Conservatives and Canadian bishops convene

By Joe Gunn
Prairie Messenger
August 2012

In a move that has no precedent in recent memory, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) has invited a federal cabinet minister to address their Plenary Assembly this autumn. Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney has accepted the invitation.

Minister Kenney will speak sometime during the Sept. 24 - 28 plenary, to be held in St. Adèle, Que. The CCCB has stated that the event will be “private and off-the-record.”

There is intrinsically nothing wrong with a minister of the Crown being invited to speak to the bishops. Questions may be legitimately asked of the CCCB, however, in terms of balance (were the other political parties’ views sought?) and political policy (whether this invitation represents a shift toward stances of the current federal government).

Raising Saskatchewan’s Minimum Wage

By Erin Weir

Progressive Economics Forum
August 29th, 2012

Saskatchewan Federation of Labour president Larry Hubich and I have the following joint op-ed in today’s Regina Leader-Post (page A10).

It’s been fourteen years since I first wrote into The Leader-Post advocating a minimum-wage increase.

Why higher wages make economic sense

Recent Saskatchewan government news releases trumpet record numbers for wholesale trade, building permits and exports. But as Labour Day approaches, we should consider that many Saskatchewan workers do not share in the prosperity they create.

The Long-view of the Nuclear Industry in Saskatchewan, Part 2

By Jim Harding

No Nukes
August 29, 2012

CCF, Liberal, NDP, Conservative and Sask Party governments all played a role in the nuclear industry getting a foothold in this province. Whether more left or right, all parties held to a post-war development view which could be called “pre-environmental technocracy”. All equated “nuclear” with industrial progress.

One of the first things done by the CCF’s Adult Education division in 1944 was to issue a pro-“atomic power” study guide. Nuclear power was going to be “too cheap to meter”, and, in those early years, there was complete amnesia about nuclear wastes. No wonder it’s been so hard to wean ourselves from the fantasy that nuclear energy is a vehicle of progress for working people. No wonder it’s been so hard for the non-nuclear view to get traction here.

Nevertheless, there’s been a steady evolution of solid opposition to the spread of the nuclear industry. In the late 1950s there was a strong “Ban the Bomb” peace movement here, but in retrospect, in that era of state secrecy, we still had our heads in the sand about Saskatchewan and Canada’s complicity in the nuclear arms race.

"Green Bitumen?!"

Nuclear reactors in the tar sands

BY D'ARCY HANDE, MARK BIGLAND-PRITCHARD
THE DOMINION
AUGUST 27, 2012

Proponents of nuclear energy are claiming small nuclear reactors in Saskatchewan will make the Alberta tar sands more environmentally friendly, all in an effort to revive the nuclear industry. PHOTO: ZINTA AVENS AUZINS

SASKATOON—What do you get when you cross a nuclear reactor with a hydraulic shovel-full of tar sands? The answer, according to the Canadian Energy Research Institute, is "Green Bitumen."

The brainchild of the nuclear industry, this novel concept of deploying small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to replace natural gas is being sold as a solution to the tar sands' reputation for producing the largest carbon footprint on the planet. Nuclear is being toutedas an environmentally friendly, "clean" energy source for the extraction process. But in order to make that claim, one must overlook the substantial carbon emissions in the nuclear "fuel cycle," from mining to ultimate disposal; the risks of weapons proliferation; the toxic radioactive footprint; and the legacy of highly radioactive waste left behind for many generations to come.

Canada Strengthens Ties with Saudi Arabia

By Yves Engler
Global Research, 

August 24, 2012

Stephan Harper’s Conservatives have strengthened military, business and diplomatic ties with one of the most misogynistic and repressive countries in the world.

Saudi Arabia is ruled by a monarchy that’s been in power for more than seven decades. The House of Saud has outlawed labour unions and stifled independent media. With the Qur’an ostensibly acting as Saudi Arabia’s constitution, over a million Christians (mostly foreign workers) in the country are banned from owning bibles or attending church.

Outside its borders, the Saudi royal family uses its immense wealth to promote and fund many of the most reactionary, anti-women social forces in the world. They aggressively opposed the “Arab Spring” democracy movement through their significant control of Arab media, funding of establishment political movements and by deploying 1500 troops to support the 200-year monarchy in neighbouring Bahrain. The Saudi monarchy may be the worst regime in the world. (The US, of course, is responsible for far more violence but it is relatively free domestically. North Korea is as repressive but its foreign policy is benign compared to Saudi Arabia’s.)

