Will Canadian Labour Accept Free Trade?

In bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. Karl Marx

Canadian Labour Congress President Georgetti
Opens Pandora’s Box


Last week Ken Georgetti, President of the Canadian Labour Congress declared that the labour movement’s twenty-year opposition to Free Trade was a failure. In no uncertain terms Georgetti opened up a Pandora’s box, well ok he backpedaled immediately afterwards, claiming he said no such thing, but it was too late the box was open.

There has been a great outcry and gnashing of teeth heard through out the labour movement, and its coalition partners in the Anti-Free Trade/Anti-Globalization movement, in Canada. While editorial writers and business press pundits applauded the CLC’s newfound pragmatism.

There will be massive repercussions to Brother Georgetti’s announcement on Wednesday September 22, 2004, a day that will go down in “infamy”. On that day the CLC issued a press release entitled: “Georgetti Urges Union Leadership To Embrace New Thinking On Industrial Policy To Ensure Labour Influence Over National Economic Strategies”.

The press release announced the CLC Industrial Strategy Conference and quoted portions of Georgetti’s speech, where he “issued the collective challenge… urging the country's labour leadership to work towards a new industrial policy that, while acknowledging the post-free-trade-agreement world, would promote a more activist role for government in steering marketforces towards jobs-rich economic development.”[i]

Then he went on to say; "The reality today is that much of our domestic economy is part and parcel of a North American economy. And to a much greater extent than was the
case before the FTA and NAFTA. Nor are we immune to the pressures on North
American manufacturing posed by the rapid rise of China and developing Asia to
world dominance in the production of consumer goods. Nor to the recent rise in
the offshoring of services."[ii]

Brother Georgetti crying crocodile tears wrote a hasty letter to his Executive Council, Officers of Affiliated Organizations and Presidents of Labour Councils saying he was misquoted by the National Post on their front page story of September 22.




“The CanWest chain (publishers of the National Post), in a front page story this morning, alleged that, in a speech I was to deliver at the Canadian Labour Congress "Industrial Policy Conference", I said that we were wrong about free trade and were not opposed to the free trade agreements.”

“The story is a deliberate and malicious falsification of what I said.The actual speech that I delivered, which is identical to the copy the National Post had, is posted on the CLC website (http://www.clc-ctc.ca). I encourage you to go to the website and read the speech.”

“We are not going to allow the National Post to get away with this misrepresentation of the position of the CLC or its Officers. The CLC has instructed its legal counsel to immediately initiate legal action against National Post and other newspapers in the
CanWest chain, which continues to propagate these lies.”[iii]

Brother Georgetti did not mention the fact that his speech was quoted in the Globe in Mail, nor did he mention their editorial where they too also claimed it was good to see the CLC finally accept what was inevitable, Free Trade was here to stay. Nor did he say he was going to sue the Globe and Mail like he was going to do with the CanWest chain.

So when the Globe and Mail editorial says: “Forward to the fascinating recent exchange between Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, and Buzz Hargrove, head of the Canadian Auto Workers. Normally one wouldn't expect as much as a sliver of daylight between two Canadian labour leaders on an issue of substance. But this week Mr. Georgetti broke the mould. He acknowledged that the Earth is round. "Contrary to some of our most pessimistic predictions," reads a new CLC policy paper, "[the free-trade era] has not been an economic disaster."[iv]

Zounds, for Brother Hargrove, this was heresy indeed. Both the original Canada-US free-trade agreement and the North American free-trade agreement must be ripped up, he loudly insisted. Mr. Georgetti, apparently stung by the implication that he has caved in to the capitalist running dogs, quickly moderated his moderation. "We don't accept it," Mr. Georgetti said of free trade. “We just want to find ways to work with it.”[v]

Obviously Brother Georgetti doth protest too much against CanWest, blaming the messenger so to speak. Clearly the Globe and Mail editorial writers are also misinformed according to Brother Georgetti’s slander suit letter to the labour movement.

Murray Dobbin, outspoken critic of free trade, in his column in the Friday, Sept 24 Globe and Mail, made the case that the CLC was wrong to embrace free trade, as the source of Canada’s recent economic boom[vi]. Was he taken by the “lies” of CanWest, could he have misread the meaning in what Georgetti said? Could the Globe and Mail be mistaken in the quotes they used from Georgetti’s speech? Could the Globe editorial, which sounded very much like the one published by the Vancouver Province, a CanWest paper, have been wrong about the CLC changing its position on the FTA, NAFTA (and what of the upcoming FTAA?).

Nope neither the National Post or the Vancouver Province, CanWest papers, nor the Globe and Mail nor Murray Dobbin got it wrong, Brother Georgetti acknowledged it’s a post free trade world. And you always have to careful about ‘new thinking’, which always smacks of neo-conservative rhetoric.


But what else did Brother Georgetti say in his speech that could possibly be interpreted, or as he now says ‘misinterpreted’, as saying opposition to Free Trade is a thing of the past? Well lets take him up on his challenge and read from his speaking notes.

“All that said, I think we, in the labour movement, need to re-think the role and nature of industrial strategies. I say this because the present economic context is different in some very important ways from the late 1980s.

That is when we last advanced a comprehensive industrial policy agenda as an alternative to the Free Trade Agreement.

In many, many ways, our critique of the FTA was correct.

More than 300,000 workers lost their jobs in the brutal re-structuring of the early 1990s. And many industrial communities were devastated. We will neither forgive nor forget the fact that the promised labour adjustment programs were never put in place.

But, at the same time, we must recognize that the lost jobs have been slowly recovered. And we must also recognize that omelettes are not easily unscrambled. Corporations have restructured their production chains so that goods now cross and re-cross the border in hugely complicated ways.

A larger share of our manufacturing production is now exported to the US than is consumed here at home.

In the services sector, we are now seeing the same type of continental integration between the two countries.

The reality today is that much of our domestic economy is part and parcel of a North American economy. And to a much greater extent than was the case before the FTA and NAFTA.

Some people see the performance of our industrial economy under free trade as proof positive that the ‘leave it all to the market’ approach works. And there have been some successes... at least if we look at the raw numbers on production and jobs. But those statistics mask the serious decline in the quality of industrial jobs.

Throughout the 1990s, we relied far too much on a low Canadian dollar to compete with the US and to create new jobs. While the immediate impact of the higher dollar has been less that many of us feared, many sectors nonetheless now face a very uncertain future.

We see a troubled steel industry, an auto industry starved of the major new investments we need in assembly plants, and a clothing industry facing a major adjustment challenge.

This might sound like an unduly negative assessment. But I am not saying anything that has not been documented – in report after report – on the problems of industrial Canada.

I want to compliment the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association, in particular, for recognizing the need for both a critical assessment of our recent performance, and the need to collectively face up to the challenges of the near future.

We will hear from their chief economist, Jayson Myers, at lunch. I hope his remarks will kick-off a spirited and constructive exchange of views. We may well have our differences, but we both share the goal of building a stronger industrial base here in Canada.

The labour movement can only be an active actor in shaping the economy if we have our own ideas and our own strategies. Once again, I can only stress the importance of this conference... and the necessity for each of you to contribute your experiences and viewpoints.

Our common task today and tomorrow is to debate issues, to revisit old ideas, and to develop new thinking.

Let me just briefly identify five key issues which I think deserve discussion, and which I'm sure will be addressed by some of our panellists...(sic)

First, what are the links between the trade deals and industrial policy?

There is little doubt that the trade deals deprived us of some tools of industrial policy which were used in the 1970s and 1980s. These tools include: the ability to require higher levels of resource processing; to control domestic energy prices; and to set conditions for Canadian content on foreign takeovers.

But the trade deals still empower governments to provide support to industry for research, training, and regional development. Many countries have been much more aggressive in pushing the trade pact envelope.

We in Canada should and must find creative ways to achieve our economic goals in different ways than in the past.

We also need to discuss the extent to which we should be thinking about industrial strategies in a North American rather than purely Canadian context. Particularly with regard to those sectors that have become so closely integrated in the era of the FTA and NAFTA.

Does it, for example, make sense today to talk about sectoral trade deals?

Second, where does energy fit in?

The trade deals have more or less locked us into a North American energy future. As prices rise, energy exports will likely become an even more important driver of the Canadian economy.

We are already witnessing the expansion of the tar sands, offshore exploration and development, new pipeline construction, and so on.

By contrast, taking Kyoto implementation and global warming seriously could underpin green industrial strategies... strategies focussed on new jobs in energy conservation and renewable energy. Can we do both? Or, do we have to choose?”[vii]

Brother Georgetti not only challenges the CLC traditional opposition to Free Trade he now also poses the fact that perhaps the labour movement needs to adjust its thinking about Kyoto as well!

Well that’s not such a shocker either. What Brother Georgetti is really saying, is that the labour movement should accept the reality of Free Trade agreements and ameliorate them. Which is not much different than what his American counterparts have been saying in their own way, or the way the ICFTU and ILO have responded to the issue of the WTO.

But first let us here from someone familiar with the original debate on Free Trade,
Dr. Karl Marx. And what is the good doctor’s diagnosis of the problem?

“Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of
establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say,
of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that
dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more
or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system
helps to develop free trade competition within a country. Hence we see
that in countries where the bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt
as a class, in Germany for example, it makes great efforts to obtain
protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie as weapons against
feudalism and absolute government, as a means for the concentration of
its own powers and for the realization of free trade within the same
country.

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while
the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities
and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the
extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social
revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I
vote in favor of free trade.”[viii]


Hmm, Marx certainly does not view Free Trade as being reformable, and sees it as forcing a revolution by increasing the growth of the proletariat in relation to the growth of capital. In fact he sees that it is an outgrowth of capitalism after a period of protectionism, in other words it is the flip side of the coin. “But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive.”

And perhaps that is what Brother Georgetti means when he says: “But, at the same time, we must recognize that the lost jobs have been slowly recovered. And we must also recognize that omelettes are not easily unscrambled. Corporations have restructured their production chains so that goods now cross and re-cross the border in hugely complicated ways.”[ix]




Maybe he is a Marxist while his old social coalition allies in the protectionist/nationalist Anti-Free Trade movement like the Maude Barlow and her Council of Canadians, Mel Hurtig, Tony Clarke, the NGO’s and the anti-globalization movement, and yes even Murray Dobbin, are being the real conservatives.

Nah, Brother Georgetti has not embraced dialectical materialism anymore than he views the working class as being a social revolutionary force. He is simply being a pragmatic trade unionist in the tradition of Samuel Gompers. He may agree that the free trade system is destructive, and that it “breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point.” But create a social revolution, never!

