Postmodern News Archives 4

2006-07-29T23:52:00.000-07:00

Labour Rights are Human Rights
Most Canadians being denied collective bargaining rights

By Roy J. Adams
From CCPA Monitor
2006

In the ideal political economy promoted by the UN’s International Labour Organization, the conditions of work of nearly all working people are negotiated by independent representatives of their own choosing. The situation in Canada falls well short of that ideal. A significant majority of Canadian workers are unorganized and thus have no effective influence over conditions under which they work–conditions critical to their well-being.

The basic argument of my new CCPA book, Labour Left Out, is that the main reason for that state of affairs is the failure of Canadian governments to deliver on their eithical and legal obligation to protect and promote collective bargaining as a human right.

Respect for human rights is an essential element of democratic society. It is a prime duty of all democratic governments to ensure that everyone may exercise their human rights as freely as they exercise their right to breathe and sleep. In 1998, the ILO reaffirmed solemnly, and with Canada’s strong support, that a set of core labour rights are human rights. Among them are freedom from child labour, discrimination and forced labour, freedom of association, and “effective recognition of the right to organize and bargain collectively.”

International human rights norms insist that each of these rights must be accorded the same respect and be treated the same. As stated in the 1993 Declaration of Vienna: "All human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis."

With respect to some human rights, we have made considerable progress in recent years. A few generations ago, women had no right to vote and few legal rights. They were treated in law as appendages of their male spouses. Not long ago, Japanese-Canadian citizens were rounded up and put into compounds--not because they committed any crime, but simply because of their ethnicity. Even more recently, our Aboriginal peoples were basically treated as wards of the state with rights and freedoms much inferior to those of fully-fledged Canadian citizens. Until even more recently, if you were disabled, you were shunted aside and prevented from participating fully in Canadian life.

For these human rights, we have experienced a revolution in Canada. In every province and territory, there are now Human Rights Commissions mandated and equipped to protect and promote the rights of these groups.

But labour has been left out of the human rights revolution. Instead of being effectively protected and promoted, the rights of labour have been going in reverse.

In Canada, the right to organize and bargain collectively exists in theory for most employees, but it is a right whose exercise is hobbled by obstacles and dangers. In the public sector, when employees attempt to negotiate decisions critical to their welfare, their governments frequently pass ad hoc legislation imposing working conditions upon them. That action offends both the letter and spirit of international human rights law--law that Canada has promised to abide by.

Most public sector strikes that are characterized by the press as “illegal” are instead the result of action contrary to statutes that should never have been passed in the first place–statutes that blatantly offend international law. For their illegal behaviour, both federal and provincial governments have been repeatedly condemned by the ILO, the UN agency charged with overseeing the implementation of global labour standards.

Such behaviour not only strikes at the heart of the human rights of Canadians, but also jeopardizes the welfare of workers around the globe who depend upon the international convention that all human rights are sacred and must be treated equally. If Canada, a self-acclaimed champion of human rights, may deliberately and with calculated intent offend one human right, then why should goverments elsewhere refrain from discriminating against ethnic minorities, or against women? When we consciously offend human rights at home, how can we credibly condemn child exploitation and forced sex-trade trafficking elsewhere?

In Canada, our neglect of the human right to organize and bargain collectively is even more evident in the private sector.

Wal-Mart, for example, has put massive resources into preventing employees from having any collective say over their conditions of work; into maintaining complete, unfettered control over labour management and labour costs. When Wal-Mart hears of any attempt by employees to associate with a view towards negotiating their conditions, the company’s executives typically send in a team of labour-busting experts to pressure them to decide against that course of action.

With the principle in mind that all human rights must be treated the same, imagine that you are a woman who has decided to apply for a job at a company known to have a predominantly male work force. Now imagine that the company sends a team around to your house to persuade you to withdraw your application. Rightly, you would be outraged. Most likely the incident would precipitate demonstrations and condemnatory editorials in the local press. But, although Wal-Mart’s procedure with respect to union organizing is the precise human rights equivalent, its behaviour is legal (although sometimes its agents go too far and offend the law), and unremakable. Rarely do you see editorials condemning Wal-Mart’s publicly stated policy of dissuading their employees from exercising their human right to organize.

Even more rarely does one find examples of politicians talking out against the union-avoidance philosophy embraced by the great majority of non-union employers. We have allowed conventions to set in that accept such behaviour as normal.

In the private sector, many of the unorganized are the working poor, immigrants, and farm-workers, whose pay and conditions are inadequate to allow them to participate fully in Canadian society. They need effective representation to help them improve their material conditions. Others, like those at high-tech firms like IBM, have pay and benefits that are quite adequate or even cushy. But, whether well compensated or not, the conditions of unorganized workers depend on the whim of their boss. Any day in the week, the boss may tap them on the shoulder and say, for any reason or no reason: “We’ve decided to change the conditions on which you have come to expect and rely upon.” Recently, the pensions of IBM workers in the U.S. were changed radically, for the worse as far as most employees were concerned, but without their advice or consent.

To impose conditions upon anyone without their advice and consent is to treat them as less than human--to strip them of their dignity as human beings, whatever their level of material welfare.

Although collective representation is a human-rights imperative, the practice of collective bargaining in the private sector in Canada is declining, and has been for some time. It peaked several years ago at about 30% of the labour force, but is now down to under 18%. And it is falling even in those jurisdictions, like Quebec, considered to have the best labour legislation.

Why is that? The great lie underpinning our current conventions is that employees, in growing numbers, prefer not to exercise their right to negotiate their conditions. They prefer their employers to make critical decisions for them without their advice and consent. Imagine an employer saying: “Would you folks like to choose a representative to sit down with us in order to work out a mutually acceptable wage and benefit system?” And the employees responding “Nah, you do it for us. Whatever you decide is fine with us. Cut our wages, do away with our benefits, increase or reduce our hours, lay us off, treat us mean and cruel, treat us like fools, why would we want to have anything to say about that?”

One survey, discussed in Labour Left Out, found that nearly everyone wanted to have a say through a collective representative about their conditions of work. About 40% of the currently unorganized want to be represented by a traditional union acting as a state-certified bargaining agent. If they were to get what they want, traditional union density would double. The remainder don’t want exclusion as Canadian policy nonsensically assumes; they don’t want to be at the mercy of their employer’s whim. Instead, they want less formal, non-statutory arrangements.

An example of what such an arrangement might look like is the McMaster University Faculty Association, of which I am a member. Although our association is not certified, like certified unions we negotiate wages with final offer selection to settle impasses. We also have a well-functioning grievance procedure and even have a check-off arrangement. Indeed, some of the arrangements the association has been able to negotiate are better than those found in typical collective agreements. For example, we have representation on nearly all university committees that have any impact on faculty interests.

The McMaster Model, as it is fondly known, works fine because in the specific circumstances our employer has accepted the association as an integral part of enterprise governance. Were similar arrangements pro-actively promoted and backed by governments and accepted by employers, they would very likely flower across the economy. But, as things now stand, they are almost unknown as a representational option.

So, if essentially everyone wants representation of some sort, why are the large majority of employees without it? Most employers don’t go as far as Wal-Mart in opposing the exercise of freedom of association, but nearly all unorganized employers make it known to their employees that they do not want them to exercise their collective rights. They make it known that employees who do so are “traitors” against corporate culture. Imagine an employer calling an employee into his/her office and saying: “I’m a Tory (or Liberal, or whatever) and would like you to vote for my party,” or even worse, “I would prefer it if you did not vote at all, and, since I know the people working at your poll, I’ll know it if you do.” Or perhaps, “Don’t vote socialist because if you do we may have to shut down and you’ll lose your job.” Whether that sort of thing is legal or not, there are norms in place that ensure it doesn’t happen. But we benignly accept behavior that is the human rights equivalent when it comes to union organizing.

According to international standards that Canada has promised to respect and promote, governments have a responsibility to ensure that workers are aware of their labour rights. They should be trying to expand the practice of collective bargaining. That is one of the ILO’s explicit goals, and, as a member of the ILO, Canada has endorsed that goal. But, as the responses to my inquiry to all of Canada’s labour ministers make clear, that’s not happening. Our governments are complacent about the decline of collective bargaining. Their policy is to remain “neutral.” Indeed, government neutrality with respect to the right to organize is strongly embedded in Canadian labour relations culture. In remaining neutral, governments behave much differently than they do with respect to other human rights and, in doing so, deny the human rights character of the right to collective representation.

Our Human Rights Commissions in every jurisdiction have the mandate to pro-actively promote respect for human rights and acceptance of them and their implications by employers and landlords. For example, the Ontario Human Rights Commission has a mandate “to develop and conduct programs of public information and education and undertake, direct, and encourage research designed to eliminate discriminatory practices that infringe rights under this Act.”

There is no such agency charged with eliminating practices that have the effect of denying workers their right to organize and bargain collectively.

Why are labour rights treated so differently from other human rights? Why do governments stand by idly as corporations actively work to dissuade employees from exercising a human right? Why are we all so tolerant of norms that permit the treatment of workers as commodities rather than as dignified human beings?

Once a set of conventions gains a hold on society, it is difficult to displace them. But it can be done. There is no better example than what has been achieved in establishing the rights of visible minorities, women, people with disabilities, and our Aboriginal peoples.

(Roy J. Adams is professor emeritus at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. This article is based on a speech he delivered in March at the launch of his CCPA book Labour Left Out. Copies of the book can be purchased from the CCPA.)

2006-07-29T20:09:00.000-07:00

INDEPTH: CALEDONIA LAND CLAIM

Historical timeline
CBC News Online
2006

Six Nations natives and developer Henco Industries are involved in a land dispute over a 40-hectare tract near Hamilton, Ont. Here is a history of the land in question.

1784:
For its loyalty to the British Crown during the American Revolution, the Six Nations is allowed to "take possession of and settle" a strip of land nearly 20 kilometres wide along the Grand River, from its source to Lake Erie, totaling about 385,000 hectares.

Henco Industries now says the so-called "Haldimand Grant" (named after the commander of the British forces) was merely a licence to occupy the lands, with legal title remaining with the Crown. Six Nations dispute that claim.

1792:
Lt.-Gov. John Graves Simcoe reduces land grant to the Six Nations to 111,000 hectares.

1796:
Six Nations grants its chief, Joseph Brant, the power of attorney to sell off some of the land and invest the proceeds. The Crown opposes the sales but eventually concedes.

1835:
The Crown approaches Six Nations about developing Plank Road (now Highway 6) and the surrounding area. Six Nations agrees to lease half a mile of land on each side for road, but does not surrender the land. Lt.-Gov. John Colborne agrees to the lease but his successor, Sir Francis Bond Head, does not. After 1845, despite the protests of Six Nations, Plank Road and surrounding lands would be sold to third parties.

1840:
The government recommends that a reserve of 8,000 hectares be established on the south side of the Grand River and the rest sold or leased.

Jan. 18, 1841:
Six Nations council agrees to surrender for sale all lands outside those set aside for a reserve, on the agreement the government would sell the land and invest the money for them. A faction of Six Nations petition against the surrender, saying the chiefs were deceived and intimidated.
Six Nations would challenge that claim in a 1995 lawsuit and it is part of the basis for the current protest.

June 1843:
A petition to the Crown said Six Nations needed a 22,000-hectare reserve and wanted to keep and lease a tier of lots on each side of Plank Road and several other tracts of land in the Haldimand area.

Dec. 18, 1844:
A document signed by 47 Six Nations chiefs appears to authorize sale of land to build Plank Road.

May 15, 1848:
The land where the current development, Douglas Creek Estates, now sits is sold to George Marlot Ryckman for 57 pounds and 10 shillings and a Crown deed is issued to him.

1850:
The Crown passes a proclamation setting out extent of reserve lands, about 19,000 hectares agreed to by the Six Nations chiefs.

1924:
Under the Indian Act, the Canadian government establishes an elected government on the reserve.

1992:
Henco Industries Ltd. purchases a company that owned 40 hectares of what it would later call the Douglas Creek Estates lands.

1995:
The Six Nations sue the federal and provincial governments over the land. The developer calls it "an accounting claim" for "all assets which were not received but ought to have been received, managed or held by the Crown for the benefit of the Six Nations."

July 2005:
The subdivision plan for Douglas Creek Estates is registered with title to the property guaranteed by the province of Ontario.

Feb. 28, 2006:
A group of Six Nations members takes over the housing project, erecting tents, a teepee and a wooden building.

INDEPTH: CALEDONIA LAND CLAIM

Timeline of recent events
From CBC News Online
2006

June 23, 2006
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty says the province will pay $12.3 million to Henco Industries to buy out their investment in disputed land in Caledonia. The government will also compensate Henco Industries for the loss of future profits, an amount McGuinty said "remains the subject of ongoing negotiations." McGuinty had previously told the legislature that he couldn't reveal the purchase price because the developer wanted to keep it a secret.

June 16, 2006
The Ontario government buys out the land developers caught in the middle of the land-claims dispute in Caledonia. Henco Industries was building a subdivision on the site before Six Nations protesters took over the land in February. The move is announced in Ontario Superior Court in Cayuga, Ont., where government representatives, developers and residents had convened to discuss a court injunction calling for the removal of aboriginal protesters from the Douglas Creek Estates construction site. The McGuinty government also announces that it will offer $1 million — in addition to the already proposed $700,000 — to compensate Caledonia-area businesses hurt by road blockades set up by the Six Nations protesters the previous month.

June 15, 2006
Negotiations resume between the province and aboriginal protesters.

June 12, 2006
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty calls off negotiations with aboriginals protesting at the Caledonia site, saying that public safety has been compromised by Friday's violence. He says the province will only return to the table when the barricades come down and native leaders assist police in finding seven suspects in connection with Friday's incidents. In response, native protesters use heavy machinery to remove one barricade made of tires and tangled metal. Another barrier at the Douglas Creek Estates housing development remains in place. The Ontario Provincial Police announce that they are looking for copies of confidential documents that were taken from the U.S. Border Patrol vehicle that was stolen during the violent incidents June 9. The documents — which included identities of undercover officers and information from confidential informants — were returned to the provincial police, but not before photocopies were made.

June 11, 2006
The Six Nations Confederacy releases a statement denouncing the violence of the previous day. The Confederacy says the suspects are known to them and have been asked to stay away from the occupation. There is speculation that the suspects may be staying on the Six Nations reserve. The OPP have a protocol not to enter the reserve.

June 9, 2006
Ontario Provincial Police Deputy Commissioner Maurice Pilon alleges that three violent altercations occurred within an hour of each other.
The first incident began after a couple in their 70s from Simcoe, Ont., pulled their car over near the protest site. Police allege that native demonstrators surrounded the couple and stole their car. The man was taken to hospital when he experienced chest pains. The second incident occurred when two news-camera operators from Hamilton's CH television approached the couple in front of a Canadian Tire store in Caledonia for an interview.

Police allege that native protesters attacked the two camera operators in front of the store, took their camera, removed the videocassette and returned the camera. One operator is taken to hospital with cuts and bruises, requiring stitches to close a head would. One of the camera operators would later launch an official complaint against the OPP, alleging police officers did nothing to stop him from being assaulted. In the third incident, police allege that native protesters swarmed an unmarked U.S. Border Patrol vehicle, forcibly removed the officers inside and drove the stolen vehicle toward an OPP officer. Sometime during this incident, internal provincial police documents containing classified information — including identities of undercover officers and information from confidential informants — are taken from the vehicle. Three people are arrested on charges of breaching the peace and police say they are seeking seven other people on charges of attempted murder, robbery, theft of a motor vehicle, intimidation and assault causing bodily harm.

June 4, 2006
Two Ontario Provincial Police officers who were new to the Caledonia protest drive into an area that police agreed not to enter. Their cruiser is surrounded by aboriginal protesters and area residents. The crowd disperses hours later.

