Canadian Dimension Feed

Alert! Episode 133

2009-11-05T00:12:21+00:00

The Pembina Institute defends its GHG emission plan in response to Federal environmental minister Jim Prentice. Why ending drug prohibition works to reduce addiction and drug crime with Jack Coles, president of LEAP. UC Berkley students revolt against California tuition hikes and cutbacks. MItch Podolak with ‘Music is the Weapon’.

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.

Unholy Alliance? Conservatives and Ultra-leftists unite against CFS?

Brian Latour — 2009-10-30T05:32:18+00:00

Recently, (as always) there has been much hullabaloo about the Canadian Federation of Students in the student media, as well as the usual suspects over at Macleans (here’s hoping the National Post somehow takes Macleans down with it). It’s mostly the usual stuff regarding disaffiliation campaigns, but with a twist this time. The interesting thing is that it doesn’t seem like it is just Tiny Tories anymore. A website titled Dear CFS appears to be run by a section of the Montreal radical left which is opposed to the CFS and actively working for disaffiliation campaigns. Signatoried to the letter include Yves Engler, author of The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy. As someone who identifies as an anarchist (anarcho-syndicalist if you want to get picky) and proudly carries my red card, yet is also active in my CFS-affiliated student union (to the point where I sometimes catch myself referring to it as “Local 103”), I find this interesting. I’m not sure I’m qualified to speak about all of their concerns because my experience with the student movement and the CFS is limited to the colonial backwater of Manitoba, but I think there are a few things which should be addressed here.

First, the CFS is far from perfect. Student union bureaucrats, especially at universities which have an active right, a history of right-wing governance, or a hostile student media, often fear conflict which could threaten the prospects of the re-election of a “progressive” slate and the self-preservation of any sort of official progressive politics at a university. They think that everyone is out to get them and to some extent they are right, as evidenced by the exposure of Tiny Tory plots over the years. However, this understandable paranoia can cause sections of the bureaucracy to start to become insular and bureaucratic, which results in some of the issues that we see in our student unions.

Also, despite what it says on my hoodie, there is a difference between the CFS and a student movement. The CFS is a bureaucratic (meant without any negative connotations) mass membership organization, somewhat analogous to a labour unions, with elected positions, an office, a big (by activist standards) budget, and a lobbying machine. While a student movement, where one has any presence, is a grassroots movement of students organizing in their spare time with every student an organizer – think SDS, or the Palestinian solidarity movement on campus. And as we all can figure out, a bureaucracy detached from a movement inevitably results in all sorts of issues. And perhaps the praxis of the CFS does need a lot of work. This is an organization that needs more organization at the bottom and to move a little from the liberal politics of awareness to the radical politics of disruption and fucking shit up.

All that said, there are things in this supposedly left critique which seriously need to be addressed.

The CFS has alienated real activists by highjacking our campaigns, stamping glossy brands on our hard work, and attracting bad press across the country. So here’s the truth. The real student movement can’t be put on a pin or a sticker, can’t be sold to us in a bus ad, and can’t hide behind superficial and obsolete rhetoric. The CFS has been a driving force behind the active and ongoing co-optation of legitimate social justice organizing for too long.

I haven’t really seen this happening. From “Drop Fees” to “No Means No” to “Target Poverty”, it seems as though rather than hijacking campaigns, the CFS is at the forefront of creating and pushing campaigns. I don’t think the CFS attracts bad press to external campaigns it signs on to, if anything, it grants them a bit of legitimacy, resources and muscle, and may generate some positive publicity or an increase in support for the issues on campus. In Manitoba, instead of attempting to co-opt social justice organizing, the CFS and local student unions are the only mass membership organizations really making an effort to mobilize their members or even lend some bureaucratic support for any sort of campaign these days (oh, the perils of having a “friendly government”). This might be different over in Montreal, but in my experience, I have seen the CFS take part in campaigns, but I have never seen them attempt to co-opt them.

sell shamelessly corporate CFS-Services contracts to our unions behind closed doors

As for CFS-Services, I don’t see any problem with student-run services, especially under the model they have with CFS-Services as a legally seperate branch of the CFS. In fact, I would say that students do benefit from some of these services, especially bulk buying and economies of scale. Incidentally, if I am not mistaken, all of the t-shirts ordered by the CFS or by individual student unions through their bulk buying programs are made by a worker co-op of single mothers in El Salvador – hardly the corporate behemoth that CFS-Services is portrayed as.

Moreover, we consider the adoption of progressive campaigns by the CFS deeply problematic regardless of whether or not we agree with their stance. The reason is simple: the CFS has a clear mandate to provide a voice for all students–on student issues–at the federal level, and no matter what we think about Palestine, copyright, gender, Cuba, abortion, or land claims it is unrepresentative to speak for all students on such divisive issues. Some of us have dedicated our lives to these causes, but it’s inappropriate for a federal lobby organization to adopt these campaigns while matters of urgent importance to all students (rising tuition, accessibility, corporate control of university bodies, declining subsidies) go completely untouched.”

Why should this be “deeply problematic”? First off, there are more to “student issues” than just the ones which are seen as directly affecting students. Attacks on students are just one part of something bigger, capital’s global offensive known as neoliberalism. We should be building coalitions and working in solidarity with people opposing an incredibly brutal intensification of the capitalist system around the world, not dismissing it as “unrepresentative”. The CFS is a civil society organization and a democratic organization of students. Why should it be prevented from taking stances on issues?

Also, copyright is a “student issue” (did I mention I hate this dichotomy of student issues and non-student issues?). We often come across it in our research, and the commodification of knowledge and culture has deep implications for any student doing any sort of research.

Furthermore, the CFS represents a broad cross-section of society – women, LGBT students, students of colour, aboriginal students, and international students from nations oppressed by global imperialism. It seems a little privileged to argue that the CFS, as their representative, should completely ignore their issues and refuse to take positions in support of their rights, especially given what myself and others have seen about the racist nature of our university.

It also seems awkward to complain about the CFS taking stances on issues such as gender when above the authors are complaining that “While quick to pay lip service to marginalized and disenfranchised communities, evidence of actual progress is hardly forthcoming.” The authors decry the CFS for not making progress, then complain about the CFS taking stands on these issues. Do they want this acutal progress or not?

It is also absurd to claim that it is inapproprate that the CFS is adopting campaigns such as Palestinian solidarity. First off, only the CFS-Ontario has a position on Palestine. I wish the national CFS, my provincial wing, or my local student union did, but they don’t (I wrote about this issue a few months ago). Also, CUPE Ontario and CUPW have voted to endorse the BDS movement against Israel – would it be logically consistent for these activists to also call for a decertification of these unions on that basis? Are they opposed to CUPE Ontario and CUPW’s endorsement of the BDS movement as well? Also, as someone who has a bit of experience in the Palestinian solidarity movement, I was under the impression that one of the goals of the BDS movement was to get large organizations to sign on and use their political and economic clout to end apartheid in Israel. It seems absurd to me that any Palestinian solidarity activist would oppose a civil society organization representing hundreds of thousands of students signing on to a BDS campaign. If anything, this only advances the cause and should make genuine Palestinian solidarity activists happy.

Finally, to address the notion that these “matters of urgent importance to all students” are going untouched, that is flat out wrong. It is the absolute height of absurdity to claim that the tuition issue has gone untouched when it is pretty much the biggest thing the CFS has done last year, and the CFS has been routinely and unfairly criticized for focusing too much on tuition. Has the writer of this document ever seen this?

Some people may say that any “other” issues should be ignored until such time as the CFS has won on all the “core student issues”, but when you are a large civil society organization like a student union or a labour union, solidarity and coalition building is not something you maybe get around to at some point when everything is peachy, it is something that you make time for. If we all decided to stop doing solidarity work until we’ve sorted out our own issues, no solidarity work would ever get done.

All in all, the CFS is far from perfect and I am sympathetic to genuine left critiques of the organization. And I am very intrigued by radical student federations such as ASSÈ in Quebec. But all that aside, I think we’re better off with the CFS than without. If you’re going to convince me that opposition to the CFS is a left position, you’re going to need a lot more than recycled Tiny Tory talking points and a rejection of any sort of solidarity campaigns.

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.

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.

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.

Alert! Episode 132

2009-10-29T01:07:59+00:00

Global human rights activist Grahame Russell talks about the coup in Honduras and Canada’s troubling role. Community organizer Eric Shragge talks about the vital work of Montreal-based Immigrant Workers Centre. Folk legend Mitch Podoluk introduces aboriginal music you have never heard.

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

Remembering the Waffle

Judy Rebick — 2009-10-25T19:44:39+00:00

Remembering the Waffle

Yesterday I did something I rarely do. I participated in an academic seminar. It was to mark the 40th anniversity of The Waffle, a radical youth movement inside the NDP. Hardly anyone under 50 knows what The Waffle was, unless you have ever tried to organize an opposition in the NDP where it remains a scary ghost. But it was a significant and almost unique formation of the 1960’s in Canada. Apparently scholarship on the 1960’s is the hottest thing in academe these days. Who knew?

The Waffle was a youthful, radical, left nationalist and socialist formation within the New Democratic Party. Formed in the heady days of 1969, the Waffle Manifesto was incredibly radical when read with today’s eyes.

Our aim as democratic socialists is to build an independent socialist Canada. Our aim as supporters of the New Democratic Party is to make it a truly socialist party.

Sigh…I wonder when the last time anyone in or around the NDP used the word socialist. It is, of course, a document of its time, referring to “men” as a word covering everyone, ignoring Indigneous people altogether in its formulation of the founding two nations, and without a mention of equality for women, or women’s liberation, as we called it in those days.

What was extraordinary about the Waffle was its economic nationalism. Even as a young woman who was attracted to the Waffle because of its strong female leadership, I never agreed with the idea that the main problem was that Canada was economically subordinate to the United States. In those days, the Waffle argued that Canada was basically a branch plant of the US and would only be able to be independent though a democratic socialist society.

I never really understood Canada as a subordinate power. A lesser power, yes, but not really under the thumb of the US. I understood cultural nationalism that sought to promote and protect Canadian culture so that we were not totally overwhelmed by US culture, but economic nationalism never made sense to me. In studying to counter their arguments at the time, I learned about Marxism, which made a lot more sense, and argued that nationalism in an advanced capitalist country was reactionary, while it could be progressive in a developing country.

Yet the Waffle’s nationalism was progressive in many ways. Yesterday I finally understood the economic nationalism, listening to both proponents and scholars. I won’t go into detail here because a podcast of the event will soon be available. I still don’t agree with it, but at least I understand it, and no doubt the left nationalism of the Waffle and others helped the Canadian Left and social movements to respond quickly to free trade when it first reared its ugly head in the Free Trade Agreement with the US.

On the surface, this discussion seems a bit archaic and not of much interest to young people now who are more likely to see Canada as a colonial power itself and an equal partner in global corporate governance. With some of the most important social movements taking on the abuses of Canadian mining companies and the exploitation of Canadian banks, it is hard to imagine anyone accepting the nationalist arguments of the Waffle, however rooted in a radical analysis.

Yet the Waffle was an important factor in the development of these very social movements. It was women in the Waffle who fought for the NDP to accept women’s liberation and women in leadership. They uniquely worked both inside and outside the party, creating a model of work that they also brought into the trade union movement. The Waffle women played a critical role in the shaping of the Canadian women’s movement. As a result, Canada’s women’s movement included working class women and Canada has among the most feminist unions and social democratic parties in the world.

As a young woman I was attracted to the powerful women in the Waffle like Jackie Larkin and Varda Burstyn, both of whom remained active on the Left and in the women’s movement. Waffle leaders like economist Mel Watkins and political scientist James Laxer continue to be relevant critics of the NDP.

In my view when the NDP expelled the Waffle, they cut out their heart by expelling the youth. It is true that the Waffle was sectarian towards the NDP, as was the culture of the time, and that the remnants of Cold War ideology made a rational response to this highly active opposition difficult, but still, it is hard to look back on the energy and creativity of the Waffle and not conclude that the NDP slit its own throat when they threw them out.

What was interesting about the roundtable was the richness of discussion about the Waffle in the context of the times in which it lived, and the decline of that discussion as soon as we started talking about the future of the Left, and everyone retreated to their usual nostrums.

I am sorry more people didn’t attend the event, and I hoping they will listen to at least some of the podcast. If we don’t pay attention to our own history, no one else likely will.

Alert! Episode 131

2009-10-21T19:09:33+00:00

Film-maker Saul Landau on what’s behind the new American Far Right movement and how dangerous is it. Political scientist Jim Silver on Manitoba’s new NDP Premier, Greg Selinger. Trade unionist Fred Wilson on Canada’s Pension Crisis and how to fix it.

Slavoj Žižek interviewed on Democracy Now!

Ben Wood — 2009-10-15T18:42:50+00:00

Cultural theorist and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek controlled his interview on today’s episode of Democracy Now! Click on the link below to read/hear why he believes the Health Care debate in the U.S. represents ideology in its material force (laughing in the face of those who claim we live in a post-ideological era) and explain his assertion that the only reason we love Latin American populism is because it warms the hearts of well-paid academics in the U.S., reminding them of the old desires of the Left.

Slavoj Žižek on Democracy Now!

Alert! Episode 130

2009-10-15T15:17:14+00:00

Raj Patel on Food Week and Global Hunger; Mike Hudema on how Greenpeace Invaded the Tar Sands; Mitch Podolak on Music is the weapon.

Alert! Episode 129

2009-10-07T17:47:28+00:00

David Jacks of the Canadian Federation of Students discusses the importance of public water campaigns and the developments to manage Winnipeg’s water department. Herman Rosenfeld reviews a recent ‘Workers Assembly’ in Toronto, held to develop partnerships in the labour activist community. DAM (Da Arabian MCs), a Palestinian rap group fresh off a recent Canadian tour, discuss their influences and their politics. Mitch Podolak uses ‘Music is the Weapon’ to explore the music of floods and hurricanes (trust us, it works).

Alert! Episode 128

2009-10-02T01:19:31+00:00

Canada’s Plan to Bury Carbon Emissions Sheer Folly. Graham Thomson, author of a new 63 page report, discusses the risks in building a system to capture and store carbon dioxide underground. Saul Landau, just returned from his 50th visit to Cuba, talks about his interviews of Fidel and Raul Castro and compares their startlingly different governing styles. Ingo Schmidt talks about new right-wing coalition government that emerged from last week’s German elections. Mitch Podolak with Music Is The Weapon.

Alert! Episode 127

2009-09-25T17:40:14+00:00

Jim Silver, a long time contributor to Canadian Dimension, works on inner city issues and teaches politics at the University of Winnipeg. Recently, he and some of his colleagues met with six members of a North End street gang to talk about gang related violence on the streets of Winnipeg.

Zelaya returns!

Ben Wood — 2009-09-25T15:49:22+00:00

Zelaya has returned, though this hardly means the de facto Micheletti regime has recognized the democratically elected president. In fact, when word spread that Zelaya had indeed returned, Micheletti denied it. During a press conference, he went on to accuse the two reporters who broke the story of “media terrorism” and “psychological warfare” and threatened to serve them with criminal charges.

Zelaya made his return publically known from the Brazilian embassy. As Greg Grandin points out, choosing the Brazilian embassy as his safe house was a ‘strategic masterstroke’ for Zelaya as this shifts attention away from Chavez, U.S. public enemy #1.

When it was confirmed Zelaya had returned Micheletti imposed a 15-hour curfew from 4 pm to 7 am in response to a growing resistance to his regime. As with Zelaya’s return, Micheletti also denies this resistance. He recently told Fox News reporters that Honduras was “a quiet and happy country.” The thousands of arrested protestors suggest something different.

To recap, Zelaya was ousted in June for his intentions to make changes to the Honduran constitution regarding presidential term limits. There has been considerable debate over this. Some claim what he expressed was an anti-constitutional and undemocratic attempt to remain in power. Others insist he was suggesting to simply poll the country on the subject of constitutional reform.

As this World Upside Down article discusses, there is a growing Women’s resistance not only to Micheletti but also to the current Honduran constitution. One women from COPINH, the Front Against the Coup, said, “The current constitution never mentions women, not once, so to establish our human rights, our reproductive, sexual, political, social, and economic rights as women would be to really confront this system of domination.”

The coup resistance represents much more than outrage at the ousting of a democratically elected president. These women’s groups, for instance, are fighting for a constitution that acknowledges their rights and needs. For others, the coup resistance means fighting to improve the standard of living in Honduras. Many, including those following the situation abroad, see the resistance to Micheletti as a desire by the Honduran people to cut ties from the U.S. and have an independent Honduras.

All of these desires happen to be expressed in the same event: protesting thede facto coup government and fighting to restore democracy. As one woman’s rights advocate said, “What Zelaya has done is symbolize the popular discontent accumulated over the years.”

The Real News Network has an excellent video newscast that documents the aftermath of Zelaya’s return.

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)

Intelligent Commentary: Episode 11

Madeline Bruce — 2009-09-20T22:13:56+00:00

The final episode of Season 1 of Intelligence leaves drug kingpin Jimmie Reardon stuck in the men’s room of a Seattle nightclub, as it dawns on him that this is a sting to arrest him, even though he has been cooperating with the Feds in Canada. Ted Altman (Matt Frewer) has sneakily thrown in his lot with the American Drug Enforcement Administration in a ploy to destabilize Mary Spalding in her career, the better to rise to the top himself. Mary is gaining important information about arms trading from her drug trade informant, whose trust she has earned. Jimmie drops his famous cool when he phones his wife and daughter on his cell phone, fearing that he may not be long for this world. Actor Ian Tracey gives a believable, riveting performance as this husband and father whose kingpin reign may well be over. It is moving to see the sudden shift from where he has been brushing off his daughter’s questions about his activities, to leveling with her, and saying, from his heart, “I’m sorry for the kind of life I lead.” Another surprise is when he tells his troublemaker wife Francine, “I’ve always loved you.”

Ted Altman belatedly realizes that the Americans have no qualms about killing Jimmie Reardon, the marijuana smuggler, and at that point he regrets what he has done. This is the first sign of a conscience that we have seen in Ted. The theme of what merging with Americans means for Canadians is a real one, because it does mean the eroding of our own unique Canadian values, which are kinder, gentler, and more humane than theirs. I don’t want to become more like the Americans, and I feel sure that the majority of Canadians feel the same way. About our leaders, I am not so sure.

