» Archive: March 2006
Concordia Elections
The last day of voting in the Concordia University Student Union elections is today.
This year, the elections have been particularly insane. A few highlights:
- The administration and alumni association spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to increase student voter turnout as a way to prevent the left (which, few would dispute, they're quite scared of) from winning
- The curiously well-funded right wing slate (Evolution in the past, Experience this year). Some folks called up the firm that did their web site, and got a quote of $7000+ for a similar site. The spending limit is $750.
- The appearance of a phantom slate called "Conscious Concordia" (the actual lefty slate is called "Conscious") on the ballot. The Chief Election Officer left the slate off of the sample ballot that was sent out. Despite plenty of precedent for removing names that are even somewhat similar in the past, the CEO left it on.
- When the phantom slate (for which no one campaigned at all, and seems to exist for the sole purpose of confusing voters) was finally removed from the ballot on the second day of voting, albeit in a half-assed way, the phantom slate filed for a court injunction. No one knows where a slate that has not run any sort of campaign found money for legal fees.
- The administration sent security guards to harrass students who were handing out the student newspaper, the Link, to students. The Link contained a story explaining the phantom slate, and a fair bit of coverage critical of the right wing slate.
- Wednesday morning, administration officials attempted to remove all copies of the Link from campus. They only stopped when the Link threatened a court injunction.
Russia and China
Asia Times: "Putin has sought to promote sales of Russian industrial goods, but China is not much interested in anything except commodities and arms."
Live from Haiti
Halifax independent journalists Stuart Neatby and John Dimond-Gibson are in Haiti, and have been posting photos and updates on their weblog.
Paddy Public Enemy Number One
"You may take the shamrock from your hat and cast it on the sod/But it will take root and flourish there, though underfoot it's trod."
Daniel Patrick Welch looks at the political origins of Saint Patrick's Day through traditional Irish songs.
Cuban "Journalists"
William Blum tackles that old bugbear, the issue of Cuban "independent journalists".
The DNC and the Grassroots
CounterPunch reports on the Democratic party's internal fights
The "mainstream" Democratic losers like Rep. Rahm Emanuel and Sen. Charles Schumer, who want the Democratic Party to remain a top-down, hollowed-out shell of an organization incapable of challenging Republican power, are frightened silly by the groundswell of public sentiment for impeachment, and for ending the war in Iraq. While Dean, as DNC chair, may be trying his best to shift the party in a more progressive and oppositional direction, they are busy undercutting progressive candidates for office, financing "acceptable" candidates (who are likely to lose their races), and preventing independent action and confrontation in Congress ala Feingold's motion.
Also, Ralph Nader: "I just received a letter from Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, describing me as a 'Democratic Leader' and 'an active and engaged member of our Party in your community.' He asks for my 'opinions' which 'will help shape the future direction of the Democratic Party and make us more effective in building grassroots support for our agenda.'"
Patrick Elie: High Profile
The Coast: "The Haitian human rights activist and former government minister [Patrick Elie], who spoke in front of an audience of 75 at Dalhousie University last week as part of a national speaking tour, arrived in Canada on February 21st, only to be informed by agents of the Canadian Secret Intelligence Services (CSIS), that he had been placed on a Designated High Profile list, and that his movements in the country would be monitored by the Canadian government. He has since been interrogated three times while traveling throughout Canada."
Anagram
Colby Cosh: "The other day, in a now-vaporized thread on Covered in Oil, I rearranged the letters in 'TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS' and found the phrase 'PLAN FOR TEAM TO LOSE'. In a just world this would guarantee my immortality..."
It's (not) getting better all the time
NYTimes: "Especially in American inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legitimate work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime declines. Although the deep problems afflicting poor black men have been known for decades, the new data paint the most alarming picture yet of ravaged lives and a deepening national calamity that scholars say has received too little attention."
War crimes in Yugoslavia
Jeremy Scahill: "Milosevic's death means that those who bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days beginning 7 years ago this month, killing thousands, will be, once and for all protected from any public scrutiny for their crimes. However opportunistic Milosevic may have been, he would have been one of the few people to appear at the Hague that could have--and would have--laid out these crimes in great detail."
