Remembering Sask Oil: It Can Be Done!

By John W. Warnock
July 26, 2012

This past week it was revealed that one of China’s state-owned oil corporations has made a bid to take over Nexen, one of the remaining four large oil corporations operating in this country that are deemed to be Canadian owned and controlled. Nexen is based in Calgary, but it is known that around 65% of its stock ownership is foreign. In recent years there has been a steady disappearance of major Canadian corporations as they are being swallowed up by larger transnational corporations. This is very noticeable in Saskatchewan.

Erin Weir, and economist with the Steelworkers, has reminded us that the Saskatchewan Oil and Gas Corporation (Sask Oil), once a Crown corporation, was privatized beginning with Grant Devine’s Conservative government, became Wascana Energy, and then was taken over by Occidental Oil corporation, which then became Nexen. So much of Nexen’s land holdings and oil and gas wells in Saskatchewan will now end up as Chinese assets. How did this happen? Are Canadians incapable of running their own economy? Do all of the profits from the extraction of our non-renewable resources have to flow out of the country? Does anyone care any longer?

The Birth of Medicare: From Saskatchewan’s breakthrough to Canada‑wide coverage

By Lorne Brown and Doug Taylor

Canadian Dimension

July 3rd 2012

The Saskatchewan Doctor’s Strike. Photo courtesy Saskatchewan Council for Archives and Archivists. 

Medicare was born in Saskatchewan on July 1, 1962. It would be the first government-controlled, universal, comprehensive single-payer medical insurance plan in North America. It was a difficult birth. The North American medical establishment and the entire insurance industry were determined to stop Medicare in its tracks. They feared it would become popular and spread, and they were right. Within 10 years all of Canada was covered by a medical insurance system based on the Saskatchewan plan, and no serious politician would openly oppose it.

The same interests that tried to prevent Medicare and are continually trying to destroy it in Canada have mostly succeeded in stopping similar progress in the United States. After more than half a century of struggle, the American Medical Association (AMA) and the private insurance industry still control the US medical system despite minor steps forward like Medicaid for the very poor and Medicare for the elderly. The latest plan passed by Congress and endorsed by the private insurance industry amounts to public subsidies for the insurance industry.

Commentators have often wondered why the campaign for state medicine succeeded in Canada and failed in the United States. The battle for Medicare occurred in the 1960s when our political culture was moving to the left. Medicare’s first breakthrough.

Why do most Saskatchewan people oppose fracking

By Jim Harding

No Nukes
July 21, 2012

A recent Environics poll found that most Canadians (62%) support a moratorium on the use of “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing as a way to extract natural gas. Support for such a moratorium was higher (64%) in this province. Why is the opposition to fracking growing so quickly here and elsewhere?

INDUSTRY SECRECY

Hydraulic fracturing involves the pumping of vast amounts of water, up 7 million gallons, with sand laced with huge amounts of toxic chemicals, into shale rock containing natural gas. This is pumped under very high pressure, as high as 9,000 pounds per square inch to create fractures. The gas is then extracted through the fracking well.

Industry has steadfastly resisted public health pressure to release information on the toxic chemicals used in their fracking. Calling this a “trade secret”, they appear indifferent to the implications for environmental health. This is a classic example of the planet-wide battle between corporate “property rights” and the quest for sustainability and protection of the commons.

The Political Legacy of Andy Griffith

Why North Carolina is a Swing State

BY KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY

CounterPunch

July 10, 2012

Some thoughts on the political legacy of Andy Griffith. Griffith, who was born in Mount Airy, North Carolina, on June 1, 1926, died on July 3 at the age of 86 in the town of Manteo.

“Funerals are for the living,” my mother is quick to say, but Griffith barely had one. They buried him so fast – he passed away around 7 a.m. and was lowered into the ground on Roanoke Island at about 11:30 a.m. – that it didn't give many of the living adequate chance to reflect on the loss.

I posted Griffith’s obit to my social network page and a 30-ish West Coast black fellow surprised me by responding, “You liked that redneck cracker?” A few days later a 50-something Jewish guy from New York astonished me more by saying that he’d never heard of Griffith, nor seen The Andy Griffith Show, which ran from 1960-1968 and has been on television almost every single day for 52 years, or Matlock, with Griffith playing a defense attorney, which ran from 1986 to 1992.

Read more HERE.

Humanity First!: What the CCF Government has done in Saskatchewan (1945)

Regina: C.C.F. (Saskatchewan Section), [1945]. 

Open publication - Free publishing - More ccf

Bloodless coup places Riders in power

BY EDWARD DODD 

THE CARILLON

JULY 19, 2012

In what is being called the “Glorious Touchdown,” the Saskatchewan Roughriders declared Saturday that they now run the province.