It is chilling to see how close an American spy, Richard Royden, got to taking over the top job in the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. Even the Deputy Minister has been hoodwinked by this menace. All it takes is one or two other ambitious, greedy, hotheads in the system for that to happen. It is not so far-fetched a situation. Only last year Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier left top secret documents in his girlfriend’s apartment, and this girlfriend had ties to the Hell’s Angels. This was after parading her in a low cut dress in a very public setting. Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney took $300,000 under the table, for ? services, from a very shady German arms dealer who now faces a number of fraud charges in Germany. Next came the Sponsorship Scandal, when millions of dollars of tax-payers money was handed over to Liberal cronies for doing – nothing.

We need to start vetting our leaders early on in their careers for sociopathic tendencies, meaning - do they have much of a conscience? The same for leaders of large corporations. Otherwise, mankind is doomed. There are tests for this. Character and integrity and morals should be the most important qualities for those in leadership positions. .

A thread running through every episode of Intelligence, or shall we say a missing thread, is the sidelining of the female of the species. Mostly she is viewed through the venetian blinds of the Chick-A-Dee nightclub office, slithering around poles, wearing nothing. What is it with men, that they actually want these girls to fool them, and pretend that they are always undressed and ready for sex, like it’s the one great thing in life? What a silly, silly game. The reality is that women rarely concern themselves with it, being too busy with raising children, keeping house, cooking, having careers, and other activities such as gardening and reading good books. They can be manipulated into behaving like moving wallpaper, but then you have taken away 99% of their true value to the human race – to civilization. I suppose this in turn makes the men feel that they then have 199% importance.

This is where Mary Spalding is such a refreshing departure, with both brains and integrity to spare, and functioning in the world at a very high level.

Intelligence shows us how seemingly unconnected things do have unholy alliances. The world of drug smuggling reveals evidence of arms dealing, and this information is valuable to Canadian security, ergo, informants from that world are cultivated by the Feds. Drug smugglers and dealers need places to put their money, and banks want money, so - cultivate a banker who likes cocaine and strippers and – you’re in business.

It’s a wonder they let men into positions of responsibility at all.

Excerpt from interview with composer of Intelligence soundtrack Schaun Tozer, August 28, 2009:

MB: The final episode of Season 2 has a fabulous car chase – the best I have ever seen, on TV or in the movies. The music for that makes it almost unbearably exciting. Was that fun to do?
ST: Very much so. Together, with the sound editors, we decided to try and go somewhere special.

Alert! Episode 126

2009-09-17T03:16:38+00:00

Toronto Film maker, Elle Flanders talks about the Toronto International Film Festival protest its purpose, impact and the responses to it. Canadian Dimension collective member and municipal activist Andrea Levy discusses the issues and the contending parties in the upcoming Montreal municipal elections. Canadian Dimension sports columnist Simon Black talks about the controversy surrounding the gender identity of South African 800m women¹s world champion runner Caster Semenya. The legendary Mitch Podolak gives his unique spin to Music is the Weapon.

Intelligent Commentary: Episode 10

Madeline Bruce — 2009-09-16T13:13:27+00:00

Excerpt from interview with Schaun Tozer, composer of the soundtrack, August 28, 2009:

MB: Did you get all of the percussion out of the synthesizer? Is a human percussion player any better than a synthesizer? Would he or she have something extra?
ST: The large percussion orchestra was a combination of live performances and sampled performances. With the latter, I programmed many different percussion templates or scenarios, which were then triggered by my performance at the master keyboard. With real players, they would replace or enhance performances that I had already recorded. With the guitars, we experimented with a wide variety of timbres, and in the case of the pedal steel guitar we used it in ways which just maybe wasn’t what the inventors had in mind. Generally, this was the modus operandi which, let’s face it, is better sustained with what the human touch may offer.

The background sound of Episode 10 contains little music as we know it. There is an exotic fantasy garden of intriguing sounds of no discernable origin. I might call this percussion, or I might call it sound colours which weave in and out of the action, not so intrusively that they distract your attention, but which serve to heighten the tension and suspense and the deep-seated paranoia and danger.

MB: How often do you hear interested commentary on the soundtrack of Crime shows?
MB: You don’t.

And, too, the soundtrack seems to absorb the personalities and the world in Intelligence, and the personalities and that world seem to absorb the soundtrack into themselves. How does this happen? I don’t know. It’s some kind of magic, like when you hear the zither playing in the movie The Third Man, and you know that Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is standing in that completely dark doorway.

In this episode we have Mary Spalding, head of the Organized Crime Unit, frantically making calls to Ottawa to warn them of the infiltration of a secret American agent – Royden, into a top position in our security network. I feel like Mary does – get him out of here! What is he doing here? Never mind what the is doing. Get him out of here! He is having secret phone calls to the American Embassy. It is spying, and it must be bad for Canada. Ottawa is behaving in a strangely placid, submissive way, which is the reality of all Canadian/American relations, and this is increasingly frightening to many Canadians, including myself. (See Paul Manly’s documentary You, Me, and the SPP: Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule, coming soon to a city near you.)

This increasing merger of Canada with the USA means getting on board with an ethic that is not Canadian, such as the proven torture at Guantanamo Bay. In this episode we have a parallel, when Jimmie and Ronnie Delmonico know that a gang member has been tortured and killed, but won’t divulge the names of the culprits who did it to Mary Spalding. That means complicity. Canadians know that the Americans are engaging in torture, and civilians are being killed, yet we assist them in their wars, which are now called “missions”.

Jimmie Reardon, the crime boss, wants to avoid a blood bath between the warring gangs in Vancouver. Interestingly, he calls on females for assistance. WHAT A GOOD IDEA! He encourages Sweet, the dancer, to parlay with a relative of the Gang Boss Dante. And then, voila, (here in Canada we all know a lot of French), calmer heads prevail.

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.

Alert! Episode 125

2009-09-11T01:15:45+00:00

Alert opens a new season with CAW economist Jim Stanford, who says says the economic recovery is only temporary. In the wake of the 8th anniversary of 9/11, author and film maker Saul Landau shows how the futile war against terrorism carries on in the age of Obama. CD collective member Angela Day argues that Canada’s immigration problems with Mexico begin with NAFTA. Founder of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, Mitch Podolak, introduces a new season of Music is the Weapon.

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.

Brandon Huntley and the Colour of Crime

Chris Webb — 2009-09-07T18:06:52+00:00

Ask any South African about the country´s crime problem, and they´ll ring off a list of brothers, sisters, friends and uncles, stabbed, hijacked or shot. A few short weeks ago, some of my family were held at gunpoint in their own security complex style home in suburban Johannesburg—complete with razor wire. Unfortunately their story is all to common in South Africa, and the nation´s familiarity with violent crime has developed its own farcical national-identity for a country still plagued by a legacy of institutionalized violence and racism. Equality, it seems, is often found at the barrel end of a gun.

Crime, by virtue of the country´s black majority, falls heavily on this (also the country´s poorest) demographic—a group victim to one of the twenty-first century´s more notable acts of barbarism. While crime is not a black only phenomenon, most South Africans acknowledge that black South Africans bear the brunt of violent crime. Which is why I was so surprised to hear the story of Brandon Huntley, the white South African refugee. Being a white South African myself, I have never considered myself a refugee even though my family has been a victim of violent crime. Huntley brought his refugee claim before the Canadian Immigration Board claiming he had been a victim of racial attacks—around 7 in total. The board—whose job description, it seems, would be to stay informed of international social and political issues—showed an astounding ignorance regarding the realities of post-apartheid South Africa. William Davis—chair of the board—declared that Huntley would ¨stick out like a sore thumb due to his colour in any part of the country.¨ Mr. Davis´s knowledge of basic colonial history seems to be lacking.

While Brandon Huntley was sticking out like a sore thumb in cosmopolitan, multicultural Cape Town, he claims he was attacked multiple times by assailants who uttered racial slurs. While multiple attacks for racial reasons seems improbable even in a country as divided as South Africa, the crux of the matter is that Huntley failed to report any of the attacks. With lack of any circumstantial evidence, the immigration board declared that Huntley´s ¨fear of persecution by African South Africans¨ is justified, and ¨he is a victim of race rather than a victim of criminality.¨ As an aside, the use of the term ¨African South Africans¨ is yet another indication of the hopelessly muddled political ignorance and PC ideology that dominates Canadian bureaucracy. While I cannot speak for all South Africans, many white, black and coloured people consider themselves African, myself included.

As African National Congress deputy of Foreign Affairs Minister Sue van Der Merwe said, the board´s decision shows ¨a lack of familiarization with the realities of South African society.¨ The decision to grant refugee protection is usually based upon systemic oppression or discrimination faced by the claimant. While South Africa´s white population is, no doubt, subject to violent crime few would argue that this crime is racially motivated. If anything South Africans across the racial spectrum would argue that the blame for out-of-control crime rates rests squarely on the shoulders of the ruling ANC government. The floundering administration of past-president Mbeki cared more about international attention and business dealings than grappling with crime and a failing public infrastructure. While the bombastic left-rhetoric of Zuma is yet to produce any profound changes. If anything, worker dissatisfaction has risen under Zuma, with massive public sector strikes in the last few months. Mr. Huntley´s case is a perfect example of the ANC hiding behind their moral curtain and crying international racism instead of pledging to do something about crime and unemployment. The jerking of knees—both to the left and right—extends from Ottawa to Pretoria.

Nevertheless Huntley´s case raises serious questions regarding the refugee review process in Canada. By showing an abysmal knowledge of South African society and politics, and accepting unreported claims as fact, the board has shown their inadequacy in dealing with refugee claims. Why was the board so willing and eager to denounce South Africa and accept Huntley´s claims and not those of US soldiers seeking asylum in Canada?

An understanding of South African history is the basis for solving this case. As Barney Mtombothi, editor of South Africa´s Financial Times, rightly argues: ¨What a shame we did not apply for refugee status in Canada during the apartheid years.¨ Mr Huntley has caused a great disgrace to his country and compatriots; and his government to its citizens by failing to protect them. The Canadian Immigration Board should be equally criticized for acting absurdly to the point of colonial protectionism. What will clear the air is a full investigation by the South African government into Mr. Huntley´s claims and a schooling in South African history for the crew of the immigration board.

Protesting TIFF’s spotlight on Tel Aviv

Judy Rebick — 2009-09-05T17:05:08+00:00

Every once in a while the act of an individual can make a big difference to a struggle. On August 28, Toronto film maker and long-time gay activist John Greyson wrote an open letter to the directors of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) pulling his short film Covered out of TIFF, which is one of the world’s top film festivals and opens in Toronto on September 10. His decision was to protest of TIFF’s spotlight on Tel Aviv. This is the first time that TIFF has held a City to City spotlight and the spotlight is on Tel Aviv, a city that is symbolic to Zionist Jews of Israel’s success and to Palestinians of the ethnic cleansing that took place to found that state of Israel.

Greyson’s courageous action and eloquent letter is a significant contribution to the Palestinian solidarity movement and the Boycott Divestment and Sanction (BDS) strategy that it has adopted to shine a light on the inexcusable aggression of Israel against the Palestinian people and pressure Israel to comply with international law. It has been followed by an open letter from arts and culture luminaries such as Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, Jane Fonda, Danny Glover, John Berger, Alice Walker, Ken Loach and several Israeli and Palestinian film makers and artists.

It begins: “As members of the Canadian and international film, culture and media arts communities, we are deeply disturbed by the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to host a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv. We protest that TIFF, whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine.”

The letter is quickly gaining signatories. You can sign it by emailing tiff.let@gmail.com.

A cultural boycott is a difficult issue. No-one is proposing that TIFF refuse to show Israeli films. In fact, Israeli films contain some of the most devastating critiques of the Israeli regime but even if that was not true, there is no desire to censor or stop audiences from seeing films made in Israel. Rather a cultural boycott is a way of insisting that a country that is actively suppressing the human rights of a whole peoples and trying to cover it up by promoting their cultural strengths not be allowed to do so.

One of the original signers of the open letter and herself a Toronto resident, Naoimi Klein explained her decision to support the cultural boycott against Israel in an interview with Alternet:

“Well, it has to do with the fact that the Israeli government openly uses culture as a military tool. Though Israeli officials believe they are winning the actual war for land, they also feel that the country suffers because most of what the world hears about the region on the news is about the conflict: militarization, lawlessness, the occupation and Gaza.

“So the foreign ministry launched a campaign called “Israel Beyond the Conflict,” which involves using culture, film, books, the arts, tourism and academia to create all kinds of alliances between Western countries and the state of Israel, and to promote the image of a normal, happy country, rather than an aggressive occupying power. That’s why we are always hearing about film festivals and book fairs with a special “Israel spotlight.”

And so, even though in general I would totally agree that culture is positive — books are positive and film is positive and communication is wonderful — we have to understand that we are dealing with a state strategy to co-opt all of that to make a brutal occupation more palatable.”

I am an anti-Zionist Jew and an active supporter of Palestinian rights but have hesitated to support to the BDS campaign. Boycotts are difficult to organize when there isn’t strong support for the issue like there was with the grape boycott to support California farm workers or the anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa and needless to say in most of North America the actions of the state of Israel remain contesting ground with governments and media aligning themselves with the State of Israel. In addition, I am a strong opponent of censorship and cultural boycotts can lead in that direction. But the Palestinian BDS campaign is very clear about their aims and in the case of TIFF, the protest is clearly not a question of censorship.

As Klein says after adding that the Israeli state is also using gay and women’s rights against the fundamentalism of Hamas to win support : “It’s a very sophisticated strategy.

“That means we have to come up with equally sophisticated strategies that defend culture and human rights on the one hand, but that, on the other, reject all attempts to use our work and our values to whitewash the ugly reality of occupation and segregation.”

The debate produced by John Greyson’s actions have for the first time in North America that I know has put the BDS campaign onto the front page and produced a very educational and important discussion led by artists about not allowing their art to be used as propaganda at the same time as ensuring that a diversity of voices are heard.

Greyson’s open letter asks: “Why are only Jewish Israeli filmmakers included? Why are there no voices from the refugee camps and Gaza (or Toronto for that matter), where Tel Aviv’s displaced Palestinians now live? Why only big budget Israeli state-funded features —why not a program of shorts/docs/indie works by underground Israeli and Palestinian artists? Why is TIFF accepting and/or encouraging the support of the Israeli government and consulate, a direct flaunting of the boycott, with filmmaker plane tickets, receptions, parties and evidently the Mayor of Tel Aviv opening the spotlight? Why does this feel like a propaganda campaign?

“This decision was very tough. For thirty years, TIFF has been my film school and my community, an annual immersion in the best of world cinema. You’ve helped rewrite the canon through your pioneering support of new voices and difficult ideas, of avant-garde visions and global stories. You’ve opened many doors and many minds, and made me think critically and politically about cinema, about how film can speak out and make a difference. In particular, you’ve been extraordinarily supportive of my own work, often presenting the hometown premieres of my films to your legendary audiences. You are three of the smartest, sharpest, skilful and most thoughtful festival heads anywhere —this isn’t hyperbole, with all of you I speak from two decades worth of friendship and deep respect —which makes this all the more inexplicable and troubling…” Read the entire letter(PDF) and TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey’s response.

John Greyson’s action is mobilizing an entire artistic community to speak out in solidarity with the Palestinian movement against the defacto apartheid that Israeli has established in Israel/Palestine. There is a debate but it’s not about whether these artists are anti-Semitic, as many critics of Israel have been called to silence debate, but rather whether Israel deserves to be celebrated in any way and whether it is legitimate to protest one of Canada’s most prestigious cultural institutions doing just that.

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.

Intelligent Commentary : Episode 9

Madeline Bruce — 2009-08-31T02:58:52+00:00

Excerpt of interview with the composer of Intelligence sound track Schaun Tozer (Facing Ali, Hard Core Logo), August 25, 2009:

MB: What kind of mood, signature, or personality were you aiming for with your music in Intelligence?
ST: Very much one that would reflect a City under stress, with an ambiguous personality, and all washed down with great dollops of intrigue and paranoia. The music of South East Asia sprinkled liberally with doses of 1960’s British thriller soundtracks. Imagine walking down a noisy, busy city block, passing stores selling wares from around the world. Each store is playing music from home. This is where the music for intelligence needed to touch down.

Along with the driving, adrenaline-soaked percussion, the beginning of this episode features some howling sounds that brought to my mind the terrible anonymity of the cosmopolitan city of Vancouver, and the sterility, the fundamental emotional coldness and disconnection of the world that all the characters in this series inhabit. These unique sounds spring from a combination of “a large percussion orchestra, and a combination of live performances and sampled performances.”

Our own society grows colder, and we are becoming more alienated from each other. One contributing factor is the reliance on drugs to solve problems, which has been masterminded by the huge pharmaceutical companies. In Psychiatry, Group Therapy, Milieu Therapy, Therapeutic Community, Psychotherapy, and counseling have been mostly replaced by prescriptions. That B.C. has a marijuana industry worth billions of dollars annually tells us what a drugged up nation this is, not to mention that other very lucrative business in liquor. The pharmaceutical corporations have done the spade work of convincing people that drugs are the answer, and a great way to relax and escape everything, including committed, intimate relationships, and civic involvement. Just ask the wife or husband of a habitual marijuana smoker what their relationship is like. They are apt to feel quite alone and cut-off. To be the partner of a heavy drinker is no better. .

In the hard and cold world of Intelligence, love cannot bloom. The pathetic, dismal roof garden atop the Chick-a-Dee nightclub is about as close as any of these characters get to the beautiful things in life. For love to happen, somebody has to take a stand, make a move. These characters are too cool to do that, and too emotionally and imaginatively frozen. Ted Altman’s near encounter in a bar with a handsome young man reflects his moral wishy-washiness in his job. He waits to see which way the wind is blowing before he makes a move. Instead of saying, “I find you very attractive,” he says, “Were you looking at me?” The young man walks out of the bar. And actually he had been looking at Ted, with interest. G. K. Chesterton wrote, “Where love is failing, power fills the vacuum.”

That was like a microcosm of our society right now – a moral wishy-washiness, passivity, and apathy that is becoming increasingly dangerous to prolong. Canada is in imminent danger of being subsumed by the world domination plan of the U.S.A.

To take a stand, to bravely put your life into what is important to you, is what gives meaning to your time on earth, even if that time is short, as it was for Canadian long distance runner and Cancer research fund-raiser Terry Fox.