In support of Anti-occupation demonstrations
[An impolite question for Canadian anti-war activists, sent in by Stewart Steinhauer, and posted belatedly. It remains relevant. -- dru ]
March 18th is approaching. Plain ordinary folks around the world are getting ready to protest the 3rd anniversary of the US/UK invasion of Iraq. March 18th, 2003, was the first time in human history that a massive global human protest against war occurred on the day a war of aggression was launched.
Nechwamps was asked if he would speak at an anti-war rally in Red Deer, in 2003. He and I discussed it and came to the conclusion that, until the day came when ordinary Albertans recognized that they are guilty of invasion and occupation, causing, over time, an uncounted death toll amongst the indigenous civilian population, and unimaginable suffering for all those still living, it didn’t make much sense to protest the US/UK invasion and occupation in Iraq.
We can’t even effectively protest the Canadian invasion and occupation of indigenous lands, waged to gain non-market access to indigenous resources.
Since 2003, I have been asking this question about invasion and occupation of indigenous lands to secure access to indigenous resources, directing the question to Canadian antiwar activists, and so far, I haven’t had a single coherent response. If I could gain access to Health Canada’s cause of death records for the years 2003, 2004, and 2005, I could tell Canadian antiwar activists more or less how much collateral damage has occurred for indigenous Peoples inside of Canada in that interval.
Correct me if I’m right, but since 2004 Canada has been the main supplier of energy to the US, used to fuel the US war economy. The province of Alberta sits on the second largest single pool of hydrocarbon energy in the world, albeit costly to extract. The Alberta provincial government and the Canadian federal government are colluding with the US gas/oil junta to get that oil sands energy into a usable form, and get it pipelined to the US. Unfortunately, we all know what the US will use it for, a prodigious display of this use being broadcast 24/7 globally on every TV channel.
As an alternative to protesting the invasion and occupation of Iraq this coming Saturday, why don’t you well-intentioned Canadian antiwar activists protest your own invasion and occupation of indigenous lands, and your own benefits accruing from non-market access to the natural wealth of these lands? Why don’t Canadian antiwar activists protest Canada’s long history as a leader in world politics, providing over time, as Canada has done, a model for such developments as South Africa’s apartheid regime, and Israel’s Palestinian policies?
The Israeli Air Force joined the Canadian Air Force and the US Air Force for training exercises at Cold Lake Air Force base in 2005, so that the Israelis could teach the Canadians and Americans how to kill a single moving human target on the ground, from as high as 25,000 feet. The world’s largest NATO training base is right beside the world’s largest secure energy reserve.
Both the NATO base and the energy reserve is on invaded and occupied land; the Original Peoples of this invaded and occupied land are, in an incredible public show of genocidal racism, not even counted as human beings. Canada is the only nation in the world with legislation like Canada’s Indian Act. My question to Canadian antiwar activists as March 18th looms is:
When are you going to begin protesting your own invasion and occupation of my lands?
East Timor still suffering
"East Timor remains the poorest country in South East Asia nearly four years after independence, the UN says - and it is getting poorer. "
Read about it here: E Timor 'poor and getting poorer'
"Let's put it in the ground instead..."
In an attempt to halt CO2 gases from being released into the climate, Shell and the Norwegian company Statoil plan to use extra CO2 to "raise oil output, curb global warming, and avert a future power crisis in central Norway".
"Under this scheme, Statoil would capture CO2 from a huge, 860-megawatt gas-fired power plant to be built at the company's Tjeldbergodden methanol complex in mid-Norway.
The CO2 would then be piped to Shell's Draugen oilfield off Norway - and later also to Statoil's Heidrun field - and injected into subsea reservoirs, to force oil to the surface."
End Homelessness?
Seattle Weekly: The Plan to Nowhere?
