Gift Cards for votes generate buying crush in Mexico

By Olga Roderiguez, The Associated Press, in Globe and Mail, July 3, 2012
Thousands of people rushed to stores Tuesday to redeem pre-paid gift cards they said were given to them previously by the party that won Mexico’s presidency, inflaming accusations that the weekend election was marred by widespread vote-buying.

At least a few cardholders were angry, complaining that they didn’t get as much as promised or that their cards weren’t working. Neighbours at one store in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Mexico City said the unusually large crowds prevented them from doing their daily shopping.
Some people shopping at the store said that they were told the cards would be valid only during the two days after Sunday’s election and that they had waited to cash them in until Tuesday because the store was packed Monday.

Under Mexican election law, giving voters gifts is not a crime unless the gift is conditioned on a certain vote or meant to influence a vote. However, the cost of such gifts must be reported, and cannot exceed campaign spending limits. Violations are usually punished with fines, but generally aren’t considered grounds for annulling an election.
Some of the people lined up to use gift cards said they got them for supporting the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), whose Enrique Pena Nieto won Sunday’s presidential election, according to the preliminary official vote count. Some wore red T-shirts and baseball caps or carried tote bags with Mr. Pena Nieto’s name printed in white.
Maria Salazar, a 20-year-old university student, came with her 70-year-old father, Antonio Salazar, to cash three cards.
“They gave us the cards in the name of the PRI and Rep. Hector Pedroza [a PRI congressional candidate], and they said they were counting on our vote,” Ms. Salazar said outside one store, as she carried plastic shopping bags packed with toilet paper, cooking oil, rice, saltine crackers and instant noodle soups.
In another time, in another place, we used to hear stories, in Canada, that whichever party lugged more alcohol to the First Nations reserve would get the votes of the people on that reserve. While that was an overt story of blatant racism, it was also the 'way politics was done' in parts of Canada...and on reflection, it is little wonder our politics today is in such shambles.
Bribery, voter suppression, robo-calls, gift cards as the new and plastic form of bribery...using the names of the dead attached to different people to pad the vote...these are all part of the small and petty agenda of desperate politicians. On the ledger, as monstrous, is the U.S. Supreme Court case known as Citizens United, which permitted trainloads of cash "as evidence of free speech" on behalf of political candidates, provided that cash flows into what are called "super-pacs". Now there is a distinction without a difference. Steering the money into super-pacs, as a way to keep the money at arm's length from the candidate, does not negate the huge impact that money can and does have on behalf of that candidate.
Mexico is awash in the blood of drug cartels, all of it shed in "drug wars" designed to feed the U.S. insatiable appetite for illicit drugs, and and to profit those who take the risks to feed that appetite.
If the rule of law is to be supported by the politics of bribery and buying votes, through direct or indirect methods, then how can the people have confidence in either the law or the source of the laws, the legislatures where they are passed.
Apparently, Mexico is also awash in plastic gift cards, given to voters to "encourage" them to vote for the PRI, whose candidate just happened to win the presidential election on the weekend. Surprise!!
So, since money motivates both drug cartels and political parties, at the expense of something we used to call "the public good," what is the difference between the groups and how does one group control the other?
Monkey see...monkey do!!!

Good men, or good at being a man?....a difference WITH a clear distinction

An excerpt from Jack Donovan's, "The Way of Men," from Good Men Project website, July 2, 2012
To truly understand "The Way of Men," we must look for where the masculinity of the gangster overlaps with the masculinity of the chivalrous knight, where modern ideas overlap with ancient ones. We must look at the phenomenon of masculinity amorally and as dispassionately as we can. We must find what Man knows for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe. The “religion” of Man is not a moral code, though a man may follow his own code to his death. A man struggles to maintain his honor—his reputation as a man—because some part of him is struggling to earn and maintain a position of value, his status and his sense of belonging within the primal gang. Men want to be good men because good men are well regarded, but being a good man isn’t the same as being good at being a man.

Men want to be good men because good men are well regarded, but being a good man isn’t the same as being good at being a man.
There is a difference between being a good man and being good at being a man.
Being a good man has to do with ideas about morality, ethics, religion, and behaving productively within a given civilizational structure. Being a good man may or may not have anything at all to do with the natural role of men in a survival scenario. It is possible to be a good man without being particularly good at being a man. This is an area where men who were good at being men have sought counsel from priests, philosophers, shamans, writers, and historians. The productive synergy between these kinds of men is sadly lost when men of words and ideas pit themselves against men of action, or vice versa. Men of ideas and men of action have much to learn from each other, and the truly great are men of both action and abstraction.
Being good at being a man is about being willing and able to fulfill the natural role of men in a survival scenario. Being good at being a man is about showing other men that you are the kind of guy they’d want on their team if the shit hits the fan. Being good at being a man isn’t a quest for moral perfection, it’s about fighting to survive. Good men admire or respect bad men when they demonstrate strength, courage, mastery or a commitment to the men of their own renegade tribes. A concern with being good at being a man is what good guys and bad guys have in common.