One way the passions and outrage of Canadians gets contained is the lack of open forums where people can express themselves, in front of each other. Even at political meetings, even at Union rallies, everything is tightly scripted now, and spontaneous debate in the group is studiously, scrupulously avoided. Our leaders are forever telling us that they have their ear to the ground to listen to Canadians, but we do not see the group in action, so leaders can cherry pick issues as they choose.

Writer Chris Haddock has said that this series contains issues of great importance and relevance to Canadians. I have been mulling over the hot potato that I learned in a recent episode about how double agents from the U.S. are groomed to infiltrate CSIS and are actually pushing the interests of the U.S., not Canada. Canadian scholarship students attending American Universities are targeted by American agents and primed to work as double agents when they return to work in Canada. This makes me feel even more nervous about the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, Michael Ignatieff, who worked for many years in the U.S., and according to many of his quoted speeches swallowed whole and digested the American agenda, and also NDP leader Jack Layton, who asks us in a recent mail-out to “Get on board with Obama.” It was reported by Barry Weisleder that at the recent federal NDP convention in Halifax, Layton’s wife overturned the plan for one hour of open debate, and instead had a Democrat from the U.S. speak. I don’t believe for one second that this increasing merger with the U.S. springs from the hearts of grassroots Canadians. Not for one second.

It is impossible now to believe that B. C. Premier Gordon Campbell has the interests of British Columbians at heart. In an under the table deal, shrouded in secrecy, and a missing paper trail, he sold our B. C. Rail, which is now a matter for the Supreme Court. He is also flogging our gas and hydro to the Americans.

In Intelligence, we are shown a window into a world where nothing has any meaning except money and power. Millions of dollars, billions of dollars, are discussed like we are in a game of Monopoly. That window is really into our own world and it is perilously close to being utterly meaningless and ruthless, and without the values that guided our forefathers and the great leaders of the past. Dostoevsky said that man is a being that can adjust to absolutely anything. That numbness and lack of meaning in the lives of the drug pushers, the strippers, and the detectives in Intelligence is just one shade darker than where Canada is at this moment. Bangsters and powerful, ruthless, privateers have taken over the ship and gutted our democracy.

It’s time to look alive and take responsibility for the moral vacuum we have created by our apathy and foolish trust in sociopathic leaders. Our country, Canada, is in danger of being swallowed up by the world domination plan of the U. S. A.

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.

Leamington, Ontario: Bloom or Bust

Tonya Davidson and Katherine Davidson — 2009-08-26T19:32:34+00:00

In his 87th year 2006, my grandfather Stefan Torau harvested his last bumper crop of tomatoes from his small, meticulously-kept vegetable garden in the southern Ontario city of Leamington. In producing this rich bounty, he was simultaneously cultivating his place — digging his hands into the soil of a land always partially foreign to him as a German-Croatian post-WW II refugee. As my mother and I sat on stools in his garden, listening as he directed us about which tomatoes to can, which ones to eat, and which to disregard, thousands of Mexican farm labourers were similarly engaged in tomato harvesting down the road at one of Leamington’s many tomato greenhouses. They were part of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program and as they laboured, they were engaging in similar, yet distinctly different place-making practices.

Although this is a story of one city, one fruit, it is composed of many stories of (im)migration, settlement, and home-making. This article is collaboration between a mother (Katherine) and daughter (Tonya) as we engage with Leamington, past and present. We know this city as a hometown, from the perspective of a first-generation Canadian, a place of 1960s Sadie Hawkins dances, lounging at the beach on Lake Erie, and adolescent experiences that can’t be divorced from the close German-Croatian community that produced this city as a home. These recollections of Leamington as a first-generation Canadian born to German-Croatian immigrant parents are Katherine’s, in italics. Leamington is also remembered from the standpoint of a grandchild visiting in the 1980s-2007, mostly knowing the city as the warm interior of a grandparental home with doilies and honey cookies, while also becoming aware of the changes that occurred.

Opening the Doors to the Tomato Capital

Leamington, Canada’s “Tomato Capital,” is a small Canadian city that was settled on Ojibway land, on the shores of Lake Erie and near Canada’s most southern tip — Point Pelee. The city was established as an incorporated town in 1890. It has since grown into a city of 31,113 in large part due to many waves of immigrants. In the 1920s, Leamington saw its first waves of Swabish immigrants — members of a German Diaspora that includes parts of the former Yugoslavia from where our ancestors came. Thirty families of German Mennonites exiled from Russia, and immigrants from Italy also found their way to Leamington at this time. World War II brought further waves of German, Italian, and Portuguese immigrants. Mexican Mennonites, European Mennonites who, after having settled in Canada, accepted an agreement with the Mexican government to move to Mexico in the 1920s, returned to Leamington later in the 1950s and have continued to constitute another distinct group in the city.

My parents purchased our first home on Ontario Street in 1954. As a child, I could easily walk to approximately a dozen households of German relatives and friends. These paths became very familiar to me and I walked them frequently, especially the route to my grandparents. My particular German community largely descended from one small Croatian town Kapetanovo; its German residents had been forced to flee en masse in 1944 after continued land expropriations and harassment by Josef Tito’s partisans. This collective past seemed to have forged enduring friendships and loyalties among my family’s acquaintances. It had also, for the most part, produced the strong work ethic, fortitude, care, and appreciation of a second chance that I remember these people exhibiting. My memories of the subculture of the German immigrants tug at my identity; my home, my extended family, and family friends occupied much of my childhood. For my parents, Leamington offered the benefit of many friends from their homeland and opportunities for employment such as work in farming, the fisheries, the H.J. Heinz Company, and construction. It is striking how closely knit the German community was, especially those families from Kapetanovo, Yugoslavia. They remained relatively close geographically, in work, in play, and in forging a semblance of their past lives together.

Cultivating Community

The H.J. Heinz Company, the city’s largest employer, celebrated its one hundred year anniversary in 2009. Leamington is also North America’s greenhouse capital, with 1200 acres of greenhouses, each of which requires two to three farm labourers. A summertime stroll down Erie Street or Talbot Street, two of Leamington’s main thoroughfares, offers a kaleidoscope of immigration practices and the lived everyday activities of forging out spaces of habitation on foreign lands. Driving into the city you pass the Leamington Lebanese Club marked by a stunning monument featuring a stylistic spiral staircase. On Erie Street, in front of the city’s library, there is a large fountain celebrating the city’s Italian community. Tony’s Tacos on Erie Street constantly bustles with a crowd of Mexican migrant labourers, while down the street customers delight in a range of breads in pastries at the Germany bakery. The Mennonite-operated Ten Thousand Villages store occupies a prime location at the city’s main intersection.

Places of employment were often sites of maintaining and developing friendships. My mother met a best friend of German origin while they worked in the local Wheatly fishery, and later at the Heinz factory, she exchanged recipes and needlework patterns with several other German women. My father found employment in construction with a former Kapetanovo resident; he worked in greenhouses that were operated by owners of Italian origin; and he eventually worked until retirement in the Heinz Company where many German acquaintances were employed. A German social club was formed where entire families congregated on weekends for dancing or possibly for viewing a German movie in a rented hall. This preceded the construction of the Rhine-Danube German Canadian Club on Erie Street, not far from the once bustling arena and fairgrounds. Germans from Kapetanovo and other origins collaborated to plan, finance, build, and administer this hub of German cultural activity where my own wedding reception took place.

In the 1940s and 1950s, when our ancestors came to the agriculture-rich Leamington region, many worked as farm labourers. From these employs, with the material and emotional support of extended and already established families, some pursued unionized labour at Heinz, employment that offered secure pension plans, benefits and company picnics. Others went into business. Pat Amicone, an Italian immigrant from this era, went on to establish a highly successful vegetable growing operation — Amco, which would in turn become a large employer of Mexican labourers.

Labourers, Not Citizens

The 4000 Mexican farm labourers that come to Leamington to harvest up to half a billion tomatoes a year are not afforded the same means for making Canada their place. Since 1974, an agreement between the Canadian and Mexican governments and private sector has established the conditions under which Mexican workers come to and work and live in Leamington. Min Sook Lee’s 2003 National Film Board film, El Contrato or The Contract, illustrated poignantly the exploitation of this new migrant Leamington population. She narrates in the film, “They are wanted as labourers, not as citizens. The program only accepts men who are married, with less than a grade school education and with strong ties and families back home, men who will go back after months of painful separation.”

In 2002, a workers’ centre opened in Leamington, offering counsel and advocacy for the farm labourers. In 2003, the time of the filming of El Contrato, the migrant farm workers worked seven days a week, ten hours a day for a flat rate of $7.25 per hour, no overtime, no holidays.

The mark of the Mexican farm labourers on Leamington is necessarily transient. Despite working and living in Leamington up to eight months of the year, some workers returning ten seasons in a row, their presence is often treated with suspicion. Prohibited by the contract to stay (or utilize the Canadian services that they pay into), the migrant workers don’t establish churches like previous waves of Leamington immigrants have. They do, however, enthusiastically visit the churches that exist. On Sundays, during the working season, one of Leamington’s Catholic churches that offer Spanish services has a full lot of bicycles. Their presence is also felt on Friday afternoons at the butcher shop which serves up to 300 or 400 customers; in the film, the butcher acknowledges that the Mexican migrant workers have been great for his business.

Cancelling the Contract of Transience

Given its small size, Leamington is full of diversity; immigrant populations have come from different parts of the world, at different times, and under tellingly different circumstances. At the closing of The Contract, one worker is asked if he is going to return for another season, to which he replies that he will let his daughter decide. Back in Mexico, he asks his daughter, “Should I go back?” When she answers “No!” with a big hug, you can see his relief and smile. Fifty years earlier, our relatives came and this decision did not have to be made. For those who had been refugees, there was no other home to which they could return. For the Germans, Portuguese, Lebanese, and Italian immigrant settlers of other generations, similarly hard-working farm labourers, Leamington became a place where churches and cultural centers could be built. They could cultivate the place into a home that was more tangible and less transient than a collection of bicycles outside a church.

The authors would like to thank Maria-Carolina Cambre and Bonar Buffam for their help with this article

Editorial: The Palestinian BDS Campaign

CD Editorial Collective — 2009-08-26T19:27:25+00:00

An important legacy of the Nazi Holocaust is the perpetrator’s defense “I didn’t know” at the Nuremberg tribunal hearings. More recently law challenges this “ostrich defense” by both perpetrators and bystanders, implying that there is an obligation to know. With regard to Israel/Palestine, there is little reason not to know about the horrific realities, for despite massive pro-Israeli advocacy there is ample documentation from within and without pointing to the clear culpability of the State of Israel in a number of international crimes against the Palestinian people.

A significant contribution to truth telling comes from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign launched in July 2005 by over 150 Palestinian unions, associations, civil-society groups and refugee-rights organizations. In itself, this call refutes one lie for there is a long history of non-violent, well-organized resistance by Palestinians that predates formation of the State of Israel in 1948. The call states that “non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:

Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”

The BDS campaign finds historical resonance with the campaign in South Africa to end apartheid, again calling attention to Israeli apartheid as embodied in its laws and institutions. George Bisharat, Palestinian-American law professor, notes that the South African BDS call took thirty years to gain traction, but that the current Palestinian campaign may have a snowball effect. Already in 2005 there was an international campaign joined by churches, universities, and municipalities against the Caterpillar bulldozers used to kill civilians like Rachel Corrie and the civilians of Jenin refugee camp, to demolish thousands of homes and olive groves.

With the devastating siege and military invasion of Gaza, the campaign continues to gain momentum. Here in Canada, the national organization Independent Jewish Voices passed a resolution supporting BDS and the Quebec Teacher’s Federation and the Toronto United Church just passed a BDS motion. CUPE Ontario and CUPW renewed their support of BDS with strong criticism of the Harper government.

It is timely to focus on Canada’s ties with Israel. Speaking recently in Canada, both Palestinian George Bisharat and Israeli activist/academic Jeff Halper spoke of the need to work strategically on this effort, given the enormous power wielded by Israel and the massive economic and political backing by the United States. Halper spoke of the difficulties in finding a focus for boycott that would engage the electorate and proposed pinpointing the extensive military and security ties between Israel and Canada. A recent COAT (Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade) report lists over fifty Canadian military exporters that have supplied essential components and/or services for the weapons systems used by the Israeli Air Force in the Gaza invasion. Extensive information is available about government and corporate contracts, about related Canadian Pension Plan investments, about Canadian university research and development projects connected with Israel’s military and surveillance industries.

A focus on the military/surveillance connection can reframe perception of both Israel and Canada in a realistic way: Israel is the aggressor and not the victim, and Canada is a military power with a large weapons and surveillance trade. The two countries are bound together in a free trade agreement and by a security pact. Interventions can work: during the last onslaught on Gaza, dockworkers in Australia and South Africa refused to unload Israeli cargo, and the Greek government forbid the unloading of U.S. munitions destined for Israel.

Canadians, whether workers, legislators, faith leaders, etc., must follow suit in actively and aggressively condemning Israeli Apartheid. Indeed, the whole world — and Palestine — is watching us.

Intelligent Commentary : Episode 8

Madeline Bruce — 2009-08-24T19:24:01+00:00

Things move so fast in Intelligence, it is so full of incident - that your head is buzzing at the end of an hour. It’s a keyed-up, telescopic view of a very exciting movie that the characters on both sides of the law are living. It’s dangerous, and it’s exhilarating. People are betrayed, guys get bumped off, and this is the daily reality in that world. Contrasting with this speedball pace were a few glimpses of a floor polisher, in action, at floor level. It made me think of Mary Spalding, with her genius I.Q., head of the Organized Crime Unit, and how dull most other occupations, including housewife, would seem to her, now that she is honed to knife-edged proficiency in her job, and ready for even more responsibility as the probable next head of the Canadian Intelligence and Security Service.

Murder, betrayals, sex as entertainment in the Chick-a-Dee Nightclub, where the business is about supplying millions of dollars of illegal drugs to people. Where is the moral compass in all this? It is missing. I’m not going to pin a medal on Jimmie Reardon’s chest because he shows caring for his adolescent daughter. The truth is that it is a superficial kind of caring, because everybody’s life is in danger that comes close to the high stakes world of the drug trade.

By omitting a moral compass, the writer Chris Haddock invites viewers to contemplate the conscienceless world of big business, to face the implications of it, because that is what people have to do, in order to turn things around before it is too late. Big corporations don’t care about polluting the earth and her waterways. They don’t care about the sovereignty of nations. In Haddock’s previous two series the hero was named Da Vinci. The great genius Leonardo Da Vinci of the 16th Century had such a broad intelligence that, along with his immortal paintings such as The Last Supper, he designed advanced forms of war weapons. He met Machiavelli in his lifetime. It’s debatable whether the genius of mankind will go towards plundering the earth and destroying it, or making an abrupt turnaround now. That would mean the exact opposite of big business, as Irish author Richard Moore outlines in his book Escaping the Matrix. As early as the 19th Century, novelist E. M. Forster prophesied the moral, aesthetic, and emotional doom that big business and the automobile would bring to people, and he pulls back the London characters in Howard’s End to the ancient form of the small family farm. In the movie Asphalt Jungle, where Marilyn Monroe makes her film debut, the character played by Sterling Hayden, a career criminal, speaks with longing of the 160 acre farm in Ireland that his family owned for centuries, and lost. He yearns to return there, and bathe in the stream.

The style with which this series is presented gives it an addictive quality, and a big part of that is the musical score by Schaun Tozer (Facing Ali). One can tend to take that for granted, because it is so well blended with the action, cutting in and out, heightening suspenseful scenes, and disappearing at times. The intriguing synthesizer “instruments” (what’s the new word?) are a new breed of cat, sometimes sounding like a Sitar, and in this episode there is a sequence of what sounds like keyboard repetitive chording, a la Phillip Glass, but this was more interesting and melodic than that. Altogether, this episode was a standout for the musical score. The main theme of the series, by the “Sitar” as I call it, got a swinging percussive treatment that literally had me up on my feet dancing.

There is a slick scene at the beginning of this episode which plainly showed the deeper dynamic behind jealousy, and that is that it is often subtly provoked. Jimmie Reardon knows that his estranged wife Francine is coming over in the morning to pick up their daughter. On the seat of his car, which Francine walks by to get to the front door, is a pair of women’s high-heeled shoes. The inevitable happens, and Francine gets upset – for one thing, because he slept with a woman while their young daughter was in the house. Then Jimmie gets to play Mr. Cool again, and tells her to “Calm down.” That’s the pay-off in this game for him: “I’m Mr. Cool, and you’re a flipping maniac, hah, hah, hah.”

Bernie Coulson gives a Sean Penn-like nerviness and quirkiness to the character of Michael Reardon, the drug kingpin’s brother. Not having to maintain that colossal, stupendous cool that Jimmie does makes him a more human character, with more dimension and unpredictability.

As we hear about the billions of dollars worth of illegal drugs that are being grown and sold on a yearly basis is B. C., I wonder what it is about life now that makes people require this, to get through the day.

Web Exclusive: WALRUS BULLS BELLOWING ON A BEACH

John Chuckman — 2009-08-24T19:17:49+00:00

I am disappointed with the view of some knowledgeable commentators over Scotland’s release of the dying man who was convicted of the Lockerbie-airline bombing.

From a purely power-politics point of view, of course, they are right: judging by the ugly noises echoing across the oceans from America, Scotland has done itself no favor.

But if all affairs are to be carried on in every country from that point of view, it seems to me that it is acceptance of America’s right to dictate every matter over the planet, including such intimate matters as how individual countries interpret justice and the government of laws.

This is the acceptance of a de facto aristocracy running the world since American voters - and only about half of eligible Americans bother to vote - represent only a percent or so of the planet¹s population. It is remarkable how many Americans do not understand the basic point that not everything a democracy does is democratic or decent or even acceptable, especially things done outside its borders.

Democracies abuse power just as surely as any other form of government, and a democracy with the immense military power of the United States a power virtually cancerous to genuine democratic values - provides a case study in the inexorable workings of Lord Acton’s dictum.

It would also represent a repression of all the better motives from which individuals and societies act now and then, surprising us and raising the standard of human behavior from the violent-chimpanzee standard that tends to hold for much of humanity and is especially notable in America’s international affairs.

That is unacceptable to most people who are not Americans or who are not dedicated flatterers of America seeking leftovers being dropped from its groaning table.

You only have to ask yourself how Americans themselves would react to others telling them how they should run their court system. The sound would be deafening, like the bellowing of walrus bulls on a stony beach in mating season, which is actually pretty close to the sound of some of America’s professional-victim families today.