June 1, 2006
Superior Court Justice David Marshall says he will compel Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice and Attorney General Vic Toews to become involved in the land claim dispute. Prentice releases a statement saying Ottawa would "co-operate fully with the courts."

May 29, 2006
Ontario Superior Court Justice David Marshall orders parties involved in the Caledonia standoff — including the provincial police, the attorney general of Ontario, First Nations leaders and developers — to a special court session to explain why his initial court order for aboriginal protesters to be evicted from the site, issued in April 2006, was not enforced.

May 24, 2006
Power is restored to most parts of Caledonia at about 6 a.m. EDT. A Hydro One spokesman says fewer than 200 customers are still without power.

May 23, 2006
Hydro One spokeswoman Laura Cooke says it will likely be days before electricity can be fully restored after vandalism and fire shut down a local power transformer. School boards serving Caledonia, Simcoe and Waterdown close 17 schools because of the ongoing power disruption. Later Tuesday morning, Six Nations protestors begin to dismantle the roadblock and two demonstrators – an aboriginal and a non-native – tell police and non-native protestors that the native barricade would come down and the road would be reopened. Ontario Provincial Police clear demonstrators, reporters and onlookers off of Highway 6 around 2 p.m. EDT. Native demonstrators fill in a trench dug across the road a day earlier, and the largest piece of the barricade, a piece of a metal electrical transmission tower, is moved from the road to the entrance to the construction site. The removal of the blockade doesn't mean the end of the occupation of the disputed tract of land. Two other aboriginal barricades on a highway bypass outside Caledonia remain in place.

May 22, 2006
Native protestors take down their blockade around 8 a.m. EDT, calling it a gesture of goodwill after the government of Ontario bans construction on the site. A spokeswoman for the Ontario Provincial Police says Highway 6 must undergo a safety inspection before it can be reopened. Around noon, non-native residents form a human barricade across Highway 6, preventing Six Nations members from passing through. Soon, aboriginal protestors re-establish their blockade using an electrical transmission tower, and use two large backhoes to tear a trench across the road. Native and non-native demonstrators trade punches and insults. A van driven by a Six Nations protester tries to force its way through the locals, prompting a fistfight. Each side accuses the other of using racial slurs. Dozens of Ontario Provincial Police officers form a buffer between the two sides.

Provincial negotiator David Peterson arrives at the scene around 4:30 p.m. and appeals for calm. Vandals shut down a transformer station in Caledonia, cutting power to thousands of residents in surrounding Norfolk and Haldimand counties.
In the evening, the Emergency Response Team of the OPP arrives in riot gear to shore up the police barrier between the native and non-native protestors.

May 21, 2006
Six Nations spokeswoman Janie Jamieson says plans to take down the native blockade across Highway 6 for the Victoria Day weekend are on hold because of a parallel blockade set up by non-native residents of Caledonia.

May 19, 2006
The government of Ontario sends a letter to the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Confederacy Council, declaring an indefinite moratorium on construction at the site of the native protest. A lawyer for developer Henco Industries says the company was not consulted about the construction ban.
A small group of non-native residents of Caledonia set up their own blockade across Highway 6, preventing members of the Six Nations from getting to the native blockade.

May 16, 2006
Native protesters take down part of the barrier, allowing local traffic on one lane of Highway 6. They make ID cards for people who live behind the barrier.

In the afternoon, an accident closes the detour road around the barricade. Protesters allow all traffic to pass through the barrier for a few hours, stopping each vehicle, but not checking for ID.

May 5, 2006
Developer Henco Industries says it has been offered the return of corporate records looted from its offices on the site of the native protest if it pays for them.

May 4, 2006
The Ontario Provincial Police says a pamphlet being handed out around Caledonia inviting people to a Ku Klux Klan meeting to discuss a "final solution" to the "Indian problem" is a hoax.

April 30, 2006
Former Ontario premier David Peterson is appointed to help resolve the standoff. "It's not a question of counting blame or finding fault, it's a question of finding a solution," he says at a news conference.

April 29, 2006
The Canadian Press reports that the Ontario government has offered compensation to the land developers and builders affected by the Caledonia occupation. The details of the proposed deal are confidential.

April 28, 2006
About 500 Caledonia residents gather to demand the removal of the native blockade.

April 25, 2006
Haldimand County Mayor Marie Trainer infuriates protesters when she tells CBC Newsworld that Caledonia residents "have to get to work to support their families. If they don't go to work, they don't get paid and if they don't get paid then they can't pay their mortgages and they lose their homes. "They don't have money coming in automatically every month," she continues. "They've got to work to survive and the natives have got to realize that." After Trainer makes the comments, Haldimand County Council votes to replace her with deputy mayor Bob Patterson as its spokesperson on the issue.

April 24, 2006
About 3,000 Caledonia residents hold a rally in the evening, calling on authorities to end the standoff. Later that night, about 500 residents confront police and native protesters at the blockade.
Some in the crowd head toward the barricade, but about 100 police officers keep them away. Some of the demonstrators smash a police vehicle. One person is arrested.

April 23, 2006
CBC News reports that the barricades around the Caledonia construction site will remain in place for at least two more weeks.Protesters allow local residents to cross the barricades to attend services at Caledonia Baptist Church.

April 22, 2006
After 18 hours of talks, representatives from the Six Nations and the federal and Ontario governments sign an agreement to talk about setting the land claim issues behind the Caledonia occupation. Within two weeks, the three parties will each appoint a "principal representative" to negotiate.Protesters and OPP and RCMP officers remain in place around the barricades.

April 21, 2006
Overnight, about 50 protesters from the Tyendinaga Mohawk reserve light bonfires beside the CN tracks on their territory in eastern Ontario, near Belleville. CN freight trains are blocked and Via Rail announces that trains from Toronto to Kingston will be replaced with shuttle buses. Friday morning, negotiators for the Six Nations and the federal and Ontario governments begin talks to settle the land claim issues behind the Caledonia occupation. Sam George, whose brother Dudley was killed by an OPP sniper during a stand-off at Ipperwash Provincial Park, calls for calm and urges authorities to treat the protesters fairly. In the afternoon, CN announces it has obtained an injunction from an Ontario court ordering protesters to remove the blockage from its rail lines.

April 20, 2006
Around 4:30 a.m. EDT, Ontario Provincial Police officers conduct a raid on the protesters occupying the housing project, arresting 16 people. Protesters say police were armed with M16 rifles, tear gas, pepper spray and Tasers, and subdued a number of people with shocks from the Tasers and pepper-spray. A spokeswoman for the protesters said one female protester was "beaten by five OPP officers." OPP would later deny that excessive force was used.

Hours later, protesters return to the site numbering in the hundreds by 9 a.m. Protesters use piles of burning tires and a dump truck to block the road into the development. They climb on vehicles and wave Mohawk flags. Police helicopters roared overhead. Police hold a news conference and say they conducted the raid because an "escalation of activity" posed a risk to public safety, but didn't provide any further details. A group of Quebec Mohawks raise a banner and Mohawk flags on a bridge near Montreal in support of the occupation in Caledonia. The demonstration disrupts traffic for about a half hour. As the night falls, a busload of supporters from other Ontario reserves arrives on the site. Four members of the Hells Angels arrive and speak with native protesters.

April 19, 2006
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty says the land dispute will be settled in a "peaceful manner."

April 4, 2006
A rally of 500 people, including people who bought homes in the development, gathers in Caledonia to demand an end to the stand off.

March 28, 2006
The court order is changed such that protesters will face criminal contempt as well as civil contempt if they don't leave the site.

March 22, 2006
Native protesters continue their occupation of the Caledonia construction site as the court-imposed deadline passes.

March 17, 2006
Protesters are given until March 22 to leave the construction site.

March 10, 2006
Developer Henco Industries obtains an injunction ordering protesters off the site.

Feb. 28, 2006
A small group of Six Nations protesters from the Grand River Territory reserve move onto the Caledonia construction site, erecting tents, a teepee and a wooden building.

Oct. 26, 2005
Six Nations Chief David General writes to Henco Industries, warning of the dangers of developing the Douglas Creek Estates subdivision on native land.

2006-07-29T19:50:00.000-07:00

Anna Mae Aquash

(excerpt)From Wikipedia

[Anna Mae Aquash was born in a small Native village near Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, Canada, March 27, 1945. Anna Mae was a Mi'kmaq warrior who became one of the most active and prominent womem members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) during the early 1970s. She was found murdered in 1976 on the Pine Ridge Reservation, about 10 miles from Wanblee, South Dakota, and became a martyr for indigenous human rights.]

Activism
In Bar Harbor, Maine, Aquash became involved in the Teaching and Research in Bicultural Education School Project (TRIBES), a program designed to teach young Indians about their history. She soon moved to Boston where she met members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) who were protesting against the Mayflower II celebration at Boston Harbor, boarding and seizing the ship on Thanksgiving Day of 1970. Anna Mae was active in creating the Boston Indian Council (now the North American Indian Center of Boston).

It was also at that time that she met her second husband, Nogeeshik Aquash, from Walpole Island, Canada. They traveled to Pine Ridge together in 1973 to join AIM in the siege of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, which is where they were married by Wallace Black Elk. A photo of their marriage can be found in the book Voices From Wounded Knee (1974).

She was also involved in the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties march on Washington, D.C. and worked until her death for the Elders and People of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota. Although she was accused of "working for the Feds" during an AIM convention in Farmington, New Mexico the summer of 1975, many in AIM realized this was not true. On orders from above, AIM members Leonard Peltier, Dino Butler, and Robert Robideau confronted her at that convention and, according to Robideau, "...the three of us walked away satisfied she was not an agent. She later became a member of our group."

Often approached by members of the FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and asked to assist their efforts to destroy AIM (as was common in that era, i.e. Black Panthers, SDS, etc), Anna Mae always refused to cooperate. Still, FBI agents and collaborators spread rumors about her, and her death may have been a consequence of the paranoia instilled in many during that turbulent era by COINTELPRO.

Murder
On February 24, 1976, Aquash was found dead by the side of State Road 73 on the far northeast corner of the Pine Ridge Reservation, about 10 miles from Wanblee, South Dakota, close to Kadoka. Her body was found during an unusually warm spell in late February, 1976 by a rancher, Roger Amiotte. The first autopsy (reports are now public information) states: "it appears she had been dead for about 10 days." The Bureau of Indian Affairs' medical practitioner, W. O. Brown, missing the bullet wound on her skull, stated that "she had died of exposure." ("The Life and Death of Anna Mae Aquash by Johanna Brand.)

Subsequently, her hands were cut off and sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Washington, D.C. for fingerprinting. Although federal agents were present who knew Anna Mae, she was not identified, and her body was buried as a Jane Doe.

On March 10, 1976, eight days after Anna Mae's burial, her body was exhumed as the result of separate requests made by her family and AIM supporters, and the FBI. A second autopsy was conducted the following day by an independent pathologist from Minneapolis, Dr. Garry Peterson. This autopsy revealed that she had been shot by a .32 caliber bullet in the back of the head, execution style.

Who killed Anna Mae?
On March 20, 2003 two men were indicted for the murder of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash: Fritz Arlo Looking Cloud, a homeless Lakota man, and John Graham (aka John Boy Patton), a Southern Tutchone Athabascan man from Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. Although Theda Clark, Graham's adopted aunt, seems also to have been involved, she was not indicted.

On February 8, 2004 Arlo Looking Cloud was tried before a U.S. federal jury and five days later was found guilty. On April 23, 2004 he was given a mandatory sentence of life in prison. Although no physical evidence linking Looking Cloud to the crime was presented, a videotape was shown in which Looking Cloud admits to being at the scene of the murder but claims that he was unaware that Aquash was going to be killed. In that video, in which Looking Cloud is interviewed by Detective Abe Alonzo of the Denver Police Department and Robert Ecoffey, the Director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Office of Law Enforcement Services, taped on March 27, 2003, he states that Graham was the triggerman. Looking Cloud is appealing his conviction.

John Graham is currently living in Vancouver, British Columbia. On June 22, 2006 his extradition to the United States to face charges on his alleged involvement in the murder was ordered by Canada's Minister of Justice, Vic Toews. Graham is appealing this order and is presently free on bail, with conditions.

CSI Vancouver: John Graham

By Lyn Highway
(excerpt)From Redwire Magazine
2005

In the case of Anna Mae Aquash, Brown initially cited her cause of death as 'exposure' from passing out drunk in the freezing cold. Even though she had an obvious bullet wound in her head. Doctors and nurses reported that they saw blood coming out of her head. He cut off both of her hands at the wrist and turned them over to an FBI agent and --among other autopsy procedures-- opened her skull and removed her brain, Her hands were sent to FBI headquarters in Washington DC for 'identifiaction.' This was despite the efforts of Gladys Bissonette (who knew Aquash) to view the body and identify it. Anna Mae was well known on the rez and could have been easily identified by simply looking at her face. This includes FBI agent David Price, who knew Aquash. Price had interrogated her on more than one occasion and just 6 months previously had recognized her from a distance at the Crow Dog's Paradise.

She was buried as a Jane Doe -without a burial certificate or burial permit. It wasn't until the day after she was buried that her hands were sent for finger print analysis. And then the FBI revealed her identity as Anna Mae Aquash. Aquash's family was told that she had died from drunkenness and exposure. They became suspicious because she did not drink. They demanded her body be exhumed and a second autopsy commenced.

The second coroner noticed a discoloured area near her temple, ran his hand over it and found an object x-rays revealed to be a bullet. W.O. Brown --even after examining her skull and brain, had somehow missed the bullet-hole wound and bullet. The bullet had been fired at point blank range from a .38 handgun into the back of her head. A weapon has never been found (In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse).

Anybody who watches CSI (a popular T.V. show about crime scene investigation) can immediately see many problems in the trail of evidence.

Her brain being removed, her body being buried and exhumed many times. Most obviously her hands being removed, and presumably preserved for transportation, would destroy any DNA material under her fingernails that would have resulted from scratching the killer during a struggle. But there doesn't seem to have been any struggle.

Why would a tested warrior, who had participated in many of AIM's armed actions, was comfortable using a gun, and also knew martial arts simply walk to her death and allow someone to shoot her in the back of the head?

There is a rumor circulating that that's exactly what happened: "she was taken by car to an isolated field; knelt down on her knees; asked to say a prayer for her daughters and was refused, than shot at point blank range in the back of the head; and her body kicked over an embankment, where it was found by a rancher walking his fence."

Where does this story come from? Or more importantly, what is the purpose of circulating this story? What this story does is attempt to plant a vivid image in our memories. And like many stories, it becomes true in our minds regardless of whether it has any basis in reality or not. It tugs at our emotions and leaves us vulnerable to believing false evidence.

The FBI, and sadly, Anna Mae's own daughters, one of whom is an RCMP officer, want us to believe that it was members of AIM who pulled the trigger. Specifically, they want us to believe that it was John Graham who killed Anna Mae. In their story, (and at this point it is objectively nothing but a fiction) Arlo Looking Cloud drove Graham and Aquash out to the isolated field, and sat in the car while Graham walked Anna Mae out of sight and shot her. Meanwhile, the facts build a different picture of the circumstances around Aquash's death. One that shows A.I.M. defenseless aginst the FBI's unrelenting and totally unscrupulous attacks.

Douglas Durham was the national head of security for AIM. It can be assumed he knew everything there was know about the organization, its members, their whereabouts and activities. It had been suspected that he was a spy for a few months before court documents proved that he was in fact a state agent and spy. Aquash was instrumental in the attempts to reveal him as an agent. He was allowed to leave the organization un-molested. He wasn't even given a beating for his treachery and deceit. FBI attempts to create suspision that Aquash was a spy were in vain: she continued to be one of the most trusted members of AIM.

