Marxist-Leninist political parties whose very divisions embodied the fundamentally anarchist spirit of the times. The siege of Concordia University and the Simon Fraser University political economy department marked high points of revolutionary-inspired conflict. As understanding of Marxism deepened, anti-imperialism fuelled a left nationalism that found an echo in Canadian society at large, gave rise to the Waffle, and led to a flirtation of some of this left with such hardened fundamentalist nationalists like George Grant and Robin Matthews.

The profound thought that lies behind this narrative, its immense range and the ability of the author to give the narrative form merit high praise. The depth of research and Palmer’s deep sense of Canadian history will make this Marxist text the basis of all further work on the period.

Yet Palmer’s discussion of feminism is somewhat thin and his treatment of gays and lesbians and the ecological movement virtually non-existent. Perhaps Palmer felt that they were matter which only came to the fore in the following decade-the period of single issues and identity politics. In any case it would have been helpful to trace the roots of Canadian feminism back to the suffrage movement, Communist Party front groups, and the Voice of Women. He singles out the theorizing of Margaret Benston as an important Canadian contribution to the development of feminist theory as well as initiatives on behalf of birth control and abortion rights. One wonders at which point the ongoing and critical issue of childcare began to take form in Canada.

Palmer’s brings his work to a conclusion with two eloquent and stunning chapters on radical nationalism in Québec and the rise of Red Power. In both cases he traces the roots of these movements far back revealing both the historical depth of oppression and the ferocity of the resistance that surfaced in the sixties. Radical nationalism struck deep root in the Québec working class beyond the power of the Canadian state under Trudeau to deflect. Faced with apprehended insurrection in the October Crisis of 1970 it was forced to repress what it could not politically bring under control. With this body-blow by the state, the radicalism of the sixties lost its breath. Meanwhile the crystallization of Aboriginal consciousness that occurred at the same moment swept aside Trudeau’s attempts to find a “liberal” solution to the Aboriginal “problem” and went on to gel into an increasingly successful protracted war against the state and capitalist exploitation of the landmass of Canada. In his conclusion Palmer shows that liberal attempts to repair the ideological dismantling of the 1960s remain unconvincing and ring hollow. According to him, “We live, to this day, in the infinitely creative and politically destabilizing wreckage of a period in Canada’s past that brought down with decisive finality what needed dismantling.”

Media as Insurgent Art

Chris Webb — 2009-08-26T19:59:45+00:00

Of Pirates, Pixels, and Politics

In the May issue of Wired Magazine, writer Kevin Kelly argues that the global dispersal of free information and the mushrooming world of open-source software constitutes a New-Socialism. This “global collectivist society,” he claims, “is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government — for now.” While it’s easy to scoff at Kelly’s claims — socialism still asks who owns production — it is indisputable that revolutions in communication and technological tissue are quickly redefining the space and sites of global protest.

While Twitter and Facebook were a definite boon for Iranian protestors, this technology has a dark side. Despite Kelly’s assertions of cyber-people’s power, tech-empires are still in the hands of the privileged few. The Wall Street Journal reported that European telecommunications companies Siemens AG and Nokia helped the Iranian government develop one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms to monitor and control communications on the internet. Media reform group Free Press warns the same technology was widely used by the Bush administration in their domestic surveillance program and is widely used to round up dissident bloggers in China.

In the election aftermath, Iranian solidarity flooded Twitter and Facebook with pro-Moussavi green profile pages and activists spamming Iranian censors with synchronized subversive messages. But support also came from an unlikely source: pirates. File sharing swashbucklers ThePirateBay.com launched an online network in support of Iranian election critics allowing users to dodge the regime’s censors. Their site, iran.whyweprotest.net, allows “a secure and reliable way of communication for Iranians and friends” and directs users to an anonymity system, which can be used to hide their internet locations. “Even if a ballot is silenced, the voice behind it cannot be,” the site said.

But is there is a danger in placing the medium before the message? Is Iran’s political upheaval thanks to a “Twitter revolution” or old-school political consciousness? In 1944 German sociologists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued “the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself.”

