Raise The Rates Op/Ed

Here is an op/ed by a social work academic writing on behalf of the Social Action Committee of the Ontario Association of Social Workers in support of an increase to social assistance rates:

Welfare rates need bolstering
By Sally Palmer, Chair, Social Action Committee, Ontario Association of Social Workers, Hamilton and District Branch
The Hamilton Spectator(Jan 30, 2006)

I am writing for the Social Action Committee of the Ontario Association of Social Workers about new restrictions on recipients of Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program.

Until recently, recipients who needed a more adequate diet could apply for a special diet supplement to their food budget.

Most were unaware of this program, according to an informal survey by some of our members, who canvassed about 50 people they met at food banks and elsewhere.

In the summer of 2005, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty began a campaign to encourage all recipients to apply for the supplement on the basis that the low level of social assistance rates did not provide adequate food for a nutritious diet.

Hamilton's Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Elizabeth Richardson, confirmed this on Nov. 2, 2005, in a meeting with poverty activists when she said social assistance levels were "woefully inadequate."

In announcing the recent restrictions, Social Services Minister Sandra Pupatello alleged that many applicants were abusing a benefit intended for specific medical conditions.

She also pointed to a 3 per cent raise in social assistance rates granted by her government in 2004, but she did not acknowledge that there had been no raise in 2005.

The 2005 report, Incomes and Poverty in Hamilton by the Social Planning and Research Council documented that the buying power of social assistance has diminished by 35 to 40 per cent over the past decade -- a combination of the 1995 Conservative cutbacks and subsequent inflation.

Recipients who are now being called abusers of the system have every reason to feel betrayed by government cutbacks, and by not being informed about a program many of them could have accessed.

Most recipients are sole-support mothers, or people with disabilities. They seldom advocate on their own behalf because they feel the public is unsympathetic.

Pupatello herself told a public meeting in Waterdown on Sept. 12, 2005, that raising welfare rates was not on her government's political agenda because it did not attract
votes.

We should not let this important group of people continue to suffer on the shamefully inadequate incomes they are granted by our public programs.

Tag, I'm It

Well, now. I have been blogging for some time, but this is my first experience of being tagged with a meme. It was Tenacious over at One Tenacious Baby Mama who tagged me. The way I understand it, there are four questions, to which I am supposed to provide four answers each, before passing the meme on to four other lucky people.

Four vehicles you've owned
a brand new bike that got stolen within two weeks, a used bike to replace it with, a silver-coloured (in honour of the silver jubilee -- yuck!) toy double decker bus supposedly given to me by my newborn sister (I was skeptical even at three that a newborn had bought me a bus), and (stealing this answer from Tenacious 'cause I like it) a computer that takes me all sorts of places

Four jobs you've had
dishwasher (saw my employers brandish knives at one another), magazine seller (as much as I enjoyed the job, on long shifts felt the uniform glossy aesthetic that surrounded me corroding my sanity), social planner (learned lots that my employer didn't intend...about hegemony, 'soft' social control, the poverty industry, and drinking beer), teaching assistant (relearned how scary some people's (mis)understanding of the world is)

Four places you've lived
Eaglesham (Scotland), Wellesley, Los Angeles, Ottawa

Four vacations you've taken
the middle-class clichee but still fun post-university trip to Europe from which I brought back a postcard of a portrait of Lorenzo Di Medici as my only souvenir (I have no idea why, except that he was a creepy looking dude, and I still have it hanging in my office), week-long solo retreat to a provincial park where I was menaced by a racoon the size of a pony, week-long solo retreat to downtown Ottawa which was much less relaxing than the provincial park but with better access to pubs, crazy sleep-deprived driving trip to the east coast with frequent stops to take picture of my co-travellers beside tacky roadside attractions

So I'm not sure about the etiquette of tagging others, so I'll just go ahead and name four blogs whose owners occasionally stop by here, and they can take the baton and run or they can pretend they haven't seen it.

Brown Rab Girl Fish
Impetus Java House
verbena-19
DesertPeace

Two Haiti Links

Here are two links to mainstream but still useful material on Haiti. (One found via The Dominion Daily Weblog and the other found via WordWarriors email list.)

Btw...I've thought a good action to raise the profile of Canada's complicity in war and empire in Haiti would be in my old home town, Hamilton...there are now three NDP MPs there instead of just one, as of this past Monday. Why not occupy all three constituency offices on the day that the new Parliament opens, with the demand that the NDP raise the issue of Haiti publically and often (which they have not done so far)? It would get national media attention, because of the target (sort of a "man bites dog" thing) and the day, and there's a good chance it would win its demand. Not sure that the capacity exists in Hamilton to do this at the moment, from what I know from folks who still live there, but it could be pretty powerful. Maybe see if Toronto folks would target Jack and Olivia at the same time.

Economics Quotes

Anyone who has seen how economic statistics are constructed knows that they are really a subgenre of science fiction.

-- Paul Krugman, economist

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recount a long and stupid dream.

-- Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed

"Release Your Inner-Weirdo"

I don't identify as a gay man and I'm not always particularly bold in living this article's advice in the ways that it might be applied to my own politics, identity, and broader life. I also think the food metaphor to be found somewhere in the middle tends to turn it in a bit of a power-blind multi-culti direction, when similar arguments under a more thorough anti-authoritarian and anti-oppression frame are actually stronger. Nonetheless, I think that "Release your inner-weirdo: Progress does not often come through subtlety, but through confrontation" has the right idea about the power and political importance of being assertively, politically "abnormal." The point isn't transgression for its own sake, but refusal to passively submit to the grafting of difference onto structures of power and the homogenizing, invisibilizing, silencing normativities (whiteness, masculinity/feminity, straightness, others) the society that surrounds us tries to push down our throats.

(Found via Direland.)

Election Day 2006

Thank god it's over.

Originally, I had intended to spend no more time on this election than what it took for L and I to walk across the road today so I could vote. Then I thought I'd maybe do one post and somehow that turned into six, some of them quite long. Not only that, but the time I spend writing for this blog is usually quite distinct from time I would spend on what I should be doing, but in order to be sure I said what I had to say by today, for the last couple of posts I actually gave up some prime work time.

Anyway, because they've taken time and effort, here is one final shot at my series of posts for the 2006 Canadian federal election:

• Election Post #1: Caving In and General Analysis
  
• Election Post #2: Can't Tell the Players Without a Program
  
• Election Post #3: Elite Consensus
  
• Election Post #4: Elite Divisions
  
• Election Post #5: Whither the NDP?
  
• Election Post #6: Hope and Social Movements

I suspect I won't make any comments on the results -- I'm sick of talking about their politics -- but I may end up posting some random thoughts. Certainly I'll be keeping my eye on a few ridings, especially Sudbury, where I live; Nickelbelt, which is right nearby; all of the Hamilton ridings; and a couple of the Kitchener-Waterloo ridings, which is where I grew up and where my mother's significant other is an NDP candidate.

Election Post #6: Hope and Social Movements

So what about the rest of us? What about oppressed communities, liberation politics, the "antis", socialists and anarchists and indigenists and explorers of radical ecologies, feminists and radical queers and revolutionary people of colour, and those who are some or many of these things? What does it all mean for what I have previously described as "those of us in the diverse but sparsely populated territory to the left of social democracy?"

It ain't pretty. But perhaps it can take the edge off the frustration at whatever result occurs on the 23rd, in a perverse kind of way: I firmly believe that no matter who wins on Monday, things are going to get worse. And despite that, we exist and we are going to keep doing our things.

Saying that things are only going to get worse does not mean that I think who wins is irrelevant. As I have argued, there are non-trivial differences at stake. Rather, it means that none of the range of even vaguely likely possibilities will stop things from getting worse, it will just determine how fast and in what ways. Nor is this some sort of simplistic "No matter who wins, the government always gets in" kind of position. Rather, it is based on looking at recent history and likely futures.