Being good at being a man is about showing other men that you are the kind of guy they’d want on their team if the shit hits the fan. Being good at being a man isn’t a quest for moral perfection, it’s about fighting to survive.
And men, traditionally and stereotypically, have gone silent "when the shit hits the fan" in an individual man's life. They are much more likely to "step up to the plate" when the "shit" is about a whole community, and a massive energy is required to face whatever flies from the fan.
You see, when the shit hits the fan in an individual man's life, most of his fellow "men" are quite willing to think, "he made his bed, now he has to lie in it"...as if somehow he conspired to make the shit hit the fan, and now, it is his responsibility to get himself out of the mess he created. Unless, of course, there is some code of conduct, among lodges, or fraternities, or secret societies or brotherhoods, or even sports teams, regardless of the age and level of the skill involved. Growing up, I never heard a man speak about wanting to help another struggling man. A man's private life was his private domain, into which no man dared to stride. So if the shit was hitting the fan, any man who knew about it backed away as far as possible, with the occasional exception.
And the exception, the man who called to ask, "Would you like me to come and have a coffee with you?" or some other equally legitimate question, left a deep, positive and enduring memory of friendship, affection and "brotherhood" that stood out in comparison to the silence, withdrawal and evaporating of the rest of the men in his life.
I know a little more than I sometimes think I would like to know about "shit hitting the fan" in one's life.
As a confirmed rebel, first in the fundamentalist, evangelical church which was my family's church home, I rebelled against the bigotry that was being spewed from the pulpit, only to have the clergy seek and effect his revenge a decade later. As a confirmed rebel, I protested the kind of treatment the church decided I deserved, when I took a private office in a town, for retreat purposes, without asking for permission, and offended the substitute clergy, who took his complaint to the bishop, who withdrew his written commitment to ordain,  and reversed his decision only after my faculty advisor pled my case before the bishop, without my knowledge.
As a rebel, I threatened to publish my graduate thesis in theology, only to have a different bishop stab his monstrous thumb into my chest and shout, "You will not publish that thesis; I am being a bishop, and my report on that event is in the archives of the diocese and you will not publish that thesis on the subject! Is that perfectly clear?"
As a rebel, I undertook an interim assignment in an urban parish, where there was considerable conflict, and offered to write a history of the parish, partly as an act of ministry, and partly as a project to generate a graduate degree, only to have the then bishop rule the project unthinkable.
As a rebel, I asked for an honorarium in a parish in which there was a $500,000 trust fund, in order to pay for gas to travel the fifty miles from my home to the parish, only to have the supervising clergy hold a kangaroo court, upon hearing from the parishioners, after her return from a four-week absence, that "He is a leader and you are not a leader!" which information literally finished me as honorary in that parish.
As a rebel, I undertook to rescue a woman from an alcoholic husband, refer her to a neighbouring clergy for counselling, and help her to enrol in a professional degree program, only to have her "betray" both me and her compliance in the relationship, in an act of revenge with which the bishop complied, in order to force my resignation.
I do know a little about the shit hitting the fan, and not finding men, particularly, willing or able to support even the most meagre attempt at recovery. Out of none of these situations has there been a single call of support, inquiry or apology or mere engagement from a single person in responsibility, whose complicity in the sequence of events merits at least an acknowledgement, and perhaps an apology. While my mother was abusing both my sister and me, physically and emotionally, even my father was silent and gagged as a potential agent of support for either of his children, so frightened of his spouse was he.
I know literally dozens of men whom I would never select to be on my team "when the shit hits the fan" and barely one or two, whose names they know, on whom I can count.
It is men who have abandoned other men, in my view, and until that fact becomes an integral part of the discussion about being good at being a man, the abdication of mere compassion, preferring to train the strong, individualist, as a solo flier, without offering support, or strength, or even confrontative counsel will continue.
And men will continue to believe, as I do, that men don't give a "shit" about the pain of other men, unless both men belong to some self-help group like AA. It is to enter one's own vulnerability that men have to come to accept, as part of the maturing process of our gender, thereby making it both possible and welcome to enter into the pain of another, without shame, embarrassment, or fear of being too much like a woman.
And that will happen only if and when men accept the truth that both genders have, as part of their unconscious, elements of the opposite gender, from which we can all draw, as part of our process of becoming individuated or integrated. For my part, I will always choose to be good at being a man over options that lead to being considered a "good man" in the strict and narrow sense of those words. I missed the classes in "painting by number" as an exercise in "how to live"...one's life. Whether the instructor was ill, or I simply skipped those classes, I'm not sure! (lol!)
Recipes for being a good man will never replace the wisdom, courage and risk-taking that accompany decisions about attaining masculinity, or being good at being a man. And, there is not an institution or an organization that is not in need of being "shaken" to its foundations, so that it never fossilizes into the complacency of conventionality, and that can and must occur within the bounds of "peace, order and good government," without shedding any blood.

