It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
So the solution to Americas deficit problem whether Federal or State government would be to increase taxes...or so says the CEO of JP Morgan bank; Jamie Dimon.
JAMIE DIMON: States have a lot of wherewithal, when you talk about this huge deficit, the deficit in California is equal to one percent of the GDP in California, so if they raise taxes one percent, they could pay their deficit. And that's true for some of the other states and they have the wherewithal
This should not surprise anyone, tax cuts and spending cuts are what got California in the mess its in still thanks to Proposition 13back in the Seventies.
Section 1. (a) The maximum amount of any ad valorem tax on real property shall not exceed one percent (1%) of the full cash value of such property. The one percent (1%) tax to be collected by the counties and apportioned according to law to the districts within the counties.
And now it has become the clarion call of the American right, reduce government, which means reducing public services such as education, health care, etc.
California public schools, which during the 1960s had been ranked nationally as among the best, have decreased to 48th in many surveys of student achievement.
Which when government can no longer provide them must then contract out the jobs, privatizing them, which leads to private profits at public expense.
And at the root of California's misery lies Proposition 13, the antitax measure that ignited the Reagan Revolution and the conservative era.
Proposition 13 was the brainchild of the late Howard Jarvis. The antitax crusader was a policy genius not unlike Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both shared an affinity for designing deep structural change that, once embedded in the political system, is nearly impossible to alter without a massive change of heart by voters.
Jarvis created a similarly impregnable institution. When he rode the wave of anger over skyrocketing property-tax assessments to pass Proposition 13 in 1978, he included a two-thirds vote requirement for the passage of any new taxes in California — an insurmountable obstacle built on populist allergy to any kind of new levy. Beholden to a tax-averse electorate, the state's liberals and moderates have attempted to live with Proposition 13 while continuing to provide the state services Californians expect — freeways, higher education, prisons, assistance to needy families and, very important, essential funding to local government and school districts that vanished after the antitax measure passed.
The Harpocrites right wing law and order agenda, though as la scandale Bev Oda shows the government itself is not above breaking the law, is typical right wing sturm and drang signifying nothing except a growth in the institutional prison industry.
The Harper Conservatives are under fire for their extraordinarily expensive legislative initiative, Bill S-10. Among other things, it seeks to spend at least hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers dollars on prison building, in order to impose a mandatory minimum term of six months in jail for anyone who grows more than six marijuana plants. Most Canadians, experts and non-experts alike, have criticized the proposal as costly and counter-productive, noting that it will imprison individuals who are mostly non-violent and who sell to willing adult consumers.
The cost is in some dispute. Correctional Services Canada estimates an increase in prisoner numbers of 3,400, requiring 2,700 new spaces, at a cost of $2-billion.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer, Kevin Page, thinks that lowballs the price tag. His office puts the increase in prisoner numbers at 4,200, at a cost of $1.8-billion for facility construction and an additional $3-billion a year for operations and maintenance. He suggests that by 2015/16, annual prison expenditure will have increased to $9.3-billion from the current $4.3-billion.
As a result the costs incurred will continue to balloon from lowballing by the government. And if the American experience tells us anything as we can see from the report below, the facts are that prison expansion is a drain on the public purse, with no rehabilitative or crime reduction consequences!
But let us not let the facts get in the way of a political ideology. After all these Republican Light Harpocrites are nothing if not panderers to American right wing ideology. An ideology that is the politics of fear.
Reason and the facts once again show that a policy of increasing the length of criminal sentences does nothing except expand the prison population, increasing costs to the public purse.
The growth of the corrections sector has other impacts. A number of rural areas have chosen to tie their economies to prisons, viewing the institutions as recession-proof development engines. Though many local officials cite benefits, broader research suggests that prisons may not generate the nature and scale of benefits municipalities anticipate or may even slow growth in some localities. Record incarceration rates can have longer-term economic impacts by contributing to increased income inequality and more concentrated poverty. Economic Impacts of Prison Growth Suzanne M. Kirchhoff Analyst in Industrial Organization and Business April 13, 2010 Congressional Research Service 7-5700 www.crs.gov R41177
The overall lessons from the case studies suggest that the prognosis for future P3s is somewhat pessimistic. Governments have generally found it difficult to effectively reduce their financial and budgetary exposure. Furthermore, in some cases, governments have faced significant increased political risk rather than reduced risk as they had hoped. At the same time, their for-profit private sector partners have had difficulty making adequate rates of return, although this is a tentative conclusion as they have usually had incentives to publicly emphasize losses. In some respects, the somewhat negative findings are not surprising. The public and private partners in P3s inevitably have conflicting interests (Teisman & Klijn, 2002; Trailer et al., 2004). Studies have shown that in other contexts with similar conflicting interests, such as mixed enterprises that are jointly owned by private shareholders and government, the result can be “the worst of both worlds”, achieving neither high profitability nor worthwhile social goals (Eckel & Vining, 1985; Boardman & Vining, 1989). In sum, while the allocation of decision-making and risk-sharing in P3s can vary widely, if decisionmaking authority and financial risk-bearing are not appropriately and clearly matched, incentives will be misaligned and effective outcomes are unlikely. This raises the question of whether governments can learn, individually or collectively, to adequately specify contract conditions and institutional conflict resolution mechanisms ex ante so that the past is not a prologue for the future.
My husband and I were two of the many Canadians left behind at Cairo airport that evening when the Canadian evacuation flight left half full. The airport was in chaos, the conditions rapidly unsanitary and embassy staff next to impossible to find. Had staff at the Canadian embassy answered the phone, or at the least put on a voice mail message directing Canadians to the correct terminal, much of the chaos could have been avoided and the plane to Frankfurt would have left full.
However, during business hours, the voice mail message said the embassy was closed (it was not, as we learned later; some Canadians had managed to get to the embassy through Tahrir Square that day) and the only voice mail message said: “for an update on avian flu, press 8.” Avian flu? What about an update on how to access Canada’s voluntary evacuation flight? How difficult could that have been?
Incorrect information was given to our tour company with the result that while we were in terminal 4 with no information and no embassy staff and no way to contact them, the plane was leaving from terminal.