Most of the relevant trends of the recent past I talked about in my post on social democracy: the rise of neoliberalism over the last three decades, with the support of both parties that have governed; the decline (unevenly and with exceptions) of rich-world social movements over the same time period; and the loss of the deeply flawed but still space-creating example of the Soviet Union. Whether it is neoliberal capitalism proper (and all of the oppressions with which it intersects and upon which it depends), the "right" elaboration on neoliberalism, or the slightly softened and delayed neoliberalism that another NDP-supported Liberal minority might bring, no outcome on election day will divert this trend on its own. The results four years down the road from each of these alternatives may be better or worse from each other, but none will take us to a place better than where we are now.

There are also things coming up that have only begun to make themselves felt which, as I have briefly argued before, are likely to make the changes over the next 30 years on a global scale much greater than those over the last 30 years. These are peak oil and the tremendous impact that will have on the global economy and those of us dependent on it; increasing climate change and environmental instability; and the loss of dominance of the United States and the likelihood that its elites will turn increasingly to the one area in which they continue to reign supreme, that of massive and horrible violence, to try and reverse that process.

The rather depressing situation for those of us who are the subject of this post can also be seen in the context of the election itself. Liberal corruption lead to a crumbling of at least a certain level of legitimacy in "how things are" despite the fact that the majority of Canadian elites did not seem too displeased with Liberal rule otherwise. Despite the loss of legitimacy, the Conservatives (and in particular the "right" tendency that dominates them at present) were not necessarily the automatic beneficiaries -- they have surged through the campaign, but it was extremely odd, and indicative of the hesitancy with which many ordinary and elite Canadians regard them, that they weren't polling at 60% going in to the election. This was an opening, but we (in the broad way I mean it in this post) weren't able to take advantage of it. In another time and place such an opening could have been used by popular movements to send all parties lurching to the left, and cracks in legitimacy could be forcibly deepened so that something that started as a corruption scandal might lead to larger questions about how things are and how they ought to be. And I'm not blaming us for not doing so; we just couldn't.

Scary, depressing stuff, right? But the point of this post -- all of my election-related posts, really -- is not to paralyze people with depression about the state of things, but to help chip away at the illusions that help keep things that way. Ideally, now would be the point in the post when I whip out the reasons to believe that social transformation is really just around the corner, or my simple four-step plan to make it happen.

That would be dumb, of course. If we are to find hope, it will not be grounded in predictions of inevitable salvation or in supposed magic answers.

Despite what I've said, there are signs of hope in the world, particularly outside the rich, white-dominated countries. And within Canada, there are deep reservoirs of consciousness of and anger at injustice: on reserves, in neighbourhoods, at women's shelters, in housing projects, on the buses, in bathhouses. It may seem fragmented and weak, even invisible, but there are always people organizing, educating, resisting. And as long as that is true, it is possible for that hard work plus unpredictable opportunities and shifts in momentum to result in much more visible and powerful popular movements.

This, then, is the only place where hope can reasonably be sought, however beleaguered it may seem at the moment. And it can only be meaningfully sought by becoming a part of the efforts, not just through some vague awareness that they exist. Hope comes not only from the fact that we may someday win great victories, and on any given day can win small ones, but from the very fact that we are actively working together in struggle.

Now, that is often an easier thing to say than to do. How we can be part of struggle depends on who we are, on our social location, on the privilege or oppression that we each experience. I have enough trouble figuring out what to do myself without being so arrogant as to think I have business telling the migrant farm workers who harvest food crops in southern Ontario or members of the Mohawk Warrior Society or militants at Vancouver Rape Relief a single thing about struggle. But I do know that one central task we have is to dispel the myths that we can do nothing and that the pinnacle of what we can do is to vote Liberal or NDP or Green or Communist. (And obviously the approaches to challening the hold of these myths over people need to vary a lot, since political despair based on experience of unrelenting oppression and dehumanization is a much different creature than semi-willful denial of the existence of harsh realities based in experiences of privilege, for example).

The point is this: If you want to take hope despite the fact that no outcome in tomorrow's election is going to stop things from getting worse in Canada, take it from the fact that you are doing what you can, in amidst the pressures and opportunities and challenges that structures of power have placed in your life, to participate in and build such struggle. Look at friends, comrades, allies, and take a moment to really appreciate who they are and what they are doing to change the world. All of that may not seem like much compared to the magnitude of the problems facing us, but it is still a pretty amazing thing, and it is our only source of future strength.

And if you are not already part of that, or figuring out ways to become so, then the day after election day is a perfect time to start.

New Carnival of Feminists

Check out Carnival of the Feminists 7 posted at Feministe!

Painful All-Candidates Meeting

Went to an all-candidates meeting tonight, sponsored by the local Social Planning Council, the Labour Council, and a number of social service agencies. Its focus was social policy issues.

All-candidates meetings are generally poor places to actually learn anything about politics, but I went to get to know my community a little better, since I've lived in Sudbury for only 7 months or so. I was worried that it would be so hard to take that I wouldn't be able to sit through the whole thing, but I managed to do so. I spent more time giggling than I expected.

Here are some disconnected observations:

• Attendance was very poor.
  
  
• The candidates consisted of five white men and one white woman (the Liberal incumbent).
  
  
• Women's equality, queer rights, and racism were all absent from the discussion (minus a couple of one-line asides relating to women's rights).
  
  
• Most of the questions were from the audience, submitted in advance on slips of paper. I didn't quite get the structure of the evening so I submitted one on the occupation of Haiti, which of course didn't get read since it was a social policy debate. I should have submitted one on racism...I'd imagine the answers would have been pretty entertaining across the board.
  
  
• The Conservative candidate was smooth but creepy. He described poor and oppressed people as "less fortunate" and confided in us that he was entering his new "vocation" as MP for "the same reasons that brought me into policing and pastoring." Yep, an ex-cop, fundamentalist ex-minister with a charming smile.
  
  
• The most offensive remarks of the debate came, unfortunately, from the Communist candidate. He was answering a question to do with training, and he made some decent points about corporate refusal to invest in training and then followed it up with some immigrant bashing against those "illegal people" who come and take our jobs.
  
  
• The funniest remarks came from the New Democrat. After giving the rote party answer on something to do with economic development -- and most of his answers he just read directly from the policy book -- he went off on some tangent about a local pet project of his. He wants to see stainless steel manufacturing come to Sudbury, and when his list of all of the wonderful things that could be manufactured here if such a thing were to happen reached "lawn ornaments" I almost fell off my seat from giggling. He also later supplemented a fairly boring answer on health care with a bizarre rant about how they came up with Viagra but they can't cure cancer or stop alzheimers and blah blah blah.
  
  
• The Liberal incumbent's answer, in response to a bizarre and vague question about social activism, consisted mostly of a rant against people who have occupied her constituency office in the past. As is always the case in these sorts of situations, it failed to arouse chants of "shame" in the audience that her basic position seemed to be that it is perfectly acceptable for the government of which she is a part to cause suffering and death but absolutely is not acceptable for a few high school students to make her office staff feel uncomfortable about that fact.
  
  
• There was a question about the separation of church and state and the role of faith in politics. All of the candidates except one gave fairly stock answers about faith being personal, needing to represent all constituents once elected, and supporting a firm separation of church and state. The Conservative candidate had room to give an answer that carved out a position distinct from the others in terms of how his own faith would carry into his work as an MP while still supporting the institutional separation of church and state. Notably, he did the former but conspicuously avoided supporting the separation of church and state.
  
  
• I'm tired and I have a headache. I'm not sure this was a good use of my evening.
  
  

Election Post #5: Whither the NDP?

It is tempting, when writing about the NDP, to be terribly unfair. It is tempting to judge them against what I wish they were and what I wish the world to be instead of what the NDP actually is: a real-world institution with a structure and a past and at a specific historical moment.

Because there is very little about the NDP that makes me excited. Oh, they are definitely the least evil among the parties that are going to win seats in English Canada this time around. They say some decent things about healthcare. They're childcare plan is probably the okayest of the lot. Their success in forcing a very modest dent in the neoliberalization of the Canadian state in the last federal budget was certainly positive. They sometimes say decent things about stopping secret trials in Canada, too.

