Occupy Canada Sites

Occupy Canada Sites

Occupy Canada Sites. (Info from wikipedia)   For some reason file is not very big on this platform, you can down load it here: http://toronto.mediacoop.ca/sites/mediacoop.ca/files2/mc/ocub_0.jpg Alberta Calgary[95] Edmonton[96] British Columbia Comox Valley[97][98][99] Kelowna[100] Vancouver[101] Victoria[102] Nelson[103] Nanaimo[104] Manitoba Winnipeg[105] New Brunswick Moncton[106] Saint John[107] Newfoundland and Labrador Corner Brook[108] St. John’s[109] Nova Scotia Halifax[110] Ontario Guelph[111] Hamilton[112] Kingston[113] London[114] North Bay[citation needed] Ottawa[115] Sudbury[116] Toronto [117][118] (Occupy Toronto) Windsor[119][120] Prince Edward Island Charlottetown[121] Saskatchewan Regina[122] Saskatoon[123] Quebec Montreal[124] Quebec City[125...

Sometimes when you fight

you succeed like our friends who had the Food Stock  & the Soup Stock http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2012/11/21/quarry-melancthon-proposal446.html  ...

Consume less

Consume less as we try to emulate America with Black Friday and Cyber Monday! Here’s an article Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S., is traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year as retailers kick off the holiday season. But this year could begin a new tradition — of Black Friday being the biggest labour protest day of the year. Workers at the giant retailer Wal-Mart are preparing for walkouts and rallies at as many as 1,000 stores across the country. The actions are part of a wave of strikes and protests that began at several distribution centers in September and then moved on to Wal-Mart stores in October. The rolling walkouts have continued sporadically since, as workers organize for the call made by their OUR Walmart campaign for actions on Black Friday around the country. The scale of the Black Friday walkouts will vary from store to store, involving smaller or larger groups of workers. Wal-Mart, of course, is nonunion, so the ‘associates’ who answer the call for a strike will do so in protest over grievances about management retaliation, harassment and unsafe conditions — this gives them some protection under U.S. labour laws. Meanwhile, supporters of the Wal-Mart workers are planning to gather alongside them for rallies, pickets and other actions at the stores — to show their solidarity with this long-awaited challenge to a corporate goliath....

Conformation Bias

So Obama won and Romney was just another side of the same Capitalistic coin. Fortunately, the corporate raider didn’t win. Also losing the popular vote and electoral college. The Senate has remained in Democrat control; though the House is in Republican control. So the question is the TEA(taxed enough already)party people going to double down this term? Here’s what I wrote 8 months ago… http://otga.ca/2012/03/elections-super-tuesday/...

Two Tier Wages for Younger Workers

Two tier wages for younger workers in the recent negotiations with the Auto Corporations! Some who even had a bailout will be screwing new workers who do the same work as their predecessors… http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1262356–caw-chief-says-chrysler-contract-deal-possible-today...

What is Neo-Liberalism?

