The Way I See It

No All Party Parliamentary Support for NATO War On Libya

2011-06-02T19:57:00.001-07:00

TO THE LEADERS OF THE PARLIAMENTARY OPPOSITION PARTIES IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.

June 2nd 2011

Don Currie Chair, Canadians for Peace and Socialism (CPS)
Box 168 Slocan BC
V0G 2C0

Phone: 250 355 2669

www.FocusOnSocialism.ca

No All-Party Parliamentary Support for Prime Minister Harper’s US -NATO War on Libya!

The US-NATO war of terror against Libya is designed to send a message to all of the people of the Middle East and Africa that governments and movements of the people that lack the approval of US-NATO potentates such as Prime Minister Harper will face murderous punishment, using the most advanced weaponry.

The US-NATO war on Libya is poised to enter a new and more dangerous phase with the deployment of massive US-NATO sea, air and land forces . A land invasion is planned. Canadian armed forces will be part of this aggression. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25081

The leaders of the US-NATO North Atlantic-Euro alliance, calling themselves the “international community”, presume to set the international standard of governance for all countries of the world. Those who don’t abide by that standard will be militarily attacked.

Leaders lacking the approval of the US-NATO overlords are routinely demonized and assassinated. Governments are overthrown and replaced, civilians killed, their homes, their schools, their hospitals, their environment destroyed at will. Leaders and Governments that defy the US-NATO overlords and attempt to dispose of their own oil and other resources, build economies that suit their needs, conduct their internal affairs as they see fit, without first seeking the approval of US-G8-NATO potentates are bombed into the dark ages. In essence, that is the foreign policy of the Conservative Government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

A majority of Canadians have not decided that Prime Minister Harper’s foreign policy has their support. Recent polls suggest otherwise. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/05/31/pol-environics-poll.html. Even many Conservatives do not support US-NATO aggression.

The collusion among all of the parties during the federal election to mute foreign policy debate made it difficult for Canadians to voice their opinion on these crucial issues. Failure to discuss foreign policy helped Prime Minister Harper win a majority.

Given the opportunity to express their opinion it is doubtful if the current war policy of the Conservative Government would be supported by a majority of Canadians. Canadian public opinion has time and again supported a foreign policy of peace and diplomacy, not war and propaganda. http://yvesengler.com/2011/03/29/why-canada-attacked-libya/

It is time to say, that there are principles that are greater than upholding convenient UN Resolutions that are simply contrivances of the G8 powers to do an end run around the principles of the UN Charter. Resolutions that permit the most powerful armed states in the world to launch pre-emptive war against small weaker states is still an international crime that is not absolved because it is sanctioned by a UN Security Council resolution.

Libya is a member state of the UN. Libya poses no threat nor done any harm to Canadians. UN Resolution 1973 ostensibly to protect Libyan civilians has been super-ceded by the US –NATO doctrine of regime change, a device to overthrow any government unwilling to live on its knees. The reward for the US-NATO aggressors is to possess and divide up the Libyan oil fields as booty.

Prime Minister Harper has placed the strategic goals of the USA above the peace and security of Canada and its people. Canadian Government participation in NATO serial wars in Central Asia, the Middle East and now North Africa will bring Canada and its people to harm.

The Harper Conservative Government chooses war as the first option of its foreign and military policy. Prime Minister Harper has no peace policy, no policies of diplomacy. Prime Minister Harper rejects out of hand all proposals for cease fire, third party mediation, any policy except the NATO strategy of shock and awe war and regime change.

The Harper Conservative Government, not satisfied with participation in one foreign war of aggression now seeks to involve Canada, its armed forces and its youth in others. The USA has targeted Iran, Syria and North Korea as countries having governments it seeks to overthrow. Cuba is another. The Harper Doctrine is to provide knee jerk uncritical support to any US instigated war.

Such a failure of policy cannot continue to be supported.

Continuation of the US-NATO war against Libya will further inflame regional and global tensions and ignite further conflicts.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has returned from the G8 demanding all MP’s rubber stamp an open-ended NATO war of aggression and regime change against the sovereign state of Libya. Prime Minister Harper expects all-party Parliamentary approval to continue Canadian Armed Forces bombing of Tripoli until Muammar Qaddafi is dead, Libya is in ruins, and a rebel government in waiting in Washington is installed on the rubble in Tripoli. The NATO mission will then be completed and the Libyan oil fields can be divided among the big oil investors of the G8 states.

Prime Minister Harper asserts there is no international role for Canada to play except by Canadian CF18’s continuing to drop hundreds more laser guided bombs on Libya, killing Libyan citizens, men women and children, and destroying the vital civilian infrastructure that provided them with one of the highest standards of living in North Africa.

All party endorsement of the Harper Conservative government policy of support for NATO serial wars of regime change would be an admission of failure on the part of all of the opposition parties and that they also have abandoned any pretense of an independent Canadian foreign policy of peace.

It is time to end this abject support for US-NATO wars.

No All Party Support for Prime Minister Harper’s War Policy! Canada Out of Afghanistan! Out of Libya!

Left Turn Canada!

Now What?

2010-11-24T17:45:00.000-08:00

The Way I See It!

November 24, 2010

Lenin and Catastrophe!

For left progressives who wish only to bring honour to the name revolutionary, now would be a good time to re-read V.I. Lenin’s “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It”, Volume 25 of Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers 1964.

Written in the period September 14-20th 1917 following the overthrow of the Czarist regime, during the period of the Kerensky bourgeois government and as Russia hurtled towards the October Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin in his exemplary style, kept pace with events, unfailingly guiding the proletarian revolutionary forces towards the victorious socialist revolution.

The work is full of illuminating insights for today’s revolutionaries who consider tailing events to be unworthy and the worst of all opportunist mistakes during a period of economic crisis and war.

Tailism is a Marxist term for after the fact brilliance of insight into events posing as leadership.

The internet is full of such insight usually from a gaggle of academia playing their favorite game of “gotcha” polemics, competing with each other as to who can shout the loudest and with clever panache calling upon the capitalists to reform themselves. Or Else!

Or Else What?

After the fact brilliance of insight has many geniuses today none of which help the working class to advance its cause that much as class conscious workers shrug their shoulders and say: “Yah! I know that…NOW WHAT?”

NOW WHAT INDEED!

NOW WHAT must be answered even if the answer is not provided as fully today as Lenin, in his day answered that question.

The worst failing of tailism is its impotence. Tailism obviates the hard work of organization reducing the working class to accept denunciation in place of organized struggle. Finance capital shrugs off denunciation as detritus. The only exposure it fears is that which leads to overwhelming public censure and mass action culminating in its loss of freedom.

Unlike Russia in 1917 Canada in 2010 is not yet in a revolutionary situation. Nor is it in a period of rest and calm. The Canadian economy and political system is in the midst of developing crisis phenomena that will not mechanistically self-correct. The public is urged by media hype and silver tongued capitalist shills to passively accept that the economic and political pendulum will swing from neo-con right to liberal- reformist “ left” if only we wait for it to happen.

The class struggle underway in Canada is no different in essence from France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Iceland or any number of G20 states where mass labour actions are underway. The process everywhere is dialectical not mechanistic and it will not self-correct in the interests of the working people without mass public and organized intervention led by organized labour.

The struggles of today are not about going back to where we were, which was never so hot in any case, but to go forward to something new not as yet fully clear that improves the conditions of life for working people.

WHERE TO START?

If one reads Lenin’s “The Impending Catastrophe” and lays down the work and leaves it with only one thought, that thought should be Lenin’s statement that monopoly capitalism is imperialism and that state monopoly capitalism is imperialism in the 20th Century.

The Canadian organized labour movement is late in completely accepting that truth. It is late because its social reformist leadership doesn’t believe that Lenin’s definition is true. The socialist reformist leadership clings to the illusion that capitalism in the 21st Century is still capable of progressive development.

Social reformism is wrong. Being wrong in the past on this matter could mask labour’s exploited status and for a privileged section relative full employment and rising wages was possible because the capitalist system was expanding and labour got the crumbs. That is not the situation today. Today the capitalist economy cannot expand universally but only in selected areas where finance capital seeks maximum profit, summed up as the energy sector, speculative rentier capital and militarism and war.

So investment decisions can continue in preferred sectors of the economy it chooses, and without accountability to the nation for the consequences, finance capital rejects the very idea of restrictions on any of its freedoms. While insisting on unrestricted rights to invest where it pleases, at the same time finance capital insists the state imposes restrictions on labour to give up wage gains, accept worsened working conditions, give up pension benefits, agree to privatization of universal social programs, and surrender hard won democratic rights to organize, bargain and defend the industries and communities they have built.

To paraphrase Lenin, when he called upon the workers to continue the revolutionary process and advance to socialism, he warned that to stop at the period of the bourgeois democratic revolution meant – to accept controls and labour for the working class, freedom and idleness for the rich. Lenin counseled that the rich do not allow themselves to be controlled and consider freedom to be their unlimited right to impose controls on others.

It is not only OK to fight to reverse the equation and for workers to put controls on finance capital. It has become the burning question of our time.

When the Lenin’s definition that state monopoly capitalism is imperialism and the form of capitalism in the 21st Century is grasped fully, all possibilities will be open to the people to put monopoly under control in the only way that really counts – to restrict finance capital freedom of action and subordinate it to the interests of the nation and the vast majority who create the wealth of this place we call Canada.

What could be more democratic than that?

To Be Continued…

Next…
The Banks – Not a Public Industry – The Private Back Room of State Monopoly Capital.

Left Turn Canada!

Prime Minister Harper Subverts Parliament

2010-11-22T20:59:00.000-08:00

The Way I See It!
Don Currie, Editor Focus on Socialism

Good Jobs, Reduced CO2 Emissions - Without Shutting Down the Energy Sector

November 22, 2010

The Conservative Senate has killed an NDP sponsored Bill on climate change to protect maximum profits of big foreign and domestic oil and gas investors and shareholders. Every Senator that voted to kill the bill should be compelled to disclose their personal investments in big oil.

The Senators voted for something even more important than killing the NDP Bill. The unelected Conservative dominated Senate veto of an NDP Bill on climate change, passed by the elected members of Parliament last May, was a political act by the minority Stephen Harper Conservative Government to strengthen extra-parliamentary corporate rule of the people of Canada. Senate hearings were certain to expose the corporate connection to the Harper government.

The NDP Bill alarmed big foreign and domestic oil investors and their corporate shareholders that their privileged position in the state and the backrooms of the Conservative Government was being challenged by the elected Parliament of Canada.
The NDP Bill would, in practice have imposed emission guidelines on big oil and compelled them to divert some of their exorbitant profits to reducing CO2 emissions. When the choice is between corporate profits and a clean environment, the Harper Government has made it clear on many occasions that it upholds the primacy of maximum corporate profit over the needs of the people of Canada.

Prime Minister Harper not only killed a bill, he killed a democratic principle of majority rule.

The subverting of Parliamentary democracy is no small matter. Even more sinister is the statement by the Prime Minister Harper that he killed the NDP Bill in the economic interests of Canadian workers and their jobs. Harper was speaking directly to workers employed in the energy industry. Harper is saying to the people who labour in the energy sector that their only choice is between jobs and a clean environment.

