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In Remembrance of the Charter of Rights and Freedom

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

By Elizabeth Littlejohn

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
- John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963), in a speech at the White House, 1962

I write this on the eve of Remembrance Day, 2010, as PM Harper flies to South Korea for a repeat performance of the G20, as three days of testimonies unfold in Toronto and Montreal to question RCMP conduct, and the government continues to refuse a public inquiry into the G20. This judicial inquiry is morally imperative as it would enable the federal court to subpoena evidence from witnesses under oath to knit together the patchwork of incriminating evidence, establish the chain of command of policing during the G20, and finally assign culpability. Both parties are standing firm- this all-encompassing inquiry must not be allowed happen. It may be the only issue they agree upon at this time, having closed ranks to goose-step around civil liberties. Meanwhile, PM Harper is fiddling while Rome burns, selling more of our assets to multinationals in South Korea. Has it occurred to him that Canada is not his to sell?

I dedicate this article to my grandfather, who fought in the First World War, and was one of the few who survived the air force. He came back so shell-shocked that if his family spoke while he drove, he had to pull over to the side of the road to calm down. Within my extended family, several members have been awarded Orders of Canada for public service. I am, however, a vilified ‘protester’, as I believe that there must be a full inquiry into the G8/G20 Summit so that both levels of government are forced to be responsible for the gross abuse of police power, violation of civil liberties and powers of taxation, and desecration of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. If the Charter cannot defend its own constitution and abrogation of civil rights, it is a constitution no longer.

It is exactly one week since I witnessed the voting down of the second reading of Bill 121, a public interest investigation into the G8/G20 Summit tabled by Welland’s NDP MPP, Peter Kormos, by 8 ‘ayes’ to 28 ‘neas’ in Queen’s Park. Upon the resounding ‘nea’ across the floor by the consolidated Liberals and Conservatives, there was a unanimous, audible gasp by those in the peanut gallery. Included in that singular voice was my own, and within an hour, having sped away on my round legs, I was listening to Chris Hedges talk about his new book, “The Death of the Liberal Class” at the Munk School for Global Affairs. His lecture was a play-by-play of what I had seen at Queen’s Park, and spoke directly to me.

Could it be, according to Chris Hedges, that the liberal left – unions, churches and universities, progressive political parties, and the press – has lost moral suasion as a guiding voice for democratic dialogue? Have we abandoned our moral compass in favour of corporate elitism? And have we allowed the gutting of ethics, and the erosion of civil liberties, for financial gain? As I watched the provincial NDP fight back at Queen’s Park, and be mocked for their efforts by the opposing parties, I thought no- it is worse- citizens’ rights are being viewed with contempt as they contest the streamlining of economic interests, the growing division between the rich and poor, and the destruction of the environment. As Chris Hedges notes, without a robust liberal voice to engage in this debate, there is a very real danger that things will degrade into violence as the middle and working classes become increasingly disenfranchised, angry and confused. Internationally, general strikes rage, generated by falsely imposed austerity measures imposed by the banks, and Chris Hedges predicts that the US, then Canada, will be next, on the front line. A cynical friend said that no doubt the Conservatives had a contingency fund for legal challenges as part of their G20 bottom line, a line item right after their $500, 000 worth of delegate party favours -glow sticks, hand sanitizer, and $100 pens.

At Queen’s Park, throughout the presentation of the bill, I was distressed by the disregard the opposition had for the NDP. They held extended conversations during their presentation, loud enough to be heard by me in the upper gallery, to show their displeasure at the possibility of the second reading of Bill 121. For me, as a Canadian citizen, it was a momentous historical occasion, for the Liberals and Conservatives, it was a $1.3 billion farce of the highest order, worthy of a William Hogarth cartoon – when Peter Kormos mentioned the editorial in the Star demanding a formal inquiry, a Liberal MPP turned to the fashion section, searching for it there. I watched her. A MPP from the Muskoka region, Garfield Dunlop, mentioned the success of the G8 in Huntsville, although I heard how golfers were losing balls off the green, and militia were crawling out of the brush, holding the golf ball up, and warning them not to hit off the fairway again.

I have always been ambivalent about the Ontario Parliament Network, the official channel of the provincial legislature, but I was glad that it was recording and broadcasting this debate for posterity, ignored as it was by the opposition. MPPs, please be aware that you are being observed. I have heard how the intellectual level of discourse, as transcribed in the Hansard, the official record, is the lowest it has ever been historically, but the resounding speeches of NDP MPPs, Peter Kormos, Andrea Horwath, and Cheri DiNovo , showed courage, a monumental standing up for the underdog. As I left the gallery, I made the universal symbol for typing to Cheri DiNovo. I will transcribe my own citizen’s Hansard of events, and I will remember this travesty of justice in the defense of the Charter, and my grandfather, who fought for a kinder, gentler Canada, and my right to protest. During the G20, police erased incriminating photographs on iPhones by resetting the factory settings to default, and stomping on memory cards, to erase incriminating evidence of police brutality. I refuse to let these memories be erased.

Later, at the lecture, deeply shaken, I asked Chris Hedges about the vilification of protesters, and he spoke of having his microphone cut off, twice, during a lecture, and being escorted off a university campus. The press reported that he had created a riot, and the university sent him his coat by mail. Protesters, intellectuals, academics, environmentalists- these are all epithets, just as a Liberal MP pointed out the eloquence of Peter Kormos was due to his background as a lawyer during the Bill 121 debate. Those who ask for educated discussion are discredited to enable bigotry and prejudice, as PM Harper plays his role as ideologue to evade facts, discourage analysis, and hold court through emotion. Elitists, environmentalists, lawyers, lefties, union members, protesters- these have all become dirty words – just read the comments section online, and see how democratic discourse has descended into name calling, supported by this new form of government.

There will be no justice until there is a public inquiry, which ties together the disparate inquiries into a coherent series of events enabled by a chain of command, and yes, assigns blame. We deserve to know what happened, and not to be distracted by the pomp and circumstance of yet another G20 Summit, quick on the heels of our own. Regulation 233/10, the five meter fence rule, will lead right back to the Premier McGuinty’s office, then to the Prime Minister’s Office.

Investigation of this fallacious law will prove PM Harper’s desire to cut away the backbone of peaceful resistance by targeting caring, educated and engaged youth to ensure their future political passivity. The young woman, hit by rubber bullets, may never return to Toronto, and sadly, these memories of the state of martial law have changed a generation’s perception of police. As an educator, I will never forget this deliberate humiliation of over eleven hundred protesters, and as a citizen, I will never forget that my grandfather fought for naught, because I can be taxed to the hilt to have my civil liberties suspended for a political spectacle enabling police brutality, and civilian abuse. Canada is not safer since the Summits and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been allowed to be put into question, and with that, the fundamental rights of every citizen. Shame.

References:
Hedges, Chris. The Death of the Liberal Class. New York: Nation, 2010. Print.
Theo Moudakis, Opinion in Toronto Star, Public Inquiry November 1st, link at http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/883743–g20-summit-public-inquiry-still-required
Krystalline Kraus, “Activist Communique: Ontario G20 inquiry public members bill failed to pass second reading and the Summit cost totals”, ‏link at http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/krystalline-kraus/2010/11/activist-communiqu%C3%A9-ontario-g20-inquiry-public-members-bill
The Hansard, November 4th, http://www.ontla.on.ca/web/house-proceedings/house_detail.do?locale=en&Date=2010-11-04&detailPage=%2Fhouse-proceedings%2Ftranscripts%2Ffiles_html%2F04-NOV-2010_L066.htm&Parl=39&Sess=2#P1300_294131

Tags:criminizalizing dissent, G20, Huntsville, illegal detentions, peaceful protest, police brutality, police state, Press for truth, Stephen Harper
Posted in Assault on Democracy, Corporate Globalization, Economic policies, Environment, Featured, Labour, The Real Issues | No Comments »

Capitalism and Pollution: A Way Out?

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Ron Jacobs discusses the increasingly popular and ubiquitous notion of “green capitalism” as critiqued by author Chris Williams in his new book, Ecology and Socialism.

This article appears in Dissident Voice, August 19th, 2010

There have been hundreds of books dedicated to the subject of environmental destruction. Very few of them have addressed the subject in terms of the economic system most of the world’s inhabitants struggles under. Indeed, as the first Earth Day in 1970 shrinks further into the distance of time, it is corporations that try to convince us that, despite being the cause of most of that destruction, they can also be the remedy. Grasping at straws while we watch our woods, waters and fields become more polluted by the day, many of us believe the commercials from Exxon and BP when they tell us they are green, even though we know better. In addition, we go along with the consumerist schemes to alter our way of living to a more ecologically sound one, even though these actions make very little difference in a world of corporate pollution.

