The Iron Heel: It’s them and us, it always has been

Thanks for finding these, NR!

The federal government has won its appeal of a 2009 court decision ordering it to allow RCMP officers to unionize.

The Ontario Court of Appeal rejected the lower court's finding that RCMP officers' rights under the Charter are violated by regulations forbidding a union.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/06/01/pol-rcmp-union-court-ap...

I support all workers right to organize.

We'll see how the Supreme Court rules on it Kropotkin. I posted it here because there is not a large enough critical mass at Babble these days to sustain thred proliferation.

josh wrote:

kropotkin1951 wrote:

I think that as a priority group in society to have the wrongs against them righted they are at the bottom of my list.

Glad to see you side with a decision taking away the right to organize.

if you want to get personal at least try to be accurate. I didn't say any such thing. Please quote my words were I "sided" with the decision. Please don't interpret my posts because you seem to have trouble reading carefully for content.

in a thread on CLASS WARFARE you'll have to excuse me if I have little time for worrying about the terms and conditions of employment for the people tasked with shooting rubber bullets at me and other citizens.  And I really don't give a flying fuck if they are getting screwed out of overtime for the long hours they must put in infiltrating peaceful groups trying to organize demonstrations. 

If you want to make unionizing the RCMP your focus for progressive change well that is your choice.  As I said above they are my lowest priority.

Idle Pleasures: Rousing the Age-Old Dream of the Heavy Laden  -  by Chris Floyd

http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2260-idle...

"When I was growing up, the 'four day work-week' was considered a viable political and social goal: the next logical step after the long and bloody struggle to win a five-day week for most working people. Like 'full employment' this idea was sometimes actually built into the public platform of serious, broad-based parties and political movements..

All this is long gone now, of course. As Owen Hatheby notes in the Guardian, both Right and Left have combined, for many decades, to advance the idea that pointless labour is our lot, and that we should be happy with it..."

The Western Welfare State: Its Rise and Demise and the Soviet Bloc  -  by James Petras

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31753

"...The 'anti-Stalinist' Left intellectuals have never engaged in any serious reflection regarding their own role in bringing down the collective welfare state nor have they assumed any responsibility for the devastating socio-economic consequences in both the East and West. Furthermore the same intellectuals have had no reservations in this 'Post Soviet era' in supporting ('critically' of course) the British Labor Party, the French Socialist Party, the Clinton-Obama Democratic Party and other 'lesser evils' which practice neo-liberalism.

They supported the utter destruction of Yugoslavia and US-led colonial wars in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Not a few 'anti-Stalinist' intellectuals in England and France will have clinked champagne glasses with the generals, bankers and oil elites after NATO's bloody invasion and devastation of Libya - Africa's only welfare state..."

James Petras wrote:

In other words, while Western intellectuals still boast of their triumphs over Stalinism, the real existing workers in the East are engaged in day-to-day militant struggles to retain and regain the positive welfare features of those maligned states. Nowhere is this more evident than in China and Russia , where privatizations have meant a loss of employment and, in the case of China , the brutal loss of public health benefits. Today workers' families with serious illnesses are ruined by the costs of privatized medical care.

<a href="http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120626/A_OPINION02/206260306/-1/A_OPINION">recordnet</a> wrote:

Health care is human right

Several countries, far less affluent than we, are working hard to provide universal health care for all their citizens. China, Mexico, Thailand, and even Rwanda and Ghana - two of the world's poorest nations - are striving for the same goal.

China committed $126 billion to new hospitals and clinics. Although health care levels vary widely in China, they are striving to improve. It could be that China achieves universal/socialized health care before the USA ever does. China made remarkable strides toward national health and education until 1976, the year of Mao's death.

"Anti-Stalinist" mentioned 21 times. Good essay by Petras. The western world has certainly lost a lot of social democracy and hard fought-for social rights since the end of the cold war.

I think various babblers have written about how today's capitalists pay lip service to "classical liberal economists" and what they actually wrote in the past. Linda McQuaig wrote about how today's capitalism basically does everything Smith, Mill, Ricardo and especially Marx warned us against. 

Michael Hudson wrote:

 "300 years of classical political economy sought to get rid of landlords and bankers."

I believe neoliberalism is basically the opposite of "classical liberalism." They've managed to undo in 30 or 35 years what took three centuries to achieve in setting up modern industrial economies and legal systems that increasingly granted certain rights to debtors over those of creditors. Many of those rights have been lost since the beginning of the "new" liberal capitalism.

This is not the class war spoken of 100 years ago. It is no longer a class war between workers and industrialists - industrial capitalists are overthrown by financial capitalists since the 1980's. Very many of the owners of the means aren't even based in Canada anymore and jobs are "offshored". Labour's power is diminished as a result.