It's the largest experiment to end homelessness since the latest wave of homeless hit America's streets in the mid-1980s. For the past 20 years, attempts to end homelessness have been largely motivated by ethics and a general sense that it's shameful for 3 million people to be homeless in the world's richest country. But good intentions in the form of a fragmented, gridlocked system of homeless shelters, transitional housing, and soup kitchens have not fixed the problem."The very definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results," says Philip Mangano, executive director of the Bush administration's Interagency Council on Homelessness.
Mangano's definition of sanity is to recognize that it is far cheaper to provide homeless people with permanent housing than to let them bounce from the streets to jail to a hospital emergency room. Housing First, as the approach is known. It's supposed to be better, faster, and cheaper. Mangano and others argue that, enlightened by potentially billions of dollars in cost savings, policy-makers, Congress, and state legislatures will open the public purse and fund permanent housing projects and medical services. The experiment is broadly known as "The 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness," the by-product of President George W. Bush's call for an end to homelessness in his 2003 budget message.
But while touting a new approach, the Bush administration is already undercutting the experiment by making crucial cuts to housing and medical programs, especially ones serving the mentally ill, needed for ending homelessness. The city of Seattle, too, is making service cuts. As a result, St. Martin de Porres, a downtown homeless shelter that houses 212 older men each night, will close two days a week” and those men, many disabled, will hit the streets.
Irish times Chomsky
Interestin interview with Noam Chomsky in the Irish Times.
One of the most hopeful signs in the United States - I think very hopeful - is that there is an enormous gap between public policy and public attitudes. In fact the gap is so strong that the press literally does not report the studies of public attitudes, literally.
I'll give you an example. The federal budget comes out around February every year for the next year. After the last federal budget last February, one of the major polling institutions in the world, the Program on International Policy Attitudes based in the University of Maryland, which does in - depth studies, did a study of people's attitudes to wards the budget. They were the reverse of the budget. Where the budget was going up, the population wanted it to go down. Where it was going down, they wanted it to go up.The public was strongly opposed to increased military spending, supplementals for Iraq and Afghanistan. It was very strongly in favour of increases in social spending, health, education, renewable energy, support for United Nations peacekeeping operations... across the board. And it was almost the inverse of the budget.
Well I had a friend do a database search on that. Not a single newspaper in the country reported it. In a democratic society people should know what others believe. And it [the suppression of polls] is quite common. Right before the November 2004 elections, the same people, the Program on International Policy Attitudes in Maryland and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, which does the main monitoring of attitudes on international affairs, published a couple of big joint studies. They came out right before the election. They were barely mentioned in the press but they were very striking. Again they showed that both main political parties are far to the right of the population on a whole range of important issues, ranging from the Kyoto protocol to the "right of intervention", which the public opposes. It [the government] takes a pretty conservative view of the UN Charter. Yet support for the United Nations was very strong.
In fact, to my amazement, a small majority of the population thinks the US ought to give up the veto and follow general world opinion even if it doesn't like it.
[Public opinion] Strongly support s more social spending. Take, say, health care. It's the leading domestic issue in the United States, by far. People are really worried about it and it's a huge fiscal crisis when you have to deal with the most inefficient system in the industrialised world. A strong, large majority of the population wants some kind of national health care. Neither political party will touch it. In fact, when the press ever mentions it, it's called "politically impossible" or "lacking political support" or something. It tells you something about their attitude to democracy. But this gulf has implications. It means if the democratic deficit can be overcome, if the public can somehow, if public attitudes have some influence on public policy a lot of things could change. That's very hopeful. The general population is a lot more civilised than it was back in the 1960s or 1950s.
Review of WSWS news
According to a UN report, hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals have been assassinated by death squads.
250 000 Mexican miners and steelworkers went on strike at the beginning of March.
Japan is having a debate on social inequality. Whoa. And PM Koizumi is feeling some heat.
The US and the coalition of the willing is holding 14 000 civilians in Iraq without trial or charges.
AT&T's merger means that 10,000 jobs will be cut.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended by an Adjudication Panel after an exchange with a reporter.
Movements
Thousands are in the streets in El Salvador, protesting the implementation of CAFTA.