Remember this is the head of the Labour congress, the greatest collection of private and public sector ‘business’ unions in Canada. While supportive of the NDP, one and all, social revolution, well that’s going a bit far. Brother Georgetti like his NDP counterparts are merely being pragmatic social democrats.

And let’s not quibble about who is or is not a business union. Whether it is CUPE and CAW (already Brother Buzz Hargrove is wrapping himself in the flag of protectionism and seeking dance partners in the Anti-Free Trade movement) or Steel and the Building Trades, social unions, public sector unions, or private sector, they are all the same. They exist to ameliorate the hardships of capitalism, to get a better deal for ‘their’ workers, to make capitalism share a portion of its profits with the proletariat. But challenge capitalism, never.

Nor is the CLC new found coziness with the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association anything less then the usual politics of tripartism and recognition of the need for a new social contract.

As Murray Dobbin points out in his article “did free trade and structural adjustment bring the promised flood of new foreign investment? Industry Canada says no. Over the whole period of free trade over 95% of foreign investment in Canada has been devoted to buying up Canadian companies - activity that more often means layoffs, not new jobs.
Ironically, this structural adjustment of the country has been done for the benefit of a surprisingly small part of the economy. Less than 25 per cent of what we produce in goods and services is exported, yet we have severely compromised the domestic economy in order to be trade-competitive with the US.”[x]

In the spirit of his new found belief in Continentalism Brother Georgetti, sounding more like CNN’s Lou Dobbs than Dobbin, says: “Nor are we immune to the pressures on North American manufacturing posed by the rapid rise of China and developing Asia to world dominance in the production of consumer goods. Nor to the recent rise in the offshoring of services."[xi]

The FTA and NAFTA have created a continental protectionist-trading block that benefits a single common signatory; the United States. The FTA, a bilateral agreement, the NAFTA a trilateral agreement that includes Mexico, and finally the FTAA, a trilateral agreement between the continental trading block of NAFTA, with Latin America and Caribbean countries. It is protectionism none the less. The key protectionist market is still the US and in all these agreements they play the main role. In fact no matter how many countries are involved the agreements in effect are a series of bilateral agreements with the US to curtail their protectionism.

It has not protected Canada or Mexico from being punished by the United States when it has seen fit to impose trade barriers around its own steel industry, or with punishing Canada through penalties around exporting cheap soft wood lumber, or Mexico with penalties over its exporting cheap tomatoes.

That Brother Georgetti should believe that the Canadian Labour Movement should reconsider its opposition to NAFTA does not mean he wants to leave the trade agreement as it is. No like his international counterparts, in ICFTU and the ILO he wants the labour movement to use side agreements, and reform these acts.

And he does it from a protectionist position, no different than Dobbin’s or Barlow’s, except his is a Continental perspective while they remain staunch nationalists. Like them he too wants to work with the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters to protect Canadian Capitalism, which is whom the majority of the unionized industrial workers in Canada work for.

In a sense it is also provincial perspective of Southern Ontario writ large on the National body politic when Brother Georgetti calls for a New Industrial Policy with labour at the table, a new tripartism between labour, capital and the state. In other words as the good Doctor said, “Hence we see that in countries where the bourgeoisie is …beginning to make itself felt as a class, it makes great efforts to obtain protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie as weapons…, as a means for the concentration of its own powers and for the realization of free trade within the same country. “[xii]

Mel Hurtig, Maude Barlow, Murray Dobbin and Buzz Hargrove all want to defend a nationalistic mixed capitalist economy, within a social democratic state. Brother Georgetti and Brother Hargrove in reality want the same thing, a made in Southern Ontario industrial policy which means, that it has to be a Continental strategy, as it was with the now defunct Auto-Pact. Brother Georgetti is just a bit more honest about, then Brother Hargrove.

And what fear does Brother Georgetti have about US economic policy? Well the attacks on outsourcing impact Canada. We are key to the outsourcing of telephony and IT. We are equal to India in number of jobs outsourced from the US to Canadian call centres according to a UN study issued the same day as the CLC began its conference.

These are the new service industries that have replaced those lost manufacturing jobs.




Recently New Brunswick, which is identified as the most aggressive province in outsourcing, paid $825 million to a US company to create a call centre with 500 jobs.
Now unlike India and the United States these jobs are being unionized. So business unions in Canada in the Service Sector may soon be agreeing with Georgetti about the need to enforce the FTA and NAFTA to save these jobs from the incessant protectionism of the United States.

When NAFTA opened up the market between Canada, the United States and Mexico, industrial jobs moved to Mexico, and to Canada. In fact Canada developed a larger industrial manufacturing base with higher productivity than its American or Mexican counterparts, according to figures provided by Sam Gidden and Leo Panitch, in their recent critique of globalization in Studies in Political Economy: A Socialist Review[xiii]. How could that be? Well while we lost some industrial jobs in some sectors particularly around the Southern Ontario US beltway. Many auto related. But we have also gained industrial development in secondary and tertiary production.

The growth of Stronach’s Magna parts company, which is non-union, is one example. The impact not of Free Trade, but of just in time production methods, is the reason for Magna’s success. The whole auto sector as well as other North American industries restructured in the nineties, laying off workers and middle management in the thousands and selling off its secondary and tertiary manufacturing arms while buying up financial and loan businesses. GM made more off its financial sector, credit card and loans, last year than it did selling cars and trucks.

Canada has benefited by having secondary and tertiary manufacturing developing in southern Ontario and Quebec. Hence Gidden and Panitch’s assertion that industrial production has grown faster in Canada then in the United States or Mexico. What infuriates Brother Hargrove is that most of this is non-union.

But a case in point of how Canada benefits from this new industrial production transfer, is the case of a car seat manufacturer in the United States. Located in the Lower East Side of LA, this company was one of the few industrial employers in that impoverished neighborhood that was the source of the LA riots. After the riots everyone claimed that the Lower East Side need economic inputs and job creation. Well the car seat manufacturer ignored this and moved these much-needed jobs north to Quebec. Why? One is the exchange rate between the Canadian dollar and the U.S. dollar, lowering our real economic costs of production, it was given tax incentives from the Quebec and Canadian government, and finally the clincher, Canada’s Medicare system saved the company millions.





Why did production jobs move to Mexico, well they didn’t really, production shifted across North America, when the new trade agreements opened up the Continental market of Canada, the US and Mexico, all sorts of readjustments were made. Some production shifted to Mexico, Volkswagen and other car manufacturers opened new plants in Mexico. Japanese car manufacturers opened up new production in Canada, and German manufacturers began moving production to the United States, where worker productivity was higher and cheaper than German workers! This later move eventually resulted in Daimler-Mercedes Benz buying out Chrysler.

Outsourcing and privatization are the key to this restructuring of capitalism in the global context. Globalization is capitalism moving to tendencies to monopoly in the G20 countries, excess importance being put on finance capital, and the move to create a mass working class base in the developing world where outsourcing of production can be shipped too. This shift is clearly towards Asia, China in particular.

Why the G20? Because this is a broader definition of the industrialized countries that are making the new continental trading blocks. Recently the president of Intel, the US monopoly chip maker, told Brazilians that the company would not be moving its production to that country because wages and benefits were too high! Instead Intel was moving into China, where wages and benefits are still low. Like the German car manufacturers moving to North America after NAFTA, now the manufacturers are looking to Asia and China.

But we have also lost other industries, milling, meat packing, for example are now direct branch plants of their American parents. Where we once had many secondary agricultural industries, we have lost them, only to have them replaced by American conglomerates. Which makes sense since we are predominately exporting to the U.S. market. And again these conglomerates such as Cargill and IBP Packers, or ADM, which was, sold Robin Hood Mills, are reshaping agriculture into agribusiness. Just as Monsanto is with control of both herbicide and genetically modified canola. The market is rapidly industrializing and the family farm across North America is doomed.

Maple Leaf is one of the few packinghouse chains left in Canada, and it has a virtual monopoly. Like other McCain businesses, which has the monopoly on potato production in the Maritimes, McCain and Maple Leaf prove that privatization and competition in the market lead inevitably to monopoly not greater competition. But hey everyone knows that since that is why it is called Monopoly capitalism.







Take Air Canada, which has been deregulated by the Federal Government, in the era of NAFTA. Was it the trade agreement, and the ideology of open skies, that led to the mess that is Canada’s airline industry? No. Air Canada’s need to be the single player in the market that drove them to absorb Canadian Airlines, and several other small carriers.

And then after overextending themselves in a limited market, becoming the sole monopoly, they declared bankruptcy in order to gain enough capital from pension funds, wage freezes rollbacks and layoffs, that the company could attract capital to maintain its monopoly. And who had the capital to buy the airline? A Hong Kong business man.

Telus is another case in point. Formerly Alberta Government Telephones, now privatized Telus first gobbled up Edmonton Telephone, a city phone company that was on the cutting edge of technological innovation in telephony especially fiber optics. Then Telus gobbled up BC Tel. It split the countries long distance market between itself and BCE (Bell Canada). Next it moved into mobile cell phone market, and has proceeded to dominate that market as well, buying up its competitors, leaving it and BCE and Rogers cable as the players in the cell phone market. As it out laid cash for these purchases it did not translate that into profits. And low and behold too rapid an expansion of the business left it asset wealthy and cash shy, like Air Canada. And the result was, wait for, layoffs, rollbacks and wage freezes.

Canada and Quebec have benefited from the protectionism of our markets for the past fifty
years. It has created a bourgeoisie in both states. And both states have used government to aid business development. Whether it is a private company benefiting from subsidies or a former crown corporation now privatized, or a IT firm with a contract for service, privatization and outsourcing have been the engines of capitalist expansion rather than the free trade agreements per se.

Now we are benefiting from the privatization of crown corporations and the expansion of secondary and tertiary manufacturing, as well as a growth in the technology and service sectors. In the nineties the Canadian government and provincial governments restructured as did the private sector. Greater emphasis is placed on contracting out and outsourcing. This has a greater impact on the economy than the trade deals did themselves. See Labour in the Global Economy,[xiv] where we assert that privatization is the problem not globalization.

Bombadier is a case in point, as is CN rail. Bombadier a private company a major employer in Quebec has for the past decade benefited from Federal Government largesse and grown into an international competitor. CN was privatized and again its first act to become profitable was to layoff thousands of workers. CN has used this capital to then expand and buy up American railroad holdings. Again picking up pension plan and benefit monies as well as wages, as it again laid off thousands of workers. The former federal bureaucrat who was made president of CN, Paul Tellier was so successful in his transformation of CN into a private monopoly, that Bombadier hired him to restructure their company. Which he promptly did with, you guessed it, more layoffs.