Much of the accusations towards members of AIM are based on the leadership's character flaws, and not on actual evidence of murderous activity. Proponents of the AIM-killed-Anna-Mae-Aquash- theory revile the likes of Dennis Banks because he, and other AIM big-wigs, were not particularly wholesome characters. But being a womanizing, arrogant, self-inflated egoist is not a crime, nor by any extension does it make them murderers.

I will pose a scenario based on the actual MO (modus operandi, or method of acting) of the FBI and its COINTELPRO operations:

On Dec 4, 1969, Fred Hampton was the head of the Chicago Black Panthers. An informant provided the police with a map of Hampton's home. Hampton was drugged by an infiltrator. Heavily armed police raided his home, killing Hampton, one other and injuring many. Hampton was asleep when police riddled him with bullets in his own bed.

Perhaps Anna Mae was drugged, and that's how the killer managed to shoot her in the back of the head without a struggle. Perhaps she wasn't killed in the field near Wanblee at all. Perhaps she was drugged, or simply asleep, shot at one location and her body dumped in the field, near the fence where the killers knew she would eventually be found, but after a long enough time for any evidence to deteriorate.

Where is the evidence from the scene of the crime? I don't imagine, if any was gathered, that it would hold much integrity, considering the FBI report states that Aquash's body was found in September of 1976, when it was actually found in February, 1976. Wouldn't there have been blood, footprints, tire tracks, gun powder traces… Sure, crime scene technology wasn't as advanced in 1976 as it is today, but shouldn't there have been some shred of evidence pointing at someone? Even if there was, W.O. Brown made sure it would never be found. Drunken indian deaths were a common occurrence in South Dakota and merited little, if any attention from government authorities. Why, in this particular instance, did FBI agents attend to the scene? These specially trained agents surely could have found something? Or were they there precisely to ensure that nothing was found?

The FBI made it a point to brazenly leave the bodies of those it killed right out in the open and then use state apparatus to bold face lie about the circumstances of the deaths. This is a method of intimidation: "we'll kill you, and we'll get away with it, and there's nothing you can do about it." It leads to intensive fear and demoralization -its called terrorism. And Aquash was a target. At the time of her death she was on the run, and in hiding from a government who had pursued her and threatened to kill her.

But even pointing to the FBI as responsible for Aquash's death is speculation. Anna Mae could have been killed by anyone. Sure, its likely she was killed by the FBI, her murder fits their M.O. But really, it could have been anyone. Plenty of people had motives. Kamook Banks could have had a murderous jealously because Anna Mae had had a long term affair with Dennis Banks. Anna Mae's ex husband could have seen a convenience in her death because of their custody battle over their two daughters. A random psycho killer could have been passing through the area… All of these speculations are just as unfounded as the accusations against Graham and Looking Cloud.

***

Anna Mae Aquash's death fell into obscurity, like the 66 other deaths during the Reign of Terror on the Pine Ridge Rez. And was left in the unsolved mysteries category of hundreds, thousands and millions of native people who have died as a direct result of colonization for the past 500 years.

30 years later, the US government decides to rekindle the case of Anna Mae Aquash. And decry how much it cares about the plight of this brave Native activist. This despite Leonard Peltier's continued imprisonment. And documented evidence that he was framed by the FBI using false evidence and through manipulating court proceedings. Suddenly the US/Canadian governments care about one dead indian, despite the refusal of US authorities to answer to the demands for investigations of the over 65 other native people killed at Pine Ridge during the same period Anna Mae Aquash was killed.

Despite the US and Canadian police continuing to kill native people with not so much as a slap on the wrist from government or police authorities. And despite colonial Governments' continued, and heightened attacks on native peoples and the criminalization of our movements under new anti-terrorism legislation.

Arlo Looking Cloud:
Arlo Looking Cloud was tried for aiding and abetting the murder of Anna Mae Aquash. He pled not guilty. In February of 2004, he was convicted and sentenced to life. His lawyer was a complete quack and the only witness he called in Arlo's defense was David Price -the agent who Anna-Mae was running from. Looking Cloud had been an alcoholic living on the streets when he was arrested. FBI agents had visited him many times in previous years, plying him with drugs and alcohol. He confessed to being at the scene of Anna Mae's murder outside of Wanblee. This confession is the only item even vaguely resembling evidence in the case against Graham. His confession was made under heavy interrogation, and also while he was under the influence of drugs and alcohol. He recanted his confession and pled not guilty to the charges. He was convicted and sentenced to life.

Why would he confess if he didn't do it? There is well documented research on the questionable value of confessions, and the ease with which false confessions can be generated. People will tend to say anything to get out of the police station. A person may even come to believe, after a certain degree of interrogation and torment, that he/she is guilty -even if what he/she is admitting too is outlandishly untrue. He/she may even fabricate further evidence to implicate his/herself. For example, look at the Peltier case, where Myrtle PoorBear submitted an affidavit that she was Peltier's girlfriend, when in fact, it was revealed later that she didn't even know him.

The US government does not care about Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash. It does not care about A.I.M. or the problems in the movement. It doesn't care about Anna-Mae's daughters or her family. All it cares about it preserving and protecting itself, and crushing its enemies. Anna Mae Aquash was an enemy of the Colonial State, both the U.S. and Canada. She believed in and fought for the sovereignty of her people, and as a warrior was willing to sacrifice everything, including her own life for the liberation of indigenous people. To turn now to our enemies and ask them for justice and resolution is an insult to all of the warriors who gave their lives fighting the settler invaders.

The colonial governments are incapable of providing 'justice' for native people. This can be seen clearly in how they initially dealt with Aquash's death -with callous disregard for native life, with gross incompetence, and with transparent malice.

***

Prophecies around Wounded Knee believed that the ghost dancers would breathe new life into the indigenous resistance. In December of 1890, those ghost dancers who were shot down left a legacy that, in 1973, was revived by Lakota traditionals and A.I.M. warriors. And the indigenous resistance did take on a new life that exists today. Wounded Knee, and the uprisings at Oglala shape strong foundations for those of us continuing the fight against colonization.

What the US government is doing with the Graham/Looking Cloud case is a waft of poison to our memories. It pollutes the efforts of Anna Mae Aquash. Her participation in Wounded Knee, and in A.I.M., is part of our proud history of resistance. And the FBI and the US/Canadian governments are trying to take that away from us.

If we don't fight against Graham's extradition, and provide Arlo Looking Cloud with the same support as Leonard Peltier, or any prisoner of war, than we are losing yet another battle in the liberation of our people. And in the preservation of decolonized space in our own hearts and minds.

2006-07-26T01:11:00.000-07:00

tEchNiQuE TuEsdaY
[Fun With Street Art]

From CreativeCollage

I have had so much fun integrating the artistic characteristics of Urban Street Art into my own art these past few weeks. I have come to respect Street Art as a dynamic form of artistic expression, many times representative of the socio-economic and political life where it is found...this genre of art can't help but make a statement! Street Artists, or "writers", make their bold artistic statements with vibrant colors and expressive images. Many of these images are either adhered ("wheat pasted") or they are stenciled onto surfaces and integrated into layers of colors.

Custom made stencils are a huge part of the Urban Street Art process; most are created from photographic images or from hand-drawn designs. There are a number of websites that feature downloadable stencil images; one of the best I've found is Stencilry. I downloaded a very simple stencil from Stencilry to demonstrate this week's technique. The city skyline (see below) is a great stencil to work with because it can be cut with scissors if you're not comfortable using with a craft knife and it doesn't take alot of time to prepare.

Before showing the steps for this technique, I'm going to demonstrate something that I haven't shown before...my practice samples. I photographed my three practice samples so you could see that i don't just talk the talk, i walk the walk! This is one technique in which I really encourage you to practice before trying on your layout; it will only take you a few minutes using whatever stencil you'd like to use and a few scrap pieces of cardstock.

1st practice...with stencil in place
Notice that the heaviest part of the spray paint is at the top of the design...I started spraying above the cutting edge of the design because I wanted the paint to be the heaviest there and then i slowly moved the paint can down and lifted it away from the cardstock so the spray would become less concentrated and give me the fade i was hoping for.

1st practice...pretty good for a first try; i achieved the fade I wanted, but i'd like the top of the buildings to be darker. I do like the dark spray spots that I got by holding the can a little close and putting only light pressure on the nozzle.
2nd practice...i kept the can a little closer to the cardstock and held it over the top area of the stencil just a few seconds longer which resulted in the darker coverage at the top of the buildings but I still want more coverage at the top of the buildings so I'm going to try it again and keep the can over that area a little longer. Also, I didn't get as many dark spray spots as i would have liked to so I will make sure to hold the can closer when applying light pressure.
3rd practice...PERFECT! The buildings are darker and I've got more of a contrast in the fade...I also played around with applying slight pressure on the nozzle to get more spray spots! Now I can spray onto my collaged background with confidence....and all it took was 5 minutes!

supplies:
cardstock
images (see stencil source above)
spray adhesive
spray paint (Krylon)

step #1. & step #2

step #1. Size and print stencil design onto cardstock
step #2. Cut stencil with craft knife

step #3. & step #4

step #3. Lightly spray back of stencil with adhesive and place over background
step #4. PAINT! I used spray paint here because I wanted to create a spray-paint fade with spotting...but you can use a sponge and acrylic paint or inks depending upon the look you want to achieve.

What I like about this technique is that there is room for imperfection...meaning that it doesn't have to be executed perfectly for it to look good. The lines don't have to be cut perfectly straight and the paint doesn't have to be perfectly applied for it to look good. I call these kinds of techniques in my book, "Perfectly Imperfect" because I like having the freedom to not feel like I have to do "perfect" all the time. And when I am unable to give myself the room to not do "perfect", these techniques encourage me to just let go and have fun...

hints:
- protect your surfaces from spray paint buy painting over a pile of tissue paper; I use it instead of newspaper because it's cheap, i can remove the top layer and throw it away, and i don't get newsprint on my hands which can easily smudge onto my artwork!
- notice how I combined the the techniques learned over the past two Technique Tuesdays (spray paint & high contrast images) with this week's technique...have fun and make it your own!!!

I will be posting more about custom-made stencils tomorrow, along with some great resources I've found on my art blog, The Crafty-Girl...

2006-07-25T15:57:00.000-07:00

Revolutionary Ecology

Biocentrism & Deep Ecology (excerpt)
By Judi Bari
From Thr@ll

I was a social justice activist for many years before I ever heard of Earth First!. So it came as a surprise to me, when I joined Earth First! in the 1980s, to find that the radical environmental movement paid little attention to the social causes of ecological destruction. Similarly, the urban-based social justice movement seems to have a hard time admitting the importance of biological issues, often dismissing all but "environmental racism" as trivial. Yet in order to effectively respond to the crises of today, I believe we must merge these two issues.

Starting from the very reasonable, but unfortunately revolutionary concept that social practices which threaten the continuation of life on Earth must be changed, we need a theory of revolutionary ecology that will encompass social and biological issues, class struggle, and a recognition of the role of global corporate capitalism in the oppression of peoples and the destruction of nature.

I believe we already have such a theory. It's called deep ecology, and it is the core belief of the radical environmental movement. The problem is that, in the early stages of this debate, deep ecology was falsely associated with such right wing notions as sealing the borders, applauding AIDS as a population control mechanism, and encouraging Ethiopians to starve. This sent the social ecologists justifiably scurrying to disassociate. And I believe it has muddied the waters of our movement's attempt to define itself behind a common philosophy.

So in this article, I will try to explain, from my perspective as an unabashed leftist, why I think deep ecology is a revolutionary world view. I am not trying to proclaim that my ideas are Absolute Truth, or even that they represent a finished thought process in my own mind. These are just some ideas I have on the subject, and I hope that by airing them, it will spark more debate and advance the discussion.

Biocentrism
Deep ecology, or biocentrism, is the belief that nature does not exist to serve humans. Rather, humans are part of nature, one species among many. All species have a right to exist for their own sake, regardless of their usefulness to humans. And biodiversity is a value in itself, essential for the flourishing of both human and nonhuman life.

These principles, I believe, are not just another political theory. Biocentrism is a law of nature, that exists independently of whether humans recognize it or not. It doesn't matter whether we view the world in a human centered way. Nature still operates in a biocentric way. And the failure of modern society to acknowledge this - as we attempt to subordinate all of nature to human use - has led us to the brink of collapse of the earth's life support systems.

Biocentrism is not a new theory, and it wasn't invented by Dave Foreman or Arnie Naas. It is ancient native wisdom, expressed in such sayings as "The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth." But in the context of today's industrial society, biocentrism is profoundly revolutionary, challenging the system to its core.

Biocentrism Contradicts Capitalism
The capitalist system is in direct conflict with the natural laws of biocentrism. Capitalism, first of all, is based on the principle of private property - of certain humans owning the earth for the purpose of exploiting it for profit. At an earlier stage, capitalists even believed they could own other humans. But just as slavery has been discredited in the mores of today's dominant world view, so do the principles of biocentrism discredit the concept that humans can own the earth.

How can corporate raider Charles Hurwitz claim to "own" the 2,000-year-old redwoods of Headwaters Forest, just because he signed a few papers to trade them for a junk bond debt? This concept is absurd. Hurwitz is a mere blip in the life of these ancient trees. Although he may have the power to destroy them, he does not have the right.

One of the best weapons of U.S. environmentalists in our battle to save places like Headwaters Forest is the (now itself endangered) Endangered Species Act. This law and other laws that recognize public trust values such as clean air. clean water, and protection of threatened species, are essentially an admission that the laws of private property do not correspond to the laws of nature. You cannot do whatever you want on your own property without affecting surrounding areas, because the earth is interconnected, and nature does not recognize human boundaries.

Even beyond private property, though, capitalism conflicts with biocentrism around the very concept of profit. Profit consists of taking out more than you put in. This is certainly contrary to the fertility cycles of nature, which depend on a balance of give and take. But more important is the question of where this profit is taken from.

According to Marxist theory, profit is stolen from the workers when the capitalists pay them less than the value of what they produce. The portion of the value of the product that the capitalist keeps, rather than pays to the workers, is called surplus value. The amount of surplus value that the capitalist can keep varies with the level of organization of the workers, and with their level of privilege within the world labor pool. But the working class can never be paid the full value of their labor under capitalism, because the capitalist class exists by extracting surplus value from the products of their labor.

Although I basically agree with this analysis, I think there is one big thing missing. I believe that part of the value of a product comes not just from the labor put into it, but also from the natural resources used to make the product. And I believe that surplus value (i.e., profit) is not just stolen from the workers, but also from the earth itself. A clearcut is the perfect example of a part of the earth from which surplus value has been extracted. If human production and consumption is done within the natural limits of the earth's fertility, then the supply is indeed endless. But this cannot happen under capitalism, because the capitalist class exists by extracting profit not only from the workers, but also from the earth.

2006-07-25T15:27:00.000-07:00

Brief History of the Judi Bari Bombing Case

From judibari.org

Judi was a renowned environmental, labor and social justice leader. She organized nonviolent protests against destructive corporate logging of the redwood forests. She died of breast cancer on March 2, 1997

Judi Bari was nearly killed in a still-unsolved terrorist attack on May 24, 1990, when a motion-triggered pipe bomb wrapped with nails exploded directly under her driver's seat. She and Darryl Cherney were driving through Oakland, California when the bomb exploded. They were on a concert and speaking tour to recruit college students for Redwood Summer, a campaign of nonviolent mass protests against corporate liquidation logging.

Judi was maimed and disabled by the bombing, while Darryl received lesser injuries. In the previous two months, both had received numerous death threats from timber industry supporters and had reported them to local police. They had copies of written death threats in the car, where investigators found them. Right away, Judi and Darryl told paramedics and police officers that they had been bombed because of their activism against the timber industry, and both of them separately named the same individuals and a right-wing group that they believed were behind the bombing.