‘What is Neo-Liberalism?‘ will be a continuing series here. This first instalment is a reprint of ‘The struggle is class . . . against class’ from the journal of the “Profs contre la hausse” (Profs against the fee hike) translated by Richard Fidler and published at his blog “Life on the Left”. Ten years ago I thought I understood the Neo-con metric fairly clearly – but a usual – life had other ideas. Neo-liberalism is after all is a movement – not a conspiracy – it is alive and developing – projected as it is, by trans-national, monopolistic corporate culture. The relatively simple metric I saw back then was that it looked like they wanted to privatize everything. I thought the left needed a new narrative to battle this corporate sponsored, sophisticated, epoch changing political evolution. Since then characteristics of the neo-con movement have bloomed into a spectrum of ways towards effective corporate control of government – and away from democratic institutions that for the most part, organized labour was pivotal in establishing in government and civil society in the post Depression / post War years – as Rush Limbaugh would conspira-cize, the ‘Liberal Press’, or the ‘Liberal Establishment’. I think that it would be of great benefit for us to understand better the characteristics of what we are dealing with. ‘Know thy enemy’, so to speak. The following is my first submission towards this end under the tag, ‘What is Neo-Liberalism?‘. Suggested links or ideas for future posts under this heading are appreciated. “Profs contre la hausse” (Profs against the fee hike) are a group of university and college professors who helped to mobilize support for the striking students in Quebec’s “printemps érable,” or maple spring. Reprinted in it’s entirety from: “Life on the Left News articles, commentaries, reviews, translations on subjects of potential interest to progressive minded individuals and organizations, with a special emphasis on the Quebec national question, indigenous peoples, Latin American solidarity, and the socialist movement and its history.“   * * * Thursday, September 27, 2012 ‘The struggle is class . . . against class’ – Ceci n’est pas La matraque des profs contre la hausse ‘Strike or no strike, the struggle continues’ Introduction The following is my translation of a feature article in the Autumn 2012 issue of a 16-page tabloid produced by Profs contre la hausse (Profs against the fee hike), the group of university and college professors that helped to mobilize support for the striking students in Quebec’s “printemps érable,” or maple spring. The newpaper bears the evocative masthead “Ceci n’est pas La Matraque des profs contre la hausse,” thematraque, or police truncheon, referring of course to the brutal repression of student demonstrators by the cops. During the strike this spring, a statement (“We are all students”) issued by Profs contre la hausse was signed by more than 2,000 professors.[1] The current issue of the profs’ newspaper, which is subtitled “The spring continues,” states on its front page: “We present this newspaper to the students, who, through their unprecedented mobilization, were able to revitalize the Quebec political landscape. Their powerful speeches and their creative opposition to the bards of austerity and the ‘fair share’ inspire us in our own practices of political freedom.” – Richard Fidler * * * The political economy behind this year’s student struggle and the increase in Quebec tuition fees by Eric Pineault, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) The spring student strike is quite probably the inaugural act of a new period of social conflict in Quebec, analogous to the struggles that are traversing the other societies beset by the similar exhaustion of a neoliberal political economy. After three decades of relative “civil peace” (1982 to 2012) and neoliberal bracketing of conflicts, Quebec could be entering an era of political and cultural awakening in which it is once again possible to hope for a fundamental transformation of economic and social relations. Such changes do not occur without arousing strong resistance, and the social offensives needed to drive them forward must be equally combative. It was precisely based on such analyses that the ASSÉ, then the CLASSE,[2] prepared the big strike of 2012. It was necessary, from the outset, to link the fight against the increase to a more comprehensive challenge to the neoliberal state model, in particular the so-called “cultural revolution” of fee-based public services, a regressive tax system and privatization of the common heritage of the Québécois and aboriginal peoples. So for the CLASSE, at least, it was not simply a fight against the fee hike — which, to be sure, would have soon unraveled in a negotiated increase. Rather, it was a social struggle for free education and for a decommodification of the university system. The so-called “radicalism” of the CLASSE is derived, as the expression suggests, from the fact that the analysis framing its strike action went to the root of the problem and grasped it in its totality: the fee increase and the commodity and corporate drift of the university system are products of a neoliberal political economy that is imposed on all aspects of Quebec society. This political economy is not an invention of Jean Charest’s Liberals; they systematized and adapted a more general model applied pretty well everywhere in North America, some key aspects having been installed by the PQ in the socio-economic summits following the 1995 referendum. The former Conservative turned nationalist Lucien Bouchard passed the torch of austerity and competitive deregulation to the former Conservative turned Liberal Jean Charest who, at first, simply developed in complete coherence what was already implicit in Bouchard’s zero-deficit policy, then accelerated and generalized the establishment of the neoliberal model in Quebec. These developments followed a long period, between 1982 and 1995, of exhaustion of the social model established in the traces of the Quiet Revolution. The Quebec model of neoliberalism was also prepared through the construction at the federal level of its neoliberal macro-economic framework: free-trade agreement, conversion of unemployment insurance into “employment insurance,” a disinflationary