Without the restructuring there would have been no free trade.

As Dr. Marx points out: “Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say,
of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that
dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more
or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system
helps to develop free trade competition within a country.”[xv]

The Nationalists who oppose Free Trade are calling for a made in Canada capitalism, whose time has come and gone. Now the integration of the market on the Continent is underway it is resulting in internal conflicts that the FTA and NAFTA were supposed to pave over. In particular US protectionism and jingoism.

Canada suffers illegal protectionist taxation by the US on our soft wood lumber exports, and a closed border to our live cattle in order to bolster the flagging American meat packing companies. Mexico faces protectionist tariffs against its tomato exports and increased jingoism against ‘illegal aliens’ read Mexicans, entering the US.

CNN’s Lou Dobbs has been an outspoken jingoist against so called open borders and the illegal alien invasion of the US. Not since the 1920’s have we seen such anti-alien hysteria.

The simple fact of the matter is that whether it is outsourcing production, or undocumented workers, the market wants cheap labour. And what the market wants the market gets. Thousands of workers are employed in sweatshops in the United States, thousands are employed as nannies, gardeners, and service workers for the ruling class.

If there wasn’t low paid work then these workers would not stay. The contradiction is that there is. And if low paid work, read indentured servitude, is required to increase profits companies will employ it wherever they can, and if they can open up the labour markets under free trade agreements so much the better. Capital moves, labour is held back from moving, and capital goes to newly industrializing nations, creating a new proletariat.

CNN’s Lou Dobbs begins to sound a lot like Brother Georgetti and Brother Hargrove when it comes to the issue of outsourcing. Of course he too focuses on India and China, and not Canada. Common cause has been made with American labour that China is the problem of outsourced American jobs. During the WTO protests in Seattle, the Teamsters may have made peace with the Turtles (the environmental movement) but the still retained their good old racist jingoism by focusing their protests not against the WTO but the American trade agreement with China. Them foreigners (who are not white people) are taking our jobs.

Just like Brother Georgetti, American labour and its ruling class have made China the global boogieman of expanding capitalism. And then enter the Democrats, presidential candidate John Kerry and the Democrats have been quick to embrace protectionism against outsourcing and in the case of Canada against beef exports to the US.

And while the free trade agreements may have eased some of this, the reality is that starting in the nineties the whole movement of capitalism was towards outsourcing and privatization. Government restructuring and corporate restructuring went hand in hand the result being that computer technologies and IT were seen as logical for outsourcing, and the services that go with greater computerized communications and telephony.

“Canada ranked a close second to India, attracting 56 new call centres in 2002 and 2003, the report found. India had 60 and Britain was third with 43. Indeed, more than half of all new call centres went to developed countries.

The UN also reported that Canada was among a group of just four countries that controlled 70 per cent of the estimated $32-billion (U.S.) yearly market for offshored services in 2001. The others were Ireland, India and Israel.”[xvi]

Why developed countries? Because as the captains of industry are so oft to say; ‘we need and educated work force.’ And you need infrastructure provided in industrialized countries. China and India are industrialized countries. Certainly they have a mass peasantry, but over the past fifty years a tremendous expansion of industrial development has occurred. As it has all over the pacific region and now in Africa as well as the Middle East and Latin America.


This is the new world market. Cellphone manufacturing in Finland, France, and the US.Car factories in England, France, Italy, Canada, the United States, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Russia Korea, China, Japan. Large scale agribusiness like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Monsanto, displacing family farms in Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Canada, the United States, England, Brazil, Africa, etc.

Outsourcing is the key to increasing capital profitability, in order to stave off the falling rate of profit.

So while American commentators like Lou Dobbs or politicians like Kerry denounce the loss of American jobs to outsourcing, their Canadian nationalist counterparts are saying the same thing. And their only solution is of course increased protectionism, close the borders. As much an impossibility today as it was in 1848.

The war in Iraq is another case of privatization, there were more mercenaries used than in any other conflict. Food services to troops, housekeeping services, engineering services were also all provided by private contractors. The war in Iraq was a Cato Institute wet dream of contracted out services. It was the first privatized war, a contracted out conflict, the new face of 21st Century warfare.

The labour movements focus in Canada and the United States has always been on how they can reform the trade agreements, as well as mobilizing popular support opposing them. One sector of movement was joining its coalition partners opposing Free Trade while another was at the table bargaining for sectoral agreements on labour, the environment, social services, etc. Brother Georgetti has not abandoned dealing with Free Trade agreements, he has merely abandoned his coalition partners and their nationalistic/sovereignty agenda.

Under the ideology of privatization and outsourcing labour must abandon their nationalistic jingoism, regardless of their national identity. And this is much harder. Since in Canada and Europe the labour movement is social democratic, it can only visualize a reformed capitalism. In the words of Ed Broadbent, patriarch of the New Democratic Party; “We are social democrats we believe in a mixed economy.” For Ed, and Brother Georgetti and indeed the entire labour movement in Canada, socialism is NOT on the agenda. A national social democratic state is the best possible world for these pragmatists.

In America, the labour movement is fiercely nationalistic, to the point of jingoism. The chants of USA, USA, USA, and We’re Number 1, can be heard in their opposition to free trade. And the Teamsters have been the epitome of jingoists, attacking Mexican truck drivers or China with a barely disguised racism.

And true to its national identity the labour movement in each country can only see the impact of a restructured capitalism as an effect on its own members. It does not even speak for the working class of its nation so divided is the house of labour, in every country, from the class which gave it birth.

Unlike the newly formed unions in the developing countries like Korea, Indonesia, etc. the labour movement in the industrialized countries of Europe, North, Central and South America, are corporations. Like their business counterparts these corporations have well heeled executives, servicing representatives, communications and marketing departments, benefits and claims specialists in effect the entire organizational structure of a corporate bureaucracy.

In the case of Canada we have a branch plant economy which also has branch plant unions such as the Steelworkers, UFCW, SEIU, Teamsters, building trades, etc. These unions in Canada reflect the national character of social democracy and tripartiteism making them more suitable than their American parent bodies for a Continental perspective.

In fact they look like positively socialist compared to their American counterparts. And in the Canadian labour movement, CUPW, CAW, CUPE, NUPGE, CEP, and other non branch plant industrial or social unions look positively communist as do their Quebec counterparts the CSN, FTQ, CSQ.

Brother Georgetti is not alone in his views of the need for a Continental policy of tripartiteism. Brother Gerard of the Steelworkers the first Canadian elected president of both the US and Canadian International is a long time supporter of tripartite schemes with employers and government.

Unions in social democratic states in Europe have spent many years in tripartite social contracts with governments and business. In Canada the last industrial policy developed by the CLC was a tripartite agreement under Joe Morris in the 1970’s but that ended in acrimony when the Trudeau government brought in wage and price controls.

The eighties and nineties have been an unprecedented attack on workers in the industrialized countries. And these attacks continue today, mainly through wage concessions, restructuring full time work to part time work, demanding greater flexibility in working schedules, rolling back wages and attacking benefits, gutting pension plans as a source of quick cash for mergers and acquisitions, moving jobs offshore.

At the same time as these jobs moved offshore, they developed new economic zones of industrialization. This saw the boom in newly industrialized countries, such as the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil, Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc. and with production comes the transformation of farmers and peasants into wage slaves, chained to the machines of Nike, Adidas, Ford, GM, etc. Once a working class develops it becomes self conscious, surprise surprise, just as the good Doctor prescribed, the working class begins to develop organizations, to defend itself against the worst excesses of capitalism in other words unions.

In order to defeat working class self-organization capitalism developed the Free Trade Zones, areas of sweatshops and low waged production, under military rule, with a concentration camp type atmosphere of a captured group of workers. Not unlike the early days of capitalism with its company towns of the late 19th and early 20th Century, or the relief camps of the dirty thirties in Canada, or the gulags in Russia. Still this has not stopped workers from organizing. And free trade zones are not just limited to the newly industrializing countries or the Third World, we have these zones in Canada in the Maritimes, and in the United States where they are called new economic zones, usually capitals attempt to revive urban ghettos.

Once production expands and becomes a major industry it employees a wider group of workers, it expands its area of dominance and hegemony, and can no longer exist within its ‘zone’. Once that happens the workers again organize such is their need and strength, and understanding that these are now permanent jobs, permanent existence. Gone is the village, gone is the peasant farm, gone are the days of planting and fishing, here is existence from dawn to midnight in the air-conditioned, fluorescent lit, concrete factories in Nicaragua, Ecuador, Haiti, Indonesia, etc. And yet these workers, such as those in Nicaragua have organized themselves, when they can, when they are not murdered by the military goons of capital.

And who employs these workers? Canadian companies, American companies, French, German, British, Japanese, companies. Capitalism needs to create these zones of primitive accumulation regardless of nationalism, nation states or national agendas and whether it had Free Trade agreements or not.

“You thousands of workers who are perishing, do not despair! You can die
with an easy conscience. Your class will not perish. It will always be
numerous enough for the capitalist class to decimate it without fear of
annihilating it. Besides, how could capital be usefully applied if it
did not take care always to keep up its exploitable material, i.e., the
workers, to exploit them over and over again?

But, besides, why propound as a problem still to be solved the question:
What influence will the adoption of free trade have upon the condition
of the working class? All the laws formulated by the political
economists from Quesnay to Ricardo have been based upon the hypothesis
that the trammels which still interfere with commercial freedom have
disappeared. These laws are confirmed in proportion as free trade is
adopted. The first of these laws is that competition reduces the price
of every commodity to the minimum cost of production. Thus the minimum
of wages is the natural price of labor. And what is the minimum of
wages? Just so much as is required for production of the articles
indispensable for the maintenance of the worker, for putting him in a
position to sustain himself, however badly, and to propagate his race,
however slightly.

But do not imagine that the worker receives only this minimum wage, and
still less that he always receives it.

No, according to this law, the working class will sometimes be more
fortunate. It will sometimes receive something above the minimum, but
this surplus will merely make up for the deficit which it will have
received below the minimum in times of industrial stagnation. That is
to say that, within a given time which recurs periodically, in the cycle
which industry passes through while undergoing the vicissitudes of
prosperity, overproduction, stagnation and crisis, when reckoning all
that the working class will have had above and below necessaries, we
shall see that, in all, it will have received neither more nor less than
the minimum; i.e., the working class will have maintained itself as a
class after enduring any amount of misery and misfortune, and after
leaving many corpses upon the industrial battlefield. But what of that?
The class will still exist; nay, more, it will have increased.