But instead of investigating the bombing as attempted murder, as the evidence clearly showed, the FBI, with the willing collaboration of the Oakland Police, tried to frame Judi and Darryl for the bombing, further victimizing them by false arrest and accusing them of knowingly transporting the bomb that nearly killed them.

It was a deliberate, politically motivated effort to target and "neutralize" Judi, Darryl and Earth First!, and to discourage people from traveling from all over the nation to join in Redwood Summer. The sensational false charges made headlines nationwide, and the FBI and their Oakland Police accomplices kept a two-month media smear campaign going with a series of false claims about physical evidence linking Judi to building the bomb.

But after delaying arraignment for seven weeks, when it was finally time for the District Attorney to present evidence in court and file formal charges, the FBI and Oakland Police didn't actually have any. The D.A. announced he would not file charges, citing the lack of evidence. The Oakland Police closed their "investigation," but the FBI continued theirs, telling the media that Judi and Darryl were their only suspects.

The FBI then used the pretext of investigating the bombing as cover for a nationwide investigation of Earth First!, sending agents to create dossiers on over 500 people whose only crime was to have received a long-distance phone call from Judi, Darryl, or one of 14 other people associated with them.

A year after the bombing, when it was clear that the FBI and OPD were making no genuine effort to solve the bombing, Judi and Darryl filed a federal civil rights suit against the FBI and OPD. The suit claims false arrest and unlawful search in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It also claims a politically-motivated conspiracy in violation of the First Amendment which attempted to suppress and chill their free speech by discrediting them in public perception as violent extremists.

“This case is not just about me or Darryl or Earth First!,” Judi said. “This case is about the rights of all political activists to engage in dissent without having to fear the government's secret police.”

Fully 12 years after the event the bomber or bombers are still free because, as overwhelming evidence has shown at trial, instead of mounting a genuine investigation of the bombing, the FBI and OPD:

falsified, fabricated and manipulated evidence,

perjured themselves under oath to get search warrants and high bail,

conducted a sustained media smear campaign to fool the public,

blamed the victims despite clear evidence of their innocence,

conspired to frame and demonize Judi Bari and Earth First! for political reasons,

spied on nonviolent environmentalists in a phony investigation of the bombing,

failed to investigate fingerprints and other evidence pointing to the real bombers,

and covered up their own wrongdoing and obstruction of justice.

To this day the FBI has never retracted the false charges or apologized. The FBI's sustained propaganda campaign against Judi, Darryl and Earth First! succeeded in fooling some people into believing they were bomb-using extremists.

The lawsuit was delayed from coming to trial for nearly 11 years by defense motions and appeals intended to wear the plaintiffs down and prevent the case from ever coming to trial. They gained an immense advantage when Judi died in 1997, but Judi's estate, Darryl Cherney, their legal team and supporters have have kept the suit alive and have cleared every hurdle and won every appeal. The courts ruled several times prior to trial that there is substantial evidence to support the charges.

The evidence was presented in a jury trial that began on April 8, 2002, and ended June 11, 2002 with a stunning vindication of Judi and Darryl, and a $4.4 million award of damages. A full 80% of the damages were for First Amendment violations, showing that the jury understood that the motivation for the false arrest and illegal searches was to interfere with Judi and Darryl's political activism with Earth First! in defense of the redwoods.

Jury Vindicates Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney!!

From Hip Mama

On June 11, a federal jury returned a stunning verdict in favor of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in their landmark civil rights lawsuit against four FBI agents and three Oakland Police officers.

The jury clearly found that six of the seven FBI and OPD defendants framed Judi and Darryl in an effort to crush Earth First! and chill participation in Redwood Summer. That was evident in the fact that 80% of the $4.4 million total damage award was for violation of their First Amendment rights to speak out and organize politically in defense of the forests.

"The jury exonerated us," said Darryl Cherney. "They found the FBI to be the ones in violation of the law. The American public needs to understand that the FBI can't be trusted. Ten jurors got a good, hard look at the FBI and they didn't like what they saw."

"It's really beyond our wildest dreams," said Darlene Comingore, Judi Bari's friend and executor of her estate who stood in for her as co-plaintiff in this suit. "We hope the FBI and Oakland and all the police forces out there that think they can violate people's rights and get away with it are listening because the people of the state of California and Oakland today said, 'No, you can't. You can't get away with it.'"

Lead attorney Dennis Cunningham said the message he hopes the verdict sends is that: "Ashcroft is doing precisely the wrong thing to abandon the (Levi) guidelines and let the FBI go after dissent with a free hand. It's clear that their intention is not about fighting terrorism, it's about suppressing dissent. That's what the FBI has always been about. Hopefully it will make Congress think twice about giving them a free hand."

2006-07-25T15:20:00.000-07:00

Gary Webb, RIP
No thanks to the L.A. Times

By Marc Cooper
From L.A Weekly/GNN
2004

First the L.A. Times helped kill off Gary Webb’s career. Then, eight years later, after Webb committed suicide this past weekend, the Times decided to give his corpse another kick or two, in a scandalous, self-serving and ultimately shameful obituary. It was the culmination of the long, inglorious saga of a major newspaper dropping the ball journalistically, and then extracting relentless revenge on an out-of-town reporter who embarrassed it.

Webb was the 49-year-old former Pulitzer-winning reporter who in 1996, while working for the San Jose Mercury News, touched off a national debate with a three-part series that linked the CIA-sponsored Nicaraguan Contras to a crack-dealing epidemic in Los Angeles and other American cities.

A cold panic set in at the L.A. Times when Webb’s so-called Dark Alliance story first appeared. Just two years before, the Times had published a long takeout on local crack dealer Rickey Ross and no mention was made of his possible link to and financing by CIA-backed Contras. Now the Times feared it was being scooped in its own backyard by a second-tier Bay Area paper.

The Times mustered an army of 25 reporters, led by Doyle McManus, to take down Webb’s reporting. It was, apparently, more important to the Times to defend its own inadequate reporting on the CIA-drug connection than it was to advance Webb’s important work (a charge consistently denied by the Times). The New York Times and the Washington Post also joined in on the public lynching of Webb. Webb’s own editor, Jerry Ceppos, also helped do him in, with a public mea culpa backing away from his own paper’s stories.

Webb was further undermined by some of his own most fervent supporters. With the help of demagogues like Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a conspiracy-theory hysteria was whipped up that used Webb’s series as "proof" that the CIA was more or less single-handedly responsible for South-Central’s crack plague — a gross distortion of Webb’s work.

But that conspiracy theory played perfectly into the hands of the L.A. Times. When its own three-day series appeared a few months later — attempting to demolish Webb — the Times disproved a number of points that were never made by Webb, primarily that the CIA consciously engaged in a program to spread the use of crack.

The Times’ Washington-based reporter McManus, who spent most of the late ’80s and early ’90s as one of the less-curious fourth-estate stenographers to the Reagan/Bush administrations, relied principally on CIA sources to vindicate the CIA in the anti-Webb series. Citing a "former CIA official" named Vince Cannistraro, McManus wrote that "CIA officials insist they knew nothing" about the Contra-drug dealers named by Webb. Cannistraro, however, was more fit to be a subject of the Times’ investigation than a source. Over the length of the Times’ series it was never mentioned that Cannistraro had actually been in charge of the CIA-Contra operation in the early 1980s, that is, before moving on to help supervise the covert program of CIA-backed Islamic guerrillas in Afghanistan (who themselves were, and continue to be, knee-deep in the heroin trade).

Which brings us back to this week’s obit written by Nita Lelyveld and Steve Hymon. The lead and body of the obit focus on the discrediting of Webb by the L.A. Times and fail to mention his Pulitzer until a dozen paragraphs down in the story.

Long before we learn of Webb’s Pulitzer, won in 1990 for reporting on the Loma Prieta earthquake, Lelyveld and Hymon obediently recite their own paper’s indictment of Webb’s exposé on the CIA-drug connection. They quote the 1996 McManus slam on Webb, saying, ". . . the available evidence, based on an extensive review of court documents and more than 100 interviews in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington and Managua, fails to support any of [Webb’s] allegations."

It’s an astounding and nasty little piece of postmortem butchery on Webb (which never mentions that after his series appeared, Webb was voted the 1996 Journalist of the Year by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists). Absolutely missing from Webb’s obit is that it was his series that directly forced both the CIA and the Justice Department to conduct internal investigations into the scope of any links between the Agency and drug dealers.

Worse, the results of those investigations proved that the core of what Webb alleged was, indeed, true and accurate. When CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz presented the findings of his internal investigation to Congress in 1998 (two years after Webb’s piece and the ensuing Times vindication of the CIA), he revealed for the first time an eye-popping agreement that the CIA had cemented with the Justice Department: Between 1982 and 1995, the CIA was exempted from informing the DOJ if its non-employee agents, paid or unpaid, were dealing drugs. In short, it was the policy of the U.S. government to turn a blind eye to such connections.

The same report by the CIA inspector general, by the way, admitted what we all knew in any case — that those connections did, in fact, exist.

And here’s the low point in this tale: After the CIA inspector general made public the second part of his investigation — the one sparked by Webb — which admitted to some links between the agency and Central American drug dealers, the L.A. Times chose not to publish a single story about the report. (No surprise here. Back in 1989, when a panel led by Senator John Kerry found similar CIA–drug-running links, the Times showed equal disinterest.)

In short, when it came to the Gary Webb series and its allegations, the L.A. Times wound up being more protective of the CIA than the CIA itself.

None of this explains why, in Webb’s obit, Lelyveld and Hymon omit the on-the-record admissions by the CIA of its involvement with drug-connected Contras, an admission owed directly to Webb’s work. Maybe, you say, the Times reporters are lazy and just didn’t look beyond their own paper’s archives. And because the Times didn’t cover those admissions, Lelyveld and Hymon remain (eight years after the fact) in the dark.

No. I fear the answer is worse than that. One of the Times reporters who wrote the obit, we now learn, called veteran reporter Bob Parry the other day for comment on Webb’s death. Back in 1985, Parry and his partner Bob Barger — working for the AP — were the first to break the story of CIA involvement with drug-linked Contras. Says Parry: "The Times reporter who called to interview me ignored my comments about the debt the nation owed Webb and the importance of the CIA’s inspector-general findings. Instead of using Webb’s death as an opportunity to finally get the story straight, the Times acted as if there never had been an official investigation confirming many of Webb’s allegations."

Gary Webb’s work deserved to be taken seriously and to be closely scrutinized precisely because of the scope of his allegations. As more-objective critics than the Times have pointed out, Webb overstated some of his conclusions, he too loosely framed some of his theses, and perhaps (perhaps) overestimated the actual amount of drug funding that fueled the Contra war. And for that he deserved to be criticized.

The core of his work, however, still stands. When much of the rest of the media went to sleep, Gary Webb dug and scratched and courageously took on the most powerful and arrogant and unaccountable agencies of the U.S. government. His tenacious reporting forced those same agencies to investigate themselves and to admit publicly — albeit in watered-down terms — what he had alleged.

Webb’s reward was to be drummed out of the profession. After his editors cowardly recanted his stories (which they had vetted), he was demoted to a suburban bureau. After a year, Webb quit and wrote up his findings into a book. The book was mostly ignored by the press. Webb took up a job as an investigator for the California Legislature and helped spit-roast one Gray Davis. Last year, Webb lost that job and yearned, unsuccessfully for the most part, to get back into journalism. From a conservative Southern California military family, Webb was driven not by an ideological agenda but rather by a sense of fairness and justice. He was found last Friday in his Northern California home after he shot himself to death.

Recently, Webb was interviewed for a book profiling 18 journalists who found themselves discredited or censored. Let his own words be a more fitting epitaph than the hack-job L.A. Times obituary:

"If we had met five years ago, you wouldn’t have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me . . . I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests . . .

"And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job . . . The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress."

Gary Webb, R.I.P

2006-07-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

BUDDHIST ECONOMICS

By E. F. Schumacher

From The E. F. Schumacher Society

"Right Livelihood" is one of the requirements of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. It is clear, therefore, that there must be such a thing as Buddhist economics.

Buddhist countries have often stated that they wish to remain faithful to their heritage. So Burma: “The New Burma sees no conflict between religious values and economic progress. Spiritual health and material well-being are not enemies: they are natural allies.” Or: “We can blend successfully the religious and spiritual values of our heritage with the benefits of modern technology.” Or: “We Burmans have a sacred duty to conform both our dreams and our acts to our faith. This we shall ever do.”

All the same, such countries invariably assume that they can model their economic development plans in accordance with modern economics, and they call upon modern economists from so-called advanced countries to advise them, to formulate the policies to be pursued, and to construct the grand design for development, the Five-Year Plan or whatever it may be called. No one seems to think that a Buddhist way of life would call for Buddhist economics, just as the modern materialist way of life has brought forth modern economics.

Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from "metaphysics" or "values" as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.

There is universal agreement that a fundamental source of wealth is human labour. Now, the modern economist has been brought up to consider "labour" or work as little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it can not be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a "disutility"; to work is to make a sacrifice of one’s leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. Hence the ideal from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal from the point of view of the employee is to have income without employment.

The consequences of these attitudes both in theory and in practice are, of course, extremely far-reaching. If the ideal with regard to work is to get rid of it, every method that "reduces the work load" is a good thing. The most potent method, short of automation, is the so-called "division of labour" and the classical example is the pin factory eulogised in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Here it is not a matter of ordinary specialisation, which mankind has practiced from time immemorial, but of dividing up every complete process of production into minute parts, so that the final product can be produced at great speed without anyone having had to contribute more than a totally insignificant and, in most cases, unskilled movement of his limbs.

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.

From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of mechanisation which must be clearly distinguished: one that enhances a man’s skill and power and one that turns the work of man over to a mechanical slave, leaving man in a position of having to serve the slave. How to tell the one from the other? “The craftsman himself,” says Ananda Coomaraswamy, a man equally competent to talk about the modern West as the ancient East, “can always, if allowed to, draw the delicate distinction between the machine and the tool. The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsmen’s fingers; but the power loom is a machine, and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work.” It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man’s work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products. The Indian philosopher and economist J. C. Kumarappa sums the matter up as follows:

If the nature of the work is properly appreciated and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to the physical body. It nourishes and enlivens the higher man and urges him to produce the best he is capable of. It directs his free will along the proper course and disciplines the animal in him into progressive channels. It furnishes an excellent background for man to display his scale of values and develop his personality.

If a man has no chance of obtaining work he is in a desperate position, not simply because he lacks an income but because he lacks this nourishing and enlivening factor of disciplined work which nothing can replace. A modern economist may engage in highly sophisticated calculations on whether full employment "pays" or whether it might be more "economic" to run an economy at less than full employment so as to insure a greater mobility of labour, a better stability of wages, and so forth. His fundamental criterion of success is simply the total quantity of goods produced during a given period of time. “If the marginal urgency of goods is low,” says Professor Galbraith in The Affluent Society, “then so is the urgency of employing the last man or the last million men in the labour force.” And again: “If . . . we can afford some unemployment in the interest of stability—a proposition, incidentally, of impeccably conservative antecedents—then we can afford to give those who are unemployed the goods that enable them to sustain their accustomed standard of living.”

From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the subhuman, a surrender to the forces of evil. The very start of Buddhist economic planning would be a planning for full employment, and the primary purpose of this would in fact be employment for everyone who needs an "outside" job: it would not be the maximisation of employment nor the maximisation of production. Women, on the whole, do not need an "outside" job, and the large-scale employment of women in offices or factories would be considered a sign of serious economic failure. In particular, to let mothers of young children work in factories while the children run wild would be as uneconomic in the eyes of a Buddhist economist as the employment of a skilled worker as a soldier in the eyes of a modern economist.

While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is "The Middle Way" and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern—amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.