Author Chris Williams does not believe that capitalism can solve the pollution problem it has created. In his new book, Ecology and Socialism, he not only refutes the corporate claims that they care about the environment and are working on halting its devastation; he argues that capitalism is the cause of the bulk of that devastation. Operating from a well-reasoned hypothesis that (put simply) because capitalism needs to expand it can not halt environmental destruction, Williams discusses the history of capitalist destruction of the environment and its supposed solutions. While he doesn’t dismiss all of the schemes proposed by corporate entities to ease the earth’s environmental demise, he points out that the dominant capitalist enterprise in the modern world revolves around the procurement and utilization of fossil fuels, Because of this fact and the easy profits to be made from this fact, the corporate world has no reason or will to change. The ongoing wars for energy market domination prove this again and again.

Williams describes a Marxism that is holistic and sees the earth and its systems, human beings and economy as an organic whole. Capitalism cannot see the world in a similar manner because of its dependence on exchange value instead of use value. In other words, its need to profit and the consequent history created by that need has produced a situation where things are produced because they make a profit, not because people necessarily need them. Nowhere perhaps is this more obvious than in the auto industry. Williams writes that over 30 million new cars are produced every year. The amount of work-hours and resources put into this process could be diverted into producing a transportation system that would not only be environmentally viable, but would serve the needs of a greater population. Yet, there is no profit motive (certainly not on the scale of the world’s automobile industry). The point is that production for profit is environmentally unsustainable. Production based on need is.

What about the former Soviet Union and China? Weren’t they socialist economies and didn’t they cause a lot of environmental destruction? It is Williams’ contention that these economies were much closer to a form of state capitalism than socialism. While leftists might debate this question to the end of time, the fact is that most of the enterprise in those two countries during the historical moment they called themselves socialist did meet the accepted left description of state capitalism: a system which utilizes the wage system of producing and appropriating surplus value in a commodity economy controlled by the state apparatus. Of course, since both economies are now capitalist, it doesn’t really matter too much what they were then.

George W. Bush once stated that the United States was addicted to oil. It was one of the few truths he ever spoke. It was also accepted without a blink by politicians and citizens alike. When Williams discusses the extraction of oil from shale and tar sands, I could not help but think of a practice undertaken by heroin junkies. For those who don’t know how oil extraction from shale and tar sands works, I will attempt a brief description of the process. The oil substances in oil shale are solid and cannot be pumped directly out of the ground. The oil shale must first be mined and then heated to a high temperature. The resulting liquid must then be separated and collected. Sometimes the oil is heated to liquid underground before it is extracted.

The junkie process I am reminded of goes like this. Before an addict shoots heroin into his vein, he must first dissolve the powder in water. This is sally done in a spoon which is heated with a lighter or match. After the drug dissolves, the addict draws up the liquid from the spoon into a syringe. In order to keep undissolved additives from entering the solution in the syringe, the addict usually places a piece of cotton in the liquefied solution in the spoon. He then draws the liquid through the cotton “filter.” Most junkies do not throw away the cotton. Instead, they save it for a time when they have no access to the drug. When this occurs, they soak the cotton in water and draw the water (which has taken the heroin residue from the cotton) into the syringe. Drawing oil from tar sands is not too different and is representative of the nature of our oil addiction. Other parallels can be seen in the nature of actions undertaken by corporate America and its citizens in our pursuit of oil to feed our addiction. The aforementioned wars and the current oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are but the most obvious of these.

Ecology and Socialism is not merely about what’s wrong in the world where fossil fuels rule our lives. It also presents a blueprint for change that could conceivably diminish certain key indicators used by environmental scientists to determine the earth’s health. The basics of this blueprint revolve around the use of solar and wind energy on a scale never before seen. Of course, such a plan flies against the powers that be and their blueprint to extract as much profit as they can from the diminishing supply of fossil fuels. This, writes Williams, is why nothing, not even reforms like the development of wind and solar farms, will come about without a popular movement demanding them. The technology already exists, he continues, but the demand for it must be vocal and large. That is where we come in: the building of that movement.

Like the other titles in this nominal series from Haymarket Books in Chicago — Women and Socialism, Black Liberation and Socialism, Sexuality and Socialism — Ecology and Socialism provides a cogent and accessible look at one of today’s pressing social issues through the viewpoint of socialist activists and thinkers.

Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. His most recent novel Short Order Frame Up is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net

Tags:capitalism, Climate, pollution, Tar Sands
Posted in Economic policies, Environment, The Real Issues | No Comments »

OECD Pursues Free Trade at the G20 Business Summit

Saturday, September 11th, 2010

One of the prime concerns of those who protest the G8/G20 summits is the lack of transparency that accompanies these meetings, as well as the absence of democratic channels through which global citizens can voice their concerns with the policies that are pursued.

The following article is a transcript of the remarks made at the G20 Toronto Business Summit by Angel Gurria, the Secretary-General of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). These remarks provide insight into the inner workings of the G20 policymakers as they continue to consolidate free trade policies such as privatization, the scaling back of government services and anti-protectionism across the globe.

These policies have direct impact on the lives of billions of citizens who have absolutely no say in the actual decisions that are made. By using the G8/G20 summits as forums for these kind of topics, trade ministers and corporations are circumventing the traditional routes of democracy to implement policies against the will of the people. This is why it is important to insist that our voices be heard, to make our presence known at the summits and demand that our concerns be taken into account.

Remarks by Angel Gurría, Secretary-General of the OECD
G20 Business Summit
Toronto, Canada
26 June 2010

It is a pleasure to be here on the occasion of the G20 Business Summit. I welcome the opportunity to discuss with you the current economic context and the challenges that Leaders will be discussing in the Summit.

A strengthening recovery, but also new risks

The recovery is on its way, but it is uneven across regions. In our latest projections, we project global growth will reach around 4 ¾ % this year and next. The main engines of growth are the emerging market economies. These economies will account for well over half global growth.

However, major challenges remain. First of all, joblessness is unacceptably high. This is the human face of the crisis that we need to continue to address effectively. In OECD countries, and even though unemployment is likely to have peaked, is still at post war high of 8.7 percent in the first quarter of 2010.

The crisis required unprecedented measures to stimulate the economy. And some countries were better prepared to afford this effort. Right now, however, public debt and deficits are also at record high, and in some regions like Europe, financial markets have reacted strongly with rising interest rate spreads on sovereign debt.

Inflationary pressures are emerging in some G20 countries where growth has been vigorous, and are receiving substantial capital flows, contributing to sharply rising asset prices.

Finally, the crisis has reduced the productive capacity of our economies. This is due to the higher cost of capital, and also high unemployment. We estimate that the fall of this productive capacity is around 3 percent in OECD economies.

In this delicate environment, governments face difficult policy choices. First of all policy needs to strike a balance between the imperative of fiscal consolidation and the need to support a job rich recovery. If public debt is left to accumulate at its current pace, the cost of borrowing is likely to rise, crowding out private investment. And private business investment is exactly what we need right now. Private demand needs to replace policy stimulus as the source of recovery in order to be self-sustaining.

But, if countries consolidate too soon, too fast and by too much, the fragile recovery could stall. Job creation, also a driver of a sustained expansion, would in turn be delayed. Moreover, if all countries move to consolidate at the same time, these effects would be exacerbated through trade and financial linkages. Thus getting the balance right is primordial!

This issue is at the core of the G20 Leaders’ agenda. The solutions inevitably will be country specific, but through cooperation the trade-offs can be reduced, and growth maximized. At the OECD, we believe that there is no option other than combine sound fiscal policies with specific actions to maintain the momentum for recovery and job creation.

Our view is that fiscal consolidation should be as growth-friendly as possible. Specifically, it means that on the spending side, growth enhancing programmes, such as on education, innovation and infrastructure should be preserved to the extent possible, and efforts, for example, to improve public sector efficiency and phase out inefficient subsidies should be pursued. Moreover, consolidation measures should concentrate first on cutting government spending.

