Ironies of History in Real Time

The rhetoric coming from mainstream liberals and conservatives is as troubling as the riot on Capitol Hill on January 6. They are calling it an insurrection, an attempted coup d’état, an attack on the sacred temple of democracy (what, democracy is a religion now?). If it was and insurrection, it was badly planned, if a coup, where were the tanks and troops?

It was none of those things. We see that now – a grand revolution was called for January 17 – Bootlegger Day in the US and a reminder, I suppose, of the first revolution of 1776. But no one came.

What happened at the Capitol was a riot – a riot of people fueled by conspiracy theories and egged on by their President who has used them to carry his own grievances. On January 6^th thousands of Americans (not traitors, Americans) expressed their anger at being deleted from the American Dream.

Yes, there were a number of groups prepared to do real damage and, if they got the chance, maybe take prisoners. And yes, on display were misogyny and racism and jingo patriotism. But America (and Canada) have those same fault lines. It’s just that these guys wear on their sleeves and tattooed on their bodies what we prefer not to confess, even to ourselves. We Canadians prefer to hide our misogyny and our racism among a variety of laws and practices. We are not as raw as the rioters; we are more systematic.

The Capitol rioters are not alone. A look at how the country voted tells you that – nearly 74 million Americans wanted President Trump back in the white House. Can they all be wrong?

The post election Senate seat runoff in Georgia was a vote for whose America will prevail. Rural Georgia voted for Trump’s. Urban Georgia voted against. But it was a nail-biter down to the last ballot.

The Capitol rioters are not wrong. They have been pushed to the sidelines of the neoliberal economy that has manufactured so much inequality there, and here. Injured on the job and in despair for their fortunes, they are dying from that other epidemic – opioid addiction.

Look at Trump’s last tweet of the day on January 6: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”

The Democrats and mainstream media harp on the first part, but they ignore the second part. American patriots have been badly and unfairly treated. Working class income has not made any substantial gains since the 1980s when Ronald Reagan pretended tax breaks for the rich would trickle down to the hoi polloi.

Bill Clinton’s reforms of social programs essentially cut people from the welfare roles – something Joe Biden voted for. And his free trade agreements encouraged manufacturing to move offshore.

The only thing that’s still ‘Made in America’ is a growing income gap. So a plague on both their houses. At least Trump said he loved them.

Now look at the guy, the so-called “QAnon Shaman,” with the buffalo horns and the racist tattoo on his chest screaming “Freedom!” into the Senate chamber emptied of its lawmakers. Can there be a clearer image of frustration and irony and impotence?

His costume speaks for him and it talks of loss. The American buffalo horns – horns are an old symbol for power, but the near extinction of the plains bison nearly extinguished First Nations in the US and Canada. He is a Hollywood idea of medicine men, who themselves watched over the displacement and marginalization of their people. His flag is a sacred staff, a spear-tipped battle banner (yet neither bloodied nor honoured). The bullhorn is to be heard (and yet he is not).

If they feel displaced, it’s because they are – hence they displaced the lawmakers. If they feel tread on, it’s because they are – hence all the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags. If they feel they’re on the losing end of a lost cause, they are – hence the battle flags of the Confederacy.

This is not an apology for the chaos on the Hill or for the damage it did to people and property. It is a warning that we not dismiss it, that we see the ironies of history in real time.

As for the militants who stormed into the Capitol, well their impotent insurrection was a failed resurrection of the old idea that “all men are created equal” – except for Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Aboriginals, Jews and women. This is the real American exceptionalism. If the riot was treasonous, it was treason against how mainstream America wants to see the nation – a land of opportunity, equality, inclusivity, and democracy. Except it isn’t.

“The second revolution begins today.”

Chris Hill, leader the Georgia-based III% Security Force
(Marine veteran) in LA Times, 6 January 2021

References

‘Second revolution begins’: Armed right-wing groups celebrate Capitol attack  https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-01-06/the-second-revolution-begins-today-armed-right-wing-groups-celebrate-attack-on-capitol

It is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the size of the crowd that stormed Capitol Hill https://theconversation.com/it-is-difficult-if-not-impossible-to-estimate-the-size-of-the-crowd-that-stormed-capitol-hill-152889

The Capitol Siege: The Arrested And Their Stories https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965472049/the-capitol-siege-the-arrested-and-their-stories

Capitol riot arrests: See who’s been charged across the US. https://www.usatoday.com/storytelling/capitol-riot-mob-arrests/

2021 storming of the United States Capitol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol

The Trump Tax Cut Wasn’t Just for the Rich https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-27/the-trump-tax-cut-wasn-t-just-for-the-rich

Biden’s Win Shows Rural-Urban Divide Has Grown Since 2016 https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/934631994/bidens-win-shows-rural-urban-divide-has-grown-since-2016

Trump’s pardon of Lil Wayne said to be the breaking point for ‘QAnon Shaman’ in new court documents filled with bizarre anecdotes https://www.businessinsider.com/new-court-records-detail-qanon-shamans-life-before-and-after-arrest

America’s Other Epidemic https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/05/nikki-king-opioid-treatment-program/609085/

The Opioid Crisis comes to the Workplace https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/workers-dying-overdoses/549008/

All Hollowed Out – The lonely poverty of America’s white working class https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-working-class-poverty/424341/

The Officers Danced at a Black Lives Matter Rally. Then They Stormed the Capitol.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/us/rocky-mount-capitol-riot-black-lives-matter.html
Excerpt … “The old order is starting to crack. Demographics are shifting. Young people are marching. Franklin County has made progress too: In December, it got its first Black school superintendent. In February, a departing member of the Town Council was replaced by an African-American man. This month, Ms. Craighead, now 30, announced a run for a seat in Virginia’s Statehouse.
But many in the county fervently believe that the election was stolen. Ms. Blue sees that as another Lost Cause narrative. White people, she said, are mourning more than just an election. They believe they are losing the right to determine what version of America is out there in the world. And that, she said, has never gone well for Black people in Franklin County.”

Under the Cover of COVID

David McLaren

Everyone is, quite rightly, focused on putting the pandemic behind us. That’s the first priority but, we should not ignore what our governments are doing in other areas of public concern. Under the cover of COVID, the conservative government of Ontario is pushing a regressive agenda that is harming workers, the poor and the environment. Premier Doug Ford’s agenda seems to be to weave a conservative ideology into the fabric of Ontario that will take more than a Liberal government to unravel.

The following short essays were published in local and regional newspapers in Ontario over the course of the past year. They provide a picture of the extent of the Ford government’s reworking of the province’s society.

From Bully to Statesman and Back … August 2020

Premier Doug Ford has gone from big blue bully to statesman-like status thanks to his deft handling of the COVID crisis in its early days. (Of course it helps if you actually listen to what public health professionals are telling you – unlike the Great Orange Orc south of us).

In front of the cameras, Mr Ford guides us through the stages of reopening and hails frontline health care workers as heroes. But behind the cameras, and under the cover of COVID, the Tories are privatizing health and treating its workers as zeros.

Here’s what they’re doing …

Bill 175 (now law as the Connecting People to Home and Community Care Act, 2020) opens the door to even more privatization of home care because it puts decisions on care into the hands of the new Ontario Health Teams, which themselves include for-profit health care providers. This could well impact the care Personal Service Workers are able to provide within long term care facilities.

We now know the real cost of privatizing long-term care. The Canadian military’s report on the disasters in nursing homes was the tip of a much larger iceberg. Most of the homes with the highest COVID case and death rates are privately owned. In Ontario, private, for-profit facilities have 54% of the beds but 73% of fatalities. Public homes have 20% of beds but only 6% of deaths.

A June 2020 report by the Royal Society of Canada reveals that Canada has by far the highest death rate in nursing homes – 81% to 66% in Spain and 31% in the US. It’s no secret that privately run homes are known for under staffing, skimping on supplies (like personal protection for workers), and poor protocols for containing outbreaks of disease. 

Among privately run homes, those operated by chains are the worst (and also the most profitable). For example, Extendicare, which owns 69 long term care and retirement homes in Canada and contracts its management services to 53 others, made over $1 billion in 2019.

But it spent only $300,000 of its own money combatting COVID-19 outbreaks in its homes. Another $400,000 came from Ontario for pandemic aid. Yet, even in the midst of the pandemic, the corporation was able to send some $10 million in dividends to its shareholders.

By December 2020 Extendicare and Sienna Senior Living had both received $157 million in COVID-19 aid from government with more to come from Ontario. They also paid $74 million to shareholders.

By the end of May 2020, 80 people had died in Extendicare facilities due to COVID-19. By December, the death toll was 153. As of December, 329 residents and staff have died at Sienna homes.

By the way, it was the Tories under Mike Harris, that expanded the reach of private corporations into long-term care in Ontario, and axed many of the regulations that maintained standards of care in those homes. Mr Harris is now Chair of the Board of Chartwell, a privately run chain of retirement and nursing homes.

Mr Ford promised an investigation of the long-term care industry and its role during the pandemic, but its terms of reference are a long way from the kind of public inquiry this scandal cries out for. Instead, it will be a back-room kind of investigation with hearings in private, documentation withheld from the public, and no recommendations for improvement.

Normally, citizens would have recourse to the courts to sue for damages caused by mismanagement of the pandemic and bring failings into the light of day. However Mr Ford’s Bill 161 may frustrate that.

Bill 161 (the Smarter and Stronger Justice Act, 2020) passed into law on July 8, 2020, the same day that Bill 175 became law. Bill 161 makes justice neither smarter nor stronger. For example, it reduces the ability of Ontario’s legal aid system to provide advice and services which, combined with dramatic cuts in funding, disadvantages those who need these services most.

Bill 161 also imports certain tests from the American system that, with other measures, will make it much harder for citizens to launch class action suits, especially against the Province and corporations like private long-term care companies.  All this is bad enough, but the real insult comes with the miserly one per cent raise the Premier is giving to the “heroic” nurses who are standing between us and the pandemic.

REFERENCES

Bill 175 – Connecting People to Home and Community Care Act, 2020

• https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/home-care-bill-debate-northeast-1.5624534
• https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-42/session-1/bill-175
• https://www.ona.org/about-bill-175/ (Ontario Nurses Assoc)
• https://www.federalretirees.ca/en/news-views/news-listing/july/ontario-bill-175-learn-more (federal retirees’ analysis)
• https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/military-report-ontario-long-term-care-coronavirus_ca_5ecd537ec5b6f19ce0c0591c (Report of the military)

Analyses of LTC facilities

• https://www.tvo.org/article/how-covid-19-has-exposed-the-perils-of-for-profit-seniors-housing
• https://rsc-src.ca/en/restoring-trust-covid-19-and-future-long-term-care
• http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6928480-OP-LASER-JTFC-Observations-in-LTCF-in-On.html (Report of Canadian military)
• https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-dec-10-2020-1.5834678/need-to-walk-before-we-can-run-with-vaccine-rollout-says-pfizer-canada-president-1.5834685 (Pfizer’s vaccine and its allergic reactions)
• (The Current 12 December 2020 – Revera’s ‘inquiry’ into LTC & COVID)

Extendicare & Sienna

• https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/extendicare-coronavirus-investor-payout-jagmeet-singh_ca_5ee2931ac5b62d56fb4d99fa
• https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/big-spend-long-term-care-aid-dividends-1.5832941

Mike Harris

• https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/council-canadians-blog/2020/06/former-ontario-premier-mike-harris-raking-profits-long

Terms for Ontario’s LTC Commission

• https://www.thestar.com/politics/provincial/2020/07/29/terms-for-ontarios-commission-on-nursing-homes-prompt-renewed-calls-for-public-inquiry.html

Bill 161 – Smarter and Stronger Justice Act, 2020

• https://cela.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/CELA-brief-Bill-161-June-5-2020.pdf (Canadian Environmental Law Assoc brief)
• https://www.osgoode.yorku.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Bill-161-Brief-March-6-1.pdf (Brief from Osgoode Hall Law)
• https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/ontario-class-actions-bill-161-coronavirus_ca_5eea71b1c5b6d28ea6cac9cf (in the news)

Nurses

• https://twitter.com/fordnation/status/1125839023388471297 (Doug Ford on Twitter: “Nurses are heroes”)
• https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-nurses-pay-increase-ona-covid-doug-ford-1.5607068 (1% pay increase a “slap in the face” – ONA)

Bill 124 – Protecting a Sustainable Public Sector for Future Generations Act, 2019. Capped public sector wage increases at 1% a year for 3 years.

