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A great new video from our comrades at Making the Links radio:
Voices of Union - Voices of Young Workers - A compelling short documentary about the importance of unions to young workers. This video documentary shows not only why young workers want to be unionized, but also the challenges of involving young workers in the labour movement - how they could be the new leadership incorporating their hopes and concerns.
A report by Macdonald Stainsby and Dru Oja Jay
Download the report at http://www.offsettingresistance.ca
A movement is building to shut down the tar sands, one of the most destructive projects in human history. Decisions are being made about the strategies that will be used and the goals that will be pursued.
But as the number of people opposing the tar sands grows larger, the number of people making the crucial decisions is getting smaller — and closer to the oil and gas industry.
A small, secretive group of insiders has been collaborating with large American foundations and industry to concentrate decision-making power concerning anti-tar sands campaigns. Headed by Michael Marx, one of the architects of the Great Bear Rainforest deal in northwestern British Columbia, these groups have a track record and a documented trail of funding relationships that steer them–whether they intend to or not–into closed-door, backroom deals with industry and government.
Tags: activism, foundation funding, tar sands
By Raquel Brown, Media Consortium Blogger
Green jobs czar and racial justice advocate Van Jones resigned from his position as environmental adviser to the White House over Labor Day weekend. Many believe that Jones’ departure is a significant setback in environmental policy, racial equity, and another reminder that pundits can destroy credibility with very little ammunition in today’s political climate. Fox News host Glenn Beck and several Republican Congressmen criticized Jones for “controversial” past activism and called for him to step down. Jones was particularly smeared for signing a petition that requested more information on the 9/11 attacks and a derogatory comment toward Republicans, both of which he apologized for publicly.
Jones’ commitment to a sustainable environment and a green economy was especially influential on progressive youth. Kristina Rizga of Wiretap explains that Jones’ vision really resonated with young people from marginalized communities and encouraged them to get involved. Additionally, Jones played a key role in ensuring that underprivileged Americans reaped the benefits of clean energy investments and green jobs training initiatives in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
By Murray Dobbin,
TheTyee.ca
Aug 27, 2009
Campaign posters in Kabul.
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” — Karl Marx
The Afghan presidential election will prove to be simply irrelevant. The U.S., whose imperial hubris renders it ignorant of other cultures and societies, invaded Afghanistan with the stated purpose eliminating Al Qaeda (remember them, the few hundred armed followers of Osama bin what’s-his-name?). In doing so, they repeated the same blind arrogance of their imperial predecessors, the British and the Soviets.
Getting in was easy. Getting out on their own terms — with a credible pro-Western government in place — is proving almost impossible.
Tags: Afghanistan, anti-imperialism, anti-war
By Eric Margolis
Winnipeg Sun
PARIS — Pakistan finally bowed to Washington’s angry demands last week by unleashing its military against rebellious Pashtun tribesmen of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) — collectively mislabelled “Taliban” in the West.
The Obama administration had threatened to stop $2 billion US annual cash payments to bankrupt Pakistan’s political and military leadership and block $6.5 billion future aid, unless Islamabad sent its soldiers into Pakistan’s turbulent NWFP along the Afghan frontier.
The result was a bloodbath: Some 1,000 “terrorists” killed (read: mostly civilians) and 1.2 million people — most of Swat’s population — made refugees.
Pakistan’s U.S.-rented armed forces have scored a brilliant victory against their own people. Too bad they don’t do as well in wars against India. Blasting civilians, however, is much safer and more profitable.
Tags: AfPak, counter-insurgency, foreign policy, imperialism, Pakistan
By Michael Skinner
The Bullet (Socialist Project)
April 25, 2009
The fact that the Taliban is a party of the peasant classes, but certainly not the only one, is not news in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It is thus interesting that The New York Times (“Taliban Exploit Class Rifts to Gain Ground in Pakistan,” 16 April 2009) is now exploiting the fact the Taliban do represent significant groups of peasants as if this is news. This indication of a possible reframing of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a class war is significant as the U.S. escalates the intensity and scale of warfare in the region.