The Prime Minister is fear mongering. The people of Canada can have both good jobs and drastically reduced green house gas emissions, without shutting down the energy sector. To do that, the energy sector must be publicly owned and controlled with big oil monopolies placed under the control of the people and compelled to operate on the basis of the best scientific and technical practices possible.

Harper operates on the corporate principle, espoused by the extreme right wing in Canadian politics that the only responsibility a corporation has is to its shareholders. That principle overrides all others in capitalist society. The tyranny of a handful of wealthy shareholders over the interests of the entire country remains unchallenged in the Parliamentary debate on the issue because all of the Parliamentary parties including the opposition parties do not challenge that capitalist principle.

The principle is obsolete because the system that upholds it is also obsolete. A government is required that will enact plans to expand the economy, take action to reduce green house gas emissions in the only way possible, at the expense of a parasitical class of investors and shareholders whose only allegiance is to maximum profit.

The only type of government that can do that is one that places the interests of the workers and their families first guaranteeing both full employment and a clean environment.

Left Turn Canada!

Response To Gary Keenan email to Bob Rae

2010-06-30T13:14:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends

Sometimes an email is particularly illuminating and prompts thoughts not to be denied…Since this is the era of the great internet discourse, when one can speak to the world not sure if anyone is listening, some thoughts, with apologies to no one…

Gary Keenan, I find, to be among the most trenchant and consistent voices for the just cause of the Palestinian people. I don’t know who he is but in my books he is a straight shooter…If you are not on his list serve you may want to consider joining.

Keenan has caused me to reflect on liberal-democracy that holy of holies…that big tent where every scoundrel that ever was loves to hid and huddle in self-righteousness…wearing reinforced leather pants to straddle the fence…

In this open letter Keenan exposes one of the most objectionable of all of the Israeli apologists in Canada, that unctuous liberal-democrat, Bob Rae (the former Ontario NDP “friend of labour”). Rae along with the likes of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (another social democratic “friend of labour” and architect of the Bush war in Iraq), Hillary Clinton US Secretary of State another liberal-democrat and women’s rights advocate no less– (so long as the women are not Gazan), Lawrence Cannon, another “democrat”, formerly a Liberal, who jumped to the Conservatives and now as Foreign Minister works with another liberal-democratic luminary Irwin Cotler as loyal Canadian MP’s no less, promoting the anti-Palestinian policy of the Israeli Government inside the Parliament of Canada.

The liberal-democratic NDP Federal Parliamentary Caucus and its advisors, cowed by ex-banker Thomas Mulchair, another liberal democrat, joined with Prime Minister Harper a neo-con in an unseemly pillorying and bullying of NDP MP Libby Davies, one of the few remaining brave voices in the NDP caucus who dares to speak publicly in defense of the just cause of the Palestinian people. Libby Davies rose from the ranks of people’s struggles in East Vancouver and deepened her conviction about justice as a candidate of COPE. She has been to Gaza twice.

Jack Layton’s timidity and complicity in all of this sordid Liberal-Conservative deference to the rogue behavior of the State of Israel, following the Israeli military attack in international waters on the Gaza Flotilla, during which many unarmed people were summarily executed by Israeli commandos, just because they were acting in solidarity with the people of Gaza, should be cause for an immediate NDP leadership review. Layton has gone too far this time…In my view he has nowhere to go but out…

As it stands now, Layton by falling to his knees, begging the Israeli Ambassador and the Israeli Parliamentary lobby’s forgiveness for NDP MP’s presuming to have a point of view different from that of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, is not only unseemly and demeaning, it hasn’t won a single vote among the pro-Israeli supporters in Canada. Harper has all of those votes. What has been lost, irrevocably, are NDP votes among labour, peace and genuinely democratic voters who are not afraid to denounce Israeli state terror when they see it and expect the NDP Caucus to do likewise.

Probe a little deeper in all of this amoral liberal democratic politics and one will find that most of the aforementioned Canadian liberal-democrats, including Liberal Irwin Cotler, the Harper Conservatives and at least one member of the NDP Caucus all together supporting the anti-Communist “Tribute to Liberty” project. This is the group of Canadian WW2 revanchists, that laments the defeat of Hitler and disparages the role of the red Army in defeating Nazism in WW2 and seeks to write the Soviet Union out of the history of WW2.

We leave it to the pro-Israeli lobbyists to explain their association with the modern day inheritors of the legacy of those forces who in WW2 collaborated with Hitler, and were complicit in assisting the SS to round up Jews for Nazi death camp mass murder along with millions of other anti-fascists. How ironic that one of Bob Rae’s relatives was a victim of Hitler’s corporate death industry and now lies buried in Buchenwald…as are other brave Canadians who died there at the hands of the SS along with the German and Internationalist Communist hero, Ernst Thalmann. How ironic indeed…

When Hitler enacted his anti-communist laws upon coming to power with the blessing of the British Government and began interning and murdering Communists, the first front-line opponents of fascism, many of whom had fought in Spain against Franco, these brave people were condemned by Nazi judges, under Nazi laws of the day that defined them as “terrorists” and “criminals”.

Many at the time who knew better remained silent, keeping a low profile and because they were good respectable liberal-democrats and of course, against “terrorism” believed they were safe from Hitler’s goons. One fact that deserves mentioning is that some social democratic labour leaders of that time approached Hitler and offered to cease opposing his policies if their unions would remain unscathed. Hitler played along, just long enough to come to power and then promptly banned all independent trade union activity, confiscated their property, jailed their leaders and to set up fake Nazi unions.

Fast forward to 2010. Today, in Poland, promoted in the west as a country suitably cleansed of its Communist past and now an acceptable liberal-democratic state, a loyal member of NATO, taking its que from Hitler has enacted legislation banning all Communist symbols. The EU Parliament has considered other such anti-communist legislation. A wave of anti-communism is spreading throughout Europe.

Failure to connect the dots, as the saying goes, is always fatal for democracy. The line that connects all right-wing extremist forces and factions today, many masquerading as opponents of “terrorism” all converge on anti-communism, the very last refuge of a scoundrel. The youth of today cannot yet be expected to know that.
Bob Rae has no excuse…

Don Currie, Chair Canadians for Peace and Socialism

_____________________________________
From: Gary Keenan [mailto:garydkeenan@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 1:35 PM
To: Gary Keenan
Subject: Reply to MP Bob Rae: "Regarding the situation in Gaza"
--- On Tue, 6/29/10, Gary Keenan wrote:
From: Gary Keenan
Subject: Re: Regarding the situation in Gaza
To: Rae.B@parl.gc.ca
Received: Tuesday, June 29, 2010, 12:34 PM

Mr. Rae et al.

What a feeble unprincipled response!! You write: "As a Party, we believe that the basis of this peace must be a safe and secure Israel that is recognized by and living side-by-side in peace with a viable Palestinian state. It must also include a full resolution of the many complex issues affecting this region. Ultimately, the best way to resolve the conflict is direct negotiation between the parties, with the assistance of the international community."

Which particular "Israel" is to be "recognized" by the Palestinians? "Israel" as recommended by the 1947 Partition Plan, or perhaps "Israel" within the 1949 cease-fire boundaries, or then again, maybe an "Israel" that includes Palestinian and other Arab lands it still illegally occupies as a result of the war it launched on 5 June 1967? In short, how do you expect the Palestinians to recognize a country that does not recognize itself, i.e,. define its borders in accordance with international law and binding UNSC resolutions, including Resolution 242?

You refer to the necessity of "direct negotiations between the parties, with the assistance of the international community." Since when has an occupied people been obligated to negotiate an end to occupation with its illegal/belligerent occupier? We did not expect occupied France to negotiate with Germany during WWII. Nor did we insist that occupied Kuwait negotiate with Iraq in 1991.

Instead of all of this gutless pro-Israel lobby pandering bafflegab, the Liberal Party should be demanding forthrightly that Israel comply with international law and withdraw unconditionally from all lands it has occupied since 5 June 1967. (Any adjustments to borders must be minor and mutually agreed to.)

Having meticulously researched the matter, I can assure you that there is no provision in international law that enables Israel to violate it with impunity. By "international law," I am referring primarily to the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Fourth Geneva Convention, which came about as a result of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis, including the systematic slaughter of six million Jews.

I regret to say that the position the Liberal Party takes on the Israel/Palestinian-Arab conflict forces one to conclude that it has in effect abandoned hard-won international law, that the 60 plus million people who perished in WWII did so for nothing.

Your position on the ongoing crisis between Israel and the Arabs which is only marginally better than that of the Harper government, is cowardly, does nothing to bring peace to the region, has a negative effect on Canada's international standing and our real geopolitical interests in the 21st century and for what should be obvious reasons, ill serves Canadian Jews.

In conclusion, I remind you that as recent surveys attest, the views of average Canadians are in conflict with those of the Liberal Party. They want Canada to take a principled position based on humanitarian law that supports the legitimate rights of the Palestinians who are the occupied, the oppressed, the dispossessed, not one that kow tows to Israel, the occupier, oppressor and victimizer.

I look forward to your prompt reply.
Sincerely,
Gary Keenan
________________________________________
From: "Rae.B@parl.gc.ca"
To: garydkeenan@yahoo.com
Sent: Tue, June 29, 2010 11:17:14 AM
Subject: Regarding the situation in Gaza

Thank you for your e-mail regarding the situation in Gaza.

Both Mr. Rae and the Liberal Party share your concerns about this conflict and the suffering and loss of life on all sides.

Following the recent ceasefire, Mr. Rae and fellow members of the Liberal Party continue to stand with the international community in its efforts to build a lasting peace in this region. As a Party, we believe that the basis of this peace must be a safe and secure Israel that is recognized by and living side-by-side in peace with a viable Palestinian state. It must also include a full resolution of the many complex issues affecting this region. Ultimately, the best way to resolve the conflict is direct negotiation between the parties, with the assistance of the international community.

The Liberal Party’s position reflects our long-standing commitment to peace, stability, justice and human rights in the Middle East. It also recognizes Canada’s proud humanitarian reputation. In the aftermath of this conflict, we must engage with the international community, which the Harper Government has largely failed to do, in order to ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches those who need it and to help restore the communities that have been affected by the conflict.

Thank you again for taking the time to share your views on this important issue.

Sincerely,
Susan Humphrey
Special Assistant
Office of the Hon. Bob Rae, MP for Toronto Centre
(613) 992-5234

Canadian Banks and the Canadian Economy – The Big Hoax Prime Minister Harper Will Foist on the G8 and G20

2010-06-16T14:29:00.000-07:00

Prime Minister Harper and Finance Minister Flaherty are going to the G8 and G20 meetings June 25-27, 2010 claiming their policies have saved the Canadian economy from the global recession and have done so without giving a penny of public money to Canadian Banks.

Prime Minister Harper’s unctuous speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos Switzerland last January 28th 2010 dripping with praise for Canadian Banks laid out the Conservative Party corporate line that Harper will take first to the G8/G20 and then into the next federal election. The Prime Minister invites the Canadian electorate to believe that when privately owned banks are profitable so is the overall Canadian economy.The privately owned and controlled corporate media propaganda machine has dutifully promoted that message ever since.