But this is not all. The progress of industry creates less expensive
means of subsistence. Thus spirits have taken the place of beer, cotton
that of wool and linen, and potatoes that of bread.

Thus, as means are constantly being found for the maintenance of labor
on cheaper and more wretched food, the minimum of wages is constantly
sinking. If these wages began by making the man work to live, they end
by making him live the life of a machine. His existence has not other
value than that of a simple productive force, and the capitalist treats
him accordingly.

This law of commodity labor, of the minimum of wages, will be confirmed
in proportion as the supposition of the economists, free-trade, becomes
an actual fact. Thus, of two things one: either we must reject all
political economy based on the assumption of free trade, or we must
admit that under this free trade the whole severity of the economic laws
will fall upon the workers.” [xvii]

While Brother Georgetti was addressing the CLC on the need for a new tripartite industrial policy, a conference on outsourcing was being held in New York where the Canadian Government, the same government that Brother Georgetti wants to develop a new industrial policy. Well Ottawa has a policy;

“ Ottawa's Export Development Corp. is financing Canadian foreign investments that lead to the outsourcing of jobs when it believes those deals help companies remain competitive in world markets, EDC executive vice-president Eric Siegel. He described a rapidly changing global marketplace in which companies increasingly locate production where it is most cost-effective.

That's what it takes to be competitive in a globalized world," he said. "And EDC has to fit within this model to fulfill its mandate of support for Canadian businesses seeking prosperity in the global marketplace.

He said Canadian firms are no longer making just one-off export sales --- for which the EDC typically provides credit and insurance -- but are also exporting services and making overseas investments as part of the globalization of their supply chains.

Nearly one-third of all world trade is now intra-firm, as companies ship components across national borders for further processing.

Mr. Siegel said the federally owned EDC needs to support those ventures in order to "stay relevant" to the Canadian corporate sector that it serves.

The EDC will even participate in sales made by foreign subsidiaries of Canadian companies, on the grounds that a healthy branch plant benefits the parent company.

"You have to respond to those competitive forces. It's impossible to ignore or to resist them -- inevitably you'll be impacted by them," he said in an interview after his presentation.

"So if we're going to be helpful to Canadian businesses, we have to accept them to some extent."

According to EDC research, the Canadian economy benefits tremendously from overseas investments, even when some jobs are lost at home, because companies win new customers in global markets and return dividends and earnings to the home country.

"So the investment itself may look like an export of jobs abroad, but in fact, it really is producing benefit and jobs at home. But it takes longer for those benefits to obviously accrue," he said.

The EDC executive acknowledged the growing concern that globalization is leading to a "race to the bottom," in companies take advantage of weaker labour and environmental standards to gain a competitive advantage.

EDC also helps finance the expansion of Canadian plants, even when they are owned by foreign companies, where they are clearly aimed for the export market.

In 2002, the federal Crown corporation supported Mexican auto parts maker Nemak's expansion of aluminum auto parts plants it bought from Ford Motor Co. It later financed Nemak's purchase of Canadian machinery and equipment for its Mexican plants.

In his presentation, Mr. Siegel said the EDC is committed to increasing its presence in emerging markets, even though Canada continues send 85 per cent of its exports to the United States. Nearly 20 per cent of EDC business last year -- or $11-billion of a total of $52-billion -- covered deals in such markets.”[xviii]

It is the development curse of capitalism, it must expand or it will collapse on itself. The working class that capitalism needs for its self-perpetuation, and which it has created worldwide over the last fifty years will hasten that collapse. As Dr. Marx puts it:

“The whole line of argument amounts to this: Free trade increases
productive forces. If industry keeps growing, if wealth, if the
productive power, if, in a word, productive capital increases, the
demand for labor,the price of labor, and consequently the rate of wages,
rise also.

The most favorable condition for the worker is the growth of capital.
This must be admitted. If capital remains stationary, industry will not
merely remain stationary but will decline, and in this case the worker
will be the first victim. He goes to the wall before the capitalist.
And in the case where capital keeps growing, in the circumstance which
we have said are the best for the worker, what will be his lot? He will
go to the wall just the same. The growth of productive capital implies
the accumulation and the concentration of capital. The centralization
of capital involves a greater division of labor and a greater use of
machinery. The greater division of labor destroys the especial skill of
the laborer; and by putting in the place of this skilled work labor
which anybody can perform, it increase competition among the workers.

This competition becomes fiercer as the division of labor enables a
single worker to do the work of three. Machinery accomplishes the same
result on a much larger scale. The growth of productive capital, which
forces the industrial capitalists to work with constantly increasing
means, ruins the small industrialist and throws them into the
proletariat. Then, the rate of interest falling in proportion as
capital accumulates, the small rentiers, who can no longer live on their
dividends, are forced to go into industry and thus swell the number of
proletarians.

Finally, the more productive capital increases, the more it is compelled
to produce for a market whose requirements it does not know, the more
production precedes consumption, the more supply tries to force demand,
and consumption crises increase in frequency and in intensity. But
every crisis in turn hastens the centralization of capital and adds to
the proletariat.

Thus, as productive capital grows, competition among the workers grows
in a far greater proportion. The reward of labor diminishes for all,
and the burden of labor increases for some.”[xix]


So which Canadian capitalist enterprise should the working class and its labour movement align with? Which one is not outsourcing, contracting out, privatizing, moving offshore, restructuring, laying off, freezing wages, or otherwise brutalizing the working class for profit?

The opposition in the streets to the Free Trade agreement did not translate into political action at the polls, the place the labour movement is so fond of placing its trust in. In the 1988 election the Liberals stole the NDP anti-free trade rhetoric and won a minority government, soon to be replaced by the pro-free trade Mulroney Tories. After which we had the Liberals promise to abrogate free trade and eliminate the GST if reelected. And as we all know that promise was the same as “the check is in the mail”. Even in this last election where the left in the form of the NDP and the BQ in Quebec did not even mention the Free Trade agreements.

The Anti Free Trade movement has moved on to become the Anti-WTO, Anti FTAA the Anti-globalization movement and its subsequent World Social Forum. And their solution to American Imperialism and rampant capitalism, is social democracy and national sovereignty in each country. Again the pandering to national identities in a world economy. Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians feels right at home with the Tobin Tax advocates of the ATTAC from France, and every one loves Lulu of Brazil. Well they did until he too was forced by capitalism to roll back pension and social benefits, and provide a workable corporate state for capital.

Fifty years ago NGO’s were created and developed a corresponding ideology of development and underdevelopment, the third world, north and south divides, the peasant agrarian economies and the industrialized economies. That was then this is now. What is being called globalization, free trade, is the expansion of capitalism around the world, now finally into the last of the Stalinist regimes; China.

Capital moves but labour is restricted to its ghettos in the nation state. The attack on immigrant workers and economic refugees is nationalistic jingoism that has failed to be addressed by the labour movement. Workers without frontiers is the movement that labour should be embracing, certainly the capitalists are with importing of workers from the newly industrialized countries to work in their packinghouses and factories in North America and Europe.

Indentured servitude of farm workers, nannies and others in Canada is slavery by any other name, and needs to be confronted as such. A recent report from the United States claimed that as many as 10,000 people work in that country in conditions of indentured servitude, or modern slavery. This is separate from the thousands of undocumented workers who serve the American sweatshop economy.

“Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word
_freedom_. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in
relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker.

Why should you desire to go on sanctioning free competition with this
idea of freedom, when this freedom is only the product of a state of
things based upon free competition?

We have shown what sort of brotherhood free trade begets between the
different classes of one and the same nation. The brotherhood which
free trade would establish between the nations of the Earth would hardly
be more fraternal. To call cosmopolitan exploitation universal
brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the
bourgeoisie. All the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition
gives rise to within one country are reproduced in more gigantic
proportions on the world market. We need not dwell any longer upon free
trade sophisms on this subject, which are worth just as much as the
arguments of our prize-winners Messrs. Hope, Morse, and Greg.

For instance, we are told that free trade would create an international
division of labor, and thereby give to each country the production which
is most in harmony with its natural advantage.

You believe, perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar
is the natural destiny of the West Indies.

Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about
commerce, had planted neither sugar-cane nor coffee trees there.

And it may be that in less than half a century you will find there
neither coffee nor sugar, for the East Indies, by means of cheaper
production, have already successfully combated his alleged natural
destiny of the West Indies. And the West Indies, with their natural
wealth, are already as heavy a burden for England as the weavers of
Dacca, who also were destined from the beginning of time to weave by
hand.

One other thing must never be forgotten, namely, that, just as
everything has become a monopoly, there are also nowadays some branches
of industry which dominate all others, and secure to the nations which
most largely cultivate them the command of the world market. Thus in
international commerce cotton alone has much greater commercial than all
the other raw materials used in the manufacture of clothing put
together. It is truly ridiculous to see the free-traders stress the few
specialties in each branch of industry, throwing them into the balance
against the products used in everyday consumption and produced most
cheaply in those countries in which manufacture is most highly
developed.

If the free-traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at
the expense of another, we need not wonder, since these same gentlemen
also refuse to understand how within one country one class can enrich
itself at the expense of another.”[xx]

If the labour movement wanted to really be radical, rather than another industrial bailout for Southern Ontario, the movement would look at mobilizing its funds and abilities to organize the unorganized on a global basis. And where workers are organized linking worker to worker with them so that a strike in Korea has an impact across the globe, to begin to take up struggles across borders, and not just in information pickets but actual sit down strikes, and occupations.

But don’t expect the corporate unions in North America to do this. The North American labour movement is not a class struggle organization let alone a voice of the working class, as a class for itself.

In Canada the labour movement would rather sick their lawyers on NAFTA, or Provincial anti-labour acts then call for political strikes, or heaven forbid a General Strike. The CLC called its lawyers in their case against CanWest, rather than calling for a one day political protest strike against the offending media organization, which is unionized. The use of lawyers is the weapon of corporations not class struggle organizations.

Modern business unions are corporations, in fact so much so that instead of expanding to organize the unorganized, they would rather raid each other, or expand through the corporate restructuring so favored by capitalism; mergers and acquisitions. To reform monopoly capitalism, you need monopoly unions, to defeat it you need a world wide class struggle and new forms of class struggle organizations and movements.