• https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-42/session-1/bill-124
• https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/06/12/2047577/0/en/Ford-Government-should-immediately-repeal-Bill-124-after-Manitoba-Court-strikes-down-similar-wage-restraint-legislation-as-unconstitutional-says-Ontario-Federation-of-Labour.html
• https://www.hrreporter.com/labour/news/challenging-ontarios-bill-124/326949

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Renters Beware … September 2020

The last time I wrote one of things, it was about how we really need a public inquiry into why so many COVID deaths have occurred in private long term care homes and how Premier Ford has short-circuited independent investigation. Four times more people have died in privately-run homes than those run by municipalities.

Now Mike Harris’ Chartwell Homes (he’s Chair of the  Board) is planning to waive the 14-day isolation requirement for new residents to its retirement facilities. But some of its buildings also house long term care nursing beds. Apparently, Chartwell is losing money due to COVID and this is to attract more customers.

Between millennials partying like there’s no tomorrow and private nursing home execs hawking their services, this pandemic is going to be with us for a while.

But there are other things going on under the cover of COVID.

The Tories passed a law affecting renters in July 2020. In true bureaucratic doublespeak, the Protecting Tenants and Strengthening Community Housing Act does neither. Here’s what it does do …

• Landlords can give tenants a take-it-or-leave-it repayment plan to catch up on arrears. If you can’t repay it, you could be evicted without a hearing. You have only ten days to file a motion to set aside an eviction order and request a hearing at the Landlord and Tenant Board.
• Landlords now have 12 months to bring former tenants to the Landlord and Tenant Board for damages or arrears. The Board assumes the landlord will notify the tenant – which may or may not happen. But if you don’t attend, the Board will issue an Order against you.
• Tenants can still talk about issues that concern them at the Board, such as the lack of needed repairs. But you are now required to provide written notice to your landlord if you plan to do so.
• If a tenant learns that a rent increase is illegal, they can appeal the increase to the Landlord and Tenant Board for a period of up to 12 months. After that, you’re stuck with the new rent.

The new law comes into effect just as Ontario’s ban on evictions ends. There is a huge backlog of notices at the Landlord and Tenant Board that the Board is now beginning to send out.

The changes require tenants to be legally savvy or to get legal representation. So if you’re in, or about to get into a dispute with your landlord, you might want to seek advice from your friendly neighbourhood law office like the Grey Bruce Community Legal Clinic in Owen Sound.

Legal aid clinics are starting to get more requests for advice on housing issues, including evictions. But the Ford government has diminished community legal services with its Smarter and Stronger Justice Act (another triumph of doublespeak). Clinic budgets were cut and their services constrained.

The homeless tents are already going up in Toronto parks. Expect to see more of them before winter sets in.

REFERENCES

Four times more people have died in privately-run homes than those run by municipalities: https://www.thestar.com/business/2020/05/08/for-profit-nursing-homes-have-four-times-as-many-covid-19-deaths-as-city-run-homes-star-analysis-finds.html

Chartwell wants to waive 14-day quarantine for new residents https://www.thestar.com/business/2020/09/15/canadas-largest-private-retirement-home-operator-wants-to-stop-quarantining-new-residents-but-experts-say-that-could-put-seniors-at-risk.html

Mike Harris’ involvement with private long term care:
https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/council-canadians-blog/2020/06/former-ontario-premier-mike-harris-raking-profits-long

Protecting Tenants and Strengthening Community Housing Act:
https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-42/session-1/bill-184

Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario brief on Protecting Tenants and Strengthening Community Housing Act:
https://www.acto.ca/5-bill-184-changes-to-the-law/

Smarter and Stronger Justice Act: https://www.ola.org/sites/default/files/node-files/bill/document/pdf/2019/2019-12/b161_e.pdf

Ontario government reduces (by one-fifth) the massive cut to legal aid it had planned: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/ontario-walks-back-legal-aid-cuts_ca_5deec18ae4b00563b8563535    

Osgoode brief on Smarter and Stronger Justice Act:
https://www.osgoode.yorku.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Bill-161-Brief-March-6-1.pdf

Canadian Environmental Law Association brief opposing Smarter and Stronger Justice Act:
https://cela.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/CELA-brief-Bill-161-June-5-2020.pdf

Law Commission of Ontario to Attorney General Doug Downey opposing Ontario’s changes to justice: https://www.lco-cdo.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/LCO-Letter-re-Bill-161-Class-Actions-Final-Jan-22-2020.pdf\

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Cuts to Environmental Assessment …. October 2020

In previous articles that I call ‘Under the Cover of COVID,’ I outlined how Mr Ford’s legislative agenda will let private, for-profit nursing homes off the hook for their failure to contain COVID. The Conservatives are restricting the release of information in any investigation into pandemic deaths in private long-term homes. And, by changing the rules for class action suits, the Orwellian named Smarter and Stronger Justice Act restricts people’s access to legal redress for the loss of loved ones in those homes. I’ve also looked at how Mr Ford is making it harder for folks to keep from losing their homes by making the eviction process easier for landlords and by cutting back on the funding and scope of legal aid clinics.

This piece deals with the Conservatives’ deregulation of environmental safeguards.

A little over a year ago Mr Ford pushed through the Ontario legislature $300 million in cuts to the Ministry of the Environment, including projects funded by Ontario’s now axed cap and trade program. Killing this carbon pricing system cost us billions of dollars in revenue and cancelling green projects cost us millions more in breach of contract defaults.

Killing cap and trade without consultation with the public meant that Mr Ford also violated the law – specifically the Environmental Bill of Rights which requires governments to publicly post changes to environmental protection regulations and legislation.

Then, with his More Homes More Choice Act (an omnibus bill passed in 2019), Mr Ford gutted protection for endangered species. Among its highlights is a weakening of science-based decision making, zero consultation with First Nations, and the fabulous notion that species are not endangered in Ontario if they are thriving in Wisconsin – never mind the ecological importance they might serve here.

The same legislation weakened requirements for Environmental Assessments in order to cut (the government says) “red tape” that encumbers development. Where have we heard that before? From Mike Harris, whose own red tape cutting helped brew up the Walkerton water tragedy of May 2000.

Then, in July 2020, Mr Ford weakened requirements for environmental assessments again, in another piece of omnibus legislation – the so-called COVID economic recovery plan (Bill 197). Under the cover of COVID, this law removes many projects from environmental scrutiny and takes decisions for approval out of the hands of local people and puts them more securely in the hands of the Provincial Government.

Mr Ford has also failed to persuade First Nations that his changes to environmental law will preserve the Honour of the Crown. In other words, Ontario chiefs say the new rules will run roughshod over constitutionally protected aboriginal and treaty rights. They are no substitute for the kind of consultation required of governments to ensure proposed projects (such as mining in the Ring of Fire zone) do not harm the practice of those rights.

Over 130 First Nations and (separately) a number of environmental groups are suing Ontario for, once again, breaking the law that obliges the government to consult with the public before passing legislation that impacts the environment.

And it looks as though the Conservative government’s sharp dealing with First Nations will land it in court for judicial review on another matter. Three First Nations north of Lake Superior are suing the Province over its plans to allow the harvest of a patch of boreal forest four times the size of PEI. The impact on the First Nations’ aboriginal and Treaty 9 rights could be severe and yet they say the Province’s consultations with them were a sham. Mr Ford might be dealing with COVID in a competent manner, but that other crisis – the climate crisis – is being allowed to plough unchecked through Ontario’s environmental safe-guards.

REFERENCES

Law Commission of Ontario to Attorney General Doug Downey opposing Ontario’s changes to justice: https://www.lco-cdo.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/LCO-Letter-re-Bill-161-Class-Actions-Final-Jan-22-2020.pdf

Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario brief on Protecting Tenants and Strengthening Community Housing Act: https://www.acto.ca/5-bill-184-changes-to-the-law/

Ford government axes oversight of the environment – the Office of the Environmental Commissioner. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/01/04/news/ontario-environment-watchdogs-say-doug-ford-just-gutted-law-protects-your-rights

Ford government kills cap & trade:
http://theconversation.com/the-doug-ford-doctrine-short-term-gain-for-long-term-pain-116131

Cutting protection for species at risk:
https://theconversation.com/doug-ford-is-clear-cutting-ontarios-environmental-laws-119624

Premier Ford breaks the law:
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/ontario-broke-law-cap-trade-court-rules_ca_5da0b4c9e4b02c9da049cc8d

Ford cuts environmental assessments again (July 2020): https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/07/08/news/environmental-assessments-speed-under-doug-fords-omnibus-covid-19-recovery-bill

Ford government’s COVID-19 economic recovery bill broke the law, auditor general says https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/07/21/news/ford-governments-proposed-environmental-assessment-changes-are-potentially-illegal

Environmental groups take Ford government to court over COVID-19 recovery Bill 197: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/08/10/news/environmental-groups-take-ford-government-court-over-covid-19-recovery-bill

Growing number of First Nations raise concerns about Doug Ford’s omnibus Bill 197: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/08/19/news/growing-number-first-nations-raise-concerns-about-doug-fords-omnibus-bill

COO – a Coalition of 133 First Nations planning legal challenge of Ford’s Bill 197: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/08/28/news/coalition-133-first-nations-planning-legal-challenge-fords-bill-197

Three FNs sue Ford government over lack of consultation on forestry plans: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/09/22/news/three-first-nations-file-suit-against-ford-government-over-lack-consultation

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Killing off teachers’ seniority …. October 2020

My Mom was the first Special Ed teacher hired by the Peel Board of Education. Just about every summer she spent in Toronto taking classes to upgrade her qualifications. By the time she retired, the trail she blazed in education was well-recognized and appreciated.

She would not appreciate (as MPP Bill Walker implied in a recent tweet) that the Ontario Government of today would not consider her the best person to teach her classes.

The Ford Government is axing Regulation 274 of the Education Act. That Reg was part of a negotiated collective agreement between teachers and the government. It recognized the value of experience and training by obliging principals to hire from a roster of Occasional Teachers who have taught in their schools. And when a permanent teaching position opened up, that was the list the school board turned to.

The rationale for axing the Reg is that, partly because of COVID, school boards need to act swiftly to hire the best qualified teachers to fill vacant temporary or permanent spots on their staffs. This implies (as Bill Walker’s tweet does) that teachers with seniority – and experience and extra training – are not the best qualified.

But a look at the regulation itself reveals a process that is fair, efficient and a good way to keep on hand a list of qualified teachers with experience in local schools.

Before Reg 274 was negotiated and put in place, principals could hire anyone they wanted – and they did. Favourite nephews, best friends, supply teachers from another board, sometimes people without teaching certificates all found their way into the classroom. Not exactly the best way to ensure quality education.

What incentives would newly minted teachers have to stay in the area if they didn’t have some assurance they would be tapped to fill in on contract or as a supply teacher? The roster system of Reg 274 ensured they would be called upon for temporary work and for interviews if a permanent position opened up.

So let’s be honest. Revoking seniority for occasional teachers and the roster system is not designed to be a response to COVID. It will not make hiring new teachers more efficient and it will not produce better quality education for our kids. No, axing Reg 274 is, at best, a cost-cutting measure since school boards can pay less for less experienced teachers. It is also another conservative shot at unions since it cancels something that was the product of negotiations toward a collective agreement.

REFERENCES

Regulation 274 of the Ontario Education Act (download here):
https://www.ontario.ca/laws/regulation/120274/v6

Ontario’s Statement on its revocation of Reg 274:
https://news.ontario.ca/en/statement/58822/ontario-ensures-teaching-jobs-go-to-the-best-educators#topics

CCPA comment on Reg 274 with notes on the situation before it was enacted:
https://behindthenumbers.ca/2019/02/15/seniority-and-occasional-teacher-qualifications-understanding-regulation-274/

Tweet from Bruce Grey Owen Sound MPP (@billwalkermpp) Oct 15/20:
“We are ensuring that your child has the best educator at the front of class. We stand with parents who want merit, qualification, and diversity to come ahead of seniority.”