The Harpocrite government has so emasculated our Foreign Affairs department that when emergencies arise abroad we are beholden to others to rescue our own people.
Now it is revealed that Harper's reluctant sanction speech on Friday night may have more to do with SNC Lavalin, headquartered in Montreal, than with principles. In fact SNC Lavalin is building a prison in Libya, a prison which the dictator would have used to continue to illegally detain his opposition and torture them, but heck we only build it, we don't care how its used.
One Canadian engineering company confirmed Friday it was forced to halt work on a new prison in Libya and evacuate its workers after the security situation collapsed.
Montreal-based international engineer SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. reported it had begun work on a $275million jail in Tripoli under a contract with the Gadhafi government.
The prison contract was not publicly announced, though it is mentioned in the company's coming annual report, said Leslie Quinton, vice-president of corporate communications. It is one of thousands of projects the company is working on, she added.
Another reason for the Harpocrites reluctance to sanction Libya, would be that of course this prison like the prisons they propose is a P3, private public partnership. And guess who will be building the new prisons the Harpocrites will need once their tough on crime bills pass...why can you say SNC Lavalin.
Canada's SNC-Lavalin company that was at the centre of a headline-grabbing bribery scandal in Kerala is now under scanner at home for allegedly overcharging in government building maintenance. Canadian Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose Thursday ordered an independent auditor to review a building maintenance contract given to SNC-Lavalin after allegations that the company charged $1,000 to install just a doorbell and $2,000 to buy two plants. The Montreal-based company has a $6-billion, multi-year contract to manage 320 Canadian government buildings.
ProFac, a division of Montrealbased SNC-Lavalin, also maintains several provincial government buildings in Alberta and Ontario and helped to build Camp Julien, a Canadian military base in Afghanistan.
KANDAHAR, January 11, 2009 — Today, the Honourable Beverley J. Oda, Minister of International Cooperation, launched the next phase of Canada’s Dahla Dam Signature Project in Afghanistan. She met in Kandahar’s Arghandab Valley with the Governor of Kandahar, Tooryalai Wesa, and representatives of the SNC-Lavalin/Hydrosult joint venture, the firm selected to lead repair efforts to Dahla Dam.
It is a Quebec company, a province that the Harpocrites need to get votes from.And it is a private monopoly engineering management firm that benefits from preferential government support. If the government sells off Atomic Energy Canada, SNC Lavalin could be a contender.
In other words a private corporation that benefits from public funding for private profit, while imposing its own management over public access to public buildings we pay for.....
Locked doors at the Yukon’s federal building signal it is now under the management of a Quebec-based multinational.
“I tried to get in the back door yesterday, but it was locked,” said a longtime employee on Thursday.
SNC-Lavalin ProFac was awarded the property management contract for the Elijah Smith Building on August 1st.
The corporate construction giant has offices in 30 countries and is working in 100 different countries around the world.
In 2004, SNC-Lavalin was given a $1.5-billion property management contract to maintain 319 federal buildings across Canada.
Its recent property management contract for the Elijah Smith Building is not part of that deal.
SNC-Lavalin is taking over a lot of federal buildings across the country, said Elijah Smith commissionaire Michael Roy, when asked about the recent changes.
SNC-Lavalin’s decision to lock the back door was made “to control access,” he said.
The multinational is also planning to shut down the public bathrooms and take out the public phone, said Roy, confirming reports the News received from other disgruntled employees.
It is not up to the United States or President Obama to respond to Libya's civil war, declared on the people of Libya by the Qaddafi ruling family. It is up to NATO as the European allied military force to enforce rule in the oil exporting country they most rely on. Europe by far gets more oil and gas from Libya than anyone else.But instead of being the force to counter Libya's dictator they shy away from their military political responsibility.
Former Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy has been cited by NATO Watch as one of the leading international voices urging NATO and the EU to take measures to guarantee peace, security, and human rights in Libya.
And it can be done easily, blockading Tripoli and all major ports with NATO's Mediterranean Navy and as asked for by Libyan UN delegates, a no fly zone over Tripoli, stopping the air attacks on civilians. And lets not forget Tobruk in the East which would welcome international support to protect their free zone from Qaddafi's counterrevolution.
The region was quiet for the first few months of the war, until Fascist Italy declared war against France and Britain on June 10, 1940. It remained a major active theatre for two and a half years until the British Commonwealth Eighth Army crossed the border from Libya into Tunisia. In February 1943, command of the Eighth Army passed from the Middle East Command to the Allied Joint command for the Mediterranean, AFHQ. The Middle East Theatre remained quiet for the remainder of the war.
If gunboat diplomacy was ever needed it is today in Libya, if ever NATO was going to fulfill its self appointed mandate of being Europe's enforcer, then it must respond to this historic moment and fulfill its historical reasone detre, to be an armed force for imperialist goals and objectives. And last time I checked at least one of those reasons was to promote and protect democratic movements.
According to the commercials the $1,500 would be a spit in the bucket in funeral costs alone. How pitiful, while the media and government praise the judicial fine to Syncrud, based on previous rulings the fine is put towards paying for a Health and Safety program. While this is an attempt to ameliorate a bad practice, why is the fine required, rather a ten year funding for all OHS training at Keyano College would be even better. And really $1,500 is a less than a spit in the bucket when it comes to the millions that Syncrud pulls out of the ground weekly.
While in most of Canada February 21st is a holiday called Family Day and in the U.S. it is President's Day in the province of Manitoba it is Louis RielLouis Riel Day. Louis Riel negotiated the Manitoba Act that brought Manitoba into Confederation on the 12th of May 1870. The holiday celebrating Riel is celebrated on the third Monday of February.
Actually it should be celebrated across Western Canada because Manitoba was the official capital for Alberta, Saskatchewan and the NWT until 1905.
Ironically my neigbourhood which Goldring represents has a large Metis community....hope they remember his stupid racist colonialist comments come election time.
I originally posted here about Lucy Parsons for Black History Month. Here are some updates from the web about Lucy. And as you read about her you realize that she could be celebrated during Womens History Month, Labour History Month, as Mexican American an Indigenous woman, an American proletarian revolutionary.
