Category Archives: Voluntary Simplicity

Activism, Class War, Economics, Equality, Family, Gender Issues, Justice, Poverty, Psychology, Unions, Voluntary Simplicity, Work

Honey Bees & Women’s Wages

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While we like to think there has been some improvement in women’s wages, StatsCan reports that women earn around a 72-cent dollar today, just like they did 18 years ago. Stunningly, four times in the last 18 years, women’s wages in Canada actually declined with respect to men’s, only to recover, but ultimately leaving women just where they were right around when NAFTA began.

There is some good news, though. There are many instances of near wage parity in some sectors, which also just happen to have relatively high union density: health, art, culture, recreation and sport. Last year, the average hourly wage for unionized women from 25 to 54 years old was 93.7 per cent of men’s hourly wages. Sadly, but not surprisingly, non-unionized women’s hourly wages, in the same age category, were only 79.4 per cent of men’s.

Canada also ranks low among industrialized nations for representation of women in political and corporate leadership, both on boards of directors and in senior management. We also do a poor job of respecting, and legitimizing rewarding, part-time work and family leave for child or elder care.

It’s easy to blame some nebulous aspect of human nature for tolerating injustices that have been around for too long. Things that are new and startling tend to capture our attention – until they, too, become commonplace. Then they become just normal. Like the 72-cent dollar: a constant reminder of our society’s complacency with gender inequity.

How can we shake our society out of this stupor? I believe a combination of enhanced ecological sensibilities and feminism might help – as well as the tale of our honeybee’s decline.

Of the many flavours of feminism, one of the most compelling is ecofeminism. In the same neighbourhood as ecosocialism, ecofeminism asserts that the dominant powers in society view nature and women in the same way: as passive objects for domination and exploitation.

Changing our way of thinking and becoming mindful of how we interact with others, and of the environmental footprint of all the goods and services we consume, means recognizing and questioning unbalanced power dynamics in our workplaces, relationships and material existence. And when we change how we think about our relationship with our world, we will, surely, break out of the complacency that allows the 72-cent dollar.

Like socio-economic inequality for women, the world’s biodiversity decline has become “normal,” and is similarly neglected by our society. With tens of thousands of species sliding into extinction in recent decades, we’ve become numb to the numbers. It’s easy to dismiss the trend as one that affects only bugs and critters. Being at the top of the food chain means we ought to be concerned about how this loss of biodiversity will affect us. But since we’re still here, most of us eating what we want, we become deluded, thinking we’re immune. That is, until a system shock wakes us up.

We’ve heard in recent years about “honeybee colony collapse disorder,” with 60 to 90 per cent of the honeybees in some colonies dying since previous summers. We need to start drawing lines between biodiversity decline and the consequences on a myriad of food chains that, while worthy in their own right, ultimately supply our food chain.

Climate change/breakdown, pesticides, viruses, malnutrition, GMOs, antibiotics, and even itinerant bee rental are all possible suspects responsible for the collapse, but there is no one clear cause. What is clear is that without bees around to pollinate our plants, we will have a food crisis and risk mass starvation and societal upheaval, along with the effects of climate change.

We ignore the plight of the honeybees, the decline in biodiversity, rising extinctions, and threats to our food chain, at our peril. Similarly, we all too easily ignore contemporary socio-economic inequities like the 72-cent dollar.

Morley Gunderson, director of the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources at the University of Toronto, has noted the absence of a “single dominant factor that would sustain discriminatory wage differentials,” but “a number of small contributing factors” conspire to maintain gender inequity.

When I hear this, I think of the host of suspects potentially responsible for the collapse of the honeybees. I think that the lack of a simple, observable, direct cause of a 72-cent dollar means it might seem too complex to address. But then I also look to ecofeminism and how it challenges us to embrace this complexity undaunted, and to confront unhealthy mindsets, for the sake of both gender equity and ecological equilibrium.

The above is a version of my commentary piece in the International Women’s Day issue of Our Times, Canada’s independent labour magazine.

