Friday, March 03, 2006

Abolish The Senate

Ontario Premier calls for abolition of Senate Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty says he would reform the Senate by abolishing it altogether. Here! Here!

We don't need no stinking Senate. Not even a Triple E Senate.

"So to elect senators in Canada under the existing system would serve both to entrench and exacerbate an existing inequity," he said. "I think it's time for us to abolish the Senate in Canada."

It is the vestigial remains of the old British Aristocracy, the House of Lords. In much the same way we have the vestigial remains of our reptilian past in our brains. It comes from the power of the rentier class over the rising bourgeois in England. To be a Senator you must be over 30, own $4000 dollars in property, and be a Canadian citizen. Reformed it becomes a bourgeois institution delayed.

Saskatchewan Premier Lorne Calvert said on Wednesday that it's irrelevant whether senators are elected or appointed because the chamber is ineffectual as it stands.

We need real political reform in Canada, including proportional representation, the right of recall (as the David Emerson affair has proven), and the right to referendum. All demands made by the labour left at the turn of last century. Which were then ripped off by the right wing populists of Preston Mannings Reform Party. Now joyfully abandoned by the Harpocrites in Ottawa.

We must create sovereign/ popular constituent assemblies, not controlled by the State or political parties, to reform this 'Con' federation to take into consideration of workers and citizens rights, municipality rights, aboriginal nations and the Quebec nation, and to reform provincial powers so that they match national reforms.



1867 Speech of Louis-Joseph Papineau at the Institut canadien

Among the most important and useful truths, those that pertain the the better political organization of a society are at the forefront. They are among those of which it is a shame to have not studied carefully, and cowardly to dare not proclaim, when we believe that those we possess are true and therefore useful.

The good political doctrines of modern times, I find them condensed, explained and delivered for the love of peoples and for their regeneration, in a few lines of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The true sociological doctrines of modern times can be summed up in a few words: Recognizing that, in the political and temporal order, the only legitimate authority is the one to which the majority of the nation has given its consent; that are wise and beneficial constitutions only those for which the governed have been consulted, and to which the majorities have given their free approbation; that all which is a human institution is destined to successive change; that the continuous perfectibility of man in society gives him the right and imposes him the duty to demand the improvements which are appropriate for new circumstances, for the new needs of the community in which he lives and evolves.


II • Democratic Renewal
In order for the people to exercise their sovereignty and govern themselves, there is an immediate need to: PROCLAIM A NEW AND MODERN CONSTITUTION
This new and modern constitution must enshrine:
• The rights and duties of all citizens without any discrimination on the basis of language, race, national origin, religion, gender, lifestyle, ability, age, wealth or on any other basis;
• The right of Quebec to self-determination, up to and including secession;
• The hereditary rights of the Aboriginal peoples; the injustices of the past and the harm done to them must be redressed through the provision of indemnity payments;
• The rights of the national minorities of Canada, including the recognition of the equality of all languages and cultures and the creation of conditions for their flourishing;
• The vesting of sovereignty in the people.
To enable the people of Canada to exercise their sovereignty, this new and modern constitution must lay down as a fundamental principle that there can be:
• No Election Without Selection.
Under the fundamental law that elected representatives and all institutions must be subordinate to the electorate, the constitution must enshrine:
• The Right to an Informed Vote;
• The Right to Recall;
• The Right to Initiate Legislation.
These laws must be turned into reality through the creation of institutions which enable the electors to exercise their right to elect and to be elected and facilitate their maximum participation in governance. A Canada-Wide Electoral Commission, as well as Electoral Committees in each constituency would be bodies to replace Elections Canada. The finances and facilities currently provided to Elections Canada and to Members of Parliament to operate their constituency offices would be reallocated to fund the functioning of the Canada-Wide Electoral Commission and Electoral Committees. The Members of Parliament would conduct their affairs through the Electoral Committees to which they would be subordinate.
The Canada-Wide Electoral Commission and the Electoral Committees would be entrusted with two key tasks: 1) Guaranteeing that all electors can exercise their right to elect and be elected; and 2) Ensuring that the elected representatives are subordinate to the electors and serve their interests. These bodies would involve a large number of people, especially in the task of ensuring the subordination of the elected to the electors.
The new and modern constitution must establish:
• The rights of all citizens and residents by virtue of being human.
In providing a guarantee to these rights, the constitution must hold the society, and the governments which represent that society, responsible to provide people with the highest possible standard of living within the existing conditions. It must also set out the aim of raising this standard to higher levels, consistent with the development of society, so as to meet the ever-increasing needs of the people for health care, education, culture and other necessities of life. The constitution must guarantee the recognition of the claims of all people on society by virtue of being human, as well as the claims based on the conditions of their collectivity in the case of women, youth, workers and all other collectives in the society.