monetary policy, financial deregulation, lower taxes and the fight against the deficit they provoked. It can be said that the crisis of 2008 marked the end of this ascendancy of neoliberalism, both here and elsewhere in North America and Europe, for it was the crisis of the economic model it had spawned. Since then we have been caught in a trap that combines economic stagnation with austerity. There is nothing in the policies responding to this crisis that eases this tendency to stagnation. The elite has apparently turned its back on the growth on which, in theory, the viability of advanced capitalism rests. Such is the political economy context of the coming social conflicts in Quebec: an anaemic economy, most incomes stagnating, and a state caught in the vice-like grip of an austerity that generates further stagnation, with greater austerity in response. This context is not peculiar to Quebec; the essential sources of this stagnation trap lie elsewhere, in the United States and Europe, and by opening up our economy we have made ourselves dependent on economic cycles over which we have no influence. The Plan Nord can only accentuate this dependency. In this context, what are the possible sequels to the social movement of the spring of 2012? One way of thinking about the last three decades of neoliberal hegemony is to see them as thirty years of a one-sided “class struggle,” and one way of making sense of what began in the spring of 2012 is to understand it as the end of this one-sidedness. The class struggle is now working both ways. How can we understand neoliberalism as a one-sided class struggle? To understand that, a small detour through history is necessary. For the greater part of the 20th century, the political economy regime was characterized by a certain compromise between capital and labour, between big corporations and employees. The profits of the first rested on the consumption of the second, and firms were constrained to share their productivity gains with the workers so that the latter could (over)consume massively what was (over)produced massively. That was the major lesson learned during the crisis of the 1930s, a crisis of overproduction, underconsumption and under-investment. From 1939 to 1980 in North America and Western Europe, real wages of the majority progressed from year to year, while everywhere the share of the wealth going to the most well-off (the highest 1% of incomes) decreased year by year, from the ceiling of 1930 to the floor of 1980. It was not through kindness or necessarily by far-sightedness that the capitalists were led to share the proceeds of economic growth. On the contrary, it was essentially thanks to the strength of the trade-union movement, the pressure exerted on the state by a mobilized citizenry, the presence in the political arena of left-wing parties, and the counter-model constituted by the so-called “communist” countries that the welfare state, and a form of partially socialized capitalism, developed. Quebec’s Quiet Revolution arrived toward the end of this period, and constituted for us a sort of catching-up with an historical trajectory that was much longer elsewhere. Within a few years, Quebec acquired a modern social state and a progressive labour law; nationalized some major sectors of its economy; created the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement, the public university and college networks, and the health care system; made working conditions in the public sector a lever for raising conditions in the private sector; and, finally, equipped itself with the tools to develop its natural resources under its own control. Added to all this, a progressive tax system that took more from the well-off than from the majority, and that tapped into profits almost as much as wages, gradually but ineluctably reduced the power of the business elites and big corporations in the society and the economy. Neoliberal policies are a struggle by the elites to reconquer the economic and political power they lost to the workers, whom they have managed to fragment into a multiplicity of groups, each forced onto the defensive, each attempting to preserve some acquisition that guarantees its dignity. The great secret of neoliberalism is that what we understand as the dismantling of some part of the social state, the privatization of some public service, the imposition of market competition in some sector, the deregulation of this or that is in fact a vast transfer of resources, wealth and power from “the commons” to the hands of the elite and their big corporations. That has been the true nature of the one-sided class warfare waged by the elite against society, for some thirty years. That warfare could continue uninterrupted for as long as it held the promise that this was the only way to guarantee economic growth that would eventually allow the workers to increase their living standards. After the crisis of 2008, belief in the need for austerity helped to extend this context of one-sided struggle. But with the spring of 2012, the veil was lifted and the elite appeared for what it is: a class of “appropriators” who live and enrich themselves by transforming our collective heritage into their individual wealth and into assets for the big corporations. The future of the universities did not escape this logic, and the fee increase was an essential tool in this strategy of incorporation of the university. By challenging the increase in the name of free tuition, the movement altered the context. The struggle is now being waged by both sides. It is possible to think of a post-neoliberalism, and to go about constructing it. Over and beyond the electoral pause, a new era of change and social debate is opening before us. [1] For an English translation, see “Massive demonstrations support Quebec students striking against fee hikes”; the statement is appended to the article. [2] Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante – Association for student union solidarity (ASSÉ); Coalition large de l’ASSÉ – Broad coalition of the ASSÉ (CLASSE). Posted by Richard Fidler at Thursday, September 27, 2012 * * * References: Life on the Left | Thursday, September 27, 2012 | ‘The struggle is class . . . against class’ |http://lifeonleft.blogspot.ca/2012/09/the-struggle-is-class-against-class.html  ...