To paraphrase the good Doctor, the Workers of the World have no country. Something that Brother Georgetti and the Anti-Free Trade/Anti-Globalization movements fail to understand.
[i] CLC PRESS RELEASE SEPT. 22, 2004; “Georgetti Urges Union Leadership To Embrace New Thinking On Industrial Policy To Ensure Labour Influence Over National Economic Strategies”.
[ii] CLC press release Sept. 22, 2004; “Georgetti Urges Union Leadership To Embrace New Thinking On Industrial Policy To Ensure Labour Influence Over National Economic Strategies”.
[iii] SEPTEMBER 22, 2004 LETTER TO:
Members of the Executive Council, Ranking Officers of Affiliated Organizations and Presidents of Labour Councils
Re: National Post Story and Free Trade
Kenneth V. Georgetti President. CLC
[iv] THE FREE-TRADE SHUFFLE, Globe & Mail Editorial, September 24, 2004
[v] CLC PRESS RELEASE SEPT. 22, 2004; “Georgetti Urges Union Leadership To Embrace New Thinking On Industrial Policy To Ensure Labour Influence Over National Economic Strategies”.
[vi] FREE TRADE HAS COST US DEARLY, By Murray Dobbin, September 24, Globe and Mail,
also posted on www.rabble.ca
[vii] SUBJECT: SPEAKING NOTES TO THE INDUSTRIAL POLICY CONFERENCE
Publish date: September 22, 2004 Author(s): Canadian Labour Congress
[viii] ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx
before the Democratic Association of Brussels January 9, 1848
[ix] SUBJECT: SPEAKING NOTES TO THE INDUSTRIAL POLICY CONFERENCE
Publish date: September 22, 2004 Author(s): Canadian Labour Congress
[x] FREE TRADE HAS COST US DEARLY, By Murray Dobbin, September 24, Globe and Mail,
also posted on www.rabble.ca
[xi] SUBJECT: SPEAKING NOTES TO THE INDUSTRIAL POLICY CONFERENCE
Publish date: September 22, 2004 Author(s): Canadian Labour Congress
[xii] ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx
before the Democratic Association of Brussels January 9, 1848
[xiii] Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, "American Imperialism and EuroCapitalism: The Making of Neoliberal Globalization," pp. 7 - 38. Studies in Political Economy: A Socialist Review Number 71/72, Autumn 2003/Winter 2004 Internalizing Global Capitalism http://www.carleton.ca/spe/
[xiv] Le Revue Gauche #1 Global Labour in the Age of Empire
Paper presented at the Alberta Social Forum October 2003, and at a Public Meeting of the Council of Canadians, Red Deer Feb 17, 2004 Presented on behalf of the IWW Edmonton GMB http://edmonton.iww.ca/
[xv] ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx
before the Democratic Association of Brussels January 9, 1848
[xvi] OFFSHORING OF JOBS BIG BENEFIT FOR CANADA Only India attracted more, UN report says
By Barrie McKenna With a report from John Saunders Thursday, September 23, 2004 –
Page A1 Globe and Mail
[xvii] ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx
before the Democratic Association of Brussels January 9, 1848
[xviii] EDC SEES SOME JOBS OUTSOURCING AS NECESSARY
Will finance foreign investments that help Canadian companies remain competitive
Globe and Mail, Tuesday, September 28, 2004 - Page B8
[xix] ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx
before the Democratic Association of Brussels January 9, 1848
[xx] ON THE QUESTION OF FREE TRADE Public Speech Delivered by Karl Marx
before the Democratic Association of Brussels January 9, 1848

Canada’s Billion Dollar P3 Boondoggle

What the Liberals and Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know

The real story behind the cost overruns at the Canadian Firearms Centre

"Just read your piece on the firearms P3 – quite a revelation. I am amazed we have never heard this before – congratulations for bringing it to light." Murray Dobbin, author of Paul Martin Canada's CEO

The controversy around the Canadian Firearms Centre (CFC) is a key element in the Conservative Party election campaign. It has been their cause celebre for years as the Reform Party, the Canadian Alliance, and now as the ‘new’ Conservative party. It has been their rallying cry for speaking for Western alienation from Central Canada, especially Ottawa and the Federal Government. As a pseudo-republican party, the Reform-Alliance-Conservatives have decried the Canadian Firearms Centre, as an attack on the ‘right’ of Canadians to own guns, in this case hunting rifles and shotguns.

Canada has long had gun control legislation, originally brought in by the Trudeau Liberal Government. This legislation at the time was denounced by some as an attack on the right of Canadians to ‘bear arms’. Though such rights have never been enshrined in law. The attacks on the Trudeau legislation came from rump right wing conspiracy groups like the Gosticks, Canadian League of Rights and by Alberta Separatists like the Western Canada Concept, the predecessors of the Reform Party.

Declaring their purpose was Law and Order and Good Government the Liberals introduced the first Gun Control legislation in response in part to the October Crisis in Quebec. This legislation was limited to hand guns and automatic weapons, and was not without controversy at the time. Gun Collectors, hunters, farmers, those from rural Canada and of course the right wing of the conservative movement were opposed to any form of gun control, it was seen as the State interfering in the rights of the individual. This American republican notion is at the core of the current Conservative opposition to the Canadian Firearms Centre.

The new legislation was introduced in response to pressure on the government from women’s groups and largely centered around mobilization of public opinion in Canada’s largest cities; Toronto and Montreal, after the Lepine Massacre at Ecole Polytechnic. Again the Reform Party, representing a grass roots right wing populist movement, cherished the ‘right to bear arms’ and belittles feminism and women’s rights, as can be attested to by their political alliance with right wing women’s groups such as Alberta Women United for Families. Their opposition to day care and abortion, and any state interference in the so called free market that might impose a tax based social program for the good of all, is key to their political discourse. As the Alliance and now Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, this is still their underlying ideology.

So the issue of the CFC is wrapped up in their political ideology of being the Republican Party of Canada. Even if there had not been cost overruns at the CFC the Reform-Alliance-Conservatives saw the gun legislation and the centre as a backroom conspiracy to take guns away from Canadians. As the saying goes; "just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t to get you", and in the case of the CFC and in particular functionaries in the Department of the Justice, opponents of the Gun registry had a reason to be concerned.

In the Auditor Generals report on the cost overruns at the CFC, one of the issues that arose was the fact that deputy ministers in Justice overseeing the creation of the centre were of the opinion that the CFC was to be a ‘gun registry’. Its purpose was not only to register the owners of rifles and shotguns, but also act as a criminal registry, their underlying hope was that it would reduce gun ownership in Canada. This was the self-justification for creating an overly complex gun registration process, which by its very nature should have been fairly simple and straightforward.

It wasn’t like Canada did not have gun control, while handguns and automatic weapons were ‘restricted’ in Canada, any Canadian owning a rifle or shotgun had to possess a FAC, a firearms registration license. You just didn’t need it to purchase rifles or shotguns. This licensing procedure was introduced under the Trudeau Liberals initially as part of the national gun control legislation.

The local police issued a FAC, after you showed a birth certificate, a driver’s license and were fingerprinted. It allowed you to purchase and collect non-restricted weapons. A special collectors license was issued in the same way, to gun collectors. A special license and registration was required to purchase, transport and own a handgun. It wasn’t that the legislation banned handguns per se, it severely restricted their access. In the case of automatic weapons, again these were restricted to registered collectors, and any use of them had to be authorized by the local police or RCMP.

So the infrastructure was already in place that should have made it relatively simple to centralize in the CFC. While gun registration was not mandatory, a vast majority of responsible gun owners had FAC’s. Transferring that registration information should have been the basis of data gathering for the CFC. But within the Justice Department, this was not good enough, they also wanted a criminal registry. So the Justice Department’s Canadian Firearms Program (CFP) decided to start from scratch, to create a Canadian Firearms Centre, where all Canadian gun owners had to register their guns regardless whether they already had an FAC.

This program was overly complicated, the questionnaires were not user friendly, and unlike the old FAC this was all being done using a brand new computer program and database. This was further confirmed by the independent audit done of the CFP in January 2003 by Raymond V. Hession with the aid of KPMG and HLB Decision Economics Inc.

Hession found that "the CFP operates as a sub-activity within the Department of Justice. As such, the intermingling of a highly operational service delivery function (the CFP) with a policy-rich department whose culture is expected to be circumspect and prudent can be problematic. The department has a very demanding policy agenda, involving itself in virtually every legislative, regulatory and program activity of the government. The CFP has, with its continuing controversies and extraordinary logistical demands, layered unprecedented burdens on the department’s management. And, correspondingly, the CFP is continuously contending for the resources and management attention it has needed to sustain its performance against its legislated milestones. The aggregate effect of these organizational dynamics includes a cumbersome leadership model, less intense focus on the mission of the CFP and corresponding inefficiencies in operational execution. Leadership, focus and execution are further sub-optimized currently because of the multiple headquarters deployments (Edmonton and Ottawa) and processing sites (Montreal and Miramichi)."

But before those in the Conservative party say; I told you so, Hennison condemns them as well as provinces like Alberta which have opted out from the federal program; "Uncertainty is the enemy of the CFP. No end-to-end integrated plan to achieve "steady state" operations, no legislative or financial authority to enable administrative improvements, an ASD contract still requiring certification, differential costs and service levels between opting-in and opting-out provinces, provincial and territorial politicians promoting delay, etc., are all contributing to the uncertainty. Fuelled by the aggressive actions of the anti-firearms control lobby whose cause is aided by the uncertainty, these vested interests are frustrating the alignment of all parties to the achievement of the expected outcomes."

In other words the very opponents of the Canadian Firearms Program and the Canadian Firearms Centre must also shoulder their responsibility for increasing the cost overruns, this is particularly true of provinces that have opted out. The Centre expected and calculated its original costs based on all owners registering their guns and the provinces opting in, at no time did they calculate the costs of provincial government abdicating their responsibilities by opting out. This caused some of the cost overrun. Nor did they calculate the economic impact of a boycott by gun-owners, supported and encouraged by the Reform-Alliance-Conservative party and by provincial Conservatives like the Klein and Harris governments, Ministers and MLA’s.

But the real reason for the cost overruns was the simple fact that the entire CFP was a public private partnership, a P3. This is the key finding of the internal Justice Department audits done in 2000 and 2001, the Auditor Generals Report in 2002 and the Hennison audit in 2003.

The billion-dollar boondoggle is the result of privatization. You will never hear this from Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. Because the Reform-Alliance-Conservatives and their allies such as the Fraser Institute, the National Citizens Coalition, the Atlantic Market Institute, and the CD Howe Institute are all proponents of the privatization of government services.

The Gun registry cost overruns are the direct result of the move to privatize, outsource and contract out government services begun under the Mulroney Conservative Government, and continued by the Liberal Government under PM Chretien and his finance minister Paul Martin.

