Letter From Crimea: Bloody Sunday 1962

Brings Down the Soviet Union

BY MATTHEW STEVENSONFacebook

\Twitter\Reddit\Email

This is the tenth in a series about a journey, by train and bicycle, across Russia to Crimea shortly before the war began.

Striking workers in Novocherkassk, in southern Russia, killed by Soviet police and troops on June 2, 1962. The rally was among the first public uprisings against the government of the Soviet Union, caused by a cut in wages and price hikes for meat and butter. Photo: Matthew Stevenson.

After my visit in Novocherkassk (in southern Russia) to the Ataman Palace, I ate lunch in an open air restaurant—it cost about $6 and was the best meal of the trip—and set off on my bicycle to explore the contours of what was called Bloody Saturday in the history of the Soviet Union. It was the 1962 massacre of twenty-four civilians (plus the wounding of many others) who were protesting price increases for meat and butter, plus wage cuts at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Plant (NEVZ), where many of the protesters were employed.

I knew that there was a stone marker for those killed in the massacre, and that in 2008 President Vladimir Putin, on a visit to Novocherkassk, laid flowers next to the memorial. (If he were required to lay flowers beside every site in Ukraine where the Russian government has massacred twenty-four civilians, he would have to leave government and become a full-time florist.) But it took me a while to find the small stone marker, which turned out to be about ten meters from where I had locked my bicycle outside the palace.

Bloody Saturday Divides the Soviet Union

Prior to leaving for Russia, I had bought a copy of Samuel H. Brown’s Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962, the first definitive western account of the massacre, published by Stanford University Press in 2001.

I only finished the book when I got home, but I took with me copies of several maps from the book showing the route of the protest marchers from the NEVZ locomotive plant to the Party headquarters, which in 1962 was located in the Ataman Palace on the main city square.

Initially in Moscow, as the strike was forming, it was feared that the Cossacks were in revolt. One Khrushchev official on the scene kept saying, as quoted by Brown: “The religious sectarians [and/or the Cossacks] have instigated the mutiny.”

Brown’s thesis is summoned up in his last sentence, which reads: “As Bloody Sunday [the 1905 revolution in St. Petersburg] had radically transformed the way masses of people perceived the tsarist regime, similarly, if less immediately, Bloody Saturday [Novocherkassk in 1962] helped to destroy the legitimacy of the Soviet regime.”

All Quiet on the Tuzlov Bridge

From the Ataman Palace, I headed north on the bicycle from downtown Novocherkassk toward the Tuzlov Bridge, which is between the locomotive factory (a huge plant about four miles outside the city) and the old Party headquarters.

Because I had seen my fill of factories in Volgograd, I stopped my bicycle on a headland above the river, from which I could see the path taken on June 2, 1962, when about 5-10,000 unhappy factory workers decided to air their grievances by marching from the factory to the Party headquarters in the city center and then to the nearby police station.

Aware that a crisis was brewing, both the local and Moscow governments had manned the barricades, in some cases with tanks, to keep the protests from “getting out of hand”.

On the bridge over the Tuzlov River, tanks were parked to thwart the marchers, but the regional army commander decided not to shoot at the demonstrators, who pressed on to the city center, where some gave speeches and others threw rocks and other missiles. There had been a KGB plan to fire water cannons on the protestors, but in the moment the hoses remained closed.

In front of the Party headquarters—around the square in front of the Ataman Palace—demonstrators voiced their unhappiness with the regimes large and small. Prices were up, wages were down, working conditions were unsafe, and the utopian future looked bleak. Their chanted slogan was: “Bread, Meat, and a Pay Raise.” (In 1917, the Bolsheviks chanted “Peace, Land, and Bread.”)

In response, as happened at the Haymarket in Chicago (in 1886) or at Homestead Steel (in 1892), troops, police, or state security personnel opened fire on the demonstrators (think too of Kent State for the confusion around the shootings) and killed twenty-four citizens, whose black and white pictures are in display in an annex of the Ataman Palace.

In later deconstructions of the shootings, many came to believe that the army troops positioned in front of the palace shot only into the air, and that the fatal volleys came from KGB and security personnel positioned on the roof.