A Better World is Needed, Activism, British Columbia, Canada, Class War, Corporations, Economics, International Relations, Labour Theory of Value, Morality, Neoliberal Economics, Poverty, Voluntary Simplicity, Work

Make (Fair Trade) Chocolate, Not War

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Day three of the five-day trek through five of Global Exchange‘s 2011 campaign goals orbits the dialogue around converting free trade to fair trade after exploring how to reduce corporate control of our lives and embracing clean energy as we abandon our carbon addiction over the last two days.

Transition from free trade to Fair Trade: Despite almost ten years of commitments from Hershey’s to take responsibility for their cocoa supply chains and improve conditions for workers, significant problems persist. Hershey’s lags behind its competitors when it comes to taking responsibility for the communities from which it sources cocoa, so we’re calling on them to “Raise the Bar” and go Fair Trade. To get the word out, we’ll be spreading the message of Fair Trade to thousands of families across the country through Reverse Trick or Treating and other actions throughout the year.

As Canadian civil society groups are in Europe to confront the rapacious agenda of the Canada-European Union Free Trade Agreement this week [the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, or CETA], it is important to focus on how free trade as a paradigm is all about reducing democratic impediments to unlimited corporate growth and control. I don’t like that at all.

I don’t think corporations should decide on how to marketize bulk water or exploit Canadian tarsands. Water is essential to life and cannot be commodified. The tarsands development will sends us hurtling backwards as time is running out on averting climate breakdown. These policy choices belong to human beings. For the last quarter century, the free trade agenda has been all about ensuring human politicians abrogate our human right to decide policy for the sake of corporate decision making.

This must stop.

Neoliberal capitalism is a reboot of the origins of laissez-faire market capitalism from Adam Smith. Capitalism has only been a part of our society since 1776 when The Wealth of Nations hit the presses. Before that we had economics, markets, domestic and international trade, but it was largely governed by priorities that didn’t put corporations in the centre, with significant exceptions like the British East India Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company.

We can have trade without laissez-faire, deregulated corporate libertarianism. These days one of the most compelling movements to make trade fair is the Make Trade Fair movement, naturally, led by Oxfam. One of many fair trade movements in the world, Make Trade Fair is all about certifying that people involved in economic activity are treated with dignity and paid fairly. Often this means a whopping ten cent higher cost to a cup of boutique coffee. And by boutique, I mean ALL coffee. Small change for rich, caffeine-addicted consumers means a significant lifestyle improvement for impoverished foreign pickers.

And despite the fact that Dairy Milk is about as boring a chocolate bar that I can find anywhere, especially compared to the more expensive fair trade bars with more exotic tastes and ingredients, Cadbury has received certification that the cocoa in Dairy Milk to be fair trade. I’m buying Dairy Milks now, albeit sporadically. But before that, I’ve had a 15 year boycott of Big Chocolate.

So Global Exchange is confronting Hershey, that American icon, to live up to moral expectations.

We can do our share at Halloween and especially at Valentine’s Day next month to let our socially-conscious people know about the Dark Side of Chocolate and how buying fair trade makes a difference.

In the end, if we’ll pay a little bit more for fair trade luxury items like coffee and chocolate, that mentality should seep into all our economic transactions. No more sweatshops, only ethically sourced goods. That means doing a bit of research into how to do business in a way that respects living wages and even stopping conflict chocolate…yes, conflict chocolate, like conflict diamonds but with more caffeine.

There are more opportunities every month for us to spend our dollars ethically. If we care to do it, we need to put some effort into better consumer sourcing. And along the way, we need to fight back the free trade wave because in the end, we’re all just widgets in the economic warfare of free trade neoliberal capitalism. To be real people, we need to put our money where our ethics are.

This is the third reason why I support Global Exchange. And so should you.

A Better World is Needed, Class War, Consumerism, Corporations, Feminism, Identity, Psychology, Society, Transit, Vancouver, Voluntary Simplicity

Shame on You, You Ugly, Narcissistic Consumer

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"If you had a secret wish, would you make it beautiful?" - False Creek Plastic Surgery Centre

Some days it’s hard to make it through the day without something like the [theoretically] “public” transit system trying to shame us as ugly narcissistic consumers with their adcreep, just in time for Christmas!