The Long-View of the Nuclear Industry in Saskatchewan Part 1

By Jim Harding

No Nukes
August 22, 2012

Earlier this summer, I was asked to speak on the nuclear industry at the National Farmer Union’s (NFU) Saskatchewan annual meeting. I have spoken on the pitfalls of nuclear energy so often that I worried I might be redundant. But what you say in a talk or article depends mostly on the questions you ask; this sets the direction of your research and analysis. So this was an opportunity for me to consider questions that I previously might have downplayed.

Sometimes we don’t want to ask new questions about old topics for fear of what we might find. This is true at a personal as well as at a political level. This year we enthusiastically ask questions about Medicare as part of celebrating its 50th anniversary. But we still don’t ask the hard questions about Saskatchewan’s longer nuclear heritage; this might be too revealing and impossible to celebrate.

I decided to prepare my NFU talk by asking two overlooked, interrelated questions: first, what role have the different provincial parties played in developing the nuclear industry here?; and second, how has the opposition to the nuclear industry unfolded over the different political regimes? I will address #1 here and leave #2 for next week’s column.

John A. Macdonald wanted an ‘Aryan’ Canada

BY TIM STANLEY
OTTAWA CITIZEN
AUGUST 21, 2012

In 1885, John A. Macdonald told the House of Commons that, if the Chinese were not excluded from Canada, “the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed …” This was the precise moment in the histories of Canada and the British Dominions when Macdonald personally introduced race as a defining legal principle of the state.

He did this not just in any piece of legislation, but in the Electoral Franchise Act, an act that defined the federal polity of adult male property holders and that he called “my greatest achievement.”

Macdonald’s comments came as he justified an amendment taking the vote away from anyone “of Mongolian or Chinese race.” He warned that, if the Chinese (who had been in British Columbia as long as Europeans) were allowed to vote, “they might control the vote of that whole Province” and their “Chinese representatives” would foist “Asiatic principles,” “immoralities,” and “eccentricities” on the House “which are abhorrent to the Aryan race and Aryan principles.” He further claimed that “the Aryan races will not wholesomely amalgamate with the Africans or the Asiatics” and that “the cross of those races, like the cross of the dog and the fox, is not successful; it cannot be, and never will be.” For Macdonald, Canada was to be the country that restored a pure Aryan race to its past glory, and the Chinese threatened this purity.

Since the Mexican debt crisis, 30 years of neoliberalism

By Jerome Roos 

RoarMag.org

August 22, 2012

Mexico’s collapse of 1982, and the radical policy response of the US and IMF, marked the birth of an elite consensus that continues to haunt Europe today.

As Nick Dearden, Director of the Jubilee Campaign for debt cancellation justwrote for the New Statesman, this week marks the “anniversary of an event of great resonance”. For this week it is exactly 30 years ago that Mexico temporarily suspended its debt payments to foreign creditors, thereby marking the beginning of what would eventually escalate into the first international debt crisis of the neoliberal era. Things would never be the same again.

What ensued was not only a tragic collapse of living standards throughout the developing world and a lost decade for Mexicans and millions of poor people in the Global South – most notably in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa — but also a historic shift in power relations between debtors and creditors in the emerging global political economy. Indeed, 1982 marked the global ascendance of Wall Street. As the famous geographer David Harvey put it:
What the Mexico case demonstrated was one key difference between liberalism and neo-liberalism: under the former lenders take the losses that arise from bad investment decisions while under the latter the borrowers are forced by state and international powers to take on board the cost of debt repayment no matter what the consequences for the livelihood and well-being of the local population.

Regional park sale raises questions

BY JASON WARICK

THE STARPHOENIX 

AUGUST 21, 2012 

Concerns are being raised about the unprecedented sale of a Saskatchewan regional park. LeRoy Leisureland Regional Park, an 80-acre park opened in the late 1960s, and offers a nine-hole golf course, camping, a swimming pool and other amenities.
Photograph by: Postmedia News , file photo

Concerns are being raised about the unprecedented sale of a Saskatchewan regional park.

A group of Vancouver investors has been lined up by the local park board to buy LeRoy Leisureland Regional Park, located a few kilometres from BHP Billiton's proposed Jansen potash mine project.

"This stinks," park manager Maggie Hamilton said. "A lot of this has been a secret, but the public should have known about this."

A public meeting on the subject takes place Wednesday evening in LeRoy, located about 130 kilometres east of Saskatoon. Hamilton and others plan to attend and ask the park's eight-member board to reconsider.

"We're hoping there'll be enough people there making enough of a stink that they'll have to take another look at this," Hamilton said.