Mercy is never misplaced, and I think Scottish justice has reached an admirable decision despite the bellowing of the unthinking American families we have heard from for years.

Apart from that, and a very important consideration, it is almost certain that al-Megrahi is innocent, having been fitted up by American intelligence desperate for a scapegoat with the relentless political pressure of the walrus-bull families.

I have to say, also, I always find it troubling to read the press repeating the lines about 270 victims for the thousandth time. It is an American mantra, emphasizing the special and precious nature of American lives over all others, at least, that is, the lives of upper middle-class Americans.

Rarely do we read an accurate perspective on the Lockerbie event.

The United States Navy stupidly shot down an Iranian airliner with 300 souls aboard as it observed the devastation of the Iran-Iraq War, a devastation America had an important hand in extending.

Those 300 innocent men, women, and children received no mercy, and their horrible deaths certainly never saw any justice. Their families never received compensation. And no apology was even offered by Americans, a disgusting set of behaviors, entirely.

Lockerbie was absolutely clearly revenge, but no one knows who actually committed the act of revenge.

I might offer the observation, too, that it is the same bellowing Americans always ready to use capital punishment or torture and assassinate opponents or, indeed, to invade the lands of those with whom they disagree, bombing and killing countless innocents three million just in Vietnam, another million or so in the Cambodia they de-stabilized, and another million or so in Iraq.

The whole pattern of the two acts of wanton destruction explains the basis for the so-called War on Terror. It is simply America’s saying, “I can do to you, but you can’t do to me.”

RiPped: A Remix Review

Brian Latour — 2009-08-23T06:35:34+00:00

Before I write this review, I must admit that I came to this film with very little knowledge of copyright issues. Prior to watching this film, I was not aware of who Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig or even Girl Talk is. Despite my extensive background as a nerd, I have always found copyright law to be a boring and unimportant issue. While Brett Gaylor’s RiP: A Remix Manifesto is an entertaining venture into the realm of remix culture and its confrontations with copyright law, its serious substantial weaknesses are unfortunately not concealed underneath its flashy presentation.

RiP uses extensive animations and pieces of audio-visual candy remixed in such a way that it can keep the viewer’s attention throughout what is essentially a 90 minute presentation on copyright law – no small feat by any means. While at times it can be overly flashy and pretentious, the presentation keeps what could be just another boring documentary fairly pleasing to watch. During the presentation, Gaylor’s open source cinema really shines. Parallels can be drawn between the remix of today and the detournement of the Situationists – a parallel which is clearly obvious when watching George Bush remixed to John Lennon’s Imagine.

Some of the secrets to the presentation are in the editing and distribution process of RiP, which is a fairly innovative attempt to practice what is preached in the film. Much of the movie is the result of six years of collaboration through mixing and remixing a glut of imagery. Gaylor is continuing to force the film to evolve as well, by asking for input to be remixed in to updated versions. The film is available to watch at the National Film Board in 12 parts, or can be downloaded at a price set by the consumer, a distribution system similar to that of Radiohead’s 2007 album In Rainbows.

While the film is an informative primer to some basic issues of copyright law, the biggest problem with this film is the manifesto iteslf. It eschews any sort of meaningful economic analysis of copyright and the interests behind copyright laws in favour of some pretentious and meaningless drivel, the sort of thing which might pass for deep political thought in either a gathering of technocrats or a Thomas Friedman column.

The manifesto is as follows:

Culture always builds on the past
The past always tries to control the future
Our future is becoming less free
To build free societies you must limit the control of the past

It starts off good enough, with the notion that culture always builds on the past. In fact, as all human labour is social, whether in the widget factories or the word factories, all contributions to society are based in some part on previous contributions. It is also hard to argue with the notion that “our future is becoming less free” given the continual of capitalist consolidation of power and erosion of civil liberties we are seeing in modern society.

However, points two and four are the problem. Point two is simply insubstantial and nonsensical – the past isn’t a person or organization with an intent on controlling anything, it is not much more than what is found in history books and its continuing legacy. Point four proposes a method to build free societies, which, instead of addressing issues of social and economic oppression and heirarchical and undemocratic power structures in society – the causes and manifestations of unfreedom – it simply builds on the tripe in point two to come up with a meaningless solution to a made-up problem.

Sadly, this muddles the relatively simple mechanisms behind all of the issues of copyright and corporate control of culture: art and information has become a form of capital, thanks to the commodification of culture embodied in copyright laws enforced by the state. And as this is a form of capital, capitalists are required to hang onto it tightly, and use their allies in the state for backup. While the power of the recording industry is touched on by the movie and there is the occaisional remark about some company making money off something, the movie portays the issue as the past verus the future instead of the owners of cultural capital versus the rest of us.

Unfortunately, RiP portrays the problem as one whereby copyright laws intended to protect the rights of consumers to consume and producers to profit are out of balance. An opportunity is missed for a discussion on how we can reverse the commodification of knowledge and return to the commons while still allowing producers of knowledge and culture a fair share.

While entertaining and fairly informative, RiP sadly comes up short in the analysis department due to the poor ideological framework embodied in the manifesto. Instead of tackling the economic issues of the commodification of knowledge head on, it manages to dilute any radical or anti-corporate message to little more than a proposal for the liberation of culture by trendy technocrats. This is actually a less emancipating message than it seems, as only a very small portion of society has the ability to participate in this liberated culture.

Overall, RiP had the potential to be an excellent movie and I really wanted to like this film, but a lack of even a semblance of a rational economic analysis and the weakness of the manifesto which replaces that analysis force me to give it only two Proudhons out of five.

A brief history of Canadian democracy

Matthew Brett — 2009-08-21T17:42:56+00:00

“When I speak of representation by population, the house will of course understand that universal suffrage is not in any way sanctioned,” said John A. Macdonald during a debate about Canadian confederation. The danger of mob rule, of open democracy, should of course be discouraged. The rabble are to be kept out. Founding American fathers Thomas Jefferson and James Madison likewise believed that power should be in the hands of the “natural aristocracy.” This slight of hand, of trumpeting democracy while excluding the people, has remained largely unchanged since confederation, and what happens in years to come is largely up to us.

The jury is still out on participatory democracy in Canada. Even before questions of participatory government can be breached, however, there is a long way to go. The common refrain is that a functioning democracy requires an informed population. Instead, we have a population with parcels of information, often distorted and just as often outright falsified for political gain.

To cite a few recent examples, the Department of National Defence fell back on reasons of national security recently to deny an access to information request filed by the NDP this summer. The NDP requested that the full financial cost of the war in Afghanistan be disclosed. The DND reversed its decision and finally provided figures after sharp coverage from the national daily press.

Earlier, in February, Canwest News Service reported that the Foreign Affairs Department “systematically prevented the release of hundreds of thousands of pages of government records on everything from the mission in Afghanistan to the NATO briefing materials Maxime Bernier left at his girlfriend’s home, and did so by applying its own interpretation of regulations governing fees.” This retention of public information is fairly widespread, and partisan researchers occasionally go through the Pentagon to obtain details on Canadian military joint operations. The reasons for withholding public information are fairly clear. “We have arrived at that stage when there is some public security,” said Louis Riel in 1870, shortly after the Red River Rebellion. “Let us, then, see to it that the public are no more allowed to rush together, on one side or the other, in such a manner as they have gathered of late.” Disclosing information on Afghanistan or NATO could very well lead the public to “rush together,” and therefore must be discouraged. Lacking verifiable information, the public are kept away from substantial policy issues, freeing decision makers from the “risk of contaminating ‘rational’ policy-making with the uninformed prejudices of interest groups and the public,” in the words of Canadian political scientist Leslie A. Pal.

The press is not alone in being denied access to the public domain. Among his 1968 reelection promises, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau signaled his intent to reassess Canada’s participation in NATO. Serious demands for withdrawal from NATO were made in cabinet, and there was a genuine interest for an independent Canadian policy. The mere thought of holding a similar debate today is a laughable, distant dream. While the country’s NATO commitments were under discussion, journalist Dalton Camp stressed the importance of “thoughtful discussion” and “careful examination” of Canada’s priorities. Yet, Camp wrote,

One cannot have such a dialog unless the policy makers will listen to the policy critics. There is an abundance of evidence they do not. Almost everyone I know who performed in the ritual of review staged by the parliamentary committee this spring came away convinced they had been talking to the deaf; the rare exceptions were those whose opinions were agreeable to the committee. In the end, the government paid lip service to the academic performers and paid no attention at all to the committee. The ‘intellectuals’ — a pejorative word for impractical thinkers — had their moment on stage.

It is remarkable how firmly this holds true today, the only difference being that policy critics know very well they will go ignored. Thirty-eight years after Camp’s statement, Afghanistan Canada Research Group intellectual Michael Skinner was repeating Camp’s sentiments virtually word for word. Having visited Afghanistan for five weeks in 2007, interviewing dozens of Afghanis on whether or not foreign troops should continue their occupation, Skinner’s first-hand accounts provided a useful balance against “scientific,” “rational” reports filed by think-tanks and federal researchers. His work went completely ignored, as his findings were not agreeable to the committee.

There are innumerable cases of equal gravity, all of which go ignored when the opinions expressed therein do not conform with those in power. Canadian legal and political scholarship points toward a further tightening of control over information and power-sharing in a post-9/11 world, and prime minister Steven Harper has twice been named by the Canadian Association of Journalists as the “Code of Silence Award” winner. “The Prime Minister’s remarkably secretive communications apparatus was the hands-down winner in 2008 and journalists from all over the country have nominated him again this year,” said CAJ President Mary Agnes Welch this past May. The playful spirit of the award has its own set of grave consequences, but Harper is acting in a consistent manner with the fathers of the confederation. And not surprisingly, when asked to describe Harper in one word, 49 per cent of respondents to an Angus-Reid poll this July used the word “secretive.”

As for why affairs continue to be conducted in such a closed manner, T.L. Wood gives an eloquent answer in 1870: “Opinions may be divided in many other matters, the votes of a party may be split on many points, but in the hands of the masses the substantial class will be heavily and unmeasurably taxed to suit the views of those who have nothing to lose and all to gain by any contemplated movement.” This sentiment is expressed with remarkable consistency in both the actions and subtle rhetoric of Canada’s elite.

It follows that the best course of action is developing a contemplated movement with nothing to lose and everything to gain from a far more open democracy. With a deliberately fragmented population and increasingly marginalized social movements, the challenge is immense; but Harper, like Macdonald, is well aware that calls to transfer power from the “substantial class” to “the hands of the masses” are unceasing. History has proven this much.

Amnesty report highlights police brutality in Honduras

Ben Wood — 2009-08-20T18:09:52+00:00

Yesterday, Amnesty International released a document that profiles the abuse of Honduran police and military against pro-Zelaya (or at least, pro-democracy) peaceful protesters. The report contains stories by protesters and photos of their injuries. Hopefully, this report will intensify the pressure the international community puts on Honduras and the de facto government to restore democracy.

A teacher in jail told Amnesty reporters, ““We were demonstrating peacefully. Suddenly, the police came towards us, and I started running. They grabbed me and shouted “why do you (all) support Zelaya’s government? Whether it’s by choice or by force, you have to be with this government”. They beat me. I have not been informed as to why I am here detained.”

Another story of police brutality highlights the gender-based violence in the country:

“L. and her mother were repeatedly beaten by police using batons, across the back of the thighs and buttocks. L also told Amnesty International that the police shoved the baton down her blouse. The policeman said to her ‘if this [demonstrating] is what you’re up to, well this is what you’re going to deserve.’ L told how her mother had attempted to cover herself with a piece of clothing and the police officer shouted ‘This cloth isn’t going to save you’.

The experience of a human rights defender working with the Centre of Investigation and Promotion of Human Rights (Centro de Investigacion y Promocion de los Derechos Humanos CIPRODEH) demonstrates the lack of respect the Honduran police have for human rights:

“I noticed that they particularly targeted three youngsters and they chased them. The young people ran into a second-hand car sales company to seek safety, but were trapped there by the police officers. They tied the hands of the three young people behind their backs and beat them. I was at a distance at that moment of about 15-20 metres from the incident, and I said that there was no need to beat them, that they already hands tied and that what they [the police officers] were doing was disproportionate. On hearing this they trapped me too. When I explained to them that I am a human rights defender they ignored me. I presented my ID card and the police officer said ‘keep this piece of shit, here there are no human rights.’ The police officer ordered me to take out my shoe lace and used that to tie my hands together behind my back in the same way as the three young people. The only difference was that I was not thrown on the floor as they had been.”

You can read the press release and download the report here.

Obama and Health Care Reform for August 19, 2009

Ben Wood — 2009-08-19T20:07:14+00:00

Judging by the amount of rhetoric emanating from all levels of media this week, it would seem Obama’s health care plan that was a cornerstone of his election platform in the fall is going to fail. And what’s worse, very few people can go beyond the hyperbole to make a decent argument for or against reform. The most outrageous was the clamoring of the “death squads” in ‘socialized’ health care that decide who lives and who dies.

A brief overview of Obama’s recent health care struggle:

Obama to abandon bipartisan health reform by Toby Harnden — Telegraph.co.uk

This article outs (via Open Secrets) Senators who have received money tied to the health insurance industry. Certainly, an important consideration when you have a Democratic majority in a House that has trouble passing the health care plan that championed Obama’s election platform. Though as the article points out, the list “is not presented to suggest that any of the congressional members have been ‘bought’ by the health insurance industry. But what flesh-and-bone human being would not at least be influenced by such largesse?”

Pulling the plug on the public option by T.L. Caswell — Truthdig.org

And as usual in American politics, the coverage slowly walks away from serious attempts to reform health care, real discussions of alternatives, or comparative studies with other countries, and more and more this issue becomes a test to see if Obama fits the President’s shoes.

The outrage directed at Obama from both Democrats and Republicans, left and right, is curious, if anything. There are those who have internalized his campaign of hope and change, as if these ideals can only surface and spread via Obama alone. We are the sheep and Obama the shepherd, as far as this group is concerned.

There are others, though skeptical of naïve Obama worshippers, certainly do wish he has a more successful term — or at least month (it’s been a rough 8 years) — than Dubya. Not just for their personal enjoyment, but for the whole country. And maybe, and this might be a stretch, to shift international public opinion on the United States.

I think these people would side with William Pfaff in his recent piece on Truthdig, who blames the American public: seniors who are convinced Medicare is not a government program, but rather “delivered through the benevolence of hospitals and doctor, or by divine providence”; or those citizens who stubbornly believe the “American system is superior to all others on Earth…If not, why does everyone in the world want to come to live in the United States?”

You can’t blame Obama for American stubbornness by William Pfaff — Truthdig.org

And then there is David Michael Green who sees Obama’s commitment to bipartisanism as nothing more than “total capitulation” to “the folks who have such small minorities in Congress that they can’t even muster forty percent of Senate votes to block consideration of legislation by filibuster”.

Guess what? He’s a terrible President by David Michael Green — Counterpunch.org

Intelligent Commentary : Episode 7

Madeline Bruce — 2009-08-17T21:50:57+00:00

Episode 7 of Season One of Intelligence starts off with moody scenes of boats and lights in the Vancouver harbour at night. Artistically this series is superior, with the exceptional music of Schaun Tauser contributing so much to the unique flavour and freshness that makes it stand out so far ahead of the standard American crime shows that look and sound so much alike. The music consists mostly of an instrument that sounds to me sort of like a sitar played like a guitar, and percussion. But that’s all you need, if it’s done right. Case in point is the music in Orson Well’s classic film The Third Man, which has only one zither. It is considered by many, including myself, to be the best movie music ever recorded.

This is an exciting series to watch – very fast-paced and intricate. But that’s why people do crosswords and play Scrabble. It’s good for us to get a brain workout. And it makes you think deeply about what is really going on in North America, not what mainstream media is purporting. People who have actually worked in this world of espionage and organized crime attest to the veracity of the themes and situations presented.

Most troubling to me is the infiltration of American secret agents into Canadian affairs at the most lofty and crucial levels. That kind of influence can get highly placed people elected into important positions, with the result that Canada can be run, as it were, by

Americans, rather than Canadians. There are so many power struggles going on for the plum “legitimate” jobs that drug dealers and smugglers become just puppets and notches on the belts of investigators, who compete for both their information, and their capture.

Mary Spalding (Klea Scott), head of the Organized Crime Unit, deals with all these sharks with a precision and clarity that is breathtaking. This is a wonderfully conceived female character. Her instructions to the Russian Madam of what her call-girls were to do with a group of international businessmen reminded me strangely of shift-change on a hospital ward, when the head nurse gives out the assignments to each nurse coming on shift.

It is interesting to compare this with Haddock’s series DaVinci’s Inquest, which is on just before Intelligence. There is a progression from a world where the welfare of those less fortunate members of society is high priority with the Mayor of Vancouver. In Intelligence, money and power are the only values, and hang the consequences. Then CBC News came on, with a report of a homeless man who was very sick for several hours on a hot day in Grandview Park in Vancouver recently, in full view of many people, who went into epileptic convulsions and died. It was reported on the news that paramedics, who were finally and belatedly called, treated the man disrespectfully.

In pursuit of leisure: A political imperative

Matthew Brett — 2009-08-13T19:31:40+00:00

I read Bertrand Russell’s compilation of essays, In Praise of Idleness, on the first day of my summer vacation. Russell makes grave predictions about the future of warfare in “Men versus Insects”; he reflects briefly on the cosmos in his essay, “On Comets” and closes with an essay titled, “What is the Soul?”

But it is the opening essay that interested me most. The essay bares the same name as the title of the compilation, “In Praise of Idleness” (1932), and it is a sweeping, vital argument. “I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of WORK, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”

I sat for a moment and thought how my boss — how any boss — would react to the idea of reducing the working week to four hour days, as Russell suggests. After composing him or herself from a round of laughter, and upon recognizing that the suggestion was made in all seriousness, a grimace would appear on the boss’s face, followed by the recommendation, in no uncertain terms, that I get back to reality — back to work.