As I researched this post I came across a number of references to Lucy being a member or supporter of the Communist Party of the USA.
Lucy was a Revolutionary Socialist and Anarchist till the end of her life.
A Fury For Justice:Lucy Parsons And TheRevolutionaryAnarchist Movement inChicago For six and a half decades Lucy Parsons played a pivotal role in some of the most influential social movements of her time. A fiery speaker, bold social critic, and tireless organizer, Parsons was a prominent figure in radical American political movements from the late 1870s until her death at the age of 89 on March 7th, 1942. Despite playing an important part in such iconic struggles as the movement for the 8- hour day, the defense of the Haymarket martyrs, and the founding of the IWW, Lucy Parsons has been largely ignored by historians of all stripes. Parsons sole biographer, writing in 1976, explained her invisibility thusly: “Lucy Parsons was black, a woman, and working class — three reasons people are often excluded from history.”1 While this helps explain in part Parsons’ absence from mainstream historiography, it is not entirely satisfying. While other working class black women found their way into academic writing and political iconography with the rise of Black Nationalist movements in the 1960s and 70s and the concurrent proliferation of Black Studies programs at American universities, Lucy Parsons was mostly left behind. Unfortunately, when she has been included in academic writing she has usually not been allowed to speak for herself. Most of the academics that have mentioned Lucy Parsons (generally very briefly) have recast her as they would have preferred her to be, usually as either a reflection of their own politics or as an example of the failures of past movements. The only biography of Parsons, Carolyn Ashbaugh’s Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary, combines misrepresentation with inaccuracy. Ashbaugh nonsensically claims that Parsons was not an anarchist, a fact beyond the point of argument for anyone that has read Lucy Parsons’s work, and she groundlessly claims that Parsons joined the Communist Party towards the end of her life. Sadly, this has allowed every writer after Ashabugh to make the same erroneous claim
DEL. LUCY E. PARSONS: I can assure you that after the intellectual feast that I have enjoyed immensely this afternoon, I feel fortunate to appear before you now in response to your call. I do not wish you to think that I am here to play upon words when I tell you that I stand before you and feel much like a pigmy before intellectual giants, but that is only the fact. I wish to state to you that I have taken the floor because no other woman has responded, and I feel that it would not be out of place for me to say in my poor way a few words about this movement.
We, the women of this country, have no ballot even if we wished to use it, and the only way that we can be represented is to take a man to represent us. You men have made such a mess of it in representing us that we have not much confidence in asking you; and I for one feel very backward in asking the men to represent me. We have no ballot, but we have our labor. I think it is August Bebel, in his “Woman in the Past, Present and Future”—a book that should be read by every woman that works for wages—I think it is Bebel that says that men have been slaves through-out all the ages, but that woman’s condition has been worse, for she has been the slave of a slave. I think there was never a greater truth uttered. We are the slaves of the slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Wherever wages are to be reduced the capitalist class use women to reduce them, and if there is anything that you men should do in the future it is to organize the women.
And I tell you that if the women had inaugurated a boycott of the State street stores since the teamsters’ strike they would have surrendered long ago. (Applause). I do not strike before you to brag. I had no man connected with that strike to make it of interest to me to boycott the stores, but I have not bought one penny’s worth there since that strike was inaugurated. I intended to boycott all of them as one individual at least, so it is important to educate the women. Now I wish to show my sisters here that we fasten the chains of slavery upon our sisters, sometimes unwittingly, when we go down to the department store and look around for cheap bargains and go home and exhibit what we have got so cheap. When we come to reflect it simply means the robbery of our sisters, for we know that the things cannot be made for such prices and give the women who made them fair wages.
I wish to say that I have attended many conventions in the twenty-seven years since I came here to Chicago’ a young girl, so full of life and animation and hope. It is to youth that hope comes; it is to age that reflection comes. I have attended conventions from that day to this of one kind and another and taken part in them. I have taken part in some in which our Comrade Debs had a part. I was at the organization that he organized in this city some eight or ten years ago. Now, the point I want to make is that these conventions are full of enthusiasm. And that is right; we should sometimes mix sentiment with soberness; it is a part of life. But, as I know from experience, there are sober moments ahead of us, and when you go out of this hall, when you have laid aside your enthusiasm, then comes solid work. Are you going out with the reflection that you appreciate and grasp the situation that you are to tackle? Are you going out of here with your minds made up that the class in which we call ourselves, revolutionary Socialists so-called—that that class is organized to meet organized capital with the millions at its command? It has many weapons to fight .us. First it has money. Then it has legislative tools. Then it has its judiciary; it has its army and its navy; it has its guns; it has armories; and last, it has the gallows. We call ourselves revolutionists. Do you know what the capitalists mean to do to you revolutionists? I simply throw these hints out that you young people may become reflective and know what you have to face at the first’ and then it will give you strength. I am not here to cause any discouragement, but simply to encourage you to go on in your grand work.
Now, that is the solid foundation that I hope this organization will be built on; that it may be built not like a house upon the sand, that when the waves of adversity come it may go over into the ocean of oblivion; but that it shall be built upon a strong, granite, hard foundation; a foundation made up of the hearts, and aspirations of the men and women of this twentieth century who have set their minds, their bands, their hearts and their heads against the past with all its miserable poverty, with its wage slavery, with its children ground into dividends, with its miners away down under the earth and with never the light of sunshine, and with its women selling the holy name of womanhood for a day’s board. I hope we understand that this organization has set its face against that iniquity, and that it has set its eyes to the rising star of liberty, that means fraternity, solidarity, the universal brotherhood of man. I hope that while politics have been mentioned here I am not one of those who, because a man or woman disagrees with me, cannot act with them—I am glad and proud to say I am too broad-minded to say they are a fakir or fool or a fraud because they disagree with me. My view may be narrow and theirs may be broad; but I do say to those who have intimated politics here as being necessary or a part of this organization, that I do not impute to them dishonesty or impure motives. But as I understand the call for this convention, politics had no place here; it was simply to be an economic organization, and I hope for the good of this organization that when we go away from this hall, and our comrades go some to the west, some to the east, some to the north and some to the south, while some remain in Chicago, and all spread this light over this broad land and carry the message of what this convention has done, that there will be no room for politics at all. There may be room for politics; I have nothing to say about that; but it is a bread and butter question, an economic issue, upon which the fight must be made.