For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used to measuring the "standard of living" by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is "better off" than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. Thus, if the purpose of clothing is a certain amount of temperature comfort and an attractive appearance, the task is to attain this purpose with the smallest possible effort, that is, with the smallest annual destruction of cloth and with the help of designs that involve the smallest possible input of toil. The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. It would be highly uneconomic, for instance, to go in for complicated tailoring, like the modern West, when a much more beautiful effect can be achieved by the skillful draping of uncut material. It would be the height of folly to make material so that it should wear out quickly and the height of barbarity to make anything ugly, shabby, or mean. What has just been said about clothing applies equally to all other human requirements. The ownership and the consumption of goods is a means to an end, and Buddhist economics is the systematic study of how to attain given ends with the minimum means.

Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity, taking the factors of production—and, labour, and capital—as the means. The former, in short, tries to maximise human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of consumption, while the latter tries to maximise consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort. It is easy to see that the effort needed to sustain a way of life which seeks to attain the optimal pattern of consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort needed to sustain a drive for maximum consumption. We need not be surprised, therefore, that the pressure and strain of living is very much less in say, Burma, than it is in the United States, in spite of the fact that the amount of labour-saving machinery used in the former country is only a minute fraction of the amount used in the latter.

Simplicity and non-violence are obviously closely related. The optimal pattern of consumption, producing a high degree of human satisfaction by means of a relatively low rate of consumption, allows people to live without great pressure and strain and to fulfill the primary injunction of Buddhist teaching: “Cease to do evil; try to do good.” As physical resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other’s throats than people depending upon a high rate of use. Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade.

From the point of view of Buddhist economics, therefore, production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life, while dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce for export to unknown and distant peoples is highly uneconomic and justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small scale. Just as the modern economist would admit that a high rate of consumption of transport services between a man’s home and his place of work signifies a misfortune and not a high standard of life, so the Buddhist would hold that to satisfy human wants from faraway sources rather than from sources nearby signifies failure rather than success. The former tends to take statistics showing an increase in the number of ton/miles per head of the population carried by a country’s transport system as proof of economic progress, while to the latter—the Buddhist economist—the same statistics would indicate a highly undesirable deterioration in the pattern of consumption.

Another striking difference between modern economics and Buddhist economics arises over the use of natural resources. Bertrand de Jouvenel, the eminent French political philosopher, has characterised "Western man" in words which may be taken as a fair description of the modern economist:

He tends to count nothing as an expenditure, other than human effort; he does not seem to mind how much mineral matter he wastes and, far worse, how much living matter he destroys. He does not seem to realize at all that human life is a dependent part of an ecosystem of many different forms of life. As the world is ruled from towns where men are cut off from any form of life other than human, the feeling of belonging to an ecosystem is not revived. This results in a harsh and improvident treatment of things upon which we ultimately depend, such as water and trees.

The teaching of the Buddha, on the other hand, enjoins a reverent and non-violent attitude not only to all sentient beings but also, with great emphasis, to trees. Every follower of the Buddha ought to plant a tree every few years and look after it until it is safely established, and the Buddhist economist can demonstrate without difficulty that the universal observation of this rule would result in a high rate of genuine economic development independent of any foreign aid. Much of the economic decay of southeast Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect of trees.

Modern economics does not distinguish between renewable and non-renewable materials, as its very method is to equalise and quantify everything by means of a money price. Thus, taking various alternative fuels, like coal, oil, wood, or water-power: the only difference between them recognised by modern economics is relative cost per equivalent unit. The cheapest is automatically the one to be preferred, as to do otherwise would be irrational and "uneconomic." From a Buddhist point of view, of course, this will not do; the essential difference between non-renewable fuels like coal and oil on the one hand and renewable fuels like wood and water-power on the other cannot be simply overlooked. Non-renewable goods must be used only if they are indispensable, and then only with the greatest care and the most meticulous concern for conservation. To use them heedlessly or extravagantly is an act of violence, and while complete non-violence may not be attainable on this earth, there is nonetheless an ineluctable duty on man to aim at the ideal of non-violence in all he does.

Just as a modern European economist would not consider it a great achievement if all European art treasures were sold to America at attractive prices, so the Buddhist economist would insist that a population basing its economic life on non-renewable fuels is living parasitically, on capital instead of income. Such a way of life could have no permanence and could therefore be justified only as a purely temporary expedient. As the world’s resources of non-renewable fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature which must almost inevitably lead to violence between men.

This fact alone might give food for thought even to those people in Buddhist countries who care nothing for the religious and spiritual values of their heritage and ardently desire to embrace the materialism of modern economics at the fastest possible speed. Before they dismiss Buddhist economics as nothing better than a nostalgic dream, they might wish to consider whether the path of economic development outlined by modern economics is likely to lead them to places where they really want to be. Towards the end of his courageous book The Challenge of Man’s Future, Professor Harrison Brown of the California Institute of Technology gives the following appraisal:

Thus we see that, just as industrial society is fundamentally unstable and subject to reversion to agrarian existence, so within it the conditions which offer individual freedom are unstable in their ability to avoid the conditions which impose rigid organisation and totalitarian control. Indeed, when we examine all the foreseeable difficulties which threaten the survival of industrial civilisation, it is difficult to see how the achievement of stability and the maintenance of individual liberty can be made compatible.

Even if this were dismissed as a long-term view there is the immediate question of whether "modernisation," as currently practised without regard to religious and spiritual values, is actually producing agreeable results. As far as the masses are concerned, the results appear to be disastrous—a collapse of the rural economy, a rising tide of unemployment in town and country, and the growth of a city proletariat without nourishment for either body or soul.

It is in the light of both immediate experience and long term prospects that the study of Buddhist economics could be recommended even to those who believe that economic growth is more important than any spiritual or religious values. For it is not a question of choosing between "modern growth" and "traditional stagnation." It is a question of finding the right path of development, the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility, in short, of finding "Right Livelihood."

2006-07-25T09:50:00.000-07:00

Monitoring Medicare's Murder
Public awakens to assassination of Medicare, but is it too late?
By John F. Conway
From CCPA Monitor

The slow, very public murder of Medicare as a universal, publicly-funded, single-tier health system has been going on for 20 years. The public failed to awaken fully to the murder because the assassins, even as they slowly throttled Medicare, smiled and claimed they were trying to resuscitate it.

Brian Mulroney vowed that Medicare was “a sacred trust” as he planned the murder and took the first steps. Liberal prime ministers and health ministers have declaimed their devotion to Medicare, even as they cut and slashed its funding and refused to enforce the law of the land, The Canada Health Act. Even Roy Romanow, before his recent role as strong defender of Medicare, in his former incarnation as Saskatchewan premier, boasted he was carrying out Tommy Douglas’s second stage of Medicare during his infamous “Health Care Reform,” now recognized as a cover for deep cuts during the 1990s. Stephen Harper wants to quickly finish the job, the only mercy killing he supports, but insists he would resurrect Medicare as a new wonderland of mixed private and public funding. The only truly honest assassin--besides the business lobby and various right- wing think-tanks--is Alberta’s Ralph Klein. He is proud of his role as assassin and laments only that he has not been allowed to finish the job in Alberta.

The public was finally awakened by the June 9th Supreme Court decision in Chaoulli v. Quebec declaring that the prohibition of private health insurance and access to private care under Medicare was a violation of a citizen’s rights under Quebec’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Although affecting only Quebec for now, the same arguments would probably succeed in a challenge under the Canadian Charter before these same judges. In this case, a patient had to wait an unreasonable length of time for orthopaedic surgery. The patient argued that he consequently should have access to a separate, private system. One of the lawyers put it bluntly: “I am arguing for the right of more affluent people to have access to parallel health services.”

There were additional wake-up calls in two recent rulings by the Ontario Health Services Appeal Board directing the government to reimburse two patients for private hip replacement surgery in the U.S. These patients did not obtain prior approval, as required--which is routinely denied except in the most exceptional of cases--but simply went and got the surgery and demanded repayment, appealing the government’s initial refusal.

According to recent polls, the public now views the Medicare crisis as the top political issue, focusing mainly on unacceptable waiting times for cancer and heart treatment, access to CAT scans and MRIs for diagnoses, hip and knee replacements, and eye surgery. Two in three Canadians have no confidence that provincial governments will reduce waiting times as they promised in exchange for the extra $41 billion in federal funding. Almost nine in ten Canadians want Ottawa to impose compulsory standards for waiting times on the provinces as a condition of federal funding. The public is awake and angry, but perhaps it is too late. Today’s crisis has been 20 years in the making.

When the neo-conservative agenda of underfunding and cuts began under Mulroney and accelerated under Chrétien and Martin, critics noted that underfunding health care would inevitably lead to declines in quality, the forced de-listing of many procedures, and lengthening waiting lists. As a result, those with the means would seek speedier health interventions by travelling to the U.S., and there would be a growing clamor among more affluent Canadians for some privatization that would allow those with the means to receive more timely care.

Some critics, me among them, argued this was a deliberate political plan to degrade the public health system to the point where public demands for private options would become politically irresistible. All these things have happened: quality has declined; many services have been de-listed and are now user-pay; and waiting lists for procedures have grown to the point of crisis. Alberta, Quebec, and British Columbia have allowed--indeed, encouraged--the development of private, for-profit surgery clinics, primarily for hip and knee replacements and cataract surgery. While these are clear contraventions of The Canada Health Act, Ottawa has looked the other way because of the incredible pressure for such services, much of which resulted from Ottawa’s own funding cuts.

The neo-conservative dream is to move to a comprehensive two-tiered health system, one publicly-funded and accessible to all, the other topped up by private funding and accessible to those with the means to pay extra to obtain speedier and better quality services. Both systems would bill the public Medicare plan for the basic fee, but the private system would be allowed to add extra user charges. This would give the private for-profit, corporate sector the opportunity to ransack the public health treasury. Neo-conservative proponents argue this would retain Medicare’s essentials while taking some of the pressure off the beleaguered public system and providing people with choices. Health experts, however, warn that this approach will lead to an increasingly underfunded, low-grade public system for lower-income Canadians, while attracting the more competent physicians and other health professionals to the more lucrative private tier.

Private health care has been consistently shown to be more expensive and more risky for patients than publicly-funded care. Furthermore, evidence from both Alberta and Australia has clearly demonstrated that opening up private options has not shortened waiting lists in the public system. And the same research shows that private options degrade the public system by bleeding resources and personnel off into for-profit medicine.

The political problem for advocates of a fully developed two-tier health system has been strong public opposition. While desperate Canadians are reluctantly willing to concede some privatization on the margins (hips, knees, cataracts, MRIs) out of desperation due to the incapacity of the public system to provide timely care, they have resisted the siren call for a comprehensive two-tier system.

The Supreme Court has provided the assassins of Medicare with a trump card. Before the Chaouli ruling, they had to lie and weasel about their true intentions: they were reforming, rebuilding, renewing, repairing Medicare even as they strangled it. Now they can wring their hands and weep: “We have no choice, the Supreme Court has ruled. A two-tier health system is a constitutional right.”

This will be another lie. The remedy to the Supreme Court decision is simple: invocation of the notwithstanding clause (Section 33(1), The Constitution Act, 1982). This clause was inserted in the Constitution at the insistence of the premiers, led by Alan Blakeney, for precisely this scenario: when the Supreme Court stupidly does something clearly contrary to the public interest and the democratic will of the Canadian people. All Ottawa has to do is pass a bill through the House of Commons declaring simply: “Notwithstanding The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, The Canada Health Act shall prevail.” The provinces could follow suit, invoking the clause to exempt all relevant Medicare legislation from The Charter.

Then Ottawa must--and would be free--to impose the law of the land and the will of the people on itself, and on all provincial governments.

(John Conway is a University of Regina political sociologist and the author of The West: The History of a Region in Confederation and Debts to Pay: The Future of Federalism in Quebec.)

2006-07-25T09:26:00.000-07:00

Anarchism
From Wikipedia

Anarchism is the name for both a political philosophy and a loosely organized society, derived from the Greek αναρχία ("without archons" or "without rulers"). Thus "anarchism," in its most general semantic meaning, is the belief that all forms of rulership are undesirable and should be abolished. For many anarchists, this includes not only the state, but other systems which they may consider authoritarian, such as capitalism. The rise of anarchism as a cohesive philosophy in the 19th century, with its notion of freedom as being based upon political, economic, and social equality, was a reaction to the rise of bureaucratic nation state and large-scale industrial capitalism.

Although anarchists are unified in the rejection of the state, they differ about economic arrangements that would prevail in a stateless society. On this issue anarchists differ widely, ranging from advocates of complete common ownership and distribution according to need, to supporters of private property and free market competition.

The word "anarchy", as most anarchists use it, does not imply chaos, nihilism, or anomie, but rather an anti-authoritarian society that is based on voluntary association of free individuals in autonomous communities operating on principles of mutual aid and self-governance.

Origins
Opposition to the state and authority has a long history prior to the formation of anarchism as a movement in its own right. This history includes the Chinese sage Lao Zi (Lao Tzu), the teaching of Jesus, and religious movements in Europe during the Middle Ages and reformation. The political thought of the Enlightenment had a significant influence on anarchism, particularly through Rousseau's arguments for the moral centrality of freedom. Anarchism in America was influenced by Thomas Jefferson.

The word "anarchist" was originally used as a term of abuse. It was adopted as a positive label by self-defined anarchists in the 19th century. William Godwin, in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (2 vols., 1793), was "the first to formulate the political and economical conceptions of anarchism, even though he did not give that name to the ideas developed in his remarkable work." But at this point no anarchist movement yet existed, and the term "anarchiste" was known mainly as an insult hurled by the bourgeois Girondins at more radical elements in the French Revolution.

Anarchism in America
Thomas Jefferson spoke of his respect for a society with no government. "The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them. I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretense of governing, they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe."

Later the influence of the Jeffersonian tradition on the American anarchists was reiterated by Benjamin Tucker, saying that: "The anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian democrats..

In 1849 Henry David Thoreau wrote "I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe--"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which we will have."

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is commonly regarded as the first self-proclaimed anarchist, a label he adopted in his work What is Property?, published in 1840. It is for this reason that some claim Proudhon as the founder of modern anarchist theory. In What is Property? Proudhon answers with the famous accusation "Property is theft." In this work he opposed the institution of decreed "property" (propriété), where owners have complete rights to "use and abuse" their property as they wish, such as exploiting workers for profit.
His opposition to capitalism, the state, and organised religion inspired subsequent anarchists, and made him one of the leading socialist thinkers of his time. He writes that,

The economic idea of capitalism, the politics of government or of authority, and the theological idea of the Church are three identical ideas, linked in various ways. To attack one of them is equivalent to attacking all of them . . . What capital does to labour, and the State to liberty, the Church does to the spirit. This trinity of absolutism is as baneful in practice as it is in philosophy. The most effective means for oppressing the people would be simultaneously to enslave its body, its will and its reason.

He was however also opposed to "Communism, whether of the utopian or the Marxist variety, [the criticism being] that it destroyed freedom by taking away from the individual control over his means of production."

Anarchism and workers' revolution

Mikhail Bakunin 1814-1876
International Workingmen's Association and Anarchism and Marxism
In Europe, harsh reaction followed the revolutions of 1848. Twenty years later in 1864 the International Workingmen's Association, sometimes called the 'First International', united some diverse European revolutionary currents, including French followers of Proudhon, Blanquists, English trade unionists, socialists and social democrats. Due to its genuine links to active workers movements the International became a significant organization.

Karl Marx was a leading figure in the International and a member of its General Council. Proudhon's followers, the Mutualists, opposed Marx's state socialism, advocating political abstentionism and small property holdings. Mikhail Bakunin joined in 1868, allying with the anti-authoritarian socialist sections of the International, who advocated the revolutionary overthrow of the state and the collectivization of property. At first, the collectivists worked with the Marxists to push the First International into a more revolutionary socialist direction. Subsequently, the International became polarised into two camps, with Marx and Bakunin as their respective figureheads.