When additional revenue is needed, emphasis should be placed on the least distortive taxes. Our analysis found that such taxes include consumption and property taxes, rather than taxes on labour and business income. Recently announced fiscal consolidation plans in the UK move in this direction. Other options include, putting a price on carbon, via a carbon tax or through tradeable emission permits, which would both raise revenue and help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

However, we must ensure that the tax burden is fairly shared, and seen to be fairly shared. This requires a renewed effort to achieve better tax compliance. Here, thanks to the combination of G20 political support and OECD work, the world has achieved important breakthroughs in combating tax evasion. Such is the case of exchange of information for tax purposes, where since November 2008 we made more progress than in the last 10 years. This breakthrough means a more level playing field for international business, where competitiveness depends on the productivity of business enterprises, rather than aggressive tax planning.

In addition to fiscal policy, we must also focus on structural policy reforms. These are essential to speed up the recovery and to lay the groundwork for a more sustainable and fairer economic future. Structural reform will also be needed to reduce global imbalances in a durable manner. For example, action will need to be taken to raise savings in countries with large current account deficits, such as the United States, and to rebalance demand towards domestic sources in surplus countries, such as China and Germany. In such an environment, businesses have a stronger incentive to hire, which in turn boosts household incomes, leading to a virtuous cycle of stronger domestic demand.

The last point I would like to make is that it is not only policy reforms that count. Avoiding policy reversals and mistakes also matters. During the past one-and-a-half years, it is fair to say that the most important lessons from previous crises have been well learned. Leaders avoided misguided labour market policies and committed to open markets as an integral part of getting the world economy out of the crisis.

The OECD, WTO and UNCTAD report to G20 leaders on trade and investment measures conclude that most G20 members are holding to these commitments. The key role that trade is playing in the current upturn is there to remind us of the fundamental benefits of keeping markets open.

But we need to remain vigilant. Protectionist sentiments are likely to increase with low growth, persistent

unemployment and mounting pressures on government finances. And as our last joint report warned, discretion in the application of the many state support and support programmes for troubled firms may be used to favour domestic companies and disguise protectionism.

Bringing the Doha Development Agenda to a successful conclusion would prevent backsliding, bring much needed stability and predictability to international businesses and, in a period of intense fiscal consolidation and other headwinds holding the pace of growth back, give added impetus to the recovery.

In this context, strengthening international dialogue and consolidating the G20 as the prime forum for economic cooperation is key. We have already seen certain decisions taken by G20 governments that go in the right direction to boost productivity and rebalance the global growth. We are certain that the outcomes of this important meeting will have a positive impact. That’s why we are here, and why international organisations are committed to contribute to this important process. Business too has a role to play by initiating new investments and hiring to expand productive capacity in order to be ready to take advantage of the recovery. Together we can build a stronger, cleaner, fairer world economy.

Taken from the OECD website.

Tags:Business Summit, Free Trade, G20, OECD
Posted in Economic policies, Featured | No Comments »

It’s the class struggle, stupid!

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Organized labour’s confused response to the McGuinty Liberals’ attack on Ontario’s working-class

By Ajamu Nangwaya and Alex Diceanu

Appeared in the Linchpin, on September 6, 2010

Organized labour in Ontario will continue to put forth a weak and ineffective response to attacks from the ruling class as long as it continues to ignore the reality of class struggle. A perfect example is its current response to a proposed two-year wage-freeze that the Dalton McGuinty-led Ontario government plans on imposing on unionized public sector workers. The provincial Liberals would like to save $750 million per year from a wage-freeze, so as to help manage the $19.3 billion budget deficit. Readers need not be reminded that this deficit is the result of the risky financial speculations of the captains of finance, industry and commerce that created the Great Recession of 2008.

But it is the 710,000 unionized members of the working class and 350,000 non-unionized managers and other employees who draw pay cheques from the government[1] and the users of state-provided services (and private sector workers) who are being asked to bear the burden of paying for the actions of the corporate sector. At the same time as this attempt to take income from the pockets of government workers, the McGuinty Liberals’ have granted a $4.6 billion tax-cut to the business sector.

The leader of the Ontario New Democrats, Andrea Howarth, has signaled her support for public sector workers’ acceptance of a pay cut. She asserts, “I’m quite sure when they get to the bargaining table they will do their part like everyone else does … there is a collective bargaining process that has to be respected.”[2] Wow! Who said that the working-class needs enemies with “friends” like the New Democratic Party (NDP) and its leader Andrea Horwarth?

However, it is the tame and even puzzling reaction of some of Ontario’s major labour leaders that should be of concern to workers in the public sector. The government called labour leaders and employers from the broader public sector to “consultation” talks on the wage freeze on July 19, 2010. Coming out of the talks, this was what CUPE-Ontario president Fred Hahn had to say, “This is not like the early ’90s, this is not about sharing the pain. That’s all just not true”.[3] He was referring to former NDP premier Bob Rae’s unilateral opening of public sector workers’ contracts and the imposition of public sector wage-cuts accompanied by tax increases for the corporate sector. Was Brother Hahn implying that a wage-freeze would be tolerable, if accompanied by the cancelation of the $4.6 billion corporate tax-cut?

No credible union or union leader should contemplate a zero-wage increase over two years – even if the government rescinds the $4.6 billion tax-cut. There should not have been a tax-cut for the capitalist class. Restoring the tax should not be used as a bargaining chip to escape a wage-freeze on public sector workers.

Not to be outdone was the president of the Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union, Warren (Smokey) Thomas. We will leave it to you to decipher the implicit message in the following statement by Smokey Thomas. “Just because he [Minister of Finance Dwight Duncan] wants something doesn’t mean he’s going to get it. It’s not a social contract. He can propose (a wage-freeze) but he has to bargain it. He can’t legislate it. He’ll lose.”[4] Is it just us or does that sound like a labour leader who is not really in a fighting spirit and just wants to make a deal?

A simple matter of misguided policy?

However, the critical issue for Ontario’s public sector workers is the extent to which many of our labour leaders seem to be completely unaware of the state and employers’ motives for disciplining labour through wage concessions. Ismael Hossein-zaded of Drake University made the following observation, which is quite applicable to the posturing of labour leaders in Ontario:

Quote:

Viewing the savage class war of the ruling kleptocracy on the people’s living and working conditions simply as “bad” policy, and hoping to somehow—presumably through smart arguments and sage advice—replace it with the “good” Keynesian policy of deficit spending without a fight, without grassroots‟ involvement and/or pressure, stems from the rather naïve supposition that policy making is a simple matter of technical expertise or the benevolence of policy makers, that is, a matter of choice. The presumed choice is said to be between only two alternatives: between the stimulus or Keynesian deficit spending, on the one hand, and the Neoliberal austerity of cutting social spending, on the other.5

Based on some of the statements coming from labour leaders, they may not have gotten the memo that the attack on the working-class (through the slashing of social programme spending, attacks on private sector pensions and wage freezes) is not about good or bad economic policies. Hossein-Zedad must have been inspired to write his paper after reading the following Keynesian-inspired comment by Ontario Federation of Labour president Sid Ryan; “From a policy perspective, it makes no economic sense whatsoever. You’ve got a government saying we need to stimulate the economy. The best way of stimulating the economy is through public-sector workers who spend every single penny of their disposable income in their local communities,”[6] But it’s not about the economy, per se. It’s the class struggle, stupid!

Canada’s economic and political elite have clearly given up the ghost of Keynesian economics, which calls on government to either stimulate or restrict the demand for goods and services based on the state of the economy. In the case of the 2008 crisis in capitalism, these neoliberal players felt forced by the magnitude of the impending financial collapse to pump money into the economy. A not-too-insignificant fact was lost on many observers and commentators who gleefully cheered on the capitalist class’ “Road-to-Damascus” moment. The capitalist state in Canada and other imperialist countries will do everything within their power to maintain a business environment that facilitates the accumulation of capital or profit-making, as well as legitimize the system in the eyes of the people. That is all in a day’s work for the state…no surprise here for class conscious trade unionists and other activists!

Labour’s “Response”

We ought to note that the recent crisis in the economy caught organized labour off-guard and ill-prepared to mobilize the working-class against that monumental failure of capitalism. For decades, Western corporations and governments have been force-feeding the public a steady diet of tax-cuts. Lower taxes on businesses, high-income earners and the wealthy, the widespread slashing of social services and income support programmes, a massive reduction in state oversight and regulation of corporations and the enactment of anti-union policies and legislation have been the all rage since corproations and Western governments abandoned their class-collaborationist pact with organized labour in the 1970s. Yet at the very moment when capitalism experienced a crisis of confidence resulting from a set of policies that had been hailed as perfect ingredients for economic and social progress, organized labour was caught with its pants down. Its leaders didn’t have a class struggle alternative to Keynesian economics – an economic tendency that was never intended to be used as a tool to end wage slavery and the minority rule of bankers, industrialists and the managerial and political elite.