The bloodless coup took place shortly before 2 p.m. on July 14. A green-clad and beaming Pat Fiacco, flanked by Roughrider’s chairman Roger Brandvold, made the announcement to a mixture of muted resignation and fanatical applause.Brandishing the Memorandum of Understanding, Fiacco declared that a new era was upon both Regina and Saskatchewan.

Grand Quarterback Brad Wall, flanked by a Roughrider guard, waved the new provincial flag from a balcony of the legislature, giving a new meaning to the term "Rider Nation."

Undesirables: White Canada and the Komagata Maru, An Illustrated History

By Matthew Behrens

Pambazuka News
2012-07-18, Issue 594

A review of Ali Kazimi’s new book (Douglas & McIntyre, 2012; $39.95)

As Parliament passes sweeping, repressive immigration legislation, Toronto filmmaker Ali Kazimi's timely book, Undesirables, is a welcome and necessary contribution that should be required reading not only for Jason Kenney and his cohorts, but also those good-hearted folks who claim the new law violates Canada's mythic "humanitarian traditions."

The Komagata Maru was a shipload of South Asian immigrants forced to dock a half mile off the B.C. coast for two months in 1914 as a battle to determine whether they could land played out in the media, the courts, on the docks and in a variety of communities. Denied access to counsel, blockaded from receiving food and water, demonized in the press, and eventually forced to leave when a Canadian court ruled that race could be a grounds for excluding newcomers, their struggle was a signature moment reflecting an ingrained xenophobia that undergirds contemporary Canadian policies.

Gov't ignoring ILO provisions in consultation

BY DAVE COLES
THE STARPHOENIX
JULY 20, 2012

Does the Saskatchewan government respect international labour law?

If its ongoing labour legislation reform is any indication, the answer is no.

A half dozen proposals in the labour consultation paper the Saskatchewan Party government unveiled in May would definitely contravene International Labour Organization statutes.

In a move that could affect a large number of non-unionized workers, the consultation paper asks: "What limitations should there be on hours of work, if any?" Yet, any move to lengthen Saskatchewan's work week would contravene the spirit, if not the letter, of the 1957 ILO Convention that concerns the reduction of work hours to 40 hours a week.

An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital

By Michael Heinrich

Monthly Review Press

Purchase HERE.

The global economic crisis and recession that began in 2008 had at least one unexpected outcome: a surge in sales of Karl Marx’sCapital. Although mainstream economists and commentators once dismissed Marx’s work as outmoded and flawed, some are begrudgingly acknowledging an analysis that sees capitalism as inherently unstable. And of course, there are those, like Michael Heinrich, who have seen the value of Marx all along, and are in a unique position to explain the intricacies of Marx’s thought.

Heinrich’s modern interpretation of Capital is now available to English-speaking readers for the first time. It has gone through nine editions in Germany, is the standard work for Marxist study groups, and is used widely in German universities. The author systematically covers all three volumes of Capital and explains all the basic aspects of Marx’s critique of capitalism in a way that is clear and concise. He provides background information on the intellectual and political milieu in which Marx worked, and looks at crucial issues beyond the scope of Capital, such as class struggle, the relationship between capital and the state, accusations of historical determinism, and Marx’s understanding of communism. Uniquely, Heinrich emphasizes the monetary character of Marx’s work, in addition to the traditional emphasis on the labor theory of value, thus highlighting the relevance of Capital to the age of financial explosions and implosions.

Labour Losing to Capital

By Andrew Jackson 

Progressive Economics Forum
July 19th, 2012

The just-released OECD Employment Outlook – full text not available on line – has an interesting chapter on the sharp decline of labour’s share of national income in virtually all OECD countries over the past 30 years, and especially the last twenty years.

The median labour share in the OECD fell from 66.1% in the early 1990s to 61.7% in the late 200s, and fell from 65.3% to 60.3% in the case of Canada, 1990 to 2009, marking a very significant shift of income from labour to capital. As the chapter notes in passing, this has serious macro-economic and equity implications.

The chapter makes the important point that the labour share has fallen even more significantly if one looks at the labour share excluding the share of the top 1% which has risen sharply even as the total labour share has fallen. For Canada, they calculate that the labour share fell by 3.1 percentage points of national income between 1990 and 2000, but by 6.0 percentage points if one excludes the top 1%.

Privatizing the last of the prairie commons

Trevor Herriot's Grass Notes

July 19, 2012

There was a time in this fair land, only five generations back from these days of high-priced real estate, when the prairie was not a commodity. The place where you pitched your lodge on a given day did not belong to you any more than it belonged to the grasshoppers or the buffalo. No one creature or species could claim to own the land because everyone knew it was a gift, as the air, the river, and the sun were gifts also.

Such gifts shared by everyone have been called “the commons”.

“A set of assets that have two characteristics: they are all gifts, and they are all shared.” [Peter Barnes]

Commons by nature are inclusive, not exclusive. To exclude, you need fences, boundaries. Which is why the process of giving public lands to favoured private citizens in 18th and 19th century Britain was called “the enclosures.” Lands that had formerly rested in the public trust were placed by the Crown into the private hands, driving subsistence peasants, pastoralists, hunters and other traditional peoples as well as wild animals from the commons.