Now, what do we mean when we say revolutionary Socialist? We mean that the land shall belong to the landless, the tools to the toiler, and the products to the producers. (Applause.) Now, let us analyze that for just a moment, before you applaud me. First, the land belongs to the landless. Is there a single land owner in this country who owns his land by the constitutional rights given by the constitution of the United States who will allow you to vote it away from him? I am not such a fool as to believe it. We say, “The tools belong to the toiler.” They are owned by the capitalist class. Do you believe they will allow you to go into the halls of the legislature and simply say, “Be it enacted that on and after a certain day the capitalist shall no longer own the tools and the factories and the places of industry, the ships that plow the ocean and our lakes?” Do you believe that they will submit? I do not. We say, “The products belong to the producers.” It belongs to the capitalist class as their legal property. Do you think that they will allow you to vote them away from them by passing a law and saying, “Be it enacted that on and after a certain day Mr. Capitalist shall be dispossessed?” You may, but I do not believe it. Hence, when you roll under your tongue the expression that you are revolutionists, remember what that word means. It means a revolution that shall turn all these things over where they belong to the wealth producers. Now, how shall the wealth producers come into possession of them? I believe that if every man and every woman who works, or who toils in the mines, the mills, the workshops, the fields, the factories and the farms in our broad America should decide in their minds that they shall have that which of right belongs to them, and that no idler shall live upon their toil, and when your new organization, your economic organization, shall declare as man to man and women to woman, as brothers and sisters, that you are determined that you will possess these things, then there is no army that is large enough to overcome you, for you yourselves constitute the army. (Applause). Now, when you have decided that you will take possession of these things, there will not need to be one gun fired or one scaffold erected. You will simply come into your own, by your own independence and your own manhood, and by asserting your own individuality, and not sending any man to any legislature in any State of the American Union to enact a law that you shall have what is your own; yours by nature and by your manhood and by your very presence upon this earth.
Nature has been lavish to her children. She has placed in this earth all the material of wealth that is necessary to make men and women happy. She has given us brains to go into her store house and bring from its recesses all that is necessary. She has given us these two hands and these brains to manufacture them suited to the wants of men and women. Our civilization stands on a parallel with all other civilizations. There is just one thing we lack, and we have only ourselves to blame if we do not become free. We simply lack the intelligence to take possession of that which we have produced. (Applause). And I believe and I hope and I feel that the men and women who constitute a convention like this can come together and organize that intelligence. I must say that I do not know whether I am saying anything that interests you or not, but I feel so delighted that I am talking to your heads and not to your hands and feet this afternoon. I feel that you will at least listen to me, and maybe you will disagree with me, but I care not; I simply want to shed the light as I see it. I wish to say that my conception of the future method of taking possession of this is that of the general strike: that is my conception of it. The trouble with all the strikes in the past has been this: the workingmen like the teamsters in our cities, these hard-working teamsters, strike and go out and starve. Their children starve. Their wives get discouraged. Some feel that they have to go out and beg for relief, and to get a little coal to keep the children warm, or a little bread to keep the wife from starving, or a little something to keep the spark of life in them so that they can remain wage slaves. That is the way with the strikes in the past. My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production. If any one is to starve—I do not say it is necessary—let it be the capitalist class. They have starved us long enough, while they have had wealth and luxury and all that is necessary. You men and women should be imbued with the spirit that is now displayed in far-off Russia and far-off Siberia where we thought the spark of manhood and womanhood had been crushed out of them. Let us take example from them. We see the capitalist class fortifying themselves to-day behind their Citizens’ Associations and Employers’ Associations in order that they may crush the American labor movement. Let us cast our eyes over to far-off Russia and take heart and courage from those who are fighting the battle there, and from the further fact shown in the dispatches that appear this morning in the news that carries the greatest terror to the capitalist class throughout all the world—the emblem that has been the terror of all tyrants through all the ages, and there you will see that the red flag has been raised. (Applause). According to the Tribune, the greatest terror is evinced in Odessa and all through Russia because the red flag has been raised. They know that where the red flag has been raised whoever enroll themselves beneath that flag recognize the universal brotherhood of man; they recognize that the red current that flows through the veins of all humanity is identical, that the ideas of all humanity are identical; that those who raise the red flag, it matters not where, whether on the sunny plains of China, or on the sun-beaten hills of Africa, or on the far-off snow-capped shores of the north, or in Russia or in America—that they all belong to the human family and have an identity of interest. (Applause). That is what they know.
So when we come to decide, let us sink such differences as nationality, religion, politics, and set our eyes eternally and forever towards the rising star of the industrial republic of labor; remembering that we have left the old behind and have set our faces toward the future. There is no power on earth that can stop men and women who are determined to be free at all hazards. There is no power on earth so great as the power of intellect. It moves the world and it moves the earth.