Presently, the labour movement is ideologically and operationally ill-prepared to effectively face down the two-year wage-freeze demand from the McGuinty Liberals. Unfortunately, labour’s leaders have, in the main, focused on narrow economic demands rather than seeking to politically develop union activists and their broader membership behind a class struggle labour movement platform. Union members have been politically deskilled and demobilized in favour of a social service model of trade unionism. These labour leaders have failed to use their unions’ courses, workshops, week-long schools, publications and other educational resources to educate members of the fact that they are a part of a distinct class with economic and political interests that are different from that of the rulers of capitalist society.

Even the most casual of observers understand that organized labour’s raison d’être is to champion the material concerns of the working-class. And yet, ideologically-speaking, most labour leaders in Canada have cast their lot in with capitalism – albeit a more Scandinavian version. This is why a coherent critique of capitalism is notably absent from most union-organized workshops and events. It should therefore not come as a surprise that many union members have swallowed the employers and politicians’ message that Canada is a largely middle-class country and that our collective aspiration should be to remain a member of this class. If the labour leaders, academics and the media say that the majority of Canadians are a part of the middle-class, it must be so. The development of a working-class consciousness becomes very difficult (but not impossible) in this kind of political environment.

The great majority of Canadians are members of the working-class. They sell their labour, exercise little to no control over how their work-life is organized, have no say over how the profit from their labour is distributed and are so alienated from work that the aphorism “Thank god it’s Friday” has its own acronym. One should never define middle-class status as one’s ability to purchase consumer trinkets, live in a mortgaged home or even own a summer cottage. Middle-class status ought to be defined by one’s exercise of power and control and/or the possession of high levels of human capital found among administrative/managerial elites in the private and public sectors, academic elites and independent professionals.

Labour’s Credibility Crisis

The narrow economic obsession of labour leaders was on plain display when Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan revealed the March 2010 Budget. When it became known that the McGuinty Liberals would be seeking a two-year wage-freeze from public sector workers, this news was all that consumed the attention of most labour leaders. Many labour functionaries scrambled around in search of external and internal legal opinions, requesting briefs from senior staff on the impact of a wage-freeze on bargaining in specific sectors and sending out correspondence to members assuring them to “just act as if nothing had happened”, because they’re “already covered by a collective agreement”. Many labour union offices’ and unionized workplaces’ anxiety was centred entirely on the desired wage-freeze by the McGuinty Liberals. Nothing else!

But today we hear labour leaders talking about keeping money in workers’ pockets to stimulate the economy and that their primary concern is maintaining public services at adequate levels. Why didn’t organized labour deploy its resources to educate and mobilize the public against the $4.6 billion corporate tax-cuts, slashing of $4 billion in transportation infrastructure spending from Metrolinx’s $9.3 billion budget7] and the scrapping of the special diet allowance that benefitted over 160,000 members of the working-class for the unprincely sum of $250 million per annum and a mere monthly average of $130 per person[8]? The provincial government anticipates that the two-year wage-freeze across the public sector will net a savings of $1.5 billion – yet the previous $8.6 billion effectively stolen from the working class failed to push organized labour into action.

The leaders of organized labour did not have the imagination to energize their members and the broader citizenry in alliance with other social movement organizations over the Budget. They could have exposed the class priorities of the McGuinty Liberals. The government’s main concerns clearly have nothing to do with those of us who are poor, live from pay cheque to pay cheque and do not patronize the golf courses where McGuinty and his friends hang out when they are not screwing the public. Listen up public sector labour leaders: the people will not be fooled by your claims to be advocating for the general interest. The broader working-class just have to simply see where you direct the labour movement’s resources and they will clue into the issues that are being prioritized. Take a look at the poor, working-class and/or racialized areas that are likely to be affected by the $4 billion cut to Metrolinx’s budget:

Quote:

…the austerity moves could affect five planned projects: rapid transit lines for Finch Ave. W., Sheppard Ave. E. and the Scarborough RT, along with the Eglinton Ave. cross-town line and an expansion of York region’s Viva service.[9]

Are we to believe that a class-struggle and anti-oppression informed public education, organizing and mobilization campaign in defense of public services, the social wage and a livable wage would not have had some level of traction with the people of Ontario?

An alternative economic plan or a different labour movement?

In some quarters of the trade union sector, there are talks of presenting an alternative plan to the slash-and-burn neoliberal policies of the provincial government. But, the presentation of Keynesian economic proposals by labour leaders is useless in a climate where the ruling class doesn’t feel threatened by a politically mobilized population, especially without “compelling grassroots pressure on policy makers”.[10] We implied earlier that labour unions have a credibility gap with the broader public if they now assert a desire to “broaden the debate, educate community members and local politicians with a view to engaging in actions that protect public services and build strong communities” as outlined by one union. What would be the purpose of the alternative plans of these labour leaders? The status quo of the 1930s to the 1960s that gave rise to the welfare state is not a transformative option.

There is no such thing as a “contextless” context. Where is the necessary political environment that would force the state to make concessions to the working-class out of fear that they maybe inclined to embrace revolutionary options? When some labour leaders are loosely talking about coming up with an alternative (Keynesian economic plan?) stimulus proposal, they would do well to understand the political implications of the following statement:

Quote:

Keynesian economists seem to be unmindful of this fundamental relationship between economics and politics. Instead, they view economic policies as the outcome of the battle of ideas, not of class forces or interests. And herein lies one of the principal weaknesses of their argument: viewing the Keynesian/New Deal/Social Democratic reforms of the 1930s through the 1960s as the product of Keynes’ or F.D.R.’s genius, or the goodness of their hearts; not of the compelling pressure exerted by the revolutionary movements of that period on the national policy makers to “implement reform in order to prevent revolution,” as F.D.R. famously put it. This explains why economic policy makers of today are not listening to Keynesian arguments—powerful and elegant as they are—because there would be no Keynesian, New Deal, or Social-Democratic economics without revolutionary pressure from the people.[11]

However, when labour leaders shy away from speaking openly about class-struggle and the nature of our economic system, we have a serious problem. It means that they are not in a position to facilitate a class-struggle, democracy-from-below and self-organizing form of trade unionism.

In order fight this attack on the working-class of Ontario, the labour movements’ rank-and-file activists, progressive leaders and principled labour socialists must engage in shop-floor education, organizing and mobilizing that is centred on a class-struggle, anti-racist and anti-oppression campaign. This approach to labour activism must be done in alliance with progressive or radical social movement organizations among women, racialized peoples, indigenous peoples, youth, students, LGBT community, climate/environmental justice, independent and revolutionary labour organizations, anti-authoritarian formations, and radical intellectuals. It must be an alliance based on mutual respect, sharing of approaches to emancipation and resources and a commitment to the value that the oppressed are the architect of and the driving force behind the movement for their emancipation. It is essential that organized labour open up and transform its leadership and decision-making structures to accommodate the full inclusion of its membership, in all their diversity.

In most of our unions and locals, this means starting from the beginning and we can use this current crisis to take those first steps. There is a lot of frustration among union members and community activists over the inaction of labour’s leadership in the face of this attack – and a desire to do something about it. That frustration and desire can be channeled into building cross-union “fight back committees” that bring together trade union and community activists in a city or town, such as members of the Greater Toronto Workers Assembly have already begun to do in that city. The “fight back committees” can give us a capacity to act independently from organized labour’s leadership. And probably our first acts should be to organize general assemblies in our locals and town hall meetings in our communities to promote a working-class view of the economic crisis and to mobilize our fellow workers and neighbours around militant, grassroots resistance to the McGuinty government and all the forces promoting a new round of austerity for the working-class.

Nothing less than a self-organizing, class-struggle approach to trade unionism will put labour in a position to fight in the here-and-now, while building the road we must travel on our way to the classless and stateless society of the future.

Alex Diceanu is a member of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Local 3906 and a graduate student at McMaster University. Ajamu Nangwaya is a member of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Locals 3907 and 3902 and a graduate student at the University of Toronto. Both authors are members of the Ontario anarchist organization, Common Cause.

