Saturday, June 17, 2006

The Traffic In Women

Canada's Complicity in Human Trafficking
If there's one labour shortage that the Canadian government won't tolerate, it's not having enough strippers.

OTTAWA - The number of foreign exotic dancers flocking to Canada has dropped dramatically since the federal government scrapped a controversial visa program intended to fill a national "labour shortage.''

Citizenship and Immigration Canada documents obtained by CanWest News Service show fewer than 10 new temporary work permits were issued for strippers in 2005, down 82 per cent from the 57 handed out the year before.

Permit extensions for dancers already here also plummeted, down 84 per cent to just 60 last year from 366 in 2004.

Until recently, the federal government granted temporary work visas to nude dancers -- mostly from Eastern European countries such as Romania -- based on a lack of Canadians willing to do the job.

Yep and it seems that Russian strippers are the most popular, via Israel. Of course on the other hand if they got a Canada Council Grant they could deem themselves performance artists.

Once again that infamous excuse for illegal immigration is used, no Canadians would take the jobs. In this case its legal immigration, traffic in women, that is being promoted with this same excuse. Well duh yeah when you pay them crap wages. Which is why all sex trade workers need a union. To keep out the pimps and panders, even if they are Cabinet Ministers.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
strippers, Canada, labour, Conservatives, Russia, Israel, performance-art, visa, immigration

Toronto Star Discovers Alberta

The Toronto Star discovers Alberta in a major feature article. But it ain't Ralphs Alberta.

"It's a cliché," says University of Calgary political science professor Doreen Barrie, who says that Alberta's public image is being held hostage by Calgary's world-famous stampede, "when the entire city is transformed into a Wild West theme park."Barrie tries to set the record straight in her controversial new book The Other Alberta: Decoding a Political Enigma.

See:
The stereotype that Alberta, as Barrie puts it, is "a parochial province peopled with right-wing rednecks who wear cowboy boots and hold attitudes to match," is crumbling like a Rocky Mountains avalanche.Barrie is convinced that this explains why most Canadians don't understand Alberta, a province that's come to be known as the new Quebec because of threats by some here to separate. What's more, Barrie argues that the bigger-than-life personality associated with the Calgary Stampede is so pervasive that the hootenanny not only dominates the city throughout the year, it actually unfairly colours the whole province.

Barrie blames Alberta's political elite, particularly leaders like Premier Ralph Klein, for nurturing the cliché, arguing they dampen dissenting voices within the province by making Ottawa the official opposition."Ralph Klein has criticized Ottawa's foreign policy stance on Iraq, threatened to violate the Canada Health Act and opposes the Kyoto accord. These are but a few recent examples of a continuing campaign against the federal government," she says. "Albertans do not share the rather mean-spirited sentiments sometimes expressed on their behalf."

See: Alberta

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Klein, Alberta, TorStar, Toronto-Star, Calgary, Edmonton, Albertans, Cosmopolitan, Metropol, red-neck, cowboys, Barrie, UofC,

I Agree With The IMF

No really I do. So do most economists and anyone rational enough to understand that the GST cut was a political ploy. Of course for the Tories rational economics is a contradiction. Since all they care about is power. To bad there isn't a rational economist in the PMO.

The International Monetary Fund has suggested the federal government would be better off cutting personal income taxes and lowering taxes on savings than cutting the GST. In its annual report reviewing the Canadian economy, the IMF said a cut in income taxes instead of consumption taxes would be "more likely to stimulate labour supply, as well as saving and investment, than a lowering the GST rate."

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Canada, IMF, GST, taxes, tax-cuts, Harper, Government, Conservatives, PM, PMO

For Queen and Country

Our black bears die in the service of the Queen and her stupid Royal Guards. Because faux fur hats just lack that glossy look. And who knows how many poached furs are sold to the English Crown while livers and gallbladders are shipped to China. Time to stop ALL BEAR HUNTS.

Hundreds of black bears face slaughter after Army abandons trial of synthetic fur for Guards' ceremonial headgear
As a show of British military finery, the Trooping of the Colour has had no equal for 258 years. Today, the Guards regiments will parade for the monarch and tourists in their spotless regalia, topped with their lustrous bearskins.

But as the Queen takes the salute to mark her 80th birthday celebrations this morning, some 4,000 miles away a group of hunters will be preparing to go into the dense woodlands of Canada and kill an Ursus americanus or Canadian black bear.
Yesterday, the MoD - and by default the guardsmen who will stand to attention on Horse Guards Parade today - were accused by animal welfare campaigners of perpetuating the annual slaughter of 10,000 Canadian black bears, many of whom die in pain from botched kills by fee-paying trophy " sportsmen".