The banks are thriving racking up record profits … but Stats Can for May reports over 8% of Canadian workers are still out of work. Most job growth has been in the low paid services sector. The 55 year old and over age category led by women workers is the group Stats claims is finding work.

The Stats Can report for May suggests that many middle aged women are being forced back to work to keep working class households going as laid off spouses seek work. Women in this age group, married and single traditionally have been in out of the work force as they raise families. A large group of partially employed women now confront sparse retirement income. Many are compelled to go back to work to try and build up CPP benefits as they approach retirement age. Most in this situation re-enter the work force lacking skills and are employed in low wage service jobs without benefits. The plight of middle aged women who have been denied the opportunity to a full education and economic independence now confront poverty in their old age proving once again that formal equality before the law is hallow if the actual second class status of women in the real economy continues.

Youth employment in the age group 14 to 25 has worsened. Youth unemployment at 7% is evidence of a stagnant economy. The largest group workers, men and women are in the age category 25 and over comprising 15.6 million of the total work force of 18.5 million. Seven and half percent of men in this category are unemployed. Women according to Stats Can in this age group are fully employed.

The Stats Can report will be news to the Canadian Labour Congress who in April 2010 released its own estimate of unemployment and linked it to the increasing difficulty of unemployed workers to get employment insurance.

While 1.4 million wage earners are out of work, at the other end of the scale a small group of wealth and privilege, the parasitical class that lives sumptuously from the labour of Canadian workers, revel in the fact that fewer employed people work harder and longer and produce the same or more of the use values and commodities Canadians and the world needs. As the Federal Government stimulus package winds down the situation will undoubtedly worsen bearing down even more heavily on the employed work force.

In spite of chronic mass unemployment Canadian GDP is actually growing. Productivity and wealth creation potential of the Canadian working people is remarkable evidenced by the fact that fewer produce more. If the unemployed were fully engaged in the economy productivity would rise even faster and higher. There would be more funds for expanding social programs and providing as the Canadian Labour Congress is demanding, a decent retirement benefit for all without exception. The struggle over who will control CPP, the beneficiaries or the finance capitalist elites is far from over. The investor classes covet the fund and will not end their efforts to get their hands on it.

Don Drummond, one of the more enlightened bourgeois economists, recently retired from his post as a top executive with Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce claims that the Canadian economy is only producing at 79% of its potential. An advocate of full employment as the road to increased productivity, Drummond’s thesis should be read by all who buy the line that a low wage economy with a high rate of unemployment spurs productivity.

Drummond is no friend of labour and has been a faithful servant of the banking establishment. His view of Canadian economic development is simply more representative of that section of Canadian finance capital that is still interested in making profit out of the expansion of the home market in addition to selling out Canadian resources to the highest bidder.

Equating Bank profiteering to overall economic recovery is a capitalist view of capitalist economics not a working class view of capitalist economics.
It is pure hoakum that Canadian banks never received a Conservative Government aid package. What is true in Finance Minister Flaherty’s boast is this : The Canadian Banks didn’t need an aid package but got one anyway.

The Harper-Flaherty shell game, that moved about $200 billion to the service of the banks that didn’t need it and that created a smooth and seamless method for the banks to borrow public money from the CMHC fund and then lend it back to the government at a handsome profit is well documented. One of the best of these many exposures was by Michael Chossudovsky of Global Research. His paper on the subject is basic reading for labour and militant. As an aside it is the view of this observer, that Chossudovsky on all counts is way ahead of the CCPA Monitor and yet seems to be underutilized by the left progressive press.

What is even more than troubling, incomprehensible, is why the organized labour movement and the NDP, in particular its Parliamentary caucus is unable to stay on message about the corporate-banking collusion with the inner-cabinet of the Harper government and in particular the contacts maintained between the government and its appointed non-elected corporate advisory committee. The NDP and the CLC are called upon to relentlessly and publicly expose the fact that Harper is a crony of big business and revels in that role.

For decades, the Communists have been exposing what they define as a merger of finance capital and the state, or state monopoly capitalism, as the prevailing form of governing in the present era of capitalist development and calling for a united struggle to replace it with a new form of governance, a worker led democratic state of the working people. That strategic goal is dependent on a waging a public, relentless, inspired, contemporary rise in class-revolutionary consciousness on the left.

The form that opportunism among the Communists takes today is the belief that someone else will do it…!

Left Turn Canada.

2009-09-18T07:28:00.001-07:00

An Open Letter to Jack Layton, Leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP)

Dear Mr. Layton

The Harper Conservative Government is a minority government of wealth and privilege. The first priority of Prime Minister Harper and Finance Minister Flaherty during the current global economic crisis has been to ensure that investor classes that live parasitically from corporate, bank, energy and arms profiteering are protected first. These are the interests that form the political support base of the Conservative Party.

The Harper Conservative Government has no record of protecting wage earners thrown out of work and onto the streets. Where is that record?

The Conservatives beginning with Brain Mulroney are the party and government that undermined the unemployment insurance system, turned it over to general revenue where it was plundered and used for everything except insuring the lost earnings of the unemployed.

Canada’s unemployment insurance benefits are far below the OECD average tied for last with Great Britain. To suggest as you and your advisors are doing, that by giving this discredited minority right wing government NDP Parliamentary support, you can charm and inveigle Prime Minister Harper to act in the interests of the unemployed is illusory.

There is one issue confronting Canada and its people in any confidence vote arising in the House of Commons in the days ahead. That issue is the overriding urgency of dealing a crushing defeat to the right wing Harper Government and to rid the country of its poisonous affect on democracy.

The majority of Canadians have never supported the right wing extremism represented by Prime Minister Harper. A direct and unambiguous rejection of its policies accords with what most Canadians want.

We call upon you to go over the heads of your clever advisors, over the heads of Parliamentary in-fighting and go directly to the labour movement, the peace movement, the environmental movement and Canadian electorate with a simple statement of unequivocal opposition to Conservative rule.

No NDP support for the right-wing Harper Conservatives.

Don Currie, Chair,
Canadians for Peace and Socialism

Fidel and Health Care for the People

2009-09-08T18:27:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends of Peace and Socialism

Upon reading the latest Reflection by Fidel Castro Ruz : http://solidnet.org/cgi-bin/agent?news/021cuba8sep09.doc on the cowardice and duplicity of the Dutch company Philips in reneging since 2006 on its obligations to supply Cuba and Venezuela with advanced medical equipment, by cravenly caving into pressure from first the Clinton, then Bush and now apparently the Obama administration, it helps to put into perspective the real essence of the public debate and struggle under way in the United States over health care. The struggle has become clouded in liberal and right wing extremist rhetoric and reeks with hypocrisy.

The Obama government is posing as an advocate of a humane and improved health care system for citizens of the USA while at the same time perpetuating long standing US imperialist policy of interference in the attempts of the Cuban and Venezuelan people to solve their health care needs. The policy is causing untold damage to people in these countries in need of health care by denying them high tech diagnostic equipment. President Obama is responsible for hurting the men, women, children and youth of Venezuela. The same interests that seek to deny the people of Venezuela medical equipment are the same interests that attack the Canadian health care system. To say otherwise is the worst possible kind of opportunist evasion.

How then can we consider Obama or any liberal-democrat would be reformer to be a reliable advocate of a truly human health care system? One cannot have a reactionary foreign policy and a progressive domestic policy. What is important is to advance and fight for the type of health care system we need, instead of taking sides with one or the other of a losing proposition.

Fidel’s expose underlines once more, the consistency of all of the governments of the United States from the end of WW2 to now to react with hate and envy at any and all attempts of other peoples to take paths of development that do not have the approval of US Presidents and the powerful imperialist interests they so faithfully serve. Rest assured the US imperialists disapprove of the Canadian public health care system with the same hatred as they express for the Cuban and Venezuelan system.

As a Communist I find it unacceptable, for left progressives anywhere to give uncritical support to Obama without exposing his unforgiveable complicity in perpetuating long standing US imperialist foreign and domestic policy. Obama seeks to change the image of US imperialism not its essence.

There can be no real advance for the people of the USA or the America’s and that includes Canada, and for that matter the world until US imperialism is defeated. That must be said first as we undertake struggles to wrest reforms from this monstrous system we know as capitalism in the imperialist era. In fact that is why we undertake them. There can be no health care advance for the people of the USA until there is a public health care system in which for profit health care is excluded entirely. A private-public mixed health care system is a private for profit system that attempts to profit out of the public purse and the personal wages, savings and incomes of working people. A retreat from public health care in Canada to a private public mix is being promoted everyday by profiteers, many US health care, drug and supply giants who seek to destroy the Canadian system. They are the same interests that hate socialist Cuba and Venezuela and seek to deny their people needed equipment.

As I read material emanating from the left progressive forces in the USA, much of which is useful and informative, I am more and more struck by what seems to me to be a delusionary, self absorbed, rosy and uncritical view of the line of the Obama administration that is retreating in confusion everyday under a right wing onslaught from the hopes of the people of the USA that brought it to power. To continue to deliberately evade that reality seems to me to be laying the basis and objectively supports what the right wing is striving for, a major political defeat for the left, democratic, labour and people’s movements.

As we Canadians confront a possible federal election, it is up to the conscious progressive left and in the first place the Communists, to go to the people with a program that begins with saying the obvious, capitalism is incapable of meeting their expectations for full employment, health, decent housing, and a truly human life. We fight for reforms to make things better but we do not cover up the fact that we do so with the aim of overthrowing and defeating the system of capitalism that is the cause of the misery of economic depression and war.

No other forces on the left are saying that convincingly. No other task is more important.

Don Currie
Chair, Canadians for Peace and Socialism

NATO's 60th Anniversary - WW2 Canadian Vet Speaks Out

2009-04-05T21:12:00.000-07:00

Guest Blog
John Beeching is Honorary Chair Canadians for Peace and Socialism
He is a veteran of WW2 and a life long activist for peace and socialism. Below are John’s comments on the 60th Anniversary of NATO.

NATO 60 year celebration

Today CBC news announced in a report on NATO that that it was NATO 60 year celebration. 60 Years to protect the profits of the rich is nothing to celebrate. Not when in this year 2009 millions are out of work or being laid-off while most in the third world countries are existing on a pittance.

NATO was not created to protect the world people or any country from attack. It was created to protect the world from communism and establish globalization led by the United States of America. The result is that millions on millions are living on substandard conditions.

Soviet Union Unaffected by the Great Depression

While the capitalist world was in the grip of mass unemployment and class warfare, the Soviet Union, by 1929 a mere 12 years into the building of socialism was unaffected by the Great Depression gripping the entire capitalist world. The Soviet Government, after a bitter struggle to defeat US and British interventionist forces attempting to restore the old hated Czarist regime, had embarked on an ambitious plan to electrify the country, modernize agriculture and construct new industries. The Soviet Union provided work for all and implemented universal free education and health care. The homeless were being housed. Collective and state farming methods rapidly made the country self-sufficient in food and agricultural products

Use Canadian Clean Hydro Electrical Power for Canadian Needs!