Imagine for a moment, as Russell proposes, a four hour working day. My first book would already be published and I would be an accomplished ocean kayaker. That long wish list of to-dos — the one stuffed in your brain or a journal somewhere — would be near complete, and you would be onto new and exciting projects. I believe, once our self-serving goals are achieved, we would move toward helping others. After all, we only pamper ourselves to maintain our sanity in an increasingly stressful society, but one can only pamper so much before a sense of common humanity impels us to help others. It is a condition of humankind that we care for one another; we are simply denied this natural instinct because we are overworked and busy tending to ourselves with whatever spare time is available. It is in this state of near-constant fatigue that we struggle and try to find joy in our lives:

The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

It follows that these passive pleasures are also targeted by the ruling class. Military advertising is common at Canadian Football League games, where a tired and more-or-less passive population is invited to join the war in Afghanistan, or wherever our next war is likely to be. The federal government is certainly readying itself for another conflict — it doesn’t seem to matter where — having invested billions more in the military while neglecting any potential peacekeeping operations.

It seems appropriate, then, that we challenge our existing social structure. Why should we work for so many hours, often worn to exhaustion, yet accept so little pay? Another race would likely look at our society and regard it as unacceptable. Why, they would ask, do we work so much for the benefit of others? Why do we not pursue our own creative efforts and desires to the fullest extent?

It is worth noting that we are among the fortunate. Our wages are decent enough to eat, find shelter and — when we are not working — enjoy our wages freely, as we please. For the less fortunate majority who live in a world of starvation — the UN reported in June that, for the first time in recorded history, world hunger is expected to affect one in six inhabitants of this planet — the struggle for a decent working day is a distant dream. It is incumbent upon us, then, that we struggle for a fair wage and more reasonable working hours. Any pay raise demanded or time taken off should be regarded as a small victory. Any working hours made available from our reduced schedule should be redistributed to the poor majority.

If each of us demand more free time and relaxation, society would gradually transition and we could focus on more grave concerns that the planet’s neglected majority face on a daily basis — environmental degradation and its disastrous and often fatal consequences, state-led violence and growing inequality — in other words, precisely the issues that our leaders are so successfully exacerbating, as we will likely be the case at the upcoming G20 meeting in Pittsburgh. So on this beautiful summer day, I leave you with a simple request — take some time off. Do it in an organized fashion, and take pride in any small achievements. It will do us all a great deal of good, and move us toward a more just society. Enjoy the rest of your summer.

Latin America: Social Movements in Times of Economic Crises

James Petras — 2009-08-13T19:05:50+00:00

The most striking aspect of the prolonged and deepening world recession/depression is the relative and absolute passivity of the working and middle class in the face of massive job losses, big cuts in wages, health care and pension payments and mounting housing foreclosures. Never in the history of the 20-21st Century has an economic crisis caused so much loss to so many workers, employees, small businesses, farmers and professionals with so little large-scale public protest.

To explore some tentative hypotheses of why there is little organized protest, we need to examine the historical-structural antecedents to the world economic depression. More specifically, we will focus on the social and political organizations and leadership of the working class; the transformation of the structure of labor and its relationship to the state and market. These social changes have to be located in the context of the successful ruling class socio-political struggles from the 1980’s, the destruction of the Communist welfare state and the subsequent uncontested penetration of imperial capital in the former Communist countries. The conversion of Western Social Democratic parties to neo-liberalism, and the subordination of the trade unions to the neo-liberal state are seen as powerful contributing factors in diminishing working class representation and influence.

We will proceed by outlining the decline of labor organization, class struggle and class ideology in the context of the larger political-economic defeat and co-optation of anti-capitalist alternatives. The period of capitalist boom and bust leading up to the current world depression sets the stage for identifying the strategic structural and subjective determinants of working class passivity and impotence. The final section will bring into sharp focus the depth and scope of the problem of trade union and social movement weakness and their political consequences.

History of Economic Depression and Worker Revolts: US, Europe, Asia and Latin America

The social history of the 20th and early 21st Century’s economic crises and breakdowns is written large with working class and popular revolts, from the left and right. During the 1930’s the combined effects of the world depression and imperialist-colonial wars set in motion major uprisings in Spain (the Civil War), France (general strikes, Popular Front government), the US (factory occupations, industrial unionization), El Salvador, Mexico and Chile (insurrections, national-popular regimes) and in China (communist/nationalist, anti-colonial armed movements). Numerous other mass and armed uprising took place in response to the Depression in a great number of countries, far beyond the scope of this paper to cover.

The post-World War II period witnessed major working class and anti-colonial movements in the aftermath of the breakdown of European empires and in response to the great human and national sacrifices caused by the imperial wars. Throughout Europe, social upheavals, mass direct actions and resounding electoral advances of working class parties were the norm in the face of a ‘broken’ capitalist system. In Asia, mass socialist revolutions in China, Indo-China and North Korea ousted colonial powers and defeated their collaborators in a period of hyper-inflation and mass unemployment.

The cycle of recessions from the 1960’s to the early 1980’s witnessed a large number of major successful working class and popular struggles for greater control over the work place and higher living standards and against employer-led counter-offensives.

Economic Crises and Social Revolts in Latin America

Latin America experienced similar patterns of crises and revolts as the rest of the world during the World Economic Depression and the Second World War. During the 1930-40’s, aborted revolutionary upheavals and revolts took place in Cuba, El Salvador, Colombia, Brazil and Bolivia. At the same time ‘popular front’ alliances of Communists, Socialists and Radicals governed in Chile and populist-nationalist regimes took power in Brazil (Vargas), Argentina (Peron) and Mexico (Cardenas).

As in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America also witnessed the rise of mass right-wing movements in opposition to the center-left and populist regimes in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and elsewhere — a recurrent phenomenon overlooked by most students of ‘social movements’.

The phenomenon of ‘crisis’ in Latin America is chronic, punctuated by ‘boom and bust’ cycles typical of volatile agro-mineral export economies and by long periods of chronic stagnation. Following the end of the Korean War and Washington’s launch of its global empire building project (mistakenly called The Cold War), the US engaged in a series of ‘hot wars’, (Korea — 1950-1953 and Indo-China —1955-1975) and overt and clandestine coups d’etat (Iran and Guatemala — both in 1954); and military invasions (Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada and Cuba); all the while backing a series of brutal military dictatorships in Cuba (Batista), Dominican Republic (Trujillo), Haiti (Duvalier),Venezuela (Perez-Jimenez), Peru (Odria) among others.

Under the combined impact of dictatorial rule, blatant US intervention, chronic stagnation, deepening inequalities, mass poverty and the pillage of the public treasury, a series of popular uprisings, guerrilla revolts and general strikes toppled several US-backed dictatorships culminating in the victory of the social revolution in Cuba. In Brazil (1962-64), Bolivia (1952), Peru (1968-74), Nicaragua (1979-89) and elsewhere, nationalist presidents took power nationalizing strategic economic sectors, re-distributing land and challenging US dominance. Parallel guerrilla, peasant and workers movements spread throughout the continent from the 1960’s to the early1970’s. The high point of this ‘revolt against economic stagnation, imperialism, militarism and social exploitation/exclusion’ was the victory of the socialist government in Chile (1970-73).

The advance of the popular movements and the electoral gains however did not lead to a definitive victory (the taking of state power) except in Cuba, Grenada and Nicaragua nor resolve the crisis of capitalism (the key problem of chronic economic stagnation and dependence). Key economic levers remained in the hands of the domestic and foreign economic elites and the US retained decisive control over Latin America’s military and intelligence agencies.

The US backed military coups (1964/1971-76), US military invasions (Dominican Republic 1965, Grenada1983, Panama 1990, Haiti 1994, 2005), surrogate mercenaries Nicaragua 1980-89 and rightwing civilian regimes (1982-2000/2005), reversed the advances of the social movements, overthrew nationalist/populist and socialist regimes and restored the predominance of the oligarchic troika: agro-mineral elite, the ‘Generals’ and the multinational corporations. US corporate dominance, oligarchic political successes and pervasive private pillage of national wealth accelerated and deepened the boom and bust process. However the savage repression, which accompanied the US-led counter-revolution and restoration of oligarch rule ensured that few large-scale popular revolts would occur, between the mid 1970’s to the beginning of the 1990’s — with the notable exception of Central America.

Civilian Rule, Neo-liberalism, Economic Stagnation and the New Social Movements

Prolonged stagnation, popular struggles and the willingness of conservative civilian politicians to conserve the reactionary structural changes implanted by the dictatorships, hastened the retreat of the military rulers. The advent of civilian rulers in Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina in the late 1980’s was accompanied by the rapid intensification of neo-liberal policies. This was spelled out in the ‘Washington Consensus’ and was integral to the President George H.W. Bush’s New World Order. While the new neo-liberal order failed to end stagnation it did facilitate the pillage of thousands of public enterprises, their privatization and de-nationalization. At the same time the massive outflow of profits, interest payments and royalties and the growing exploitation and impoverishment of the working people led to the growth of ‘new social movements’ throughout the 1990’s.

During the ascendancy of the military dictatorships and continuing under the neo-liberal regimes, while social movements and trade unions were suppressed, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) flourished. Billions of dollars flowed into the accounts of the NGOs from ‘private’ foundations. Later the World Bank and US and EU overseas agencies viewed the NGOs as integral to their counter-insurgency strategy.

The theorists embedded in the NGO-funded feminist, ecology, self-help groups and micro-industry organizations eschewed the question of structural changes, class and anti-imperialist struggles in favor of collaboration with existing state power structures. The NGO operatives referred to their organizations as the ‘new social movements’, which, in practice, worked hard to undermine the emerging class-based movements of anti-imperialists, Indians, peasants, landless workers and unemployed workers. These class-based mass movements had emerged in response to the imperial pillage of their natural resources and naked land grabs by powerful elites in the agro-mineral-export sectors with the full support of voracious neo-liberal regimes.

Toward the end of the 1990’s, neo-liberal pillage throughout Latin American had reached its paroxysm: tens of billions of dollars were literally siphoned off and transferred, especially out of Ecuador, Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina, to overseas banks. Over five thousand lucrative, successful state-owned enterprises were ‘privatized’ by the corrupt regimes at prices set far below their real value and into the hands of select private US and EU corporations and local regime cronies. The predictable economic collapse and crisis following the blatant looting of the major economies in Latin America provoked a wave of popular uprisings, which overthrew incumbent elected neo-liberal officials and administrations in Ecuador (three times), Argentina (three successful times) and Bolivia (twice). In addition, a mass popular uprising, in alliance with a constitutionalist sector of the military, restored President Chavez to power. During this period mass movements flourished and numerous center-left politicians, who claimed allegiance to these movements and denounced ‘neo-liberalism’, were elected president.

The deep economic crisis and repudiation of neo-liberalism marked the emergence of the social movements as major players in shaping the contours of Latin American politics. The principal emerging movements included a series of new social actors and the declining influence of the trade unions as the leading protagonist of structural change.

The Crisis of 1999-2003: Major Social Movements at the ‘End of Neo-liberalism’

Major social movements emerged in most of Latin America in response to the economic crisis of the 1990’s and early 2000’s and challenged neo-liberal ruling class control. The most successful were found in Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia.

Brazil: The Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST), with over 300,000 active members and over 350,000 peasant families settled in co-operatives throughout the country, represented the biggest and best organized social movement in Latin America. The MST built a broad network of supporters and allies in other social movements, like the urban Homeless Movement, the Catholic Pastoral Rural (Rural Pastoral Agency) and sectors of the trade union movement (CUT), as well as the left-wing of the Workers Party (PT) and progressive academic faculty and students. The MST succeeded through ‘direct action’ tactics, such as organizing mass ‘land occupations’, which settled hundreds of thousands of landless rural workers and their families on the fallow lands of giant latifundistas. They successfully put agrarian reform on the national agenda and contributed to the electoral victory of the putative center-left Workers Party presidential candidate Ignacio ‘Lula’ Da Silva in the 2002 elections.

Ecuador: The National Confederation of Indian and Nationalities in Ecuador (CONAIE) played a central role in the overthrow of two neo-liberal Presidents, Abdala Bucaram in 1997 and Jamil Mahuad in January 2000, implicated in massive fraud and responsible for Ecuador’s economic crisis of the 1990’s. In fact, during the January 2000 uprising, the leaders of CONAIE briefly occupied the Presidential Palace. Beginning in the late 1990’s CONAIE had resolved to form an electoral party ‘Pachacuti’, which would act as the ‘political arm’ of the movement. Pachacuti, in alliance with the rightist populist former military officer Lucio Gutierrez in the 2002 elections, briefly held several cabinet posts, including Foreign Relations and Agriculture. CONAIE’s and Pachacuti’s short-lived experience as a government movement and party was a political disaster. By the end of the first year, the Gutierrez regime allied with multi-national oil companies, the US State Department and the big agro-business firms, promoted a virulent form of neo-liberalism and forced the resignation of most CONAIE-backed officials. By the end of 2003, widespread discontent and internal divisions were exacerbated by an army of US and EU-funded NGOs, which infiltrated the Indian communities.

Venezuela: Major popular revolts in 1989 and 1992 culminated in the election of Hugo Chavez in 1999. Chavez proceeded to encourage mass popular mobilizations in support of referendums for constitutional reform. A US-backed alliance between the oligarchy and sectors of the military mounted a palace coup in April 2002, which lasted only 48 hours before being reversed by a spontaneous outpouring of over a million Venezuelans supported by constitutionalist soldiers in the armed forces. Subsequently, between December 2002 and February 2003, a ‘bosses’ lockout’ of the petroleum industry, designed to cripple the national economy, supported by the Venezuelan elite and led by senior officials in the PDVSA (state oil company), was defeated by the combined efforts of the rank and file oil workers with support from the urban popular classes. The failed US-backed assaults on Venezuelan democracy and President-elect Chavez radicalized the process of structural changes: mass community-based organizations, new class-based trade union confederations and national peasant movements sprang up and the million-member Venezuelan Socialist Party was formed. Social movement activity and membership flourished, as the government extended its social welfare programs to include free universal public health programs via thousands of clinics, state-sponsored food markets selling essential food at subsidized prices in poor neighborhoods and the development of universal free public education including higher education. At the same time numerous enterprises in strategic economic sectors, such as steel, telecommunications, petroleum, food processing and landed estates, were nationalized.

While the ruling class continues to control certain key economic sectors and highly-paid officials in the state sector retain powerful levers over the economy, the Chavez government and the mass popular movements have maintained the initiative in advancing the struggle throughout the decade from the late 1990’s into the first decade of the new millennium.

The Venezuelan social movements retain their vigor in part because of the encouragement of Chavez’ leadership, but the movements are also held back by powerful reformist currents in the regime, which seek to convert the movements into transmission belts of state policy. The movement-state relationship is fluid and reflects the ebb and flow of the conflict and the threats emanating from the US-backed rightist organizations.

The regime-movement relationship deepened during the crisis period of 1999-2003 and was further strengthened by the rise in oil prices during the world commodity boom of 2003-2008. With the unfolding of the world economic crisis in late 2008-2009, the positive relationship between the state and the movements will be tested.

Bolivia: Bolivia has the highest density of militant social movements of any country in Latin America, including high levels of mine and factory worker participation, community and informal market vender organizations, Indian and peasant movements and public employee unions. The long years of military repression from the early 1970’s to the mid 1980’s weakened the trade unions and was followed by intense application of neo-liberal policies.

By the end of the 1990’s, new large-scale social movements emerged but the locus of activity shifted from the historically militant mining districts and factories to the ‘sub-proletariat’ or ‘popular classes’ engaged in informal, ‘marginal’ occupations, especially in cities like ‘El Alto’. ‘El Alto’, located on the outskirts of La Paz, is densely populated by recent migrants, displaced miners and impoverished Indians and peasants, and received few public services. The new nexus for direct action challenging the neo-liberal regimes emerged from the coca farmers and Indian communities in response to the brutal implementation of US-mandated programs suppressing coca cultivation and the displacement of small farmers in favor of large-scale, agro-business plantations. In the cities, public sector employees, led by teachers, students and factory health worker unions fought neo-liberal measures privatizing services, like water, and cutting the public budgets for education and health care.

The economic crises of the late 1990-2000’s led to major public confrontation in January 2003, followed by a popular revolt in October and insurrection centered in ‘El Alto’ and spread to La Paz and throughout the country. Before being driven from power, the Sanchez de Losada regime murdered nearly seventy community activists and leaders. Hundreds of thousands of impoverished Bolivians stormed the capital, La Paz, threatening to take state power. Only the intervention of the coca farmer leader and presidential hopeful, Evo Morales, prevented the mass seizure of the Presidential palace. Morales brokered a ‘compromise’ in which the neo-liberal Vice President Carlos Mesa was allowed to succeed to the Presidency in exchange for a vaguely agreed promise to discontinue the hated neo-liberal policies of his predecessor, Sanchez de Losada. The tenuous agreement between the social movements and the ‘new’ neo-liberal President survived for two years due to the moderating influence of Evo Morales.

In May-June 2005, a new wave of mass demonstrations filled the streets of La Paz with workers, peasants, Indians and miners forcing Carlos Mesa to resign. Once again, Evo Morales intervened and signed a pact with the Congress calling for national elections in December 2005 in exchange for calling off the protests and appointing a senior Supreme Court judge (Rodriguez) to act as interim President.

Morales diverted the mass social movements into his party’s campaign machinery, undercutting the autonomous direct action strategies, which had been so effective in overthrowing the two previous neo-liberal regimes. This resulted in his election as President in December 2005.

While the economic crisis abated with the boom in commodity prices, President Evo Morales’ social-liberal policies did little to reduce the gross income inequalities, the vast concentration of fertile land in a handful of plantation elite and the dispossession of a majority of Indian communities from their lands. Morales’ policies of forming joint ventures with foreign multinational gas, oil and mining companies did little to end the massive transfer of profits from Bolivia’s natural resources back to the ‘home offices’ of the MNCs. Nevertheless the Morales’ tepid ‘nationalist gestures led to a ‘political-economic’ confrontation with the US-backed Bolivian oligarchy, which was funded by their enormous private profits gained during the ‘commodity boom’.

Argentina: The strongest relationship between a severe economic crisis and a mass popular rebellion took place in Argentina in December 19-20, 2001 and continued throughout 2002.

The conditions for the economic collapse were building up in the 1990s during the two terms of President Carlos Menem. His neo-liberal regime was marked by the corrupt ‘bargain basement’ sale of the most lucrative and strategic public enterprises in all sectors of the economy. The entire financial sector of Argentina was de-regulated, de-nationalized, dollarized and opened up to the worst speculative abuses. The national economic edifice, weakened by the massive privatization policies, was further undermined by rampant corruption and gross pillage of the public treasury. Menem’s policies continued under his successor, President De la Rua, who presided over the banking crisis and the subsequent collapse of the entire national economy, the loss of billions of dollars of private savings and pension funds, a thirty percent unemployment rate and the most rapid descent into profound poverty among the working and middle classes in Argentine history.