Today it's a war of finance capitalism against entire economies.

Kropotkin-- pickpockets have bodies as well. But you are quite right: the invisible hand is attached to a thief.

World's 100 Richest Earned Enough in 2012 To End Global Poverty 4 Times Over

http://rt.com/news/oxfam-report-global-inequality-357/

"The world's 100 richest people earned a stunning total of $240 million in 2012 - enough money to end extreme poverty worldwide four times over, Oxfam has revealed, adding that the global economic crisis is further enriching the super-rich. 'The richest 1% has increased its income by 60 percent in the last 20 years,' while the income of the top 0.01 percent has seen even greater growth, a new Oxfam report says..."

In all the first world countries...20% of the income earning workers are net producers....meaning they produce more than they consume.

The other 80% of the income earning workers are net consumers...meaning they consume more than they produce.

In Canada it works out to...

3,520,000 employees that are net producers or productive members of society...The power plant...Or supply of power

14,080,000 employees that are net consumers or consumptive members of society...The light bulbs...Or demand for power

When the demand of the net consumers becomes greater than the supply by the net producers...The economic systsem becomes yield starved and all in the the system begin eating themselves attempting to satisfy their hunger.

This process became visible in 2008 when the 1944 bretton woods global trade agreemnet which made the USA the supply of inflation and the rest of the world the demand for inflation...Reached maximum potential after 6 decades and begain visibly collapsing to oblivion...and has been getting worse and worse since then till now.

The exponential growth of the past 6 decades or doubling time reached maximum potential in 2008 and the exponential decay or half life is taking over...or becoming visible since inflation is sustained by causing deflation.

Like chopping down (deflating) trees faster than they regrow to power inflation.

When the trees begin to run out...Inflation or life that is powered by deflation or death of the forrest turns into deflation of inflation or life powered by the deflation or death of the forrest.

The fire of life grows more and more until the supply of firewood begins to run out and then the fire of life grows less and less...and when the trees run out completely.

That is absolute zero...the fire of inflation or life goes out...and the darkenss of deflation or death is all that remains.

Great news... thanks for this Caissa! I remember the CAW had an organizing campaign for United Church ministers back in the 1990s and always wondered where that ended up.

I had to chuckle about this, though:

Quote:

Rev. Janet Walker doesn't think a union is necessary, though.

"If our focus is only on ourselves, we're missing what our ministry is," she said. "I guess that's why, for me, I haven't had an interest in looking at what this union is about. I'm more focused on what we can do for others."

I don't want to count the number of variations on that theme I've heard from workers who haven't yet figured out that without a collective voice, they're toast.

Let me remind Rev. Walker of what one of our sages, Rabbi Hillel, said a couple thousand years ago:

Quote:

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

Still good questions for our time.

Ahaha, I missed that twist. Mind you, I hope they realize that the minute they start suggesting that we "turn the other cheek", or "love thy enemy", they're out!!!

I am not one of those who think all parties are the same so please do not read that into what I will say here.

No matter what party, most of those who are elected are privileged in almost every respect-- you can see this in gender (nowhere near parity in Canada). You can see that most are white unless they are from communities where the majority in the community is non-white. And seldom are they promoted in the caucus of their party. How often does a person of colour get elected to the House from a riding that is majority white? Does a person from a part of the country where the majority are  people of colour really know what it is like coming from another part of the country? Perhaps. But certainly white people (like me) can only imagine what we have not experienced no matter how well-meaning we may be.

The people elected to the NDP are most often well-meaning but also relatively well-off. They may mean well but it does not mean that they truly understand through experience what social justice is. This distortion is so severe that people who are in the middle often think they are at the bottom and struggling -- even if they aspire to be in the middle. People who are low income rarely come in contact with middle income people never mind higher income people. Our social circles usually approximate our circumstances. We even choose to a great degree our news and opinion. We live in parallel but different universes.

In the latest polls we are seeing a class divide. I always thought this was there to some degree but that lower income people were being conned into supporting other parties. Perhaps it is just that the BS is not working as well this time.

But at the end of the day can you really trust the NDP to completely understand?

They will get labour because labour is well-represented. At times they may still take labour for granted and propose bad policy because they are trying to be popular rather than right. But they at least understand.

But can you really expect any party to understand what it is like to work on minimum wage and try to live in a major city on this income? Can any party understand what it is like to try to get by on social assistance or even how a person comes to depend on it? The NDP may be more inclined to listen to what people are saying who are in this position but let us not pretend that they are representative. The class war will remain in part because the ignorance that it is founded on and the lack of representation will be there.

[ARTICLE] The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State, by Fred Block:

https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/SOC621/RulingClass.pdf