2009-03-11T01:53:00.000-07:00

Konrad Yakabuski, Globe and Mail business writer, broke a story on December 30th reporting that Hydro Quebec is negotiating with two New England states for the first long term export of Quebec hydro electrical power to the USA in two decades. The 20 year sweet deal for US consumers requires approval of the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). No mention was made of any Canadian approvals.

The deal will require two private US power utilities to invest $700 million (U.S.) to build a transmission line from a substation in Sherbrooke Quebec to New Hampshire USA where clean Quebec hydro power will be distributed through the New England power grid to provide non-polluting Canadian generated electrical power to Boston USA.

Ontario, desperately in need of clean power and anticipating imports of Quebec Hydro power, planned to build a transmission line from Quebec to Ontario. Slowness of the McGuity Liberals to conclude a deal on the project between Canada’s two largest and most industrialized provinces means the line may now be used to transmit Quebec hydro power through Ontario to the USA leaving Ontario out in the cold.

The plan to export large volumes of clean Quebec hydro electrical power to the USA occurs at a time when Canadian environmentalists are demanding that Ontario seek alternatives to its reliance on coal fired and expensive nuclear generated electrical power.

US environmentalists are calling for boycotts of energy imports produced from the Alberta Tar Sands. Nothing like having it both ways, use clean Canadian hydro power (No Buy American ban on this commodity) to meet President Obama’s targets for clean energy while at the same time damning Tar Sands production that employ Canadian workers.

Canadian environmentalists need to reassess. So long as Canadian energy is considered an exportable commodity instead of a national resource needed to serve the common good, neither Canadian jobs nor the environment can be protected.

The answer is obvious! Nationalize all Canadian energy and do it now! Develop east west hydro electric grids and construct east west natural gas and oil pipelines with up graders and refineries in Canada to process the products. That is real stimulus and job creation.

A new energy policy is needed to serve Canadian needs first. Then we can talk about exporting surpluses to the USA.

Left Turn Canada!

Prime Minister Harper Preaches to the Converted

2009-03-10T16:48:00.000-07:00

Don Currie, Editor, Focus on Socialism
March 10, 2009.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s speech before a big business crowd in Mississauga Brampton Ontario on March 10th re-stated his government’s pledge that the interests of wealth and privilege will continue to come first as the country slides into depression, and the working class and the unemployed are welcome to go along for the ride. He was heartily applauded by the partisan audience.

As he was speaking to the upscale crowd, GM workers and retirees with their backs against the wall were being urged by their union leadership to vote in favour of a roll back in wages and pensions to keep GM in business and a shrinking work force temporarily employed to produce cars that most people can’t afford to buy.

Meanwhile in the House of Commons, the Liberals and the NDP chided Finance Minister Flaherty for not admitting the economic situation for wage earners was dire, as though the Conservative minister really cared. The Conservative finance minister is content to rebut all criticism of his failed policies for working people by claiming that Canada is hostage to the financial melt down in the USA. Flaherty claims that until US banks start lending there is nothing to be done. Finger pointing is a safe bet for Flaherty and a convenient way of dealing with any future failure as the US economy continues to slide with no bottom in sight. Even as Flaherty was speaking in the House Ben Bernanke, head of the US Federal Reserve Board characterized the economic debacle as worse than the Great Depression.

At the same time Minister Flaherty boasts that Canada is the envy of the G20 because the Canadian chartered banks aren’t failing and are well capitalized unlike US banks. Canadian banks are all reporting quarterly profits in spite of the real economy tanking. What’s up? Bank profits and unemployment are rising at the same time! Minister Flaherty is mute about rising bank profits and a disintegrating real economy. He says nothing about this obvious anomaly because he worked for this outcome.

The Finance Minister was instrumental in backstopping the banks with $200 billion of government guarantees long before there was any talk in Parliament about a stimulus budget for workers and communities. Flaherty knows that the banks don’t have to lend to the real economy to make profit. They are doing fine on spreads between a falling Bank of Canada rate, high interest credit cards, safe mortgages and loans (the government removed the toxic debt and burdened CMHC with it) to preferred lenders that really don’t need the money anyway. Canadian Banks got their Harper Government “stimulus” up front last October after President Bush convened the G20 and all present agreed to pump 2% of GDP into the economy. Do the math. Two percent of $1.3 trillion GDP is about $260 billion; $200 billion for the banks and the rest for a “stimulus” budget that has within in lots of room for big business insiders to do very well. Flaherty only presented the budget to Parliament after it was vetted by a blue ribbon big business committee.

The actual amount of stimulus that will reach workers and communities is dubious. There is no reason for the opposition parties to rubber stamp it. There is stimulus and then there is talk of stimulus. The opposition charges that the budget is entangled with a number of Conservative plans having nothing to do with infrastructure funding. Environmentalists are concerned about the removal of restrictions on industrial development on inland waterways. Women workers are angry about the budget endorsing pay equity discrimination. The budget is not user-friendly compelling small communities to come up with co-pay money they don’t have and foisting P3’s on infrastructure projects that private investor abuse. Flaherty is bullying the Senate and the opposition to rush through the budget, before the people realize what is really in it. The Conservatives do not want the public to look too closely at the budget (all 300 plus pages of it) for fear of what they might find there. The Conservatives have stuffed the budget with barbs and hooks and at the same time, as a side show, are attempting to slip through the Finance Committee a $3 billion no strings attached pork barrel.

The Canadian people are paying a heavy price for the failure of the faint-hearted Ignatieff Liberals recoiling in fear from joining with the NDP and the Bloc to administer a crushing defeat to the Harper Conservatives when they had the chance. The Liberal and Conservative back room brain trusts held their noses, gave each other a little “upper class hug” and signaled to the Bay Street, Calgary Petroleum Club, the Irving Empire, the Montreal and Vancouver investor groups, and the TSX, that as much as they find each other distasteful, when the chips are down they will unite against any threat of organized labour and the movements of the people gaining a position of influence over Parliament.

The academic-intellectual left advice to labour to be “more clever and persuasive” in pleading with capitalism to reform itself is not helpful. An article in the last issue of CCPA Monitor suggesting to their 10,000 readership that progressives should support pleading for a place at the corporate table as a means of democratizing capitalist decisions is typical. Likewise, the Lakeland Institute, correctly lambasting the Stelmach government for funneling $5 billion to the oil investors continues to fail to demand nationalization the whole energy sector as the way to end its privileged position in the economy. The entire gamut of left academia remains timid and mute about the ruinous influence on the economy of $492 billion over 20 years allocated by the Canada First Defense Policy of the Harper Conservatives.

The G20 finance ministers will be meeting next week in preparation for their April Summit. The global depression is much worse than Flaherty and Harper are prepared to admit. The Conservatives are going to the G20 with one eye on the event and the other on their political base. That base doesn’t include organized labour. Flaherty and Harper will be coming back to Canada after the G20 to sell the plans of the IMF, the World Bank and G7. They will confront at the meeting a brawl among the USA, the EU, as they confront the rising power of China, Brazil, India.

Now is the time for organized labour to send a message to the Government that Canadians will not accept any plans of international finance capital that require the working class and the farmers to make more concessions to save the profit system.

Organized labour and the left-progressives confront a challenge. Either continue to support one of the alternatives offered by the Liberals or the Conservatives, fronting for corporate and banking capital, or begin the difficult task of organizing now around an independent program of economic development for Canada.

What is happening to the autoworkers, forced into concessions and condemned to long term unemployment is a template for what the employers will be demanding from steel, forestry, transportation, the energy sector and what remains of manufacturing. Following employer attacks on the productive sector workers there will be pressures on the civil service and the entire service industry for wage rollbacks and benefits concessions.

Labour needs its own summit! Relying on the banking and corporate elites to plan our future is a mugs game. Labour can and must lead the country!

Left Turn Canada!

The Speech from the Throne and the 41st Parliament

2009-01-26T14:59:00.000-08:00

Defeat Harper and Move On!

After debasing Parliament, expressing contempt for the majority of Canadians who do not support their policies, the Harper Minority Conservatives are now pleading for a second chance. Their repentance is phony.

Following the throne speech, initial statements by Michael Ignatieff, Liberal leader and Liberal war horse Ralph Goodale, were remarkable and contemptible showing that they may betray the NDP-Liberal Coalition and prop up a lame duck Conservative Prime Minister.

There is no basis for a national consensus under a Conservative Prime Minister. Unity can only be built around progressive economic and social programs. It can never be built on reaction and backwardness.

The Harper government needs to be swept aside for reasons that go beyond the budget. The Harper Conservatives are unrepentant far right neo-cons. They are incapable of redemption. Their time is up.

Under the Conservatives Canada has declined on all vital benchmarks. Canada has less jobs, less science, less arts, less mass participation in sports, recreation. Fewer youth can go to university and post secondary education. There is more homelessness; more poverty, less optimism and more despair.

The Harper Conservative Government is fundamentally a neo-con government of the Thatcher-Reagan-Mulroney-Bush ilk: after all the others have been consigned to the rubbish heap of history, Harper lingers on – now his time has come.

Neo-cons are slaves to the capitalist free market. They are anti-labour. Neo-cons are for privatizing the public health care system and using pension funds for private investment. They are for the militarization of the economy. They are anti-science. They oppose regulation of banks, markets, health, and all forms of industry.

Neo-cons are against pay equity for women. They oppose the legitimate demands of first nations and aboriginal people’s for the redress of all outstanding land claims and rights. They are against single desk marketing and work to abolish the Wheat Board. Neo-cons oppose universal child care. They oppose universal unemployment insurance for all. They oppose public housing. They believe in punishing the addicted and imprisoning adolescents. They are intolerant of racial minorities, immigrants and attempt to challenge the separation of church and state. They are against the CBC and all public broadcasting. They are contemptuous of creative artists, writers, public sports and recreation for all. They are penny pinching and mean and they should not be in power.

Throw them out!

Left Turn Canada!

President Obama and Real Change

2009-01-23T20:49:00.000-08:00

Don Currie, Chair CPS

The litmus test for the international working class and all oppressed people as to whether or not the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the USA represents real change will be revealed in the months and years ahead in his government’s attitude to the struggles of the people of other countries that choose a path of economic and political development different from that prevailing in the USA.

Will the Obama Government greet with grace and equanimity, the declaration of other peoples that they also love their country and believe they also live “in the best country in the world” and insist on doing so without the permission or interference of US imperialism?

The people of the USA as is their inalienable right are determining their own destiny. It is not yet clear if in voting for real change, if that change includes recognition and support for the right of other peoples to do likewise.

In the appeals for unity and reconciliation expressed in both the concession speech of Senator McCain and the victory and inaugural speeches of President Obama it is not clear if those appeals are for a graceful and long overdue retreat from empire and acceptance by the people of the USA of the necessity to live as others do, within their own borders and within their own means, or whether the appeal for unity is around a new, revised and perhaps less belligerent version of US imperialist destiny.

While the former is the business of the people of the USA the latter is the business of the people of the world.

That is not a small consideration for Canadians who will inevitably be compelled out of economic necessity to call for a recasting of any and all agreements with US finance capital that limit Canadian sovereignty, restrict Canadian independent economic development and interfere with Canadian sovereign ownership and control of its own resources. Most revealing will be the attitude of the Obama Government to the majority opinion of Canadians as expressed in the last federal election to end to Canadian participation in the US-NATO war of aggression in Afghanistan.