But they have "No platform on ending poverty [and] No platform on violence against women or women's equality." Those are pretty huge things to be missing. They have no proposals to scale-back Canada's War Department. They have said nothing about Canadian complicitly in the U.S.-backed overthrow of an elected government in Haiti, or larger role in war and empire. And as far as I can tell, the word "racism" doesn't appear in their platform, or at least not in the two sections to which it would be most relevant, that for "New Immigrants" and that for "Aboriginal Peoples." And there is no recognition that creating the world that their rhetoric claims to want to create -- yes, even the fairly moderate vision of reform represented by the current phase of social democracy -- will take not just votes but long, hard, extra-parliamentary struggle. That makes it hard to take the vision seriously.

They are poised to pick up seats. This isn't a bad thing. I may even get a small, irrational feeling of satisfaction from seeing this happen on January 23rd as I try to find silver linings in the Conservative victory, for all that it won't make a huge material difference to the country's course in the next few years whether the NDP wins 25 or 30 or 35 seats. What I worry is that NDP partisans -- people who identify as "the left" in some sense or other -- will take the wrong message from this modest gain. They might mistakenly conclude that social democracy is in something other than a vast, global crisis with no end in sight.

Unfortunately, I can't take the story all the way back to the beginning. I don't know enough about the origins and struggles of the European social democratic parties before World War One. From what I do know, there was something that seems at this end of history a little bit innocent but still compelling about the spirit of such parties -- a radical vision, an embrace of struggle, a clear idealism, though perhaps unrealistic expectations about what could be accomplished in the electoral arena. But I don't really need to reach back that far because though there were small parties using those words in their names in that period in Canada, it was not until the '30s that our first successful, mass-based, socialist party emerged: the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. It was a joining of existing socialist groupings, workers, farmers, and middle-class left-leaning Christians. It was succeeded in 1961 by the NDP, which resulted from a formal association between the CCF and the labour movement and a deliberate reframing of party and rhetoric to attract the more progressive wing of middle-class liberaldom.

Social democracy in Canada, therefore, came to be in the post-Russian Revolution world, and had its largest impact towards the end of and after World War Two. Popular struggle, the threat of revolution embodied by the mere existence of the Soviet Union (however flawed an example it might have been), and the devastated state of most of the industrialized world outside of the United States created space for changes that left capitalism intact but shifted the experience of it in signficant and positive ways for much of the white working class of North America and Europe. An important vehicle both for struggle by working people and concession by elites were social democratic or democratic socialist parties. The visions of social transformation held by many of the parties in earlier years were gradually weeded out, but there was still space whereby struggle under the banner of social democracy could advance meaningful change, and in which at least some elites would be forced to concede those changes under the threat of worse.

In much of Western Europe, the socialist parties themselves often took power and made changes, or did so often enough that elite parties had little choice but to make similar changes. In the U.S., social democracy was contained as a wing of an elite (and at that time liberal) party, the Democrats, and never had much freedom of action from their liberal superiors in the party. (In the '30s the Communist Party USA could play something of that role, but their days as an effective, independent political force were numbered after the end of World War Two, for various reasons.)

Canada has had a very peculiar pattern. There have been social democrats in Parliament since the '20s at least, but they have never been called on to form a government at the federal level. The pressures and temptations of rule haven't tainted their image of righteous idealism and bureaucratized them, as happened in Europe, and they retained some independence from the liberal wing of the elites, unlike in the U.S. By electoral threat, moral suasion (often piggy-backing on quite separate and autonomous social movement pressure), and occasional short-term support for minority governments, social democrats played a role in changing the Canadian state from its harsh classical liberalism of the '30s and before to something still capitalist, racist, sexist, queer-hatin', colonial, and otherwise deeply flawed, but a little more humane for some segments of the non-elite population.

As partial and flawed as it was, the appeal for some of an opportunity to create real, practical advance was understandable.

We don't live in the world any more, unfortunately. There is no longer the same space. This means that social democratic parties are not able to play the role they used to play -- politically distinct in qualitative ways from elite liberal parties and able to make small and flawed but still real steps towards a more humane world. In the early '70s, neoliberalism began to advance, signalling the beginning of the end of elite toleration of this space. Though it hasn't been total or uniform, rich-world social movements have ebbed since the height of the New Left in the early '70s and especially since the '80s. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, as oppressive and flawed as it was, so did some space for the electoral left in the West to operate.

So you have New Labour in Britain, now an elite liberal party, and quite a neoliberal one at that. A few years ago you had workers in Germany having to mobilize to defend welfare state provisions from a nominally socialist government. You have most of the socialist leadership in France telling their base to vote for an extremely neoliberal European Union constitution and most of their base refusing. Heck, Venezuela -- and this was before the more recent overt socialist and anti-imperialist turns by Chavez -- was treated as a global pariah (especially by the United States) for trying to implement a program that Tariq Ali (perhaps somewhat rhetorically) has compared to the program of the Clement Atlee Labour government in the United Kingdom immediately after World War Two. And here in Ontario at the provincial level, the biggest dose of neoliberalism came from the Harris Tories but the turn in that direction started under Bob Rae's NDP.

I'm not sure that the helpful conclusion here is the Trotskyist one, that the social democratic leadership constantly betrays the working class. They may, but I think it makes more sense to approach the problem in a less accusatory manner. There quite simply is less space for any purely electoral effort to make even incremental progressive change that is novel and that breaks with neoliberal logic. We need to pressure social democrats to understand that the most that voting for them can do now (with rare exceptions) is defend (small) past gains or maybe even only slow their erosion. We need to challenge them to recognize this new reality and decide what they are going to do. Are they happy being a more genuinely "liberal" (less neoliberal) liberal party, as the federal NDP seems to have fallen into, or do they want something more? And if they want something more, they have to accept that supporting, with effort and words and institutional space and money, extra-electoral social movements, including those considerably to their left, is the only way to create space for their electoral efforts to be a bit less futile.


[See also Election Post #1: Caving In and General Analysis, Election Post #2: Can't Tell the Players Without a Program, and Election Post #3: Elite Consensus, Election Post #4: Elite Divisions .]

Where's the Due Process, Mr. Volpe?

Today I received the following report on actions that focus on federal Liberal cabinet minister Joe Volpe's embrace of Canada's use of secret trials and of our deportation of people to regimes known to torture. Harass your local Liberal and Conservative candidates on this issue as we wind down to election day.

Son of Secret Trial Detainee Confronts Minister of Deportation; Volpe Calls out the Cavalry for Peaceful Picket


January 14, 2006 -- The button-clad Raging Granny, armed with pointed lyrics and provocative floral arrangements, had a single question for the two lonely individuals holding a large banner in front of Deportation Minister Joe Volpe's campaign office today.

"Why are there so many police officers here?" she asked, noting that the dozen-plus patrol cars, additional police supervisor vans, undercover RCMP officers, prisoner wagons, and a large collection of police barricades, seemed a tad disproportionate to the setting of two people desperately trying to hold a banner against a backbreaking wind and bitter cold.

"Perhaps," one suggested, "they have finally decided to arrest Mr. Volpe for violating international law!"

As things turned out, Mr. Volpe was not in the building, given that he tends to make himself scarce whenever the possibility arises that a constituent seeking clarification on his illegal practices might darken his doorstep.

With the international outlaw nowhere to be found, the police had little to do but stand inside and keep warm while a small crew of folks concerned about Volpe's determination to violate the Convention Against Torture stood outside with a large banner that read: "Canada: Stop Deportations to Torture." It is Mr. Volpe who, as Deportation Minister, has supported his delegates' opinions that individuals such as secret trial detainees Mohammad Mahjoub, Mahmoud Jaballah, and Hassan Almrei should be sent from Canada to Egypt and Syria even though all three would likely face torture or death at the hands of their overseas jailers.

Like his partners in crime, Anne McLellan, Irwin Cotler, and Paul Martin, Volpe reigns over the security certificate regime which allows for the detention without charge, on secret evidence, of individuals who do not enjoy citizenship status. All have outright refused to meet with the families of the secret trial detainees for years now, preferring to pretend they either do not exist or are just some bizarre and unfortunate aberration from an otherwise really great political system.

That track record was broken last night, however, when, in a sign of how desperate the Liberals have become, Volpe ventured into the less than welcoming, packed house at the Islamic Foundation of Toronto, where he was confronted by the son of one of the men Volpe is trying to have tortured and murdered.