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Thursday, March 02, 2006

Anti Islamism Manifesto

There is a certain irony in this manifesto one of the signatories Maryam Namazie who emailed this to me is a member of the Workers Communist Party of Iran, WPI.


And because of this lowest common denominator popular frontism, this Manifesto is also being distributed on blogs on the right, and I am sure they don't realize that some of the signatories are on the left. Opps.


Ah well. I am sure that this guy won't be supporting the Manifesto no matter how much of an Iranian democrat he claims to be.

I have seen a kindered politics in the Workerist Marxism of the WPI and the WCP of Iraq. They have focused on important issues such as womens and union rights in the Middle East. And I have appreciated their non dogmatic marxism. Which is why they can criticize Stalinism. On the other hand this popular front approach of aligning with secularists whose criticism is the need for enlightenment liberalism is problematic for those who call themselves Marxists.


While rejecting cultural relativism they embrace it by calling for acceptance of the enlightenment. The enlightenment is NOT socialism, nor a socialist morality, it was and is the values of the bourgoise, to see a Marxist party calling for such a lowest common denominator politics is not only disappointing but smacks of opportunism.


One signature that is missing is Tariq Ali a long time critic of Fundamentalism and a Pakistani Marxist. And that is problematic. Since Ali says this about the whole cartoon issue from whence this Manifesto arises.


This is the real outrage

Amid the cartoon furore, Danish imams ignore the tragedies suffered by Muslims across the world

Tariq Ali
Monday February 13, 2006
The Guardian


The latest round of culture wars does neither side any good. The western civilisational fundamentalists insist on seeing Muslims as the other - different, alien and morally evil. Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons in bad faith. Their aim was not to engage in debate but to provoke, and they succeeded. The same newspaper declined to print caricatures of Jesus. I am an atheist and do not know the meaning of the "religious pain" that is felt by believers of every cast when what they believe in is insulted. I am not insulted by billions of Christians, Muslims and Jews believing there is a God and praying to this nonexistent deity on a regular basis.


How many citizens have any real idea of what the Enlightenment really was? French philosophers did take humanity forward by recognising no external authority of any kind, but there was a darker side. Voltaire: "Blacks are inferior to Europeans, but superior to apes." Hume: "The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the parrot manages to speak a few words." There is much more in a similar vein from their colleagues. It is this aspect of the Enlightenment that appears to be more in tune with some of the generalised anti-Muslim ravings in the media

But for the WPI to promote this as they are doing, is a shift to alliances with the bourgoise, something that they have not done before. And it does not bode well, for their independent Marxist critique of the Middle East. Such alliances in the past have led to the disintigration of workers organizations into electoral political parties, something the WPI has opposed in favour of direct action and workers councils.


The following manifesto on the new totalitarian global threat – Islamism - has been signed by myself and Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nasreen, Chahla Chafiq, Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji, Mehdi Mozaffari, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val and Ibn Warraq. Please feel free to reprint.