Nothing that is said here should be understood to mean that Canadians do not also confront the urgent need to denounce and break with the imperialist ambitions of our own state monopoly rulers and its interference in the internal affairs of the peoples of other countries.

The challenge confronting the Canadian people is the same as people of the USA, whether we will permit our state monopoly ruling class to continue to pursue its imperialist ambitions at the expense of our dignity and at the expense of other peoples or whether we will use our own resources and ingenuity to overcome the process of deindustrialization that threatens our economy with ruin.

That issue becomes the only principled basis for the unity the working classes of North America, an anti-imperialist unity that will be understood and greeted by all the oppressed people of the world suffering from the curse of underdevelopment, poverty and oppression imposed on them by all of the leading imperialist states.

Left Turn Canada!

An Open Letter to All Members of Parliament

2009-01-20T11:13:00.000-08:00

Canadians for Peace and Socialism
Box 168 Slocan BC
V0G 2C0
1 250 355 2669
Email: editor@focusonsocialism.ca
Website: www.focusonsocialism.ca

January 20, 2009

Canada is the first country US President Barack Obama will visit following his January 20th Inauguration.

Canadians will be watching closely to see if during President Obama’s visit, there is a single Canadian political leader that will have the courage to publicly repudiate the long record of collusion of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative minority government with the President George W. Bush Administration’s policies of pre-emptive war and regime change.

President Barack Obama’s visit to Canada will be the opportunity for all Members of Parliament to call for a new direction in Canadian US relations based on the restoration of Canadian sovereignty lost during the long bleak years of the Bush Republican-Harper Conservative collaboration.

The opportunity has been presented to the Liberal, NDP and Bloc coalition to publicly enunciate a new direction for US-Canadian foreign, military, economic and political relations that can begin by disengaging Canada from the ruinous affects of membership in NAFTA, SPP, NORTHCOM and NATO and to align Canada with people’s progressive movements in the USA and around the world that seek peace and economic development that provides full employment, affordable housing, food, public medical care and education, child care and pensions for the millions that do not now have such basic needs.

It is important that the leader of the official opposition be sent a message. If Michael Ignatieff leader of the Liberal Party of Canada intends to become Prime Minister it can only be as the Prime Minister of the majority of Canadians that have consistently rejected the Conservative Party. Anything less, risks more years of minority Conservative government rule.

Should Mr. Ignatieff continue to equivocate, there is nothing preventing the NDP and the Bloc, leaders of organized labour, the peace movement, democratic and patriotic organizations of the Canadian people from speaking out resolutely for Canadian independence from US imperialist oversight.

In welcoming President Obama the left democratic peace and progressive movements are called upon to restate some fundamental truths for the benefit of the new incoming Barack Obama US administration and those in Canada who will greet him in our name.

Canadians are a sovereign people. From coast to coast to coast including the far arctic, all of the nations that inhabit this land, all those who labour in its economy, all those who contribute to its accomplishments, all those who value and seek to conserve its vast natural resources, its grandeur, wilderness and natural beauty, all those who believe in the youth and in their right to a future, all those who dream and fight for peace and justice for all people of the planet, all those who do not live in envy of anyone; the people of Canada who call this place our home and native land will decide its destiny.

Left Turn Canada!

Don Currie Chair, Canadians for Peace and Socialism

The Coalition!

2008-12-18T13:02:00.000-08:00

The Coalition!

Majority Government Prepared to Govern - Or Timorous Prop for a Lame Duck Minority Harper Government?

When will the Liberal NDP Coalition begin to act like a majority government poised to take power on behalf of the disenfranchised 62% majority?

Michael Ignatieff is lapsing into his familiar and comfortable role as an academic advisor to the rich and powerful instead of a Coalition Prime Minister prepared to take power on behalf of the people of Canada.

Coalition inaction is breathing life into a gasping Harper Minority Government instead of preparing to deal it a crushing defeat on January 27th.

Liberal establishment meddling, behind the backs of its coalition partners and more egregious, the 62% majority that supports it, has paved the way for the appointment by Finance Minister Flaherty of a non-elected big business Economic Council that will have a greater say over the federal budget than the 162 elected coalition MP’s.

There is not a single labour representative to be seen among Jim Flaherty’s gold plated luminaries. It is doubtful if any self-respecting labour leader would want to be associated with such capitalist glitterati.
Flaherty has recruited former B.C. finance minister Carole Taylor, James D. Irving from the New Brunswick Irving Empire, James A. Pattison, applauded in corporate circles for his singular ruthless pursuit of wealth, University of Calgary professor Jack Mintz, who is the former president and CEO of the right wing C.D. Howe Institute and a frequent columnist for Can West Financial Post and Montreal financier Paul Desmarais of Power Corporation, a major behind the scenes player in the selection of Canadian Prime Ministers from Trudeau and Mulroney to Chretien and Martin.

Organized Labour must appoint its own Economic Council and a shadow cabinet of working people representing the 62% majority and outline a democratic people’s economic program for Canada.

There are many honest left-labour economists that have no other agenda than what is in the best interests of working people as the country slides into depression. The people need their help. The Coalition Policy Accord is a good start. Use it, develop it, publicize it, fight for it…

Left Turn Canada!

Liberal Establishment Politicians Come to the Aid of Conservative Prime Minister Harper to Scuttle the Coalition Policy Accord.

2008-12-08T20:15:00.000-08:00

Right wing Liberal grandee John Manley is helping Prime Minister Stephen
Harper wreck the NDP-Liberal-Bloc Coalition. (Globe and Mail December 5, 2008)

John Manley is a right-wing corporate establishment lawyer, a former Finance Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister. Manley helped Prime Minister Harper condemn Canadian soldiers to another two years of bloody combat in the US-NATO war in Afghanistan.

Manley is a close associate of Paul Martin. Martin as Finance Minister from 1993 to 2002 rang up massive federal surpluses that were returned to big business in a series of tax cuts while systematically capping and rolling back funding for unemployment insurance and social programs.

Today’s media is reporting that Liberal Scott Brisson, a Martin protégé is working behind the scenes with the hapless Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to cut and paste a Lib Con budget for presentation to Parliament on January 27th . Their aim is to scuttle the Policy Accord signed by Layton, Dion and Duceppe and replace it with a conservative right wing budget with a liberal face.

Michael Ignatieff, true to himself is seizing upon the confusion and disarray in Liberal ranks to sink “his friend Bob Rae” by-pass the Liberal rank and file and propel himself into the leadership of the Liberal Party.

Such are the morals and ethics of Liberal establishment politicians who in a heart beat betray the coalition documents they just signed and turn their backs on the hardships confronting the working people and the unemployed.

The NDP and organized labour and the left must publicly condemn the establishment Liberal betrayal of the coalition policy accord and call upon the 161 MP’s from all opposition parties to renew the pledge given to the 62% of Canadians who support them that they will act together to defeat Harper on January 27th. and implement the policy accord.

The coalition policy accord falls far short of what the working class needs and much more will have to be fought for.

What are the supportable points of the NDP-Liberal-Bloc policy accord? What does the economic stimulus package of the policy accord say?

NDP-Liberal-Bloc Economic Stimulus Package

The top priority of the new Government is an economic stimulus package designed to boost the domestic economy beginning with (but not limited to):

Accelerating existing infrastructure funding and substantial new investments, including municipal and inter-provincial projects (such as

transit, clean energy, water, corridors and gateways). This would certainly include addressing the urgent infrastructure needs of First Nations, Métis and Inuit;

Housing construction and retrofitting; and

Investing in key sector strategies (like manufacturing, forestry and automotive) designed to create and save jobs, with any aid contingent on a plan to transform these industries and return them to profitability and sustainability.

Rapid Support for those affected by the Economic Crisis

The new Government is committed to ensuring that the federal government has the appropriate programs in place to assist those most affected by the economic crisis so that all citizens will be in a position to fully participate in the economic recovery to follow, including the following measures:

Facilitate skills training to help ensure Canadian workers are properly equipped to keep pace with the rapidly changing economy, while respecting provincial jurisdiction and existing agreements;

Amend the current law establishing a new crown corporation for employment insurance in order to guarantee that all revenue from EI premiums provides benefits and training for workers. Eliminate the current two week waiting period;

Lower the minimum required RRIF withdrawal for 2008 by 50 per cent;

Reform bankruptcy and insolvency laws to better protect pensions; and

Implement an income support program for older workers who have lost their jobs in order to help them make the transition from work to receiving retirement benefits.

Other Priorities to Stimulate the Economy

Support for culture, including the cancellation of budget cuts announced by the Conservative government.

Support for Canadian Wheat Board and Supply Management

Immigration Reform

Reinstate regional development agency funding to non-profit economic development organizations.

Families

As finances permit, we are committed to moving forward with improved child benefits and an early learning and childcare program in partnership with each province, and respectful of their role and jurisdiction, including the possibility to opt out with full compensation.

Working with our North American Partners

We will work with our North American Partners to pursue a North American cap-and-trade market with absolute emission targets, using 1990 as the base year.

Layton, Dion and Duceppe put their signatures to the above.

The Manley-Harper collaboration works for another type of coalition – a right wing majority Parliamentary coalition working on behalf of finance capital.

Canadian workers have had experience with a Conservative Government in power during a depression. When an unemployed delegation in 1935 went to Ottawa seeking help, Conservative Prime Minister Iron Heel Bennett replied that he would not subsidize idleness.

The Harper Reform-Alliance-Conservatives are the true inheritors of Iron Heel Bennett’s legacy. A Conservative Government in power during a depression in the 21st Century is the wrong Government for the working class, the farmers, the unemployed and oppressed.

Support the Coalition! Support the Coalition Economic Stimulus Package.

On January 27th. defeat the Harper Conservatives.

Left Turn Canada!

Stop the Extreme Right Coup – Labour Wants In!

2008-12-06T17:25:00.000-08:00

An arcane remnant of Canada’s colonial past has been used by Prime Minister Harper to legitimatize a far right coup to padlock Parliament and keep the cause of labour out of national politics.

Political trends representing the far right, the ultra-left, and the most despicable of all, condescending centrist evasion, have joined together to oppose the formation of a Parliamentary coalition of a majority of liberal and social democratic MP’s. Objectively these trends fear any opening to political power that might open up in Parliament that will accord to the working class, the unemployed and working farmers a say over the economic affairs of state.

Prime Minister Harper “locked the doors” on Parliament to ensure that in an economic crisis rapidly assuming Great Depression proportions, a non-elected cabal of banks and corporate insiders will continue to have exclusive say over how the wealth of the nation will be apportioned. They are supported by a small class of wealth and privilege accustomed to entitlement of the best the capitalist system has to offer and determined to keep it all for their private pleasure.

The Harper coup has reactivated the extreme right wing Reform-Alliance base of bigotry and division that democratic Canadians have rejected time and again. It has been kept alive by a cabal of extremist right wing professors at the University of Calgary political science department, the Fraser Institute and media hacks that serve US-Canadian oil and investor elites of Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan. Their minions include a motley crew of right wing talk show hosts inciting a network of western separatist and US style religious right wing groups with hot button non-issues.