GlaxoSmithKline to pay $3billion fine, largest in history for promoting drugs for unapproved uses

By Jesse J. Holland, The Associated Press, in Globe and Mail, July 2, 2012
GlaxoSmithKline LLC will pay $3 billion and plead guilty to promoting two popular drugs for unapproved uses and to failing to disclose important safety information on a third in the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history, the Justice Department said Monday.
The $3 billion fine also will be the largest penalty ever paid by a drug company, Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole said. The corporation also agreed to be monitored by government officials for five years to attempt to ensure the company's compliance, Cole said.
“Let me be clear, we will not tolerate health care fraud,” Mr. Cole told a news conference at the Justice Department. He would not say whether any company executives were under investigation. The company's guilty plea and sentence have to be approved by a federal court in Massachusetts.
“For far too long, we have heard that the pharmaceutical industry views these settlements merely as the cost of doing business,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Stuart F. Delery, head of Justice's civil division, said at the news conference. “That is why this administration is committed to using every available tool to defeat health care fraud.”
Mr. Delery added, “Today's resolution seeks not only to punish wrongdoing and recover taxpayer dollars, but to ensure GSK's future compliance with the law.” He noted that a similar recent settlement with Abbott Laboratories also included continuing compliance monitoring.
It is illegal to promote uses for a drug that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration — a practice known as off-label marketing.
Prosecutors said GlaxoSmithKline illegally promoted the drug Paxil for treating depression in children from April 1998 to August 2003, even though the FDA never approved it for anyone under age 18. The corporation also promoted the drug Wellbutrin from January 1999 to December 2003 for weight loss, the treatment of sexual dysfunction, substance addictions and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, although it was only approved for treatment of major depressive disorder.
Justice Department officials also said that between 2001 and 2007 GlaxoSmithKline failed to report to the FDA on safety data from certain post-marketing studies and from two studies of the cardiovascular safety of the diabetes drug Avandia. Since 2007, the FDA has added warnings to the Avandia label to alert doctors about potential increased risk of congestive heart failure and heart attack.
The drug corporation also agreed to resolve civil liability for promoting the drugs Paxil, Wellbutrin, Advair, Lamictal and Zofran for off-label, non-covered uses. The company also resolved accusations that it paid kickbacks to doctors to prescribe those drugs as well as the drugs Imitrex, Lotronex, Flovent and Valtrex.
“GSK's sales force bribed physicians to prescribe GSK products using every imaginable form of high priced entertainment, from Hawaiian vacations to paying doctors millions of dollars to go on speaking tours to a European pheasant hunt to tickets to Madonna concerts, and this is just to name a few,” said Carmin M. Ortiz, U.S. attorney in Massachusetts.
Of the penalties, $1 billion covers criminal fines and forfeitures and $2 billion is for civil settlements with the federal government and the state governments of Massachusetts and Colorado.
While it is uncertain whether even an historic fine of $3 billion will begin to limit the culture of cozy dependency between the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession, one has to welcome this investigation and decision by the Justice Department.
If only they were as aggressive about the white collar crime on Wall Street that plunged the country, and many parts of the world economy into recession in 2008, that would truly be something to cheer about.
If GlaxoSmithKline considers $3 billion "just the cost of doing business" then there is little wonder about the high cost of prescription drugs. The consumer pays both ways, medically by using drugs for purposes for which they were not approved by the FDA, and financially for the "cost of doing business" as described by the companies in the sector.
Pushing the envelop, through over-aggressive marketing, abuses the relationship between drug company and prospective patient, not to mention the relationship between doctor and drug company. This issue must also be addressed by the medical schools, where there needs to be a course in medical practice that includes the business practices of the pharmaceutical companies, and the doctors' obligation to resist their seductions.
Even if there were a case of this magnitude every month for the next four  years, the incestuous relationship between doctors and drug companies would not be eliminated. There would still be doctors willing to accept what are literally "bribes" for using a company's products, considered "part of doing business" by those companies.
Is this another case of "too big to be monitored" and regulated...as is the case with the big banks?

Canadian Aid Workers among abducted in Kenya by Al Shabab now free

By Timothy Appleby, Globe and Mail, July 2, 2012
Aid workers like Steve Dennis know the risks they are taking when venturing into one of the most volatile regions of the world.

But nothing could prepare him for the events that unfolded this weekend.