Ahmad Jaballah, the eloquent 19-year-old son of secret trial detainee Mahmoud Jaballah, got the first question in at an event which focused largely on security certificates, no-fly lists, and related attacks against this country's Arab Muslim communities.

Following four candidates' introductory statements (including an especially compelling and truthful set of remarks by the NDP's Joe Comartin), Jaballah addressed the man who is trying to outsource the torture and murder of his father, Mahmoud.

"Mr. Volpe," he began, "There are two worlds, one of reality and one of wonder. Mr. Volpe, you live in a world of wonder," he said in reference to Volpe's glowing comments about human rights, respect for law and due process. Jaballah outlined the terror his family has been put through at the hands of CSIS and Canada's immigration bureaucracy, five years of indefinite detention without charge, unfounded accusations and allegations never proven in a court of law, and the threat of deportation to torture or death.

In response, Volpe gassed on about how his secret trial Star Chamber process reflects only the highest in due process, charter rights blah blah blah, to which Jaballah jumped out of his seat and, with supportive cheers from many in the room, again asked, "Where's the due process? Where's the due process?"

Volpe, shocked, then switched his approach and, according to eyewitnesses, said he did not comment on individual cases and that he did not feel sorry for Mr. Jaballah or for his son.

The Tory candidate, Barry Devolin, at least said he DID feel sorry and that there had to be a better way, though he did not come out for abolition of the medieval process (a classic Canadian position -- you can feel bad if it makes you feel better). The NDP's Comartin and Green candidate Raphael Thierren both reiterated their parties' positions that the secret trial process should be abolished.

It was indeed a rare moment for the deportation minister to come face to face with the pain and terror that are wrought by his policies. These are realities from which he, like so many Good Canadians, has chosen to insulate himself. The only irony here may be that come January 23, Volpe will be a member of an opposition which is forced to take a stand on security certificates if Harper's Conservatives continue the process.

But in the week that remains of the federal election, Martin's Liberals continue to blow a hypocritical wind in Stephen Harper's direction, trying to convince us that consrvative leader will lead us back to medieval times and sever our ties with the civilized world.

While members of the Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada, No One is Illegal, and the Raging Grannies shivered outside Volpe's office yesterday, Martin was on the offensive in Montreal, where he said "we put our national reputation at risk when we turn our back on the world," adding that if the Conservatives were to take power, Canada's signature "on an international treaty will have no value. Well, let me tell you, when Canada's gives its word to the world, Canada keeps its word."

This comes as a surprise to those affected by the Liberals'
draconian "security" policies as well as to the United Nations, which time and again this past year has criticized Canada for turning its back on the world and breaking its word on issues including torture, arbitrary detention, ongoing wretched treatment of First Nations, and a variety of related commitments to women, children, the environment, and global peace.

Back at Volpe's office, volunteers trying to staff the phone bank and encourage people to come out and support the deportation minister were reminded constantly today that a vote for Volpe is a vote for torture. Distracted at first when a small group took jail bars with the names of each of the Secret Trial Five and affixed them to the many windows of the office (a former fast-food chicken outlet), some volunteers appeared visibly disturbed later on when the jail bars were replaced with huge placards with the following words about their man, their party, their Canada.

"What Happens When Canada Deports People to Torture? Detainees are beaten with fists, sticks, gun-butts, makeshift whips, iron pipes, baseball bats, electric flex. Victims suffer bruises, internal bleeding, broken bones, lost teeth, ruptured organs and some die. Rape and sexual abuse of prisoners is also widespread, as are electric shocks, suspension of the body, beating on the soles of the feet, suffocation, mock execution or death threat, submersion in water, stubbing of cigarettes on the body, being tied to the back of a car and dragged, prolonged solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation."

Words to remember the next time a cheery-faced, Charter-thumping liberal appears at your door.

(Today's vigil was the latest in a series that have been organized by groups including No One Is Illegal, Justice for Migrant Workers, the Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada, Country Music Fans Against Secret Trials, and Solidarity Across Borders, which next Saturday will host another gathering at Volpe's Avenue Road/Lawrence West campaign office)

(report from Matthew Behrens of Country Music Fans Against Secret Trials)

Check out the links to the various groups that are listed, too!

Election Post #4: Elite Divisions

As the polls shift to predict a Conservative minority or even majority government after the January 23 election, it is more relevant than ever to move beyond appreciating the fundamental consensus among Canadian elites (see also: this) to examine whatever divisions there might be. We know they are small in degree in the grand scheme of things, but what is their substance in qualitative terms?

To examine this question, I will not look at the often deceptive ephemera produced in the course of a specific election campaign. Indeed, the particular differences I'm interested in do not necessarily correspond simply to particular political parties. For ease of discussion I need to label the two different camps, and the labels "liberal" and "right" are useful though they are imperfect. They overlap and bleed into each other, and it might be better to think of the two of them as hazily defined tendencies rather than concrete groups.

In any case, the group I am labelling "liberal" used to encompass both the Liberals and the Tories. They still dominate the Liberal Party, and have maintained a small, quiet presence within the new Conservative party. What I am labelling "right" dominates the Conservative Party but has a presence within the Liberals in some parts of the country. I would also add that the current surge by the Conservatives in the polls probably has to do with a block of elites switching their allegiance between the two parties because the Liberal Party corruption is just too much for them to take (e.g., this), but it is not clear at this point what it means about their allegiance to the two factions I'm talking about here. Their presence in the Conservative Party may help contain some of the worse excesses of which the "right" grouping is capable but that is hardly likely to be a priority for them, unless those of us on the other side manage to stir up enough of a fuss to make the risk of loss of legitimacy brought by this approach greater than its benefits. But more of that in a later post.

This post counts on a particular feature of Canadian elites: they know which side their bread is buttered on. The relationship between Canadian elites and their patrons in Washington/New York (or London, in an earlier age) may not always be straightforward or easy, but generally speaking the conflict has been about the details and there has never been any impulse by Canadian elites to strike out on an independent course in any truly important way. When there are shifts in the United States, they eventually find their way here as well -- perhaps the resulting changes are not identical, but the two countries are sufficiently connected economically and culturally that forces producing change in the U.S. will inevitably have an impact here as well. This is important because the division that I want to talk about is much more fully developed in the U.S. so I'm going to feel free to use examples from there. I will, however, tie it back to Canada in the end.

At the centre of this post is the nature of classical liberalism -- not necessarily the way "liberal" is used in contemporary political discourse, but the overall system that characterizes the liberal-democratic capitalist state. One of the ways that this system attained and maintains legitimacy is through its myths of equality and objectivity -- "All men [sic] are created equal" and such. Everyone is free, everyone is equal, and neutral rules regulate everyone alike, so only the sweat of your brow and Lady Luck determine where you end up; so runs the myth. But the abstract citizen of liberalism turns out to be, if you scratch the surface, a(n outwardly) straight, white, property-owning man, and everyone else has been written out of the deal in different ways and to different degrees at different points in history. In the 20th century, struggle expanded both the formal and functional definitions of "citizen" in part, but only in part. Even today, the rules are not neutral, power is far from equal, the obligation to sell your labour to eat isn't freedom, and it isn't easy to exercise your supposed rights as a citizen when you're not even treated as human.

So, yeah, liberalism sucks, but it does hang its legitimacy on having rules and on words like "justice," and that can be useful. It also has pretenses to internal consistency, and sometimes that can be used in the service of real gains by them who ain't. ("Neoliberalism," by the way, is the effort by this system to shed all of the baggage it picked up from social democracy and various popular struggles in the effort to keep its masses from turning Red, and because popular struggles forced it to. That isn't necessary anymore, so the more savage world of classical liberalism can be returned. The "liberal" grouping that I talk about in this post and the Liberal Party are both enthusiastic participants in this process, whatever some of the less important members of both might delude themselves into thinking.)

A basic adherence to this system, a desire for stacked but ostensibly neutral rules, and a shift to neoliberalism at some rate (fast or slow), characterizes what I'm grouping under "liberal."