Now, in conclusion, I wish to say to you—and you will excuse me because of what I am going to say and only attribute it to my interest in humanity. I wish to say that nineteen years ago on the fourth of May of this year, I was one of those at a meeting at the Haymarket in this city to protest against eleven workingmen being shot to pieces at a factory in the southeastern part of this city because they had dared to strike for the eight-hour movement that was to be inaugurated in America in 1886. The Haymarket meeting was called primarily and entirely to protest against the murder of comrades at the McCormick factory. When that meeting was nearing its close some one threw a bomb. No one knows to this day who threw it except the man who threw it. Possibly he has rendered his account with nature and has passed away. But no human being alive knows who threw it. And yet in the soil of Illinois, the soil that gave a Lincoln to America, the soil in which the great, magnificent Lincoln was buried in the State that was supposed to be the most liberal in the union, five men sleep the last sleep in Waldheim under a monument that, has been raised there because they dared to raise their voices for humanity. I say to any of you who are here and who can do so, it is well worth your time to go out there and draw some inspiration around the graves of the first martyrs who fell in the great industrial struggle for liberty on American soil. (Applause). I say to you that even within the sound of my voice, only two short blocks from where we meet to-day, the scaffold was erected on which those five men paid the penalty for daring to raise their voices against the iniquities of the age in which we live. We arc assembled here for the same purpose. And do any of you older men remember the telegrams that were sent out from Chicago while our comrades were not yet even cut down from the cruel gallows? “Anarchy is dead, and these miscreants have been put out of the way.” Oh, friends, I am sorry that I even had to use that word, “anarchy” just now in your presence, which was not in my mind at the outset. So if any of you wish to go out there and look at this monument that has been raised by those who believed in their comrades’ innocence and sincerity, I will ask you, when you have gone out and looked at the monument, that you will go to the reverse side of the monument and there read on the reverse side the words of a man, himself the purest and the noblest man who ever sat in the gubernatorial chair of the State of Illinois, John P. Altgeld. (Applause). On that monument you will read the clause of his message in which he pardoned the men who were lingering then in Joliet. I have nothing more to say. I ask you to read the words of Altgeld, who was at that time the governor, and had been a lawyer and a judge, and knew whereof he spoke, and then take out your copy books and copy the words of Altgeld when he released those who had not been slaughtered at the capitalists’ behest, and then take them home and change your minds about what those men were put to death for.
Now, I have taken up your time in this because I simply feel that I have a right as a mother and as a wife of one of those sacrificed men to say whatever I can to bring the light to bear upon this conspiracy and to show you the way it was. Now, I thank you for the time that I have taken up of yours. I hope that we will meet again some time, you and I, in some hall where we can meet and organize the wage workers of America, the men and women, so that the children may not go into the factories, nor the women into the factories, unless they go under proper conditions. I hope even now to live to see the day when the first dawn of the new era of labor will have arisen, when capitalism will be a thing of the past, and the new industrial republic, the commonwealth of labor, shall be in operation. I thank you. (Applause.)
The utopian colony of Home was founded in 1896 on Von Geldern Cove, across the Tacoma Narrows on the Key Peninsula. Established by three families who were refugees from another failed utopian community, it became in time a successful anarchist colony whose most famed inhabitant was the sometimes elusive Jay Fox, anarchist and labor radical.
In 1904 Fox worked closely with Lucy Parsons, widow of the Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons, in an attempt to launch an anarchist, English-language newspaper. In the spring of that year Parsons, Fox and others discussed the possibility of starting a paper to replace The Free Society which had folded in the wake of the persecution of radicals following the McKinley assassination. Throughout the summer the group held socials and picnics to raise money for the cause.
However, by late summer a rift had developed between Fox and Parsons. A group headed by Fox felt that The Demonstrator of Home Colony should be adopted and backed. The other faction, headed by Parsons, felt strongly that such a paper should emanate from the radical and industrial center of Chicago rather than from the backwater colony of Home. Before the controversy was settled, Fox sent the money to Home. Parsons, undaunted, started a Chicago-based paper, The Liberator. It should be noted that Fox had good reason for his position. He had been invited to assume the editorship of The Demonstrator, planning to move to Home in the fall of 1905. He was delayed that fall and again in the spring.
by Robert Black
Not for its intrinsic interest - no part of this book has much of that - but as a case study in Salerno's shortcomings, let me review in much more detail than it deserves his chapter on "Anarchists at the Founding Convention." Here is his most of his case for significantly raising prevailing estimates of anarchist influence on the IWW. He first cites the expressions of solidarity with the Haymarket anarchists martyred two decades before which issued from the podium; there was even a pilgrimage to their graves. Indeed , one of the opening speakers was Lucy Parsons, widow of executed Haymarket defendant Albert Parsons.(112) Mrs. Parsons, however, was so far from speaking as an anarchist that she actually apologized for using the word "anarchy." As Joseph Conlin described the scene, "while almost all the delegates claimed to be socialists, there was also present a small group of anarchists, the remnants of the Chicago group. Lucy Parsons was honored by a prominent seat and spoke several times. But she functioned primarily as platform decoration and had little influence on the proceedings. Her ignominious role characterized the dilemma of the less eminent anarchists: tolerated in attendance, they went all but unheard. Mrs. Parsons sheepishly apologized for employing the term 'anarchy' in a speech, and the few avowedly anarchist proposals that reached the floor were summarily rejected."(113)
None of this is evidence of anarchist influence at the founding convention. The Haymarket labor martyrs had been anarchists - although even that has been called into question(114) -- but they were commemorated in Chicago, not as anarchists, but as labor martyrs. By then, their anarchism long since interred with them, they were remembered as heroic leaders of the eight-hour movement, a lowest common denominator cause any unionist could rally around at a convention bent on forging unity. (115) That they assembled in Chicago made it only that much more obligatory as a matter of common courtesy to pay homage to the local heroes. The presence of Lucy Parsons on the platform had exactly, and only, the honorific significance of the presence of, say, Coretta King on the platform of a Democratic Party convention. Coretta King has no influence on the Democrats and Lucy Parsons had none on the Wobblies.
Lucy Parsons, an adamant socialist and ‘Wobbly’ (a term for IWW members), stands out as a great example of a woman in the IWW. While little is known about her earliest background, we do know that she was born in 1853. Her ethnicity was the convergence of African, Mexican and Native roots, and, because of this, she was keenly aware of injustices in society in respect to those groups to which she belonged (Bird, Georgakas and Schaffer). Furthermore, it is supposed that she was born into slavery, which, again, gives her an interesting perspective in regards to the injustices perpetrated by the rich on the destitute.
Lucy Parsons was born in Texas in 1853 (most likely as a slave) to parents of Native, African and Mexican American ancestry. She was an anarchist labor activist and powerful orator who fought against poverty, capitalism, social injustice and racism her whole life.
She married Albert Parsons, a former confederate soldier, in 1871. During that time, the South was instituting repressive Jim Crow laws and Lucy and Albert fled north to Chicago . The Chicago Police Department described her as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters” in the 1920s. Lucy and Albert were highly effective anarchist organizers involved in the labor movement in the late 19 th Century. They also participated in revolutionary activism on behalf of political prisoners, people of color, the homeless and women. Albert was fired from his job at the Times because of his involvement in organizing workers and blacklisted in the Chicago printing trade. Lucy opened a dress shop to support her family and hosted meetings for the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). She began to write for the radical papers The Socialist and The Alarm , weekly publications of the International Working People's Association (IWPA) which she and Albert were among the founders of in 1883.