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Ontario is letting COVID off the leash …. November 2020

It looks like Doug Ford isn’t coping with COVID as well as we thought he was when the first wave of the virus tore through the Province. Now his concern for Ontario’s economy seems to be trumping (pun intended) his concern for people. Witness, for example, the weak thresholds for his new colour-coded closures – thresholds that were never endorsed by public health. And while other provinces used the lull over the summer to ramp up health care staffing, Ontario did not.

Compared to the rest of the world, Canada (and therefore Ontario since we seem to be the nation’s super spreader) is not doing as well as China, or Vietnam, or Australia or New Zealand or any number of African countries. Comparing ourselves to the terror to the south of us is not an accurate measure of our COVID containment.

Cases are spiking again in long-term care homes – especially those run by private corporations. In the spring, Canada had by far the highest death rate in nursing homes – 81% to 66% in Spain and 31% in the US. For-profit homes own about 60% of LTC beds in Ontario but accounted for over 70% of COVID-related deaths.

Mr Ford could have opened the can of worms that is Ontario’s LTC system to public scrutiny with an official inquiry. Instead he opted for a limited look with an investigation that asked polite questions behind closed doors.

He could have allowed folks who have lost loved ones in the pandemic to sue LTC homes in open court. That would prompt some serious changes.

Instead he has, under the cover of COVID legislation, restricted the grounds on which people can take these homes to court. Under the Supporting Ontario’s Recovery and Municipal Elections Act plaintiffs will now have to prove gross negligence – that a home did not act or even try to act in accord with public health guidelines.

That’s an almost impossible bar to reach in court. It requires proof not only of malfeasance but of maliciousness. But there’s more. The Act also wipes out all the COVID-related suits that have already been filed.

The rationale advanced by the government is that this was done to protect workers in the homes from litigation. This is nonsense. No one sues the workers in cases like this. For one thing, they have no money, their wages being so low. For another, it’s the owners of LTC homes that own responsibility – it’s their low staffing levels, their poor infection control practices, their skimping on supplies.

No, the new law is clearly meant to protect nursing home owners, shareholders and boards of directors … like Mike Harris, who is the Chairman of the Board of Chartwell. Chartwell is a real estate firm that owns some 200 retirement and LTC homes across Canada (23 in Ontario) and had revenues last year of just under $800 million. 85 people died in its homes from COVID in the spring.

When he was Premier, Mr Harris axed many of the regulations that were designed to keep residents safe. Mr Ford went further. In the fall of 2018 he eliminated most Resident Quality Inspections (RQIs) – down to 14 in 2019 from an average of 650 over the previous three years. 

RQIs were the most effective check on resident health and quality of care. They were done in addition to other inspections and were a comprehensive assessment of (for example) infection control and patient care.

Even scarier, a CBC investigation found that LTC homes averaged 7000 regulatory violations a year and 85% of homes were repeat offenders.

Private sector ideology is trumping (again, pun intended) public safety and people are paying the price.

REFERENCES

Ontario rejected its own public health agency’s advice when it launched its colour-coded plan for COVID-19 restrictions: 
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/11/11/ontario-rejected-its-own-public-health-agencys-advice-when-it-launched-its-colour-coded-plan-for-covid-19-restrictions.html

For-profit long-term-care homes once again seeing significantly worse outcomes in Ontario’s second wave, Star analysis finds:
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/11/13/residents-of-ontarios-for-profit-long-term-care-homes-experiencing-significantly-worse-covid-19-outcomes-in-cases-and-deaths.html

How COVID-19 has exposed the perils of for-profit seniors’ housing:
https://www.tvo.org/article/how-covid-19-has-exposed-the-perils-of-for-profit-seniors-housing

Chartwell’s overview of its LTC operations (May 2020):
https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/chartwell-provides-an-overview-of-its-ltc-operations-830146209.html

The latest COVID-19 data from Canada and around the world.Ontario is the worst jurisdiction in CA (in deaths/100k pop):
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/the-latest-covid-19-data-from-canada-and-around-the-world-check-here-for-updates-on-cases-and-deaths.html

Doug Ford’s government is making it almost impossible to sue long-term-care homes                       22 October 2020:
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2020/10/22/doug-fords-government-is-making-it-almost-impossible-to-sue-long-term-care-homes-good-thing-hes-protecting-covid-victims-families.html

Comprehensive nursing home inspections caught up to 5 times more violations. Why did Ontario cut them?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/long-term-care-inspections-violations-1.5737081

85% of Ont. nursing homes break the law repeatedly with almost no consequences, data analysis shows:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/marketplace/nursing-homes-abuse-ontario-seniors-laws-1.5770889

________________________________

With a Little Help for his Friends …. December 2020

Under the cover of COVID, Christmas came early this year for the friends of Doug Ford.

The owners and directors of Long Term Home corporations (including Mike Harris) are off the hook for liability for their well-documented shoddy operations during COVID.

Ford’s friend and funder Charles McVety will, somewhat magically, likely get his Christian College turned into a university.

His developer buddies will like Mr Ford’s new rules for Conservation Authorities whose authority is now much diminished.

And what did Santa Doug do to make all this happen? He stuffed the stockings hung by the chimney with care. Every one of these treats was snuck into omnibus bills designed to deal with the pandemic.

The legislation limiting peoples’ ability to sue LTC homes was stuffed into the Supporting Ontario’s Recovery and Municipal Elections Act. You now have to prove the home was not merely negligent, but ‘grossly’ negligent.

There’s plenty of evidence of negligence. Just ask the army. Or personal support workers who have come forward with tales of poor infection control, lack of personal protection equipment, low staffing levels and abysmal pay. But ‘gross negligence’ is harder to prove.

Those factors have contributed to horrible statistics: For-profit homes have logged ten times the deaths per bed as non-profit homes. Residents in for-profit homes are three times more likely to catch COVID and staff twice as likely – a record worse than European countries and even the US. 

Of course it may have helped that the LTC association lobbied the government hard in the months leading up to the passage of the Act. And no doubt lobbyists’ donations to Mr Ford’s party got the attention of MPPs. And that many of those donors used to work for the Tories.

The legislation for rebranding McVety’s Canadian Christian College as an accredited university was tucked into the stocking labelled Bill 213, an omnibus bill dealing with urgent pandemic matters. Schedule 2 of the Bill simply declares, much like a papal bull, that the college can now grant Bachelor-level degrees.

It doesn’t upgrade the academic qualifications of Mr McVety and his staff – which are questionable. It doesn’t elevate the low standards for graduates. And it doesn’t whitewash Mr McVety’s homophobic and racist speech. But it does give Mr McVety, a long-time supporter and funder of the Ontario PCs, what he wanted for Christmas.

Finally (for now at least) is legislation which practically eviscerates the ability of the Province’s conservation authorities (CAs) to regulate development to protect the environment. Schedule 6 does the damage and it’s buried in omnibus Bill 229, an act to implement the Conservatives’ 2020 pandemic budget.

The government spin is that it simply increases transparency of what CAs are up to. It does that, but it also expands the authority of the Minister to override decisions made by a CA. It narrows the authority and scope of what CAs can do to protect the environment. And it restricts the ability of CAs to act on things like flood control and protecting clean water sources.

Bill 229 (the Protect, Support and Recover from COVID-19 Act – I love the titles of these things) also has a bonus stocking stuffer. This one is for the logging industry. As the Canadian Environmental Law Association notes, Schedule 8 exempts them from prohibitions against destroying the habitat of endangered species. That covers logging operations on nearly two-thirds of the Province. 

Mr Grinch didn’t steal Christmas. He gave it to his friends.

REFERENCES

Doug Ford’s government is making it almost impossible to sue long-term-care homes:
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2020/10/22/doug-fords-government-is-making-it-almost-impossible-to-sue-long-term-care-homes-good-thing-hes-protecting-covid-victims-families.html

85% of Ont. nursing homes break the law repeatedly with almost no consequences, data analysis shows:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/marketplace/nursing-homes-abuse-ontario-seniors-laws-1.5770889

Inside Kennedy Lodge (a Revera home), The Scarborough Home Where 31 People Have Died Of COVID-19:
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/covid-care-home-deaths-kennedy-lodge-scarborough_ca_5fb43bd2c5b66cd4ad3faeb8

For-profit long-term-care homes once again seeing significantly worse outcomes in Ontario’s second wave, Star analysis finds:
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/11/13/residents-of-ontarios-for-profit-long-term-care-homes-experiencing-significantly-worse-covid-19-outcomes-in-cases-and-deaths.html

Ontarians Suffered ‘Agonizing’ Weeks While Nursing Home Group Hired Lobbyists:
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/holland-christian-homes-coronavirus-lobbyists_ca_5fc7f1b6c5b66bc57467044c?utm_hp_ref=ca-politics&ncid=newsltcahpmgpols

Ontario PCs Have Raked In $30K From Big Nursing Home Lobbyists:
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/ontario-nursing-home-lobbyists-pc-party-donations_ca_5fc53f95c5b63d1b770e8a4d

A plea from a Grey Bruce Personal Service Worker:
https://owensoundhub.org/letters/10220-psw-a-day-in-the-life.html

A little help for Charles McVety’s Canadian Christian College: https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2020/10/31/doug-ford-wants-to-give-university-status-to-a-school-run-by-a-homophobic-preacher-but-thats-only-half-the-story.html

McVety and his family borrow heavily from his Christian College charity: https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/2020/11/09/charles-mcvety-borrows-heavily-from-his-christian-college-charity-he-also-holds-a-political-iou-from-doug-ford.html

More on McVety from Ryan Brown (in BGOS): Walker’s Vote (for college) Propagates hate: https://owensoundhub.org/opinion/10584-walker-s-vote-propagates-hate.html … with an exchange of views: https://owensoundhub.org/opinion/10587-further-on-charles-mcvety.html

Bill 213: “Better for People, Smarter for Business Act, See Schedule 2.

Ford moving to permanently exempt logging industry from endangered species law in same Act:
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/11/13/news/doug-ford-permanently-exempt-logging-endangered-species-law

Brief of the Canadian Environmental Law Association on changes to Conservation Authorities in Bill 229, the Protect, Support and Recover from COVID-19 Act (Budget Measures), 2020:
https://cela.ca/bill-229-written-submission/. Links to CELA’s written submission here: https://cela.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/CELA-Bill-229-Schedules-6-and-8-Submission-to-Standing-Committee-Nov-2020-1.pdf Updated to 4 December 2020 to include Government’s additions to the Bill: https://cela.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/CELA-Analysis-SCFEA-Motion-Package-Bill-229-2.pdf

3 Essays on Government vs the People in the time of COVID-19

Happy May Day

May 1^st was May Day. In the Celtic calendar it’s a cross-quarter day – halfway between the vernal equinox on March 21^st and the summer solstice on June 21^st. From Greek and Roman times, it is a celebration of the return of Spring. It’s also International Workers Day.

May Day 2020 in the US should be remembered for the White House war on workers.

In four months, twice as many Americans have died from COVID-19 as were killed in the 19 years of the Vietnam War.

Hang on, you say. That working class people are dying at a higher rate than others doesn’t mean the White House is waging war against them. Well, I would answer, the boys in the trenches of Vietnam knew they were shooting at the North Vietnamese, but they must have noticed who was America’s cannon-fodder. It wasn’t Bill ‘Oxford U’ Clinton or Donald ‘Bone-spur’ Trump.

But back to the White House.

Trump’s various diversions – from blaming China to advocating chloroquine or sunlight or Mr Clean – work well for him. He serves up enough red herring to feed the multitude. The media is obliged to cover Presidential press conferences and to investigate all his claims. After all, they might be true. It keeps the media busy on wild goose chases and his opposition off balance.

As soon as they nail down one lie, Trump is on to the next. His dog-whistle to “liberate” Democratic states was brilliant. It woke up his Tea Partying white power troops who brought their Confederate flags and swastikas, jammed traffic and, in Michigan, openly carried their guns into the State legislature.

Not only did that distract from the terrible job he’s doing, but it turned the story away from class, and toward race: working class whites are ready to go back to work and to hell with COVID. Trump amplified that message by calling them what he called the Charlottetown yahoos: “These are very good people.”

That’ll help keep working whites from making common cause with working blacks, as Martin Luther King used to preach they should. Besides, blacks have their own problems – they are dying from COVID-19 at twice the rate of their proportion of the population.

But in reality, he’s throwing white workers under the bus along with blacks and Latinos. Trump and the Republicans want to get the economy going in time for the election (even as cases and deaths are rising). His relief programs are rigged against workers but overwhelmingly benefit corporations.