What I'm labelling "right" says of liberalism, to some extent, "Fxxk that sxxt." To what extent, I'm not exactly sure. It may be within the confines of classical liberalism but a quicker return to more blatantly stacked rules than standard neoliberal pretensions can accommodate right now. Or it may be something more. The term "fascism" gets bandied about rather carelessly, I think, but the impulse to employ it comes from a desire to name the tendencies of those I'm labelling "right" in this post to wish to dispense with inconvenient rules and let the powerful do what they want in a very open and obvious way.

The differences between these two are more easily visible in the U.S. context, mostly because both factions have held power in recent years.

Perhaps a good place to start in characterizing the nature of the "right" grouping in the United States is the following quote that surfaced on lots of progressive U.S.-based blogs before the November 2004 election. This quote is journalist Ron Suskind talking about his interview with an un-named "senior White House advisor":

" . . . then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality ­ judiciously, as you will ­ we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

You can't find a much more direct rejection-from-the-right of the principles of classical liberalism than that. We have seen this show up in countless places in the last five years. When Clinton or Bush Sr. wanted to invade somewhere, they followed a certain protocol that hid their imperial designs behind legitimizing but stacked rules, accepting that this process might place some limits on what they could do -- I've seen the quote form someone that they would go "multilateral if we can, unilateral if we must." During the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush Jr. administration was quite clear that it was not interested in expending too much energy in even appearing to follow these rules, or in accepting any modest limits (such as sharing the spoils of the war with lesser European powers) that such a process might impose.

You see it in the endless subversion of the legal system. Again, lots of horrible stuff in terms of civil liberties has happened under supposedly liberal presidents, but under this president it has been in a way that obviously doesn't care too much if the legitimizing fictions of the liberal-democratic state remain intact. You can see it when legal categories like "enemy combatant" are invented from nothing, with no basis. You can see it in the judicial theory of the "unitary executive" being pushed by the administration and held by their current Supreme Court Justice nominee. This theory basically says that the Commander-in-Chief is above Congress and the Courts. It can be seen in the still-building scandals around domestic NSA wiretapping -- they are supposed to ask for a warrant from a secret court which almost never says no, but Bush ordered them to just ignore the requirement to ask the court in some situations, and then when this got out he didn't deny it but claimed it was perfectly legal for him to give orders contrary to the law of the land.

You can find the difference in other settings, too. Take the distinction between the New York Times and Fox News. The former is the bastion of the liberal-democratic rules of objective reporting. Its subservience to power (a la Manufacturing Consent) is generally covered with the fig leaf of legitimizinag rules and "objective" procedures for reporting, which can occasionally be turned to the advantage of popular struggles and which set bounds on what kinds of distortions can occur. While abuses do occur, the bias in the news that ends up favouring the powerful is a product of a system with rules. These rules provide the range of outputs that can occur given available inputs. They don't prevent important things from being supressed (e.g. invasion of East Timor back in the '70s) and they don't prevent manipulation of and mischaracterization of the inputs from producing reporting that bears no relationship to reality (e.g. Judith Miller and Ahmed Chalabi et al in the run-up to the 2003 invasion), but they do set standards to which the content can theoretically be held. With Fox News, you have blowhards like O'Reilly sitting there spewing falsehoods that are easily disproven, and very blatantly following a pro-elite political line without bothering to go to the trouble of inventing a system of supposedly objective rules to disguise it.

You can also see it with things like Intelligent Design and arguments over sex education and climate change. In these cases, the "right" grouping (including both elites and their allies in right-wing grassroots social movements) really doesn't care about liberal-democratic epistemology and rationalism. Inconvenient facts are ignored. Assessment of evidence by very traditional methods is irrelevant. Entirely different epistemologies not rooted in enlightenment thought are substituted, not through careful critique of enlightenment epistemologies (which is important and necessary) but through having the power to just ignore them.

The connections between the "right" grouping in Canada and that in the United States are obvious to anyone who has followed the rise of this grouping in the last fifteen years. As a self-identified Tory observes, "The present Conservative party of Canada, predictably and consciously so, has many an affinity with the American empire."

You can look at the idiotic statements that Reform Party, Canadian Alliance, and new Conservative Party leaders, MPs and affiliates have made over the years.

You can look at the reports of the glee with which right-wing forces in the U.S. are anticipating a Harper victory. The Washington Times, owned by the leader of the Moonies and an institution of the right if there ever was one, has called Harper "the most pro-American leader in the Western world" and has said, "If elected, Mr. Harper will quickly become Mr. Bush's new best friend internationally and the poster boy for his ideal foreign leader."

According to Murray Dobbin, in 1999 Harper was quoted as saying of human rights commissions, "as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society. It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff." Harper has also said of the United States, "your country, and particularly your conservative movement, is a light and an inspiration to people in this country and across the world." Harper spoke very strongly for Canada following the lead of the U.S. right and becoming a full participant in the recolonization of Iraq -- we are complicit in many ways as things stand now, but Harper wants us to be enthusiastic and open in our participation in empire.

You can look to the fact that the ideological underpinnings of the current Conservative Party come from the "Calgary School" of hard right-wing political scientists, who trace their ancestry to thugs like Leo Strauss, who also happens to have served as a guiding light for many of the neoconservatives that run the Bush administration.

Then you have the statements by Chief of Defence Staff General Richard Hillier earlier this year: "These are detestable murderers and scumbags, I'll tell you that right up front. They detest our freedoms, they detest our society, they detest our liberties... We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to kill people." This is part of a larger offensive by the military bureaucracy in Canada to push the country into much closer alignment with the latest imperial realities of the United States. The Liberals aren't completely closed to this vision, but the "right" grouping and Harper is much more enthusiastic about it, whatever contrary things he has said in the heat of the campaign.

Now, obviously the right is not as strong in Canada as in the United States and has not yet ruled the country, which means that some of the more blatant examples found in the U.S. have not yet appeared here. As well, right-wing social movements, which in the U.S. are strong enough to force even "liberal" elites to take notice, are in more embryonic form in Canada, particularly outside of areas that were Social Credit strongholds in decades past. In addition, during this election campaign the Conservatives are trying hard to look like old-fashioned Tories and to pretend they are really in the "liberal" camp. I saw on the news last night that the cost of their platform not only outstrips the Liberals by a considerable amount, but is even higher than the NDP. Indeed, it is possible that even if they attain power, the realities of politics will constrain the true "right" elements in the Party to a certain extent. Certainly it would take them some time to attain the dominance over as wide a range of institutions as the right has done in the United States. But give them time.

And it is on that basis that I think we on the left, who are neither "right" nor "liberal," should care about which faction of elites is in charge. In saying this I'm not advising a particular strategy, all I'm saying is that it does make a difference in terms of the space open to us for organizing and the harm that is done to our communities. The rules that underpin liberalism are oppressive and flawed, but Canadian popular movements are not in a place to take on the unmasked beast without the buffer that liberalism currently provides.

[See also Election Post #1: Caving In and General Analysis, Election Post #2: Can't Tell the Players Without a Program, and Election Post #3: Elite Consensus.]

Learning About the "Middle East"

Interested in learning more about the region of Asia that currently gets labelled the "Middle East"? Here is a list of the top 21 books in Middle Eastern Studies, derived by a survey of 52 academics and published in this newsletter. I got this from Angry Arab News Service, whose owner, As'ad Abu Khalil, was one of the academics surveyed and who agrees with most of the results.

1. Orientalism by Edward Said, 1978
   
2. The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq by Hanna Batatu, 1978
   
3. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age by Albert Hourani, 1962
   
4. A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani, 1991
   
5. The Venture of Islam by Marshall Hodgson, 1975
   
6. Colonising Egypt, by Timothy Mitchell, 1988
   
7. The Mantle of the Prophet by Roy Mottahedeh, 1986
   
8. Contending Visions of the Middle East by Zachary Lockman, 2004
   
9. Women and Gender in Islam by Leila Ahmed, 1992
   
10. The Emergence of Modern Turkey by Bernard Lewis, 1961
    
11. Over-stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East by Nazih Ayubi, 1995
    
12. A Political Economy of the Middle East by Alan Richards & John Waterbury, 1990
    
13. A History of Islamic Societies by Ira Lapidus, 1988
    
14. Rule of Experts by Timothy Mitchell, 2002
    
15. Amiguities of Domination by Lisa Wedeen, 1999
    
16. The Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun, 1377
    
17. A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin, 1989
    
18. Armed Struggle & the Search for State by Yezid Sayigh, 1997
    
19. State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East by Roger Owen, 1992
    
20. Society of Muslim Brothers by Richard Mitchell, 1969
    
21. Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy by Michael Hudson, 1977
    

Cabinet Minister Confronted Again

Yesterday, in a replay of an action that took place in mid-December, members of the Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee confronted MPP Rick Bartolucci as he attended a ceremony at Laurentian University.