To this day, no one is quite sure who gave the fatal orders and who fired the shots that killed twenty-four and wounded dozens more.

The Great Soviet Cover-Up

As General Secretary of the Communist Party and head of the Politburo in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev (who by the way grew up in the Donbas) took the protests to be an existential threat to his one-party rule, and once the scene of the massacre was cleared (and hushed up), he ordered that some one hundred and fourteen so-called provocateurs be put on trial for inciting the riot, for which, in some cases, the sentence was death.

Most of the demonstrators (even if they were just caught up in the marches) were convicted. All got harsh prison terms, and eight protesters were executed.

Even more barbaric was the decision to scatter the burials of the dead in anonymous graves and to deny the grieving families any official mourning. The governments in Moscow and locally also did their best to suppress any news of the massacre, denying that it had even happened. (Over the years some Russian and foreign journalists, including my friend George Feifer, reported on aspects of the massacre.)

Solzhenitsyn Breaks the Story

Not until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, some thirty years after the massacre, did the facts of the cases become public, although in the 1970s to his credit Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn pieced together the narrative and published an account in his Gulag Archipelago.

As he was writing his history Solzhenitsyn even traveled to Novocherkassk and interviewed survivors. Samuel Brown writes: “Solzhenitsyn was the first writer to describe accurately the terrain on which the events occurred, and the first to get the chronology right.”

Solzhenitsyn believed the violence and cover up of Novocherkassk was a watershed moment in the Soviet Union. He wrote: “We can say without exaggeration that this was a turning point in the history of modern Russia.” As quoted by Brown, he called it: “a cry from the soul of a people who could no longer live as they had lived,” but Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag history did not appear in Russia until 1990.

General Shaposhnikov: An Unlikely Hero

If there was a hero in the shameful story, it was General Matvei Kuzmich Shaposhnikov, who was the commander of the North Caucasus garrison and Novocherkassk, thus responsible for insuring domestic tranquility.

He did two things that were remarkable: first, he refused to open fire on the protestors as they came across the Tuzlov Bridge (he said in effect, “I don’t see before me a foe we should attack with our tanks…”). After all, these were workers—in a worker state, and Shaposhnikov had worked in mines and factories before joining the army and serving with distinction as a tank commander in World War II.

Second, once he figured out that Khrushchev’s government was doing its best to suppress news of the revolt and massacre, Shaposhnikov wrote an open letter and circulated it to a number of important Russian writers (including Konstantin Simonov, who wrote Days and Nights about Stalingrad), urging them to investigate how the Communist Party had devoured its own in Novocherkassk. For his efforts Shaposhnikov was put on trial, cashiered from the military, and made a non-person.

Not until the government of Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the 1980s was Shaposhnikov exonerated. He received a judicial ruling that read: “Only under the conditions of perestroika, the democratization of all dimensions of life of Soviet society, has it become possible to acknowledge that you are innocent.”

At a time when it appears that the Russian army is a hostage to Putin’s fortune, it is comforting to know that somewhere in the military ranks there are the equivalents of General Shaposhnikov—prepared to act on their conscience.

Next: On the train to Crimea and the Tatar city of Bakhchysaray. Earlier installments can be found here.M

Matthew Stevenson is the author of many books, including Reading the Rails, Appalachia Spring, and The Revolution as a Dinner Party, about China throughout its turbulent twentieth century. His most recent book, about traveling in France and the Franco-Prussian wars, is entitled Biking with Bismarck.

Why Trader Joe’s Workers Are Joining the Fight to Unionize

BY SONALI KOLHATKAR

 JULY 25, 2022
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photograph Source: Mike Mozart – CC BY 2.0

There was a big lie that modern corporations sold to American workers in the late 20th century and into the first decade of the 21st century: It was that profit-driven entities could make both employees and customers happy enough that no interventions like worker unions or strong federal regulations were needed.

Modern companies like Apple, Google, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s perpetrated this lie, obscuring their business practices with a veneer of progressive ideals and referring to staff with euphemistic titles like “partners,” “associates,” or “crew members.” Indeed, many workers employed within this slice of the American corporate world were often relatively content—until now. Alongside the recent pro-union activity at more than 150 Starbucks cafés across the United States is a newfound awareness among some workers at the Trader Joe’s grocery chain that a union may also be in their best interest.