By 1886, tension among workers across America was high due to horrid working conditions and the squelching of union activities by authorities. A peaceful strike at McCormick Harvest Works in Chicago became violent when police fired into the crowd of unarmed strikers. Many were wounded and four were killed. Radicals called a meeting in Haymarket Square and once again, this peaceful gathering turned violent when someone threw a bomb that killed a police officer. Although Albert was not present at Haymarket, he was arrested and executed on charges that he had conspired in the Riot.
In the years following the execution, Lucy lived in poverty but remained committed to the cause. In 1892, she began editing Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly and was frequently arrested for public speaking and distributing anarchist literature. Then, in 1905, she helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and began editing The Liberator , a paper published by the IWW and based in Chicago . Here she was able to voice her opinions on women's issues, supporting a woman's right to divorce, remarry and have access to birth control. She organized the Chicago Hunger Demonstrations in 1915, which pushed the American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party and Jane Addam's Hull House to participate in a huge demonstration on February 12.
In 1925, she began working with the National Committee of the International Labor Defense, a Communist Party group that aided with the Scottsboro Eight and Angelo Hearndon cases. These were cases where the establishment charged African-American organizers with crimes they did not commit.
With eyesight failing, she spoke at the International Harvester in February, 1941. She fought against oppression until her death in 1942 at the age of 89 when she died in an accidental house fire. Her boyfriend died the next day from injuries he sustained while trying to save her. Adding to this tragedy, the FBI stole her library of 1,500 books and all of her personal papers. The state still viewed Lucy Parsons as a threat, even in her death.
WILLIAMS, Casey. "Whose LucyParsons ? The mythologizing and re-appropriation of a radical hero". Anarcho-Syndicalist Review number 47, Summer, 2007 As a radical anarchist, LucyParsons dedicated over sixty years of her life to fighting for America’s working class and poor. [1] and A skillful orator and passionate writer, Parsons played an important role in the history of American radicalism, especially in the labor movement of the 1880s, and remained an active force until her death in 1942. The one question from which she never swayed was "how to lift humanity from poverty and despair ?" [2] With this question propelling her life’s work, Parsons was active in a multitude of radical organizations including the Socialistic Labor Party, the International Working People’s Association, and the Industrial Workers of the World. Coupled with her long involvement in America’s labor movement was Parsons’ unbending anarchist vision of society, a philosophy which underlay her critique of America’s oppressive economic and political institutions.
Rosemont has a crucial chapter on the indigenous people. Lucy Parsons, "whose high cheek bones of her Indian ancestors" as her biographer says, provided the physiognomy of a countenance of utter inspiration when she spoke at the founding convention of the IWW August Spies lived with the Ojibways; Big Bill Haywood attended pow-wows. Abner Woodruff, a Wob, had a chapter on Indian agriculture in his Evolution of American Agriculture (1915-6). The Wobblies were "the spiritual successors to the Red Indians as number one public enemy and conscience botherers." Frank Little, the most effective Wobbly organizer, was lynched in Butte, Montana, by the same hard rock copper "bosses" which caused Joe Hill to be shot. Little was a Cherokee Indian.
The Wheatland Riot, The Bisbee Deportation, IWW Ties with Mexico, Workers of the World
The IWW arose in response to the abysmal working conditions of many poor and unskilled workers in the United States and to what it considered the lack of concern on the part of the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL), who sought to organize skilled, U.S.–born workers. The AFL excluded many of the groups that the IWW actively recruited: immigrants, women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and unskilled laborers. The AFL was determinedly anti-immigrant, and even Mexican Americans were viewed as “foreigners.” In order to recruit Mexican Americans to its ranks, the IWW hired Mexican American organizers and translated IWW literature into Spanish.
Mexican Americans have been a part of IWW's history since the beginning. Lucy Gonzales Parsons was a founding member of the IWW and a longtime radical whose work from the 1870s until her death in 1942 gained her the reputation of being “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” Born in Texas, Gonzales Parsons moved to Chicago in the 1870s with her husband, Albert Parsons, one of the “Haymarket Square martyrs.” Although many scholars argue that she was African American, Gonzales Parsons claimed Mexican and Indian parentage and her death certificate listed Spanish-surnamed parents.
The IWW spanned a decade and a half of an extremely repressive period—Jim Crow segregation of Blacks and Mexicans was firmly entrenched, Native Americans had to have passes to leave their reservations and were not allowed to join trade unions, women didn't have the vote. Yet, the IWW was able to organize and inspire inter-racial struggles. It was also the period of the prolonged Mexican Revolution and cooperation between the IWW and the Mexican revolutionary workers was constant. In Oklahoma, black, white, and Indian tenant farmers, inspired by the Wobblies, rose up together in 1917 to oppose the draft for World War I and oppose the war as a "rich man's war." It was called the "Green Corn Rebellion." And, of course, women were prominent in the IWW founding and leadership: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Emma Goldman, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, and many local leaders.
Thus Lucy Parsons, already renowned for her defense of her husband after the Haymarket incident in 1886 and as an African-American revolutionary in Chicago, famously spoke for the most lowly, women driven to prostitution. But she also spoke of workers' capacity, arguing: "My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production." In this way, the extraordinary veteran of nineteenth-century class, race, and gender struggles predicted the sit-down strike of the future, which took place first in factories, then at sit-ins to integrate public facilities, and still later in college classrooms and presidents' offices to protest the brutal war on Vietnam.