The Army confirmed yesterday it would continue to buy between 50 and 100 bearskins a year after it declared a trial to replace the distinctive headwear with hats fashioned from synthetic fur had failed because they got " waterlogged" on rainy days.
Senior officers complained that the man-made hats lacked the "life" and "bounce" of real bearskin - the focus of millions of tourist photographs every year and, as one MoD official put it, "as much an icon of Britishness as a red telephone box.

Ohh our poor bears suffer so that an icon of Britishness can continue. Gimme a break.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Bears, black-bear, ursus-americanus, Queen, Elizabeth, Royal-Guards, UK, Britain, Hats, Royal-Guard-Hats,

America: Economic Basket Case

America is an economic basket-case. It is in debt to China, Japan and other cash rich lenders. It is flying high on consumer debt. It is an economic basket case about to collapse. If it does it will take the world economy with it. I have said it before and Toronto Star Columnist Tom Walkom agrees;

Perhaps we're all living in a fool's paradise

Big trouble if U.S. economy falters

As long as interest rates and the U.S. dollar stayed stable, investors were satisfied. But the U.S. dollar has been sinking. And now the country's new central banker, Federal Reserve Board chief Ben Bernanke, is indicating that he wants to push up rates to forestall inflation.That, in turn, means bad news for ordinary Americans. Currently, Americans are in the unusual position of spending more, on average, then they earn. An economist would say they have a negative savings rate. More simply put, they are in debt.They are in debt to buy houses; they are in debt to buy cars; they are in debt to buy groceries and clothes and geegaws. Even more than Canadians (who save a paltry 1.9 per cent of their disposable income), Americans owe money.As long as interest rates stayed low, this did not matter. Now that the central bank is talking of raising rates, it does. If Americans suddenly find their loans and mortgages being called in, they won't be able to afford toasters from China and cars from Windsor. If they are forced to default on mortgages they can no longer afford, the big North American real estate bubble will burst, with repercussions for the entire financial system.

See:

Debtors Nation

The Real Debt and Deficit Crisis

Storm Clouds Over The US Economy

Housing Boom or Bust

Greenspans Legacy

Warren Buffet: U S Capitalism in Crisis

What's good for GM is bad for Workers

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
productivity, income=trusts, business, labour, jobs, Canada, technology, variable-capital, capitalism, corporate-debt, shareholders, government, tax-cuts, subsidies, corporate-welfare,inflation, loonie, dollar, jobless-report, workers, credit, credit-card, debt, Canada, employment, unemployment, interest-rates, Bank-of-Canada, labour, labor, Dodge, 1974, productivity, consumer-debt, housing-boom, competitiveness,,America, USA, economy, debt, trade, consumers,

The Key To Canada's Success

Work more for less pay.

"Business owners, too, are feeling flush. With wage increases damped down and labour productivity rising, employees are working more for less. What could be better?"

See:
Unproductive Capital

Boom and Bust

Suplus Value

Putting the Boots to Outsourcing

Work Creates Addiction

Work Sucks

Why Am I Not Surprised

Labour Is Capital

The Real Debt and Deficit Crisis

A Capitalist Enema

Stupid headline: Labour mobility 'constipated,' economist warns

Oh so what do we need a capitalist enema, yep he says just like that MP from Northern Alberta.

The enema of course is ending EI benefits and pushing folks out of the Maritimes and the East towards the West where the labour shortage is.

By the by this policy is not Conservative but Liberal, Trudeau implemented it back during the boom of the Seventies.

Last one out of Newfoundland please turn out the lights.

While the unemployment rate has dropped across Canada, there has been no convergence between West and East: The unemployment rate in the East is still 30% above the Canadian average, Mr. Orr told a conference call. Newfoundland has consistently had the highest rate of unemployment, which last month came in at 14.8% compared with 3.4% for Alberta. Quebec, which accounts for 23% of Canada's labour force, has averaged 10% unemployment over the past 30 years, though it made some headway in May, with the rate dropping to 7.9%. While oil companies and retailers have brought recruiting missions east and labour mobility has improved from Newfoundland and other eastern provinces, Mr. Orr said the federal government should do more to encourage migration, including reforming the employment insurance program.