The Global Womens' Strike is demanding social and economic recognition of "unwaged caring work".
Activists and community members are fighting the eviction of a successful community farm in South Central Los Angeles.
11,000 people in Belgium demanded status for the country's 150,000 non status sans papiers.
"Riot" police in South Korea attacked a village that has been resisting the expansion of a US military base.
Students at various University of California campuses stripped off clothes to protest the use of sweatshops for official University apparel.
Coverage of the Zapatistas' "Other Campaign" is being translated into Farsi by Iranian activists.
The folks at Narco News have been covering the alleged corruption of DEA officials in Colombia by--who else?--drug traffickers.
Impeachment
Washington Post: "In a white-clapboard town hall, voters gathered Tuesday to conduct their community's business and to call for the impeachment of President Bush."
More from AT
Lots of interesting coverage from Asia Times.
Asia Times: "South Korea and the US have drifted so far apart on North Korea policy there is now speculation the longtime partners are getting close to divorce."
A three part series on China:
1. Is China headed for a social 'red alert'? "Economic inequality and social protests in China have become a frequent topic in the Western press. The startling figure of 74,000 protests across China in 2004, up from 58,000 the previous year, has popped up in many newspapers, as has China's most recent Gini coefficient of 0.45, suggesting that economic inequality in China has in fact surpassed that of the US and UK with their allegedly cold-blooded 'Anglo-Saxon' model of capitalism."
2. China's revolution for everyone and no one "There is a very widespread perception that street protests are just the first step in a continuum that leads inexorably to riots and ultimately revolution. But this is misleading, because there is a huge qualitative difference between protests and revolution."
3. Beijing's great Hong Kong experiment "The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) envisages an orderly transition to democracy, guided by the party. While the minimum time frame for the change is 15 years, there is also a maximum time frame, placing the transition around mid-century. In 2047 Hong Kong fully returns to "Chinese sovereignty" under the 50-year clause in the Sino-British agreement that returned the former colony to China in 1997, and it is highly probable that Beijing will adapt to Hong Kong's political system, not the other way around."
"new socialist countryside"
Asia Times: China goes back to the land
But the emphasis in this year's report on building a "new socialist countryside" betrays a worrying trend for the central government: outside of the urban centers - which, following the old Soviet model, have been the focus of economic development since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 - there is growing civil unrest over the gross inequities of China's phenomenal economic growth.Arguably, this increasing discontent among the 800 million people who live in China's rural areas transformed this past year into a grassroots movement that is primarily aimed at combating local corruption, but has also shaken Chinese leaders at the highest level.
Surveillance culture for a few cheaters?
CBC: "A university in the Halifax area is banning the use of computer software designed to help professors catch plagiarists....Students at several Canadian universities that use the service have objected to the practice, saying an American company is profiting by fostering an atmosphere of distrust at Canadian campuses."
A part of our heritage
CBC: Winning Tim Hortons cup sparks bitter row
When the two girls discovered the cup was the winner of a $28,700 Toyota RAV4, they took it to a teacher at the school, who called the girls' parents.The 10-year-old's father, who wasn't identified, arrived first and took the cup, saying he planned to sell the vehicle and would offer some of the money to the second child's family.
But when the 12-year-old's mother, Nathalie Prevost, showed up, she said her family deserved to take the prize.
Indian Act and Corruption at Tobique First Nation
Some members of the Maliseet community in Tobique have set up a web site that details band council corruption and the many problems with the Indian Act.
Capers in the Fort
CBC: "Alberta paycheques worth millions of dollars are pouring into Cape Breton's economy each week, as oil workers send their dollars back home to the Nova Scotia island."
Kirby and Ali
Kirby Puckett and Ali Farka Touré both passed away today. They will be missed.
Plain Crash into Brokeback Mountain
I have yet to see "Crash", but Counterpunch has a contrarian take on it.
Although it is established early on that he is deeply flawed, it is ultimately suggested that his sins are to be forgiven due to his heroics. Because Dillon's character is never held accountable for his repugnance and moreover in the end romanticized, "Crash" does more to uphold the subconscious structures of white supremacy than destroy them.