________________________________________
[1] Walkom, T. (2010, March 26). Liberals aim at easy targets. Toronto Star. Retrieved from http://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/ontariobudget/article/785616–walkom…
[2] Brennan, R. J. & Talaga, T. (2010, March 26) Hudak cut wages deeper. Toronto Star. Retrieved fromhttp://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/ontariobudget/article/785343–hudak-cut-wages-deeper
[3] Benzie, R. (2010, July 20). Dwight Duncan’s wage-freeze pitch gets frosty reception. Toronto Star. Retrieved fromhttp://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/article/837872–dwight-duncan-s-wage-freeze-pitch-gets-frosty-reception
[4] Benzie, July 20
[5] Hossein-zaded, I. (2010, July 23-25). Holes in the Keynesian Arguments against Neoliberal Austerity Policy—Not “Bad” Policy, But Class Policy. Retrieved from http://www.counterpunch.org/zadeh07232010.html
[6] Benzie, July 20.
[7] Hume, C. (2010, March 29). Transit still not a priority. Toronto Star. Retrieved from http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/ttc/article/787317–transit-still-not-a-…
[8] The Canadian Press. (2010 April 1). Ontario asked to restore special diet allowance. Retrieved fromhttp://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2010/04/01/diet-allowance.html
9] Goddard, J., Rider, D. & Kalinoski, (2010, March 26). Miller outraged as budget sideswiped GTA transit. Toronto Star. Retrieved fromhttp://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/785573–miller-outraged-as-budget-sideswipes-gta-transit
[10] Hossein-zaded, I, Holes in the Keynesian arguments against neoliberal austerity policy.
[11] ibid

Tags:austerity measures, corporate bail out, Linchpin, Ontario, organized labour
Posted in Economic policies, Featured, Labour, The Real Issues | 2 Comments »

Did AbitibiBowater Settlement Create Private Water Rights?

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

The Council of Canadians is demanding that the terms of the recent NAFTA settlement between pulp and paper company AbitibiBowater and the federal government be made public. The Council believes that within this settlement exist possible constitutional repercussions affecting provincial jurisdiction over regional water rights.

AbitibiBowater used Chapter 11 of NAFTA to sue Canada over the alleged illegal seizure of company property by the province of Newfoundland following the closure of the Grand Falls paper mill and ensuing bankruptcy of the company. The property was seized in response to the cancellation of severance packages worth thousands of dollars for 500 workers within the province as a result of the company filing for bankruptcy protection.

Fred Wilson goes into further detail in an article from rabble.ca :

Danny Williams and the Newfoundland government were furious with the company and they proceeded to take back the company’s timber and water rights and expropriate their hydro-electric dam and power station. After all, the hydro operation depended entirely on a water license issued by the province to provide power for the mill.

A negotiation then ensued over the appropriate compensation for the investments that the company had made in the hydro operation. But just what is the value of a hydro station that is based on a license to provide power for a mill that the company has now closed?

Danny Williams was nicknamed “Hugo” over the expropriation of the assets. Even though the government’s actions did not save their jobs, the mill workers have nothing but admiration for Williams. A lesser known part of this story is that the Premier and the government then stepped in and paid over $30 million in severance pay that was owed to the people who lost their jobs at Grand Falls. To my knowledge, this is unprecedented by any government in Canada.

Needless to say, any deal between the province and AbitibiBowater would have to take into account the millions of dollars of company obligations to workers already paid by Newfoundland. The larger question is whether AbitibiBowater was using public resources to run a paper mill or to be a private power producer. Put another way, are the licenses to use resources for economic development just another kind of private property that can be used or not used or sold regardless of the public benefit?

In any event, the NAFTA challenge was from day one a bargaining chip in these negotiations, and the NAFTA proceedings will now be just another bargaining table where the company thinks it will have a stronger hand.

The NAFTA suit also offends on another level. AbitibiBowater is presumably still a Canadian company (although 51% of its shares are held by the former Bowater shareholders). Its headquarters is a landmark in downtown Montreal and the majority of its mills are in Canada. The company has a $100 million loan guarantee from the province of Quebec and it is negotiating with the federal government for further assistance to restructure and emerge from CCAA protection.

As it turns out, whether the company is Canadian or not doesn’t matter. As long as there are US investors or shareholders, a Chapter 11 case can be brought. In other words, this NAFTA provision is much less about trade between countries, and much more about the privileges of capital to trump the rights of citizens and governments.

So Newfoundland is in effect being dragged to the World Bank building and forced to defend the actions of its legislature before an unelected and non-judicial, unconstitutional NAFTA star chamber. Of course, all that can be avoided by giving the company everything it wants.

The case was ultimately settled at the end of August of this year, with the federal government agreeing to compensate AbitibiBowater $130 million for the expropriated assets.

Originally published on cbc.ca

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams expressed happiness with the federal payout.

“We are pleased that the matter has been concluded and we appreciate the work of the federal government in resolving the issue,” according to a statement issued to CBC News by Williams’s office.

“The Government of Canada has agreed to make a payment of $130 million to AbitibiBowater upon the company’s restructuring. This payment represents the fair market value of the company’s expropriated assets,” said a statement from Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada.

“AbitibiBowater has agreed to irrevocably and permanently withdraw its claim against Canada.”

The company said the federal payment forestalled an expensive legal case under NAFTA.

“We believe this is an acceptable settlement for our company, stakeholders and creditors, given the set of circumstances faced by the company at this particular time, as well as the inherent uncertainty of any judicial process,” stated CEO David Paterson.

“We are now able to move forward and focus on finalizing our restructuring process and plans to emerge from creditor protection in the fall 2010. AbitibiBowater would like to thank the Government of Canada for its efforts to reach this settlement and avoid a protracted and expensive NAFTA case.”

The settlement has not generated a solely positive response however, and has in fact set off warning bells in the offices of those charged with the task of safeguarding the public rights of Canadians.

The Council of Canadians released the following press release on August 25 in response:

The $130 million NAFTA settlement handed to pulp and paper company AbitibiBowater yesterday by the federal government could have constitutional repercussions affecting provincial jurisdiction and water governance according to the Council of Canadians. The organization is demanding that the terms of the deal be made public. “Water is a public resource to be managed by governments in the public interest,” says Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians.

“If AbitibiBowater has in any way been compensated for the loss of water and timber rights, as the company is suggesting, the Harper government’s hundred million dollar buyout would turn water into private property. Imagine the consequences of handing oil and gas companies operating in the tar sands this same right to draw water or else be compensated,” says Barlow.

Unlike the United States and other countries, Canada rejected private property as an inalienable right when it signed a new Constitution into law in 1982. This NAFTA settlement with AbitibiBowater proves again how investment guarantees in free trade agreements have forced private property rights into Canadian law – with high costs for Canadians and few if any possible benefits to the management of Canada’s economy, natural resources in particular. If the company is telling the truth that not only its assets but its water and timber rights have been compensated for, the threat to water management in Canada will be high.

The Council of Canadians is also astonished that AbitibiBowater was let off the hook recently by a Quebec court from having to foot the bill of the needed environmental cleanup of its now inoperative plant in Newfoundland.

“This NAFTA settlement tells multinational companies around the world that Canada will pay them to eliminate jobs and to pollute the environment,” says Barlow. “NAFTA made these kinds of settlements inevitable by letting investors challenge even public health and environmental policy directly as indirect expropriations of their profits. The anti-democratic Chapter 11 dispute process should be gutted from NAFTA and a more balanced international investment regime put in place.”

Tags:AbitibiBowater, Council of Canadians, NAFTA, Newfoundland, Settlement
Posted in Economic policies, Featured, Labour, The Real Issues | 1 Comment »

Housing Crisis, System Failure

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

The G8/G20 Toronto Mobilzation Network writes that the G8/G20 gatherings “are about trying to fix capitalism, a system that cannot be fixed.” Below, Rick Wolff explains how, in the United States, the attempt to find solutions to the housing crisis by working within capitalist paradigms perpetuates cycles of poverty: In the absence of wage increases and adequate social security measures, government subsidies on private bank loans plunges low-income residents further into debt and dependence.

Housing Crisis, System Failure

By Rick Wolff
Published in t r u t h o u t, August 21, 2010.

This capitalist crisis resembles a certain kind of serious disease. Different symptoms keep flaring up at different locations. It began with sub-prime mortgages in residential housing. Then, sequential flare-ups hit the private banking system, forced millions out of their jobs and homes, drastically cut world trade, and undermined the public services and national debts of several European countries. Meanwhile, another symptom festered in the credit freeze crippling so much private borrowing. Now, yet another symptom matures as government subsidies and supports to our crisis-ridden private housing industry add rising billions to the deficit.