On Monday, Mr. Dennis and three other kidnapped foreign-aid workers, including fellow Canadian Qurat-Ul-Ain Sadazai, were rescued in Somalia. The four aid workers are believed to be recuperating in Nairobi, and have made no decision about returning to work, a spokesman for their employer, the Norwegian Refugee Council, said.
In a 2009 op-ed piece he penned for The Globe and Mail, Mr. Dennis, 37, grappled with the challenges all aid workers face when confronted with abductions and violence.
“The troubles of the world will continue, and my contribution is to be engaged in bringing life-saving aid to individuals in desperate need,” he wrote. “I accept a degree of personal risk, because I can’t accept standing aside in the face of another person’s suffering.”
Monday’s rescue was not just a victory for the humanitarian assistance so desperately needed in the war-ravaged Horn of Africa. It was also, perhaps, a small sign of the times.
Since late last year, the fanatical Islamist militia believed responsible for the abduction at gunpoint of the four volunteers, the much-feared al-Shabab network, has sustained an erosion of popular support and a string of defeats in firefights.
Now, the freeing of their captives looks to be among the losses.
Traumatized but safe and in good spirits, the quartet were kidnapped in Kenya’s biggest refugee camp Friday and freed Monday after a dramatic pursuit into Somalia and a gun battle that saw one of the kidnappers shot dead as the other three fled.
Mr. Dennis of Richmond Hill, Ont., and Ms. Sadazai, 38, of Gatineau, Que., were assisting displaced Somalis in Dadaab, a chain of sprawling refugee camps 100 kilometres north of Nairobi, when they and two other foreign volunteers from Norway and the Philippines were kidnapped.
Stung by cross-border raids and pressured by the international scourge of Somali piracy, the Kenyan government and its allies have since October been mounting a fierce counteroffensive in support of the fragile Somali government of President Sheik Sharif Ahmed ,which al-Shabab seeks to dislodge.
And among the Kenyan government’s key allies is a militia, dominated by one of the region’s most powerful clans, the Ogaden, that took a key role in Monday’s rescue. Supported and trained by the Kenyan military, the Ras Kamboni group takes its name from a former Shabab stronghold on the Kenya-Somalia border.
Although the militia comprises only 300 to 400 members, its leader, Ahmed Madobe, has evolved into a significant player in the seemingly endless Somali conflict, said a Somali-Canadian journalist who has long tracked the travails of his homeland.
“He gets money from Ethiopia, he gets money from Kenya and he gets the collaboration of the Somali government,” said the journalist requesting that for safety considerations he be identified by his given name, Mohammed.
Al-Shabab did not claim responsibility for the failed kidnapping, but suspicion immediately fell on the heavily armed militia, which has long held sway in much of Somalia and beyond.
The NRC identified the four as Mr. Dennis; Ms. Sadazai, a Canadian of Pakistani origin with long experience in both her homeland and east Africa; Astrid Sehl of Norway, 33; and Glenn Coses, 40, of the Philippines.
“They’re all doing quite well considering the circumstances,” said Christian Jepson, the NRC spokesman in Nairobi, who has spoken to the four rescued aid workers but declined to say where they were staying. “They are in a safe place in Kenya.”
The four were kidnapped in Dadaab when they and three Kenyans travelling in a three-car convoy were attacked by a party of four gunmen who fatally shot one of the drivers and wounded the other two Kenyans.
One of the vehicles, carrying NRC Secretary-General Elisabeth Rasmusson sped away.
The four remaining captives were then driven away away in one of the vehicles, heading north toward Somalia, but the car was abandoned and the kidnappers and their prisoners crossed the unmarked border on foot.
The captors had only nut-based rations for the aid-workers. Mr. Dennis, who is allergic to peanuts, had to subsist on a meagre allocation of chocolate.
The journey was particularly arduous for Mr. Coses, who sustained a light bullet wound during the abduction.
In pursuit, however, were members of the Kenyan military together with another Somali militia, the pro-government group called Ras Kamboni, and they caught up with the kidnappers about 60 kilometres inside the Somali border, at a small village named Alu Gulay.
A gun battle ensued, and Ahmed Madobe, Ras Kamboni’s leader, told the Associated Press that his men killed one of the four kidnappers but that the other three escaped.
From the nearby town of Dhobley, another liberated al-Shabab redoubt now under Kenyan control, the four freed workers were then flown by military helicopter to Nairobi.
“We are happy, we are back, we are alive and we are happy this has ended,” a jubilant Mr. Sadazai was quoted as saying upon arriving in the Kenyan capital.
None of the four are ready to answer questions about their ordeal, said Eril Abild, NRC’s media co-ordinator in Oslo.
“The experience has been quite traumatic.”
Friday’s abduction at Dadaab, home to roughly 500,000 Somalis who have fled chaos in their homeland, was not the first of its kind.
Two Spanish women working for Doctors Without Borders were grabbed there in October and are still believed held by al-Shabab, an affiliate to al-Qaeda that over the past year has carried out numerous attacks on the shaky Somali government based in Mogadishu, the capital.
Since then, some aid workers at Dadaab have begun deploying bodyguards. In this instance, the four aid workers had planned to to hire armed guards but that the arrangement was cancelled at the last minute, on grounds that the extra security would attract attention.
Anti-Kenya hostility by al-Shabab has mounted since Kenya’s decision last year to send troops to Somalia to help hunt down the militia.
Ras Kamboni has been part of that effort, working alongside the Somali government, the Kenyan military and troops deployed by the African Union.
Canadian officials voiced relief at Monday’s rescue and said the High Commission in Nairobi would be providing support for the two rescued Canadians.
The elation, however, was diluted by the death of the Kenyan driver killed by the abductors, and the two others wounded.
“It is good news,” said Mr. Jepson, the NRC spokesman. “But we also have to remember we lost a colleague.”
Whether Mr. Dennis and Mr. Sadazai go back to Dadaab is moot, Mr. Jepson said.
“Not at this point, they will need some time to decide what they do next.”
With a long-time reputation for efficiency, the NRC is a well-known name in the field of refugee assistance, deploying 3,000 staff spread across 20 or so of the world’s neediest regions.
Ms. Sadazai is the NRC’s deputy regional director for the Horn of Africa, a post she has held since February. When the kidnapping took place, she was visiting the Dadaab refugee camp, along with other NRC officials.
Mr. Dennis joined the NRC last year, after a spell with Doctors Without Borders, and other humanitarian agencies.
"I accept a degree of personal risk because I can't accept standing aside in the face of another person's  suffering." (from above, by Mr. Dennis)
Should the motivation of people like Mr. Dennis, and his colleagues erode in the face of attacks like the one these workers have endured, not only will the Islamic militant terrorists have won another battle on the ground, where the suffering is horrific, but more aid workers will question their commitment to help those in dire need, like the half-million refugees in the camp where these workers helped.
Once again, it appears that the scourge of Islamic radicals has reared its ugly head, arms (both physical and military) and threatened the lives of courageous aid workers, in a refugee camp of the most needy human beings on the planet.
Will there be others of similar courage, conviction and commitment to consider joining in the fight to preserve the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of refugees in the Horn of Africa?