All of this political noise, refined into pap by the likes of CTV’s Mike Duffy and his little band of self-promoting pundits covers up a far right economic and political agenda that will be embedded and concealed in the January 26th Harper-Flaherty Budget.

The budget will have nothing to do with the needs of labour and job creation. The Harper Conservatives will appear to move to the centre on economic policy but continue to rule from the extreme right. The non-sectarian left must start to warn workers of the craft and guile the budget will contain and call upon the coalition to defeat it.

The betrayals of a democratic electoral coalition are already beginning to appear from frightened Liberal and NDP personalities. The Rae, Ignatieff, Leblanc road show is prepared to cash in on the coalition to strengthen their leadership bids. Stephane Dion’s foolish statements that if Harper made “huge concessions” he would consider them confirm the popular belief that the man is out of touch and in the best interests of all should leave the scene.

The splits and divisions appearing in the coalition are not surprising. How to cope with them is the issue. The “told you so crowd” who talk lots and do little are already preparing their bleak analysis.

The non-sectarian left must avoid barren politics. The fact is politics is being embraced by the majority and passing out of the control of pundits. That is what is new in this crisis. It marks the beginning of the end of passivity.

The rank and file among all of the coalition parties, most of whom are working people, have expectations of success and they have a right to demand that those who forged this alliance keep it together and make it work.

Those of us on the non-sectarian left who are familiar with betrayal need to be vigilant. Even if the coalition in its present form is betrayed and destroyed, the necessity to rebuild it into a stronger more durable form will remain.

There are enough committed forces in the three coalition parties, supported by the Greens, organized labour the non-sectarian left and the rest of the popular democratic movements to justify a real effort to make it work in the next election. The threat of a Harper majority should energize everyone.

The leading role of organized labour in this process is decisive. What the far right fears above all else is any expression of independent and united political action by the left and organized labour in determining the destiny of the country. That is precisely what the left must work for.

Left Turn Canada!

Defeat the Harper Conservatives. Support the CLC Sponsored Thursday December 4th Rallies for a Coalition Government

2008-12-01T21:38:00.000-08:00

A major Parliamentary crisis is underway resulting from the most serious economic crisis since the Dirty Thirties. The country is being momentarily polarized around a liberal social democratic coalition and far right political reaction. A major struggle for Parliamentary democracy is underway.

The main danger at the moment is for the left democratic forces to miss the opportunity to defeat the autocratic Harper Government. It won’t be easy. Prime Minister Harper and his right wing supporters are in panic mode. This week leading up to December 8th and a non-confidence vote in the House of Commons, the Conservative Party will conduct an unprecedented media disinformation campaign reminiscent of the darkest days of McArthyism. Prime Minister Harper will resort to the most desperate measures to stay in power.

No progress in our country can be made while a minority Conservative government is in power. They have inflicted serious hardship on the people. They are the wrong party to have in power during an economic crisis. The time to discuss the problems that will arise with a coalition government is after Harper is ousted.

The Canadian Labour Congress, the Canadian Peace Alliance, the Council of Canadians and the coalition parties will conduct rallies on Thursday December 4th in support of the coalition accord signed today in Ottawa by the leaders of the Liberal Party, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois.

Phone your local labour council to find out where the local rally will be held.

Left Turn Canada!

A Moment of Opportunity for the Left and Organized Labour

2008-11-27T17:27:00.000-08:00

Finance Flaherty’s economic update had two goals; one to cover up the Harper Government’s responsibility for the crisis and the other to use government fiscal policy to assist the banks and the corporate sector to profit from it.

Flaherty failed utterly on the first, but hasn’t given up on the second. Budget cuts and restraints were imposed on transfers to the provinces, while no strings attached public money will continue to flow to private banks and financial institutions. Massive military spending on the US-NATO war in Afghanistan is to continue.

Neo-con deficit abstinence and deregulation is no longer the hallmark of Conservative economic virtue. In fact it never was. Harper copied the George W. Bush deficit and deregulation policy to militarize and give speculative investors free reign in Canada. Without the slightest embarassment Flaherty is now ready to engage in illicit deficit sin because the Conservatives blew a $13.7 billion surplus on war and corporate tax cuts and has no where to go but into deficit. Now after three years of de-regulation Flaherty wants to re-regulate.

Budget deficits aren't sinful. On whose behalf will deficit be incurred determines its virtue? Avoidance of deficit by the Conservatives is the rhtetoric used cut spending on people’s needs. They have renamed deficit “budget restraint” to enact attacks on labour.

Under cover of “budget restraint” Flaherty announced the Harper Government will eliminate the right to strike for public sector workers, impose a wage freeze on the civil service, (a signal to the private sector to do the same), halt and roll back pay equity gains for women workers and eliminate the $1.75 per vote that helps smaller parties to participate in federal elections.

The opposition parties all attacked the government as though they had a joint caucus prior to the debate. Surprisingly the NDP muted its attacks on the Liberals and the Bloc did the same. Scott Brisson for the Liberals, Gilles Duceppe for the Bloc and Jack Layton and Thomas Mulchair for the NDP between them said what had to be said. All pointedly continue to avoid comment on the disastrous and costly war in Afghanistan.

Now what?

The opposition parties are temporarily on the same page regarding the urgency of the need for massive government stimulus package to get the economy moving. All have stated they will vote against the Government. The chattering classes and the media are speculating about a coalition government not another election.

This is a moment of opportunity for the left and organized labour to come forward with its own plan for the working people. A Parliamentary coalition government can make sense as a short term answer to a long term problem.

If that is to happen, labour must convene its own Parliament and layout now its minimum demands. If that were done, labour could establish its terms of support for a Parliamentary coalition and just possibly make it work for the people.

Left Turn Canada!

Bob Rae's "Out the Other Side"

2008-11-21T10:34:00.000-08:00

The media is reporting the Liberal leadership race as though it mattered.

Bob Rae, Michael Ignatieff and Dominic LeBlanc are talking over the heads of the people to Bay Street pleading with finance capital to be given a second chance “and this time we promise to get it right … much farther right.”

Too late…the right bower is all sewn up by the Harper Conservatives at the moment.

Rae, trivializing his anti-labor record as NDP Premier of Ontario promised that if elected Liberal leader he will “use that experience” to lead the country through the current economic crisis and “out the other side.”

The Ontario Labour movement knows well what the “other side” is as Rae envisions it. Labour experienced it when Rae was Premier and imposed the burden of an economic downturn on public employees. Unabashedly Rae wants organized labour to follow him once again, alluding to sacrifices unions will be expected to make to help him help big business get out of the debt crisis mess they have created.

The “other side” is more capitalism. The “other side” is a capitalism much the same as it is now, only leaner, meaner and a more exploitive capitalism that will continue to leave behind it hundreds of thousands of Canadian workers and their families permanently displaced from the workforce.

Rae said he is going this week to explain his epiphany and vision to Bay Street. Where else would he go since he has no audience among organized labour and the working people for his warmed over neo-liberal pap.

What Rae didn’t say should concern workers and farmers. He didn’t speak about the growing militarization of the Canadian economy, energy sell-out to the USA, the de-industrialization of the country, boom and bust market capitalism and the contraction of all democratic and civil rights and freedoms after decades of neo-liberal and neo-con rule.

What Rae, Ignatieff and LeBlanc can’t ignore is that the whole country is to the left of all of the opposition parties…and the gap is widening.

As a matter of fact, the working class is to the left of the “left”, and that is what the Communists and leaders of the popular movements of the people need to study and act upon.

Let Turn Canada!

The 143rd Speech from the Throne - “Economic Renewal” for Whom?”

2008-11-19T19:25:00.000-08:00

Prime Minister Harper has crafted the Speech from the Throne to forestall consideration of any proposals for economic “renewal” not designed to protect banking and corporate wealth first. No sooner had Governor General Michaëlle Jean stepped down from the regal dais, right on cue, Premier Stelmach of Alberta announced a freeze on royalty payments for the big oil companies.

The throne speech ignored the needs of labour. The Prime Minister remained mute on the urgency of expanding the EI system, freezing mortgage payments of unemployed workers and protecting pensions of the retired. An immediate start on a government funded low costs housing construction program and urban and rural infrastructure programs which could ease the impact of the crisis on the working people was off the table.

The speech selected all of the proposals of the November 10th first minister meeting and the November 15th G20 meeting that strengthen the global banking system and continue the discredited neo-liberal stratagems of privatization deregulation and decentralization. The speech refloated the discredited corporate cap and trade “environmental” strategy that rewards the energy giants for polluting.

The speech calls for a freeze on government spending which means less money for health care and social programs to alleviate poverty. The speech promotes P3’s, support for the Alberta-BC and SPP backed trade investment and labour mobility (TILMA) the latter, a plan to drive down wages and labour standards to the lowest common denominator. For the farmers Harper promised to proceed with the scuttling of the Canadian Wheat Board.

Prime Minister Harper dares the opposition to question escalating military spending brazenly restating his government’s plan to carry forward, in the midst of a depression a 20 year $482 billion plan to revamp all three branches of the armed forces. The speech pledges to continue Canada’s support for US-NATO wars of interference and the Bush Doctrine of the so-called “right to intervene”. Harper is floating the idea with a new name, “new non-partisan democratic agency”. More ominously the Conservative Government plans to table a National Security Statement. Every time the Conservative Government mentions “security” it results in a loss of civil and democratic rights.

The Speech from the Throne is in essence a reactionary appeal for big business class “solidarity” against the victims of the coming depression, the working people of Canada.

What the opposition may or may not do in the debate on the speech from the throne is not yet clear. Next comes Finance Minister Flaherty’s economic update next week as the economy sinks daily deeper into recession. The initial statements of Dion, Layton and Duceppe are not encouraging.

The idea of bringing down the Harper government and forming a reform coalition government to implement a genuine program on behalf of labour and the farmers, and all people who must labour to live, seems to be beyond their imagination.

Left Turn Canada!

The Cause of Peace Deserves Careful Analysis. A Response to Obama Bashing!

2008-11-15T19:22:00.000-08:00

Recently a number of FOS readers active in the peace movement asked for my comment on postings by an assortment of Canadian and US “left” commentators attacking President elect Barack Obama. Here is my response…

Dear Friends

Thank you for asking for my opinion on this important debate. I apologize for the length of my reply but you have caused me to think how best to answer. I am not good at sound bites and believe we need the time to think and discuss things at greater length. The cause of peace deserves careful analysis and comment.

First of all I do not subscribe to the view of COAT on this matter at this time. They do good and useful work for peace but for a Canadian peace organization to mobilize Canadian public opinion against the outcome of a US election and its President elect is presumptuous and not useful to our cause right now. I think we need a deeper analysis and a more considered and sober approach. What do I mean by that?

The US election was more about the movement that brought Barack Obama to power than the President-elect himself.

There was a powerful element of popular, grass roots support for the candidates of the Democratic Party Presidential nomination that Obama during the campaign succeeded in uniting behind his candidacy. He did that by speaking more directly to the real problems caused by war and economic depression confronting the people of the USA and their deep conviction that matters had to change. Those were genuine issues and contrast sharply with the Bush era and its open advocacy of the US Century and its drive for unilateral control of the world under the bogus "war on terrorism".