The push to privatize government services was the result of the tax cutting, free trade neo-conservative political agenda adopted by governments in the 1980’s under the leadership of Ronald Reagan in the US, Margart Thatcher in the UK, Brian Mulroney in Canada and Sir Roger Douglas in New Zealand. It impacted on all levels of government, federal, provincial/state, and municipal. Business lobbyists such as the BCNI and the NCC and their think tanks such as the Cato Institute and Fraser Institute promoted privatization as the answer to debt and deficit crisis governments faced. The fact that the tax cuts introduced by the neo-cons caused this crisis was ignored. Regardless of the impact of tax cuts their answer was always the same; reduce the size of government, and contract out/privatize government services.

One of the influential texts produced in response to the neo-conservative agenda was Reinventing Government, How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler published in 1993. It became the bible for the reduction in government services in order to reduce deficits by using contracting out, outsourcing and public private partnerships. It was the bible of the ‘new ‘ way for governments to do ‘business’. It was a liberal version of the harsher conservative view that all government services could and should be privatized.

It became the rallying cry of governments under siege from business and the right wing. In the United States it was embraced enthusiastically by the Democrats and Vice President Gore. In Canada it became the Chretien Liberals alternative to the Klein Revolution in Alberta. And it is the reason that Canadian Firearms Program ended up being a billion-dollar boondoggle.

Facing a massive deficit and debt crisis that was world wide, governments began to end their Keynesian approaches to social spending and embrace the new neo-conservative agenda. Reduce spending, outsource government contracts and increase tax cuts to business. The Liberals were no different, and Reinventing Government became an internal bible within the various departments. It was read by Cabinet Ministers, deputy ministers, and most importantly its ideas of contracting out and outsourcing was embraced in every department as a way of supposedly saving money.

The Liberals began the promotion of private-public partnerships (P3’s) and contracting out not based on any real economic analysis but based on popular business ideology. One of the areas the government saw, as perfect for outsourcing was its IT needs. The computer and information technology boom meant that the government could easily contract out these services rather than developing them in-house. Various departments began wholesale contracting out of IT services, including hardware purchasing and installation, computer programming and data base construction, as well as data inputting.

Unfortunately in their rush to privatize and outsource, they failed to develop a business plan that would allow for project oversight, and worse they failed to tender specific contracts for services. The government became a slush fund for private sector IT companies which were not the small computer companies of struggling entrepreneurs of the Wired generation, but large-scale corporate monopolies.

Such was the case with the Canadian Firearms Program, as is clearly shown by all the audit reports. In the case of the creation of the CFC, not only was the IT contracted out but also so was all the staff who did data intake, customer service and data input. The entire Centre is one large venture in private delivery of government services. Cost overruns occurred because of having " multiple headquarters deployments (Edmonton and Ottawa) and processing sites (Montreal and Miramichi)." These were staffed not by public sector workers, but by contracted out workers.

Management was the only area that was not contracted out, but in this case the management also did not have the knowledge or experience to oversee the IT component of creating a brand new data base for registering Canada’s gun owners.

The Auditor General reported that: "The Department had major difficulties in distinguishing between expenditures for project implementation and ongoing operations. This problem particularly affected two of the largest categories of costs: communications activities and the development and implementation of computer systems supporting the Canadian Firearms Registration System. The amounts allocated to these areas in various official documents differ significantly from one another. For example, one document provided to us stated that for 1997-98 the cost of the Canadian Firearms Registration System was about $13.5 million. However, the document provided to us for audit purposes stated that this amount was about $20 million."

And why were there cost overruns? "From the start of the business process and technological development of the CFP, EDS and SHL Systemhouse (subsequently acquired by EDS), responding to requirements defined by the CFP project management, performed a large number of changes (1997-319 changes; 1998-310; 1999-474; 2000-415; 2001-260; and, 2002-112) leading to a CFP technical solution that had rapidly evolved from seemingly straightforward to very complex."

In other words from the beginning the IT companies controlled the whole process, they provided the hardware, developed the software and data processing, and maintained control over it leasing it back to the government. Every time a change was made a charge was issued, driving up the operational costs of the CFC and the CFP. The costs were in the millions, and the government still did not own the hardware, software or data, this was still the property of the IT company.

And the reason these costly changes were required? "The Canadian Firearms Registration System information technology was modified several times before and after licensing and registration began in December 1998. The technology was developed in parallel with repeated changes to Program forms, rules, and processes and before legislation and regulations were finalized. The Department stated that the complexity of the system increased unnecessarily because many of the design assumptions were invalid; the system was intended to capture detailed information about firearms for criminal investigations and process licence and registration applications; however, the information needed for criminal investigations was well beyond the administrative needs of the Program; and small changes, such as modifications in data entry on a form, required major changes in the whole system because of its size and complexity, and these changes typically took three to six months to implement at a cost of millions of dollars."

So the Justice Department created a system that was not just simply about Canadian registering their guns but also an attempt to track gun ownership for police purposes. This was the underlying problem with the IT program. And they left the creation of this overly complex database to EDS and SHL Systemhouse. That system instead of being adaptable became a very expensive white elephant.

"In 2001, the Department told the Government that the three-year-old Canadian Firearms Registration System was not working well; its technology was expensive, inflexible, out-of-date, and could not be modified at a reasonable costs to support future operations. Construction and maintenance costs of the existing system were exceptionally high and without radical change, these would represent over 60 percent of future operating costs. This would be significantly higher than the industry norm of 10 percent to 20 percent."

EDS made their money and left the CFP and consequently Canadian Taxpayers on the hook for their outdated system. And anyone who works with computers, even a home computer, knows that there is something wrong when a database program and computer hardware is "expensive, inflexible, out of date (sic) and cannot be modified to support future operations". Somebody sold the government a pig in the poke, and left laughing all the way to the bank. That somebody was EDS.

Who is EDS? Well does the name Ross Perot ring a bell? EDS is originally his company for outsourcing computer programming and database processing it is one of the largest US based IT providers in the world. On their web site they state "EDS' core business is outsourcing services. Our innovative portfolio is built around our unique offerings in mainframe, data center, help-desk and desktop services, application maintenance and development, business process outsourcing, and transformation services." In this case they provided CFP with outdated and costly mainframe computers, lets not even ask who uses mainframes anymore, and proprietary application development and maintenance. In other words at the end of 2001 the CFP did not even own their own equipment and applications.

EDS informs us that "Outsourcing is about more than simply cutting costs. It's about increasing business value for your company." And what business value did we get from EDS? "Its technology was expensive, inflexible, out-of-date, and could not be modified at a reasonable costs to support future operations " Proudly EDS reports their "Canadian revenues of Cdn $1.25 billion in 2002," much of that revenue was paid by Canadian taxpayers thanks to their screw up at CFP.

And so what was the solution that the Government came up with to resolve this problem? To further outsource the computer operations of the CFP! That’s right, in a bill passed in the House of Commons, voted on by the Liberals and Conservatives the boondoggle that was caused by outsourcing in the first place was going to be fixed by…. (wait for it) outsourcing to a different company!

According to the Auditor General; "In 2002, following a competitive procurement, an Alternative Services Delivery (ASD) contract was awarded to Team Centra (a consortium of CGI and BDP). This outsourcing contract will, upon certification, replace the existing services. In the interests of cost containment and technology evolution, the strategic focus of the ASD solution is dependent on Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software replacing the custom-built solution. Current indications are that the complexities of the CFP continue to put the potential economic advantages of the COTS solution in jeopardy."

So were costs more controlled under the current contracted out services with Team Centra than with EDS? Not so according to the Hennison audit. "Nevertheless, the program administration remains unnecessarily complex and costly. KPMG reports that program expenditures were $200,364,000 in fiscal year 2000-2001 and $136,629,000 in fiscal year 2001-2002. The Minister of Justice recently stated that the expenditures for the current fiscal year will be somewhat less than the $113,500,000 previously expected."

So the problem originally was that the government was sold an out of date mainframe computer and overly complex customized data base program and the solution is now to hire another IT company to come in and sell us "off the shelf" computers.

The logic of this befuddles the mind, except to those proponents of contracting out and privatization as the answer to everything. This begs the question, if the original CFP cost overruns were caused by outsourcing the IT why not bring it back in-house, and purchase off the shelf computers and software directly? The ideology of Public Private Partnerships is so imbedded in federal government departments, and provincial governments Canada wide that they cannot admit that P3’s are a failure, even when it is so obvious, as it is in this case.

The result of all this outsourcing of computer technology for the CFP is the recommendation from Hennison that "to bring development costs under control, with the exception of normal application maintenance, no additional software functions should be added to the existing technical infrastructure." So when outsourcing fails once we try it again and when it fails again and cost overruns occur we now freeze the program.

Like EDS, Team Centra benefited from outsourcing. "By joining forces with AMS, CGI has doubled its critical mass in both the United States and Europe. With 25,000 professionals and US$3 billion in revenue, CGI is one of the largest independent IT and BPO companies in the world," says their web page. And again they profited from cost overruns at CFP, just like EDS.

The CFP is an example of who exactly benefits from P3’s, as the companies providing outsourcing services. There are clearly no cost savings in outsourcing government services, there is less direct control and less accountability. And yet these same companies that outsource are the ones that not only claim they are more efficient than in-house services, they also are companies that support tax cuts for business. No wonder the Conservatives don’t want to talk about this being a P3 boondoggle. It damns their ideology that privatization and contracting out save money and are more efficient than public sector services provided by public sector workers.

None of these companies has been sued or have had their contracts cancelled. There will be no attempt to recoup the losses from companies that swindled the taxpayers of Canada, by providing "technology was expensive, inflexible, out-of-date, and could not be modified at a reasonable costs to support future operations."

Where else could this be happening? EDS and CGI still have contracts with the Federal Government and its departments, they provide IT outsourcing to provincial governments in Canada, municipalities, hospital boards, and universities. If this is Reinventing Government then we should expect more billion-dollar boondoggles, not less, thanks to outsourcing, privatization and P3’s.