Unlike corporations like Starbucks or Amazon where attempts to unionize have a long history, Trader Joe’s workers have traditionally been content. In 2003, when tens of thousands of grocery store workers in Southern California—home of the original Trader Joe’s—went on strike for better working conditions and pay, Trader Joe’s workers, who were not unionized, sat out the labor strife.

Indeed, before the pandemic, Trader Joe’s was considered one of the best retail workplaces in the U.S. The employee resource website Glassdoorgives the grocery chain high marks year after year, making Glassdoor’s annual Best Places to Work list for 2011-2013 and 2017-2022. One Trader Joe’s employee told Business Insider that the part of their job they enjoyed most was customer interaction: “As long as I make sure the customer is having a great time, and I’m emphasizing Trader Joe’s values, I can talk to people about whatever I want.” Workers also cited good hourly wages, health insurance benefits, and retirement benefits as reasons to love their employer.

Why then, in 2022, are workers at a Trader Joe’s store in Hadley, Massachusetts, voting to join a newly formed independent union called Trader Joe’s United? And why are their colleagues at a store in Minneapolis looking to do the same?

According to Sarah Beth Ryther, an employee of the aforementioned Minneapolis Trader Joe’s and an organizing member of Trader Joe’s United, the reputation that her employer enjoyed “was once well-deserved.” But, since the COVID-19 pandemic began, she explains that “there’s been an erosion of some of the benefits,” and “there’s been a kind of degradation in the situation in the workplace that has led some of us to understand and see that the [company’s] narrative no longer aligns with the truth.”

Indeed, the company began cutting workers’ benefits years ago. In 2013, Trader Joe’s stopped offering health insurance plans to part-time employees. It did so based on the fact that workers could potentially obtain plans through the Affordable Care Act, cynically taking advantage of a government program aimed at helping the uninsured.

Boasting about 530 stores in 43 states—more locations than Whole Foods—Trader Joe’s, like many grocery companies, has thrived during the COVID-19 pandemic, earning $16.5 billion in revenues in 2020. But instead of sharing some of that wealth with workers, the corporate chain continued slashing benefits.

“Several years ago, the benefits were really good,” says Ryther, adding, “There was a 15 percent guaranteed retirement match.” But then in more recent years, she says that coverage was reduced to 10 percent. This past January, workers at the company discovered that their retirement match was further cut by half, to 5 percent. “As of right now,” says Ryther, “there is no guaranteed retirement contribution.”

Wages are also a huge issue. “The pay structure is set up so that some folks who have worked for the company for several years make less than people who are hired now,” says Ryther.

Ryther also takes issue with the fact that there is no job security at her workplace. “Trader Joe’s is an ‘at-will’ company, which means they can let folks go for no reason or small reasons.” Union membership can bring contracts that prevent workers from being fired without cause—a critical protection for those active in labor organizing.

Rather unsurprisingly, Trader Joe’s reportedly began engaging in union-busting tactics as soon as it was clear that employees were agitating for better working conditions. Several workers at the Hadley store who wore Trader Joe’s United pins said they were retaliated against and sent home before their shifts were over, even though wearing pro-union insignia is protected by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). There was similar retaliation against workers at a Vermont store, with one worker even being fired. Employees filed a complaint to the NLRB and won.

Ryther, like many young workers around the country who have no direct experience with unions, says it has been a journey for her and her colleagues; they have been working since February to educate themselves “about what unions are, what a union could mean for Trader Joe’s and for our daily work life.”

When the Hadley store’s union election date was set for late July, a Trader Joe’s spokesperson named Nakia Rohde sent an email to workers saying, “We are happy the dates have been set. Trader Joe’s is a great place to work, and we look forward to our Crew Members having a chance to vote on keeping things as they are or being represented by this SEIU-backed group.”

Ryther says she had never even heard of SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, a well-established and large union that happens to be a favorite target of right-wing media. Indeed, Trader Joe’s United is not affiliated with SEIU or any existing union. The company’s reference to SEIU was likely a sly bid to undermine the newly formed independent union.