Canada, unempolyed, EI, Conservatives, MP, Tar-Sands, Fort-McMurray, Government, Alberta, workers, labour, unions, construction, jobs

Its Raining Folkies

Yep if its raining it must be time for the North Country Fair folk festival up in Northern Alberta. Mudstock. I think last year was the only year that this festival did not get rain. It's June, it's Alberta. It rains. And all the old hippies go north to Joussard/Driftpile to relive Woodstock errr mudstock.

12°C

A few clouds. Light rain.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Folk, music, festivals, Alberta, North-Country-Fair, Joussard, Driftpile, rain, mudfest

Kenneth Patchen

"Now is then’s only tomorrow."

The Hangman's Great Hands

And all that is this day. . .
The boy with cap slung over what had been a face. ..

Somehow the cop will sleep tonight, will make love to his
wife...
Anger won't help. I was born angry. Angry that my father was
being burnt alive in the mills; Angry that none of us knew
anything but filth, and poverty. Angry because I was that very
one somebody was supposed To be fighting for
Turn him over; take a good look at his face...
Somebody is going to see that face for a long time.
I wash his hands that in the brightness they will shine.
We have a parent called the earth.
To be these buds and trees; this tameless bird Within the
ground; this season's act upon the fields of Man.
To be equal to the littlest thing alive,
While all the swarming stars move silent through The merest
flower
. .. but the fog of guns.
The face with all the draining future left blank. . . Those smug
saints, whether of church or Stalin, Can get off the back of
my people, and stay off. Somebody is supposed to be fighting
for somebody. . . And Lenin is terribly silent, terribly silent
and dead. November 1937

Kenneth Patchen was and is an underrated American poet, a surrealist, an anarchist, a founder of the Beat movement, a painter and illustrator. I came across his works when we ran Erewhon Books, the Anarchist Bookstore in Edmonton in the seventies and eighties.

His stream of conciousness novel The Journal of Albion Moonlight has many memorable mise et scenes. Like Jesus and Hitler arguing about capital punishment, murder and war on a train. Hitler wins the argument.

Or the tale of the little light bulb that hides in the impoverished home of a poor working class family, keeping them in light to live and learn, hiding from the nameless electrical company which wants to kill this lightbulb because unlike its mates, it is eternal. It can provide light forever, but the evil corporation that makes light bulbs has created all the other bulbs to die out, planned obselecence.

He was anti-war, a true anarchist pacifist. He spoke out against WWII when it was far from popular to do so, even amongst the left. His wife Miriam was his muse and his most ardent advocate.

For more than thirty years, Patchen lived with a severe spinal ailment that caused him almost constant physical pain. The weight of this personal battle was compounded by his sensitivity to greater issues of humanity, and his poetry paid special attention to the horrors of war. With his work he tried to create a kind of sanctuary for the reader, apart from reality, where larger-than-life characters were motivated by their loving and benevolent natures. Kenneth Patchen died in 1972.

There is a Canadian connection with Patchen. Both Vancouver and Edmonton. His poetry reading accompanied by Jazz music was recorded for Smithsonian, and is both in their Folkways collection in the U.S. and at the University of Alberta.

He was the first avante garde poet to mix avante garde jazz with the spoken word.
Patchen was a man out of time, ahead of his time, always in the here and now. He is still influencing modern music; New Redlemon Song 'Truly,' from StarSearch Winner Turned Lawyer, Features Beat Poet Kenneth Patchen; Flash Anime Video to Follow

Patchen is relevant today as an antitode to the era of the Security State whose politics of fear exudes the paranoia of the endless aimless war against terror, which is terror itself . "There are so many little dyings that it doesn't matter which of them is death."

Kenneth Patchen - Reads with Jazz in Canada (locust 60)

"Comic, surreal, compassionate, fierce, wild, angry, joyous, cantankerous, alive, visionary, and divinely human." - george parsons, dream magazine

“This modern-day minstrel is as fascinating and interesting as any swing or blues singer…phrases and thoughts so beautifully woven into the jazz background, and so expertly phrased and timed, that it is a revelation to the ear and mind.” – Los Angeles Examiner

On a single October evening in 1959, fabled people’s poet Kenneth Patchen and Vancouver’s Alan Neil Quartet made a little bit of history. Together, they cut one of the first jazz-and poetry recordings to disc – fiery, spontaneous and free of pretensions, where hard bop playing wailed neck-and-neck with Patchen’s scathing, slurred, rabid vocalizations. Today, many see Jazz In Canada as among the very first truly beatific documents on record – preceding efforts by Kerouac, Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg. This new edition features original notes by Alan Neil & new retrospective notes by rock’n’roll poet of the San Francisco renaissance David Meltzer.