The unspoken ideological taboo in most public discussion of the economic crisis prohibits seeing or treating the problem as systemic, as a problem of capitalism as a system. Instead, our political, journalistic, and academic leaders mostly see only symptoms and “develop policies” only for those symptoms. Alarms about one symptom — and contested efforts to address it — soon shift to another symptom and “policy responses” for it. Often such policies for one symptom actually worsen another symptom. For example, when stock markets collapsed early in 2000 (symptom), the Federal Reserve drastically cut interest rates (policy response); that move facilitated the excess lending that collapsed the entire economy in 2007.

Today’s alarms focus on housing and huge government subsidies there. To see the systemic problems of the US housing industry, consider its basic economics. The “American dream” of owning one’s home was never affordable to the vast majority of US families because the wages or salaries paid by their employers were never enough. To realize the dream therefore required borrowing. However, because working families had insufficient wages and salaries and no accumulated wealth — their situation inside US capitalism — private banks rarely lent to them. The vast majority of them, not merely the poorest among them, were too risky as borrowers.

A “solution” was found within US capitalism. The government would subsidize and guarantee private banks’ loans to millions of homebuyers. This solution boosted profits in private banks’ mortgage loan business. It indirectly subsidized all the industries producing for private homes. Yet it did not raise wages and salaries (something capitalists opposed). Many US workers became homeowners with large, long-term mortgages, making them more dependent on keeping jobs, not offending employers, etc. That experience also prepared workers to accept credit card, student loan, and other consumer debts. Expanding debt became the way most Americans bridged the gap between their incomes and the “good life” relentlessly advertised by capitalists needing buyers.

Government subsidies for housing took off in the last great collapse of US capitalism. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created in 1934 and the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA or “Fannie Mae”) in 1938 (the latter was split to form GNMA or “Ginnie Mae” in 1968). The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (“Freddie Mac”) came in 1970. The goal in the 1930s was recovery of the depressed housing industry. Housing — and the larger US economy dependent on it — have both been increasingly dependent on government guarantees and subsidies ever since.

The 2007 crisis plunged the housing market into serious decline. Poor, middle, and richer homeowners defaulted on their mortgage debts. Banks turned for relief to the government guarantees and subsidies. Providing them has cost the US government outlays now estimated at $150 billion with possibly hundreds of billions more in this crisis. Defaults and falling home prices made banks refuse to provide mortgage loans to almost anyone without government guarantees and subsidies (thus, in 2010, the US government has guaranteed or bought 98 per cent of new private mortgage loans). Without government support, there would be virtually no market in US housing. Even the richest get subsidized: “The Federal Housing Administration agreed in March to insure mortgages for apartments at the 98-unit [New York City] Gramercy Park development, known as Tempo. That enables buyers to make a down payment of as little as 3.5 percent in a building where apartments are listed at $820,000 to $3 million.”

Despite routinely endorsing government housing supports for years, Republicans have suddenly found it politically expedient to attack Democrats for those supports’ impact on the US deficit (ignoring that Bush nationalized Fannie and Ginny Mae and their debts in 2008). Democrats know they cannot cut government supports without producing a deeper housing and general recession which the Republicans would then blame on them. Thus, Treasury Secretary Geithner promises little change in the basic housing subsidy and guarantee system: doing away with it, he says, risks even worse future recessions. For Geithner, no systemic issue exists; for him it’s just a question of how much government support the housing industry needs.

The US housing industry’s basic problem is the system in which it is embedded. The larger capitalist economy shapes the gap between the costs of privately produced homes and American workers’ earnings. Over the last 75 years, US capitalism has bridged that gap by means of private credit guaranteed and/or subsidized by the government. This system provides incentives as well as opportunities for excessive home prices, diminished wages and salaries, and excessive quantities, risks, and costs of housing credit. The last 30 years have seen all three phenomena converge into a systemic crisis.

A systemic solution would include rethinking housing fundamentally. Consider, for example, a national program of building low-cost public housing (in various styles and configurations) owned and operated by local communities. Besides the job-creating virtues of such a program, it could yield high-quality, low-cost alternatives to and long overdue competition for private housing and its prices. Working people could then choose between them. A systemic solution could also raise wages and salaries relative to profits and thereby rebuild the finances of those who buy homes. These two steps would together reduce or remove the dependence on credit that has repeatedly and dangerously spun out of control among lenders and borrowers.

Republicans and Democrats will likely not mention, let alone debate, the systemic causes or solutions to the housing crisis and the mounting losses at the FHA, Fannie, Ginnie, and Freddie. They obey and enforce the ideological taboos of our time; they do not challenge them. Their minor “fixes” for the housing crisis, likely promoted as great reforms, may well worsen the crisis by provoking another symptom somewhere else. To address this society’s systemic problems with systemic solutions will require new political formations without ideological taboos about questioning or changing the system.

Tags:austerity measures, housing, poverty, truthout
Posted in Economic policies, Featured, The Real Issues | No Comments »

Canada-USA Procurement Agreement: Free Trade Goes Local

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

Provincial “barriers to trade” broken under new regional agreements

Article by Dan Kellar in The Dominion, June 23, 2010.

WATERLOO—While the Canadian government was prorogued and the Canadian public was watching the Olympics, Prime Minister Stephen Harper quietly signed the Canada-USA Procurement Agreement (CUPA).

The agreement navigates around a recently enacted United States “Buy-American” policy. Critics of the CUPA argue that the agreement further locks neoliberal ideologies into Canadian-American trade policy. This free-market expansion challenges or removes much of the capacity for provincial and local governments to control local economic development decisions.

Photo by Dave Ron

The implementation of the CUPA foreshadows Canada’s agenda at the June 2010 G8/20 meetings where, as Harper stated during a planning meeting in Ottawa in March, he will be urging the G20 to “open global markets” and “resist protectionism.” Miranda Goeltom, Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Indonesia, noted at the G20 Workshop on the Global Economy in May 2009 that the G20 agreed upon commitments to “reinvigorate world trade and investment,” primarily through “reducing trade and investment barriers and financial protectionism.”

The CUPA overcomes what a March 2010 edition of the Global Trade Alert report calls a “worrying measure” of protectionism. Under the CUPA, resisting protectionism means decision-makers will have to consider bids from American contractors for procurement contracts, giving no favour to local companies. In an appendix in the CUPA titled “Market Access,” procurement associated with publicly funded schools and local economic development programs in Ontario and Quebec are not protected from the CUPA’s reach. For other provinces and territories, specific exclusions were created for education and local economic development programs.

While there are no tariff barriers between provinces in Canada, differences in regulation and approaches to management in environmental protection, labour rights, health care delivery, and public education are equated to barriers by trade economists. These views are shared by a group which holds considerable influence at the G20 summits—the World Trade Organization. Agreements such as the 2007 Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) between Alberta and BC aim to eliminate these barriers.

In 2009 the Council of Canadians (CoC) released “State of Play: Canada’s Internal Free Trade Agenda,” a report giving updates on TILMA and other interprovincial Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). The report critiques these agreements for allowing “corporations and individuals to challenge any provincial or municipal government measure they feel ‘restricts or impairs’ their investment. Even measures designed to protect the environment and public health can be brought to an unelected TILMA dispute panel with the authority to impose penalties as high as $5 million [against the challenged government].”

This allowance is akin to the CUPA provisions in Notes to Appendix A, which challenge strengthening environmental protections as “disguised barrier[s] to trade,” or the Chapter 11 review panels of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which allows corporations to sue governments when they change policies or regulations that could affect trade. A 2009 case brought to the NAFTA review panel by DOW Chemicals found that Quebec’s restrictions of certain toxic pesticides were considered a disguised trade barrier.

“It [TILMA] will dramatically restrict the ability of governments—including local governments—to act in the public interest,” said Murray Dobbin of the CoC.

Unlike NAFTA, in TILMA there is no limit on how many times a corporation may bring an issue to the dispute panel. If a regulation is found to be a “disguised barrier to trade,” foreign corporations may continue to sue the offending government until that regulation is changed. To avoid continual negative repercussions, governments may avoid implementing stronger standards and policies.

The CoC reported that “some US states have shown an interest in signing TILMA, which would lead to massive deregulation in Canada as we harmonize policies with the United States. TILMA thus becomes an issue of democracy and of deep integration with the US.” With the two agreements sharing many of the same clauses, the implementation of the CUPA forces many of TILMA’s clauses onto provinces, states, and municipalities who had little-to-no input into the agreement.