In December 2001, the people of Buenos Aires staged a massive popular uprising in front of the Presidential palace with the demonstrators taking over the Congress. They ousted President De la Rua and subsequently three of his would-be presidential successors in a matter of weeks. Hundreds of thousands of organized, unemployed workers blocked the highways and formed community-based councils. Impoverished, downwardly mobile middle class employees and bankrupt shopkeepers, professionals and pensioners formed a vast array of neighborhood assemblies and communal councils to debate proposals and tactics. Banks throughout the country were stormed by millions of irate depositors demanding the restitution of their savings. Over 200 factories, which had been shut down by their owners, were taken over by their workers and returned to production. The entire political class was discredited and the popular slogan throughout the country was: ‘!Que se vayan todos!’ (‘Out with all politicians!’). While the popular classes controlled the street in semi-spontaneous movements, the fragmented radical-left organizations were unable to coalesce to formulate a coherent organization and strategy for state power.

After two years of mass mobilizations and confrontation, the movements, facing an impasse in resolving the crisis, turned toward electoral politics and elected center-left Peronist Kirchner in the 2003 Presidential campaign.

Low Intensity Social Movements: Peru, Paraguay, Colombia, Chile, Uruguay, Central America, Haiti and Mexico

The entire Latin American continent and the neighboring regions witnessed the significant growth of social movement activity of greater or lesser scope. What differentiated these movements from their counterparts in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela was the absence of political challenges and regime change and the limited scope of their social action.

Nevertheless significant outbreaks of mass popular movements raised fundamental challenges to the reigning neo-liberal hegemony.

In Haiti, a mass popular rebellion to reinstate the democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide, who had been taken hostage and flown into exile by a joint US-EU-Canadian military operation, was brutally repressed by a multinational mercenary force led by a Brazilian general. Subsequent massacres in crowded slums by the occupying troops aborted the resurgence of the popular ‘Lavelas’ movement protesting the foreign imposition of neo-liberal ‘privatization’ and austerity measures.

Mexico witnessed a series of localized rebellions and mass uprisings against the neo-liberal regimes dominating Mexico. In 1994, the Zapatista National Liberal Army (EZLN), based in the Indian communities of rural Chiapas, rose and temporarily succeeded in gaining control of several towns and cities. With the entry of many thousands of Mexican Federal troops, and in the absence of a wider network of support, the Zapatistas withdrew to their jungle and mountain bases. An unstable truce was declared, frequently violated by the government, in which an isolated EZLN continued to exist confined to a remote area in the state of Chiapas. In Oaxaca, an urban rebellion, backed by trade unions, teachers and popular classes in the capital city and surrounding countryside, organized a popular assembly (comuna) and briefly created a situation of ‘dual power’ before being suppressed by the reactionary neo-liberal governor of the state using ‘death squads’ and Mexican troops. Faced with the repressive power of the state, the insurgent popular movements shifted toward the electoral process and succeeded in electing center-left Andres Manual Lopez Obrador in 2006 in the midst of the neo-liberal economic debacle. Their victory was short-lived, with the election results, overturned through massive fraud in the final tally of the votes. Subsequent peaceful protests involving millions of Mexicans eventually lost steam and the movement dissipated.

In Colombia, mass peasant, trade union and Indian protests challenged the neo-liberal Pastrana regime (1998-2002) while the major guerrilla movements (FARC/ELN) advanced toward the capital city. Fruitless peace negotiations, broken off under US pressure and a $5 billion dollar US counter-insurgency program, dubbed ‘Plan Colombia’, heightened political polarization and intensified paramilitary death-squad activity. With the election of Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian regime decimated peasant, trade union and human rights movements as it advanced its neo-liberal policies.

The political effects of the economic crisis at the end of the 1990’s, which had precipitated social movement activity throughout the hemisphere, led to brutal repression in Haiti, Mexico and Colombia in order for the neo-liberal regimes to continue their policies.

In several other Latin American countries, namely Peru and Paraguay, as well as in Central America, powerful rural-based peasant and Indian movements engaged in rural road blockages and land occupations against their governments’ neo-liberal ‘free trade’ agreements with the US. Since these rural movements lacked nation-wide support, especially from the urban centers, their struggles failed to make a significant impact even as their economies crumbled under neo-liberal policies.

Social Movements in the Time of the Commodity Boom

The sharp rise of agricultural and mineral commodity prices between 2003-2008, along with the election of center-left politicians, had a major impact on the most active and dynamic social movements.

Brazil: In Brazil the election of Lula De Silva (2002-2006) from the putatively center-left Workers Party was backed by all the major social movements, including the MST (Landless Rural Workers Movement) under the mistaken assumption that he would accelerate progressive structural changes like land re-distribution. Instead, Da Silva embraced the entire neo-liberal agenda of his predecessor, President Cardoso, including widespread privatization and tight fiscal policies, which, with the rise of agro-mineral prices, led to a narrowly focused agro-mineral export strategy centered exclusively on large agro-business and mineral extractive elites to the detriment of small businesses and rural producers. The MST’s efforts to influence Da Silva over the past decade (2003-2009) were futile — as state, local and federal governments criminalized the movement’s direct action tactics of land occupation. Lula’s policy of granting subsistence federal food allowances to the extremely poor and his success at co-opting movement leaders, especially from the huge trade union federations, neutralized the landless peasants and organized workers’ capacity to protest and strike. Lula’s policies isolated the MST from its ‘natural’ urban allies in the labor movement.

Lula’s right-turn and the vast increase in export revenues from high commodity prices led to increased social expenditures and reduced the level of activity and support for the MST in its struggle for agrarian reform. While retaining its mass base and continuing its land occupations, the MST no longer had a strategic political ally in its quest for social transformation. Subsequently it pursued more moderate reforms to avoid confrontation with the Lula regime, to which it still offered ‘critical support’.

In Argentina, the massive wave of direct action social movements subsided with the election of Kirchner (2003-2008) and the 7% economic growth rate stimulated by the commodity boom and the recovery from the dramatic economic meltdown of 2001-2002. With the recovery of employment and the return of their savings, the middle class assemblies rapidly disappeared. Kirchner offered subsidies to the unemployed and co-opted their leaders, which led to a sharp reduction of road blockages and membership in the militant unemployed workers organizations. Kirchner won over part of the human rights movement with his policies, which included his public purge of some of the more notorious military and police officials and the granting of subsidies to certain sectors of the human rights movement, including the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. With the decline of the radicalized movements of 1999-2002, the economic recovery of 2003-2008 led to a partial recovery of trade union activism, whose demands were mostly economic, focusing on the recovery of the workers’ wages and benefits lost during the systemic crisis.

In Bolivia, the economic boom, which began under the neo-liberal regime of Carlos Mesa continued under ‘leftist’ populist Evo Morales. He quickly moderated movement demands as he moved to the center-left. As an alternative to the social movement platform calling for the nationalization of the principal resource sectors exploited by multi-national corporations, Morales promoted ‘joint ventures’ which he demagogically claimed were ‘nationalization without expropriation’. Likewise he answered peasant and Indian demands for agrarian reform by opening up mostly uncultivable public lands in the Amazon to the landless peasants. By the same token, he protected the most fertile land in the largest privately owned plantations from expropriation by exempting private land, which was classified as performing a ‘social function’. Avoiding structural change, Morales was able to use the windfall of state revenues from the high prices of Bolivian minerals and gas to co-opt movement leaders, provide incremental increases in the minimum wage, finance subsidies to Indian communities, encourage legal, political rights and recognize indigenous jurisdiction over their local communities.

Morales retained his leadership of the coca farmers union and, through his Movement to Socialist Party (MAS), exercised hegemony over the major community-based movements. His close ties with Presidents Castro in Cuba and Chavez in Venezuela set him in radical opposition to Washington’s interventionist policies and its supporters among the five rightist-controlled provinces centered in Santa Cruz. The extreme right gained ascendancy in the latter region and launched a violent racist frontal assault on the Morales government, polarizing the countryside while guaranteeing Morales the continued mass support among the popular classes and movements throughout the country.

In Ecuador, the powerful Indian movement (CONAIE) and its allies in the trade unions supported the neo-liberal regime of Lucio Gutierrez and suffered a severe decline in their power, support and organizational cohesion. The recovery has been slow, hindered by interventions of numerous US/EU funded NGOs.

With the demise of the established social movements, a new urban-based ‘citizens’ movement’ led by Rafael Correa overthrew the venal, corrupt, neo-liberal Gutierrez regime and led the electorate to vote Correa into power in both 2006 and 2009. Correa adapted center-left political positions, financing incremental wage and salary increases and state subsidized cheap credit to small and medium size businesses. He adopted a nationalist position on foreign debt payments and the termination of US military basing rights in Manta. The boom in mining and petroleum prices and ties with oil-rich Venezuela facilitated President Correa’s capacity to fund programs to secure support among the Andean bourgeoisie and the popular classes.

Venezuela: The economic boom, namely the tripling of world oil prices, facilitated Venezuela’s economic recovery after the crisis caused by the opposition coup and the bosses’ lockout (2002-2003). As a result, from 2004 to 2008 Venezuela grew by nearly 9% a year. The Chavez government was able to generously fund a whole series of progressive socio-economic changes that enhanced the strength and attraction of pro-government social movements. The social movements played an enormous role in defeating opposition referendums, which had called for the impeachment of the President. Peasant organizations were prominent in pressuring recalcitrant bureaucrats in the Chavez government to implement the new agrarian laws calling for land distribution. Trade union militants organized strikes and demonstrations and played a major role in the nationalization of the steel industry. Given the vast increase in state resources, the Chavez government was able to both compensate the owners of the expropriated firms and meet workers’ demands for social ownership.

Summary

The economic boom and the ascendancy of center-left governments led to incremental increases in living standards, a decline of unemployment and the co-optation of some movement leaders — resulting in the decline of radical movement activity and the revival of traditional ‘pragmatic’ trade union moderates. During the economic boom and the rise of the center-left, the only major mass mobilization took the form of right wing movements determined to destabilize the center-left governments in Bolivia and Venezuela.

A comparison of the social movements in countries where they played a major role in political and social change (Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil and Bolivia) and movements in countries where they were marginalized reveals several crucial differences. First of all, the differences are not found in terms of the quantity of public protests, militant direct actions or number of participants. For example, if one adds up the number of social movement protests in Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Central America, they might equal or even surpass the social actions in Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia. What was different and most politically significant was the quality of the mass action. Wherever they were of marginal significance, the organizations were fragmented, dispersed and without significant national leadership or structure and without any political leverage on the institutions of national power. In contrast, influential social movements operated as national organizations, which coordinated social and political action, centralized and capable of reaching the nerve centers of political power — the capital cities (La Paz, Buenos Aires, Quito and to a lesser degree Sao Paolo). To one degree or another, the high impact social movements combined rural and urban movements, had political allies in the party system and bridged cultural barriers (linking indigenous and mestizo popular classes).

World Economic Crisis and Social Movements — 2008 Onward

Beginning in late 2008 and continuing in 2009 the world economic crisis spread across Latin America. The crisis came later to Latin America and with less initial severity than in the US or EU. Because it is an ongoing process, the full socio-political implications and economic impact is still far from clear. What we can observe is that, at least initially, the current crisis has not provoked anything like the mass upheavals and the surge of radical social movements that we witnessed during the crisis beginning in 2001.

(See Gross Domestic Product, Latin American and the Caribbean, 2007 - 2009 at the top of the page)

If anything, we have seen a surge of right-wing movements and electoral organizations in countries, like Argentina, and a US-backed right-wing military coup backed by the rightist business associations in Honduras, and the continued ‘pragmatic’ behavior of mass social movements in Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador.

The only exception is in Peru where the organized Indian communities in the Amazonian region have engaged in armed mass confrontations with the US-backed, right-wing regime of Alan Garcia. The Amazonian Indians responded to a series of Government decrees, which handed mineral and gas exploitation rights on Indian lands to foreign mining and energy corporations. From a historical perspective, the struggle was ‘conservative’, in so far as it pitted indigenous communities defending traditional use and ownership of lands and resources against the modern economic predators and the neo-liberal state.

The Lumpen-Bourgeoisie: The Triple Alliance of the Neo-Liberal State, Narco-traffickers and the Unemployed Poor

The least studied, but most dynamic, and, possibly best organized social movement in Latin America today is the right-wing drug trafficking movement. Headed by a powerful narco-bourgeoisie, with strong ties to the military and neo-liberal state apparatus and with armed lumpen-cadres drawn from the urban unemployed and landless peasantry, the ‘Lumpen’ Movement has created a powerful geographic and social presence in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and elsewhere.

It was the agrarian neo-liberal policies that prepared the ground for the ‘mass base’ of the rightist narco-movement. The promotion of mechanized agro-export agriculture in Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Central America uprooted millions. State terror and paramilitary death squads drove millions of peasant families from the land and into urban slums. The large-scale importation of cheap, subsidized agricultural produce from the US wiped out many thousands of small-scale family farms. The stagnant of manufacturing sector was unable to absorb the migrants into labor-intensive work. This created massive numbers of young rural unemployed landless and urban workers, who could be either recruits for progressive social movements or recruits for the narco-industry. Cultivating coca and opium, refining and smuggling the drugs and soldiering for the drug lords provided a livelihood for these desperate young men and women. The deep economic crisis and stagnation of the 1990’s and early 2000’s created a large mass of young unemployed and under-employed workers in the cities ripe for employment by the narco-gangs who paid a living wage for an often deadly occupation.

The links between right-wing political parties, banking, business and landowner associations has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout Latin America. In Colombia, drug traffickers have become large landowners after their death squads devastated peasant communities suspected of supporting leftists or progressive organizations. ‘Sicarios’ or ‘hit-men’ are mostly young men from working or peasant class background who ‘work’ for business leaders and multi-national corporations as assassins. They have killed hundreds of trade union and peasant and Indian leaders each year in Colombia alone. Over a third of the members of the Colombian Congress, the principle backers of President Uribe, have been financed by the drug cartels. Uribe has long-term ties with prominent narco-traffickers and death-squad militia leaders. In Mexico, drug traffickers have recruited widely among the impoverished peasants. In many Mexican states the narcos have purchased the services of thousands of government officials from top to bottom. In the absence of employment and a social safety-net, many of the poor find work in the narco-trade. Narco-traffickers have established alliances and business associations with upper class financial groups engaging in joint ‘philanthropic’ activities, such as handing out cash and delivering needed services to the poor. Narco-traffickers eventually wash their illegal earnings through major banks in the US, Canada and Europe and then invest in real estate, tourist complexes and landed properties.

Narco-trafficker organizations and death squads have worked closely with rightwing movements in Sta. Cruz (Bolivia), with rightist political parties in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as in Mexico and Colombia.

The ‘lumpenization’ process operates via two routes: in some cases, young unemployed males are directly recruited via neighborhood organizations; in other cases the dispossessed, bankrupt and downwardly mobile farmers and long-term unemployed workers are gradually forced into the ‘illegal’ labor market.

The long-term, large-scale process of stagnation, despite the periods of export growth, marginalize the rural poor and accelerate their impoverishment without generating compensatory stable, urban employment paying a living wages. The ‘lumpenization’ of these displaced, marginalized peasants and workers, produced by the crisis and class polarization, is accompanied by the rise of a ‘lumpen culture’ with its own hierarchical structures, where the few at the ‘top’ develop ties to the economic and state elite and the masses at the ‘bottom’ aspire to a degenerate kind of middle-class consumerist life-style.

By the first decade of the new millennium, the rightist lumpen-narco movement far exceeded the progressive popular movements in terms of power and influence in Mexico, Colombia, Central America and some countries in the Caribbean, like Jamaica. The relationship between the ‘legal’ rightist and the ‘narco’ rightist movements is one of collaboration and conflict: they join forces to oppose powerful rural and trade union movements and progressive electoral regimes. The lumpen-narcos provide the ‘shock troops’ to assassinate progressive leaders, including elected officials and to terrorize supporters among the peasantry and urban poor. On the other hand, violent conflict between the rightists can break out at any time, especially when the lumpen-elite encroach on the state prerogatives, business interests, ties with imperial drug enforcement agencies and raise questions about the legitimacy of the bourgeois class.

Latin America’s Social Movements and the Economic Recession/Depression

Economic crises have multiple and diverse impacts on the popular classes and social movements.

The profound economic crisis of the 1990’s and first years of 2000 radicalized the popular classes and led to widespread ‘high impact’ protests and national rebellions, which overthrew incumbent neo-liberal regimes and replaced them with ‘center-left’ regimes. At the same time the social changes, implicit in the neo-liberal crisis, led to a downwardly mobile urban and rural sector. This formed the basis for the growth of dynamic leftist social movement led by popular mass-based leaders and rightist movements led by lumpen-narco chiefs and supported by the economic elites. The conservative, far-right confronted popular social movements from positions in the state and through the military and para-military death squads.

The commodity boom and the ascendancy of the ‘center-left’ regimes led to the ‘moderation’ of demands from below in the face of cooptation from above. Large-scale job creation and poverty programs, cheap credit and incremental wage and salary increases all contributed to moderating mass politics. The trade unions re-emerged as central actors and collective bargaining replaced mass direct action. Rural movements engaged in militant struggle were relatively isolated. The key political factor in this period was the demobilization of the popular classes, the decline of the direct action movements and the restoration of the power of the business, land-owning and mining elite based on their strengthened economic position. The rejuvenated Right took the lead in directing their own ‘direct action’ movements in Bolivia, Argentina and Central America.

As the crisis of 2008-2009 unfolded, the progressive movements were slow to respond, having been ‘under the tent’ of the center-left electoral regimes. Since these regimes were now being held responsible for the fallout of the commodity crash, the left social movements were in a weak position and unable to pose any radical alternatives.

It is important to remember that the world economic crisis had hit the ‘North’ (US/EU) earlier and harder than in Latin America. In Latin American, the social impact was weaker — at first. Unemployment grew mainly during the last months of 2008. The gradual unfolding of the crisis contrasted with the system-wide crash of the late 1990’s-2002, which precipitated mass rebellions. In addition, as a consequence of the earlier crisis, capital and finance controls had been imposed that limited the spread of the toxic assets and financial crisis from the US to Latin America.