Canada’s tax break didn’t do much for workers either (Postmedia)

Republican antipathy for programs that support workers goes even deeper. They have long wanted to strip states of their ability to provide a social safety net funded by taxes. COVID-19 has already stretched state resources to the breaking point. But most are bound by law to balance their budgets.

Mitch has a solution.

Mitch McConnell (the Senate Republican majority leader) is pushing ahead with the Administration’s goal of changing the face of the federal judiciary from bipartisan to corporate conservative with a penchant for believing the President is beyond the reach of both Congress and the courts. He’s handing out judgeships like kewpie dolls at a carnival.

Hence the Administration’s call for states to declare bankruptcy. It’ll take a new law, but once in bankruptcy court, Mitch McConnell’s new judges can rule on who gets paid first. You can bet your last dime that won’t be workers and their state-funded pensions.

And the call for an early return to work? Among other things, that would foreclose on applications for unemployment insurance, a federal program. Over 30 million workers have applied for unemployment insurance and reopening the economy would force them back to work.

A quarter of US workers do not have paid sick leave or much in the way of health insurance but Trump also wants to cut the payroll tax that currently funds Social Security and Medicare. At the same time, he agrees with the corporate position that companies should not be held liable if their practices lead to workers catching COVID-19.

All this is not so much a grand conspiracy as it is Republicans acting quickly to turn what is surely a national calamity to political advantage by using the tools at hand – in this case Executive power, access to the media, judicial appointments and a rabid fan base.

In the world the Republicans are constructing out of the COVID-19 disaster, the first will come first and the last, last – if they don’t die off in the Great Cull.

Source: Conference Board of Canada

 

 

Race in the Time of COVID

In the fourth month of the time of COVID, in Louisville Kentucky, Breonna Taylor was shot by police as she lay sleeping. Her boyfriend was wakened by the ruckus of police busting down their door looking for drugs. He thought it was a home invasion and fired a bullet into a policeman’s leg. That triggered the hail of bullets that killed Ms Taylor.

Breonna Taylor was a decorated EMT

Trouble was, the cops were 10 miles off target – they were in the wrong house. The initial police report didn’t mention that. Nor did it mention that they had killed Ms Taylor. Or that she was a decorated Emergency Medical Technician serving on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.

What makes this story especially poignant is that it is largely black and brown people on those front lines. As a consequence, as recent epidemiological research shows, the virus is killing Latinos and blacks at rates higher than their representation in the population. In the case of African Americans, it’s more than twice (blacks make up 13% of the population but 27% of the dead).

For those who labour in ‘essential’ jobs, social distancing is not an option. Add the fact that precarious employment yields precarious pay and poor pay buys you poor nutrition, poor housing and poor health, and you’ve got another reason for the inequality of who’s dying.

Now, stir in 400 years of slavery and its toxic racist legacies, bake in a police helmet, et voilá – American pie.

Canadians are too smug when we look at the racial carnage in the States. We may not be hosting the brutal shooting gallery that’s America (although the families of Colton Boushie,  Chantel Moore, Jason Collins, Eishia Hudson, Kevin Andrews, and Rodney Levi might disagree), but we have nothing to crow about.

Chantel Moore (Tla-o-qui-aht/Nuu-chah-nulth) killed by police in Edmunston NB on a wellness check

A recent study by the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences shows neighbourhoods in Toronto where the virus is most active are those with lower incomes, poorer housing and greater concentrations of visible minorities.

It’s the same in Montreal where a collaborative mapping project shows the neighbourhood of Montreal North is the hardest hit area in the city. Here, incomes are low, unemployment is high, and half the population is of a visible minority. Many work in the health care industry and are bringing the virus home with them.

Also living in Montreal North are many of the “guardian angels”  lauded by Premier Legault. They are asylum seekers who, even as angels, have no guarantee of staying in Canada, unless they die of the virus.

As the Americans say, if white folk catch a cold, black folk get pneumonia.

There’s any number of ways to think about the role of race in COVID in America, including a cogent argument that there’s a ‘racial contract’ – an invisible codicil to the social contract we all buy into.

The  racial contract allows society to suspend the social contract for those who are not white. So it’s all right to suppress the vote of black people (as was done during Jim Crow flagrantly and now surreptitiously to combat so-called ‘voter fraud’), or to lynch black folk for the slightest perceived offence (flagrantly in Jim Crow years and under the cover of self-defence, or citizen’s arrest, or stand your ground, today).

Pushing for the re-opening of the economy is, in effect if not by design, exercising the racial contract with a COVID addendum that says, black and brown lives are expendable to the corporate well-being of the nation.

The animosity behind armed thugs in the legislature of Michigan and demonstrations by the bugaloo boys in Hawaiian shirts is fueled, at least in part, by white anger that their liberty is constrained just because some black and brown people are dying. It’s a violation of the racial contract – hence the Confederate flags flew alongside Don’t Tread on Me flags, and swastikas adorned ‘Arbeit macht frei’ signs.

Or maybe the social contract has been blown up. As Kimberly Jones put it in a bloody-minded tirade on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight …

“There’s a social contract that we all have. If you steal or I steal, then the person in authority comes in and they fix the situation. But the person who fixes the situation is killing us. So the social contract is broken. And if the social contract is broken, why the fuck do I give a shit about burnin’ the fuckin’ Football Hall of Fame, or about burnin’ the fuckin’ Target.”

So if the social contract no longer applies, then let’s look at the idea that whiteness is property, because it also applies to Canada. Whiteness is like a get-out-of-jail-free card á la carte blanche (literally). If you have whiteness, you are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (and a jury of your peers). If you do not, well, the end of the line starts at the back of the bus.

But then, some say Mr Trump is the first white President, well, except for Trump’s hero, Andrew Jackson (who owned 100 slaves and drove the tribes west of the Mississippi). Oh, and maybe Thomas Jefferson (who did not count his slaves amongst all the men who are created equal). Or James Polk (who wanted slavery extended to the west coast and stole Mexican Americans’ land). Then there was Woodrow Wilson (who purged the civil service of blacks and backed the KKK).

And, of course, Ronald Reagan whose Reaganomics impoverished black households and whose Anti-Drug Abuse Act decimated black families.

Which brings us back to Breonna Taylor.

 

 

 

The More Things Change …

In these days of COVID, there’s been a lot of talk about how things will change … or ought to change.

The New York Times ran a remarkable editorial in April as part of a series on ‘What America Needs’. It was as if America’s paper of record suddenly woke up and realized the country was not the America the Founders had intended. It reads like a Bernie Sanders stump speech – the part in which he rails against the inequalities of US society – before he gets to his solutions. Ironically, the New York Times has dumped Sanders in order to support Joe Who for the Democratic nomination.

And in the Toronto Star, Bob Rae and Mel Cappe offered their opinion on what Canada needs: a universal basic income, suggesting Canada’s COVID CERB is a good first step.

A universal basic income is not unlike what the English government enacted in its 1601 Poor Laws. Whatever the poor were able to scrape together was topped up by the parish to a living wage. Those Laws were amended in 1834, in the belly of the industrial revolution when being poor was your own fault. Poor folks were forced into workhouses and paid the same low wage as the most menial job in the land. It is perhaps not coincidence that slavery had been abolished in England and the Empire the year before.

The fact that some corporate leaders want a universal basic income should arouse our suspicions that, maybe, this is not the panacea we need. A universal basic income is a chance to get cheap labour without the guilt of not paying people enough to live on. Or perhaps they see it as an investment on the part of government in the business of Canada. But then, any subsidy for business is an ‘investment’ whereas any program to alleviate poverty is ‘welfare.’

Let’s not be fooled – a universal basic income will be a public subsidy for private profit unless the private sector is forced to pay a living wage.

So, is the pandemic an opportunity to create a more equitable society? Not if history is to be believed.

The Black Death of the Middle Ages actually concentrated wealth in the towns and cities. The plague might have opened the door to the Renaissance, but it also gave rise to mega-corporations and the global trade of European empires and a colonialism fueled by slavery. The new societies that emerged were not in any way more equal.

The Triangular Trade – a triumph of capital and government working hand-in-hand

The concentration of wealth that has occurred over the past 200 years has been well documented by Thomas Picketty and others. In the midst of the current pandemic that concentration is accelerating. The US Institute for Policy Studies shows that the combined wealth of billionaires in the US increased by $565 billion between March 18, 2020 and June 4^th. During this period over 40 million Americans applied for unemployment.

But it’s not just their big numbers and their bigger bottom lines. Corporations in America and Canada have their fingers on the scale of government too. The revolving door between Wall Street and the Fed is well known. And Mr Trump, after making the rich richer with tax breaks and COVID relief, moved to indemnify corporations from lawsuits for forcing employees back to work.

Never mind that some corporations – meat-packaging companies for example – were happily exporting their products during the time of COVID even as they became breeding grounds for the virus. (Meat processors in the US and Canada employ mostly brown and black people, so the racial contract rules).

Apparently slavery is now illegal, but poverty wages and precarious work are not.

It’s pretty clear that corporations have the means to influence public policy. I mean, some have revenue streams larger than the GDP of many countries and their CEOs are funding things that are normally within the purview of government.

For example … Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is donating a quarter of his fortune to the fight against the coronavirus. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder has donated $100 million to the food bank charity Feeding America (he has also cut the measly $2/hr ‘danger pay’ he was paying workers during the pandemic). In Ontario, 407ETR (the private company that runs the toll-highway 407) has pledged over $5 million to the United Way and hospitals in the GTA.

Don’t lose the irony – if corporations paid a living wage, food banks would not be as crucial. If corporations paid their taxes (even at the low rate they enjoy) there would be more money for health care.

In Ontario, the Financial Accountability Office reveals the province’s new income tax breaks overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest. The Ford government is moving ahead with completely privatizing home health care with Bill 175. Meanwhile, there are now five former Ford government staffers working in the private long term care industry – including the corporation Extendicare which owns 69 homes in Canada and manages another 56. Extendicare received provincial COVID money which it added to it’s $1.13 billion-plus revenues for 2020. It spent a measly $300,000 of its own money fighting the coronavirus in its homes but is rich enough to pay a dividend of $10 million to its investors.

As Ontario surfaces from lockdown, the Conservative government of Doug Ford gratefully gave ‘heroic’ nurses a $1/hr raise under its new law to restrict bargaining rights in collective agreements. And, as grocery chains claw back the $2/hr ‘danger pay’  they were giving their ‘essential’ workers, Mr Ford has given retail companies what they’ve long sought — a reduction in the number of statuatory holidays for staff from 9 to 3. (Now, where does a single mother find day care on a statuatory holiday?)

SNC Lavalin executives escaped jail time. Volkswagen Canada escaped any kind of penalty for its fraudulent manipulation of vehicle emissions. PG&E started the deadly Camp Fire  in California that killed 84 people and was found guilty of felony manslaughter, but its managers saw no jail time. None of the CEOs of the big banks went to jail for flooding the world with their toxic packages of collateralized debt.

But George Floyd was lynched by the state for trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. And Chantel Moore was shot to death by Edmunston police during a wellness check.

Change post-pandemic? It’s going to take a lot more than people in the streets to change this system.

 

Akinoomaagewin at Standing Rock ND

‘Maamiikwendaagziwin’ is how Barb Nolan remembers the camps at Standing Rock in North Dakota—an “awesome experience.” Not as in “That’s awesome, man;” more like the warm, spiritual awe you might feel standing on the bluffs of the Niagara Escarpment or at the Vimy Ridge memorial in France.

Demonstrations in support of the Standing Rock tribe are popping up in cities all over North America, including Toronto. Some Ontario First Nations have joined others in Canada and the US in signing a Treaty Alliance vowing to resist the transportation of oil through their territories by rail, truck or pipeline.

Briefly (very briefly) the Dakota Sioux are literally standing in the way of the Dakota Access pipeline being pushed through their traditional territory and, more horrifically, through burial grounds and archaeologically rich sites. The pipeline is owned by a consortium of companies (Enbridge, a huge Canadian energy corporation has the largest share). If built, it will carry half a million barrels a day of crude fracked from the Bakkan fields to connect with pipelines some 1,172 miles to the south.

The confrontation at Standing Rock is finally getting traction in the mainstream media, with NBC interviewing people in the camps and CNN reporting on the construction site. It’s about time, the standoff started in April. However, these are exceptions and they only scratch the surface. We have to turn to first-hand accounts to learn what’s really going on and why.