Regardless of how one interprets Haymarket, their memory would have vanished altogether by the next generation without recent efforts and those of Lucy Parsons, along with other anarchists and labour activists, to recount and publish Haymarket accounts. In this manner, Haymarket became an integral part of labour movements’ lore, especially in Latin America and southern and eastern Europe. Between 1887 and today, with uneven speed and through differing circumstances and motivations, Haymarket was turned into the basis of a holiday with the establishment of the first of May as labour-day in most of the world. Even if that history was appropriated by state socialist dictatorships for their own propagandistic and geopolitical ends during the middle and late twentieth centuries, it remained a symbol of workers’ struggle for rights and dignity in the workplace, if not a struggle for socialism. In the US, however, the holiday, along with its radical referent, was banned by 1955. The observance was not revived until the 1970s with the endeavours of veteran union activists and the renewed spread and popularisation of anarchist perspectives (Avrich, 1984, 428-436; Green, 2006, 301- 320; Zinn, 1995, 267).
Lucy also wrote about the press, and how even in her own time, newspapers suppressed and manipulated information with their disinformation and misinformation in reporting incidents which occurred. Lucy wrote essays, “The Importance of a Press” and “Challenging the Lying Monopolistic Press” that alerted people that the fourth estate could be just as destructive to citizen’s interests as much as any robber baron, or government institution.
Her writings on sex and patriarchy, as well as her thoughts on race and racism, require closer reading, and certainly deserve greater attention.
In February, 1941, in one of her last major appearances, Lucy spoke at the International Harvestor, where she continued to inspire crowds. On March 7, 1942 at the age of 90, Lucy died from a fire that engulfed her home.
Her lover George Markstall died the next day from wounds he received while trying to save her. To add to this tragedy, when Lucy Parsons died, the police seized and destroyed her letters, writings and library. She almost disappeared from history, but, many of her writings did survive.
Lucy’s library of 1,500 books on sex, socialism and anarchy were mysteriously stolen, along with all of her personal papers. Neither the FBI nor the Chicago police told Irving Abrams, who had come to rescue the library, that the FBI had already confiscated all of her books. The struggle for fundamental freedom of speech, in which Lucy had engaged throughout her life, continued through her death as authorities still tried to silence this radical woman by robbing her of the work of her lifetime.
She is buried near her husband, near the Haymarket Monument.
Lucy lived well up into this century, well into this century, died in 1940. One time, she was speaking at a big May Day rally back in the Haymarket in the middle 1930s, she was incredibly old. She was led carefully up to the rostrum, a multitude of people there. She had her hair tied back in a tight white bun, her face a mass of deeply incised lines, deep-set beady black eyes. She was the image of everybody’s great-grandmother. She hunched over that podium, hawk-like, and fixed that multitude with those beady black eyes, and said: “What I want is for every greasy grimy tramp to arm himself with a knife or a gun and stationing himself at the doorways of the rich shoot or stab them as they come out.”
Considering Lucy Parsons’s life as a muckraker, incendiary wordsmith, and all-around thorn in the side of the established order, the Chicago Park District should have expected the flurry of controversy it got when it decided to name a park for her. Like most controversies, this one has made some fairly preposterous bedfellows. The two groups most vociferously opposed to naming a city park after Parsons have been the Fraternal Order of Police, and local anarchists who insist that any government-sanctioned recognition dishonors Parsons’s anarchist legacy.
In tracking this little gush of new blood from an old wound, I’ve gained an even deeper understanding of just how tortured Chicago’s relationship with its radical history is. Lucy Parsons — the anarchist formerly known to the American labor movement as one of its founding mothers, and to the Chicago Police Department as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters” — is barely known to most Chicagoans today, including the city officials who supported the park-naming. In what is surely one of the greatest ironies in the history of Chicago’s civic life, the cops were the only ones who went on record openly acknowledging Parsons’s anarchism, while her supporters both in and out of local government labored to recast her merely as a champion of rights for women and minorities (which she was, but only by extension of her lifelong fight for workers’ revolution).
Class, Race and Gender Parsons’ commitments towards freedom of the young Black Communist Angelo Herndon in Georgia, Tom Mooney in California, and for the Scottsoboro Nine in Alabama were unflinching. Parsons recognized the class system in America as the prime factor in perpetuating racism. She was the foremost American feminist to declare that race, gender and sexuality are not oppressed identities by themselves. It is the economic class that determines the level of oppression people of minorities have to confront. Notwithstanding her social location of being a black and a woman, Parsons declared that a black person in America is exploited not because she/he is black. “It is because he is poor. It is because he is dependent. Because he is poorer as a class than his white wage-slave brother of the North.”
Lucy Parsons was a relentless defender of working class rights. To contain her popularity, the media portrayed her more as the wife of Albert Parsons – a Haymarket martyr, who was murdered by the state of Illinois, while demanding for eight-hour working day on November 11, 1887. While identifying her with Albert’s causes, history textbooks – both liberal and conservative – seldom mention Parsons as the radical torchbearer of American communist movement.
Parsons was among the first women to join the founding convention of IWW. She thundered: “We, the women of this country, have no ballot even if we wished to use it. But we have our labor. Wherever wages are to be reduced, the capitalist class uses women to reduce them.”
In The Agitator, dated November 1, 1912 she referred to Haymarket martyrs thus: “Our comrades were not murdered by the state because they had any connection with the bombthrowing, but because they were active in organizing the wage-slaves. The capitalist class didn’t want to find the bombthrower; this class foolishly believed that by putting to death the active spirits of the labor movement of the time, it could frighten the working class back to slavery.”
She had no illusions about capitalistic world order. Parsons called for armed overthrow of the American ruling class. She refused to buy into an argument that the origin of racist violence was in racism. Instead, Parsons viewed racism as a necessary byproduct of capitalism. In 1886, she called for armed resistance to the working class: “You are not absolutely defenseless. For the torch of the incendiary, which has been known with impunity, cannot be wrested from you!”
For Parsons, her personal losses meant nothing; her oppression as a woman meant less. She was dedicated to usher in changes for the entire humanity – changes that would alter the world order in favor of the working poor class.
Even as a founding member of IWW, she was not willing to let the world’s largest labor union function in a romanticized manner. She radicalized the IWW by demanding that women, Mexican migrant workers and even the unemployed become full and equal members.
With her clarity of vision, lifelong devotion towards communist causes, her strict adherence to radical demands for a societal replacement of class structure, Lucy Parsons remains the most shining example of an American woman who turned her disadvantaged social locations of race and gender, to one of formidable strength – raising herself to bring about emancipated working class consciousness.