War! What's it Good For? Profit

IRAQ
THIS WAR IS ABOUT PRIVATIZATION
Ok enough of this crap, about contractors. Lets call a spade a spade, these so called contractors are hired guns; mercenaries attached to the US military. So why isn't the media calling them that? Cause the news would read different. Lets take Fallujah for instance if you heard or read or watched a news broadcast that said four heavily armed mercenaries were ambushed and killed by residents of Fallujah, well that would have a different spin than calling them contractors.
Contractors imply some guys in coveralls working driving a truck or building something or serving food to someone. It does not imply a guy in military khakis carrying weapons. Mercenaries are hired killers however, and calling them contractors as if they were another truck driver, is clever and disingenuous and the media has played right into this rhetorical slight of hand.
Iraq is Bush and the Republicans first full scale Privatized war. Sure mercenaries have been used in other recent conflicts but not on this scale. Bremers role in Iraq is to privatize all existing state owned industries and civil infrastructure.
The military is being supported by 10,000 mercenaries from companies in the US and UK. The UK is the largest supplier of mercenaries, it has several of the largest companies, made up of former SAS, special ops personnel.
The US has recently seen a boom in private security/mercenary companies all headquartered in Virginia around the CIA and Pentagon. These companies are made up of ex US military personnel and ex CIA.
To say that these folks don't understand the military code they once served is ridiculous. The reality is they are outside the Uniform Code of Justice because the US Congress did NOT declare War in Iraq. However in 2000 the US Congress passed a law that would put these 'civilian' mercenaries under Military oversight, they just haven't applied it.
Mercenaries (Military Contractors sic) are part of the overall effort of the US to contract out all the support services in its operations in Iraq. Troop suppliers are contracted out, field operations contain military personnel supported by contracted out food, medical and material supply personnel. Infrastructure is being built by private contractors such as Bechtel and Halliburton. Much of this is not just oil pipelines, but the schools and hospitals, electrical generating stations, etc.
Sure the US says its building hospitals and schools, but lets look at what they are building, private hospitals and private schools. The ideology of privatization and contracting out, so called free enterprise is behind the destruction and reconstruction of Iraq. Saddam was the excuse. The reasons for the war are many, oil security, Israel’s security, most importantly what Bush and his Republicans bring to Iraq is in the words of Senator Elizabeth Dole: "a free market." So privateers are running the country under the protection of mercenaries and US troops.
What about the workers in Iraq? They are not allowed to organize unions under a 1987 law passed by Saddam. Since the state controlled all enterprises all workers were made government employees under the law.
Bremer has continued to use this law to disallow free collective bargaining in Iraq. Independent unions have arisen and workers have gone on strike only to be told by the Coalition Government and its Finance ministry they have no right to strike or unionize. US military forces have attacked union offices in Baghdad.
There are no union or worker representatives present in the Governing Council nor has the UN made any effort to include the workers and their unions in the new government coming into effect in July.Yet the ILO is part of the UN and has not been called in to review the conditions of the working class in Iraq.
This is reality of the war in Iraq, it is to take over the infrastructure of the country, remove it from state control and sell it off to the highest bidder, which is exactly what Bremer and Company are currently doing. State run industries are being sold off at fire sale prices with no concern for the workers in those industries.
Lets look at where all the billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq are going
Mercenaries cost $100,000 a year
Contracted Truck Drivers (like James Halwell) $1000 a week
Average Iraqi Oil worker- $160 a month
This is the real outrage of Bush's Privatization war.
Until the media ends its complicity with the US government by calling mercenaries "contractors" the people of Canada, the US and the UK will continue to be hoodwinked as badly as the Iraqi prisoners.

Printed online at Indymedia, Resist.ca, Rabble.ca, and excerpted in Alberta Views, September 2004



Don't Call them Contractors
Dear Editor
Lets call a spade a spade, these so called military 'contractors' are hired guns; mercenaries, attached to the US military. So why isn't the media calling them that? Cause the news would read different.
Lets take Fallujah for instance if you heard or read or watched a news broadcast that said four heavily armed mercenaries were ambushed and killed by residents of Fallujah, well that would have a different spin than calling them contractors.
Contractors imply some guy in coveralls working driving a truck or building something or serving food to someone. It does not imply a guy in military kahkis carrying weapons. Mercenaries are hired killers however, and calling them contractors as if they were another truck driver is clever and disingenuous, and the media has played right into this rhetorical slight of hand.
The military is being supported by 10,000 mercenaries from companies in the US and UK. The UK is the largest supplier of mercenaries, it has several of the largest companies, made up of former SAS, special ops personnel.
The US has recently seen a boom in private security/mercenary companies all headquartered in Virginia around the CIA and Pentagon. These companies are made up of ex US military personnel and ex CIA.
To say that these folks don't understand the military code they once served is ridiculous. The reality is they are outside the Uniform Code of Justice because the US Congress did NOT declare War in Iraq. However in 2000 the US Congress passed a law that would put these 'civilian' mercenaries under Military oversite, they just haven't applied it.
Until the media ends its complicity with the US government by calling mercenaries "contractors" the people of Canada, the US and the UK will continue to be hoodwinked as badly as the Iraqi prisoners.


Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Thesis on The Kosovo Crisis and the Crisis of Global Capitalism
(originally written May 1999, Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. to invade Afganistan and Iraq for humanitarian purposes.)

The current undeclared war being conducted by NATO against Yugoslavia on behalf of the Kosovo Albanians has been seen as a political act. Both left and right wing commentators those in favour of the war and those opposed have posed their arguments in political and humanitarian terms.
The fact that this war is a direct result of the current crisis of global capitalism, has been overlooked if not out right ignored by those debating on either side of the war.
That politics should be divorced from economics as well as their military implications reveals the short comings of current left wing analysis and critique.
One reason is that this war is happening in our time, at this moment in history.
It is hard to stand back and look at the larger picture, when an immediate
response is demanded by the situation.
But this war is just one more low intensity conflict that has occurred since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in fact more of them will occur as the contradictions of capitalism expand exponentially through the process of global neo-liberalization and the creation of international trading blocs.
A political-economic interpretation of this war is needed to put this moment in its historical context, free of the prejudices of the current power politics at play but by no means ignoring them or their influence.
The current war in Yugoslavia has stabilized the global financial capital market.
The justifications for the war are irrelevant propaganda, the real reason is fourfold:
The launch of the Euro Dollar and the development of the European Union as a perceived threat to American geo-political and military hegemony, and the subsequent need to expand that hegemony in Europe via NATO.
The collapse of the Russian and Asian economies which created a deflationary economic cycle (stagflation).
The increasing exponential boom bust cycle on Wall Street, where the market breaks 10,000 crashes and booms again to 11,000 points all occurring during the war.
The need to destroy excess production in order to stabilize the world market and expand the neo-liberal trade accords and trading blocs, which had been stalled by a mass movement world wide in opposition to those accords. This is a ‘bombing’ war, aimed at the destruction of production capabilities in Yugoslavia weaking it for a Marshall like reconstruction plan via the European Union, and the need for the United States to rid itself of large amounts of costly armaments.
The old adage that when capitalism reaches a crisis it uses war as a way of stabilizing itself should not surprise us at the end of the 20th Century. The fact that capitalism as a global market no longer needs to create ‘World Wars’ but can function with low intensity wars, to do this, is what is new.
Hard on the heals of a year long market depression in Asia, and the complete collapse of the Russian economy in the spring of this year, the world capitalist system now faced a deflationary cycle, mass overproduction and stagflation, economic terms not used since the 1930’s.
The launch of the Eurodollar and the creation of the European Union, added a new trading bloc challenge to American Economic and Political hegemony. The subsequent expansion of euro-capitalists like the Dahlmer-Benz/Chrysler merger are symptomatic of trading bloc hegemonic struggles in this period of global expansion of the capitalist world system.
Both the crash of the Asian trading blocs and the expansion of the EU trading bloc produced a bust on Wall Street.
Since the war began Wall Street has subsequently broken the 10,000 and 11,000 point mark. War is the health of capital and its state.
Most commentators have focused on the political/humanitarian issues around this war. These are not the prime factors for this war, they are the propaganda issues that are used to arouse the support of the various publics.
Like the war against Iraq, which was a low intensity conflict a test ground for the latest in American weapons technology, this war is more about global financial capitalism than about geo-politics or territorial acquisition. The war against Iraq, and the subsequent war in the Sudan, were about maintaining American corporate hegemony over oil. In Iraq’s case the war was to curtail the pending dumping of billions of gallons of oil onto the market which would have disastrous economic consequences for the Transnational Oil Companies and their OPEC client states.
It was a war to maintain market share.

The international intervention in the Sudan, was also an oil war, in order to secure
a stable political and economic situation for predominately American Trans-National Oil companies in the region.
The fact that limited intervention was conducted by the United Nations in Rwanda, was due to the lack of support French Imperialism garnered for its geo-political and economic interests in the region. Destabilization of this region , which is rich in oil, heavy metals and other mineral resources, was in the vested interests not of French Imperialism but its competitors in the European Union and of course the United States.
Yugoslavia is the current victim of the neo-liberal agenda.
Mass mobilizations against the third world debt, the MAI and other trade accords as well as calls for capital controls (such as the Tobin Tax) had been garnering strength and legitimacy when the war was declared.
The war immediately resulted in a boom on Wall Street thus thwarting the very real danger of a deflationary drive towards stagflation in the United States. It allowed the U.S. to reassert its hegemony via NATO over the European Union. And it allowed Russia to be a player in European geo-politics providing a momentary stabilization in its economic and political spiral towards chaos.
The war now allows the United States a greater say in the power politics of dividing up the Balkans, which had been until now dominated by the EU and its most powerful member; Germany.
Conversely it has worked in favour of stabilizing the Euro, as well as cementing the EU as a political as well as economic alliance, with Britain acting as the voice of Europe backing it’s American allies.
Canada’s role in supporting NATO’s war, reveals the depth and dangers of the corporate trade agreements and economic blocs like APEC, NAFTA, the WTO.
These accords, as well as our membership in NATO, compelled the Liberal Government to act as a comprador nation to American Imperialism, completely negating our ability to act independently as a member of the UN Security Council with the right to veto.
This is a market driven war, it is about trade agreements and the expansion of neo-liberal globalization and economic stabilization. National sovereignty, ethnic cleansing and the creation of Balkan democracy are so much propaganda masking the real reason for this war; to remedy the contradictions of an overheated global capitalist world system facing a pending global depression.

Also see:http://www.columbia.edu/cu/sipa/REGIONAL/ECE/flaws.pdf
The fatal flaws underlying NATO'S intervention in Yugoslavia
By Lt Gen Satish Nambiar (Retd.)
USI, New Delhi April 6, 1999



Iraq

oil

socialism

labour

anarchism

anti-war

political

Politics

Canada’s Long History of Criminalizing Dissent

As a result of September 11 and the United States declaration of a nebulous War On Terrorism, we once again face the chilling prospect of repression of all democratic free speech, especially speech opposing the war and its encroachments on civil rights.