My Afghan-Canadian research partner, Hamayon Rastgar, has said many times since we returned from a research trip in Afghanistan that “the West gives the monopoly of anti-imperialism to the Taliban” by crushing and continuing to suppress socialist forces in Afghanistan and by portraying the complex insurgency in the simplistic way Western governments and media do.
Many non-violent resisters as well as various insurgent groups oppose the Taliban, the mujaheddin, and imperialist forces. The complexity of the resistance and insurgent forces remain opaque to most Western analysts. Articles by Afghan intellectuals engaged in non-violent resistance against all the forces of repression – the Taliban, the mujaheddin, and the Western forces – are rarely translated for Western readers. Westerners believe all insurgents are under a Taliban banner. However, as an Afghan Maoist leader told us: “The government credits the Taliban for every insurgent attack; the Taliban like to take the credit; and that works for everyone else at this moment.”
It is important to recall that the militaries of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), from the U.S., Britain, Canada, and Australia, set the stage to institute a supposedly ‘democratic’ state in Afghanistan. However, this state is a reconstitution of the theocratic Islamic Republic of Afghanistan originally instituted in 1992. The Islamic Republic was instituted by one of several competing mujaheddin factions who were built up as part of the U.S.’s anti-socialist “freedom fighters.” The later rise of the Talban, facilitated as it was by the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA, the ISI, was in good part a response to the horrors inflicted on Afghans by conflicts between the rival mujaheddin factions after 1992. Several of these factions retreated to the north, in 1996, fleeing from the advance of Taliban military forces. These mujaheddin factions formed the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, which the Western news media sanitised with the title Northern Alliance.
In an article in Briarpatch (March/April 2008) regarding the use and abuse of feminism to sell Canada’s war in Afghanistan, I wrote: “The Taliban are radical Islamists intent on isolating Afghans from the world; the mujaheddin are radical Islamists intent on profiting from their relationship to the U.S. and now Canada. The Taliban are reprehensible, but the mujaheddin are hardly different; both created misogynistic regimes based on erroneous interpretations of Islam.”
The Taliban and mujaheddin also share a hatred of ‘Godless’ socialists. It is still illegal, based on religious grounds, as it has been since 1992, to form a socialist party in the elected theocracy of Afghanistan. Freedom of religion is supposedly guaranteed by the new Afghanistan constitution. But in practice the state acts in a way that all Afghans are considered Muslim by default. This misses the incredible cultural diversity in Afghanistan, and the many religions including several unique indigenous ones, that Afghans practice. Moreover, socialists (which include an important organized Maoist component) are not likely to have suddenly found salvation in Islam. There is, it seems, no Islamic equivalent of Latin American liberation theology or Canadian Christian socialism in Afghanistan.
The kicker is that in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan apostasy is punishable by death. Any Afghan socialist could be ‘legally’ executed on the grounds she or he has converted from Islam. Moreover, the Afghan Supreme Court ruled socialists are legally atheists to ban socialist parties from electoral politics.
Despite this suppression, Afghan Maoists claim they have consolidated disparate Maoist and socialist organisations into a new party. The Maoists also claim they will eventually beat the Taliban in a competition for the hearts and minds of peasants, once the insurgency has exhausted the OEF-NATO occupation, which even Afghan liberals consider as an imperialist occupation.
Even Michael Ignatieff (2003), in his book Empire Lite, which is a collection of his New York Times essays, explicitly identifies the occupation of Afghanistan as imperialist. Ignatieff just happens to think this imperialist occupation is “humanitarian,” because, he argues, imposing a liberal world order in Central Asia is preferable to allowing people he claims are “barbarians” the autonomy to govern their own affairs. The fact that the hierarchical priorities of this liberal world order rank the accumulation of state power and individual wealth far above observation of international laws and human rights is, for Ignatieff, an inconvenient but unavoidable truth. Ignatieff’s complaint is that this empire needs to throw its weight around more forcefully to establish liberal world order – an argument the Obama administration seems to be implementing.