Bakunin characterised Marx's ideas as authoritarian, and predicted that if a Marxist party came to power its leaders would simply take the place of the ruling class they had fought against. In 1872 the conflict climaxed with a final split between the two groups, when at the Hague Congress Marx engineered the expulsion of Bakunin and James Guillaume from the International and had its headquarters transferred to New York. In response, the anti-authoritarian sections formed their own International at the St. Imier Congress, adopting a revolutionary anarchist program.

Anarchist communism
Although the collectivist anarchists advocated remuneration for labor, they held out the possibility of a post-revolutionary transition to a communist system of distribution according to need. Bakunin's associate, James Guillaume, put it this way in his essay, Ideas on Social Organization(1876):

When… production comes to outstrip consumption… [e]veryone will draw what he needs from the abundant social reserve of commodities, without fear of depletion; and the moral sentiment which will be more highly developed among free and equal workers will prevent, or greatly reduce, abuse and waste.

An early anarchist communist was Joseph Déjacque, the first person to describe himself as "libertarian". Unlike Proudhon, he argued that "it is not the product of his or her labor that the worker has a right to, but to the satisfaction of his or her needs, whatever may be their nature."

Other important anarchist communists include Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Errico Malatesta. Many in the anarcho-syndicalist movements (see below) saw anarchist communism as their objective. Isaac Puente's 1932 El comunismo libertario was adopted by the Spanish CNT as its manifesto for a post-revolutionary society.

Kropotkin
Peter KropotkinPeter Kropotkin, often seen as the most important theorist of anarchist communism, outlined his economic ideas in The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops. Kropotkin felt co-operation to be more beneficial than competition, arguing in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution that this was illustrated in nature. He advocated the abolition of private property through the "expropriation of the whole of social wealth" by the people themselves[18], and for the economy to be co-ordinated through a horizontal network of voluntary associations. He maintained that in anarcho-communism:

"...houses, fields, and factories will no longer be private property, and that they will belong to the commune or the nation and money, wages, and trade would be abolished."

Individuals and groups would use and control whatever resources they needed as the aim of anarchist-communism was to place "the product reaped or manufactured at the disposal of all, leaving to each the liberty to consume them as he pleases in his own home." Moreover, he repeatedly stressed (like other communist-anarchists) that individuals would not be forced into communism, arguing that the peasant "who is in possession of just the amount of land he can cultivate," the family "inhabiting a house which affords them just enough space… considered necessary for that number of people" and the artisan "working with their own tools or handloom" would be free to live as they saw fit.

Anarchism and organized labor

Anarcho-syndicalism and Anarchism in Spain
Anarcho-syndicalism is a form of anarchism which looks to the labor movement as the catalyst for revolutionary change ("syndicalism" being derived from the French syndicalisme, meaning "trade unionism"). Anarcho-syndicalists advocate the creation of revolutionary trade unions to fight for better working conditions, to seize control of the means of production, and to overthrow the State by means of direct action and the general strike. Anarcho-syndicalists seek to abolish the wage system and private ownership of the means of production, which they believe result in class division, exploitation and domination.

The anti-authoritarian sections of the First International were the precursors of the anarcho-syndicalists, seeking to "replace the privilege and authority of the State" with the "free and spontaneous organization of labor."

The Confédération Générale du Travail (General Confederation of Labour, CGT), formed in France in 1895, was the first major anarcho-syndicalist movement, but it had been preceded by the Spanish Workers Federation in 1881. Anarchist trade union federations were of special importance in Spain. The most successful was the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labour: CNT), founded in 1910. Before the 1940s the CNT was the major force in Spanish working class politics, and played a major role in the Spanish Civil War. The CNT was affiliated with the International Workers Association, a federation of anarcho-syndicalist trade unions founded in 1922, with delegates representing two million workers from 15 countries in Europe and Latin America.

The largest organised anarchist movement today is in Spain, in the form of the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT) and the CNT. CGT membership was estimated to be around 100,000 for the year 2003. Other active syndicalist movements include the US Workers Solidarity Alliance, and the UK Solidarity Federation. The revolutionary industrial unionist Industrial Workers of the World, claiming 2,000 paid members, and the International Workers Association, an anarcho-syndicalist successor to the First International, also remain active.

The Russian Revolution
Anarchists participated alongside the Bolsheviks in both February and October revolutions, many anarchists initially supporting the Bolshevik coup. However the Bolsheviks soon turned against the anarchists and other left-wing opposition, a conflict which culminated in the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion. Anarchists in central Russia were imprisoned or driven underground, or joined the victorious Bolsheviks. In Ukraine anarchists fought in the civil war against both Whites and Bolsheviks within the Makhnovshchina peasant army led by Nestor Makhno.

Expelled American anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman before leaving Russia were amongst those agitating in response to Bolshevik policy and the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising. Both wrote classic accounts of their experiences in Russia, aiming to expose the reality of Bolshevik control. For them, Bakunin's predictions about the consequences of Marxist rule had proved all too true.

The victory of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution and the resulting Russian Civil War did serious damage to anarchist movements internationally. Many workers and activists saw Bolshevik success as setting an example; Communist parties grew at the expense of anarchism and other socialist movements. In France and the US for example, the major syndicalist movements of the CGT and IWW began to realign themselves away from anarchism and towards the Communist International.

In Paris, the Dielo Truda group of Russian anarchist exiles which included Nestor Makhno concluded that anarchists needed to develop new forms of organisation in response to the structures of Bolshevism. Their 1926 manifesto, known as the Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists [25], was supported by some communist anarchists, though opposed by many others. Platformist groups today include the Workers Solidarity Movement in Ireland and the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists of North America.

The fight against fascism
Spain, 1936. Members of the CNT construct armoured cars to fight against the fascists in one of the collectivised factories.
In the 1920s and 1930s the familiar dynamics of anarchism's conflict with the state were transformed by the rise of fascism in Europe. Italy saw the first struggles between anarchists and fascists. Anarchists played a key role in the anti-fascist organisation Arditi del Popolo. This group was strongest in areas with anarchist traditions and marked up numerous successful victories, including driving back Blackshirts in the anarchist stronghold of Parma in August 1922. In France, where the fascists came close to insurrection in the February 1934 riots, anarchists divided over a 'united front' policy. In Spain, the CNT initially refused to join a popular front electoral alliance, and abstention by CNT supporters led to a right wing election victory. But in 1936, the CNT changed its policy and anarchist votes helped bring the popular front back to power. Months later, the ruling class responded with an attempted coup, and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was underway.

In response to the army rebellion, an anarchist-inspired movement of peasants and workers, supported by armed militias, took control of Barcelona and of large areas of rural Spain where they collectivized the land. But even before the eventual fascist victory in 1939, the anarchists were losing ground in a bitter struggle with the Stalinists. The CNT leadership often appeared confused and divided, with some members controversially entering the government. According to George Orwell and other foreign observers, Stalinist-led troops suppressed the collectives, and persecuted both dissident Marxists and anarchists.

Anarchism and the individual

Max Stirner and Ethical egoism
Around the same time as Proudhon's most famous work was published, Max Stirner argued in The Ego and Its Own, that most commonly accepted social institutions - including the notion of State, property as a right, natural rights in general, and the very notion of society - were mere illusions or ghosts in the mind, saying of society that "the individuals are its reality." He advocated egoism and a form of amoralism, in which individuals would unite in 'associations of egoists' only when it was in their self interest to do so. For him, property simply comes about through might: "Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property." And, "What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing."

Stirner never called himself an anarchist - he accepted only the label 'egoist'. Nevertheless, he is considered by most to be an anarchist because of his rejection of the state, law and government, and his ideas influenced many anarchists, although interpretations of his thought are diverse. Anarchists including Benjamin Tucker, Federica Montseny and the Bonnot Gang claimed him as an influence, and Emma Goldman gave lectures on his thought.

Individualist anarchism and Individualist anarchism in the United States
Benjamin TuckerIn 1825 Josiah Warren had participated in a utopian socialism experiment at New Harmony, which failed in a few years amidst much internal conflict. Warren blamed the community's failure on a lack of individual sovereignty and dedicated himself to promoting economic cooperation on the basis of individual liberty and self-ownership. Perhaps the most successful of his experiments in liberty were the Cincinnati Time Store and the Modern Times intentional community. Other prominent nineteenth century individualists included Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Victor Yarros and Emile Armand.

These thinkers held that the state was the foremost source of inequality and oppression. They argued that a network of a free market exchange between voluntary cooperatives could supplant all functions of the state, including defense.[29]. Since individualist anarchists were adherents of the labor theory of value, they believed that the working man ought to enjoy the full fruit of his labor. Armand elucidates: "The individual or association ought to be able, without having to take into consideration anybody else whatsoever, to consume its own output, or exchange it either gratis or for something else, and furthermore, it should be open to it to choose those with whom it will exchange its products and what it will receive in their stead."

Tucker's economic theory blamed the poor condition of American workers on four monopolies based in authority: the money monopoly of control over currency and credit by state-sanctioned banks; the land monopoly of land-titles for absentee owners; patents, prohibiting competition; tariffs, restricting competition in favor of established firms. Without these interlocking "invasions", Tucker maintained, individuals would be free to determine their own economic lives through mutual banking, labor notes, cooperative manufacture, and other voluntary pursuits. His commitment to individual sovereignty led him to strongly support the individual's rights to own private property and to trade it in a free market economy, both of which he saw as inseparable from anarchism.

Issues in anarchism

Ends and means
Propaganda of the deed and direct action
In general, anarchists advocate direct action and oppose voting in elections. Most anarchists feel that real change is not possible through voting. Further, many believe that voting amounts to condoning the state.

Direct action may be violent or non-violent. While some anarchists believe violence is justified in overthrowing existing authority, most anarchists reject terrorism as authoritarian. Mikhail Bakunin and Errico Malatesta, for example, wrote of violence as necessary in revolutionary settings but denounced terrorism as counter-revolutionary.

Anarchists have often been portrayed as dangerous and violent, due mainly to a number of high-profile violent acts, including riots, assassinations, insurrections, and terrorism by some anarchists. Many anarchists do not see the destruction of property to be violent. Anarchists see war, however, as an activity in which the state seeks to gain and consolidate power, both domestically and in foreign lands, and subscribe to Randolph Bourne's view that "war is the health of the state".

Anarchists also engage in building parallel structures and organizations, such as Food Not Bombs, radical labor unions, infoshop and radical social centers. This is in line with the general anarchist concept of creating Dual Power, creating the structures for a new anti-authoritarian society in the shell of the old, hierarchical one.

Anarchism and capitalism
From its origins to present day, anarchism has been marked by a rejection of capitalism, which they believe can be maintained only by state violence. The newest element in this discourse has been a school of thought called anarcho-capitalism which argues for a stateless, laissez-faire capitalist society. Its reception among scholars and advocates of traditional anarchism has been mixed.

Anarcho-capitalism
Murray Rothbard (1926-1995)Anarcho-capitalism and Anarchism and anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a predominantly United States-based theoretical individualist tradition that promotes an economic system of stateless free market capitalism. In such a society no authority would prohibit anyone from providing, through the free market, any service - even those services traditionally provided by state monopoly such as police, courts, and defense against invasion. Anarcho-capitalism does not oppose profit, rent, interest, or wage-labor. It has been influenced by non-anarchist libertarians such as Frederic Bastiat, Ayn Rand and Robert Nozick and its leading proponents are Murray Rothbard and David Friedman.

Murray Rothbard, an Austrian-school economist, developed anarcho-capitalist theory on the basis of classical liberal natural law argument (specifically, the non-aggression principle). Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists believe that private property can legitimately result only from being the product of labor and that it may only be transferred by trade, by gift, or -- after the passage of a given period of time -- by abandonment. The community is not recognized as having any authority over the property of the individual. Another prominent anarcho-capitalist, David D. Friedman, prefers to justify stateless capitalism on a utilitarian basis. For Friedman, pre-modern society of medieval Iceland provides some evidence of how anarcho-capitalism could function.

Most anarcho-capitalists believe that, in the absence of state coercion, free capitalism would naturally and inevitably develop. Hence, Rothbard's statement that "capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism, and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism." This has met resistance from those anarchists who hold that capitalism is inherently oppressive and hierarchical.

Some followers of Rothbard, calling themselves left-libertarians or agorists, have adopted leftist critiques of presently-existing corporate capitalism, and favor strategies of resistance such as counter-economics.

Neocolonialism and globalization
Most anarchists oppose neocolonialism as an attempt to use economic coercion on a global scale, carried out through state institutions such as the World Bank, World Trade Organization, Group of Eight, and the World Economic Forum. Many participate actively in the anti-globalization movement.

Prominent anarcho-capitalists, such as Murray Rothbard and Wendy McElroy, are outspoken critics of the WTO, World Bank and "free trade" zones (such as NAFTA); however they support worldwide expansion of the division of labor and trade, which they see as beneficial so long as governments do not intervene.

Post-left and poststructuralism
Post-left anarchy
A movement called post-left anarchy seeks to distance itself from the traditional "left" - communists, socialists, social democrats, etc. - and to escape the confines of ideology in general. Post-leftists argue that anarchism has been weakened by its long attachment to contrary "leftist" movements and single issue causes (anti-war, anti-nuclear, etc.). It calls for a synthesis of anarchist thought and a specifically anti-authoritarian revolutionary movement outside of the leftist milieu. Important groups and individuals associated with Post-left anarchy include: CrimethInc, the magazine Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and its editor Jason McQuinn, Bob Black, Hakim Bey and others.

The term postanarchism was originated by Saul Newman, first receiving popular attention in his book From Bakunin to Lacan, a synthesis of classical anarchist theory and poststructuralist thought. Post-anarchists critique what they see are contradictions in anarchism, particularly those ideas they consider to be essentialist.

Feminism and anti-racism
Anarcha-feminism is a kind of radical feminism that espouses the belief that patriarchy is a fundamental problem in society. However, it was not explicitly formulated as anarcha-feminism until early 1970s, during the second-wave feminist movement. Anarcha-feminism views patriarchy as the first manifestation of hierarchy in human history; thus, the first form of oppression occurred in the dominance of male over female.

Black anarchism opposes the existence of a state, capitalism, and subjugation and domination of people of color, and favors a non-hierarchical organization of society. Theorists include Ashanti Alston, Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, and Sam Mbah.

Since the late 1970s anarchists have been involved in fighting the rise of neo-fascist groups. In Germany and the United Kingdom some anarchists worked within militant anti-fascist groups alongside members of the Marxist left. They advocated directly combating fascists with physical force rather than relying on the state. Since the late 1990s, a similar tendency has developed within US anarchism.

The environment
Green anarchism, Eco-anarchism
Since the late 1970s anarchists in Anglosphere and European countries have been agitating for the natural environment. Eco-anarchists or green anarchists believe in deep ecology. This is a worldview that embraces biodiversity and sustainability. Eco-anarchists often use direct action against what they see as earth-destroying institutions. Of particular importance is the Earth First! movement, that takes action such as tree sitting. Another important component is ecofeminism, which sees the domination of nature as a metaphor for the domination of women.

Primitivism is a predominantly Western philosophy that advocates a return to a pre-industrial and usually pre-agricultural society. It develops a critique of industrial civilization. In this critique technology and development have alienated people from the natural world. This philosophy develops themes present in the political action of the Luddites and the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Religion
From Proudhon and Bakunin to the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, Anarchists have traditionally been skeptical about and opposed to organized religion, believing that most organized religions are hierarchical in nature and, more often than not, aligned with contemporary power structures like state and capital.