Has Obama abandoned the cause of US imperialism and global domination? That is unlikely and it is unrealistic to expect him to do that or frame our discussion around whether he will or he won't.

What is completely reasonable to consider is that given internal US politics and the unfolding world economic crisis he will find it impossible to completely ignore the peace movement and the expectations of the people of the USA for a withdrawal from Iraq. It is one thing to have no illusions about Obama as COAT advises. It is quite another to predict and actually work for a negative outcome of his Presidency before he has assumed office.

It would be more useful to conduct a campaign to bring pressure on Obama to honor his election promises, not predict he won't even before he has taken office.

What Obama will do with his presidency is not completely predictable and not even entirely in his hands. We need to keep in mind that US voters still accorded the Republican Candidate John McCain 48% of the popular vote. The Republican Party will not remain idle and they will be campaigning hard to erase the expectations of the people of the USA for peace and progress in their country.

What are some of the obvious things we in the Canadian peace movement may want to say and that should be said soberly and without hyperbole about the US election?

It is reasonable to observe that it is impossible given the political and economic reality of the US class, electoral and governmental system for anyone who isn't well integrated in that system at the highest levels and extremely rich or have access to wealth to become president. That by the way is true of our country as well.

Obama comes to the Presidency with baggage. The matter cannot be left at that and be considered the last word. What US president hasn't arrived on the scene without baggage and that goes for Canadian Prime Ministers as well?

It is remarkable considering endemic racism in the USA that a well placed African American candidate, with or without baggage, was elected president of the USA.

It is not so important what COAT thinks about that outcome as what the African American citizens of the USA think about that outcome.

We in Canada need to think carefully about expressing views and mobilizing campaigns that would be viewed by African Americans as questioning their wisdom and support for Obama. They are quite capable of deciding whether or not he will measure up to their expectations.

We in Canada have experienced US interference in our elections and we didn't like it and neither will Americans.

As a retired worker I take a slightly different view of the election of Obama which I do not disparage in its importance to the struggle against racism in the USA.

As a worker I await the day when a worker, man or woman, and I have known many that qualify, can aspire to become Prime Minister of Canada or President of the USA.. The closest the US ever came to taking seriously a genuine labour-peace candidate for President and who by the way had an unblemished record of struggle for the common people, was the great socialist Eugene Debs. He ran for President on a labour ticket and garnered a million votes at the turn of the century. Henry Wallace another impassioned labour peace candidate after WW2 put up a serious battle for the common people but fell far short of election. That is something for the future.

It is also a reality of US politics that once elected it is difficult for any president to completely ignore the movement (electoral base) that brought him or her to power.

US Presidencies are always establishment presidencies but given certain conditions it sometimes becomes possible depending on the real balance of political forces in the country to make some headway on peace and on behalf of workers and the poor. That possibility cannot be discounted by serious activists for peace.

Such was the case in the 1930's with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who defied some of the wealthiest and most powerful financial capitalist interests of the USA and enacted some badly needed economic reforms for labour and the poor. That possibility cannot be ruled out with Obama in power. Neither is it a guarantee.

When it happened in the USA in the 1930's it resulted from the mass struggles of the people led by labour against the terrible conditions brought on by the Great Depression. The great merit of FDR is that he had the courage to actually do something. That era needs to be restudied in the light of today's economic depression.

George Bush II on the other hand was in power during a long period of economic expansion in the USA. He was openly beholden to the neo-con religious right and on a deeper level to the powerful oil interests and the military industrial complex and all of those who parasitically were making billions out of war and preparations for war.

It is regrettable that US citizens, including some workers, saw their economic interests tied to militarism and unbridled capitalist speculation. They voted for Republican Presidents for a long time, disguising their support with patriotic flag waving but with a definite economic interest in doing so.That is regrettable but that fact can't be ignored. That by the way is also true of our country where many mask their economic interest with patriotic fervor.

Obama has been brought to power by a different electoral base, and under a different set of objective circumstances. Most of his electoral base is amongst those who have been excluded from benefitting from war and suffer directly the economic hardships it has brought to the American people and in particular the youth both African American and white, who have been its special victims. There is strong expression of the desire for peace in the election of Obama.

What prevents any President in the USA from acting swiftly on the question of peace is an overarching reality of the US economy. We need to keep in mind that there is evidence that 40% of the US economy is directly or indirectly dependent on militarism and active wars. It is by far the main cause of the lack of public funds for basic governmental needs that has created a dire situation for many US states and municipalities that can't pay for state and local services as basic as public education, health care and infrastructure. The State of California, one of the richest in the union, has gone to the federal treasury for a state loan to fund its obligations. Military spending is also a major if not the major contributor to environmental damage and certainly a major factor in global warming. That fact is not spoken of enough by the environmental movement.

Whether Obama will have the courage to cut arms spending, withdraw from Iraq, shut down some of the 800 US military bases world wide, withdraw its military to its own borders and live within its own means is an open question. I count myself among those that are skeptical and consider it unlikely for that to happen quickly during the Obama Presidency. That outcome will take time and a maturity of political and economic factors that will result in another big upsurge of popular pressure from the people of the USA.

Another reality is the fact that the Democratic Party is far from united. Within the Democratic electoral base are also well to do and some very rich US interests who have been excluded from power by the Republican insiders and who now want in. These interests have not prospered as they would have liked out of US wars, foreign investments like the small group of Republican insiders. They were not the main beneficiaries of the sub-prime bubble. They are more interested in making up for lost time than solving the great issues of peace and economic reform on the minds of the millions who voted for Obama.

There is already a struggle underway inside the Democratic Party for positions of influence. I did not see a single prominent civil rights or labour leader on the platform at Obama's first press conference. That is a portent. There is not doubt that there is movement inside the Democratic Party to subvert its peace and reform wing. How Obama will cope with that is not known at this time. If the people of the USA want his Presidency to live up to their expectations they will have to fight for it, and we should do nothing that will make their struggle more difficult.

Any US Presidency is a hot bed of patronage. It cannot be forgotten that President Bush elevated political cronyism to unprecedented heights. It still is the main feature of US politics. Bush in the dying days of his Presidency continues that practice.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and The Federal Reserve Board Chair Ben Bernanke and before him Allen Greenspan were the Republican architects of deregulation and neo-liberalism that enabled insider cronies to use derivatives and hedge funds (betting with stocks they don't own and money they don't have) to cause trading in these bogus instruments to reach the astronomical amounts, many times global GDP.

What upheld the whole system were US working people using their hard earned incomes to pay their mortgages. When the economy declined and millions defaulted the whole system of sub-prime instruments collapsed causing a world wide global recession. It caused a world wide recession because banks around the world were buying and selling these worthless securities on the advice of US investment houses and of course on the advice of Allan Greenspan.

I was alarmed to read today in the Globe and Mail that the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board was heavily involved in backing hedge fund trading which may yet, seriously harm our public pensions. CPP is the money of Canadian working people deposited there in trust, since 1966 in the belief that it was secure and not to be used for speculation. The creation of the CPP Investment Board changed all that and now a cloud hangs over our pensions.

Does all of this mean that nothing can be achieved during the Obama Presidency? No I don't subscribe to such an extreme view. I believe much can be achieved but it will involve unrelenting popular democratic pressure to ensure that it happens. Next weekend the G20 will meet in Washington at Bush's invitation. Harper and Flaherty are going there and all bets are off as to what they will do at the meeting. I will be so bold as to predict they will continue to ally themselves with the US administration believing that Canada's destiny is tied to the USA.

Harper will now try and re-invent himself and he will cause great embarrassment to us all as he obsequiously ingratiates himself with Obama hoping we will all forget his past admirations and support for Bush.

Canadian peace demands something better than that from our Government. It demands that we distance our country from US-NATO wars, from militarism, the $482 billion arms budget to be squandered in the next twenty years. It means getting out of NAFTA and SPP. That is what we should demand be discussed with the new President of the USA.

We do not need to rely solely on the US market to prosper. Other countries are finding new markets in a new world. We have everything we need in Canada, resources capital, a productive and well educated workforce and the world is waiting to trade with us. That is why we need to consider an entirely new relationship with the world, not dependent on what is happening in the USA.

Harper is so implicated in submissive behavior to the USA he is not the Prime Minister that can be trusted to do it. That is why it is important for the peace movement to take an interest in federal politics and advance our own program for peaceful development of our country. The preoccupation with US politics is unavoidable but our destiny is in Canada and its future. That is my concept of what peace means.

There is much more to be said, and thank you for asking. Please feel free to share this discussion with anyone you may think would be interested.

Capitalism and Racketeering 101

2008-11-15T18:35:00.000-08:00

President George Bush in the lead up to the G20 meeting in Washington on November 16th grandiloquently lauded his defunct administration’s disastrous war on terror and made-in-USA global economic melt down. His speech came with a warning: Don't disturb capitalism.

Bush said: "In the wake of the financial crisis, voices from the left and right are equating the free enterprise system with greed, exploitation and failure. It is true that this crisis included failures, by leaders and borrowers, by financial firms, by governments and independent regulators. But the crisis was not a failure of the free market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system."

Bush of course is right. The crisis is not a failure of the free market system. It functioned superbly, just as it is designed to do, to rip off and exploit workers and the poor and transfer the stolen wealth to the wealthy and powerful elites of the world. Capitalism 101!

Bush delivered his remarks with his trademark smirk and swagger in the full knowledge his insider cronies were listening and appreciated the in-joke that they had just put another one over on the capitalist world. The routine is; first create chaos in the system and then pass legislation to make the taxpayers pay for the mess so it can be done all over again. Global racketeering 101!

Right on cue Finance Minister Flaherty supported Bush on all counts stating; "The open market system did not fail in this crisis. However, some forgot Adam Smith’s maxim that the invisible hand needs to be supported by an appropriate legal and regulatory framework.”

There was a regulatory framework; the artful handiwork of Allan Greenspan former Chair of the US Federal Reserve and Henry Paulson former CEO of Lehman Brothers and now U.S. Treasury Secretary who actively promoted changes in the rules of the US Securities Exchange Commission that permitted investment insiders without oversight to trade quasi-legal derivatives and hedge funds, (betting with borrowed stocks and leveraged money) many times global GDP.

The global Ponzi scheme was promoted globally enmeshing Canadian banks and the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board. Underpinning the whole stratagem was the hard work of the U.S. people attempting to buy homes they were encouraged to purchase at sub-prime rates. When working class families confronted high rates of interest, hidden like time bombs inside the sub-prime contract, millions couldn’t pay. Many others who could pay lost their jobs. The whole system began to crumble.

What is the penalty for global insider investor racketeering? Capitalist governments that give billions from the public purse to the same investors and banks so they can do it all over again.

Left Turn Canada!

Keep Canada Out of the US Bar Room Brawl

2008-11-12T10:54:00.000-08:00

Prime Minister Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty on the eve of the G20 meeting in Washington next weekend have no mandate to support the plan of US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced today that rewards insider cronies of the Bush Administration for plunging the world economy into chaos and crisis.

Paulson is shoveling $700 billion of US taxpayer’s money directly to the banks, near banks and their own private insurance company AIG, and then pleads with them to give it back to cash starved US industries. They won’t. The money is not intended for job creating industries such as auto, or to keep working class families confronting foreclosure in their homes.