Wisconsin's disease is crossing the 49th border into Canada

By Jim Sanford, Globe and Mail, July 3, 2012
Jim Stanford is an economist with the Canadian Auto Workers union.

Caught in a punishing recession that just won’t end, many Americans must think they’ve been transported back to the 1930s. Meanwhile, U.S. labour laws are heading even further back in time. Emboldened Republicans in several states are trying to dismantle the last remaining features of New Deal labour law (as codified in the 1935 Wagner Act).

In the public sector, this crusade includes measures (such those in Wisconsin) that in essence ban unions and collective bargaining altogether. In the private sector, the favoured tool is the so-called right-to-work law. Pioneered by southern Dixiecrats who always hated the New Deal, these laws ban the union security and dues collection provisions that constitute the core of North American “majority unionism.” Workers make a majority decision (by signing cards or voting in an election) to form a union. The union is required to bargain on behalf of everyone in the bargaining unit. But without the power to collect dues, clearly the union cannot survive. Unions are thus effectively prohibited; indeed, in right-to-work states, private-sector unionism is virtually non-existent.

Fueled by economic desperation and beggar-thy-neighbour competition for investment, the practice has been creeping north – reaching Indiana earlier this year. In fact, just a day after Indiana enacted the law, Caterpillar closed its locomotive plant in London, Ont., shifting some production to that state. (Right-to-work wasn’t the only lure: huge subsidies and Buy American rules also helped.)
It was inevitable this back-to-the-future trend in U.S. labour law would spill over into Canada. Three provincial political parties have already proposed U.S.-style right-to-work laws for Canada. Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance and the Saskatchewan Party led the way. Last week, Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives jumped on the bandwagon, with leader Tim Hudak now endorsing right-to-work laws for that province.
For this agenda to be taken on by Conservatives in Canada’s industrial heartland is a remarkable (and, for unionists, worrisome) development. This is, after all, the party of Bill Davis, who actively promoted unions as a tool to reduce inequality and enhance the well-being of common folk. In contrast, Mr. Hudak’s policy paper blames labour laws (not corporate greed or flawed foreign investment rules) for the debacle in London, implicitly endorsing Caterpillar’s position that Canadians must cut their wages in half or face even more job losses.
Mr. Hudak’s paper rails against the “forced paycheque contributions” required under the famous Rand Formula. Invented by Supreme Court Justice Ivan Rand in 1946, it’s a compromise between the need for stable labour relations and individual objections to union membership. An individual doesn’t have to join a union. But they can’t free ride on the unions’ services, either. If they object to joining the union that represents them, they must pay an equivalent amount (for example, to a charity). The law is democratic (remember, no union exists without majority bargaining unit support) and has stabilized workplace relations (which were far more volatile before Rand). But new-right conservatives, backed by some employers, now yearn for a world without unions altogether. And this is how they plan to achieve it.
But why stop with union dues? Exactly the same logic applies to every other “forced paycheque contribution,” such as payroll deductions and income taxes. Yes, those taxes are set by elected governments (just like unions only exist with majority support). But surely individuals should be allowed to “opt out” – even if they still enjoy the services taxes pay for. Let’s make every tax voluntary, and see what happens.
Of course, public services as we know them would collapse entirely. And that is exactly what Tim Hudak and his allies want to happen to unions.
Let's not stop with Hudak, in Ontario.
Harper, in Ottawa, has demonstrated, through the intervention of the federal government in several labour disputes to overturn collective bargaining and to order workers back to work, "to preserve the Canadian economy," as their mantra puts it, the federal government, without formally advocating a policy of opposing "forced paycheque contributions," is removing 20,000 public service jobs, and gutting the collective bargaining process to the point where unions have become eunuchs, paper mache shells of their former selves.
In fact, many former Progressive Conservatives, like Bill Davis, would not recognize the new attitudes and policy approaches of the current federal government, on several fronts, including their attitude to workers' rights, and the union movement. One of the real questions is, "How long can current premiers hold back the tide of anti-labour attitudes and perceptions that is sweeping across the North American continent?"
Part-time workers, the preference for many employers, are offered no benefits, thereby reducing both costs and the commitment of the employer to train, to inspire and to lead those workers into full compliance with company goals, objectives and culture. And part-time workers are not likely to be members of any union or worker association, through which they would acquire some protection against the whims of the employer.
Retail employers have followed the lead of both McDonalds and WalMart, in generating employment of low pay, few if any benefits, and few if any incentives to do a better job. In fact, WalMart is so resistant to the union movement that it has fought court battles over mere threats of certification in Canada.
And by gutting the relationship between employer and worker, WalMart has led the way in the fight against the labour movement.
There is already a large wave of anti-union sentiment, among the Canadian media, government, and many corporations that threatens the future existence of many of the benefits enjoyed by all workers, the results of battles fought over the last century to enhance both productivity and workers' rights, including weekends off, that no one would wish to eliminate.