MANIFESTO

Together facing the new totalitarianism

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

We reject « cultural relativism », which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia”, an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.

We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas.

We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

12 signatures

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Chahla Chafiq

Caroline Fourest

Bernard-Henri Lévy

Irshad Manji

Mehdi Mozaffari

Maryam Namazie

Taslima Nasreen

Salman Rushdie

Antoine Sfeir

Philippe Val

Ibn Warraq

Presentations for the press

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, from Somali origin, is member of Dutch parliament, member of the liberal party VVD. Writer of the film Submission which caused the assassination of Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist in November 2004; she lives under police protection.

Chahla Chafiq

Chahla Chafiq, writer from Iranian origin, exiled in France is a novelist and an essayist. She’s the author of "Le nouvel homme islamiste, la prison politique en Iran" (2002). She has also written novels such as "Chemins et brouillard" (2005).

Caroline Fourest

Essayist, editor in chief of Prochoix (a review that defend liberties against dogmatic and integrist ideologies), author of several reference books on « laicité » and fanatism: Tirs Croisés: la laïcité à l’épreuve des intégrismes juif, chrétien et musulman (with Fiammetta Venner), Frère Tariq: discours, stratégie et méthode de Tariq Ramadan, et la Tentation obscurantiste (Grasset, 2005). She received the National prize of laicité in 2005.

Bernard-Henri Lévy

French philosopher, born in Algeria, engaged against all the XXth century « ism » (Fascism, antisemitism, totalitarism, terrorism), he is the author of La Barbarie à visage humain, L'Idéologie française, La Pureté dangereuse, and more recently American Vertigo.

Irshad Manji

Irshad Manji is a Fellow at Yale University and the internationally best-selling author of "The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith" (en francais: "Musulmane Mais Libre"). She speaks out for free expression based on the Koran itself. Née en Ouganda, elle a fui ce pays avec sa famille musulmane d’origine indienne à l’âge de quatre ans et vit maintenant au Canada, où ses émissions et ses livres connaissent un énorme succès.

Mehdi Mozaffari

Mehdi Mozaffari, professor from Iranian origin and exiled in Denmark, is the author of several articles and books on Islam and Islamism such as: Authority in Islam: From Muhammad to Khomeini, Fatwa: Violence and Discourtesy and Globalization and Civilizations.

Maryam Namazie

Writer; TV International English producer; Director of the Worker-communist Party of Iran's International Relations; and 2005 winner of the National Secular Society's Secularist of the Year award.

Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen is born in Bangladesh. Doctor, her positions defending women and minorities brought her in trouble with a comittee of integrist called « Destroy Taslima» and to be persecuted as « apostate ».

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is the author of nine novels, including Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses and, most recently, Shalimar the Clown. He has received many literary awards, including the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, Germany's Author of the Year Award, the European Union's Aristeion Prize, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Premio Mantova, and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He is a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres, an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T., and the president of PEN American Centre. His books have been translated into over 40 languages.

Philippe Val

Director of publication of Charlie Hebdo (Leftwing French newspaper who have republished the cartoons on the prophet Muhammad by solidarity with the Danish citizens targeted by Islamists).

Ibn Warraq

Ibn Warraq, author notably of Why I am Not a Muslim; Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out; and The Origins of the Koran, is at present Research Fellow at a New York Institute conducting philological and historical research into the Origins of Islam and its Holy Book.

Antoine Sfeir:

Born in Lebanon, Christian, Antoine Sfeir chose French nationality to live in an universalist and « laïc » (real secular) country. He is the director of Les cahiers de l’Orient and has published several reference books on Islamism such as Les réseaux d’Allah (2001) et Liberté, égalité, Islam: la République face au communautarisme (2005).





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Cops and Robbers Video

Violent videogame should be banned, police Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Uh oh here we go again just like they banned crime comics in the forties, now they want to ban crime videos. And of course the crime rate dropped dramatically after the banning of crime comics in Canada. Yep like a stone. NOT.