Barbara Nolan is from the Garden River First Nation in Ontario. She visited Standing Rock in the fall of 2016.

“We’d just driven into the camps at Standing Rock and people came from out of nowhere to help us set up our tents and get settled in. We stayed four days and every one of them was peaceful, even prayerful. We saw ceremonies going on here and there. We had our own pipe ceremony. Tribes and First Nations from all over North America—Haudenosaunee, Lakota, Hopi, Anishinaabe, Pawnee, Arapaho, Cherokee, Navaho—from all over were there. There’s between three and 5,000 people now living in a small city of tents and tiipiis. Everyone volunteers and there’s no shortage of work. Everything was always clean, even the port-a-potties. There’s a medical tent, places to eat, to get clothes—even a school for the kids. It felt safe.”

Standing Rock Camp at the Cannonball River – T Maxwell, http://www.yesmagazine.org 

However, a few kilometers from the camps, along a dirt road, the scene is neither peaceful nor safe. At the construction site, private security guards put their dogs onto protestors, CNN reports people are arrested, strip-searched and charged with rioting—a felony that carries jail time and fines. Journalists who turn up are also arrested and charged.

It is the head of a pipeline, or the edge of a clear-cut or the berm of a tailings pond that truly defines our relationship with First Nations.

Yes, we are blessed with people like Murray Sinclair who patiently and with much grace tell us what we have done with our residential schools and broken treaties and our bulldozers. We have learned about the consequent loss of lands, economies, culture, language—of Aboriginal agency itself—and we have expressed sorrow and apologized and said we will reconcile.

But when First Nations act on that agency, according to their own ancient cultures and their own laws, that tests our sympathy and the sincerity of our reconciliation.

Let me share with you some things I’ve heard about Standing Rock and the protectors (their word) who have assembled there. I take very seriously these comments because they came from people who are accomplished, intelligent and thoughtful, and whom I respect.

One question I hear is, who are these Indigenous groups who set themselves up like countries and block our economies?”

Who indeed? John Marshall, Chief of the US Supreme Court in 1831, called them “domestic dependent nations” because they had their own cultures, languages and jurisdiction on tribal lands over which US states still have no authority. Of course that didn’t keep American Manifest Destiny from rolling relentlessly across the Great Plains.

In Canada, our Supreme Court, has spent years ruling on cases involving the clash between our notions of progress and First Nations’ understandings of their laws and rights and claims. The Justices’ decisions recognize that they do indeed retain some sort of jurisdiction, even in traditional territories covered by treaties.

Surely there’s a middle-way some say. Surely there’s no need for protests that shut down development.

At Standing Rock – J Rivas, http://www.yesmagazine.org

Well, as it happens, there is a middle way. It’s called consultation and accommodation and, in Canada at least, it’s the law. The 2004 Haida-Taku decision of our Supreme Court is unequivocal: the honour of the Crown depends on properly consulting with First Nations about any project that may pose a threat to their Constitutional rights and their land claims.

Proper consultation means early notification, in depth discussions, and informed decisions. Yes, Dakota Access is not in Canada, but whether the company did more than hold a lot of meetings is an open question.

I’ve heard this question too: Don’t the people at Standing Rock understand that transporting oil by pipeline is a lot safer than by rail or truck?

The premise of this question is a little shaky given all the pipeline spills in the news lately. But that’s not the issue. The people gathering at Standing Rock are telling us that we need stop taking the earth for granted.

Barbara Nolan, and also former Anishinaabek Nation Chief Vernon Roote, talk about the Anishinaabe duty to protect the earth—to protect, therefore, the land, the water and the air. The word in Ojibwe for land is ‘aki’; but, as Basil Johnston once told me, the Anishnaabe idea of ‘aki’ embraces all three elements. “Akinoomaagewin’, he said, is our word for science. It’s what the land teaches.”

So perhaps we shouldn’t be taking so much from the earth, especially out of land that people who were here before us consider sacred. Perhaps we should listen, especially since our own scientists are telling us we have maybe 17 years to get off fossil fuels; and to meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C, global warming we will have to leave what’s still in the ground, in the ground.

David McLaren writes from Neyaashiinigmiing on Georgian Bay, Ontario. He can be contacted at david.mclaren@utoronto.ca or via @JDavidMcLaren.
Barbara Nolan’s Anishinaabemowin lessons are at www.barbaranolan.com.

A version of this post was published in the ‘Forum’ Section of Postmedia’s Ontario dailies on the weekend of October 29, 2016.

Dakota Access Pipeline was re-routed away from Bismark ND to just upstream of Standing Rock

Other Struggles

Standing Rock is not the only struggle with resource extraction in the US or Canada. Here’s a link to 7 other major battles in the US.

Updates on Standing Rock

A valuable series of videos on Standing Rock from several points of view is at the Washington Post. And there’s another briefing here. 

December 4, 2016. In early December the Army Corps of Engineers refused to grant an easement to Dakota Access, effectively blocking the pipeline from crossing the Missouri River at Lake Oahe for the time being, at least until an proper environmental assessment can be done on alternative routes. The decision came shortly after a late November stand-off at a bridge that led out of the area. That stand-off resulted in some 200 arrests and serious injuries to the the water protectors. Veterans for Standing Rock had started to trickle into the camps to stand between protectors and the militarized police presence. Reports put their presence at close to 4000 vets at one point.
Raw video of the night-time battle on the bridge is here.

January 24, 2017. Newly installed President Trump signed Executive Orders to smooth the path to both the XL pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline.

January 31, 2017. Acting Secretary of the Army Robert Speer ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to abandon the environmental review and grant Energy Transfer Partners the final easement it needs to complete the last stretch of the $3.7 billion, 1,172 mile-long pipeline. But the Army Corps of Engineers says approval will await the expeditious review that President Trump ordered on January 24th.

February 1, 2017. Law enforcement arrested over 70 people at the site of the protests. (Over 400 people have been arrested to date.) Those arrests prompted US veterans (Veterans Stand) to once again vow to support the water protectors. Spokesman Anthony Diggs said, “We are committed to the people of Standing Rock, we are committed to nonviolence, and we will do everything within our power to ensure that the environment and human life are respected.”
Veterans Stand saw its Go Fund Me account rise nearly $120,00 in 6 days. The donations will support the presence of vets at Standing rock.

February 7, 2017. From NPR: The US Army Corps of Engineers has granted an easement allowing the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under the Missouri River north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, paving the way for construction of the final 1.5 miles of the more than 1,700-mile pipeline. In doing so, the Army cut short its environmental impact assessment and the public comment period associated with it.

February 10, 2017. FBI agents from the Terrorism Task Force have been questioning water protectors on the street and at their homes as those remaining at the Standing Rock camps urge protesters to return for the ‘last stand’. It’s starting to look like the 1973 stand-off between the FBI and the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Amnesty International reminds us that, out of that incident, the only one convicted (on very sketchy evidence) was Leonard Peltier. He remains a prisoner in Coleman Federal Penitentiary.

So … are pipelines safe?

Brexit & Trump: what their supporters have in common (and it’s not bigotry)

“The times, they are a changin’,” sang Bob Dylan way back at the start of the ‘60s revolution. Well they are changin’ once again. The Brexit vote shocked not only the markets and the debt rating agencies (both of which promptly punished Britain for voting ‘leave’), but it led to the resignation of PM David Cameron. There was a lot of “what have we done” second guessing the morning after.

It would be easy, as some in the mainstream media have opined, to think that the yobs who hate immigrants, especially if they’re not white, carried Britain out of the EU.

Yes, the leave vote was generally older, whiter, less educated and lived outside of urban centres, but not dramatically so. And yes almost all UKIP (UK Independence Party) supporters voted to leave, but so did chunks of Labour and Conservative voters. Besides, Britain’s working people have an honourable history of resisting racism and fascism. But, like both the Labour and the Conservative Parties, they too have blurred the lines between immigration, race, tradition and what really ails them.

You could say much the same about Mr Trump’s supporters. They too are older, less educated and largely working class. But it would be equally foolish to tar and feather them with the same race-baiting brush we might use on the Donald. Many of them are working class Democrats who would have voted for Bernie, but will now vote for Donald J.

Ronald Reagan & the boys whoop it up back in the day when it all started to come apart.

What the Brexit voters and the Trump supporters have in common is betrayal. They have been betrayed by the very people who have said they “feel their pain.” For the past two generations they have been promised that work and money would trickle down to them; that free trade deals like NAFTA (and now TPP) would provide them with a good job; that if you work hard, serve your country and pay your taxes you’ll be alright.

Well, that’s a load of horse-spit, isn’t it? Workers in both England and America have lost real wages. Some have lost their homes and their health. They watch their political leaders bail out bankers and know their CEOs make in a day what will take them a year to earn. The good union manufacturing jobs are gone, replaced by precarious service jobs. And still they’re told they’ll have to make further cuts to salaries, to pensions to health care.

The Brexit vote last June was as much a revolt against this neoliberal agenda as it was about anything else. There is no party in the UK who can give the disheartened a voice – not the Conservatives under Thatcher-lite Theresa May, not Labour if they come up with another leader like Tony Blair, and especially not the UK Independence Party.

Love-in at the Democratic National Convention

The Presidential vote in November is shaping up the same way. The disenchanted and disinherited vs the established corporate and political elite. With Ms Clinton, the ultimate insider on one side and the Donald on the other, the contest could not be more stark.

This is not to say that Mr Trump is the great white hope of the working man – he’s not, despite his proclamation: “I am your voice.” It is to say that the Brexit vote and the Trumping of American democracy are really the same urge for escape from a political and economic agenda that has disadvantaged so many people.

You can see the same struggle in just about every democracy in the West: the rise (and co-opting) of the anti-austerity party Syriza in Greece, the quick ascendency of Podemos in Spain. But as the left resurges, so does the far right – the National Front in France, Golden Dawn in Greece, the nail-biter of an election in Austria where the fascist Freedom Party is contesting the result.

The interesting thing about this revolution is that it’s democratic – as long as the Hillary Clintons and the Donald Trumps and the Theresa Mays and their elite backers don’t co-opt it, which they will try to do. Expect Ms Clinton to signal left to win the election and then turn right in office – a very dangerous manoeuver both in traffic and in a precarious democracy.

We in Canada should not feel smug. Large scale unionized manufacturing jobs are not coming back anytime soon. Most of our new jobs are precarious. And now that the oil patch is no longer propping up the middle class, expect to see the same fault lines start to appear here as well.

 

 

There’s always hope …

Just the tip: Payday loan companies are the poster-child for what’s really wrong

Postmedia file photo

If you’ve ever walked into a payday loan company to get something to tide you over to the end of the month, you’ll know you’re lucky if you come out with your shirt. It takes less than half an hour to get a $300 loan, but it can take years to get it all paid off. Ontario allows interest at 21% over the short duration of a payday loan. Add in fees and interest over a year and you’re paying north of 300%.

There’s a word for that: “usury” and it’s a practice that should have disappeared with fourth Century. Pope Francis calls it something else from the fourth Century: “the dung of the devil.”

He puts it into this context: “The new colonialism takes on different faces. At times it appears as the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain ‘free trade’ treaties, and the imposition of measures of ‘austerity’ which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor.”

He’s talking about the unfettered pursuit of money world-wide and its consequence: the subordination of the sovereignty of nations to multi-national corporations. But he knows it’s always a short step from the global to the personal.

Colonized, or at least indentured, is how you feel when your two or three part-time jobs leave you in poverty; when even the food banks don’t have enough on their shelves; when you’re spending nearly half what you earn on a crappy basement apartment.

And to top it off, you’re subsidizing your boss. Or as Francis puts it, talking like a boss: “I will pay you this much, without vacation time, without health insurance … but I will become rich!”

Don’t worry, says government, the money will trickle down.

Recently Ontario tried to make things better. It sent around some options for legislation that would lower the short-term interest rate payday loan companies could charge from 21% to 19% or 17% or 15%.

In what world do the Liberals think this incremental, nearly infinitesimal change will make things better? All it will do is blunt the impetus for fundamental change by giving a smoke-screen of legitimacy to a vampiric practice.

With vampires you need a big wooden stake, strategically placed through the heart. So allow me to suggest some serious changes the Ontario government can make right now that will make things a little easier for those of us with wounds in our necks.