Karl Marx's "Das Kapital" in Manga!

By Richard Metzger
Dangerous Minds
August 17, 2012

You would think that it would be difficult to take a daunting 19th century masterpiece of economics, philosophy and history like Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and turn that imposing intellectual colossus (which is well over 1000 pages in length) into a simple, straightforward and easy to follow comic book, but you would be dead wrong.

In 2008, Tokyo-based publishing company East Press published a manga version ofDas Kapital by Variety Artworks that flew off the shelves, selling 6000 copies in the first few days and getting discussed in the media the world over. The manga market is huge in Japan, generating billions of dollars, even so, Das Kapital: Manga de Dokuha (“Reading ‘Das Kapital’ through Manga”) was one of the publishing events of that year. Now it’s being published in a new English translation as Capital In Manga! by radical publishing house Red Quill Books.

Capitalist Theology on the CBC

By Dr. Joseph Tohill

ActiveHistory.ca

August 9, 2012

There’s nothing like a bit of neoconservative propaganda gussied up as a hip, edgy CBC radio program to get your blood boiling on a hot summer’s day. The Invisible Hand, a mid-week staple of Radio One’s summer schedule hosted by Vancouver broadcaster Matthew Lazin-Ryder, bills itself as “a defiantly non-dismal take on the ‘dismal science’ of economics.” Revelling in its role as cheeky iconoclast, the show seeks to upend the conventional wisdom about greedy price gougers, rapacious capitalists, and exploitative sweatshop owners.

Behind The Invisible Hand’s irreverence, however, runs a deep-seated conservative ideology that the show seeks to pass off as hipster wisdom or indisputable truth. From beginning to end, each episode of the show is a resounding affirmation of the basic tenet of capitalist theology, that nothing promotes the public good more than the grasping, amoral pursuit of individual self-interest. Greed is good; government is bad; and any well-meaning attempt to interfere with the invisible hand inevitably causes more harm than good.

Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety [Book Trailer]

Between the Lines
Purchase book HERE.
   

Radical Left Melenchon calls for mutiny against Hollande

BY REVOLTINGEUROPE

AUGUST 20, 2012

French radical left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon has called for a mutiny by Socialist Party ministers disenchanted with the policies of President Francois Hollande.

Melenchon, a former Socialist minister who left the party and stood against Hollande as a candidate of the radical Left Front in the presidential elections this year, said ministers who opposed Hollande’s policies should come out of the closet.

‘You exist by being independent, not by being carried along by someone else,’ he said. ‘We need you to come and help us in our battle.

MEP Melenchon garnered just over 11% of the vote in the first round of the presidential elections in April and his supporters helped Hollande defeat outgoing right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round.

Saskaboom changing its tune?

By Paul Sullivan

Metro Regina
August 19, 2012

The news that Brazilian miner Vale is putting its multibillion-dollar potash mine on hold has sent a little ripple of concern across the brows of various Saskatchewan boosters.

It also reminds me of the ongoing dialogue between Captain Nemo and his hostage Pierre Arronax in Jules Verne’s classic novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Nemo’s futuristic submarine Nautilus encounters everything from giant squids to sub-surface volcanoes, which the captain coolly dismisses as mere “incidents,” not the more severe “accidents.”

No Vale on the Plains?

By Erin Weir 

Progressive Economics Forum
August 19th, 2012

I had the following comments in yesterday’s front-page story on Vale’s decision to postpone its proposed $3-billion potash mine at Kronau, Saskatchewan:

Regina economist Erin Weir, who is widely expected to run for the leadership of the provincial NDP, said in a statement Friday that the Vale announcement “represents a failure of the Saskatchewan government’s approach of almost giving away the resource to encourage companies to dig it out of the ground as quickly as possible.”

“The silver lining is that Vale will not increase potash supply as quickly as expected. A tighter potash market likely means higher potash prices and even larger profits for existing producers,” he said.

What did not make it into print was my further argument that the provincial government should collect a better royalty return from those existing companies by ending the potash production tax concessions that proved ineffective in spurring Vale’s investment.

Another important issue is that Vale has been a rather poor employer in Canada’s mining sector. In 2009, it provoked a strike that lasted more than a year at its nickel mines in Ontario and Labrador.

In response, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador established an Industrial Inquiry Commission, which made recommendations about how a small province could more effectively deal with large multinational employers.

The Government of Saskatchewan should use the time provided by the Kronau delay to consider these issues, so that our province does not have a similar experience with Vale if the mine is built