Millionaire Mayor uses Office

Millionaire Mayor uses office to benefit his local football team rather than the City’s youth as a whole; as exemplified by his cutbacks. When it comes to Don Bosco Catholic Secondary School things are a different story… http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1263583–top-rob-ford-aide-asked-province-to-help-with-2-8m-in-football-field-improvements...

Parti Quebecois will be taxing the wealthy in Quebec

We know the Harper government already gave Corporations $6 billion in tax cuts financed by the $25 billion deficit by the citizenry. So now the question; in that minority government at the Provincial level of Quebec will they get it passed? http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2012/09/25/montreal-pq-flexible-on-tax-hikes.html?cmp=rss...

Salary Freeze Optics

the Liberals under finance minister Duncan appear to be doing something about the high salaries of provincial CEOs and Upper Management. It may save $12 million in the future; some 200something people given those who are currently in the upper echelons of management are grandfathered and continue to make the dough… http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1259819–dwight-duncan-targets-civil-service-managers-with-pay-freeze-salary-caps-and-bans-bonuses...

“I am a revolutionary” One Day Activist Conference

When:  Saturday September 15th Where:  Bahen Center Room 2185 – University of Toronto (40 St George Street, room 2185 *Just north of College on St George)  * The Bahen Centre is a fully accessible space. Website: http://iamrev.wordpress.com/   Synopsis: What does it mean to be a revolutionary today? Can you be a revolutionary without a revolution? What exactly does a revolutionary do? How do we fight racism? How can students win free tuition? Does voting make a difference? Are the police on our side? We all have questions, but together we have answers. ‘I am a revolutionary’ is a one-day conference that aims to discuss these and other questions about being an effective anti-capitalist activist. Organized by the International Socialists, the conference features three workshops that will discuss how to be a revolutionary in your workplace, on your campus, in your neighbourhood, and in the social movements. We will try and address debates about who has the power to change the world, the connection between capitalism and oppression, and the need for revolution. People introducing the topics will draw on historical examples, theory and personal experience to try and discern what it means to be a revolutionary in the here and now. Sessions will take the form of a short introduction on the topic, followed by group discussion. Everyone is welcome to participate and share their experiences. Schedule: 12:30 pm Registration 1:00 pm Who has the power to change the world? Capitalism is based on the exploitation of the majority of the world’s population by a tiny elite. How do they get away with it? This session will explain how class society works and how workers could overthrow it. 2:15 pm Break 2:30 pm How does capitalism cause oppression? Sexism, racism and homophobia are just a few examples of oppression. Where do these ideas come from? This session will explain the roots of oppression and the best ways to fight it. 3:45 pm Break 4:00 pm Why do we need a revolution Economic crisis, climate change and war are all features of capitalism – which is why we need to get rid of it. This session will explain what revolutionaries can do to fight capitalism and why they need to be organized to work for an alternative....

Canadian Banking Industry rakes it in

while nickel, diming and charging fees from customers to have a record quarter in the area of over $9 billion in profits let alone the Big 5 while sitting on piles of cash that could be put to better use… http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1249021–royal-bank-reports-highest-quarterly-profit-ever-of-2-2-billion...

Amerikan Republican VP candidate

Paul Ryan is a Roman Catholic who follows a Russian Atheist’s ideas. Alissa Rosenbaum aka Ayn Rand is about selfishness which means Romney & Ryan would be looking out for the interests of the 1% while making it cost more for services for every citizen er taxpayer… http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1241907–romney-pick-paul-ryan-is-hard-right-theorist-ayn-rand-in-a-prettier-suit...

Rising Canadian Unemployment

Rising Canadian Unemployment under the stewardship of the Conservatives, some 30,400 jobs were lost; mostly in Quebec under (former federeal) Conservative – Charest who is going through another election campaign… http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1239970–canada-s-unemployment-rate-rises-in-disappointing-july...

G 20 Police Profiling

BY: SONNY August 2 2012 19:13 G 20 Police Profiling includes abuses of power and making up reasons to arrest protesters… http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/1235060–g20-lawsuit-hamilton-area-plaintiffs-file-1-4-million-claim-against-toronto-police...

Some Banksters

help launder money… http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1234096–shamed-hsbc-takes-2-billion-hit-for-u-s-uk-flaws...

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