Because we are not beautiful, we need plastic surgery. But we should not brag about it or openly discuss it with our peers: it needs to be a secret wish. Ads like this one from the for-profit False Creek Plastic Surgery Centre abuse us into thinking we’re ugly, then shame us into secretly wishing to be beautiful.

Priceless. We’re beautiful already, but the ad’s job is to convince us of the lie that we’re ugly.

"Our World Revolves Around You" - The Perfect New World of Technology: The HP Store in Vancouver

And then we have the new HP Store in Vancouver. Its goal is to let us know that the world revolves around me. I truly am that special. Except I’m a mark. HP is modelling its narcissism-inducing relationship with its customers after the Apple Store’s worship/exploitation of its cult members.

And perhaps the worst thing about this particular ad is that it appears to be on a bus shelter on Burrard near the SkyTrain station, but in fact it’s the same physical structure of a bus shelter ad, but it’s just sitting there on the street for people to walk into. It’s a TransLink billboard plunked right there on the sidewalk in our way when we’re walking, a billboard outside the transit system.

Adcreep takes a new angle.

So what is our job this Christmas?

  1. voluntary simplicity
  2. reject affluenza
  3. recognize we already have enough stuff
  4. remember that we’re all beautiful
  5. get over yourself if you think the HP world actually revolves around you, or that anything does
  6. know we are loved, honoured and cherished as human beings regardless of how much plastic surgery we’ve had or how big our hard drive is.

It’s hard to have a merry Christmas if you let the adcreep brainwash you into perceiving yourself as ugly, shameful and narcissistic…all at once. It takes decades of psychological work and training to get us to be all those things simultaneously.

Break out of that and suddenly you’ll notice the homeless teen 75 feet from the HP ad who also deserves the dignity that the adcreep is trying to rob from us all.

Now go give a hug to someone you love.

Activism, Art, British Columbia, Class War, Consumerism, COPE, Corporations, Environment, Identity, Transit, Vancouver, Voluntary Simplicity

Is a Car Free Vancouver Possible?

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CarFreeYVR posted a nice video [below] discussing the motivations and inspirations for car-free days in Vancouver. With car-free days festivals coming again on June 20 on Main Street, Commercial Drive, Kits and the West End [happy Father’s Day!], I’m excited to see hundreds take over the pavement.

But how does Vancouver ever become the first car-free city in North America? It’s all about systems theory.

Sure, elected leadership reflect dinosaur corporate interests. It will take us to “think outside the box” and embark on “grassroots mobilization” to self-actualize our “community organizer” vibes…and all the other cliches. But really, it’s about understanding the interconnectedness of everything.

And it isn’t necessarily about converting everyone who shows up to the festivals and getting them to sign a petition. It’s about living the community we envision. People will come. They will enjoy the day. The next day they will watch cars drive over all the great kids’ chalk art. A small part of their souls will be maimed.

Then next year we will have maybe more than four locations. Then we’ll have more than one day. Then people will finally stop griping about bike lanes in the downtown.

And through this we simply manifest the reality we want. Systems theory. Let’s see how the main areas of systems theory play out in car free days:

We move from understanding ourselves merely as isolated individuals to seeing ourselves as parts of a social, community whole. We are part of a hive mind. We have our own existence, but when we get to stroll down the yellow line of Main Street, we’ll see how our neighbours are a part of us.

We will realize that the objects in our communities are not distant items, but connected to us. When cars drive on our streets, we are separated from all these objects. Sitting on the pavement in the middle of Main and King Ed chatting with friends and sharing popsicles helps us see objects as part of us, not alien.

In the end, we become more attuned to our context. We get to question it from the perspective of sitting on the road instead of bolting across King Ed on a yellow light to catch a bus.

When we adjust our normal relationship with roads we get to move past the normal and embrace the rich quality of alternatives: what we can do with streets if we don’t let cars on them. Knowing comes from doing.

Instead of being humans with defined roles in an urban world, when we shift our relationships, we notice the patterns and processes that consume us. We enjoy different relationships and get to evaluate whether we really need the prescribed, unquestioned patterns we have endured forever.