Moreover, Latin American countries are diversifying their trade, especially toward Asia including China, which continues to grow at 8% a year. Diversification and financial controls limited the impact of the US financial meltdown on the Latin American economies. In addition, the early ‘stimulus’ measures, taken in response to the first signs of the crisis, had the effect of temporarily ameliorating the impact of the global recession/depression on Latin America.

Nevertheless as the depression deepens in the North, Latin America’s trade has plunged, and the region has fallen into negative growth. As a result, unemployment is growing in both the export sectors as well as in production for the domestic economy. In response, the right-wing parties and leaders blame the center-left regimes. Moves are underway in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador to oust these regimes through elections or through coups, backed by US President Obama’s ‘rollback’ global strategy. The July 2009 coup in Honduras, covertly backed from the strategic US military base in the country, is the first sign that Washington is moving its military client to overthrow the new independent ‘center-left’ regimes in the region. This is particularly true among the Central American and Caribbean countries linked with Venezuela in the new integration programs, such as ALBA and PetroCaribe.

The first manifestations of progressive mass popular protests in the current economic recession are not directly related to the economic decline. In Peru, the indigenous Amazonian communities organized militant road blockages and confrontations with the military resulting in over one hundred dead and wounded. This mass movement developed in response to the Peruvian government’s granting concessions of mining exploitation rights to foreign multi-nationals, an infringement of the rights of the indigenous people to their lands in the Amazonian region. Demonstrations in solidarity with the Amazonian Indians occurred in most cities, including Lima. The Congress, fearing a mass uprising, temporarily canceled the concessions. This was a major victory for the indigenous communities. Moreover, the success of the Amazonian Indian communities has detonated widespread sustained strikes and protests in most of the major cities of Peru, in response to economic decline resulting from falling commodity prices.

The sustained popular struggle in Honduras is in response to the military coup overthrowing President Zelaya, a moderate reformer pursuing an independent foreign policy. Led by the urban public sector trade unions and peasant movements, the struggle has combined democratic, nationalist and populist demands.

Apart from these two mass popular movements, the economic crisis has yet to evoke mass radical rebellions, like those which took place during earlier crises between 2000-2003. We can posit several possible explanations or hypotheses for the contrasting responses of the mass movements to economic crises.

Hypotheses

The full impact of the world crisis has yet to hit the popular classes — it began late in 2008 and only began to register increased unemployment in the first quarter of 2009.
The current crisis, at first, did not hit the lower middle classes, public employees and skilled workers. It has been highly segmented, thus weakening cross class solidarity and alliances present in earlier crises.
Unlike the previous period, the crisis takes place in many countries, which are ruled by ‘center left’ regimes with an organized social base backed by the social movements. These regime-movement linkages neutralize mass protests, out of fear of a return to the hard right.
The mass movements on the left have responded to the crisis with relative passivity — in part because the governments have intervened with economic stimulus measures and some social ameliorative policies. The continuation and deepening of the crisis and the inadequate coverage of moderate public interventions could eventually lead to the resurgence of mass struggles.
The increasing economic vulnerability of the incumbent center-left regimes and the relative passivity of the progressive social movements has opened political space and opportunities for right-wing mass mobilizations, combining electoral and street politics to build a base for a return to power.
The crisis will likely accelerate the lumpenization process, as long-term unemployment sets in and if alternate movements fail to organize the chronically unemployed in consequential struggles.
As the bourgeoisie and its political supporters find few legitimate sources for profiteering available, they will likely serve as intermediaries and ‘protectors’ of the narco-traffickers and other criminal syndicates and rely on them to eliminate left social movement leaders and activists.
The rise of the ‘lumpen-Right’ may lead to a virtual ‘dual power’ situation in which legitimate and illegitimate power configurations cooperate in repressing social movements and compete for influence.
The relative passivity of the social movements is likely a transitory phenomenon, influenced by the convergence of circumstances. If the crisis deepens and extends over time and rightist regimes return to power, recent past historical experience strongly suggests that the massive increase in poverty and unemployment, combined with repressive rightist regimes, could lead to mass rebellions on the part of the previously ‘passive’ popular classes.

CBC interviews CDs Sid Shniad

James Patterson — 2009-08-13T18:59:29+00:00

There has been plenty of chatter leading up to today’s United Church vote. Charges of antisemitism are being thrown around pretty liberally, and it’s a clear example of just how polarizing this discussion has become.

Despite the debate-stifling tactics being used, this vote in Kelowna has clearly sparked the interest of the MSM in Canada (which will help continue to fuel the discussion). This morning, CD’s own Sid Shniad, co-chair of Independent Jewish Voices Canada, spoke with the CBC early edition about the issue. You can listen to some of his perspectives, many of which CD holds, via this CBC podcast:

Click to stream — CBC (runs 6:26)

Start with Stories

Dave McLaren — 2009-08-13T17:10:18+00:00

It’s worth taking a closer look at President Obama’s speech at the University of Cairo, June 4, 2009. Obama’s greeting of peace, assalaamu alaykum (peace be upon you) was loudly cheered because it signalled he knew where he was and that he had respect for the place and the people. But his speech was more than a tip of the hat to a potentially hostile audience. It was a speech from America to the Muslim world, from one people to another, and the President did something I’ve never heard a national leader do before: he started with stories.

I don’t mean stories from the rubber chicken circuit (“Hey, did you hear the one about the Jew, the Muslim, and the Christian …”) I mean the stories of nations.

To quote from his speech: “The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”

In other words, he fessed up to the history of the West’s colonial adventures in the Middle East and, later in the speech, of his own countrymen in Iraq. It was more than an acknowledgement of history; it was a validation of the Muslim story as told by Muslims themselves.

Obama then acknowledged the value of Islam and the West’s ancient debt to the Muslim world: “As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar University — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation … And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”

Obama was applauded for that statement and many similar, but he did not purchase his applause at the expense of his own country, for he was as adamant about the contributions of America: “The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known.” And he also made it clear that, “it is my first duty as President to protect the American people.”

Do you see what he was doing? Obama was telling the stories of both Muslim nations and America with respect and accuracy and asserting the intrinsic value of both. He was charting a course in parallel to the Other in which both are to be allowed to plot their own futures in peace.

This method was never clearer than in the part of his speech that dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He acknowledged the suffering of both the Jews in the Holocaust and the Palestinians in the refugee camps on the West Bank. Neither denying Israel the right to exist, nor colonizing Palestinian lands will dissolve the hated. Again he reached for stories — the ancient myth of three peoples whose common ancestor is Abraham. And again the lesson is taken from Islam, from “the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.”

As the President pointed out, the separate stories of Jews, Christians and Muslims — our cultural myths (“myth” is just an old Greek word for “story”, albeit a story of defining power for a people) — are not all that different. They put all three peoples on ground that is surprisingly solid. From this common ground, he addressed several difficult matters: democracy, religious freedom, nuclear weapons, women’s rights, the developed world and the developing world.

In his concluding paragraphs, he demonstrates what Muslims, Jews and Christians have in common by quoting from our separate mythologies:

“The Holy Koran tells us, ‘O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.’

The Talmud tells us: ‘The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.’

The Holy Bible tells us, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.’”

So, the mid-East is the birthplace for three great cultures and, for better or worse, we have at least that much in common. If stories are the starting point for understanding a people, then place is the starting point for understanding their stories — Moses, Jesus and Mohammed prayed together in the same land in which God created Adam and Eve. As the sign at the entrance to the Ziibiwing Heritage Centre of the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe in Michigan says, “All creation myths are true.”

I would go further: all myths are true. I don’t mean all stories: hockey does not define Canadians, well not all of us anyway and certainly not as a people. I mean myths that arise from being in a particular place and that define who we are. If you think about it, most of those are stories about spirit and its connection with place. I can hear the old Celtic as well as the not so old English ideas of land and spirit in our modern Canadian plays, novels, court rulings and legislation.

In this regard, Canada is a difficult country. Most of our mythologies come from somewhere else. They are all as true as anyone else’s, but here is not their birthplace. And the languages we use to tell them (French, English, Polish, Greek, Chinese, Urdu, Yoruba, Tamil and a whole lot more) are also rooted in lands other than North America.

Those whose stories and spirit and languages do come from this place are Aboriginal, literally “from the beginning.” Aboriginal peoples are our Other. Even more so than the French for the English or the English for the French, for both have been dealing (and not well) with Turtle Island peoples for 400 years. And now Chinese, Jamaicans, Tamils, Indians — the real ones, from India — are also not dealing very well with Turtle Island peoples. Turtle Island is what Aboriginal peoples call North America — the source of their stories, spirit and language. The name itself, Turtle Island, has its origins in Aboriginal myths.

If President Obama is on to something — if we can begin to understand the Other from their mythologies — then we must ask, how well do we know the stories at the heart of Aboriginal culture? For their myths — those stories that define a people — are very different from ours. There is, I think, more that separates us from First Nations than from Muslim nations. But that’s all the more reason to start with the stories of Turtle Island.

“How well do we know their stories” is not an idle question. We are about to hear their stories yet again — from the new Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Shawn Atleo, and from residential school victims during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. Some of what they tell us we won’t want to hear. But listen we must and, this time, try to understand them from their point of view — from the point of view of Aboriginal culture.

I hope the media is prepared to do as good a job in teaching us about Aboriginal culture as they have been about Muslim culture. We all know stories about land claims and Aboriginal rights because the media has reported the facts of the disputes; but do we understand what it is about Aboriginal culture that sets First Nations so at odds with the rest of Canadian society?

We know about residential schools and we know that they have done harm, but do we know why? What is it, exactly, about Aboriginal ways of raising children, of seeing the world, of knowing the spiritual, of relating to one another and to the land that was so damaged by residential schools? And why is it that our governments’ policies and practices continue to offend and seem to have no effect on the well-being of Aboriginal peoples?

I suspect the answer lies somewhere in our separate mythologies. All myths are true, but they are not all the same. Perhaps giving people the room to be different by starting with their stories as they wish them told is to let peace settle upon us all.

You can read more essays by David McLaren at http://mclarenathome.spaces.live.com/

Is the Party Over?

Judy Rebick — 2009-08-10T19:46:01+00:00

Today I was on The Current to debate the proposed name change of the NDP. The name is the least of their problems is my view. David Michael Lamb, the guest host, asked me why I wasn’t going the NDP convention. I answered, “I’ve kind of given up on the NDP.” Frankly, it didn’t even occur to me to go. I have been involved in efforts to change the NDP since the 1980’s in Ontario and with a few exceptions (getting them to support the Morgentaler clinic) it has been almost impossible to get them to change. Their response to opposition from the Waffle, a powerful youth opposition reflecting the new politics on the 1960’s until now has been to crush it.

Paul Dewar, the Ottawa NDP MP who seems to be doing an excellent job, is taking the opportunity of a debate on changing the name of the party to propose a process of thorough going debate about what the party is doing. He is enthusiastic about the possibilities of change and I wish him luck. I am sure he and I agree on many things. Libby Davies, another fantastic NDP MP, is currently on a mission to Palestine, as usual doing and saying what a progressive politician should be doing and saying. Follow her blog on rabble.ca

Libby was part of the effort to transform the party in 2002 called the New Politics Initiative. Most of the leadership of the NPI no longer see the NDP as an instrument of change. The NDP defeated the NPI’s proposal for a new unitary party of the Left at the 2002 convention by promising to incorporate our ideas. Instead Jack Layton has moved the party more towards the other parties, more professionalized, less and less presenting any kind of alternative vision. Paul Dewar said that the NDP unlike the other parties has real debates at convention. That’s true, but like the other parties, the NDP doesn’t really have discussions where they try and learn from opposition and from their own mistakes and look at debate as an opportunity for transformation rather than a threat to their power.

On this eve of the NDP convention, next week-end in Halifax, here is an excerpt from Transforming Power about the NDP and NPI experience.

“Over the years I have had to acknowledge that political parties seem to be just about the most intractable organizations around. I have been trying to convince the New Democratic Party to change since the 1980s, using various methods. Frankly, it was easier to win legal abortion in Canada against the power of the church, the police, the courts, and the government than to get this rather weak third party to change in any fundamental way. The pressure on political parties to conform to the existing political system is so great that they seem incapable of behaving in a way that is accountable, transparent, democratic, and effective. It is no wonder that so few people want anything to do with them.

My generation of activists expanded the notion of politics, arriving at an understanding that social movements, such as the women’s and environmental movements, far from being special interest groups or interlopers in the political system — as they have been labelled by right-wing politicians — have actually been the most important forces for change in our political system. Ever since the early twentieth century, trade unions participated in electoral politics through a close alliance, often institutional alliance, with labour parties, such as the NDP in Canada. But the movements that emerged in the 1960s maintained a greater autonomy from political parties, pressuring the parties from the outside or making alliances with activists inside the party to make change. Today, many activists believe that it is movements alone that will make the changes we need, and that political parties are anachronisms of a previous age that cannot adapt to the new politics of this one. However, my experience tells me that unless we change power at the top while we are building power from the bottom, the change will only be partial. I am frankly not sure if this means retaining political parties as we know them. In any case, I think we need to learn how power can be exercised at a government level in a manner that is dramatically different than that used today.

“The efforts I have been involved with, starting with the Campaign for an Activist Party in 1988, and ending with the New Politics Initiative in 2002, attempted to persuade a social-democratic party that its future lay in an alliance not only with the labour movement, but also with all the various social movements for change that had emerged and were emerging…

“In 2002, using some of the ideas from the Workers Party in Brazil and some of the lessons we learned from the NDP experience in Ontario, I got together with Jim Stanford, who is the chief economist for the Canadian Auto Workers, and we came up with the idea of the New Politics Initiative (NPI). We noted that the New Democratic Party was not attracting the youth of the anti-globalization movement, so we pulled together a group that was half old-time left-wing activists and intellectuals and half newly minted activists from the anti-globalization movement. Stanford and I proposed a manifesto for a new party that would be, in deference to the anti-authoritarian politics of the new movement, signed by grassroots activists in addition to well-known leaders.

“The young activists said “No” to the manifesto, because the process was too top-down, but suggested we put out the manifesto as a discussion paper on the internet and ask for comments and signatories. Since we had the support of CAW president Buzz Hargrove and NDP MPs Svend Robinson and Libby Davies, our discussion paper hit the front page of The Globe and Mail.

“Within days of the posting, we were engulfed in a maelstrom of public debate as well as a difficult private process of trying to integrate the Old Left culture with the emerging New Left culture. The NPI argued that a new party be a unitary party of the Left, bringing together the NDP and the Green Party as well as movement activists, and base itself on a partnership with social movements and with a commitment to participatory democracy. Many in the NDP, including current leader Jack Layton, easily took up the politics of partnership with the social movements that in the 1980s had been such a hard sell, but there was less general understanding about what participatory democracy would mean in a party. Even though I had just written a book on the topic, in retrospect, I don’t think we had much of an idea ourselves. Nonetheless, NPI argued that the NDP had to open itself to the new forces of the anti-globalization movement by initiating the formation of a new party.

Writing for Rabble after the NPI made its debut at the 2002 NDP convention, I said,

What became clear over the course of the NDP convention, where we brought a resolution calling for the formation of a new party, was that the NPI is really about transforming left-wing politics by bringing together the best traditions of old left with the radical democracy of the new left…” The NPI was able to bring a bit of the spirit of the anti-globalization movement onto the floor of the NDP convention, chants, costumes, and face paint included. More than that, in a profoundly cautious political party, 40 percent voted for a radical proposal to initiate a new party. Indeed the impact may have been strong enough to open the NDP to formally including a political opposition for the first time in its history…” On the left internationally, two currents are emerging. On the one side, social democratic parties in England and most of Europe are moving to the right and embracing the so-called “third way,” meaning corporate globalization with a slightly more humane face. “The other current is emerging through the anti-corporate-globalization movement and some socialist parties in Latin America. This current strongly opposes corporate globalization and sees radical democracy, engaging citizens at every level of government, as the way to counter corporate power. As someone who has given up on the NDP more than once in my long political career, I feel a greater sense of optimism today that a new kind of political party that brings together most of the forces fighting for social justice is a real possibility.”

It’s a little depressing to read these words today, but important to assess them. What really happened was that Jack Layton used the rhetoric of the NPI for his run for leadership, and he was supported by NPI leaders such as Svend Robinson and Libby Davies. As most NPI activists were NDP members, they got caught up in this election campaign and the NPI dissolved….

“Jack Layton has since turned the NDP into more of a professionally driven party than it has ever been. Instead of participatory democracy in the party, what we have is informal social networking. Layton does this himself as a form of damage control every time the party makes a move in a direction that activists don’t like. The party considered it a victory when it won eight more seats in the same election won by the Bush-loving Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, infuriating a lot of social movement activists. In the 2008 election, the party recognized the error of its ways and turned its fire on Harper, thus improving its presence in Parliament and somewhat healing its relationship with social movement activists.

“In retrospect, the NPI was too little, too soon. It has taken a decade or more even to begin to ask the right questions about how to transform political power. Events in Brazil and South Africa, as well as the experiences of Venezuela and Bolivia, have given us a lot of information about what works and what doesn’t. And the experiences of two decades of organizing under neo-liberalism gives us more of a vision of what a participatory democracy might really look like.” For more on political parties read Transforming Power.

So I’ve given up on the NDP once again. Here’s hoping Paul Dewar has more luck than the NPI. Change would be a lot easier if we had real leadership or at least a little more help from the political Left.

This blog was originally posted at Transforming Power.

Intelligent Commentary: Episode 6

Madeline Bruce — 2009-08-10T16:27:59+00:00

In this episode we hear lots of talk about guns, munitions, gun-running, spying, and war strategy, on a street level, and on a global level, stretching all the way to Hong Kong. Take it down a level, and it’s the talk you hear on the Canadian TV series Trailer Park Boys, when Ricky and Julian decide that a loaded gun is the best way to solve a conflict in the Trailer Park.

Take it up a notch, and you can find Marcel Proust’s delight in talking very elaborate Military strategy with his friend in the French Military, Robert de St. Loup. Also, in War and Peace Leo Tolstoy gives a masterful description of the relish and zeal with which Napolean’s soldiers ride happily to their deaths, so loyal are they to this emperor and his cause.

Missing from each of these examples is the presence of women. In each case, men have defined the situation, the problem, and the solution.