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Shall I Stay Or Shall I Go

Immigration hopping well what did ya expect. Those with skills move, those with little stay, refugees stay, those who do not have easily transferable skills or lack skills in both official languages stay, families stay. Proving that all that money we have spent targeting the wealthy businessmen and skilled craftsmen/professionals, was money well wasted. Over a decade of targeted immigration was a failure. Duh Oh.

Oh yeah and don't forget that since this is a long study going back twenty years its major finding was;
Immigrant retention rates in the recession years of 1981 and 1991 were lower (at 80.9 per cent and 72.6 per cent respectively) than in the boom years of 1986 and 1996 (at 90.2 per cent and 76.3 per cent). Make that another Duh Oh.

So we need to change our immigration priorities to those who would stay and retain their ability to be trained for our economic needs. Or is that too rational, a little too much planing for the free market. If so then we could just open our doors to whoever wanted to come here. That would allow for a higher retention rate. Which of course the right wing opposes.


Many skilled immigrants aren't staying

One in six male immigrants leaves Canada for better opportunities elsewhere within the first year of arrival, and those most likely to emigrate are the cream of the crop: businessmen and skilled workers. Kunz downplays the notion that the immigrants who stay behind might not be those Canada most wants and would unnecessarily burden the settlement system. (People who arrive through family reunification have a 30 per cent departure rate, while refugees have the lowest at 20 per cent.) The bottom line, Kunz said, is newcomers need to feel welcomed in Canada and have the ability to get established here.According to the study, married immigrants stay about 25 per cent longer than singles, and are 40 per cent more likely to stay than those widowed, divorced or separated.One way to keep newcomers here, U of T's Reitz suggests, is for Canada to carefully balance immigrant numbers between the family and business/skilled worker categories. "People stay where their families are," he noted

Many working-age immigrants leave: Statistics Canada

The study found higher departure rates among immigrants who were admitted in the business and skilled-worker classes, noting that the global labour market makes their mobility easier.

Refugee claimants had the lowest departure rates.

Newcomers from the United States and Hong Kong were most likely to leave Canada, with about half leaving within 10 years. Newcomers from Europe or the Caribbean, in contrast, were about half as likely to leave.

Language was also a factor. Bilingual immigrants and those fluent in French had 25 per cent shorter stays. Married immigrants stayed 25 per cent longer than single immigrants.





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Origins of the Captialist State In Canada

I came across this interesting blog If There Is Hope and the authors article on a Marxist interpretation of captialist development in Canada as a counter to the concensus view of the Left Nationalists in Canada whose see the development of capitalism as incomplete and under colonial domination, first by Britain then the United States.

His article coincides with my thesis on Western Canadian development and the radical movement of industrial workers and farmers in the West.

See:

Historical Memory on the Eve of the Election


Calgary Herald Remembers RB Bennet


Canada's First Internment Camps


Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

Rebel Yell


It is intersting to note that the movement for integration with the United States which the Council of Canadian CEO's has been advocating recently was also a political blip back in pre-Confederation Canada. And like today it was a minority of the wealthy pushing for it. a group of leading merchants based in Lower Canada published the Annexationist Manifesto calling on the US to annex Canada.The movement gained little popular support, and disappeared as economic prospects improved in 1850. As Marx liked to say; Merde, Merde, the same old Merde comes around again.




