May 2006:Threads of Resistance

By Daniel Martinez and Claudia Quintanilla
Briarpatch
May 2006

Two worker-driven initiatives in El Salvador have captured the imagination of a global solidarity movement.

HILDA CASTRO LIVES IN El Salvador near the capital, San Salvador, where she cares for her three children and works in a maquila, a garment assembly plant. Her hands leave no doubt as to the hard work she does to put food on the table for her family. Hilda’s sense of humour and her enthusiasm are readily apparent when she speaks.

Marta Sonia Diaz, like Hilda, has three children. She exudes cheerfulness and enthusiasm when she speaks about them, about her work, and about her union activities. Her relative youth belies the wealth of her experience and the many struggles she has witnessed over the years. Marta’s commitment to the struggle for fair working conditions and her capacity for sacrifice are inspiring.

Marta is the secretary of the Union of Textile Workers, and works closely with the Just Garments factory. Hilda is a founding member of the Cooperativa de Madres Solteras (the Single Mothers’ Co-operative).

Marta and Hilda are both veterans of the Salvadoran maquilas—they are the foot soldiers of the global garment industry. They saw the Salvadoran garment industry flourish in the 1990s, when it employed thousands of labourers. Now they are witnessing its decline as the maquilas are relocated to countries with more “competitive” conditions. But rather than remain passive victims of global trends, Marta and Hilda have become active builders of viable—if risky—alternatives that have attracted the support and captured the imagination of a global solidarity movement.

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By Ken Collier
Briarpatch
May 2006

“Medicare’s history provides us with fertile ground upon which to consider opportunities for improving and expanding public health care.”

WHILE ALBERTA STAGES PROVOCATIONS aimed at privatizing at least part of medicare, the rest of Canada watches and wonders whether provincial programs elsewhere may meet a similar fate. Much argument is made about how to defend medicare, how to keep it public, how to cure ills such as long waiting times and uneven distribution of resources. This debate falls unevenly and haphazardly across the country, usually in response to some external event such as the Quebec Supreme Court rulings on timely access to treatment.

In these circumstances, medicare could very easily become a casualty of the reactive, defensive nature of this debate. No political party has stepped forward to propose anything much beyond defending existing health programs.

Merely defending public medicare, however, is a very limited (and limiting) goal. Medicare’s history provides us with fertile ground upon which to consider opportunities for improving and expanding public health care in bold and innovative ways.

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By Macdonald Stainsby
Briarpatch
May 2006

THE NATIONS THAT CONTROL THE largest oil reserves outside of Saudi Arabia—and I�m not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan—have seen their sovereignty violated and their most valuable resource taken from them for the benefit of corporations working hand-in-glove with an occupying power. I’m talking about the Dene and the Inuvialuit indigenous to northern Canada. These Arctic and sub-Arctic indigenous nations stand to be affected by the proposed MacKenzie Gas Project, a 1200 kilometre pipeline that, once in place, would feed the vast energy needs of the Alberta tar sands industry.

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If India and Pakistan ever nuke it out, or if ever those CANDUs should snafu, Canada will have to face up to its own role as a nuclear proliferator.

By Ingmar Lee
Briarpatch
May 2006

IN A MAY 20, 1974 INTERVIEW, THE LATE CBC reporter Barbara Frum asked India’s UN Ambassador Samar Sen whether India violated its agreements with Canada in developing and detonating an atomic bomb. Ambassador Sen’s response was that India had not developed an atom bomb. “What did it develop, then?” Frum asked. Sen responded: “India just exploded an atomic device, nothing to do with a bomb. It is just one of the processes which is necessary for using atomic energy. How did you get the idea for an atom bomb?”

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Wealth, Dreams, and Comfort

“The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.”

-Balzac

“You get what you pay for. Pay a lot and you get an expensive life. Take what’s free, and you get freedom.”

-Kika Kat & Hib Chickena, off the map

“We have got to understand that they dream our dreams and we dream theirs. We have got to understand that they are us. We are them.”

-Rachel Corrie, age 10

Comfort: “that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master.”

-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

What’s left

“He hadn’t prepared himself for the situation when it’s not what you have that matters, but rather what’s left when they’ve taken everything away…He wished for some other fate: to have spent those decades storing up wisdom, refining courage, learning to distinguish the real from the imaginary and good from evil, to have prepared not for Heaven but for Hell.”

-Ariel Dorfman, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero

Sit down for Canada

“To give support to nationalist sentiments subverts, ultimately, even the values that hold a nation together, because it substitutes a colourful idol for the substantive universal values of justice and right.”

-Martha Nussbaum

Imperial prerogative

“The power of superpower: first to describe a given leadership as unacceptable; then to create the circumstances in which it becomes unacceptable; and finally to obliterate the memory of its (the superpower’s) own part in the process.”

-Salman Rushdie

“The Vice-President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. According to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail ultimately turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Wittington in the face.”

-Rob Corddry, The Daily Show’s “Vice-Presidential Mishap Analyst”

“If the rest of the world adhered to the ‘Bush Doctrine,’ they’d all attack us immediately.”

-Steve Spahr (Quoted by Michael Donnelly, Counterpunch)

The limits of lifestyle politics

“If the Situationist author Raoul Vaneigem was right that those who speak of revolution without mentioning everyday life ‘have a corpse in their mouth,’ then maybe its fair to say that those who equate revolution with the lifestyle choices of well-read drop-outs confuse making love with jerking off.”

-Jed Brandt, Clamor Magazine

Grand Theft Pentagon

Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror
Jeffrey St. Clair
Common Courage Press, 2005

In Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror, Jeffrey St. Clair (co-founder with Alexander Cockburn of the hard-hitting investigative website CounterPunch.org, which receives 60 to 70 millions hits per year) exposes, excoriates, and pillories the multitude of crooks, hacks and morally bankrupt corporate and government officials who are making billions off of war, violence and bloodshed.

The book tells the story of how some of the world’s most powerful corporations exploited the events of 9/11 to make billions in the form of government contracts with the connivance of the Bush administration. And it’s an ugly, distressing tale they tell. This is not a book that warms the heart or gives one reason to hold any faith in the US government.

In the wake of 9/11, the Pentagon was handed what St. Clair shows was essentially a blank cheque, which it used to resurrect a number of Cold War-era weapons programs—particularly the B-2 stealth bomber, the F-22 fighter and the $80 billion Star Wars missile defense system. He shows through the use of the Pentagon’s own documents that none of these exorbitant weapons systems are needed and that none of them has ever come close to working as advertised. St. Clair posits that such contracts have contributed immensely to the national debt and have sparked a new global arms race with other players including North Korea, Pakistan. China, Iran and even France.

St. Clair never pulls a punch or hides his viewpoint. Those are frivolities he doesn’t have time for. His perspective is obviously not for everyone, but he never minces words or tries to con the reader with the illusion of impartiality. He is an impeccable researcher, consistent in his viewpoints and honest to a fault. What you read is what you get.

My only complaint, and it’s a minor one, is that in this book and others by Common Courage Press the quality of proof reading is average at best. There are repetitions and deletions of words here and there that detract from otherwise well-done, important works.

- John Holt