The $700 billion will be used to bolster the strength of the last three major US banks and investment houses left standing, U.S. global financial giants Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, the latter the former employer of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. These favoured mega banks are being shored up with taxpayer’s money in an attempt to bully all US private capital to join in a bar room brawl with the EU and British Banks and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) that are openly challenging US dominance and control of the world capitalist financial system.

What is totally missing from Paulson’s report is the ruinous affect on the global economy of the ongoing squandering of the US treasury on US-NATO wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fortune Magazine last January estimated the total cost of the “war on terror” (Iraq) to average about $100 billion per year or a total of $500 billion to that date. The US War Resistors League places the total closer to $200 billion per year out of a total US military expenditure for 2009 of $965 billion. The war is consuming about 1 to 2% of US GDP and if it continues for a decade may reach 5% when overall total US GDP is likely to contract. The CIA Fact Book puts US GDP for 2007 at $13.78 trillion.

The Harper Conservative Government has no mandate to continue to tie Canada to this US economic boat anchor. Prime Minister Harper has no mandate to use Canada’s wealth and resources as a powder monkey for US imperialism. The Harper Government has no mandate to place at risk the wealth and welfare of Canadians in an inter-imperialist brawl that will break out at the G20 next week.

Canadians have the right to demand a made-in-Canada solution to our economic future and end our dependence on a shrinking crisis ridden US economy.

Canada has everything it needs to create jobs, provide capital and to produce cheap energy for economic expansion and to produce goods needed for the home and international markets. The way forward for Canada is independence of economic development and the establishment a new relationship with the world, free of the domination and control of US imperialism. If Harper won’t do it – it is time for the left to discuss the kind of government that will.

Left Turn Canada!

What Is Peace?

2008-11-11T08:41:00.000-08:00

On Remembrance Day
November 11, 2008

To Fight for Peace is to Fight for Life

I was recently asked by a peace activist in Nelson to contribute my definition of peace to a compendium of definitions she was collecting.

As we observe on this day, in solemn ceremonies everywhere our indictment of unjust wars, for what it is worth, my definition of peace.

What is Peace?

Peace is the restraint imposed on aggressive imperialism by the organized political and social actions of the vast majority of humankind as they realize that the basic necessities of life and human happiness can only be achieved in a society that eradicates all of the causes of war.

Peace is neither a sentiment nor a plea to reason. If it were we would have it. Peace is the unavoidable struggle for human existence. To fight for peace is to fight for life. Peace is the objective condition necessary for the existence of human life and in today’s world, of all life.

Don Currie

United We Fall!

2008-11-10T12:02:00.000-08:00

The G20 Meeting next week - United We Fall!

Today the first in a series of Federal Provincial first ministers meetings on the global economic crisis concluded in Ottawa, remarkable for its complete failure to give clear direction to the minority Harper Conservative Government on the eve of G20 meeting in Washington next week. Ed Stelmach of Alberta didn’t even show up.

The Provincial premier’s abandonment of their collective responsibility to the people of Canada gives Prime Minister Harper and Finance Minister Flaherty, what they want, a free hand. Their options include lining up with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and lame duck President Bush, the BRIC, (Brazil, Russia, India and China), President Sarkozy of France representing the EU, or British Prime Minister Gordon Brown representing British Banks. It could be any of the above because Prime Minister Harper has no unique plan to protect Canadians.

As far as Finance Minister Flaherty is concerned, his work is done. Canadian banks cleared out $25 billion of mortgage debt from the books and transferred it to Canada Mortgage (the taxpayers) without any requirement imposed on the banks to begin lending to stimulate the economy. Pensioners, unemployed, cash strapped governments and companies are “on their own.” Case closed.

Then why bother going to the G20? It was formed in 1999 and accounts for 85% of global production. Members are the seven major industrialized countries, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Germany and the United States, plus Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the European Union.

Harper and Flaherty have to go because 2008 is not 1999. The capitalist world has changed. Brazil’s finance minister, Guido Mantega asserts that major industrial countries had zero growth in the past year and emerging economies such as Brazil, China, Russia, India, grew by 6.1%. Emerging economies account for 75% of global economic growth.

To underline the point, a $700 billion U.S. Government bail out package is being used to create “three colossal U.S. global financial giants” Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs positioning the U.S. to compete with the EU and other G20 competitors. The reorganized U.S. banking system was brokered by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a Wall Street enforcer going back to the days of Richard Nixon and you guessed it, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs.

The Paulson bailout rewards “Crony Capitalism’s” insiders. The Paulson bail out is not aimed at stopping the thievery of US workers pensions or put the 6.1% of US citizens out of work back to work. It is aimed at perpetuating and accelerating more plunder of the U.S. treasury (another $14 billion was transferred today to AIG the U.S. cashed strapped banking insurance company) before President elect Obama takes over on January 20th. 2009 and is handed the mess.

In contrast to the U.S. policy of rewarding the sub-prime criminals, China announced yesterday it had invested $586 billion, about 18% of its GDP into protecting its economy that will be spent on low-rent housing, infrastructure in rural areas as well as roads, airports and railways. It will also provide low interest loans to cashed strapped companies. China has a GDP of $3.3 trillion with a growth rate of around 7%. The investment is projected to boost China’s growth rate by another 2% next year to maintain its status as the fourth largest economy in the world. The effect of China’s action was an immediate upturn in global markets that helped stabilize metal and oil prices.

If the first minister’s meeting in Ottawa had done the same, agree to invest 18% of Canada’s GDP to stimulate the Canadian economy that would set aside a national recovery fund of about $280 billion Cdn. That figure is a little more than half of what the federal government will spend on U.S.-NATO wars and militarizing the Canadian economy over the next twenty years.

An opportunity has been missed. The first ministers have failed the Canadian people. Instead of putting Canadian interests first, they have allowed Harper and Flaherty to engage in what is certain to be an inter-imperialist brawl between the EU and the USA with the non-belligerent states attempting to come up with a workable plan. Depending on Harper and Flaherty to support a plan favourable to Canadian workers and farmers is wishful thinking.

All bets are off. If you are inclined to make one, bet on Harper supporting whatever U.S. cockamamie plan is floated next.

Left Turn Canada!

Left Right and Centre

2008-11-09T11:51:00.000-08:00

Jack Layton speaking this morning to Ontarian NDP’ers said bank bailouts cost each person in the world $582 and called for at least that much to be spent by the Harper Government on protecting the jobs and pensions of Canadian working class families. Layton staked out the NDP’s Parliamentary plan of economic stimulus including cancelling Harper’s corporate tax cuts and spending instead on low cost housing, research and development, trades training and infrastructure renewal including public transit. Layton demanded that workers have full access to their own money in the EI fund. He called for protection of workers pension funds and warned about government tampering with the Canada Pension Plan Funds in its February report. He reiterated the NDP’s position on climate change to make polluters pay through a hard limit cap and trade program and to clean up the tar sands. Nothing was said about the $200 million per month squander on the war in Afghanistan.

In contrast yesterday the Globe and Mail reported the “grass roots” Conservatives will demand less government and more privatization of health care at their policy convention in Winnipeg next weekend.

Also in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Paul Adams a former parliamentary correspondent and now teaching Journalism at Carleton University rails against the “fallacy” of a united “left wing alternative” in or out of Parliament. The piece is a thinly disguised response to Professor John Ryan of Winnipeg and his call for a left of centre coalition in an October 29th article in Global Research http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10742

What is missing in all of this? The organized labour movement!

Layton appeals for Harper to respect the 63% of Canadians that voted against him and work with the opposition parties on a united approach to solving the economic downturn.

What would give greater meaning to that appeal is thousands of Canadian workers and their families demonstrating at the Winnipeg Conservative Policy Convention next weekend and tens of thousands on Parliament Hill on the Opening of Parliament outlining organized labour’s plan for Canada.

Let Turn Canada!

Wait and See or Organize and Fight

2008-11-08T02:07:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama has had his first press conference as President elect. All Canadian media commentators are preaching a wait and see approach. While President elect Obama has to put up with the Bush administration until January before acting, Canadians don’t.

The preoccupation of the media with the internal situation in the USA is a plea to Canadians to allow Prime Minister Harper to defer solutions to our urgent problems until Barack Obama and his advisors tells him what they will permit him to do.

No government in the world is sitting and waiting to see what the next US administration will allow them to do with such timorous and demeaning servility as our own. That also goes for the opposition parties as well.

The challenge confronting Canadian workers and farmers is not to allow a minority government to hide behind the latest “US love in” as an excuse for doing nothing.

Inaction is not an option for labour and working people as they lose their jobs in the tens of thousands.

There is a made-in-Canada solution to re-start the economy, end de-industrialization and stop the sell out of our dwindling energy resources. The problem is to organize a people’s movement that will fight for it.

The dignity of our country and its survival as an independent country depends on it.

A "Made-for-Canada" Economic Plan

2008-11-07T11:04:00.000-08:00

Prime Minister Harper, Stephane Dion, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe are huddled with their advisors transfixed as they await President elect Barack Obama’s first press conference this afternoon and his “made-for-USA” plan to make Canada and the world pay for the Bush administration’s war-induced world economic melt down.

Finance Minister Flaherty is praying that Obama will say something, anything; that will help him explain to Canadians why the Harper Government has no “made-for-Canada” economic plan to save Canadian jobs.

There is no sign that Dion, Layton and Duceppe have even talked about a united opposition plan for a “made-in-Canada” economic plan to protect Canada from the plan of U.S. finance capital to off-load its problems on the world. Their “we are all in this together” approach is an admission of political impotence and bankruptcy.

The news out of GM and Ford today and the economic bad news reported in the Edmonton Journal about looming job loss in the energy sector, challenges organized labour and the left to do what the Harper Government and a paralyzed opposition won’t do – act on behalf of the Canadian working class.

In the first place that means to organize labour led community committees to save Canadian industry.

What has been built in Canada, what has been paid for by Canadians stays in Canada.
No dismantling of Canadian production facilities for shipment to the USA.
Nationalize energy and use it in Canada first to fuel Canadian industry and manufacturing.
No public funds for private banks.
Working class family income loss trumps Canadian investor losses.

Left Turn Canada!

The 44th President of the USA

2008-11-06T18:50:00.000-08:00

The Way I See It
Don Currie Chair CPS

By electing Barack Obama their 44th President, the people of the USA, as is their inalienable right, are determining their own destiny. It is not yet clear if in voting for a program of change, if that change includes recognition and support of the inalienable right of other peoples to do likewise.

Will an Obama Government greet with grace and equanimity, the pronouncements of other peoples that they also love their country and believe they also live “in the best country in the world” and also insist on saying so and doing so without the permission or interference of US imperialism?

In the appeals for unity and reconciliation expressed in both the concession speech of Senator McCain and the victory speech of President elect Obama it is not clear if those appeals are for a long overdue retreat from empire and acceptance by the people of the USA of the necessity to live as others do, within their own borders and within their own means, or whether the appeal for unity is around a new, revised and perhaps less belligerent version of US imperial destiny.

While the former is the business of the people of the USA the latter is the business of the people of the world.