First, raise the minimum wage to the average Ontario living wage – somewhere around $15 an hour. And offer no impediment to municipalities to raise it further, to match the living wage in their jurisdictions.

Second (and Ontario may need some help from their federal colleagues for this) create or authorize a financial institution to make short term, high risk loans at a rate people can, with a little credit counselling, actually pay back. Ontario used to have the perfect tool for the job – Ontario Savings Offices. But, in spite of a $10 million annual profit, the Harris government sold off their assets in 2003.

Third, allow this same financial institution to provide micro-loans to low-income people who are able to show they have an innovative, marketable idea.

But the Pope is talking about more than payday loan companies. He is talking about the way the economic order of things works on people. Payday loans are a scourge on the working poor. They are not a filling a need. They are helping to create a need that they then feed off.

They are the neighbourhood storefront for the “new colonialism” the Pontiff talks about. It’s all around us, but we don’t see it. We know that something’s out of whack, but we can’t quite put our finger on it.

How is it that certain people and large companies around the globe can stash some $30 trillion in tax havens, and so withhold billions in tax revenues from people who desperately need them? Is that not a public subsidy of private profit? And why do our governments let them get away with it?

Canadians are dropping out of the middle class as their share of the income drops.

Why has the burden of taxation been shifted from corporations onto a middle class that is already overburdened with debt and losing members to the economy? People used to have good jobs; where are they? And what is our government doing about that, other than signing free trade agreements and hoping jobs trickle out of them?

Can we not ask, even if it’s only ourselves, “Does this game seem rigged to you?”

Well, as it happens, citizens all over the world are beginning to ask that question and the answer they’re coming up with is, “yes.”

The followers of Podemos in Spain, of Syriza in Greece; many of the supporters of Brexit, of Bernie Sanders in the US primaries, and of Donald Trump – especially of Donald Trump because those folks have been cheated of their American Dream.

It’s not government that’s stooping to scoop the “dung of the devil”. It’s not the Church, for all of the worthy Pope’s exhortations. It’s the people. And people are using the only tool they have – their vote.

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This post was originally published in the ‘Forum’ Section of Postmedia’s Ontario dailies on the weekend of August 2, 2016

TPP: The Devil’s in the Details

Think ‘property.’ Now think ‘treaty’ … as in those instruments that transferred land from people who belonged to it, to people to whom it then belonged. Pretty good deal for us, not so much for First Nations. (A stony outcropping of land called the Bruce Peninsula was evaluated not so long ago as being worth some $50 billion —just imagine what the rest of Canada is worth.)

Now you’re in the proper frame of mind to consider the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). That’s the instrument that the Conservatives negotiated and the Liberals have yet to ratify.

The TPP is a massive trade and investment agreement that dwarfs, but does not replace, NAFTA in its scope. It’s the rule book for many things: investment (a troubling chapter that allows foreign companies to sue countries if national laws get in the way of corporate profits), textiles and apparel, customs administration, financial services, entry for business persons, telecommunications, electronic commerce, government procurement, intellectual property and more.

Put aside for the moment that the deal takes another bite out of the Canadian market for our dairy farmers. They’ll lose some 3% of market share and we’ll lose some tax revenue. That loss doesn’t count the $4.3 billion worth of compensation promised to dairy farmers or the $1 billion for innovation in the auto industry – if there’s one left after the TPP. The benefit of the TPP to the Canadian economy? According to former Trade Minister Ed Fast: $3.5 billion.

And let’s not look at the 58,000 lost jobs some economists are forecasting, partly because Japanese cars and trucks will be allowed for sale in Canada with much higher ‘foreign content’ (parts made outside the country) than previously.

By the way, before the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect, we had a trade surplus in the auto sector of over $14 billion a year in 1999. Now, owing to the loss of jobs to Mexico and of business to the Great Recession, we have a deficit of over $10 billion. NAFTA was a pretty good deal for the multinational companies, and a posse of trade lawyers, not so much for US and Canadian auto workers. (Actually it’s not such a good deal for Mexican workers either, at least the campesinos who leave their land and families to work for multinationals for maybe, for $60 a day, wages and benefits.)

Among the corporations who have moved production out of Canada and into Mexico is our very own Magna International. That’s under NAFTA. Under the TPP we’ll have to accept cars with even more parts that used to be made here. How’s that for free trade?

Let’s look at the section of the TPP that deals directly with property – intellectual property or IP. That’s Chapter 18. You can find it and the rest of the text of the TPP at the Government of New Zealand website – don’t ask me why Canada doesn’t have it up. Canada’s other free trade agreements are at Global Affairs CA: www.international.gc.ca.

The TPP doesn’t replace any other agreement — it adds its own rules to over a dozen other agreements on intellectual property alone, including one under the WTO which, in 2000, forced Canada to change its Patent law with respect to the manufacture of generic drugs.

Chapter 18 sets the ground rules for the IP industry in any country that signs on. And those rules pretty much dictate how nations are to deal with everything from songs on the Internet to prescription drugs to GMOs. It even includes – and First Nations should be aware of this — a section on traditional knowledge, how to acquire it and how to patent it.

Nothing, it seems, has escaped the attention of whomever it was that drafted Chapter 18. It even lays down the law — literally setting out the sort of punishments that we will have to levy against those who violate its terms. If there’s a dispute — if a foreign multi-national doesn’t like how it’s being treated — it will go, not to Canadian courts, but to a secretive trade tribunal for arbitration. All this helps to cement corporate control of our economy.

This is no small matter. The IP industry (which include the Googles, and Facebooks and Apples of the world, as well as Big Pharma corporations and emerging Financial Tech companies) is the one that’s growing, at least in the US. Manufacturing is accounting for less and less of the GDP there, and here. It’s no coincidence that the IP rules in the TPP best serve US-based multi-nationals.

“We’re a trading nation” as Mr Trudeau likes to say. Well, we export commodities but we import intellectual property and with commodities tanking in a global slow-down, we have to turn our economy toward IP and innovation.

And there’s the rub. As Jim Balsillie, the co-founder of the company that gave the world the Blackberry, points out in a recent article for the Globe and Mail, we are not prepared to compete in the IP game and he quotes the data to back up his claim. In general, Canadian companies are not very good at commercializing innovation. The title of his article asks the right question: “Will TPP mean protection – or colonialism?”

In an earlier piece, Mr Balsillie quotes a lead strategist for one of the world’s most valuable technology companies: “We don’t sue Canadian companies until they start to matter to us. The money is not worth it when they’re small and we don’t want to look like a bully. We wait until they get big enough, then we go after them. And we kill them.”

We would do well to remember the treaties of two centuries ago and think on what we promised and what we took, and do it before we ratify the TPP.

Originally published in PostMedia’s community papers, 12 February 2016, under the title, “Pick Your Trans Pacific Poison”.
Link to Paul Lachine’s portfolio: http://www.paullachine.com.

 

You can tell the government what you think of the TPP 

At least you can until midnight April 30, 2016 when written comments are closed. If you want to appear before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on International Trade, you might have a bit longer. Here’s how (from the Committee’s press release, March 10/16):

“Written submissions are to be no more than 1,500 words. More information on the process for providing a written submission can be found in the Guide for Submitting Briefs to House of Commons Committees. Written submissions should be emailed to: ciit-tpp-ptp@parl.gc.ca.”

You can find the full text of the TPP here or here (easier to read and includes some citizens’ comments).

 

The TPP is one of 3 massive Trade & Investment agreements being negotiated …

The US is currently negotiating another major trade and investment deal: the TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade & Investment Partnership) with European countries. It does not include the UK or Canada – we signed our own deal with the EU, the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA). We have not ratified that one either, largely because Germany is worried (with good reason) about its Investor State Dispute Settlement  (ISDS) provisions.

The principal worry is that trade agreements with ISDS chapters pretty much lock a country into doing business in a certain way. If, for example, a nation wants to change the packaging of cigarette cartons to reflect their health hazards, a company (the Investor) can sue the nation (the State) for erecting a barrier to trade. The dispute doesn’t go to the State’s courts, it goes into secret and very lucrative (for lawyers) Dispute Settlement.

Phillip Morris tried this with Australia. Fortunately, Australia won, but not all disputes are settled in the nation’s favour.

Canada has been successfully sued by a number of corporations for laws and regulations we have tried to pass that were deemed to ‘interfere’ with corporate profits. These suits and complaints have come from a variety of sources already, including the NAFTA and the WTO (World Trade Organization) which successfully forced Ontario to drop its requirement that renewable energy equipment be manufactured in the Province.

There’s a good video from Germany that concisely and accurately lays out the Germans’ worries about ISDS provisions in ‘free trade’ agreements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV2NZ9MQh0w. They mirror the concerns those of us who opposed the NAFTA had about Chapter 11 of that agreement, back in 1988. History has borne us out.

Here’s another quicker, cheekier briefing on ISDS from Lead Now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SbO2zDDpDA.

So, think of the TTIP as the US-EU version of our CETA. Negotiations on TTIP are  scheduled to wrap up in 2020.

But don’t let anyone tell you it’s not possible to open up sections of these trade agreements for review and revision before ratification. At the urging of the EU (ie, Germany) the ISDS chapter of the CETA is being re-negotiated.

The TISA (Trade in Services Agreement) is another US initiative. It is being negotiated among 23 members of the WTO (including the EU although that’s not reflected in the graphic). Counting the 28 countries of the European Union who sit as a block, some 50 countries, including Canada will be subject to the TISA.

It is based on the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade and Services – the thing that obliged Ontario to stop preferring provincially-based manufacturers of green energy technology under the Green Energy Act. However, the TISA will cover services, not goods, and include banking services, education, water, social services and healthcare.

Some critics see the TISA as an attempt to privatize services now provided by (some) governments such as education and health care. It does seem as though the US is looking for foreign markets for its private service sector. For example, the provision on ‘National Treatment’ states that once a country lowers trade barriers for any service, as it committed to under TISA, it cannot then raise them again. That might protects corporate profitability, but the public good, not so much.

However, the EU has so far been firm in asserting that no trade agreement will prevent its governments, at any level, from providing services in water, health, education and social services. And companies outside the borders of the EU will not be allowed to provide publicly funded healthcare or social services. (But the door may remain open for privately run penal and education services.)

As for public consultation on the TPP in Canada, here’s what one person found at the public forum in St John’s: “This, then, is what the consultation process is to look like: Promotion and publicity are to be minimal and done on short notice, the roundtable discussion is to last one hour, and there is no online audio record of what is said. Government feels this is sufficient.”

As for CETA (Canada’s trade and investment deal with the EU), that seems like a done deal, although some 3.5 million EU citizens have signed a petition opposing this deal and the TTIP, largely because of the influence over national interests they hand corporations.

Bottom line: Governments beware, Citizens be alert.

       (Video published 18 August 2015 – we now have the complete text of the TPP)

A New Deal for a Precarious Economy

What do you say we start this discussion with some facts?

I know, I know, that’s not the way we do things anymore. Economics is common sense after all. Wage hikes cause unemployment. Unions are job killers. Companies are job creators. Tax breaks for the few trickle down to the many as wages. Inequality works, or rather it makes people work harder.

It’s a narrative that has informed our economic polices for the past 25 years. Unfortunately for its proselytizers, the facts tell a different story.

Good jobs lost in Ontario since the Recession hit

Canada has the 3^rd highest rate of working-age poverty amongst 17 developed countries. Inequality is at levels not seen since the 1920s. We have a moribund manufacturing sector that may or may not rebound with our petro-dollar now brought low. Companies get a ‘fail’ from the Conference Board of Canada on innovation. We have the lowest corporate tax rate in the G7 and one of the highest levels of precarious work. Roughly 40% of the population is a couple of paycheques away from bankruptcy. Household debt is growing (now at 162.6% of disposable income), as the middle class tries to keep its head above water. Workers whose paycheques are shorter than the month are relying on food banks and publicly funded services to get by. Essential government programs such as health care are cracking as tax revenue falls.

Does that sound like a healthy economy to you? No, it doesn’t. What we need is a new way of doing business. What we need is a New Deal.

To guide us, we have the experience of the New Deal that helped lift economies out of the Great Depression. And we have the expertise of economists on both the left and the right, among whom a consensus is emerging.