But, like many corporations whose progressive façade is crumbling in the eyes of their young workers, Trader Joe’s may well lose the battle over unions. One former worker at a Florida store, Noella Williams, who resigned in protest of numerous concerns, published a litany of complaints this past June, adding to the company’s eroding reputation and confirming the views of many disgruntled workers.

For most of her fellow workers, “it’s a no-brainer” to unionize, says Ryther, who hopes her Minneapolis store colleagues will soon follow in the footsteps of their counterparts in Hadley, Massachusetts, with a union election date.

“We are very, very, excited to be able to vote in this election,” she says.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. 

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. 

Selfishness Fuels the War on Abortion

BY SONALI KOLHATKAR

 JULY 22, 2022

Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was as predictable as it was shocking. Right-wing forces have spent years working to erase the right to abortion, and — for now — they have won.

Contrary to the idea that men have foisted the abortion ban on women, though, the ban is a patriarchal attack by conservatives — men and women — on the rest of us.

There’s a general attitude that forms the basis of most right-wing attacks: that the denial of rights will only affect someone else — someone who deserves it. But when conservatives are personally impacted, they’re an exception.

Stories abound of conservative women who picket out front of abortion clinics quietly coming in the back to get their own abortions. One provider told The Daily Beast, “All of us who do abortions see patients quite regularly who tell us, ‘I’m not pro-choice, but I just can’t continue this pregnancy.’”

She added, “These are not people who turn anti-choice after having an abortion, but who simply access this essential service when they need it in spite of their personal beliefs about abortion in general.”

A survey of women who’ve had abortions by the fundamentalist Christian group Care Net suggests that many of these women belong to conservative churches. Over 40 percent of their respondents reported attending services regularly.

It’s a classic case of “do as I say, not as I do.” This selfish logic informs many conservative positions.

Take gun violence. Those who support the complete availability of guns seem to have no problem surrendering that right when it comes to protecting the powerful.

Armed members of the public are allowed nowhere near Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, or current and former presidents. Guns are even prohibited at National Rifle Association conventions when current or former presidents speak.

But the rest of us — even children and the elderly — have to risk living among armed and dangerous people.

Take welfare.

Republican politicians have made it their mission to slash what they call “entitlement” programs. But their voters often rely most heavily on food stamps and other benefits. In polls, white Americans, who are overrepresented among conservatives, tend to support welfare programs — until they discover those programs might also help people of color.

Take voting rights.

Conservatives and Republicans want to make it harder for people to vote, premised on the false claim that many people vote for Democrats illegally. But most of the very small handful of people caught illegally voting have turned out to be Republicans.

Circling back, many religious conservatives seem to believe that abortion is the first resort of promiscuous teen teenagers.

In reality, today’s typical abortion patient is a low-income woman in her late 20s who has already had one child and cannot afford another one. In fact, nearly a quarter of all people capable of pregnancy will have one in their lifetimes by age 45. That percentage may be even higher considering that researchers find people severely underreport their abortions.

It’s a fair bet that if anti-abortionists had a way to ensure their own personal access to abortion when they needed it, and a ban for everyone else, they’d do it.

Of course, the religious right didn’t do this on their own. So-called liberals in Hollywood have written anti-abortion tropes into their plot lines for decades, and Democrats in office failed to codify these rights when they had the chance.

Years of invisibility and shame paved the road to Roe’s reversal. But now, more and more people are coming forward to tell their stories, revealing abortion as the mundane and shame-free health procedure that it is.

These stories will be crucial to tell. And when anti-abortion conservatives — victims of their own success — need an abortion and have nowhere to turn to, I hope we’ll hear their stories too. When you’re no longer the exception to the rule, it’s harder to be selfish.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. 

Deterrencelessness: Nuclear Threats Neither Credible Nor Viable

BY JOHN LAFORGE  JULY 22, 2022

 JULY 22, 2022

Image by Egor Myznik.

Threatening to make attacks with nuclear weapons is known as “deterrence” when the United States does it, but it’s called madness, blackmail, or “terrorism” if Russia, China, or North Korea does.