In this case, his presence for the announcement was particularly perverse, because it involved the acceptance of a sizeable donation by Sudbury's largest employer, INCO, to the Northern Ontario School of Medicine for student bursaries -- a prime motivation for Sudbury's long pursuit of the recently-opened NOSM has been to improve access to good health in Sudbury and throughout the north, and it was Bartolucci's efforts to thwart that goal that people were protesting. Specifically, HCOC was protesting Bartolucci because of his role as a provincial cabinet minister in the decision in October to gut the Special Deitary Supplement provision of the Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support programs and thereby doom countless recipients to the ill-health that comes from inadequate and poor quality food.

Unfortunately, I can't provide a description of the action because L and I were only present for the last few minutes -- my partner's gift to L for Xmas was to sign him up for a toddler gymnastics session at the Y first thing every Monday morning, and yesterday was the first one. (I can relay my partner's report from the gymnastics that L's disinterest in taking part in group activities has not abated, and that getting him up and moving plenty early will be important for his future enjoyment of this activity, but he did warm up to it by the end of the session!)

Here is the text of the flyer that was distributed, which includes material from HCOC and from a Toronto-based group called Health Providers Against Poverty:

Bartolucci - why did you let your government slash the Special Dietary Supplement?

Last fall the Liberal government with the support of Rick Bartolucci, Sudbury MPP and Minister of Mines and Northern Development, decided to slash the Special Dietary Supplement program of Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program. This program allowed people on social assistance to get up to $250 more a month to purchase the nutritious foods they need to survive which they cannot afford on current OW and ODSP rates. The program has now been made much more restrictive (see the statement from Health Care Providers Against Poverty below). Bartolucci and the Liberal provincial government have been basically taking food out of the mouths of poor people, families, and children in this province.

When we went to Bartolucci's office on November 14th to protest this decision we were met by a wall of cops and one anti-poverty protestor was arrested and held by police overnight. We call on Bartolucci and the Liberal government to reinstate the Special Dietary Supplement as it previously existed or to raise social assistance rates by 40% (which only brings people on social assistance back to where they were before the Tory cuts in 1994). Everywhere Liberal cabinet ministers go across the province they will be followed by anti-poverty protestors until these very justified demands are met.

-- The Hunger Clinic Organizing Committee


Health Providers Against Poverty

Sandra Pupatello seemed surprised that social assistance recipients weren't more grateful for the tiny 3 per cent raise she granted them last year. Now Ontario's Community and Social Services minister, along with Minister of Mines and Northern Development, scorns the anger and dismay at her government's recent decision to drastically restrict the special diet benefit for people on Ontario Works and Ontario Disability grants.

The Harris government's devastating 21.6 per cent cut to social assistance rates 10 years ago translates into 40 per cent today, once inflation and the cost of living are factored in. Today, one in three children in the province's largest city live in poverty. We have not seen such a vast network of soup kitchens and food banks since the Depression and still people go hungry. Pupatello characterized us as "rogue advocates" who are "misusing" the special diet benefit. She knows, however, that we are nurses, doctors and dietitians who understand there is a dangerous risk to health affecting people all across the province. Its name is poverty.

As Dr. Dennis Raphael, an expert on the social determinants of health, reminds us, the number one factor determining whether people stay healthy is income. According to a 2001 British Medical Journal study, if you are a child living in poverty you will carry with you, for the rest of your life, an increased risk of heart disease, even if you manage to raise your socio-economic status.

Because we understand this, we have been participating in "hunger clinics," set up to help low-income people receive the special diet allowance. We have prescribed this as a high-impact health intervention to thousands of people, using the language of preventive medicine, and we have compelling reasons for doing so. We've learned that, without the supplement, the average amount of money social assistance recipients have to spend on food is $2.43 a person a day. The supplement changed that. Mothers are at a loss for words when they try to describe what it feels like to send their children to school with a healthy lunch every day, to surprise a child with a first-ever birthday cake, or to purchase fresh fruit and vegetables. But all that has ended. Ontario's Liberal government has decided it must stop this rampant outbreak of good nutrition and healthy living. So it has cut the special diet allowance and replaced it with a miserly version that disregards preventive health and attaches serious conditions to the most nominal of funds. It is unclear what a welfare recipient with liver failure is supposed to do with the $10 a month she will now receive, but clearly the intent is not to improve her health.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that what historically has been held in confidence between an individual and her health professional will now be revealed to her welfare worker. A mother reported that after the 20th of the month, she and her daughter are reduced to one meal a day; a tuna sandwich if they are lucky, a "mayonnaise" sandwich if they are not.

One Peterborough woman wrote to us: "Thank you for standing with low-income Ontarians. My children and I have done so much better in the last seven months. I am sad and a bit scared but I can only hope we can continue to fight."

We join with her and thousands like her in demanding that social assistance rates be raised by 40 per cent, and that the special diet allowance be restored for everyone whose health is at risk from legislated poverty.

(Nurses Kathy Hardill and Debra Phelps, and Dr. Mimi Divinsky are Toronto-based members of Health Providers Against Poverty)

Cool New Blog

I'd like to direct readers' attention to a new blog that just started up a few days ago, One Tenacious Baby Mama. The author-in-charge at OTBM is T.J. of darkdaughta.com, a site I have had a link to in my sidebar for some time and a repository of lots of great radical writing. She described the new blog in an email as "a lefty pregnancy, birth and parenting site" and it looks to be one very worth visiting regularly.

From her introductory post:

I know I'm pretty much screaming "Ostracize me!" from any online birthing communities and ignore my work/words by refusing to comprehend any sort of mama critique simultaneously including Blackness, queerness, non-monogamies, pregnancy, birthing and homebirth all in one. But that's my life.

And:

What this blog will attempt:

• To show complex signs and indicators of (my mothering) life
  
  
• To add to the information already published online in a way that appeals to anyone interested in pregnancy and birth while deconstructing the whole white mother and child as birthing, pregnancy and mother/child relationship epitome, father as child and woman owner patriarchal paradigm so prominent in most of the sites I visit.
  
  
• I want to include my birth plan, which is fairly hefty, since I'm verbose and very anal.
  
  
• I'd also like to talk about my visits to see the midwives and about why I chose midwifery and a homebirth over the OB and the hospital.
  
  
• I want to download my belly pictures and pictures of my birth.
  
  
• I also want to see if there'll be anyway to include the video Kunle will hopefully shoot at the time of the birth, as well.

Check it out! And while you're at it, check out her essay, Mama Work: Transgressing Toward The Future, written shortly after the birth of her first child.

Abstinence-Only Education Does Not Work

According to a report at 365gay.com, "The Society of Adolescent Medicine, in one of the most exhaustive reviews to date of government-funded abstinence-only programs, has rejected current [U.S.] administration policy that promotes abstinence as the only sexual health prevention strategy for young people in the United States and abroad."

The review article was written by the Society for Adolescent Medicine and published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Journal of Adolescent Health.

Here is the full citation of the article:

Santelli, John; Ott, Mary A.; Lyon, Maureen; Rogers, Jennifer; Summers, Daniele; Schleifer, Rebecca. Abstinence and abstinence-only education: A review of U.S. policies and programs. Journal of Adolescent Health, Vol: 38, Issue: 1, January 2006.