Are Facebook and Twitter responsible for de-politicizing struggles into online quarrels instead of real shows of political power? Adorno and Horkeimer were writing at a time when media gatekeepers were the Ayatollahs of information. Their analysis that “the producers are expert” still applies to monopoly media empires and their talking heads. But with Web 2.0, production has changed hands. Individuals and collectives are not only creating content, they are seizing productive methods by creating their own software and daring to share it. If this is a form of socialism, then we are missing a valuable opportunity if we don’t fully engage with it and shape it toward real political goals.

Soderbergh’s Che: Homeland or Boredom

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Starring Benicio Del Toro

I had high hopes for this film. Not just because I thought it would be the Oceans 11 of revolutionary cinema, but because it would be a nice follow-up to the beautiful Che biopic The Motorcycle Diaries. What Che parts 1&2 lacks in cinematic creativity and political context it makes up for in detailed historical accuracy — although at 4.5 hours it’s detail et nausea. Part one takes us back to 1959 Cuba and the revolutionary war waged from the Sierra Maestra. The seizing of towns and villages; the distribution of land amongst the peasantry; and Che’s revolutionary discipline make part one an enjoyable overview of the struggles of urban guerrilla warfare and muddy comradely heroism. Che’s myriad roles as doctor, instructor, and soldier are interspersed with a flash-forward to his legendary 1964 UN speech. Unfortunately, this is the only creative use of cinematography in the film, and it is only in these sparse frames that we learn of Che’s anti-imperialism and world-view.

After taking Havana — and a fifteen-minute intermission for the audience — a disguised Che takes off for Bolivia. Is he trying to remake a Cuban style revolution there? Is he acting as an agent of Soviet expansionism? Why doesn’t he have support of the Bolivian Communist Party? None of these questions are fully addressed and we’re left wandering with a bag of vagabonds through the Bolivian bush. I won’t bother with any more plot-details, but suffice it to say Che’s tragic end is made worse by a half-hour scene detailing every bullet fired and every grunt emitted. Ultimately this film fell flat artistically and politically. I despise Che-worship, and this film only reinforces it by skipping over the political, emotional, family man Che and framing him as a heroic, scraggly, guerrilla god. The film exists in a political context where Che is a commodity and his ideas are considered laughable by most. What we need to take from Che isn’t the “inspiration” or “revolution” peddled by liberal-hippies, but the need to once again engage with dangerous ideas.

Toronto Labour Council Organizes Stewards’ Assembly

Herman Rosenfeld — 2009-08-26T19:54:09+00:00

In an environment where working people in Ontario have suffered major setbacks, organized labour’s response has so far been disappointing. Until the current round of public sector strikes, aside from a few workplace occupations demanding severance and demonstrations calling for pension protection and EI changes — there has been little resistance.

The May 7th coming together of over 1,600 stewards, workplace representatives, staff, and other union reps in Toronto around the necessity of fighting against attacks by employers and governments was an unprecedented and impressive exception that brought some hope for forward motion. It was organized by the Toronto Labour Council led by President John Cartwright. The meeting brought together a mix of workplace representatives from public and private sector unions from across all of the different factions within the labour movement. It was the first such meeting in living memory and was the result of an impressive organizing effort.

This was the latest in a series of projects by the Cartwright leadership of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council. Previous efforts included the electoral project to tilt the balance of the Toronto Board of Education in favour of those who wanted to challenge the Conservative Provincial government; a movement to raise the minimum wage — and engage different communities as well as unions in the process; fighting against water privatization; arguing for local sourcing rules for the city government; the more recent Good Jobs Coalition project and the ongoing support of labour struggles.

The meeting aimed, as Cartwright noted, to “reach deeply down into the labour movement and engage the true-front-line activists that are our stewards.” It’s important to note that rank and file leaders aren’t necessarily politically engaged. Efforts to involve them in larger struggles are extremely difficult but absolutely essential to building a response to the crisis. As an introduction to the crisis and the necessity of fighting back, this meeting was very important.

While most of those who attended the meeting felt extremely good about the experience (including me), the jury is still out on whether or not the assembly will actually contribute to developing the mobilizational capacity of the union movement, stimulating a larger movement to resist attacks by business and governments, building support for the current round of public sector struggles and challenging the ideological assault being waged against the rights of unions and working people.