Canada is discussing a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Europe that the CoC says “is likely to put pressure on provincial governments to increase privatization, including in areas such as child care and public health care…municipal governments will also be forced to fall into line.”

Fraser Institute economist Amela Karabegovic and trade advisor Robert Knox wrote that “interprovincial barriers are, and will remain, a major roadblock in the current negotiations… the free-trade agreement with the EU is an opportunity for Canadian governments to finally resolve the remaining interprovincial barriers.” It becomes clear that the regulatory harmonizations that result from TILMA and the CUPA must take place for FTA negotiations to continue.

“The [G8] recognized in its Pittsburgh statement last year that ‘there are different approaches to economic development and prosperity,’ which is the same as saying that free trade, privatization and open markets don’t always work,” Stuart Trew of the CoC told The Dominion. “Harper disagrees with that idea and has made noises that he’d like the G20 to broaden its mandate to go after ‘protectionism in all its forms,’ which would include important national measures to protect the environment or help local industries grow up and compete.”

Dan Kellar is an organizer with AW@L and is co-host of AW@L Radio.

This story was published in The Dominion’s special issue on the G8 and G20 summits in Ontario.

Tags:Canadian-American Trade Policy, CUPA, Free Trade
Posted in Economic policies | No Comments »

Why Is Canada Blocking Congo’s Debt Forgiveness?

Friday, August 20th, 2010

(taken from The Dominion)

by Macho Philipovich

WINNIPEG—In the lead-up to the G20 summit in Toronto, as several major demonstrations and tens of thousands of police and military personnel filled the downtown, a quieter summit took place 200 kilometres to the north, in Huntsville, Ontario. In closed meetings Canadian officials worked to convince the world’s major military and industrial powers to criticize the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

They succeeded. The final G8 communique called on the DRC to “enhance governance and accountability in the extractive sector,” and “extend urgently the rule of law.” Just a few days later, on June 29, Canada attempted to block a decision by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to cancel the overwhelming majority of the DRC’s roughly $8 billion debt.

Photo: Caitlin Crawshaw

In spite of Canada’s objections, the World Bank and IMF approved DRC’s debt cancellation two days later. But Canadian diplomats delayed the process long enough that the announcement missed celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence from Belgium which had ruled Congo with legendary violence while extracting its mineral wealth. The DRC’s debt, widely considered to be “odious”—consisting of loans to illegitimate rulers—had accumulated through their history as a colony of Belgium, then through the years of the Mobutu dictatorship and on to the present. The loans rarely benefited ordinary people in what is one of the most impoverished countries in the world. Even after one of the IMF’s own reports during the Mobutu era showed the loans were being misused and would likely never be repaid, the lending programs were not only kept in place but boosted to higher levels.

Why would Canada want to interfere with relieving a poor country from illegitimate debt?

The Congo has long been the site of bountiful natural resources, which governments and corporations the world over have scrambled to access. The Vancouver-based mining company First Quantum has not been immune to this allure. In 2006, the company’s president Clive Newall said of the DRC: “It’s the holy grail of the copper industry. Companies are saying: to hell with the political risk, we just have to be here.”[1]

The risk did not pay off as well as he would have liked. Over the past year, the government of the DRC canceled three of First Quantum’s mining concessions, worth about $1-billion, as part of a review of contracts signed during the tumultuous period of conflict at the end of the 1990s. Canada retaliated on the company’s behalf through the G8 and international lending institutions.

Maurice Carney, Executive Director of the Friends of the Congo, a Washington DC-based advocacy group, is asking why Canada was not worried about illegality in the Congo before the recent cancellations; illegality on the part of the companies themselves. He points to a 2002 UN Security Council report called the “Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” that showed connections between foreign mining companies, including First Quantum, and the ongoing conflict in the DRC, the deadliest conflict the world has seen since the second World War.

“The United Nations clearly stated that these companies that were involved are fueling the conflict, illegally exploiting Congo’s wealth, and have violated OECD Guidelines,” says Carney. “Yet neither Canada, nor the G8 have issued any major declarations against these corporations.”

The report pointed to payouts by First Quantum to top Congolese officials.[2] The company’s Kolwezi project, the first to be canceled by the DRC, was secured through deals with then-rebel leader Laurent Kabila before he took power in 1997, at a time when mining companies were helping finance his insurgency against the national government. The deal was made with a smaller firm called American Mineral Fields, which First Quantum was planning to buy, and did, securing the contract for themselves. From 1997 to 2001, while accumulating these contracts, their share prices shot “from zero to around $140 USD.”[3]

First Quantum’s board has always been politically well-connected. Around this period, former Prime Minister Joe Clark was serving as an adviser and later he became a board member. In 2008, Carney told Democracy Now! that nearly all Canadian Prime Ministers since Trudeau have been involved in a mining company working in the Congo.

The international community’s main concern remains re-shaping the DRC government much in the way foreign powers in Congo’s colonial period saw themselves to be carrying out a “civilizing mission.” The World Bank and the UK have announced $92-million for their PROMINES project in the DRC “to increase transparency and accountability in the mining sector.”

Although the government of the DRC claims that during the period of mining renegotiation the people in charge of the First Quantum project in Kolwezi were “the only ones who refused to negotiate,” and that “[t]hey refused with a lot of arrogance,” the cancellation was, in fact, dubious. The holdings were transferred to a company registered in the British Virgin Islands owned by businessman Dan Gertler, among the wealthiest Israelis, who owns other companies financing Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Carney says in regard to Gertler that “just about every deal he’s made in the Congo has benefited him, a select few people in the government, and undermined the people.”

The Canadian Ministry of Finance did not respond to a request for an interview from The Dominion. A Ministry representative previously told Reuters they would “continue to work with our international partners to ensure Canadian investment in the DRC is protected.”

Carney asks us to consider another way the G8 leaders’ summit could have played out. “We’re not aware of any statements the G8 has issued regarding the millions of Congolese dead or the hundreds of thousands of women raped… Imagine if the call from the G8 was for an end to the conflict and bringing peace and stability to the Congo, as opposed to securing mining deals for First Quantum.”

With files from David Barouski.

Macho Philipovich lives in Winnipeg.

Notes

1.Bloomberg, “BHP, Anglo Shun Congo Risks to Expand as Copper Soars,” 7 February 2006, quoted in Global Witness, “Digging in corruption: Fraud, abuse and exploitation in Katanga’s copper and cobalt mines,” July 2006.

2.UN Security Council 16 October 2002 “Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” p 9: “In its attempts to buy rights to the Kolwezi Tailings, First Quantum Minerals (FQM) of Canada offered a down payment to the State of $100 million, cash payments and shares held in trust for Government officials. According to documents in the possession of the Panel, the payments list included the National Security Minister, Mwenze Kongolo; the Director of the National Intelligence Agency, Didier Kazadi Nyembwe; the Director General of Gecamines, Yumba Monga; and the former Minister of the Presidency, Pierre-Victor Mpoyo.”

3.Alain Deneault et al., Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalite en Afrique, Montreal, 2008. p 69.

Tags:Canada, Congo, debt, G8, IMF, Mining, World-Bank
Posted in Economic policies, Featured | No Comments »

Criminalization of Dissent: The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

Image via VeganSoapBox.com

In Toronto, this week’s Criminalization of Dissent panel and discussion highlighted issues surrounding the state’s assault on G20 protesters. Critics of the G20 argue, among other things, that nations represented at the summit champion free enterprise at the expense of the world’s most vulnerable – including the economically disadvantaged, indigenous people, the environment, and animals. In a phenomenon that has been dubbed the ” Green Scare,” fear of terrorism is being exploited to push a political and corporate agenda - attaching the label of “eco-terrorist” to those animal rights and environmental activists whose actions would threaten free enterprise. Legislators in the United States have responded to the threat posed by alleged “eco-terrorists” by enacting the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), signed into law in 2006 by George W. Bush, with the support of animal industry groups and corporations.

Animal advocates such as Lee Hall have argued that militant tactics by animal rights and environmental advocates paved the way for this legislation, “because militant tactics have given oppressive forces the ability to rationalize a need for it.” Regardless of one’s criticisms of such tactics, it is probable that ”legal, above-ground activists” employing exclusively non-violent tactics will be the most adversely affected by laws such as the AETA. The legislation includes a clause stipulating fines of up to $10,000 and up to 6 months in jail for:

“…an offense involving exclusively a non-violent physical obstruction of an animal enterprise or a business having a connection to, or relationship with, an animal enterprise, that may result in loss of profits but does not result in bodily injury or death or property damage or loss”

Full text of the AETA can be found here. As Will Potter explains in the following article, a group of animal rights activists known as the “AETA 4” were charged with violating this act after allegedly chalking (animal rights) slogans on the sidewalk, distributing flyers, and attending protests. Reactionary legislation such as the AETA threaten free speech and are cause for concern among all those involved in activism, protest, and dissent.