On the other hand, Christian anarchists believe that there is no higher authority than God, and oppose earthly authority such as government and established churches. They believe that Jesus' teachings and the practice of the early church were clearly anarchistic, but were corrupted when "Christianity" was declared the official religion of Rome. Chinese anarchism was most influential in the 1920s. Strands of Chinese anarchism included Taixu's Buddhist anarchism which was influenced by Tolstoy and the well-field system.

Criticisms of anarchism
The theory and practice of anarchism has been controversial since it came to prominence in the 19th century. Some of the criticisms made of anarchism come from the interests it opposes, such as governments. Other criticisms have been made internally of other anarchists or by political movements that appear to share similar goals, such as Marxism.

Cultural phenomena
Noam Chomsky (1928–)The kind of anarchism that is most easily encountered in popular culture is represented by well-known figures who publicly identify themselves as anarchists. The following figures are examples of prominent publicly self-avowed anarchists:

the MIT professor of linguistics Noam Chomsky
the social historian Howard Zinn
author Ursula K. Le Guin
author Edward Abbey
author Robert Anton Wilson
graphic novelist Alan Moore
UFC fighter and champion Jeff Monson
feminist, author and critic Germaine Greer
Hans Alfredson, actor, film director, writer and comedian.
In Denmark, the Freetown Christiania was created in downtown Copenhagen. The housing and employment crisis in most of Western Europe led to the formation of communes and squatter movements like the one still thriving in Barcelona, in Catalonia. Although not always explicitly anarchist, militant resistance to neo-Nazi groups in places like Germany, and the uprisings of autonomous Marxism, situationist, and Autonomist groups in France and Italy also helped to give popularity to anti-authoritarian, non-capitalist ideas.

In various musical styles, anarchism rose in popularity. Most famous for the linking of anarchist ideas and music has been punk rock, although in the modern age, hip hop, and folk music are also becoming important mediums for the spreading of the anarchist message. In the UK this was associated with the punk movement; the band Crass is celebrated for its anarchist and pacifist ideas. For further details, see anarcho-punk and list of anarchist musicians.

Recent technological developments have made the anarchist cause both easier to advance and more conceivable to people. Many people use the Internet to form on-line communities. Intellectual property has been undermined to some extent and a gift-culture supported by sharing music files, collaborative software development, and free software (also called open-source software) has arisen. These cyber-communities include those that support GNU, Linux, Indymedia, and Wikis. Others use technology to remain anonymous, communicate securely using public key cryptography, and maintain financial privacy through digital currency. See also: Crypto-anarchism and Cypherpunk.

2006-07-24T22:50:00.000-07:00

Target: Wal-Mart Lite

Shopping in a Target store, you know you’re not in Wal-Mart. But the differences may be mostly skin deep.
By Kari Lydersen
From CorpWatch
2006

Targets are spaciously laid out and full of attractive displays and promotions. While many people associate Wal-Mart with low-income, rural communities perhaps dominated by a prison or power plant, life-size photos throughout Target stores remind you that their customers are a lively, beautiful cast of multi-cultural hipsters.

“Their image is more upscale, more urban and sophisticated, sort of a wannabe Pottery Barn,” said Victoria Cervantes, a hospital administrator and documentary-maker in Chicago who regularly shops at Target. “I’m not sure if their customers really are more upscale. But that’s the image they’re going for. They have a very good PR campaign.”

In contrast to this image, however, critics say that in terms of wages and benefits, working conditions, sweatshop-style foreign suppliers, and effects on local retail communities, big box Target stores are very much like Wal-Mart, just in a prettier package.

Of more than 1,400 Target stores employing more than 300,000 people nationwide, not one has a union. Employees at various stores say an anti-union message and video is part of the new-employee orientation. At stores in the Twin Cities, where Target is headquartered, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union Local 789 has been trying for several years to help Target employees organize, with little luck.

“People ask what the difference between Wal-Mart and Target is,” said UFCW organizer Bernie Hesse. “Nothing, except that Wal-Mart is six times bigger. The wages start at $7.25 to $7.50 an hour [at Target]. They’ll say that’s a competitive wage, but they can’t say it’s a living wage. We know a lot of their managers are telling people, ‘If we find out you’re involved in organizing a union you’ll get fired.’”

Wal-Mart has about 3,800 stores nationwide and another 2,600 worldwide, employing about 1.6 million people. Target plans to open at least 600 more stores by 2010, for a total of about 2,000 in 47 states. Like Wal-Mart, a typical Target sells a wide range of consumer goods including clothing, household items, office supplies, toys, sports equipment, furniture, art, and electronics; and the stores often have photo laboratories and pharmacies. About 160 SuperTargets nationwide also sell “upscale” groceries, as the company’s website describes them, and often contain banks, Starbucks, and Pizza Hut Express outlets. Total revenue was up 12.3 percent in 2005 – $52.6 billion compared to $46.8 billion in 2004.

Wage Slaves

A survey by the UFCW found that starting wages are similar in Targets and Wal-Marts -- possibly higher overall at Wal-Marts – and that Target benefits packages are often harder to qualify for and less comprehensive. (Target’s media relations department refused to comment on its wages and benefits policies; individual wages and benefits policies are not included in their annual report.)

“We know that Target and Wal-Mart are constantly checking each other out and seeing how cheap they can get by,” says a UFCW statement on the website Targetunion.org, urging Target employees around the country to post their wages.

A Target employee who asked that his name and store location be kept secret said he can barely make ends meet on his salary of $8.40 an hour.

“After three years, I have received less than $1 an hour in raises. I started at $7.65,” said the worker, adding that he does love his job because of camaraderie with his co-workers. “We are never compensated and rarely even recognized for meeting our goals.”

The starting wage he describes would put a single parent with two kids working full time at Target just slightly above the poverty line; someone with more children or working fewer hours would fall below the poverty line.

Compare that to Target CEO Robert Ulrich, who earned $23.1 million in 2005, according to Forbes, making him the second-highest paid CEO in the retail sector. That’s more than 1300 times as much as the worker we spoke to.

Sweat on the Racks?

Meanwhile a glance at labels on a few racks of stylish $20 cardigans and capri pants shows that, like Wal-Mart and most major clothing retailers, Target itself sources its products in India, Indonesia, Guatemala, Mexico, Bangladesh, Kenya, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia and other low-wage, developing countries.

In October 2005 representatives of a Mexican labor federation protested outside a Bronx Target to call attention to alleged child labor and illegal worker lockouts at a Mexican factory that supplies the store’s Halloween costumes.

“The way the global garment industry is, there are so few factories that respect workers’ rights that there is no way Target gets its clothes from workplaces where workers’ rights are being respected,” said Allie Robbins, national organizer of the group United Students Against Sweatshops.

Race to the Bottom

Target doesn’t differ from most major clothing vendors; you usually have to seek out small specialty companies to find union-made, American-made textiles. But as one of the country’s major retailers, Target is an industry leader, fostering and profiting from the U.S.’s general culture of consumerism: We buy, buy, buy at ever lower prices in a market system sustained by very low-paid, non-union workforces in impoverished countries.

Even as American consumerism thrives, however, there is growing public awareness and critique of the problems it spawns. Wal-Mart is becoming a lightning rod for the public’s increasing dissatisfaction and animosity. A recent study by the University of Massachusetts at Lowell showed that 63 percent of people would oppose a Wal-Mart opening in their community. Groups such as Wal-Mart Watch, several documentarians have harshly critiqued Wal-Mart’s working conditions and its effects on communities and international labor standards.

But somehow, perhaps because of its relative small size compared to Wal-Mart, Target has largely avoided negative publicity.

In fact, it benefits from anti-Wal-Mart anger, a fact that isn’t lost on company officials.

Media reports describe Target executives booing and hissing at a Wal-Mart logo during sales meetings and calling it the “evil empire.” While communities often fight tooth and nail against new Wal-Marts, residents usually welcome Targets, as local governments offer the corporation generous tax breaks and subsidies to locate in their area.

That is what happened last fall in West St. Paul, Minn., where a new Target reaped $731,000 in local tax breaks, while 30 miles away, Ham Lake was fighting Wal-Mart’s efforts to open a superstore. The Target in downtown Minneapolis received $68 million in public subsidies, according to the Star Tribune newspaper. In Chicago in 2004, a city-wide coalition formed to oppose two proposed Wal-Marts and the fight roiled the city council for months. Meanwhile at least three new Target stores have been built in the metro area in the last several years.

Target definitely works hard on its image. Last summer it became the first company to sponsor an entire issue of The New Yorker, with 17 pages of ads. With a 2005 advertising budget of $1.028 billion, it regularly takes out full page ads in major daily papers and magazines, promoting the company’s products, and sophisticated image as well as its charity work. The company’s website says that 96 percent of Americans recognize the Target logo, “more than the Swoosh or Apple.” Unlike Wal-Mart’s low-budget, cluttered decor, Target sports artsy, larger-than-life photos of everything from cleaning products to desserts to women in lingerie. It is the exclusive marketer of specialty items such as the Roots “retro-futurism” official gear for the 2006 Winter Olympics. Target’s website notes that its average consumer has a median household income of $55,000, and 43 percent have completed college.

“It’s like they’re trying to be Marshall Fields or something,” said Chicago high school student Stephanie Evans, shopping for a bikini for spring break. “But it’s really the same things as at Wal-Mart, just at higher prices.”

The first Target discount store opened in Roseville, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul, in 1962. It was run by the Dayton Company, which originated in 1902 with a retail store called Goodfellows owned by George Dayton in Minneapolis. Along with the discount stores, Target Corp. runs Target Financial Services, which manages the Target REDcard credit card.

Target: We Train the FBI

Perhaps Target’s oddest singularity is the fact that it boasts one of the nation’s top forensics labs at its company headquarters. A product of its efforts to stop shoplifting and property destruction at its stores, its mastery of surveillance and investigative technology and strategy is now eagerly subscribed to by law enforcement agencies nationwide, including the FBI. The company provides training for police and federal agents on investigation and prevention of everything from arson and robbery to smuggling.

Target does more proportionately for the community in the form of community grants and charity than Wal-Mart does, and spends considerably less boating about it. According to the company website, which says Target donates more than $2 million a week to local and national non-profit organizations. The company gives grants of $1,000 to $3,000 to community organizations, and shoppers can donate 1 percent of Target REDcard charges to a local school. The website says more than $154 million has been donated to schools since 1997. The company also runs Target House, a luxury residential facility in Memphis where families can stay while their seriously ill children are treated at a nearby medical center.

In comparison, Wal-Mart, with revenue of $288 billion in 2005, donated $200 million (or 7/100ths of a percent) to charities and organizations in 2005, according to its web site.

While many customers and employees praise Target’s charity efforts, critics counter that the company would have more positive impact on communities by providing living wage, stable jobs to local residents.

Following the general trend in retail and the U.S. job market as a whole, Target relies on part-time workers. This schedule may work well for some students and retired people, but it contributes to a dearth of full-time, fully benefitted, stable employment – especially in communities reeling from the store’s impact on small local businesses.

“If I needed a full time job I couldn’t afford to work here,” said "Rosa" a 57-year-old who works part time at a St. Paul Target near her house. (Her name has been changed because she fears retribution.) “It starts at $7.50 an hour and you only get a 50-cent raise once a year. So how long will it take you to even get to $10 an hour! You can’t live on that.”

Diversity Dilemma

Target’s website says diversity is a core value for employees and customers. It says Target is above national averages in employing minorities, both in the overall workforce (21 percent) and managerial positions (38 percent).

But that may depend on the store. Hesse said that some of the many Somalis refugees employed in the Twin Cities stores complain about cultural insensitivity and discrimination.

“Entry level management people just don’t know how to handle it, they seem to be insensitive to immigrant workers,” said Hesse. “In one store, there’s a lot of friction between managers and Somali workers. They hire these young white boys as managers, and then they run a crew of Somalis with a very condescending attitude.”

An African-American employee at the flagship Roseville, Minn. store (who asked that her name not be used for fear of retribution), said she feels as if she constantly suffers racial discrimination. She said there are no black supervisors on the overnight shift she works. “There are a lot of Somalis working on the overnight shift, but no Somali team leader.” She said she is tired of young white “team leaders” repeatedly telling her to work faster or do things differently.

“It’s the same conversation over and over,” said the middle-aged woman. “They treat us like we’re kids. And they’ll approach you in front of other crew members, not in the office or somewhere private.”

She thinks she was unfairly given a document from management saying she needed to increase her work speed.

“I feel like I was discriminated against because I’m black,” she said. “I talked to white co-workers who I was working side by side with, and I could see I was working just as fast as them. I asked them if they had to sign the paper [from management] saying they were too slow and they did not. The majority who got the "guidance" slips were Somali or African-American like myself.”

Beat the Clock

Workers generally complain about a pressurized and patronizing work atmosphere where they are constantly pressed to work harder and faster and at the same time to act cheery and invested in the store’s success. The company’s website boasts that workers will respond with “cheetah-like” speed within 60 seconds to customer calls on the red phones throughout the store.

Rosa said employees are constantly exhorted to get shoppers to sign up for Target REDcards; some stores have weekly quotas. “They’ll have little employee promotions, it’s so ridiculous, you’ll get candy or a liter of pop if you get two people to sign up,” she said.

She said the store is generally understaffed and workers are expected to do numerous jobs at the same time.

“You’re running around, feeling like you’re being pulled in every direction,” she said. “There’s never enough people on the sales floor. You’re getting calls to come up to the cash register, to do pulls [of merchandise] in the back room, to deal with returns at guest services, all at once. And the whole time you’re constantly picking up and folding stuff, getting things off the floor. At my age it’s a really hard day, on your feet the whole time on these linoleum floors. I’m aching when I get home. I have to take Ibuprofen just to be able to sleep.”

John Hayden had a similar experience working in a Target distribution center near his home in Oconomowoc, Wisc. After quitting his Target job in 2002, he was diagnosed with a hernia which he blames on lifting up to 700 boxes a day.

“It was hard work,” said Hayden, who was in his late 50s at the time. “We never produced enough to keep the middle managers happy. I think they plan it that way – they always want more.”

Could it Be Different?

In today’s market, could retail really be any different? Fair labor advocates think so. Hesse notes that in several unionized grocery stores in the Twin Cities, hourly wages hover around $13 to $17 an hour, roughly double Target’s. Now SuperTarget’s sale of groceries threatens the survival of union grocery stores.

Even other major big box retailers have managed to pay significantly higher wages and achieve higher employee retention. The prices at Costco Wholesale Corp., the nation’s fifth largest retailer, are competitive with those at Target and Wal-Mart, but it pays full-time employees an average of around $16 an hour along with generous health benefits.

Costco pulls this off by offering fewer brands of each item, keeping infrastructure costs low and forgoing advertising; and the company also benefits financially from low employee turnover. Labor advocates also note that The Container Store is known for decent wages and good working conditions.

“We’ve turned into a nation of consumers, not citizens,” said Hesse. “We need to make retailers and employers bring back the old social contract where if you work hard and give them full time, they have to treat you with some degree of dignity and pay you enough that you don’t need to worry about your basic needs all the time.”

2006-07-24T22:29:00.000-07:00

Ad Nauseum

Gary Marshall gets angry about advertising with
Naomi Klein's "No Logo"(book review excerpt)

From Spike Magazine

No Logo is a book about brands, which means it's a book about popular culture - Golden Arches, the Nike "swoosh", Tommy Hilfiger jackets and Starbucks coffee. It's about the television you watch and the newspapers you read, the theme parks you visit and the films you go to see. It's about magazines and rock music, universities and the Internet. In short, it's a book about everyday reality - or, rather, what lies behind it.

The connection between brands and corporate irresponsibility has been highlighted before - Nike's links with third world exploitation are well documented - but No Logo digs much deeper. In an attempt to describe the rise of anti-corporatism and "culture jamming", Klein covers issues as diverse as labour rights, censorship and education, and how the rise of the brands has affected them. The resulting book is likely to disturb even the most hardened of cynics.