Tags: Afghanistan, anti-imperialism, class, counter-insurgency, imperialism, media, Pakistan, war, war on terror
Global Symposium on Engaging Men and Boys on Achieving Gender Equality
Rio de Janeiro
March 29 – April 3, 2009
PART ONE: PREAMBLE
We come from eighty countries. We are men and women, young and old, working side by side with respect and shared goals. We are active in community organizations, religious and educational institutions; we are representatives of governments, NGOs and the United Nations. We speak many languages, we look like the diverse peoples of the world and carry their diverse beliefs and religions, cultures, physical abilities, and sexual and gender identities. We are indigenous peoples, immigrants, and ones whose ancestors moved across the planet. We are fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, brothers and sisters, partners and lovers, husbands and wives.
What unites us is our strong outrage at the inequality that still plagues the lives of women and girls, and the self-destructive demands we put on boys and men. But even more so, what brings us together here is a powerful sense of hope, expectation, and possibility for we have seen the capacity of men and boys to change, to care, to cherish, to love passionately, and to work for justice for all.
We are outraged by the pandemic of violence women face at the hands of some men, by the relegation of women to second class status, and the continued domination by men of our economies, of our politics, of our social and cultural institutions, in far too many of our homes. We also know that among women there are those who fare even worse because of their social class, their religion, their language, their physical differences, their ancestry, their sexual orientation, or simply where they live.
There are deep costs to boys and men from the ways our societies have defined men’s power and raised boys to be men. Boys deny their humanity in search of an armor-plated masculinity. Young men and boys are sacrificed as cannon fodder in war for those men of political, economic, and religious power who demand conquest and domination at any cost. Many men cause terrible harm to themselves because they deny their own needs for physical and mental care or lack services when they are in need.
Too many men suffer because our male-dominated world is not only one of power of men over women, but of some groups of men over others. Too many men, like too many women, live in terrible poverty, in degradation, or are forced to do body- or soul-destroying work to put food on the table.
Too many men carry the deep scars of trying to live up to the impossible demands of manhood and find terrible solace in risk-taking, violence, self-destruction or the drink and drugs sold to make a profit for others. Too many men experience violence at the hands of other men.
Too many men are stigmatized and punished for the simple fact they love, desire and have sex with other men.
We are here because we know that the time when women stood alone in speaking out against discrimination and violence – that this time is coming to an end.
We also know this: This belief in the importance of engaging men and boys is no longer a remote hope. We see the emergence of organizations and campaigns that are directly involving hundreds of thousands, millions of men in almost every country on the planet. We hear men and boys speaking out against violence, practicing safer sex, and supporting women’s and girl’s reproductive rights. We see men caring, loving, and nurturing for other men and for women. We see men who embrace the daily challenges of looking after babies and children, and delight in their capacity to be nurturers. We see many men caring for the planet and rejecting conquering nature just as men once conquered women.
We are gathering not simply to celebrate our first successes, but, with all the strength we possess, to appeal to parents, teachers, and coaches, to the media and businesses, to our governments, NGOs, religious institutions, and the United Nations, to mobilize the political will and economic resources required to increase the scale and impact of work with men and boys to promote gender equality. We know how critical it is that institutions traditionally controlled by men reshape their policies and priorities to support gender equality and the well-being of women, children, and men. And we know that a critical part of that is to reshape the world of men and boys, the beliefs of men and boys, and the lives of men and boys.
Tags: feminism, gender, masculinity, men
Campus sit-ins began as a response to the Gaza attacks, but unrest is already spilling over to other issues.
They are the iPod generation of students: politically apathetic, absorbed by selfish consumerism, dedicated to a few years of hedonism before they land a lucrative job in the City. Not any more. A seismic change is taking place in British universities.
Around the UK, thousands of students have occupied lecture theaters, offices and other buildings at more than 20 universities in sit-down protests. It seems that the spirit of 1968 has returned to the campus.While it was the situation in Gaza that triggered this mass protest, the beginnings of political enthusiasm have already spread to other issues.
Tags: activism, hope, Israel/Palestine, protest, student activism
By Naomi Klein
The Nation
Watching the crowds in Iceland banging pots and pans until their government fell reminded me of a chant popular in anti-capitalist circles in 2002: “You are Enron. We are Argentina.”