21st Century Socialism: Making a State for Revolution

By Lee Artz
Triple C
2012

Objectively speaking, movements, classes, and media must challenge power to be revolutionary. One cannot govern from below. There can be no grass roots social transformation without replacing existing power.  History has shown from Ghandi and Mandela to Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Lula in Brazil, neither the working class nor its charismatic representatives can secure any lasting accommodation with their patriotic capitalists. Negotiating better terms for the exploited while leaving the social relations of capital intact is not revolutionary, nor even defensible as pragmatic today. If freedom, democracy, and social justice are expected, there is no “third way” as Hugo Chavez and Venezuela realized after the media coup of April 2002.

In the 21st Century, it’s either global capitalism, with more human suffering and environmental collapse or it’s socialism with the working class and its allies building a democratic society of international solidarity. Venezuela provides a positive prime instance of this claim. In Venezuela, revolutionaries are changing society by taking power. This essay highlights the features and contradictions in this historic process, turning to media practices in particular to illustrate the dialectic of state and revolution. This contribution recognizes the need for revisiting and contextualizing the Marxist theory of the state, the role of the working class, and the relationship between culture and socioeconomic relations under capitalist globalization of the 21st century.

Read more HERE.

Paving the Way for a U.S.-Canada Economic and Security Perimeter

By Dana Gabriel
Be Your Own Leader
July 18, 2012

Over the past several months, the U.S.-Canada Beyond the Border action plan has taken significant steps forward. This includes efforts to modernize and expand infrastructure at key land ports. In a move that went largely unnoticed, both countries also recently agreed on a statement of privacy principles that will guide information sharing across the border. Meanwhile, a separate joint initiative has been announced which addresses energy and environmental issues.

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched the U.S.-Canada Clean Energy Dialogue (CED) in 2009 to promote new ways to reduce greenhouse gases and combat climate change. The CED Action Plan II released last month, outlines the next phase of activities both countries will undertake. This includes continued work on carbon capture and storage, as well as integrating the electricity grid. In a press statement, Canada’s Minister of the Environment Peter Kent explained that the CED, “strengthens our efforts to collaborate on innovative clean energy solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” He also commented on how "It is our hope that the transformation of our economies and our joint work will identify clean energy solutions that will contribute to making sustainable energy a reality for all." Whether real or exaggerated, environmental issues are also advancing North American integration. If you look at some of the words being used and the goals being pushed, they are tied to Agenda 21. Under the guise of protecting the environment, many solutions being offered are in the form of more taxes and control over our lives.

Five Reflections about 21st Century Socialism

By Marta Harnecker
SolidarityEconomy.net

June 18, 2012

The journal Science and Society devoted a special number in April 2012 [Volume 76, No. 2] to explore central topics in the current discussion about socialism. Marta Harnecker and five other Marxist authors from different countries were invited to participate in this reflection by the editors Al Campbell and David Laibman, who prepared a set of five questions. This paper written in July 2011 presents her contribution with some foot notes that does not appear in the journal. The following topics are explored: 1. Why speak of socialism today?; 2. Central features of socialist organization of production; 3. Incentives and the level of consciousness in the construction of socialism; 4. Socialism and the transition to socialism; and 5. The centrality of participatory planning in socialism.

1. WHY SPEAK OF SOCIALISM TODAY?

1. Why talk about socialism at all if that word has carried and continues to carry such a heavy burden of negative connotations, after the collapse of socialism in the USSR and other Eastern European countries?

2. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, Latin American and world leftist intellectuals were shocked. We knew better what we did not want in socialism than what we wanted. We rejected the lack of democracy, totalitarianism, state capitalism, bureaucratic central planning, collectivism that sought to standardize without respect for differences, productivism that emphasized the expansion of productive forces without taking into account the need to preserve nature, dogmatism, the attempt to impose atheism and persecution of believers, the need for a single party to lead the transition process.

Labour changes considered by Saskatchewan violate international labour law

NUPGE News
July 17, 2012

If the Saskatchewan government implements labour law changes based on the direction set out in its Consultation Paper on the Renewal of Labour Legislation in Saskatchewan, the province will be in violation of international human rights standards.

This is according to a research study released today by the 340,000-member National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE).

“Saskatchewan working people could fall below the international standards set by the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) if the government acts on some of the changes suggested in the consultation paper," said James Clancy, NUPGE National President.

"This would be a setback for workers in the province and would embarrass Canada on the international human rights stage. Canada has a reputation for championing human rights, not restricting them," Clancy noted.

The study, Saskatchewan's Labour Law Review in relation to its compatibility with ILO Freedom of Association principles and jurisprudence, assessed the legislative direction under consideration by government in light of Canada's international law commitments.