Confederation and Imperialism

by Doug Nesbitt
August, 2005


Confederation in 1867 was the result of many intersecting interests from several different sections of the Canadian ruling class. Ryerson describes two main pressures, first from the rising industrial bourgeoisie, and secondly from imperial interests in Great Britain. Regarding the former, Ryerson describes the industrial bourgeoisie as "[r]equiring a state of their own, under their control, capable of providing a favorable framework for the home market and for securing terms for borrowing abroad..." [25]

Protection had already been sought by industrialists, beginning with agitation in the 1840s. By 1858, Isaac Buchanan, a leading Canadian capitalist, had organized the Association for the Promotion of Canadian Industry, and had helped bring about a protective tariff in that same year. When tariffs were reduced in 1866, Buchanan's organization met again. John A. MacDonald was already praising protection in 1861, and make tariff protection a key plank in his campaigns for Prime Minister.[26]

The second pressure, British interest in confederation, appears to be contradict their own imperial interests. However, the British desired a colony capable of withstanding a naval blockade and isolation. This entailed a diversified, self-sufficient economy, and was a strategic, long-term goal beginning in the 1790s, and accelerating in the aftermath of the War of 1812. At the height of the American Civil War, British military and strategic concerns were raised again, and therefore, no serious objection was made to Canadian confederation.

The merchants themselves had declined in importance by the time of Confederation, contrary to the claims of left nationalist historians. As previously mentioned, the 1850s railway boom was the last bid for continued economic power by the merchant class. Its power had been crumbling for over a decade prior.

The two rebellions in 1837-8 led to a decade of British intervention and pressure to dismantle the political system which had entrenched mercantile interests.[27] The 1840s also marked the end of Britain's mercantile system that had protected Canada's staple export market. South of the border, the American economy was unified by an earlier railway boom and industrialization threatened the interests of merchant class, especially those in Montreal. The merchants began to panic.

The same year that Hincks introduced the Guarantees Act, a group of leading merchants based in Lower Canada published the Annexationist Manifesto calling on the US to annex Canada.[28] The movement gained little popular support, and disappeared as economic prospects improved in 1850. In the following years, the merchant class, heavily invested in the transport industry, began to rely on the home market and the power of the state in order to survive. This necessitated the protection of the home market and a more powerful state.

After several years of serious negotiations, Confederation came into being in 1867 in order to meet the interests of merchants, industrialists and imperialists. The first task of the new Canadian state was to complete the Intercolonial Railway, tying New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to Quebec and Ontario. It also called for a rapid westward expansion and a railway that reached the Pacific Ocean. This would satisfy both merchants and industrialists. The other task was the protection of industry through tariffs. Prime Minister MacDonald's 1879 "National Policy" was the first explicit strategic policy of the Canadian state and called for two courses of action: railways and tariffs. Both courses of action were already well underway by the time it was articulated in MacDonald's campaign policies.

It did not take long for the actions of the new Canadian state to reflect its nature. The railway proved a potent weapon capable of shipping troops with great speed to Manitoba and Saskatchewan in order to conquer the Métis in 1885. Aboriginals were quickly rounded up and imprisoned in reserves. The formation of the the North West Mounted Police served the role as the armed wing of the state in the west, and continues today as one of the state's key forces of repression and violence.

One constant remained during the economic and political upheavals of the 19th century: the oppression of Quebec. Quebec was systematically denied self-determination as domestic and British ruling classes kept the feudal system in place until 1854, despite several disastrous crop failures, soil exhaustion and a bloody rebellion.[29] Even before Confederation, it was clear that national oppression coincided with interests of the domestic ruling classes. National oppression retarded Quebec's economic growth as Ontario became the economic centre by the 1860s.

Through the development of a home market, and the growth of industry, Canada also witnessed the rapid growth of a modern urban working class, ushering in a new age of class conflict.







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Harper Retreats on Afghanistan

It was all a bluff. No plans to visit Afghanistan, Harper says

But it got the troops hopes up
Troops planning for Harper visit

And now he brings them crashing down.

Just like he did with Conservative voters who thought the Harpocrite government would be different than its predecesors.

But hey kids thats ok Bush visited, well the Kabul bunker at least.

But our PM still is behind ya' all.
Government 'fully behind' troops in Afghanistan from the safety of his bunker in Ottawa.

And he hopes none of ya gets hurt.
Are Canadians ready for casualties?





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