If we look at the arc of the career of this series writer, Chris Haddock, we recall that his series DaVinci’s Inquest, and then DaVinci’s City Hall, was based on Vancouver’s real-life coroner, and then Mayor, Larry Campbell. Campbell was that rare specimen in politics – a genuine compassionate person of integrity. Where might Haddock look now for an inspiring example of goodness amongst our leaders. Hello? I’m waiting……. .

In this series Intelligence we enter into a world of blatant crime and lives lived for greed and lust for power. It’s more difficult to look at our own world and acknowledge just how far down that path we are ourselves.

August 8th. This is the eve before the meetings in Guadalajara, Mexico, of the so-called Security & Prosperity Partnership between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico on August 9th and 10th, 2009. Heads of huge corporations, and world leaders will be there, but the press, and ordinary citizens will be strictly forbidden, and security forces will be very much in evidence. Business deals are being made away from democratic and parliamentary process. This is about the deregulation of laws that have been put into place concerning pollution, workplace safety, and liveable wages. Corporations are making their own laws now. This is all spelled out in Nanaimo Filmmaker Paul Manly’s full length documentary You, Me, and the SPP: Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule. This is available via the internet, and Paul will be showing this film on his cross Canada tour. Paul is the son of former United Church Minister and MLA Jim Manly.

In this episode, Jimmie Reardon (Ian Tracy) utters the slogan, “Peace and prosperity” several times. His brother Mike remarks something about, “Do you want me to sing an anthem? ” Well yes, I do. We are in danger of losing our Canadian sovereignty with the secret and nefarious planning taking place in the SPP meetings.

Actor Matt Frewer excels in these little bits of business that underline the profound sleaziness of his character. He is talking here to colleagues while placing a toothpick in his mouth.

That is what a society based on greed is – sleazy.

Rethinking the “Get Tough on Crime” Policy: A Tip for Tories

Dave Bennett — 2009-08-07T17:25:02+00:00

Warkworth, August 6, 2009: “The Warkworth Institution remains in lock down following a July 21 riot by more than 200 of the medium-security prison’s 579 inmates.

“The riot began when the inmates refused to return to their cells and broke into the prison’s health-care centre and plundered its supply of narcotics, which include methadone and painkillers. Inmates also trashed a courtyard and set several items on fire. By the time the riot had ended one inmate was dead of a drug overdose and 13 others were injured.

“Assistant warden, management services, Ann Anderson said this week the institution remains in lock down as staff continue their cell-by-cell search of the prison’s five living units.

“We’re getting near the end, but we’re not quite there yet,” Anderson said Tuesday. “It will probably be another week in order to ensure we are doing it as safely as possible, and we’ll remain locked down until that is complete.” — Belleville Intelligencer

The riot at Warkworth federal penitentiary that began around 9 PM of Tuesday July 21, 2009 got very little attention in the mainstream media. A couple of local Belleville newspapers and Mix 97 Radio caught the story first. The Canadian Press followed that story, which was picked up by the Ottawa Sun and The Toronto Star. (CTV.ca ran one CP story, “Inmate Found Dead” attributed to CTV.ca News Staff.)

Feminist lawyer Nicole Summer talks about “the social invisibility of prisons. The general public neither knows nor cares about the plight of the incarcerated, and thus cannot demand that its government properly protect prisoners’ bodily integrity and rights.”

Thanks to this attitude, prisoners have, as a group, experienced years of neglect. The problem can be measured in taxpayer dollars, billions of them. And the problem can be measured in the pain and suffering of communities, of families, and of individuals.

Crime is a problem with no easy solutions. Given the human bent for procrastination and denial, the responsibility for fixing our justice system and our prisons must fall on all citizens, not just the politicians.

Given its scope, the situation demands that we seek radical solutions, not mere patches. Is our government up to it? Are Canadian citizens up to it?

Over the past eight years I have had a small window on the prison system. My wife and I have been volunteers at Warkworth Penitentiary. We now count many convicted criminals as our friends. They, of course, have their own take on how the system works, and we tend to look at it from their perspective. Yet at the same time we’ve come to appreciate some of the system’s good points.

What’s Good about Canadian Federal Prisons?

Over the years, as part of the Canadian Justice System, the agency has provided a wide range of services. In the process it has created a huge bureaucracy in which the number of staff [14,500] exceeds the number of prisoners. [13,500].

There has been a conscious effort, however, to balance the prisons’ need for security and for creating an environment which can prepare prisoners for eventual return to society. Some examples:

Watchdog agencies such as those of the Correctional Investigator (ombudsman) and Citizens’ Advisory Committees. There is also a multi-culturally oriented chaplain service.

Federal Prisoners in Canada have a grievance process which they can exercise. They can even sue the government [Crown], as a prisoner friend of mine did, successfully.

Among the staff, many CSC caseworkers truly care about their charges, and their efforts are appreciated by some inmates (if ignored by others).

Federal Prisoners are permitted — sometimes encouraged — to participate in positive group activity formed according to common interest (seniors, hobbycraft, self-improvement, AA etc.), or cultural lines (Native Brotherhood, Italian, Celtic, Chinese, Buddhist, Christian, Pagan etc.) There is also a Prisoners Association.

CSC has achieved international stature for its research programs and reports, for its leadership in restorative justice reforms. “At the core of these new reforms” says Patricia Kachuk, writing in a Simon Fraser website, “is repairing the harm done to victims and the community…in contradiction to the current retributive criminal justice approach….focused on public vengeance, deterrence, and punishment through an adversarial process.”

Enter Stephen Harper and his Tory government. Deliberately playing the fear card, they like to focus blame on the criminal element in society with their “tough on crime” policy, instead of aggressively seeking solutions.

It is a simplistic way of deflecting complex issues such as social neglect, the lack of education, or the gap between rich and poor which afflict a dysfunctional criminal justice system.

Our Tory government acknowledges this in the standard manner, assembling — as Toryspin puts it — “an independent panel…as part of the government’s commitment to protecting Canadian families and communities.”

Harper’s carefully chosen panel is mandated to provide the Minister of Public Safety with advice on, among other things, “The availability and effectiveness of rehabilitation programming and support mechanisms in institutions and in the community post release, including the impact on recidivism.”

This is the task of the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), which “contributes to public safety by actively encouraging and assisting offenders to become law-abiding citizens, while exercising reasonable, safe, secure and humane control.” The problem, as I see it, is that exercising control now trumps preparing prisoners to become law-abiding citizens.

The Roadmap

The panel’s report is titled A Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety , and it runs to 255 pages.

The panel has faced a daunting challenge and has produced a thought-provoking and comprehensive report, although I disagree with some of its conclusions. Some key topics:

Assessment on admission to prison after sentencing (Review of CSC previous work)
Statistical Analysis of recidivism (Review of CSC previous work)
The changing size and demography of prison populations (New)
Requirements for rehabilitation (Review of CSC previous work)
Construction of new American-style super-secure, super-sized jails across the country. (New)
Most of the panel’s focus is on rehabilitation and recidivism, as mandated. It is beyond the scope of this article to parse the components, but you can read the entire document here.

Problems with Rehabilitation

As early as 1996, the Auditor General’s Report concluded “that there are systemic weaknesses in the Service’s management of its reintegration activities and clear indications that senior management is not providing the attention these activities need.”

The CSC’s task of rehabilitation has been eclipsed by a well-placed concern over recidivism — an admission of defeat. Over 40 per cent of convicted felons are back in our federal prisons within two years, where they will each cost the taxpayer over $90,000 a year to lock up again.

Rehabilitation may be defined as an inmate’s return to a community as a responsible citizen (not just his/her release from prison). But as my inmate friend Reggie observed, there is no measure of ‘successful’ rehabilitation such as a released prisoner’s holding a job for a year. He proposed that some reward — if only recognition for the rehab agency — be tied to ‘success’ if it takes place.

There are many components in the inmates ‘successful’ return to the community: employability, social responsibility and community support.

Last year CBC Radio’s The Current presented a comprehensive program on Federal prisons. Annamaria Tremonti interviewed Corrections Investigator Howard Sapir (the prison ombudsman). She asked about the mandatory programs required for reintegration. “How easy is it to get high school or trade programs?”

“Increasingly difficult,” Howard Sapir replied, “There are waiting lists across the country, gaps in staffing, a lack of assessment… Only about a third of the programs that are started are completed… We’re seeing inmates increasingly waive or postpone parole hearings because they’re not getting access to programs [they need to qualify].”

Later Tremonti talked to [the then] Minister Stockwell Day. He was frequently evasive, harping on the need for public safety and raising the spectre of violent sexual offenders. He assured Tremonti that training programs would be in place “for developing skills: working in an apprenticeship program, working toward a journeyman certificate.” But Tremonti was relentless. “What about the prisoner we just heard from? He was just three months short of getting his certification and they pulled the program!” The minister changed the subject and talked about years of neglect by the previous government.

From the start of our regular visits as volunteers, we heard prisoners complaining of what seemed to be a deliberate CSC assault on education and training. Teachers were being dropped. Under CSC administration, Warkworth once had certificated apprenticeship level programs in auto body repair. Vocational programs such as hairdressing, chef training were closed down.

Education for Reintegration

Two major obstacles to reintegration are lack of education and lack of work experience.

CSC observes that 65 per cent of inmates have a lower than grade 8 level, and that 82 per cent of inmates test lower than Grade 10; but they claim that budget constraints prevent them from hiring enough teachers. Yet CSC has refused to implement a number of readily available options, including the prisoners’ in-cell use of their own computers.

In 2003 the Correctional Investigator reported to parliament: “The Service decided to prohibit the [further] purchase of computers by inmates. Given the impact of this decision on the offender population we have contacted the Service to initiate a review of this policy change and the alternatives available.”

CSC’s response: “It has been determined that inmate-owned computers represent an overall security threat for CSC… CSC plans to organize a multiparty facilitated discussion [on] appropriate use of computers by inmates under the amended policy.”

(It should be clearly stated that inmates never, at any time, had access to the internet; and they were allowed to buy only authorized software.) Many inmates had their computers confiscated. Computers purchased earlier were dated, often needing repair. Some inmates claimed that they were returned from repair with malicious damage.

To give CSC credit, a committee of stakeholders was formed which included Prof. Michael Jackson, author of Justice Behind the Walls, the definitive work on Canada’s prisons, Graham Stewart, then head of the John Howard Society, Peter Hennessy, the author and educator. CSC staff and two well-informed prisoners were also included.

Peter Hennessy wrote to the Honourable Anne McLellan , Minister of Public Safety at the time with A Proposal To Improve Computer Accessibility For Federal Prison Inmates. The letter said, in part:

“In the past, Correctional Services Canada has permitted inmates to purchase computers with their own earnings. This was sound policy, given the benefits of computers in preparing documents for classroom assignments, parole hearings and other legal matters as well as for corresponding with family and friends. Most important, computer literacy is, increasingly, a requisite job skill…. While we are mindful of CSC’s direction to maintain a “secure operation,” it is hard to imagine the validity of an argument for security of the prison and society that outweighs the value of electronic connection with the civilian world to which all inmates will return at some future date. A deliberate policy of isolating prisoners, many for several years, from the nearly limitless variety and quantity of on-line information will be seriously counterproductive. Solutions are possible, given the technical resources available to CSC. It is a matter of imagination and will.”

The CSC-sanctioned committee produced a report on computers for inmates which seemed to satisfy all the stakeholders; and the advance copy caused elation among my friends at Warkworth. But at that point a new Conservative government assumed control. Computers continued to be seized and nothing more was heard or seen of the report.

Work Experience for Reintegration

The Roadmap looked at jobs: “A current snapshot of the employment needs of the federal prison population taken at intake assessment identified that more than 70% of offenders at admission had unstable work histories; more than 70% had not completed high school and more than 60% had no trade or skill knowledge.”

The best preparation for reintegration comes from actual job experience. Here is where the prison-based job — whether it is in the library or the laundry or the Corcan factory — can be valuable.

According to its Annual Report, Corcan (a contraction of Correction and Canada) “has the mandate of…providing employment training and experience and employability skills to offenders [and it] helps offenders find employment and successfully reintegrate into the community… Corcan also provides opportunities to observe offenders in a ‘real-world’ work environment and to assess how well other programs, like anger management and substance abuse, are working.”

Corcan’s products or services are sold primarily to federal government departments, and the enterprise has evolved into a multi-million dollar business. At various locations, selected inmates can get a ‘real-world job’ in agribusiness, construction, manufacturing or textile production. In return they get wages of about $5 a day (as long as there are no lockdowns). CSC deducts part of this for room and board in some cases. One friend calculates that, in his case after deductions, the wage amounts to $3.75 a day. This goes into a trust fund. No payments are made to funds for Unemployment Insurance or Canada Pension Plan. (This was among the grievances raised at a recent peaceful strike by Warkworth prisoners.)

Planning for Success

Apart from a few overworked CSC Parole Officers and a few CSC-supported Halfway Houses any framework of community support is a hit-or-miss affair. [”Not in MY back yard!”] Across Canada there are a number of supporting agencies such as the John Howard Society, the Elizabeth Fry Society and some faith-based groups, and these are mostly in the larger cities.

It would seem obvious that planning for successful rehabilitation should start soon after the assessment process in prison and the assignment of an appropriate level of security. In my view, this would include maintaining links with family, establishing community support, educational planning and creating job experience. To a certain extent CSC performs some of these tasks; but by their own admission they are failing.

Why the System Fails

In a 1971 attempt to analyze the effect of prisons, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo created the Stanford Prison Experiment in which 24 college students were randomly assigned the roles of prison guards and prisoners at a makeshift jail on campus. The experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks.

The Wikipedia account says that “one-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited ‘genuine’ sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early.” The experiment had to be canceled after just six days.

We can link this to Philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti’s description of the “us and them” mentality and the origins of violence: “When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.”

Joyce Arthur, a Vancouver writer and blogger puts it more cynical terms: “The business of prisons is to turn human beings into emotionally crippled, institution-dependent, and dangerous people who are even more likely to commit crimes after serving time than if they hadn’t gone to jail in the first place. That’s what prisons do, they can’t help it…. Even at their best, prisons are unnatural and dehumanizing. When your basic freedoms are taken away, by which I mean the ability to control your own life and make your own decisions, you lose your independence, privacy, dignity, self-esteem, incentive, and hope.”

Fixing the System. What’s to Be Done?

There are many possibilities. I suggested at the outset of this article that the situation called for boldness. Radical solutions, not mere patches. We need an attitudinal change in society and the way we think about the criminal justice system. The best proposal I have come across, and it is radical, is from Joyce Arthur, cited above:

“Existing prisons should be run like cooperatives. Prisoners should have a say in the process and should eventually be given the means to run the prison system itself, with most prison staff acting the part of consultants, counselors, and mediators instead of authority figures (a few security staff would still be required, of course). Facilities should provide a reasonable standard of physical care, and provide for the inmates’ need for safety, privacy, dignity, autonomy, incentive, education, and counseling.” The Problem with Prisons (and the Solution)

That proposal meshes well with mine, which is to change the agency responsible for rehabilitation. I believe that the agency assigned to this task (i.e. Corrections Services Canada) is the wrong one: This is an agency of Public Safety Canada, which is primarily responsible for ‘law and order’ - i.e. putting felons in prison, but which has failed to focus on the rehabilitative role. That is because the focus is necessarily too diffused. In its own words: “[Public Safety] works with five agencies united in a single portfolio… dealing with national security, emergency management, law enforcement, corrections, crime prevention and borders.” CSC’s role should be reduced to that of the “few security staff” mentioned by Joyce Arthur.   I propose that the rehabilitation of prisoners should be assigned to the agency responsible for human resources: Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC). Originally its website reported:   “HRSDC’s mission is …to improve Canadians’ quality of life…By focusing on education and training for society in which all can use their talents, skills and resources to participate in learning, work and their community.”

I find it interesting that — today under the Tories — the specific reference to ‘education and training’ been dropped. Instead, the wording has been amended to “HRSDC’s mission is to build a stronger and more competitive Canada, to support Canadians in making choices that help them live productive and rewarding lives, and to improve Canadians’ quality of life.” This is compatible with the version cited above, but it’s not the same.

Changing agencies responsible for rehabilitating prisoners will not be easy, given the considerable difference in cultures involved, and how well entrenched the present CSC bureaucracy is. Among the Beneficiary Stakeholders there are many winners among what many call ‘the prison-industrial complex.’ There are the usual suspects:

Politicians at all levels of government who play or amplify the fear card; police and security-related agencies and the unions whose members serve them.
Definitely among the Winners are members of the thriving Security Industry: Manufacturers of burglar alarms, the Rent-a-Cop agencies, the developers of Gated Communities.
Finally there are private CSC-sanctioned businesses such as Corcan whose thriving multi-million dollar businesses are based on cheap prison labour.

But few people would include the municipalities in which the prisons are located. For example, Osprey’s Community Press reports:

“Locally, Brighton receives $602,000 in grants in lieu of taxes from Warkworth [prison] while Northumberland County receives $168,500. Trent Hills receives at least $15,000 a month for municipally treated water piped to Warkworth Institution. The prison invests $32 million into the community through employees’ salaries and the purchase of goods and services.”

Costs to taxpayers

Ultimately the costs to taxpayers can be measured in billions of dollars.

According to the Toronto Star, [July 20, 2008] Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day has said the tougher sentences will cost an extra $240 million over five years, adding 300 to 400 inmates in federal prisons and 3,600 more in provincial jails. But the minister may have underestimated. “Anthony Doob, a criminologist at the University of Toronto, told a legislative committee the changes would put a further 1,000 offenders in prison each year and cost an extra $80 million annually.”

The Star points out that there are conflicting reports on what the latest changes will cost. They range from federal estimates of $240 million over five years to $80 million annually for the extra prisoners alone.

Neither estimate accounts for the still more prisoners and costs to be incurred once the drug bill, with its long list of mandatory minimum sentences, becomes law.

Nor do they include the cost of new prisons. The government has already approved building two more prisons, one medium security and one maximum security, at an unspecified cost. .. massive prison compounds… at an estimated $750 million each. [emphasis added]

Criminal justice experts consider the extra costs poor value for money.

There is no question that among the many crises Canadians face is a crumbling economy. One of the dilemmas we face is how to minimize this. Our Conservative government can seize the opportunity to spare taxpayers further debt by rethinking their “Get tough on Crime” policy.

But surely, for Canadians it’s not just the money. Most of us want to leave our children a legacy of hope and caring founded on respect for all people. We can let our politicians know that we will not be intimidated by the politics of fear, and we seek a justice system based on the humane treatment of those members of our society that we incarcerate.