And here is the abstract:

Abstinence from sexual intercourse is an important behavioral strategy for preventing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and pregnancy among adolescents. Many adolescents, including most younger adolescents, have not initiated sexual intercourse and many sexually experienced adolescents and young adults are abstinent for varying periods of time. There is broad support for abstinence as a necessary and appropriate part of sexuality education. Controversy arises when abstinence is provided to adolescents as a sole choice and where health information on other choices is restricted or misrepresented. Although abstinence is theoretically fully effective, in actual practice abstinence often fails to protect against pregnancy and STIs. Few Americans remain abstinent until marriage; many do not or cannot marry, and most initiate sexual intercourse and other sexual behaviors as adolescents. Although abstinence is a healthy behavioral option for teens, abstinence as a sole option for adolescents is scientifically and ethically problematic. A recent emphasis on abstinence-only programs and policies appears to be undermining more comprehensive sexuality education and other government-sponsored programs. We believe that abstinence-only education programs, as defined by federal funding requirements, are morally problematic, by withholding information and promoting questionable and inaccurate opinions. Abstinence-only programs threaten fundamental human rights to health, information, and life.

For those readers not familiar with conventions of writing in medical research literature, this is definitely strong language.

Here's the rest of the 365Gay.com article:

"We believe that current federal abstinence-only-until- marriage policy is ethically problematic, as it excludes accurate information about contraception, misinforms by overemphasizing or misstating the risks of contraception, and fails to require the use of scientifically accurate information while promoting approaches of questionable value," the report concludes.

"Based on our review of the evaluations of specific abstinence-only curricula and research on virginity pledges, user failure with abstinence appears to be very high. Thus, although theoretically completely effective in preventing pregnancy, in actual practice the efficacy of abstinence-only interventions may approach zero."

When the report's authors looked specifically and LGBT teens they found that abstinence-only education was "unlikely to meet the health needs" of the group because abstinence-only programs focus heavily on no sex until marriage and ignore homosexuality. This could lead to increased risk of infection among these youngsters, the investigators said.

The report, published in the peer review Journal of Adolescent Health, also says that abstinence-only programs negatively impact other federal policies

Citing the Administration's requirement that U.S. AIDS relief programs abroad spend at least 33 percent of prevention dollars on abstinence-only programs, the report states: "Human rights groups find that U.S. government policy has become a source for misinformation and censorship in these countries. U.S. emphasis on abstinence may also have reduced condom availability and access to accurate information on HIV/AIDS in some countries."

"The report reads like an indictment," said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth.

"Enough is enough. The time has come for Congress to declare an immediate moratorium on federal funding for these programs. It is a national scandal that we have already spent over $1.1 billion of taxpayers' dollars on programs that don't work and that censor vital public health information for young people."

I Will Read This Book

I've known it was coming for awhile and I am excited to hear it is almost out: Stan Goff is publishing a new book called Sex & War.

Book Description:

The notion that war is intrinsic to man’s nature is dealt a powerful setback in Stan Goff’s Sex and War. Goff, a former Special Forces sergeant, argues persuasively that rather than being born that way, men are made into killers by governments, corporations, and systems of power. Drawing both on his experiences in the military and on his reading of feminist writers such as Patricia Williams, bell hooks, and Chandra Mohanty — and as the father of a son stationed in Iraq — Goff journeys through wars, ideologies, and cultures, revealing the transformation of men into killers. His story encompasses not just the battlefield and the book, but the Swift Boat Veterans controversy, the eros of George W. Bush, pornography, the Taliban, and gays and lesbians in the military. Goff’s remarkable ability to connect his own personal experiences to contemporary feminist criticism makes for a provocative discussion of war and masculinity.

Recommendation from Robert Jensen:

Men should thank Stan Goff for this loving challenge to us to reject all aspects of the male dominance of our society. In his riveting blend of personal experience and thoughtful analysis, Goff stares down the most brutal aspects of masculinity without flinching, as he opens up a crucial discussion about how we can get beyond being “real men” and beyond the cruel institutions and practices men have created.

Recommendation from T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting:

In Goff’s hands, the language of militarism, redemption, violence, sexist-misogyny, and war are prosaic yet poetic grenades, lobbed at American empire, television, the Hollywood cinematic machine with its mind-numbing trifles, religion, and neo-cons and iconoclasts like Condoleeza Rice, Rumsfeld, and Michael Moore –the sacred and the profane are thrashed out in this opus on sex and war. Like prophesied deliverance, Goff’s insights should move those of us hitherto wishy-washy liberal-leftists, complacent hard leftists, and the seeming voices-in-the-wilderness race-gender-class radicals to rethink our strategies for bringing about a new human condition.

Review: Race Against Time

[Stephen Lewis. Race Against Time. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005.]

When speaking about knowledge of the world, I sometimes feel it is more accurate to talk about "gradations of ignorance" rather than "levels of expertise." Each of us can have direct knowledge only of our local experiential context, where "local" doesn't necessarily refer to geography but to social location. To learn about what lies beyond that location requires having the opportunity to visit, to listen, and to read. I continually come face-to-face with my own ignorance of realities in Canada, let alone of the massive and diverse spectrum of spaces that make up the rest of the world.

Like much of the white left in North America, one rather large piece of the world about which my level of ignorance tends towards the higher rather than the lower is the continent of Africa. If I were to deliberately set about to reduce my level of ignorance, ideally I would select books written by women and men of progressive to radical politics who are themselves African; I would not necessarily pick a book by a white Canadian social democrat. Nonetheless, through one facet of the magic of Christmas, in which you receive books you would not buy for yourself but which you invariably end up enjoying, I did receive one in the latter category, and I am very glad.

I have never heard anyone else use this expression, but one could describe the family of Stephen Lewis as being the First Family of the social democratic left in Canada. His father David was the first federal secretary of the CCF, Canada's first broadly based social democratic party, and was later federal leader of the CCF's successor, the NDP. Stephen was the NDP's first full-time paid organizer at the federal level in the early '60s, served in the Ontario legislature and later led the Ontario NDP. His wife Michelle Landsberg is a prominent feminist and for many years wrote a wonderful regular column in the Toronto Star, Canada's largest circulation newspaper. His son Avi has become involved in progressive media production, including the now-defunct CBC series counterSpin. Avi, of course, is married to Naomi Klein, of No Logo fame.

Every year, the Massey Lectures are delivered on CBC radio by a prominent thinker and published by Anansi. The politics of the speakers varies considerably, but over the years the series has included the likes of John Ralston Saul, Ursula Franklin, R.D. Laing, and Noam Chomsky.

Lewis was named the the Canadian ambassador to the U.N. in the mid-'80s and he has served at various posts within the U.N. secretariat since his time as ambassador ended. He is currently the Secreatary-General's special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. The focus of his lectures is Africa, African development, and specifically HIV/AIDS.

I learned a lot from this book. Lewis is not afraid to talk about how the World Bank and the IMF have devastated Africa, and the neocolonial relationship between rich countries which give aid and the African countries which depend on it. He tackles head on the Geldoff-and-NGO co-opted hype about what was achieved at the recent G8 summit and he does not hesitate to point out the extreme U.S. stinginess when it comes to development aid. He also points out the ongoing Canadian failure to meet the widely accepted target of 0.7% of GNP to foreign aid, even though that target was a Canadian idea to begin with and we are the only G8 nation that has consistently run budget surpluses over the last number of years. His words have, I'm sure, introduced many other Canadians like me to aspects of the reality on the ground in Africa with respect to HIV/AIDS and other issues, and to the strange ways of the United Nations -- an institution he values highly but is not afraid to criticize. His very strident section on the failure of the U.N. with respect to women and women's issues is a particularly important contribution to the never-ending debate about U.N. reform.

I was also struck by the discussion of the huge numbers of children in Africa who are orphans because of AIDS. Many are being raised by their grandmothers or they are living in child-headed households. Lewis repeatedly emphasized how this loss of such a large proportion one or two entire generations is unprecedented in recorded history. In many ways, that's true, but at least some of the impacts -- the trauma, the disruption of family continuity in terms of culture and wisdom and stability -- make me think of the impact of residential schools on people from indigenous nations in Canada. The two situations are certainly not the same for many reasons, but I couldn't help but think there are some analogies.