On the revenue side, the CD Howe Institute suggests restructuring the tax system by adding at least two new tax brackets for upper income earners to be taxed at higher rates. Remember, the top income bracket in the 1950s and ‘60s—the Golden Age of Capitalism—was taxed at 90% in the US and over 80% in CA.

While we’re at it, let’s get rid of the morass of boutique tax credits that have grown like weeds in the past several years. Even the Fraser Institute says they’re expensive, inefficient and return too little to the wrong pockets. What we need is not more for middle class people. What we need is more people in the middle class.

Bill Gates and others want to see a minuscule tax on financial transactions (.01-.1% on stock and money market trades). In Canada, that would raise enough revenue to slay the deficit and erase the debt.

Raise corporate taxes. They were cut by the Liberals in the late 1990s and cut some more by the Conservatives. There is room for gradual, incremental increases, taking care to measure their effect on employment and the economy.

Now for the expenditure side. The trick, as the UN recommends in its Innocenti Report Card for 2014 and as Scandinavian countries are doing, is to use revenues to increase the participation of all income groups in the economic life of the nation. Governments that are successful at reducing inequality fund an inter-related suite of programs that provide some universal services (such as education, health and child care), and some programs that target low income groups (housing and training, for example).

Finally, how do we re-new our economy? Where should government be deploying its legislative levers to foster a sustainable economy that provides enough tax revenue to balance the budget and to pay for essential services?

Unfetter unions. In Canada and the US, government legislation and corporate strike breaking have reduced their membership. A 2011 Harvard study attributes roughly 25% of today’s inequality to the loss of union jobs. Remember, the first New Deal set unions free to bargain collectively. Private sector union membership was at its highest during the 1950s and ‘60s.

Peace & Justice Grey Bruce have released a thoroughly researched paper on the economic damage precarious work does and what municipalities can do about it.

Legislate a living wage. Forget minimum wage. That’s just trapping people below the poverty line and in the line-up for public services. For governments, a living wage will relieve the stress on community resources and the public purse. For citizens, it will enable more people to participate in the social and economic life of their communities. New Westminster BC has done it. And Seattle WA has even legislated the private sector to follow its lead of paying workers at least $15 an hour.

For business, higher wages mean better employees. That’s why Aetna Insurance in the US has raised its lowest wage to $16 an hour. The company reckons it will save about $100 million a year by reducing its employee turn-over costs and fostering a well-trained and loyal work force.

Stimulate. Recovering economies do not respond well to austerity. In fact, austerity measures imposed on Greece have made the situation worse. Even the International Monetary Fund is saying, with interest rates so low, now might be a good time for more infrastructure spending.

Diversify. You hear that so often it’s almost an article of faith, like common sense. But in this case, it’s also true. Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea. You might trip and fall, as oil prices are doing now. Canada’s dollar was high on hydrocarbons for years; now it’s not. Maybe manufacturing will return; maybe not.

Encourage innovation. Engineering, re-engineering, architecture, information technology, pharmacy and the arts are all industries that don’t need cities. Richard Florida’s Creative Economy is on the right track, as long as creators turn their innovations into products; or if they can’t, turn them over to those who can.

We can no longer afford to be just hewers of oil and drawers of liquid gas, or to rely on the US economy to create jobs, or wait for their policies to determine ours. We have to start thinking, and working, for ourselves.

© David McLaren January 2015

This essay appeared in the Forum section of Sunmedia’s Ontario papers January 31 or February 2, 2015.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Minimum Wage Costs … Everyone

It was Andrew’s first day at his new job. It paid minimum wage but, hey, it was his first job ever. His task was to stack bins that had just been washed out and disinfected. He was given rubber boots and gloves but no apron. So when chemicals from one of the bins sloshed out and down his legs, it filled his boots. He was rushed to hospital with burns from his waist to his feet. No safety training, no proper protection, no union, and now, no job.

Illustration by Paul Lachine
http://plachineillustrations.blogspot.ca/

 Judy works in a big box store stocking shelves on the night shift. It’s supposed to be part time work, but she’s expected to fill in for people who go on holidays or are sick or don’t show up. So it’s full time work at $12 an hour and few benefits with no “promotion” in sight. All the full time positions are filled anyway—all four of them. To make things worse, she has 3 kids in school and spousal support honoured more in the breech, than in the payment. She’s stuck—behind the eight-ball and below the poverty line.

Both Andrew and Judy (not their real names) are in what academics call precarious work: low wage, full time or part time or short term jobs. Whatever you call them, the paycheque won’t get you to the end of the month. Sometimes they are dangerous.

It’s one thing for business to make a profit. There’s nothing wrong with profit—I wish I had more of it. But there is something wrong with the business plan of a company whose profit depends on (or is enlarged by) the public purse.

By Banksy in New York City

How much we in Canada are paying to help businesses with their profit is hard to gauge with our health care system, our progressive tax system, our social programs and our food banks. But in the US, where everything is monetized, it’s easier. Economists have crunched the numbers and discovered the fast food industry alone costs American taxpayers some $7 billion a year simply because it doesn’t pay its employees enough to live on. Corporate MacDonald’s even set up a ‘McResources Line’ to help its cash-strapped employees apply for food stamps and Medicare.

There are consequences to driving down wages. Canada now has the 3^rd highest rate of working age poverty—ahead of every developed nation except Japan and the US (Conference Board of Canada). Inequality, driven by precarious work, is rising almost as quickly in Canada as it is in the America according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

But there is something even more basic at stake. How fair is it to expect people to work a 40-hour week for a wage they can’t live on?

So what do you say we stop talking about whether the minimum wage is too high? It’s costing all of us a lot more than we think. Just ask your local United Way or Public Health Unit how far public resources are being stretched.

Let us, instead, start talking about a living wage—a wage at which those working full time, even if it’s two or three part time jobs, can begin to participate in the economy. A living wage in Ontario is about $15 an hour, give or take, depending on local services.

The United Way of Bruce Grey puts it at $16.76 for 2014 for rural areas. For Owen Sound, it’s $14.77, thanks largely to that city’s bus service—which City Council has been thinking of cutting.

What goes into a living wage? Not liquor or cigarettes or cell-phones—although many people are choosing cells over land lines if they can’t afford both. It covers the basics: food, rent, utilities, clothing, car and insurance (but not repairs), child care, prescriptions, and dental care.

Now, remember, we’re talking a living wage so we have to count the cost of participating in society and helping the economy, even a little bit, by buying stuff. So, throw in a pass to the Y for the kids, the odd family outing, a vacation in Ontario, birthday gifts, school activities, banking fees, tenant insurance, telephone and internet. Add them up and you will find that, if you are a single parent with two children, you need to be making at least $15 an hour.

Temporary, part time, precarious jobs are outstripping full time jobs. 95% of jobs created in Canada in 2013 were prec arious.

This list doesn’t include things many of us take for granted: computer purchases, cable or satellite TV, a new or used car every so many years, music or gymnastic lessons for our kids, hockey, or lunches and lattes with friends. Or buying a house. You can’t build equity on $15 an hour.

Governments—and we’ll be electing one ofhem on October 27 and another in 2015—have options to eliminate worker poverty. They can restructure the tax system. They can find ways to encourage the return of good manufacturing jobs (by far, the best long-term solution). They can stop fighting the unions. Unions have been part of our capitalist system for over 100 years and were instrumental in redistributing wealth during capitalism’s golden age in the mid 1900s.

But the single most useful thing—and some municipal governments are leading the way on this—is to get more money into more people’s pockets. Councils can lead by passing a living wage policy for their own employees and by writing it into the terms of contracts for out-sourcing as New Westminster has done.

Penny-wise and pound-foolish is never so true as it applies to politicians who think the only bottom line is found on a balance sheet. The real bottom line is the degree to which all citizens can participate in the economic and social life of their community.

© David McLaren October 2014

This essay appeared the Forum section of Sunmedia’s Ontario papers October 10 or 12, 2014.

Some Interesting Links

Austerity is a mug’s game. Greek debt to GDP ratio has grown since its creditors imposed austerity measures. Greeks are hurting, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn have elected representatives in the Parliament and the heatlh care system has imploded.
Two American Families’ PBS Frontline show about falling out of the middle class; a series of documentaries that has followed two American families from the 1970s. Middle class no more.
‘Poor No More’ the movie looks at the impact of part time and low wage jobs on Canadians contrasted with Ireland and Sweden.
Ontario’s economy has shifted from manufacturing to service (fast food, big box retail, hospitality).
Precarity in the GTA. A study by McMaster University and the United Way Toronto found barely half of people had a full time job that paid well and had benefits.
Precarity in rural Ontario. The Grey Bruce Public Health Unit starts a conversation on the social determinants of health. (50% of health outcomes depend on income, social status and education).
Why precarious work is bad for you. Scarcity of anything can make anyone a bit crazy, but scarcity of money can make you sick.
Why inequality is bad for you. Research on the serious social side-effects of inequality in a community or country. One of the most serious is social and political trust, perhaps one of the reasons for low voter turnouts.
US mayors focus on the lowest paid workers in their cities and vow to raise the minimum wage for city workers and contractors’ employees.
Toronto’s ‘Fair Wage Policy’. Not yet a living wage but Toronto pays its lowest paid workers above Ontario’s minimum wage and obliges City contractors to do the same. The living wage in Toronto is $17.17.
Australians pay 6 cents more for a Big Mac and their minimum wage is $16/hr.
Welfare Queens. How much Walmart and McDonald’s are costing the American taxpayer: $1.2 Billion a year for McDonald’s and for Walmart’s ‘associates’, $1000 per employee a year.
In Owen Sound Ontario (pop 23000), the food bank hands out $40,000 worth of food every month, even during the summer.
Teachers in New Mexico in the US pack their students’ backpacks with food at the end of the day.
It pays to pay well. From the Harvard Business Review: Cashiers at QuickTrip earn about $40,000 a year.

After Thatcher in the UK and Reagan the US began busting the unions and deregulating industry, inequality began to rise in the late 1970s.

 

A variety of causes: deregulation of industrial and financial sectors, free trade pulls jobs off-shore, seismic shift in economy from manufacturing to service and in jobs from well-paid full-time to poor part-time, attacks on unions. All exacerbated after the 2008 financial crisis. (US figures, but Canada data mirror these effects).

Plato’s Tree

The boy followed the old man along the road that wound up from the city. He had to run sometimes for the man was old but he was strong, and the axe the boy carried was heavy. At least they were above the sting of the tear gas that still hung heavy in the streets below. But they were not above the wood smoke that even now partly obscured the Parthenon.

The winter of 2013 in Athens was not the coldest on record, not as cold as it was when I camped out on a boat in the Piraeus harbour so many Christmases ago. But it was cold enough for people to burn things. The city was swept of bits and pieces of scrap cardboard and wood, and now the elderly were breaking up their furniture. In November, the government had jacked up the tax on heating oil 450%.

Along with Greek tables and chairs, the Greek economy was pretty much in ashes. The European Union and the International Monetary Fund were keeping the country from burning to the ground by pouring money on its economy. The price for their beneficence? An austerity regime of tax hikes and draconian cuts to government jobs and services.

In the winter of 2013, so few could afford to buy heating oil, that the government lost revenue on its sales. And the air in Athens turned black with burning wood.

Keeping the home fires burning in Athens (NYT)

Who knows how it got so bad? Credit default swaps hid the real economy. Greece’s trade deficit grew and so did its labour costs. But credit was easy before 2009, so the government borrowed. Banks around the world bought into the toxic derivatives cobbled together by the Americans. When all the bubbles burst, the Greek economy was exposed, vaporizing confidence in its ability to carry on, let alone repay a trillion dollar debt.

Those individuals and companies who could afford to do so, hid their incomes in Switzerland, Lichtenstein or Luxemburg—some $75 billion by the reckoning of Greek journalist Kostas Vaxevanis.

They weren’t the only ones. The OECD reckons the world’s tax havens hide about $6 trillion owed to its governments, mostly by corporations like Apple and Nike. If you have some cash to stash offshore, Canadian banks are there to help. We lose at least $8 billion a year to tax havens, even though successive governments have cut corporate taxes to the lowest in the G7.

Austerity consumes struggling economies. You can’t cut jobs and still expect people to buy things. Where is government to find revenue if people are out of work and corporations are hiding their incomes (or if government itself is cutting their taxes)?