U.S. Air Force thermonuclear weapons, about 100-to-150 of them known as B61s, are stationed at two NATO bases in Italy, and at one NATO base each in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, and Turkey. These 170-kiloton H-bombs — 11 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb — are always described euphemistically as “theater” nuclear weapons, defensive ones that are a “deterrent” to aggression.

Of course, Russian aggression in Ukraine has shown nuclear “deterrence” to be an expensive, destabilizing, terroristic fraud. That our high, holy, sacrosanct, and unquestionable arsenal of “deterrence” did not deter Russia on February 24, 2022 is dreadfully, painfully, catastrophically obvious. Yet the nakedness of the deterrent-less Emperor has hardly been acknowledged.

In the ghastly maw of ongoing war in Ukraine, the needless provocation of stationing U.S. thermonuclear B61 H-bombs at six NATO base’s facing Russia could hardly be more frightening. Then, as if to scream “fire” in the auditorium, NATO’s ministers on June 30 issued their latest “Strategic Concept”, a public relations version of the alliance’s ongoing threat to wage indiscriminate, uncontrollable, and poisonous mass destruction using U.S., French and British nuclear warheads.

The Strategic Concept’s soothing, cotton candy version of NATO’s open embrace of nuclear terrorism is this: “NATO will take all necessary steps to ensure the credibility, effectiveness, safety and security of the nuclear deterrent mission.”

At the moment however, the B61 hydrogen bombs stationed at Germany’s Büchel air base cannot credibly be a part of the “mission” since they can’t be attached to Germany’s Tornado fighter jets. This is because the base’s runway is being rebuilt. Until 2026, Büchel’s 33rd Fighter-Bomber Wing of Tornado jets are based at the nearby Nörvenich air base.

For Kathrin Vogler, a Left Party member of the German Parliament in 2021, this is a chance to denuclearize Germany. The politician told the daily paper Rhein-Zeitung last year that “From June 2022 to February 2026, flight operations at Büchel Air Base will be largely discontinued and transferred to the Nörvenich military airfield…. This was confirmed to us by the German government in our minor inquiry. As far as we know, the 20 or so nuclear bombs stored at Büchel will remain there.”

“This means that German nuclear sharing will effectively not take place for four years from 2022,” Volger told the paper.

“This exposes the argumentation of the German government, which repeatedly claims that nuclear sharing is an important part of NATO’s deterrence strategy. In fact, maintaining it and thus also the Büchel nuclear weapons site is pure symbolic politics, albeit with high risks for the population. Therefore: The suspension of nuclear sharing must become a phase-out, [and] now would be a good opportunity to do so,” Volger said last year.

Proven useless, nuclear weapons can now be discarded

The June 30 NATO “concept” says, “The fundamental purpose of NATO’s nuclear capability is to preserve peace, prevent coercion and deter aggression.”

As of February 24, 2022, NATO’s nuclear weapons arsenal’s “fundamental purpose” has been utterly delegitimized, politically pulverized, and militarily reduced to ashes. The alliance’s nuclear arsenal can finally be removed without any loss of face, much less any loss of security.

NATO’s latest “concept” accidentally acknowledges the uselessness of retaining nuclear weapons in its recognition that, “The strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance, particularly those of the United States, are the supreme guarantee of the security of the Alliance.”

This is the terrible farce of nuclearism. If nuclear weapon threats guaranteed any security at all, none of the tens of billions of Euro-dollars’ worth of military training, weapons, mercenaries, cyber warfare, or intelligence assistance that NATO partners and Russia are now pouring into Ukraine would be necessary.

Nuclear-armed alliances are a thing of the past which must be and now can be made nuclear-free. Under the auspices of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, along with the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, international law provides a pathway, training wheels, guide rails and a motorcade — courtesy of the great majority of the world’s governments — to a world where conflict and even wars don’t endanger whole civilizations and the biological integrity of life on earth.