Hedges: Crazy Horse, model of resistance

By Chris Hedges, from truthdig.com, July 2, 2012

Native Americans’ resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans took two forms. One was violence. The other was accommodation. Neither worked. Their land was stolen, their communities were decimated, their women and children were gunned down and the environment was ravaged. There was no legal recourse. There was no justice. There never is for the oppressed. And as we face similar forces of predatory, unchecked corporate power intent on ruthless exploitation and stripping us of legal and physical protection, we must confront how we will respond.
The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite. They dismiss calls for equitable distribution as unnecessary. They say that all will soon share in the “expanding” wealth, which in fact is swiftly diminishing. And as the whole demented project unravels, the elites flee like roaches to their sanctuaries. At the very end, it all will come down like a house of cards.
Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality. Societies strain harder and harder to sustain the decadent opulence of the ruling class, even as it destroys the foundations of productivity and wealth. Karl Marx was correct when he called unregulated capitalism “a machine for demolishing limits.” This failure to impose limits cannibalizes natural resources and human communities. This time, the difference is that when we go the whole planet will go with us. Catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Arctic ice is in terminal decline. There will soon be so much heat trapped in the atmosphere that any attempt to scale back carbon emissions will make no difference. Droughts. Floods. Heat waves. Killer hurricanes and tornados. Power outages. Freak weather. Rising sea levels. Crop destruction. Food shortages. Plagues.
ExxonMobil, BP and the coal and natural gas companies—like the colonial buffalo hunters who left thousands of carcasses rotting in the sun after stripping away the hides, and in some cases carrying away only the tongues—will never impose rational limits on themselves. They will exploit, like the hustlers before them who eliminated the animals that sustained the native peoples of the Great Plains, until there is nothing left to exploit. Collective suicide is never factored into quarterly profit reports. Forget all those virtuous words they taught you in school about our system of government. The real words to describe American power are “plunder,” “fraud,” “criminality,” “deceit,” “murder” and “repression.”
Those native communities that were most accommodating to the European colonists, such as the peaceful California tribes—the Chilulas, Chimarikos, Urebures, Nipewais and Alonas, along with a hundred other bands—were the first to be destroyed. And while I do not advocate violence, indeed will seek every way to avoid it, I have no intention of accommodating corporate power whether it hides behind the mask of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that resistance may ultimately be in vain. Yet to resist is to say something about us as human beings. It keeps alive the possibility of hope, even as all empirical evidence points to inevitable destruction. It makes victory, however remote, possible. And it makes life a little more difficult for the ruling class, which satisfies the very human emotion of vengeance.
“Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power,” wrote the philosopher John Locke, “they put themselves into a state of war with the people who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.”
The European colonists signed, and ignored, some 400 treaties with native tribes. They enticed the native leaders into accords, always to seize land, and then repeated the betrayal again and again and again until there was nothing left to steal. Chiefs such as Black Kettle who believed the white men did not fare much better than those who did not. Black Kettle, who outside his lodge often flew a huge American flag given to him in Washington as a sign of friendship, was shot dead by soldiers of George Armstrong Custer in November 1868 along with his wife and more than 100 other Cheyenne in his encampment on the Washita River.
The white men “made us many promises, more than I can remember,” Chief Red Cloud said in old age, “but they kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it.”
Native societies, in which people redistributed wealth to gain respect, and in which those who hoarded were detested, upheld a communal ethic that had to be obliterated and replaced with the greed, ceaseless exploitation and cult of the self that fuel capitalist expansion. Lewis Henry Morgan in his book “League of the Iroquois,” written in 1851 after he lived among them, noted that the Iroquois’ “whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals. …” This was a way of relating to each other, as well as to the natural world, that was an anathema to the European colonizers. ...
There are few resistance figures in American history as noble as Crazy Horse. He led, long after he knew that ultimate defeat was inevitable, the most effective revolt on the plains, wiping out Custer and his men on the Little Big Horn. “Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was,” Ian Frazier writes in his book “Great Plains,” “because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn’t know what a jail looked like.” His “dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic,” Frazier writes. “He never met the President” and “never rode on a train, slept in a boarding house, ate at a table.” And “unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter.”

Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death on Sept. 5, 1877, after being tricked into walking toward the jail at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. The moment he understood the trap he pulled out a knife and fought back. Gen. Phil Sheridan had intended to ship Crazy Horse to the Dry Tortugas, a group of small islands in the Gulf of Mexico, where a U.S. Army garrison ran a prison with cells dug out of the coral. Crazy Horse, even when dying, refused to lie on the white man’s cot. He insisted on being placed on the floor. Armed soldiers stood by until he died. And when he breathed his last, Touch the Clouds, Crazy Horse’s seven-foot-tall Miniconjou friend, pointed to the blanket that covered the chief’s body and said, “This is the lodge of Crazy Horse.” His grieving parents buried Crazy Horse in an undisclosed location. Legend says that his bones turned to rocks and his joints to flint. His ferocity of spirit remains a guiding light for all who seek lives of defiance.
Learning to say, "No!" to the politics of fear, greed, exploitation, and the power of the 1%, at the expense of the 99%, takes more courage and confidence than most people either have or wish to expend on confrontation, conflict and the public disdain of being considered "too radical"... The truckloads of money and power, as demonstrated by the Koch brothers, and others in support of Governor Walker in Wisconsin, in his successful recall vote, are literally stampeding into the political super-pacs in support of the Republican candidate, Romney. The forces opposed to a world in which "might is right" and "money will buy the power of both might and right" are struggling to amass the war chest necessary to compete.
When the facts of climate change are denied, along with the facts of the research on criminal rehabilitation, and the facts of hunger, disease and poverty in the two countries that could be defined as among the most wealthy on the planet (Canada and the U.S.), by those who support such denials, in favour of the exploitation of natural resources and the incarceration of more prisoners, for longer terms, for example, without a serious public outcry, then perhaps Crazy Horse might be inspiration for the silent, angry and as-yet unmobilized majority, as Hedges sees it.
In the U.S. there were eight years of Bush Two, and in Canada, we have had nearly as long under Harper, both of whom were/are committed to the corporate, capitalist, exploitative, dangerous agenda. Following Bush Two, the Tea Party Republicans obstructed most of the legislative program of Obama, and in Canada, Harper moved from minority to majority government, thanks largely to the neo-con vote in Toronto and surrounding constituencies.
While groups in Canada such as "leadnow" and "rabble.ca" and The Council of Canadians, the Centre for Policy Alternatives, and the Broadbent Institute all take a more compassionate and more egalitarian and a somewhat resistant stance to the Harper government's positions, there does not appear to be either a Canadian equivalent to Crazy Horse, or even a Canadian clone of Chris Hedges, speaking articulately and with both force and commitment to the need for political awakening, political resistance and political confrontation of the kind it will take to drive Harper from 24 Sussex Avenue, the home of Canadian Prime Ministers. Whether Romney's cash flow will drown the Obama presidency is still an open question for November 2012.
In Mexico, one of the presidential candidates declared that students protesting the return of the PRI, the party he leads, after several years out of office, numbered only 131 and spoke only for themselves. His reductionism, of both their numbers and their impact generated significant street protests, many of those people proudly wearing signs indicating they were "Number 132"....by the thousands.
There is, even in secure, stable and relatively peaceful democratic countries like the U.S. and Canada, an untapped reservoir of strength and courage and conviction that, when the tipping point is reached, will take to the streets and will express a political agenda that will no longer comply with the governing policies and/or tactics of the rich and the powerful...And when that tipping point will be, can never be predicted, only anticipated along with the convergence of the multiple energies that such a tipping point will need for its articulation.

Sufi Shrines to Saints desecrated by Islamist Ansar Dine group in Mali

Adam Diarra, Reuters, in Globe and Mail, June 30, 2012
BAMAKO, Mali -Al-Qaeda-linked Mali Islamists armed with Kalashnikovs and pick-axes destroyed centuries-old mausoleums of saints in the UNESCO-listed city of Timbuktu on Saturday in front of shocked locals, witnesses said.

The Islamist Ansar Dine group backs strict Islamic law, and considers the shrines of the local Sufi version of Islam to be idolatrous. Sufi shrines have also been attacked by hardline Salafists in Egypt and Libya in the past year.