The Meeting

The actual assembly covered a number of areas: a presentation on the origins and causes of the crisis; a series of testimonials from the floor by participants from different key union struggles in Toronto over the past few years and from individuals victimized by outsourcing, workplace closures, racism, and concession demands; speeches by CLC President Ken Georgetti, John Cartwright, Winnie Ng (a leader in the Good Jobs Coalition) among others; a short period set aside for small group discussions; speeches by leaders of major union affiliates pledging their collective resistance to the crisis measure of governments and employers; and a “surprise” visit by Toronto Mayor David Miller.

The assembly came away with a commitment to build support for EI reforms and pensions associated with the Canadian Labour Congress campaigns. It ended with a request that the stewards go back to their workplaces, circulate, and discuss the EI petition and mobilize for upcoming political actions demanding reforms.

What Did it Accomplish — and What Will it Contribute?

Walking out of the session, I couldn’t help but feel good about the potential there and hoped that it would be the beginning of an ongoing movement. But events that have unfolded in the three months since the assembly — raise a number of further issues and questions.

There were important limitations of the meeting:

Rather than being an actual assembly, with open discussion, debate, and space for the stewards to initiate points and ideas, it felt more like a process of conveying information. In order to encourage the creation of an ongoing Stewards’ Movement, a living, more participatory process is necessary.
The close ties to Mayor Miller, and the constant references to NDP politicians, showed that the politics of the assembly was confined within the “legitimate” institutional parameters of the labour movement. While some NDP politicians did play a positive role in the Minimum Wage Campaign, the party as a whole has notably failed to lead on even such basic campaigns as EI reform and has been absent from any discussions on alternatives during the crisis. Miller’s address to the assembly reflected the wide “popular front” like platform that has dominated labour politics in Toronto in the current period. This alliance has meant a modest political program that rests on lower business taxes and co-operation between labour and private investors. There was little mention of any vision of a different way of creating jobs and shaping investment, or the need for a political movement that might articulate such a vision.
Even the critique of the financial sector was limited to complaints about speculation and excess profits — rather than a real explanation about the way finance affects jobs, investment, and communities. We need to avoid one-dimensional populism that poses the problem as being “monopolies or financial speculators against the people,” pulling the movement into an alliance with industrial capitalists. The problem of that type of approach is all too evident in the auto sector. There was no mention of demands to control and shape investment through reforms such as nationalizing the banks.

Even more, the assembly begs another set of questions, based upon its success:

If the Toronto Labour Council was able to organize a Stewards’ Assembly, is this happening in other cities across Canada? If not, why isn’t it?
The CLC campaigns remains tied to uninspired and relatively ineffective forms of action. Since the assembly in May, there has been one demonstration in Toronto demanding action on EI reform and pension protection. The turnout was disappointing and wasn’t followed up (or preceded) by more militant actions, such as occupations of EI offices. Where will this campaign go?
Will there be any follow-up with this first effort to bring stewards together from across the city or was this a one-off activity? If there are plans to do it again and build on this initial assembly, what forms might that take?
Will there be efforts to build networks of resistance and solidarity between groups of stewards across the city? Are there plans to produce materials to help stewards explain the crisis to their co-workers and argue for new forms of collective resistance, led by stewards within workplaces?
Are there plans to discuss ways of uniting workplace representative with workers in communities and those not unionized who are also looking for ways to extend and deepen their struggles?

The Toronto Labour Council has taken the lead in a number of areas over the past few years. Once again, in the current context, the Stewards’ Assembly can represent an important counterweight to the defensiveness of Ontario’s labour movement. But the Council operates within the constraints of the official union structures, limited to a certain extent by the conservatism of the leadership of the affiliates and the political and economic structures of the city — even as it works to stretch the boundaries of those limitations.

In this instance, the Stewards’ Assembly needs to become a springboard towards a larger and broader effort to educate and mobilize workers across Toronto in resisting current attacks and developing political approaches independent of business-dominated projects that currently dominate the agenda.