Its message was simple enough. You–politicians and CEOs huddled at some trade summit–are like the reckless scamming execs at Enron (of course, we didn’t know the half of it). We–the rabble outside–are like the people of Argentina, who, in the midst of an economic crisis eerily similar to our own, took to the street banging pots and pans. They shouted, “¡Que se vayan todos!” (”All of them must go!”) and forced out a procession of four presidents in less than three weeks. What made Argentina’s 2001-02 uprising unique was that it wasn’t directed at a particular political party or even at corruption in the abstract. The target was the dominant economic model–this was the first national revolt against contemporary deregulated capitalism.
It’s taken a while, but from Iceland to Latvia, South Korea to Greece, the rest of the world is finally having its ¡Que se vayan todos! moment.
Tags: activism, anti-capitalism, economics, globalization, protest, resistance
By Joshua Holland
AlterNet.org
Explosive anger is spilling out onto the streets of Europe. The meltdown of the global economy is igniting massive social unrest in a region that has long been a symbol of political stability and social cohesion. It’s not a new trend: A wave of upheaval is spreading from the poorer countries on the periphery of the global economy to the prosperous core. Over the past few years, a series of riots spread across what is patronizingly known as the Third World. Furious mobs have raged against skyrocketing food and energy prices, stagnating wages and unemployment in India, Senegal, Yemen, Indonesia, Morocco, Cameroon, Brazil, Panama, the Philippines, Egypt, Mexico and elsewhere. For the most part, those living in wealthier countries took little notice. But now, with the global economy crashing down around us, people in even the wealthiest nations are mad as hell and reacting violently to what they view as an inadequate response to their tumbling economies.
The Telegraph (UK) warned last month that protests over governments’ handling of the crisis “are widespread and gathering pace,” and “may spark a new revolution”: A depression triggered in America is being played out in Europe with increasing violence, and other forms of social unrest are spreading. In Iceland, a government has fallen. Workers have marched in Zaragoza, as Spanish unemployment heads towards 20 percent. There have been riots and bloodshed in Greece, protests in Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and Bulgaria. The police have suppressed public discontent in Russia and will be challenged again at large gatherings this weekend. Consider a snapshot of a single week of unrest, courtesy of the Guardian:
Greece: “There are many wellsprings of the serial protests rolling across Europe. In Athens, it was students and young people who suddenly mobilized to turn parts of the city into no-go areas. They were sick of the lack of jobs and prospects, the failings of the education system and seized with pessimism over their future. “This week it was the farmers’ turn, rolling their tractors out to block the motorways, main road and border crossings across the Balkans to try to obtain better procurement prices for their produce.”
Latvia: “The old Baltic trading city had seen nothing like it since the happy days of kicking out the Russians and overthrowing communism two decades ago. More than 10,000 people converged on the 13th century cathedral to show the Latvian government what they thought of its efforts at containing the economic crisis. The peaceful protest morphed into a late-night rampage as a minority headed for the parliament, battled with riot police and trashed parts of the old city. The following day, there were similar scenes in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital next door.”
France: “Burned-out cars, masked youths, smashed shop windows and more than a million striking workers. The scenes from France are familiar, but not so familiar to President Nicolas Sarkozy, confronting the first big wave of industrial unrest of his time in the Elysée Palace. “France, meanwhile, is moving into recession, and unemployment is going up. The latest jobless figures were to have been released yesterday, but were held back, apparently for fear of inflaming the protests.”
Iceland: “Proud of its status as one of the world’s most developed, most productive and most equal societies, Iceland is in the throes of what is, by its staid standards, a revolution. “Riot police in Reykjavik, the coolest of capitals. Building bonfires in front of the world’s oldest parliament. The yogurt flying at the free market men who have run the country for decades and brought it to its knees.”
Britain (via the Times of London): “Wildcat strikes flared at more than 19 sites across the country in response to claims that British tradesmen were being barred from construction jobs by contractors using cheaper foreign workers.”
Russia (via Al-Jazeera): “Thousands of protesters have rallied across Russia to criticize the government’s economic policies and its response to the global financial crisis. “Russian police forcefully broke up many of the anti-government protests on Saturday, arresting dozens of demonstrators.”