John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Joe Biden and the Approaching NPT Review

BY MARK MUHICH   

 JULY 22, 2022
 JULY 22, 2022

Photograph Source: Hajime NAKANO – CC BY 2.0

“I definitely feel that the development and use of nuclear weapons should be banned. It cannot be disputed that a full-scale nuclear war would be utterly catastrophic. Hundreds and millions of people would be killed outright by the blast and heat, and by the ionizing radiation produced at the instant of the explosion . . . Even countries not directly hit by bombs would suffer through global fall-outs. All of this leads me to say that the principal objective of all nations must be the total abolition of war. War must be finally eliminated or the whole of mankind will be plunged into the abyss of annihilation.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, 1957

The Tenth Review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty begins August 1, 2022 at the United Nations in New York City. The NPT is the landmark 1968 nuclear arms control treaty that remains the only multi-lateral treaty in force. The NPT is signed by 191 nations.

Only Israel, North Korea, India, Pakistan and South Sudan have refused to sign the NPT. Iran has signed the NPT but is regularly accused of non-compliance. South Africa to date is the only NPT signatory to have dismantled their own nuclear arsenal.

For its part the United States though a principal negotiator in the drafting of the NPT has delayed and obstructed various efforts over many years to strengthen the treaty and fulfill the spirit and letter of the NPT: The complete elimination of nuclear weapons.

The NPT’s architecture rests on three pillars; The non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and technology, The right of nations to develop peaceful nuclear power, And the reduction and elimination of nuclear weapon arsenals. The original term of the treaty was twenty- five years, expiring in 1995.

Increasing frustration among non-nuclear signatories of the NPT toward recalcitrant nuclear armed nations has caused a rift in the arms control community. Currently the five largest nuclear armed states, the U.S., Russia, United Kingdom, France and China, the P-5 nations, are retooling their nuclear arsenals and modernize their delivery systems. Resentment about hypocrisy and this double standard have grown more acrimonious at successive NPT Reviews since 1995.

The NPT was extended indefinitely only after the P-5 nuclear armed nations agreed to consider a nuclear weapons free zone, NWFZ, for the Middle East, and to adopt the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Through obfuscation and delays by the P-5 a nuclear weapons free zone for the Middle East has not succeeded.

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty has been observed since 1996, but was never ratified by the U.S. Senate.

Other Nuclear Weapons Free Zones, protecting one-half the world’s people have developed on different continents in spite of or because of the failure of the NPT to outlaw and eliminate nuclear weapons stockpiles, and despite intense pressure from the U.S. to quash them.

Whether President Biden’s agenda included mention of the Nuclear Weapons Free Zone for the Middle East during his recent trip to Saudi Arabia could not be confirmed by the U.S. State Department for this article.

And non-nuclear weapon states and non-governmental organizations have pleaded to the International Criminal Court that nuclear weapons, their use, or even the threat of using nuclear weapons is illegal. Indeed, the International Criminal Court found in 1996 that the threat of using nuclear weapons and in most every case the use of nuclear weapons are illegal.

Calls from non-aligned and non-nuclear states for a “negative security strategy” for nuclear weapons policy, such as “no first use” of nuclear weapons, or no use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states have been roundly rejected by the nuclear powers, especially the U.S.

Defying logic, the nuclear weaponed powers assert that negative security policies like no first use weaken their nuclear deterrence. But if “deterrence” prevents a first strike attack by an adversary, then maintaining a first strike prerogative contradicts the function of deterrence. As many former Secretaries of State and military leaders have testified, “nuclear weapons are worthless and we should get of them”.

Of course, the United States is not a member of the ICC and has ignored its ruling on nuclear weapons. That does not mean the Court’s determination that nuclear weapon are illegal is moot.

Assertions by top U.S. nuclear arms negotiators that “the NPT is solid enough” to survive yet another contentious failed five-year Review sound cynical. Hopefully the U.S. delegation at the NPT Review this August can represent a more positive position than those offered during previous Reviews. Given the brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia nuclear arms control will be more difficult but will be even more crucial today.

U.S. State Department Under Secretary for Arms Control, Bonnie Jenkins will have to answer some tough questioning from the international community at the upcoming NPT Review. Why does the U.S. still oppose a “no first use” of nuclear weapons policy? Why has the U.S. repeatedly and punitively opposed Nuclear Weapons Free Zones historically and now in the Middle East? Why is the U.S. budgeting nearly $1 Trillion for the modernization of its nuclear arsenal?