Idealistic young anarchist who suffered the brutality of both the US cops and the Russian Cheka.
Born in Russia, Fanya Anisimovna moved to the United States where she established a relationship with Aron Baron (aka Kantarovitch), who worked as a baker. She was active in the anarchist movement in Chicago, and with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). She was involved in the hunger demonstrations of 1915 there, alongside Lucy Parsons and Aron. On January 17th 1915 she led the Russian Revolutionary Chorus at a meeting addressed by Lucy Parsons and others at Hull House, established by Jane Addams to help the poor. On the demonstration outside the police viciously attacked. Plain clothes detectives used brass knuckles on the crowd, while uniformed cops struck out with billy clubs. Fanya was knocked unconscious by one of the club wielding cops. She and five other Russian women and fifteen men were arrested. Jane Addams arranged bail for Fanya, Lucy and others who were pictured in the Chicago press.
"The most prominent black woman radical of the late nineteenth century, Lucy Parsons [was also] one of the brightest lights in the history of revolutionary socialism."-Robin D. G. Kelley, in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
"Lucy Parsons's writings are among the best and strongest in the history of U.S. anarchism. Although written long ago, these texts tackle the major problems of our time. Her long and often traumatic experience of the capitalist injustice system-from KKK terror in her youth, through Haymarket and the judicial murder of her husband, to the U.S. government's war on the Wobblies -made her not "just another victim" but an extraordinarily articulate witness to, and vehement crusader against, all injustice. That kind of direct experience gave her a credibility and an actuality that those who lack such experience just don't have. Lucy Parsons's life and writings reflect her true-to-the-bone heroism. Her language sparkles with the love of freedom and the passion of revolt." - Gale Ahrens, Introduction
"More dangerous than 1000 rioters!" That's what the Chicago police called Lucy Parsons- America's most defiant and persistent anarchist agitator, whose cross-country speaking tours inspired hundreds of thousands of working people. Her friends and admirers included William Morris, Peter Kropot-kin, "Big Bill" Haywood, Ben Reitman, Sam Dolgoff-and the groups in which she was active were just as varied: the Knights of Labor, IWW, Dil Pickle Club, International Labor Defense, & others. Here for the first time is a hefty selection of her powerful writings & speeches-on anarchism, women, race matters, class war, the IWW, and the U.S. injustice system.
"Lucy Parsons's personae and historical role provide material for the makings of a truly exemplary figure ... Think of it: a lifelong anarchist, labor organizer, writer, editor, publisher, and dynamic speaker, a woman of color of mixed black, Mexican, and Native American heritage, founder of the 1880s Chicago Working Woman's Union that organized garment workers, called for equal pay for equal work, and even invited housewives to join with the demand of wages for housework; and later (1905) co-founder the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which made the organizing of women and people of color a priority. . .For a better understanding of the concept of direct action and its implications, no other historical figure can match the lessons provided by Lucy Parsons." - Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Afterword
Alibris has Hobohemia: Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman & Other Agitators ... but - thanks to the prominence of the Chicago-based IWW - much more ... www.alibris.com/booksearch?qwork=10370395&matches... - Cached
Should the Toronto and London Stock Exchanges merge? Of course they should, since the marketplace is global and other borses (exchanges) are merging in this era of global capitalism. And it fits in well with the Feds argument for one national exchange. The irony is that while business sees this as a favorable idea the right wing politicians don't.
Caldwell insisted there will be a net benefit to Canada in this deal.
Here are some of his arguments in favour of a TSX-LSE merger:
* "The listings, the fundraising, the corporate finance will still be done in Toronto." * If it gives "easier access to Canadian companies, easier access to European and Middle East funding via the London Stock Exchange, that would be a tremendous economic boom." * "The LSE does not have a derivatives platform, that is options, and Montreal does. So they're going to be using the Montreal system and staff to build their products in Europe." * "Quebec may actually get jobs out of this" * "We are going to have a greater selection of investments quite possibly, and greater access to capital."
....capital is global and no matter how you regulate it nationally, or provincially, until those regulations are internationalized then you have failed to address the real nature of the new global capital markets.
David Weild, a former Chairman at Nasdaq, says that might not be the case, as the exchange companies—now publicly traded—don’t adhere to the same principals they did in the past when they were private.
“They used to be quasi public utilities that had to look out for the public good by building better economies, they looked out for the entire ecosystem that included dealers, institutional and retails investors and issuers,” he tells BNN.
“They have taken their eyes off of the plight of the small cap company, which is the one that generates jobs and innovation and regenerates economic growth for the world’s economy.”
The very markets that led to the recession and financial collapse of 2008. Denying these mergers does not address the real issue; how to regulate them.
“We at Canaccord believe that Canada should be open to foreign investment,” said Canaccord chief executive officer Paul Reynolds.
And quite a few business leaders took the argument a step further, saying flat out that Ottawa has no business weighing into this deal. “If the Canadian government subscribes to and practises free trade and open market economics, it should leave it alone,” said Ed Miu, chief financial officer of Eldorado Gold Corp.
“Who cares?” said Bill Holland, chief executive officer of CI Financial Corp., adding that exchanges are now “nothing more than a bunch of servers and a name.
“The bigger the better,” he said. “All you’re trying to do is get the most liquidity at the best prices. Is it something that is vital to Canadian interests? Not at all. It’s a non-issue.”
And this weekends G20 Finance Ministers meeting did nothing to address the need for global regulations, leaving each national capitalist regime to come up with its own policies.
This then is the anarchy of capitalism, best reflected by the unregulated Canadian stock market that allows provinces to regulate their own marketplaces. Right wing provincial governments oppose a single national regulator, claiming their constitutional right to have their own regulations and stock markets. Mind you in the case of Alberta and B.C. both Stock Markets have been home to many a ponzi scheme, Bre-X to just mention one.
They may have a 'constitutional' right to having provincial Stock Markets but that constitution was written in 1867 when the Canadian borse but was a mote in gods eye. The City of London (the Stock exchange) still dominated the markets in Canada until the great depression.