I don't feel I know enough to say for sure, but my sense is that Lewis does not entirely escape a colonial frame but he does better than almost anything else you'll find in the North American mainstream. He doesn't shy away from naming the more recent blame that the rich countries have for Africa's plight, but I get the sense that there is a lot more context than he includes that would create a much stronger picture of predation by North on South as an ongoing reality, and a much stronger case for reparative justice in the form of massive capital flow from North America and Europe to sub-Saharan Africa. While his repeated emphasis on the value of universally accessible primary education in African countries probably does reflect the stated desires of a great many African children and adults, as he indicates, I'd be interested to hear if any African radicals have anything to say about how expanding the role of the state in the lives of increasing numbers of children might also help create a workforce that serves the needs of capital, both local and global. I have the sense that there are a number of other issues that deserve more attention, too, but I don't know enough to identify them.

I also do not feel I know enough to comment intelligently on the policy recommendations he makes in the final lecture. I suspect they are mostly good ideas, with the kind of strengths that you would expect from a die-hard democratic socialist: a dash of idealism and a fair bit of practicality, more than a few political flaws when viewed from a more rigorously left and anti-colonial standpoint but the potential to save many millions of lives.

I hope Lewis's very useful, very easy-to-read public intervention can be a part of an ongoing discussion of the role of Canada in the world, the role of the U.N., the ongoing neocolonial oppression of Africa, and the scourge of HIV/AIDS. It has helped bring my ignorance of Africa down a notch, if nothing else.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Election Post #3: Elite Consensus

In colloquial speech on the left it is not uncommon to use metaphors of rate or degree when talking about differences and similarities among elites. You heare things like, "The Liberals say the Tories are going too fast, but really they're both headed in the wrong direction." Or, "The Conservatives are bad, sure, but the Liberals are almost as bad."

I would argue that these figures of speech convey important truth, but at the current point in history they also oversimplify the nature of those divisions that do exist within English Canadian (and North American) elites.

Representing divisions among elites as matters of rate or degree, and small ones at that, captures the truth that there is immense underlying consensus among English Canadian elites. The evidence for this statement can be found by examining the history of how elites have positioned themselves with respect to the hierarchies of power and privilege on the basis of class, racial background, gender, sexuality, ability, and other factors that shape every aspect of Canadian society (and which, admittedly, many or even most non-elite English Canadians buy into in some way, shape, or form as well even if they are harmed by one or more axis of oppression).

The liberal wing of the elites is more likely to say things that recognize the existence of these hierarchies, or at least of some of the less easily deniable impacts of them, and is also more likely to take rhetorical positions in favour of doing something about those impacts. There is no evidence, however, that this should be taken to indicate an underlying commitment to abolishing the hierarchy or hierarchies in question. If such a commitment were to exist, you could count on the devotion of significant resources to making fundamental changes necessary for such an outcome by the state when under the control of the liberal wing of elites, and by non-state elite liberal institutions. But there is no evidence at any point in Canadian history of such resource expenditure. Elite-controlled resources tend to be expended to address the impacts of hierarchies of power and privilege, and perhaps even to reduce the steepness of such hierarchies in limited ways, only when such expenditures are useful to ensure the legitimacy of the underlying system (with its very modestly reduced but still intact hierarchies of power and privilege) and when popular movements force them to make such expenditures. They do not tend to go beyond what is necessary to address one or the other of those things.

Have you heard any significant block of elite voices in any elite-controlled political party or other institution demanding that we do what's necessary so that we cease to have an economy that depends on people going hungry? Have you heard any block of elites call for a new approach by settler-dominated institutions to indigenous nations in northern North America that goes beyond just another tired reworking of colonialism? Have you heard any block of elites with institutional power seriously address the changes that would be necessary to give women the power to free themselves from the spectre of male violence without having to appeal to individual male consciences? Did any elite think-tank recently (or ever) release a report calling for a radical reworking of Canada's place in the global political economy so that we no longer depend on the deprivation, exploitation, suffering, and death of untold millions for our prosperity?

To the extent that these issues get addressed it is because (a) rhetoric more strident than any intended action is useful to one faction of elites in competition for power with another faction; (b) social movements and/or political parties outside of elite control are threatening elite control in some way; or, (c) elites have judged that such a threat could realistically develop and it is easier and cheaper to make concessions before they do rather than waiting for acute conflict.

Appeals by apologists to practicality, to possibility, to justify why liberal elites haven't accomplished these things are nothing more than passive endorsement of an oppressive status quo. They haven't accomplished them because there is no evidence of them trying to do so. If short-term reforms are not complemented by serious, risk-taking efforts by large numbers of elite individuals and a significant subset of elite institutions to create fundamental change in systems of power that are at the heart of these issues, why should we believe that elites as a group care even a tiny morsel more about them than the struggles of oppressed peoples force them to care?

(The one partial but significant exception to this in Canadian history has been, I think, the women's movement, where a block of elite women supported, at least to a certain extent and in certain periods, a social movement that has a sizeable non-elite base as well. The importance of solidarity among women across class at certain points in Canadian history is a great accomplishment of the Canadian women's movement, and was a source of strength that contributed to some important victories. Of course there has been much less evidence of practical solidarity across lines of race and ability. The defunding of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women in the mid-'90s can in part be blamed on the rise of neoliberalism, but I have also heard (and believed) that another factor was its abandonment by a significant proportion of elite white women in the civil service and the Liberal Party as a vehicle for their interests after reasonably successful efforts to transform it to put anti-racist feminism and women of colour at the heart of its functioning in a meaningful way. And in any event, while this cross-class unity was certainly important to the course of Canadian history, there has been no sustained institutional demonstration by elite women of commitment to the kinds of changes that would be necessary for the liberatory transformation of the full spectrum of hierarchies of power and privilege that shape our society. And, needless to say, it isn't even a question for elite men.)

Here's a concrete example:

After the neoliberal restructuring of the Canadian state picked up serious steam in 1995, many experts predicted an increase in homelessness because of the changes being enacted. These experts were soon proven right. There was quite a bit of activity from a wide range of groups and organizations to get the state to do something about increasing homelessness, including urban Aboriginal communities, mainstream social service agencies, social movement configurations like Homes Not Bombs and OCAP and the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, and even the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. The feds, after much pressure, announced a program called the Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative. It was initially a one-time-only, three year program, though it is close to entering its third generation now. This was touted by politicians as being The Answer. Yet its main purpose was to address infrastructure needs of emergency service providers related to homelessness. In other words, the same Liberal government that made many of the policy and spending changes which caused a spike in the levels of homelessness was responding to the pressures caused by that spike not by undoing any of the changes that caused it but by ensuring that communities had the emergency services infrastructure to somewhat more humanely respond to a new higher endemic level of homelessness. The more mainstream sources of pressure were coopted, and most either did not see that this was the functional impact of SCPI or they chose not to talk about it. In other words, the state responded to pressure, and there were homeless people who had better access to services that they needed because of SCPI than they would have had in its absence. But the state response was minimal and showed no actual commitment to getting at the root causes of homelessness, and therefore of the suffering and death that it leads to.

To recap: English Canadian elites demonstrate a great deal of consensus, via the institutions they control, about what Canadian society should look like and how it should function. To that extent, it is reasonable to characterize the differences among them as being slight in degree or rate. But I would argue that, at least at the current juncture, a purely quantitative shorthand to characterize the difference between the principle elite factions in Canada omits some information that could be important in understanding our political environment and guiding our decisions.

I had intended to say all I had to say about elites in this post, but I have decided to make the rest of this discussion a separate post. Stay tuned!

Another Rape Link

I don't like going too heavy on posts that are basically "Hey, look at this!" but here's my second in a row on the same topic: Please check out this immensely brave post at Marginal Notes telling of one woman's experience with rape and subsequent navigation of "a culture that sanctions violence against women, and punishes women who try to resist."

As well, here is a classic essay on rape by Andrea Dworkin cited in both the link above and in the (imperfect) essay I linked to in my last post.

To Men Re. Rape

Here is an article by Julian Real called "What I Need To Say To Some Men I Know, about Suffering and Rape" posted at Feral Scholar.

To male readers: Read it. Reflect on it. Let it percolate for a few days, then read it again.