Along similar lines, there's John Scagliotti's Why Are There No Real Gays in "Brokeback Mountain"?
Gay men in the sixties who were forced to live a straight life knew how to wear the mask of heterosexuality, but once together the mask fell. They were in on each other's secret, and with that secret came language, gestures, a dry, knowing, sometimes gallows sense of humor-subtle things that say, "We're different," because we are. Straight actors, no matter how deeply they believe they can play a role, have no experience of that mask or how to let it drop. They certainly haven't the slightest chance of understanding it in a creative team as robustly heterosexual as this one. It's maybe hard for people to fathom, but casting real straight men in roles that are so clearly in need of real gay men is no different from casting Jimmy Dean in the Sidney Poitier role in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
April
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Tell us.
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Thailand: Election Boycott
Asia Times: "When Thailand goes to the polls on April 2, voters will be faced with just one choice: caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's Thai Rak Thai party - a prospect that sets the country's struggling democracy on an uncharted course. The main opposition Democrat Party, along with the smaller Chat Thai and Mahachon parties, followed through Thursday on their threat to boycott the snap polls Thaksin called last week to head off mounting criticism. Thaksin had declared on national television that the election result would put an end to the rallies and corruption allegations that in recent weeks have rocked his government's credibility."
Libertad?
village voice > news >Village Voice: "On September 23, 1868, a gutsy band of Puerto Rican nationalists launched a revolt against their Spanish rulers. The uprising failed within 24 hours. On September 23, 2005, FBI agents shot and killed a fugitive Puerto Rican independence leader. Now New York's independista community is hoping that anger over that death ends Puerto Rico's 100-plus years as a U.S. possession."
So they're not coming back?
CTV.ca: "You do not send men and women into harm's way on a dangerous mission with the support of our party and other Canadians, and then decide when they're over there that you're not sure you should have sent them. That's not the way this government is going to behave," Harper said.
Not the precautionary principle anymore
BBC: "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had previously said gases such as CO2 were 'probably' to blame. Its latest draft report will be sent to world governments next month. A source told the BBC: 'The measurements from the natural world on all parts of the globe have been anomalous over the past decade. If a few were out of kilter we wouldn't be too worried, because the Earth changes naturally. But the fact that they are virtually all out of kilter makes us very concerned.'"
India and Pharmacos
Wired News: A Nation of Guinea Pigs
...the government is working to advertise India's most pharmacologically appealing qualities, notably its doctors (English-speaking and educated abroad) and its vast number of ailing patients - 32 million diabetics alone. Many of these patients are also, in the delicate parlance of the drug world, "treatment naive," meaning they've never taken any medication for their illnesses. This is a perk for trial managers, because it lowers the risk of unforeseen drug interactions and avoids the troublesome process of weaning patients off one medication and onto another.
Last year, the government took a more controversial step, amending a long-standing law that limited the kind of trials that foreign pharmaceutical companies could conduct. That law allowed companies to test drugs on Indian patients only after the drugs had been proven safe in trials conducted in the country of origin. In January, the government threw out that constraint. India, the brilliant hub of outsourced labor, was positioning itself in a newly lucrative role: guinea pig to the world.
What they says when you ask em.
Stars & Stripes: "Seventy-two percent of troops on the ground in Iraq think U.S. military forces should get out of the country within a year, according to a Zogby poll released Tuesday."
Pimps in Moncton
CBC New Brunswick: "RCMP believe a criminal network is recruiting young sex trade workers from New Brunswick, with pimps sending prostitutes back and forth between Moncton, Halifax and Niagara Falls. Codiac RCMP Const. Michel Mercier says recruiters in Moncton are going to high schools to find young men and women to bring into the trade. 'Recruiters are going to school or evening dances. They will try to do recruitment through the internet.'"
Record Breaking Weather
CBC North: "Warm temperatures and rain showers across southern Baffin Island have broken almost every record on the books."