BREAKING: AETA 4 Case Dismissed, But Re-Indictment Possible

July 12, 2010, by Will Potter
Image and article published at GreenIsTheNewRed.com

A U.S. District Court has thrown out the indictment of four animal rights activists who were charged with violating the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, because the government did not clearly explain what, exactly, the protesters did.

When Joseph Buddenberg, Maryam Khajavi, Nathan Pope and Adriana Stumpo were arrested in 2009, prosecutors said little other than that the group allegedly chalked slogans on the sidewalk, distributed fliers and attended protests. Later, when they were officially indicted, the government was still tight-lipped about how their non-violent, above-ground protests amounted to “terrorism.”

In response, the Center for Constitutional Rights and attorney Matthew Strugar led an effort to have the indictments dismissed. In short, they argued that the charges should be dropped because they seem to involve only protected First Amendment speech, but that in order to make that argument the defendants’ speech must be clearly identified.

Here’s an excerpt from Judge Ronald M. Whyte’s ruling:

In order for an indictment to fulfill its constitutional purposes, it must allege facts that sufficiently inform each defendant of what it is that he or she is alleged to have done that constitutes a crime. This is particularly important where the species of behavior in question spans a wide spectrum from criminal conduct to constitutionally protected political protest. While “true threats” enjoy no First Amendment protection, picketing and political protest are at the very core of what is protected by the First Amendment. Where the defendants’ conduct falls on this spectrum in this case will very likely ultimately be decided by a jury. Before this case proceeds to a jury, however, the defendants are entitled to a more specific indictment setting forth their conduct alleged to be criminal. [emphasis added]

As background, a fierce campaign has been being waged in California against animal research at the University of California system. There has been a wide range of both legal and illegal tactics. Illegal tactics have included the destruction of UC vans, and an incendiary device was left at the home of a UC researcher.

The FBI and local law enforcement haven’t been able to catch the people responsible, though. They’ve only cracked down on the above-ground activists, like the AETA 4, who protest and create fliers.

The previous version of the law was used to convict the SHAC 7 for running a controversial website that posted news of both legal and illegal actions. This case, the first use of the new Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, was clearly an attempt to use this sweeping legislation even more broadly against First Amendment activity. This ruling sternly rebukes the government’s attempt to take activists to trial for “terrorism” without even explaining what they have done.

To be clear, though, this case is not over. The government can still re-indict the defendants with an amended bill of particulars that clearly outlines their alleged actions.

This is a victory worth celebrating, and it should also be inspiration for renewed organizing. Corporations and the politicians who represent them have been pushing this “eco-terrorism” and “animal enterprise terrorism” legislation for years, and they will not sit quietly as the flagship case of their pet scare-mongering law is tossed aside.

If prosecutors choose to re-indict, it should be at their own peril; the animal rights and environmental movements must be ready to respond even more loudly, more forcefully, that activism is not terrorism.

Tags:Activism, civil liberties, criminalization of dissent, legislation, peaceful protest, violence
Posted in Animal Rights, Assault on Democracy, Economic policies, Featured, The Real Issues | 4 Comments »

Clare Demerse: Leaked G20 documents – Canada won’t cut extra subsidies for fossil fuels

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Canada’s section of a leaked G20 document detailing plans to phase out fossil fuel subsidies reveals that Canada has no plans to phase out any of its estimated $2 billion a year in tax breaks to oil and gas producers.

By Clare Demerse, Pembina Institute Climate Change Blog
Originally Published Jun 29, 2010
Image courtesy of ImageShack.us

Despite the Harper government’s decision to downplay climate and energy issues at the G20 summit, there was no way to avoid a discussion of phasing out fossil fuel subsides. That’s because leaders at the previous G20 summit, held in Pittsburgh in September 2009, decided to phase out these subsidies “over the medium term” – and specifically asked ministers to prepare implementation plans and timetables for discussion in Toronto.

The Toronto summit gave G20 leaders an opportunity to take the next step with their subsidy commitment by agreeing to a joint target and timeline. (That’s exactly the approach that Stephen Harper proposed, and won agreement on, for reducing the G20′s budget deficits.) And G20′s Toronto declaration does refer to fossil fuel subsidies – but it doesn’t set a common target or timeline. Instead, Paragraph 42 welcomes “the work of Finance and Energy Ministers in delivering implementation strategies and timeframes, based on national circumstances.” It also encourages “continued and full implementation of country-specific strategies” and commits to reviewing “progress towards this commitment at upcoming summits.”

The problem with a “country-specific” approach is that there’s no common definition of what constitutes a subsidy, and no collective deadline for getting rid of them. So instead of a joint commitment with mutual accountability, you end up with a potluck, where everyone can decide for themselves what they want to bring. Some people will make a mouthwatering dessert, but others will merely pick up some ketchup chips en route to the party – or even arrive empty-handed.

Canada’s Contribution

Officially, the G20 has not released countries’ implementation plans and timeframes. But thanks to a leaked document published yesterday by the U.S. news service ClimateWire , we now know that they prepared to do exactly that: the group drafted a 50-page annex listing the G20′s plans and actions, with the words “Not for distribution until the Toronto summit” right on the cover.

Unfortunately, Canada’s section does not make for inspiring reading. It offers no new plans to phase out any of the estimated $2 billion a year (as described in a previous blog post ) in current tax breaks to oil and gas producers. Instead, it relies on a commitment from Budget 2007 to phase out a specific subsidy to the oil sands – a good decision, but one made long before the Pittsburgh commitment.

In other words, if the G20′s approach is a potluck dinner, Canada arrived with some stale leftovers.

We can’t say that we weren’t warned. In late May, articles from journalist Mike de Souza described a leaked memo from the Department of Finance to federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. The memo gave the minister two choices:

• “Lead by example” in phasing out Canada’s remaining tax breaks to the producers of oil, gas and coal. This was the option that the department recommended, for a number of very sound environmental and economic reasons.

• Make no policy change and instead “seek to minimize the commitment”.

Just in case Minister Flaherty went against the department’s advice and chose the second option, his officials provided him the arguments he could use to try to defend it. On page six of the memo, Finance officials suggest listing three older commitments as evidence of Canada’s early action.[1] The government’s 2007 decision to phase out the accelerated capital cost allowance to the oil sands could be portrayed as “a current action helping to fulfill the commitment,” according to the memo.

It’s very telling to compare that list with Canada’s actual G20 submission : while the G20 document is a bit longer, the content is almost identical. You rarely get to see such clear documentation of a minister’s decision to override his own officials’ recommendations on the right course of action.

We outlined our concerns with Canada’s approach at a media briefing over the weekend, and we’re going to keep pushing the government to re-think its attempt to “minimize” the Pittsburgh commitment.

One argument we’ll be making is to compare and contrast Canada’s approach with President Obama’s, because Canada’s government often likes to say that it’s harmonized with the U.S. on climate policy. But in his budget plan for this year (see Table 14.3 on p.30), President Obama has proposed phasing out 12 specific subsidies to the producers of oil, gas and coal, which they estimate will save a cumulative total of $38 billion from 2011 to 2020.

So it turns out that some countries did show up with goodies in hand to the G20′s subsidies potluck. But despite the extra pressure of hosting the party, Canada wasn’t one of them.

Tags:Canada, Climate, corporate/industry subsidies, G20, Stephen Harper
Posted in Economic policies, Environment, Featured, The Real Issues | 3 Comments »

The Real G8/G20

Archive for the ‘Economic policies’ Category

In Remembrance of the Charter of Rights and Freedom

Capitalism and Pollution: A Way Out?

OECD Pursues Free Trade at the G20 Business Summit

It’s the class struggle, stupid!

Did AbitibiBowater Settlement Create Private Water Rights?

Housing Crisis, System Failure

Canada-USA Procurement Agreement: Free Trade Goes Local

Why Is Canada Blocking Congo’s Debt Forgiveness?

Criminalization of Dissent: The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act

BREAKING: AETA 4 Case Dismissed, But Re-Indictment Possible

Clare Demerse: Leaked G20 documents – Canada won’t cut extra subsidies for fossil fuels

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