The attack came just days after UNESCO placed Timbuktu on its list of heritage sites in danger and will recall the 2001 dynamiting by the Taliban of two 6th-century statues of Buddha carved into a cliff in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan.
“They are armed and have surrounded the sites with pick-up trucks,” local journalist Yeya Tandina said by telephone. “The population is just looking on helplessly.”
Mr. Tandina and other witnesses said Ansar Dine had already destroyed the mausoleums of three local saints – Sidi Mahmoud, Sidi El Mokhtar and Alfa Moya – and at least seven tombs.
“The mausoleum doesn’t exist any more and the cemetery is as bare as a soccer pitch,” local teacher Abdoulaye Boulahi said of the Mahmoud burial place. “There’s about 30 of them breaking everything up with pick-axes and hoes. They’ve put their Kalashnikovs down by their side. These are shocking scenes for the people in Timbuktu.”
Locals said the attackers had threatened to destroy all of the 16 main mausoleum sites by the end of the day. UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova called for an immediate halt.
“There is no justification for such wanton destruction and I call on all parties engaged in the conflict to stop these terrible and irreversible acts,” she said in a statement. The sites date from Timbuktu’s Golden Age in the 16th century.
France’s Foreign Ministry condemned the attacks on what it called “a part of the soul of this prestigious Sahelian city”.
Ansar Dine has gained the upper hand over less well-armed Tuareg-led separatists since the two joined forces to rout government troops and seize control in April of the northern two-thirds of the inland West African state.
Located on an old Saharan trading route that saw salt from the Arab north exchanged for gold and slaves from black Africa to the south, Timbuktu blossomed in the 16th century as an Islamic seat of learning, home to priests, scribes and jurists.
Mali had in recent years sought to create a desert tourism industry around Timbuktu but even before April’s rebellion many tourists were being discouraged by a spate of kidnappings of Westerners in the region claimed by al-Qaeda-linked groups.
UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee said this week it had accepted the request of the Malian government to place Timbuktu on its list of endangered heritage sites.
“The Committee ... also asked Mali’s neighbours to do all in their power to prevent the trafficking in cultural objects from these sites,” it said of the risk of looting.
The rebel seizure of the north came as the southern capital, Bamako, was struggling with the aftermath of a March 22 coup.
Mali’s neighbours are seeking UN backing for a military intervention to stabilise the country but Security Council members say they need more details on the mission being planned.
It is neither safe nor sensible for a non-Muslim to harangue those strict Islamists who carried out these acts. Nevertheless, respect for the religion of another, or for the non-religion of another, seems to have been imprinted in the minds and hearts of many people over the last few centuries. Somehow, these strict Islamists missed that cultural upheaval part of the cultural curriculum.
And it is these same 'strict Islamists' who have wrought destruction and murder and mayhem around the world for the last couple of decades or more. Where I live, there are UNESCO World Heritage sites, which, if they were desecrated in any way by anyone would generate a public uproar, in the spirit of 'who do the perpetrators of these acts of desecration think they are?'
This is an act not only of civil disobedience, vandalism and terrorism but strikes at the central icons of a specific Islamic sect, by another self-proclaimed Islamic sect. And there is very little likelihood that the United Nations is going to send a military battalion to Mali to protect these artifacts.
Strict adherence to a set of words in a literal and ideological way is one clear manifestation of a kind of anal perfectionism that has too many people of all faiths in its grip. Anyone who considers such anal perfectionism, in the name of any god, as legitimate worship of that god, is smoking something I do not want to be near. And what's more, with these people there is no option to negotiate because they are so sanctimonious and self-righteous that they believe they are doing the will of their version of god.
 And this kind of misguided power, in the hands of the most frightened and most neurotic among us is doing great damage to our collective safety, security and sense of what it means to be a human being.
So we address these issues, generally, from a legal and a judicial and perhaps even a military perspective, since public order has been violated. However, no public response, on the part of any country, or any collective of countries, through the UN for example, is going to have any impact on those who hold these rigid, and righteous and religious beliefs. If anything, push-back will only deepen their resolve to carry out their acts of defiance in their misguided frenetic and almost insane intensity.
And such people exist in all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
And they are a scourge on the god of all faiths, and on all faith institutions. Their virulence and their hatred and contempt of 'other' can only be seen as sociopathic, even though our institutions, including our courts and our schools have no adequate ways to deal with their beliefs and their actions.
And sociopathic actions, when shared, will prompt other sociopathic reactions among groups or individuals who have a need to resist, as in the Breivik case in Oslo.
By Jonathan Kay, National Post, June 25, 2010
On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik set off a bomb outside a government building in Oslo, killing eight people. Hours later, he murdered 69 innocent activists and volunteers, most of them teenagers, at an island political retreat. It was the worst peace-time mass murder in Norwegian history. Though the court’s verdict in his criminal trial won’t be announced until next month, he is certain to become an icon of evil for generations.

But another aspect of Breivik’s crimes also deserves to be remembered: the humane and intelligent response they elicited among Norwegian authorities. Even in the most civilized of societies, our instinctive response to senseless slaughter is vilification and revenge. Instead, the court sent teams of neutral psychiatrists to interview Breivik, and find out how his mind works. Thanks to their findings, the prosecution has been arguing that Breivik is insane — and that he belongs in a (well-guarded) mental institution, not a prison.
Norwegian psychiatrists are split on Breivik’s precise diagnosis. In 2011, two experts interviewed him more than a dozen times, and produced a lengthy report concluding that he is a paranoid schizophrenic. Other experts rejected the schizoid diagnosis, and testified that Breivik merely has narcissistic personality disorder, autism-spectrum disorder, Tourette’s syndrome and (possibly) a form of paranoid psychosis.
There is no conclusive way to settle this argument because there is no laboratory test for any of these conditions. One thing seems certain though: Breivik was, in layman’s terms, nuts. And the story of his descent into madness makes for fascinating, if extremely dark, reading.
It is almost as if the global community is unpacking another 'frontier' of human experience, once contained in the attics of Victorian mansions now unleashed in public acts of violence, desecration and mayhem, under the banner of some god, or some principle or some ideology, or some need for power (Assad in Syria). Not only do we not have tests for many 'conditions'; we have only named some conditions themselves in the last decade or two.
And while the academic, scientific and so-called expert communities begin their investigative research processes, the world continues to listen, read and attempt to digest the stories of human acts that seem to stretch our common understanding of reasonable, responsible and modest human beings.
Have we, now, to face our collective Shadow, unleashed as it seems to be, at a time when even the unpacking and releasing the personal, individual Shadow is so verboten to so many, providing the unlikely and unexpected clash of two completely opposed forces...the individual resistance to anything unconscious like the Shadow, and the public release of portions of that Shadow as public acts of terror and violence?
If that hypothetical scenario has any credibility and relevance to the discussions in both public and private domains, then we would do well to back away from micro-managing these events, and begin to look at how each of us participates in the culture that represses the true and full expression of human emotions. Not that emotionally-based actions are not and cannot be illegal. Of course they can. However, our capacity to hold and to restrain and to control public acts of violence will not be sufficient as these incidents, wherever and whenever they occur, demand our immediate response.
We would do well to begin to consider such acts as part of a broader landscape, of which we are all a part.