At least in Western Europe, cries of “burn the shit down!” are being heard in countries with some of the highest standards of living in the world — states with adequate social safety nets; countries where all citizens have access to decent health care and heavily subsidized educations. Places where minimum wages are also living wages, and a dignified retirement is in large part guaranteed.The far ends of the ideological spectrum appear to be gaining currency as the crisis develops, and people grow increasingly hostile toward the politics of the status quo. The Financial Times quotes Olivier Besancenot, a young leader of “France’s extreme left,” promising “to reinvent and re-establish the anti-capitalist project.” “We want the established powers to be blown apart,” Besancenot said. Europe’s far right is gaining momentum, too, using the economy and populist outrage over immigration to gain a legitimacy it hasn’t enjoyed in some time.
Notably absent from the list of countries where the economic crunch is rending the social fabric is the good ole US of A, a state with the greatest level of economic inequality in the wealthy world. Outside of a few scattered and quickly contained protests, the citizens of the U.S. — a country born of revolution, but with an elite that’s been terrified of that legacy since immediately after its founding — have been calm, despite opinion polls showing that Americans are more dissatisfied with the direction in which the country has been headed since they began measuring such things. It’s a baffling disconnect, considering that real wages for all but the top 10 percent of the economic pile haven’t increased in 35 years. It’s more bizarre still when you consider that while European governments have handled their own bailouts relatively transparently, the U.S. government has doled out close to $10 trillion in bailouts, loan guarantees and fiscal stimulus — if there were a million-dollar bill, that would be a stack of 10 million of them — with a stunning lack of oversight or accountability.
Even the congressional commission charged with overseeing key parts of the banking bailout can’t get answers to basic questions like “who’s getting what?” Americans are rightfully angry about that state of affairs, but with a few small exceptions, quietly so. Why? It depends on whom you ask. In a 2006 interview with Harper’s, Barack Obama shared a subtle, but rather fundamental observation about America’s political culture: “Since the founding,” he said, “the American political tradition has been reformist, not revolutionary.” If there is to be positive change, Obama has argued, it must be gradual; “brick by brick,” as he put it in one of his final campaign speeches. Mark Ames, author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion — From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond, argues that Americans have been beaten down to a degree that they’re now a pacified population, largely willing to accept any economic outrage its elites impose on them. In a 2005 interview with AlterNet, Ames said the “slave mentality” is stronger in the U.S. than elsewhere, “in part because no other country on earth has so successfully crushed every internal rebellion.”
Slaves in the Caribbean for example rebelled a lot more because their oppressors weren’t as good at oppressing as Americans were. America has put down every rebellion, brutally, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Confederate rebellion to the proletarian rebellions, Black Panthers, white militias … you name it. This creates a powerful slave mentality, a sense that it’s pointless to rebel. Anyone who has witnessed the brutal police riots that have become so common since the infamous “Battle in Seattle” protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 can tell you there’s some merit to the argument. It’s also the case that European societies tend to be more homogenous than the mishmash of tribes we call the United States. Whereas Americans are divided by religion, region, ethnicity, urban-rural tensions and all the other trappings of the “culture wars,” the primary split in most European countries is class. Thomas Frank argued eloquently in What’s the Matter With Kansas that those wedge social issues that the American right nurtures with such care obscure the fundamental differences between the rich and poor, the powerful and the disenfranchised.
Indeed, any hint of discussion of economic inequality in the U.S. is shot down with cries of “class warfare” — exactly what is playing out in the streets of much of the world today. As the crisis deepens, as virtually every analyst predicts it will, that may well change. As The Nation’s Bill Greider told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, “you can’t do this to people year after year — that is, upturn their lives, take away what they thought they had earned, and so forth and so on, without provoking rather intense political reactions. … We’re just, just beginning to see a few bubbles like that around this country. I don’t say we’re going to have riots, but I think … people, out of their own distress and anger, will organize their own politics, and they will make themselves seen and heard around this country.” Stay tuned.
Tags: activism, economics, resistance, riots, U.S. politics