Larry Smith

Kenneth Patchen — Poetry and Jazz days, 1957–1959

This is an excerpt from chapter fourteen of Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America by Larry Smith, A Consortium of Small Presses & Bottom Dog Press, 2000, ISBN 0-933087-59-4
http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/lsmithdog/bottomdog

Yes, I went to the city,
And there I did bitterly cry,
Men out of touch with the earth,
And with never a glance at the sky.

(Doubleheader 41)
KENNETH PATCHEN met the end of the 1950s like a wounded lion, healing and rising in a loud and rhythmic roar. At the beginning of 1957, while still recovering from the back operation, he and Miriam were told by the director of the Palo Alto Clinic that their house on Bryant Street was scheduled for demolition. Just out of his body cast and into a metal brace, Patchen still lacked mobility and so began to look around for a house nearby. A young fan and graduate student from Stanford University came to the rescue. William Packard (who would later help organize benefit readings for Patchen and would edit New York Quarterly) had visited them at their place on Bryant Street. In February, he drove them to the end of Palo Alto’s residential Sierra Court, to the little house where Kenneth and Miriam would live the rest of their lives together. For two people who had made homes out of the more than twenty apartments during their twenty-three years of married life, this was as close as they would ever come to the ‘little cottage’ of their dreams. Here Kenneth Patchen would launch his poetry-jazz tours and achieve his ultimate writing-visual synthesis in the original picture-poem form. Here also he and Miriam would suffer and endure the tragic debilitation of his last fifteen years. [. . . .]
It was soon after their moving into their Sierra Court home that he told Miriam, ‘I think people need a little joy and humor as well as commitment in their lives’ (Interview 1990). He was preparing to give them both through a new medium, his poetry-jazz.

Perfect Sound Forever: Kenneth Patchen- jazzy poet

Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz
by Mike Wood
Ignored both by the academy and by the street, Kenneth Patchen's rebellion against and challenge to conformity continues even in death. His black mark seems to be that he truly believed in freedom, which put him outside hip fads, outside any political groups left or right that demanded his loyalty, and where no critics' asses would be kissed. He followed his own vision to the end, with little recognition or financial success. His poems, paintings, "painted books" and novels, make him to the 20th century what Whitman was to the 19th, and a close to a true Dadaist, minus the nihilism, of any American. His novel, The Journal of Albion Moonlight, is one of the greatest written by an American; its absence from official critical conversation is a further disgrace to academia. While tenured professors fawn over any literary theory that floats over from France, American writers who do not fit into neat post-modern paradigms, or who challenge whatever canon is currently hip, are ignored. Language is distancing enough as it is; the obsession with linguistic pretension further distances one from an actual cultural discourse that all can participate in. Patchen risked ridicule and poverty to speak both to the powerful and to the powerless. Henry Miller called Patchen "the living symbol of protest" in his essay "Kenneth Patchen: Man of Anger & Light." It was his compassion for communicating eternal truths that made his connection to music authentic. His hope, for art and for the country, rivaled what Toqueville saw when he first hopped off the boat in Newport. His was a voice unafraid to be hopeful, accusatory, sentimental, alone.

CAGE, JOHN / KENNETH PATCHEN: The City Wears a Slouch Hat: ReR .

Kenneth Patchen at the Blue Neon Alley

Kenneth Patchen (The Lied and Art Song Texts Page: Texts and ...

Kenneth Patchen - Free Music Downloads, Videos, CDs, MP3s, Bio ...

Allyn Ferguson : Allyn Ferguson and Kenneth Patchen with the ...

	From Beneath the Underdog, His World as Composed by Mingus by Charles Mingus: "Not long before I worked with a poet named Patchen. He was wearing his scarlet jacket and sitting on a stool on a little stage in a theatre you walk upstairs to down on fourteenth street.
We improvised behind him while he read his poems, which I read ahead of time 'It's dark out, Jack-' this was one of his poems-'It's dark out, Jack, the stations out there don't identify themselves, we're in it raw-blind like burned rats, it's running out all around us, the footprints of the beast, one nobody has any notion of. The white and vacant eyes of something above there, something that doesn't know we exist. I smell heartbreak up there, Jack, a heartbreak at the center of things, and in which we don't figure at all.' Patchen's a real artist, you'd dig him, doctor. 'I believe in truth' he said, 'I believe that every good thought I have, all men shall have. I believe that the perfect shape of everything has been prepared.'" [p.330] - Charles Mingus