Why does the U.S. still oppose the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, TPNW, despite its commitment under Article VI of the NPT to eliminate American nuclear weapons?

Ambassador Jenkins can come prepared to this NPT Review with a different and imaginative approach to nuclear arms control. Non-nuclear armed states should not be expected to support a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons while their nuclear armed cohorts continue to expand their nuclear arsenals.

Were Ambassador Jenkins at a minimum to promise that the U.S. would not attack with nuclear weapons any non-nuclear armed country it would be a small step toward meeting its treaty obligations. Such a promise would reverse decades of self-defeating and contradictory presentations by American representatives at previous NPT Reviews.

Posthaste: Canada's housing market headed for 'historic correction,' says RBC

Pamela Heaven - JULY 25,2002

Good Morning!

Canada’s largest bank has downgraded its outlook for the housing market and now forecasts a “historic correction,” worse than any national decline seen in this country in the past 40 years.

Soaring inflation has put the Bank of Canada on a course of aggressive hikes that will take its policy rate to restrictive levels by the fall, wrote RBC assistant chief economist Robert Hogue in the report that came out Friday.

“This will send more buyers to the sidelines, especially in British Columbia and Ontario where affordability is extremely stretched,” he said.

RBC now expects home sales to fall nearly 23% this year and 15% next year, and national benchmark prices to drop more than 12% from peak to trough by the second quarter of 2023.

The 42% drop in home sales from the peak in early 2021 will exceed the declines seen in the past four national downturns, Hogue said. In 1981-82 and again in 1989-1990 sales fell 33%; they fell 38% in 2008-09 and 20% in 2016-2018.

The 12% decline in prices by early 2023 will be the steepest correction in the past five housing downturns, he said.

The housing correction first began to take hold when the Bank started to hike rates in March, but the 100-basis point-rise on July 13 — an increase that brought variable rates within sight of fixed rates — will speed the cooling, Hogue said.

RBC expects the Bank’s policy rate to reach 3.25% by October — “a big bite for borrowers to swallow that will spoil or delay homeownership plans for many buyers.”

The most expensive provinces, Ontario and B.C., will be the epicentre of the correction, says Hogue. RBC sees home resales in British Columbia and Ontario falling 45% and 38% in 2022 and 2023, respectively, and prices falling more than 14% from quarterly peak to trough. The downturn will rival the decline Ontario saw in the early 1990s when sales fell 41% and prices 15%, but it’s not as bad as what B.C. went through in the early 1980s when sales fell 62% and prices 27%, said Hogue.

More affordable areas of the country should fare better. While sales are expected to fall more than 20% from record levels in every other province than Ontario and B.C., prices may prove more resilient. RBC expects prices to fall less than 3% in Alberta and Saskatchewan and between 5% and 8% in most of the other provinces by the first half of 2023.

In Quebec, RBC sees home sales falling 16.8% by the end of 2022 and down 6.1% in 2023. Prices are expected to end 2022 7.5% higher than the year before and but then decline 5.1% in 2023.

But while RBC economists are predicting a “historic correction,” they do not see a collapse in the housing market.

Rather, they argue that this downturn should be seen as a “welcome cooldown” after the two-year buying frenzy that put homeownership out of reach for many Canadians.

RBC expects the correction to wind up in the first half of 2023, though a steeper and longer downturn can’t be ruled out.

“Solid demographic fundamentals (including soaring immigration) and a low likelihood of overbuilding should keep the market from entering a death spiral,” wrote Hogue.

18 YEARS DRIVING IN THE SLOW LANE

 

THE HYDROGEN HIGHWAY

 Then California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger gives the thumbs-up as he uses a hydrogen fuel pump to fill a Toyota fuel cell vehicle in Davis, California in 2004. 

Despite all the buzz, prototypes and pilot projects over the years the hydrogen push has failed to produce a stampede of buyers for these vehicles, let alone a proliferation of corner hydrogen fuel stores across North America. 

As revolutions go, the hydrogen revolution has paced at a slow burn, but that doesn’t mean change isn’t coming.

 The Financial Post’s Joe O’Connor has the story on the dream of the hydrogen highway . Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images