"When deep space exploitation ramps up, it will be corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Philip Morris Galaxy. Planet Starbucks." - Fight Club

In the early chapters of the book, Klein describes the rise of the brands. Originally an importer of cheap Japanese clothing, Nike successfully reinvented itself as a "lifestyle company", selling an ideal rather than any particular physical product. As Klein reports, the most successful brands don't actually make anything - from Tommy Hilfiger to Nike, they outsource their manufacturing, and the companies themselves concentrate on the all-important brand ubiquity.

Through advertising, the companies encourage people to buy products that act as advertisements for the brand itself, turning a nation into what one executive gleefully describes as "walking billboards". Levi's repaints an entire street to promote its Silver Tab jeans, footwear companies become synonymous with sporting achievement, and beer companies co-opt music festivals to promote their products. Like the narrator in Fight Club, customers don't choose products on the basis of price or effectiveness; instead, they ask themselves "what sort of dinner set defines me as a person?"

Where No Logo surprises is when it describes the less obvious, and arguably less ethical, forms of brand promotion. According to Klein, companies such as Tommy Hilfiger use black ghettos as seedbeds for their brands, recognising the white middle-class fetish for black urban culture and employing local youths to "talk up" products to their peers. A similar technique was used by the Daewoo car company, which paid students to drive its cars and enthuse about them at every opportunity in an all too real echo of The Truman Show. If you spend any time on the Internet, you'll see entertainment companies doing the same thing on message boards and newsgroups.

Klein doesn't need to lecture you about the increasing ubiquity of sales messages - she lets the facts speak for themselves as she describes universities where Coca-Cola is "the official soft drink", schools where the mega-brands have their logos on textbooks and toilet cubicles, and university departments wholly reliant on corporate sponsorship.

"No Logo demeans the causes it purports to celebrate by offering a narrow, fashion victim's perspective on achievements that have undoubtedly helped to make the world a better place". - Barry Delaney, creative partner at Delaney Fletcher Bozell, Management Today

Where No Logo excels is in the chapters detailing the "achievements" that the above reviewer believes "have undoubtedly helped to make the world a better place". Klein presents a powerful argument that global brands have resulted in the exploitation of third world workers, increased domestic unemployment, reduced domestic wages, and the continual erosion of workers' rights. One executive responds to calls for a "living wage" by saying, apparently without irony, "while the concept is romantically appealing, it ignores the practicalities and realities of our business environment". When two McDonalds employees successfully win the right to union recognition - almost unheard of in the fast food industry - the company simply shuts down the branch.

Klein argues that McDonalds has deliberately presented itself as a company that employs teenagers while they look for their first "real" job. Despite a workforce that is considerably older and better educated than the pimply youths of repute, this successful image-making enables the company to keep hours and wages at levels which, in any other industry, would attract howls of protest. Klein also describes the conditions inside call centres, which have been described elsewhere as "the dark, satanic mills of the technological revolution". In Britain, as in America, call centres are one of the few growth industries, traditionally located in areas of high male unemployment and employing a workforce largely comprised of part-time, female - and low-paid - workers.

One of the most disturbing parts of the book is when it focuses on the issue of censorship. As the book explains, the strategies of retailers such as Wal-Mart - essentially, bulldozing the competition out of business - means that, as one record company executive admits, "Wal-Mart is the only game in town". It's something the chain hasn't been slow to realise, and the company's pro-family stance means that it regularly practices censorship. Magazine covers have to be pre-vetted by the company; if they aren't and Wal-Mart feels the cover is "inappropriate", the publication will be de-listed - in other words, the retailer will never stock that publication again. Record companies regularly tone down releases to make them appropriate for Wal-Mart's censors, and magazines know better than to feature anything less than wholesome. It's a worrying trend as, through sheer economic muscle, Wal-Mart effectively controls what the public is allowed to read, watch or listen to.

"Media concentration is high, and increasing. Furthermore, those who occupy managerial positions in the media...belong to the same privileged elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations, and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own class interests as well. Journalists entering the system are unlikely to make their way unless they conform to these ideological pressures" - Noam Chomsky

One key area highlighted by No Logo is the increasingly incestuous corporate world, where the same companies own television stations, record companies and newspapers. British readers will be familiar with the Sun newspaper's regular plugs for Sky TV and Fox Movies, all of whom share the same parent company, but the book describes how the links between companies can alter the news itself. An expose of theme parks by ABC was spiked after the reporters uncovered shocking events at Disney, ABC's owners, and Klein describes a number of similar occurrences in other news media.

This "corporate synergy" has an effect on politics, too. Klein recounts how journalists are expected to give certain politicians an easy ride if those politicians are responsible for handing out valuable broadcasting licences to a newspaper's parent company - a tradition that's also well-established in the UK.

Klein argues that corporate interference can also cost lives. The majority of American universities work in "partnership" with brands, carrying out research or helping develop new designs for training shoes. Klein asks whether such links devalue the traditional independence of universities - almost every sponsorship contract, explains Klein, includes a "gagging clause" that prevents any criticism of the corporate benefactor. The tale of the student expelled for wearing a Pepsi T-shirt to his college's Coca-Cola day is amusing, but Klein quickly follows this by describing how corporate-sponsored drug trials uncovered potentially fatal side effects in the sponsor's products. When the researchers attempted to publish their findings in scientific journals, the universities were threatened with the termination of their lucrative sponsorship contracts, and the researchers were promptly sacked.

On the face of it, sponsorship seems the ideal solution to the growing problem of funding for educational institutions, but many campaigners are worried about the growing presence of commercially funded learning materials in schools and colleges: as the Centre for Commercial-Free Schools notes, "when [the] Consumers Union collected and evaluated examples of these materials, it found that 80 percent contained biased or incomplete information, and promoted a viewpoint that favoured consumption of the sponsor's product or service or otherwise favoured the company and its economic agenda". In an article aimed at schoolchildren, activist magazine Adbusters argues that "companies profit by changing the way you think. Representatives of the drug Prozac will come to your school to 'teach' you about depression. Exxon has [an] ecology curriculum that shows how clean the environment of Alaska is".

"Let's remember November 30 and the days that followed as the launch of the Seattle Rebellion, the anti-corporate resistance that will reshape society in the next 10 years. It wasn't a skirmish or an opening salvo, but a manifesto etched in the streets by tens of thousands of people." - Adbusters

The closing chapters of No Logo investigate the growing number of protests against globalisation, of which the Seattle Riots of late 1999 and the current anti-GM food campaigns have been the most visible. Although both events occurred after the book's completion, they help to reinforce Klein's conclusion that the rise of global brands and increasing consumer awareness is leading to a growing backlash.

One of the most visible forms of anti-corporatism is "culture jamming", espoused by groups such as Adbusters and the band Negativland. Culture jamming attempts to subvert the ubiquitous advertising messages by spoofing them or altering their meaning in Situationist-style pranks, and the Adbusters site in particular offers a "culture jammer's toolkit" together with a gallery of spoof adverts (we've used some of them to illustrate this article).

Klein rightly questions the effectiveness of these tactics. While the proponents talk of their activities with missionary zeal, the corporations are hardly changing their policies as the result of a few spoof adverts. As Klein points out, culture jamming has been co-opted by the very advertisers it aims to subvert - see the recent "image is nothing. Thirst is everything" campaign by Sprite, or MTV's continual adoption of "underground" imagery to reinforce its own brand identity. Even anti-corporatism has become a marketable commodity, as the success of major studio picture Fight Club demonstrates.

Klein is more enamoured with activists such as the defendants in the McLibel trial, who successfully raised awareness of many of McDonalds' activities, and the semi-political "reclaim the streets" movement. Rather than the outlandish hippies the media portrays them to be, Klein discovers that the people involved in the movement are attempting to make people think about the way in which every available part of civic space is saturated with advertising.

It's in this section of the book that No Logo falters. While Klein clearly believes that Reclaim The Streets is one of a number of groups that will define the politics of the future, the fact that most of the population believe the group's members are all drug-crazed anti-car crusties shows the difficulties inherent in swimming against the tide of globalisation and media concentration. The book rightly highlights the role of the Internet in helping activists to organise and disseminate information, and the outcry over genetically modified foods demonstrates the effect that a well-organised, single-issue campaign can have. By comparison, the demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle seemed to have no clear agenda and, by degenerating into riots, made it easy for the media to dismiss any legitimate protest as the work of subversives and "terrorists". As Klein points out, Adbusters magazine is starting to resemble the very media companies it urges its readers to fight against, while she cheerfully admits the irony of massive global corporations publishing anti-corporate polemics such as No Logo, which are marketed just like any other product.

No Logo is a powerful read - Chomsky without the paranoia - and, if you have even the slightest interest in popular culture, it's an essential one. Unfortunately, while it's easy to share Klein's concerns, it's much harder to share her optimism about the future.

2006-07-24T18:28:00.000-07:00

Cuba’s eye surgery program
becomes popular in Caribbean

By Arrin Hawkins
From The Millitant

The Cuban government has expanded its medical program Misión Milagro (Mission Miracle) to residents of Latin America and the Caribbean, providing operations in Cuba free of charge for people with cataracts and other treatable eye conditions.

The program grew out of Cuba’s internationalist collaboration in Venezuela, where nearly 20,000 Cuban doctors are providing health care in rural and working-class communities. So far, tens of thousands of Venezuelans have received eye operations in Cuba.

Since the program was expanded in July, more than 5,000 people from 10 Caribbean countries have had operations in Cuba to restore their sight, the Cuban embassy in Guyana has reported. The joint Cuban-Venezuelan plan, covering people from all Latin America and the Caribbean, offers to treat 600,000 people a year over the next 10 years.

Cuban doctors are performing some 1,500 eye operations a day. Free transportation to Cuba is provided along with food and lodging for the patients. The simple operation takes about 10 minutes.

More than 2,000 Guyanese so far have received eye treatment in Cuba. “If people had to go to a private doctor for the same treatment, it could cost up to US$2,000 each,” the Guyanese health minister told the Jamaican Observer.

More than 3,000 patients from Belize have received eye surgery. “Because of financial constraints or the inaccessibility to the services, many individuals suffer from conditions that are very easy to treat,” said Eugenio Martínez, Cuba’s ambassador to Belize, in an interview in the September 15 issue of the Belizean newspaper San Pedro Sun.

David Scott, a 75-year-old Jamaican farmer, had been blind from cataracts for two years before his sight was restored in Cuba in September. Surgery at a local hospital had repeatedly been postponed. “When you can’t see it makes you miserable and it is like you’re sick and a part off your life is gone,” Scott told the Jamaica Observer. “When them take off the bandage off me eye me see the wall and the doctors. Oh man, you can’t imagine how it feel.”

Diann Edwards, a farm worker in Jamaica who was forced to quit a job because of a cataract, said she could not have afforded the surgery. One of the first 50 Jamaicans to receive the operation in Cuba, she said, “We were feted and given world class medical care.”

This initiative by the Cuban government takes place as many medical technicians are leaving semicolonial countries for the imperialist centers. A regional health official noted that the Caribbean loses some 300 nurses annually to the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. Jamaica has lost 41 percent of its doctors and Haiti 35 percent, according to a study by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Some 25,000 Cuban doctors are currently providing medical services in 66 countries, Reuters reports. The Cuban government is also training medical students from around the semicolonial world to help meet the health-care needs in their countries.

2006-07-23T23:56:00.000-07:00

The Topic of Cancer

It's sick to make sickness essential for making profits
By F.H. Knelman
FromCCPA Monitor

If we view the health care delivery system as a social system, it becomes amenable to sociological analysis. In analyzing social systems, it is very important to understand the world view or belief system that guides their behaviour and tends to determine roles, norms, status hierarchy, rewards and values.

I am basing my analysis on the U.S., a dominant power in the world and one which strongly influences Canada. We can discern three distinct social complexes in the U.S.: the military-industrial, the automobile-petroleum-highway, and the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex. These terms identify the major social actors or members of the complex.

It is important to describe the larger context in which the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex has evolved. The context is the current process of globalization which imprints its values on all dominant social systems. It is no accident that the U.S. is the only country in the economically developed world which does not have a national universal health care plan. Not surprisingly, the U.S. also has the highest infant mortality, lowest life expectancy, and highest incidence of cancer--as well as the highest per capita consumption of beef and fatty foods. It also has the highest per capita production of all major pollutants and industrial waste. Given the nature and profit-making priority of the medical-pharmaceutical complex, it is no wonder its leaders view cancer as a growth industry.

Cancer is the plague of “progress”—largely the result of the millions of chemicals in our air, food, and water, including known and suspected carcinogens, exposure to ionizing radiation and tobacco smoke. Theoretically, all of the cancers induced by environmental factors are preventable by the exercise of political will. The basic reason they are permitted is patently obvious. In our social system, economic values supersede and transcend human values. In the U.S. alone, there are over one million cases of cancer currently, and the death rate is over 50%. Mortality and morbidity rates continued to climb, bringing us closer to epidemic levels. Like the Vietnam War, the cancer war is a lost one, despite billions of dollars spent on costly unproductive treatments.

In fact, if we compare the total social cost of over one million cases of cancer, it is clear that prevention would be far less costly. The trouble is that cancer treatment is a business in which public costs are discounted in favour of private profits. And this is done with government collusion. In a truly just and democratic society, our governments would be laying criminal charges against the CEOs whose companies are spewing carcinogens into our environment. Instead, these business leaders are extolled for raising dividends and profits regardless of the enormous toll in preventable human suffering their methods entail. It is a system in which profits are made only if people become sick, so the sicker they become the better for the bottom line. Billions are reaped from expensive treatments and diagnostic procedures—treatments that, in the case of cancer, are often useless and sometimes do more harm than good.

In the allocation of causes between lifestyle (e.g., diet and smoking) and environmental, the exact numbers are still uncertain. But the downgrading of environmental causes is a perfect example of biopolitics--i.e., arguing that a biological hazard is of minimal significance.

A special class of cancer-causing chemicals are xenoestrogens, found in some pesticides, cosmetics, and plastics, which can behave in our bodies like hormones, mimicking estrogen or blocking testosterone. These are all hormone-disrupting pollutants. There is little argument about their impact on various animal populations, destroying their ability to reproduce and reducing immunity to disease. Some investigators are now arguing, with considerable scientific merit, that these same xenoestrogens can activate natural forms of estrogen in human females, increasing the risk of breast cancer.

Underlying all of this is a more fundamental distortion of our health system, in that it is really a disease system with exclusive concern with treatment and cure, and a profound neglect of prevention. This follows naturally from the power of the economic imperative. Since the treatment of disease is a business venture, only those patients who can generate profit will tend to be treated or given preference in treatment. In fact, the insurance companies have a name for these patients: “revenue generators.” This, of course, leads to the neglect of health care for the majority of the poor, and many of the aged and disabled. These people are simply sacrificed at the altar of organized greed.

This is a system of functional inhumanity which views social services generally as subversive to free enterprise, and thus in need of deregulation. But it is also a system that belatedly is at last being questioned. Some physicians and scientists are reappraising the preventive and therapeutic value of vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements. Studies are exposing the cancer-causing toxins in the environment.

An awareness is growing that prevention and the preservation of health is far less costly to society as a whole than the treatment of the sick and the search for elusive cures. But a switch from treatment to prevention would be very costly for the corporations whose profits rise with the incidence of sickness and fall with the rise in overall well-being.

Unfortunately, we live in a world in which corporate health trumps human health. Unless we succeed in our efforts to have this twisted set of values and priorities reversed, the toll of needless deaths and suffering from cancer and other preventable ills will continue to rise.

(Fred Knelman is a long-time peace activist and writer on international affairs.)

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