In the winter of 2013, after four years of austerity, unemployment in Greece was nearly 30% and the country’s debt to GDP ratio was still going up. Unemployment among youth was 65%.

Now gangs of young men emblazoned with the swastika-like symbols of the Golden Dawn roar through the streets of Athens on motorcycles menacing immigrants, Jews and anyone else they can scapegoat. They have become more brazen now that 18 of their comrades have been elected to the Greek Parliament—elected in spite of a televised debate in which their spokesman repeatedly slapped his female opponent.

At the sound of a backfire the boy tightened his grip on the axe and thanked the Christ he was not Muslim.

But the old hate, and the new poverty, and the massive job cuts—none of that was the worst. The worst was Elena.

Elena (NYT)

For people with jobs, health care is paid for by their employers and the government. When people lost their jobs, the hospitals treated them anyway. But Greece’s lenders demanded that even this charity cease. From the summer of 2011, Greeks have had to pay out of pocket for medical care. The cruel irony is that the poorer you are the harder it is to heal.

Elena’s breast cancer had advanced and now it had burst through her skin. With no job and no money, she had been draining her own wound with paper napkins. The doctor she finally found works in an underground network of clinics, unfunded but supplied with “donated” equipment and drugs. If he is discovered treating Elena, he will have to pay for her meds himself.

The old man stopped at the foot of an ancient olive tree, trunk gnarled like the backs of his hands, old branches twisting just above his head. He wrapped his bony fingers into one of the deep creases in the trunk and told the story of Athena’s gift.

Women collect leftover vegetables in Athens

In the old days, she and Poseidon vied for the protectorate of the city. Their priests arranged a contest: each would offer a gift and the Athenians would choose.

Poseidon struck his trident on the ground and salt water welled up. The god of the Sea would give safe passage to Athenian ambition for trade, commerce and empire.

Against Poseidon’s gift, Athena offered the olive tree—a gift of wood, oil and food that promised peace, plenty and good governance for thousands of years. The City accepted it and flourished. Indeed, this very olive tree, the old man told the boy, was said to have shaded Plato himself.

But Poseidon was angry the Athenians had refused him. He harassed their fleets and frustrated their trade for centuries after.

When the old man had finished his tale, he took the axe from the boy and, with a curse on his lips for the Earth Shaker, he delivered the first blow.

© David McLaren, June 2014

A version of this essay appeared in the Forum section of Sunmedia community papers, 14 June 2014.
You can follow this blog by clicking on the + sign in the banner along the top of your screen. You can see an annotated list of articles here.

Update: Syriza wins election in January 2015

The left wing Syriza Party ran on the promise to renegotiate Greece’s debt to the eurozone and, as of this writing, it is resisting all kinds of pressure from France and Germany to continue austerity measures. Essentially, the Greek government wants to reduce the spending cuts its debtors have been insisting on; raise revenues by getting people working again; and put more of their budget surplus back into the economy.

As Nobel laureate Paul Krugman says in a recent New York Times article: “This is a dastardly ploy by those left-wing radicals. You see, it’s completely reasonable.”

Other economists are coming around as well. Reza Moghadam, the former head of the International Monetary Fund’s European division has endorsed Syriza’s anti-austerity plan. Moghadam was one of those who imposed austerity on Greece in the first place. In fact, the IMF is now suggesting that nations should be stimulating their economies by spending on infrastructure, even if it means running a deficit, since interest rates are so low.

Moghadam goes even further, saying half of Greece’s debt should be written off (mostly because, as its Debt to GDP ratio rises, it’s clear the Greeks will never be able to pay it all off anyway, leaving the country mired in perpetual debt). The Bloomberg View, a business publication, also calls for debt forgiveness.

Mark Carney, the well-respected former governor of the Bank of Canada and current Governor of the Bank of England, has also said the eurozone needs to ease up on its austere budget cuts to avoid the unsustainable debt trap the Greece is now in.

Even if it can’t negotiate a new deal with its eurozone lenders: the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund (aka ‘the troika’), Greece has an exit strategy. It could leave the eurozone, re-instate the drachma and go it alone.

Others have done it. Argentina untied its currency from the US dollar in 2001. East Asian countries did something similar following their 1997 crisis. It means short term decline and financial chaos, but the economy of those countries ended up with GDPs higher than they were before the devaluations.

Austerity Fail
In spite of draconian measures imposed on southern European countries, their debt keeps growing.

 

Update: October 2015

Yanis Varoufakis, Syriza’s choice for Finance Minister of Greece resigned when his government capitulated to the Eurozone’s demands for continued austerity. You can find his ‘apologia’ (not ‘apology’, it’s a Greek word for ‘explanation’) in this You Tube video from October 2015.

It’s over an hour long, but revealing in Varoufakis’ description of how the Eurozone’s bankers dictated to Greece’s democratically elected government – even after a referendum in July 2015 in which the Greek people voted ‘No’ to the bankers’ austerity plan.

In the 2nd half of the interview, Varoufakis sets out some ideas for a democratic economy. For  most people today, economic justice cannot be realized without political power.

He continues to “make mischief” (as he calls it) by revealing the assault on democracy that the neo-liberal policy makers of the Eurozone represent. From his view from inside the Greek crisis, Varoufakis saw the political will of his people denied by the insistence of the troika that they submit to their crippling economic measures.

The crisis was not an economic one – it was (and continues to be) a democratic one – an argument he makes in an article for the guardian on April 15, 2016.

As Tommy Douglas was wont to say (I paraphrase): Beware the elites who, fearing the people may use political democracy to gain economic democracy, begin to use their economic privilege to destroy political democracy

 

From the rule of the virtuous
to the rule of the rich

Achilles on a coin from 4thC BC

There is a very old idea from ancient Greek culture that goes by the Greek name of timé. It is honour, specifically, in the Homeric view of the world at least, honour that has external measure and great value among men.

But such honour is not infinite. Think: spoils of war. Homer’s Iliad is about timé. It is a snapshot of one incident in the long siege of Troy by a Greek city-state coalition of the willing.

Achilles is the greatest of the Greeks who attack Troy and he gains the lion’s share of spoils—of timé: tripods (for some reason), armour, weapons, gold, Briseis the concubine whom he loves.

Along comes Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek forces who feels, being leader, he should have more timé than Achilles. So he takes Briseis for himself.

To a man, especially a man like Achilles in a society like that of ancient Greece, this is an irredeemable insult, not the least because it also weakens his kleos.

Kleos seems to be part and parcel of timé. Timé is for show in the here and now, but kleos is forever. Kleos is a word closely related to the Greek verb ‘to hear’ and carries the idea of ‘what people hear about you’. Acclaim is earned only through great deeds which had best end in death if you want your praise sung loud and long. In the ancient oral tradition of the West, you lived on only through the encomiums of storytellers like Homer.

As Homer himself indicates in his first line, the whole of The Iliad is a song about the wrath of Achilles: “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians.”

Achilles is so angry at the loss of timé, that he refuses to fight. Not the promises of even greater rewards from a regretful Agamemnon; not the threat of annihilation of the Greek expedition; not even smooth-talking Odysseus’ appeal to kleos can move Achilles to fight. Such is the hold on the mind of our ancestors of timé justly won and unjustly lost.

We like to think we have moved beyond such old ways. We like to think that honour comes to those who are the best of us, the most noble. Such honour is limitless and everyone can have any amount of it if they are deemed worthy enough.

But not so when it comes to money. There is a finite amount of that in the world. If I acquire more, it means you will have less, like water from a well. And, like water in a well, money can be drawn out of the rich earth. But, as with water from a well, money doesn’t automatically trickle down to those who are most in need of it.

The more money I have, the more I am likely to accumulate, as Thomas Piketty demonstrates in his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The more money I have, the more likely I will want to proclaim my wealth by buying outsized homes, big cars, memberships in private clubs, and political influence—especially political influence, for influence brings me kleos. And, as research shows, the more money I have the less I want to share it, especially with those who don’t have it.

Aristo Onassis, 1932

Money, especially a lot of money, is timé. Think: the Koch Brothers. Think: Bill Gates. Think: Conrad Black who, notwithstanding his various convictions, has managed to hold fast to both timé and kleos. Think Aristotle Socrates Onassis (Aristo for short).

Greece’s 1%, along with others of the world’s 1%, own nearly half of the wealth in the world. They are jealous of their timé and find novel ways of hiding $6 trillion of it lest some undeserving political leader comes along and takes it.

For some, the old way of viewing the world hasn’t change much. Nevertheless, societal mores and values do shift over time.

If, for Achilles, timé is his hard-won spoils, timé for Plato is also the essence of an honourable man. As the man so the state, says Plato and although a timocracy (the rule of those who love honour and glory) is worse than an aristocracy (rule by ‘the best’, the lovers of wisdom), it is better than a oligarchy (in which “the lovers of money” take the place of the lovers of virtue—what some now call a plutocracy and what others call a corporatocracy).

For the record, Plato doesn’t think much of democracy, which he deems as worse than oligarchy and only a little better than tyranny. We however believe democracy to be the best sort of government, as long as the best and most noble of us are elected. But that’s always been a bit of a crap-shoot.

As with a man without discipline or self-examination, one kind of rule can slip into another. Our ideal governance (democracy that elects virtuous men and women) can slide into a democracy that elects avaricious men and women.

Hear Socrates explain how a government of honour can degenerate into government by the wealthy in Book VIII of The Republic …

Graffiti in Athens. ‘System of Fraud’ by iNO

[Adeimantus] And what manner of government do you term oligarchy?
[Socrates] A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it.
—I understand, he replied.
—Ought I not to begin by describing how the change from timocracy to oligarchy arises?
—Yes.
—Well, I said, no eyes are required in order to see how the one passes into the into the other.
—How?
—The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals is the ruin of timocracy; they invent illegal modes of expenditure; for what do they or their wives care about the law?
—Yes, indeed.
—And then one, seeing another grow rich, seeks to rival him, and thus the great mass of the citizens become lovers of money.
—Likely enough.
—And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.
—True.
—And in proportion as riches and rich men are honoured in the State, virtue and the virtuous are dishonoured.
—Clearly.
—And what is honoured is cultivated, and that which has no honour is neglected.
—That is obvious.
—And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man.
—They do so.
—They next proceed to make a law which fixes a sum of money as the qualification of citizenship; the sum is higher in one place and lower in another, as the oligarchy is more or less exclusive; and they allow no one whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in the government. These changes in the constitution they effect by force of arms, if intimidation has not already done their work.
—Very true.
—And this, speaking generally, is the way in which oligarchy is established.

Since the cuts, graffiti in Greece has flowered into an art form of protest. ‘Access Control’ by iNO.

In the next section Socrates lays out the defects of oligarchy …

—Yes, he said; but what are the characteristics of this form of government, and what are the defects of which we were speaking?
—First of all, I said, consider the nature of the qualification. Just think what would happen if pilots were to be chosen according to their property, and a poor man were refused permission to steer, even though he were a better pilot?
—You mean that they would shipwreck?
—Yes; and is not this true of the government of anything?

…

—And here is another defect which is quite as bad.
—What defect?
—The inevitable division: such a State is not one, but two States, the one of poor, the other of rich men; and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another.

…

—Another discreditable feature is that, for a like reason, they are incapable of carrying on any war. Either they arm the multitude, and then they are more afraid of them than of the enemy; or, if they do not call them out in the hour of battle, they are oligarchs indeed, few to fight as they are few to rule. And at the same time their fondness for money makes them unwilling to pay taxes.
—How discreditable!

…

—A man may sell all that he has, and another may acquire his property; yet after the sale he may dwell in the city of which he is no longer a part, being neither trader, nor artisan, nor horseman, nor hoplite [citizen soldier], but only a poor, helpless creature.
—Yes, that is an evil which also first begins in this State.
—The evil is certainly not prevented there; for oligarchies have both the extremes of great wealth and utter poverty.

…

—Well, I said, and in oligarchical States do you not find paupers?
—Yes, he said; nearly everybody is a pauper who is not a ruler.
—And may we be so bold as to affirm that there are also many criminals to be found in them, rogues who have stings, and whom the authorities are careful to restrain by force?
—Certainly, we may be so bold.
—The existence of such persons is to be attributed to want of education, ill-training, and an evil constitution of the State?
—True.
—Such, then, is the form and such are the evils of oligarchy; and there may be many other evils.

1500 year-old olive tree in Ithaca Greece