I'm Back - Nothing's Changed, Just Getting Worse

After a week out of the country with limited access to the Internet and Canadian news, I see things keep getting worse. First thing I read this morning was how the Harper regime faked a Citizenship ceremony staged on Sun TV, the ever-faithful tool (and I mean that in the full sense of the word) of government propaganda. Now that the truth has gotten out, I'm sure the government will find some way to burnish Sun's up-to-now- unblemished reputation for journalistic integrity.

Next comes word that Caterpillar Inc. is closing down its Electro-Motive plant in London because the workers wouldn't accept a 50% reduction in their wages and the gutting of pensions and benefits. Expect the usual suspects to lay the blame on an intransigent union, while those of us who can think will see yet another sad result of Harper and McGuinty's corporate appeasement policies.

And finally for now, despite the fact that Old Age Security is on pretty solid financial footing, Harper and Flaherty, that dynamic duo of despair, show no signs of backing down, despite widespread anger, in their plan to raise the age of entitlement to the pension, regardless of how that will affect countless Canadians.

I keep asking myself when my fellow citizens will finally rouse themselves sufficiently from their apparent inertial indifference and have a strong and unequivocal reaction against this tide of neo-liberalism, a reaction that can't be ignored even by the fascists now in control of our collective fate.

Time For A Brief Break

Regg Cohn's Thoughts on Catterpillar Inc.

I don't have too much time this morning, but I highly recommend Martin Regg Cohn's piece, which offers, amongst other things, a contrast between how long-serving Conservative Ontario Premier Bill Davis treated labour, and the current do-nothing philosophies of Dalton McGuinty and Steven Harper:

The former Tory premier of Ontario wasn’t perfect, but he was always plugged in. He took labour seriously, listened closely to business and wooed foreign investors (remember Renault?). He knew how to leverage the power of the premier’s office to stand up for Ontario’s greater interests.

A phone call to Caterpillar’s corporate braintrust would show that Ontario’s premier is no pushover. If that didn’t work, a phone call to Harper — who is still trying to live down the tax breaks he gave the locomotive factory’s former owners a few years ago — might find a receptive ear.

While his suggestions are unlikely to move either McGuinty or Harper, who much prefer to offer platitudes such as "We urge negotiations to continue," and "This is a matter between private interests," or, as of January 1st, grant a further federal corporate tax reduction of 1.5%, no strings attached, we must, as a province and nation, keep current with such situations and urge action by communicating with our elected representatives.

Harper Government Identifies A New 'Enemy Of The People' - ForestEthics

Now this is just getting outrageous to the point of surrealism. The latest story in The Star reveals that the PMO has allegedly labelled an environmental group an “enemy” of Canada for opposing a proposed west coast oil pipeline and threatened retribution if its funding was not cut off, according to the affidavit of a former employee.

According to Andrew Frank, a former communications manager with ForestEthics, a group receiving funding from Tides Canada, a charitable group that funds initiatives that address poverty, climate change and social problems, senior federal officials referred to ForestEthics as an “enemy of the government of Canada” and an “enemy of the people of Canada” in a private meeting with the president of Tides Canada, Ross McMillan.

In that meeting, government officials apparently gave McMillan “a set time period … by which to ‘cut loose’ ForestEthics, or the government would ‘take down’ all of Tides’ charitable projects,” Frank said in his affidavit, which was accompanied by internal e-mail correspondence and transcripts of voice mails.

This kind of paranoid and demagogic bullying is unworthy of any democracy, even Harper's.

The Conservative Mantra: Statistics? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Statistics

The title of this post, meant to evoke the misquote of the Mexican bandits as they prepare to eliminate Fred Dobbs, the miscreant protagonist of The Treasure of the Seirra Madre played by Humphrey Bogart, seemed appropriate in light of the Harper government's contempt for the authoritative substance of statistics.

As reported in today's Star,

A new report shows that Canadian police services are using the firearms registry more than ever, relying on it more than 14,000 times a day rather than viewing it as an obsolete and unreliable database as the Conservative government claims.

Don't, of course, expect this striking data to fork any lightning with the right-wing set who, moved by reactionary ideology rather than logic, is still intent on destroying all of the information gleaned over the many years of the registry's existence.

As with the government's prohibition of government scientists speaking out without Harper's permission, as with the elimination of the mandatory long-form census, and as with the imposition of mandatory minimum jail terms and the building of expensive super-prisons at a time of declining crime, all indicators of a regime drunk on power and intent on absolute control, one can only bear witness to this dark period in Canadian history and hope that the slumber of the electorate ends soon.

Unions and Organizational Decay

As indicated in a post written last Sptember, I wholehearted support unions as the best path of resistance to the depredations inflicted by practitioners of unfettered capitalism. That support, however, doesn't mean that I ignore or accept the malfeasance and lack of true representative democracy frequently found in mature union organizations.

The latest incidence of such malfeasance was recently uncovered by The Star, in yet another example of the fine investigative work the paper does. On January 16, the newspaper reported how John Mandarino, a top Liuna executive, was rehired 13 months after having been terminated for misuse of union funds much to the consternation of many:

In a controversial comeback, trustees rehired John Mandarino last summer as the administrator for the training centre of the continent’s largest construction local, Toronto-based Labourers’ International Union of North America Local 183.

The centre’s board had unanimously dismissed him in June 2010 for breaching contract tendering rules, losing valuable government grants, regularly breaking cheque-signing policy and charging unauthorized personal expenses without proper accounting.

A few days later, The Star revealed that not only had Mandarino regained his former post, but was 'rewarded' with a second post:

The Labourers International Union of North America (LIUNA) appointed John Mandarino as director of its Canadian Tri-Fund after rehiring him to head a major training centre.

Fortunately, this sordid tale has a somewhat happy ending, in that today The Star reports that Manadarino has resigned from one of those positions, that of administrator of the Liuna Local 183 training centre, as a result of Star investigation. No word, however, about his position as director of the Tri-Fund.

While the kinds of incestuous relationships suggested by these developments are relatively common within organizations, rarely do they reek of such egregious wrongdoing and contempt for rank and file union members, who surely deserve better use of their hard-earned dues, and should not have to rely on explosive exposes by crusading journalists.

A Man Is Not A Piece of Fruit

"I put 34 years into this firm, Howard, and now I can't pay my insurance. You can't eat an orange and then throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit" - Willie Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

In the play, Willy Loman lives in a world of illusion, a world in which loyalty and long-term service are rewarded by one's employer. Of course, even when the play was written, that ideal was already on the wane to the point that we are now witness to the return of unfettered capitalism worldwide, where workers are yet just another disposable commodity.

In her column today, Heather Mallick writes about how all of the electronic tools that we so highly prize for both our productivity and our diversion are made in China under conditions that are eerily reminiscent of those that gave the Victorian Era such a bad name.

About Foxconn, the electronic company that makes about one-third of all of the electronic devices we use today, she writes:

Cameras watch the line workers and supervisors throughout non-stop shifts of 12 to 16 hours ... the workers wear uniforms. They are not allowed to speak to each other at work. After a recent string of suicides, Foxconn installed nets on the upper floors and made workers sign documents promising not to kill themselves.

When you work as hard as Foxconn employees do for dimes an hour, the joints in your hand disintegrate ... Workers don’t switch from job to job, as Canadian workplace standards would demand. They make the same motion hundreds of thousands of thousands of times until their hands are used up. “When you start working at 15 or 16, by the time you are 26, 27, your hands are ruined.”

And finally, in a slip that reveals much about how the workers are regarded, the head of Hon Hai (Foxconn) last week said:

“Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide . . . to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes, however, words are just as effective.