In the past nine months the Canadian State has passed legislation giving itself extensive police powers, powers that go beyond those used in the War Measures Act.
The criminalization of dissent and protest is a direct result of these so called "war powers/anti-terrorism" acts. And it is intentional.

Already the threat of identifying legitimate protest and civil disobedience as “terrorism” has been uttered by Premier Ralph Klein in regards to opposition to the upcoming G8 summit. He has declared that protestors are terrorists, while the federal government spends millions in security and military actions in Alberta to secure the site of the G8 meeting in Kananaskis and surrounding areas.

The history of state repression during war and times of crisis is the story of the free speech movement and the radical labour socialist traditions, which have been repressed by the state.

During World War I the labour movement faced unprecedented assaults by the United States Government and the Canadian Government, which banned membership in anarchist groups and in unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known as Wobblies.

In the United States The Palmer raids (named for the then Federal Attorney General) were aimed at the labour movement and were an assault on that movement for daring to challenge capitalism. This was even before the Bolshevik Revolution, which added a new dimension to capitalism’s fear of “foreign agitators”.

The Wobblies had been engaging in free speech fights across North America, demanding the right , the same right in fact that the Salvation Army had, to speak on street corners to workers. To voice opposition to capitalism and declare that workers needed One Big Union to challenge the bosses and their government.

Anarchist orator and propagandist Emma Goldman called for the overthrow of capitalism and Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist Party of America, called on workers to vote for socialism.

Across America local authorities used the police to break up free speech meetings, demonstrations and public lectures. This was even before World War I broke out.

By the time of America’s involvement in WWI the radical left was speaking out against the “Imperialist War”, and declaring opposition to the draft.

Declaring the new immigrant working class from Eastern and Central Europe as unwanted foreign agitators, the Palmer Act in the United States, and the War Measures Act in Canada were used to deport labour activists, socialists, anarchists and Wobblies during WWI.

Eugene Debs, who got over 1 million votes in the American Presidential election, was jailed for advocating that workers refuse the draft. In Canada Wobblies were deported back to the United States or Europe as unwanted radicals as they were in the U.S.

Laws were passed to censor the mainstream press, which it accepted gladly, and to ban out right thousands of workers and radical newspapers and publications.

Hundreds of newly immigrated Canadians from Eastern and Central Europe were arrested and detained in internment camps during WWI since they were identified as members of the “enemy” Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ukrainians and others were then sent to forced labour camps, to build the railroad through the Rockies and to clear the National Parks in Banff and Jasper.

Even after the war ended these laws and acts were still on the books and used to repress the workers movement after the General Strikes of 1919 spread across North America and as a consequence of the corresponding social revolution in Russia.

The Russian Revolution so terrified the ruling classes in both countries, that acts which should have ended with the war were extended to be used in the 1920’s to ban membership in the Communist Party and to deport its members as “foreign agitators”.

Emma Goldman was exiled from the United States under this act, and in Canada Communist Party Leader Tim Buck faced a criminal trial and deportation under the red scare of the 1920’s.

Yet social justice, radical labour and socialist ideals spread as did the movements of workers and farmers against capitalism, in North America and Europe despite the repression. Socialism was the populist politics of the day, and workers fought to not only to win a better deal under capitalism but to overthrow it. The repression they faced was not about some abstract notion of free speech, but about how speaking out against capitalism would not be tolerated by the capitalist state.

The rise of fascism in Europe during the Spanish Republican struggle of 1936-1939, at the height of capitalism greatest meltdown; the world wide depression, led many Canadians, Americans and Europeans to volunteer to defend revolutionary Spain against the Nationalists of Franco and his German and Italian allies. Yet they too faced laws that banned their volunteering to fight in a foreign war. Despite the fact that Canada had previously raised volunteer expeditionary forces to fight against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution.

During WWII the left made common cause with the State to fight fascism, and Russia joined the Allies in defeating Hitler and Mussolini. The same War Measures Act that allowed for conscription and detention in WWI now was used to draft Quebec War Resisters and intern Japanese Canadians as it had been used to intern Ukrainians in WWI.

With the end of WWII the uneasy truce between Russia and America and Britain were over as the race for atomic weapons balance began. America declared the Smith Act and identified communists as foreign agents under the Smith Act. This act made the entire left suspect of collaboration with Stalin’s Russia, the Cold War had been declared in 1948.

It would be a two-decade long struggle, where Republicans and Democrats alike would hound active communists and left wing labour activists. Before Joe Mcarthy began his anti-Communist trials in the late1950’s the Kennedy’s had been active in hounding the Teamsters and other unions, not for racketeering but for being hotbeds of socialism, Trotskyism and communism.

Mcarthyism, or the period of our popular culture known by that name, led the labour movement into an internal internecine battle, between its left wing, which was under attack by both the American and Canadian state, and those more moderate social democrats and liberals who saw unions in partnership with capitalists in rebuilding the world after the war.

In the 1970’s Canada saw the Federal Government under Trudeau invoke the War Measures Act against its own citizens, declaring the FLQ crisis in Quebec an apprehended insurrection, in fact a civil war. Never before had this act been used in peacetime to repress democratic freedoms of speech, assembly, and publication.

This was the last time the act was declared, and subsequently in the 1980’s was withdrawn as Trudeau introduced a formal declaration of human rights and a constitution in Canada.

As a result the Federal Liberal Government on September 11 did not have its old club, the War Measures Act, to use. Like all moments in history, and especially in those times of War, social activism and protest are fermenting this time is no exception.

We have seen the development of a mass anti-capitalist movement around the world in response to twenty years of neo-liberal free trade endeavours by governments and business.

Like the movements prior to and after WWI and during the Great Depression, this movement has arisen in opposition to the excesses and greed of global capitalism. The attacks on the United States on September 11 and its subsequent declaration of its war on terrorism, have been used as excuses by all States to increase repression against advocates of social change and justice.

The State has once again declared in its jingoistic and racist manner that its “Us Against Them”, them being foreign agitators, and the right wing has taken up the cudgel and banner by calling, once again, for the deportation of immigrants.

It’s the same old story. But freedom especially freedom to protest, are only lost if they are not used. Protests and occupations occurred as the government attempted to pass its various anti-terrorism bills- C-42, C-36, ad-naseum.

Federal and provincial New Democrats spoke out and supported popular opposition to these draconian attacks on our civil liberties.

We now face the situation where increasing police powers are being used against us, by intrusion into our lives at all levels. Immigrants suffer racist profiling and summary detention, without recourse to lawyers or contact with their families and subsequently Star Chamber justice. Police and army personnel as well as intelligence services are being mobilized to deny us the right to freedom of speech and assembly.

Even before September 11 anti-globalization activists were arrested and detained at the border. Now under the terrorist hysteria, anti-capitalist activists have been identified as public enemies of the corporate state, apparently far more dangerous to Bush, Chretien and Klein than Osama bin Lada and Al Quaida.

But this has been the history of capitalism and the left for the past 100 years, War is the result of a crisis in capitalism, that crisis has been used as an excuse to smash the workers movement and movements for social change.

Submitted to the Strathcona New Democrat summer 2002

Book Review: BEHIND THE TIMES

The Decline and Fall of Twentieth Century Avant Gardes by Eric Hobsbawm
1999 Thames and Hudson Press (UK)
48 pages Illustrated
30th Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture, given at the National Gallery (UK) 1998

Founded by Walter Neurath fifty years ago, Thames and Hudson are the preeminent publishers of art books in the UK. For the past thirty years the annual Neurath Memorial Lecture on Art was given by one of the worlds leading art historians, curators, or artists.

The Neurath memorial lecture, marking the half century of this fine art publishing house, was given by Eric Hobsbawm, England’s leading Marxist social historian. His lecture, The Decline and Fall of Twentieth Century Avant Gardes, published by Thames and Hudson this spring, is controversial and challenging.

Hobsbawm challenges the orthodoxy of art ideologues and art historians, by declaring the avant-garde as a failed project. Modernism says Hobsbawm did not succeed, in fact it was a double failure. If Modernism is a failure as Hobsbawm asserts then ipso facto post-modernism must be viewed as still born, if not an abortion, a hysterical pregnancy in the mind of a select few academics.

Hobsbawms short essay focuses on the failure of modernism as an avant garde movement in visual arts; painting and sculpture.

“More than any other form of creative art, the visual arts have suffered from technological obsolescence. They, and in particular painting, have been unable to come to term with what Walter Benjamin called ‘the age of technical reproducibility’.”

Modernism is the technological innovation in the arts that defines the twentieth century.

Unfortunately in the visual arts, and painting in particular, modernism has meant short lived avant gardes that announced the supersession of their art as it was superseded, leaving painting less of an influence than other forms of mass reproducible art.

In many ways Hobsbawm reiterates and expands on Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay: The Work of Art In The Mechanical Age of Reproduction. Benjamin applies a Marxist analysis to art, and in particular visual art, painting, sculpting, architecture, film and photography, in looking at how the visual art has been transformed by new technologies and techniques of mechanical reproduction.

“Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses towards that art,” says Benjamin. “The reactionary attitudes towards a Picasso painting changes into a progressive reaction towards a Chaplin film.”

And Hobsbawm agrees, “The crisis of the visual arts is therefore different from the twentieth century crisis so far undergone by the other arts….The good news for avant-garde painting was therefore that it was the only live game in town. The bad news was, that the public didn’t like it.”

The avant-garde movements in painting were a reaction to the technological innovations of the twentieth century that embraced the modern while wanting to hold onto the outdated ‘special role’ that the artist had in salon society of the 19th Century.

This contradiction gave the avant-garde painters and their movements and manifestos “a paticular desperation” says Hobsbawm. “They were constantly torn between the conviction that there could be no future to the art of the past - even yesterday’s past, or even to any kind of art in the old definition - and the conviction that what they were doing in the old social role of ‘artists’ and ‘geniuses’ was important, and rooted in the great tradition of the past.”

Hobsbawms conclusion is clear, post-modernism in art predates its academic vogue by fify years in the revolutionary struggles of the avante-garde art movement. Their 'desperation' to move through and past modernism,whether dadaist, surrealist or futurist, was to be the percusor to revolution. Revolution was the avante gardes post-moderism, not the academic one which has recuperated it's name but none of its essence.*


This review was orginally published July/August 1999 issue of Fifty3 , the Latitude 53 Newsletter, Vol 1. Issue 2, Latitude 53 Society of Artists, Edmonton Alberta.

*Updated Jan. o2, 2005

For Tommie Gallie, who appreciated it the first time


art
surrealism
del.surrealism
socialism
anarchism