Finally, when we take the rubber off the road we get a chance to build new patterns and relationships with the people, landmarks, shops, artists and green space in our road communities. We can’t get outside any box without experiencing an alternative. Imaginations can be powerful, but a car-free day is worth a thousand words.

And just like another great cliche bumper sticker: when the people lead, the leaders will follows. Eventually, the politicians will start showing up to car-free days because they’ll realize there is a serious constituency there. That’s where we earn the political legitimacy to force the leaders to follow our lead and start legislating car-free space.

And the fact that it’s all an open source, volunteer coordination effort is just icing on the cake. Actually, really, though, if it were all sponsored by Red Bull or Dasani, it would flop.

So what are you doing on Father’s Day? I know what I’ll be doing.

YouTube – Car Free Vancouver.

Class War, Corporations, Democracy, Economics, Environment, Imperialism, Neoliberal Economics, Poverty, USA, Vancouver, Voluntary Simplicity

Capitalism as Extortion: 700,000,000,000 Ways

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Over the last 7 days, I’ve been watching the repulsive song and dance in the USA to bail out some of the wealthiest corporations in the world. Congress finally passed bailout legislation today.

But instead of reforming the system that allowed the kind of greed and manipulation we’ve seen, we see capitalist extortion at work. The price is $700,000,000,000 from US taxpayers, their children, their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren…most of whom aren’t yet born so they have no political rights in this situation.

In this bailout, we see an arbitrarily derived number, $700,000,000,000, borrowed from non-US banks and added to the US debt. The money is essentially a gift to maintain the solvency of the financial firms at risk of tanking. Despite all the free market competition rhetoric from the neoliberal, neo-conservative Democratic and Republican White Houses for the last 3 decades, the government has chosen to intervene in the market to avoid the socio-economic ramifications of the collapse of so many firms. Surely, their collapse would be devastating to the US economy and the rest of the world, but the nature of this bailout says a great deal about options not embraced.

The Cause

This is perhaps debatable, but the sub-prime mortgage collapse last year is the likely trigger of this mass insolvency.

The US economy has been in trouble for a long time. Right after 9/11 Bush’s initial advice to Americans was to go shopping. Their economy is so dependent on consumer purchasing that if it were to stall, their trade imbalances and currency stability would crash, leading to a domestic and likely global depression. Canada is not much better. Such is the desperation of those running the US economy that they have supported a massive culture of consumer debt to underwrite increasing spending. This cannot go on forever.

Part of this consumer debt cycle is the sub-prime mortgage. Financial institutions lured desperate people who are reasonably unable to buy homes or expensive homes, to purchase them beyond their means with interest rates temporarily below the prime rate. Just like pyramid schemes, the system was profitable…for a while. Then it becomes untenable. Last summer, the sub-prime mortgage market crashed.

A humourous and accurate portrayal of this crisis is this short cartoon, well worth watching and spreading around: http://www.businesspundit.com/sub-prime/

The sub-prime crisis was a warning that went unheeded. It indicated that consumers were overextended and financial institutions were overextended in their lending. That left both citizens and institutions vulnerable to slight problems that could push them over the edge.

Options

There are several options available to the US government in recent weeks. They include the following:

  1. Let the corporations collapse
  2. Pay off their debts
  3. Nationalize them

1. Let the corporations collapse

Capitalism is all about risk and reward. Even though Canada and the USA do not allow people to drop their student loan debt when declaring bankruptcy, corporations can drop all their debt if they orchestrate their collapse effectively enough. Bankruptcy is designed to stimulate entrepreneurship. The problem comes when corporations get so large and powerful that their collapse has devastating ripples throughout society: job loss, pension fund collapse, currency devaluation, increased trade imbalances, recession, depression, increased working class and middle class bankruptcy and homelessness.

Governments that espouse free market principles, deregulate and undermine their own ability to intervene in markets are faced with a painful choice: live up to their free market ideals and let insolvent corporations collapse and allow their society to suffer, or pretend it’s OK to intervene sometimes and dodge criticisms of pulling a socialist tactic to save the economy.

Clearly, letting corporations collapse is painful medicine. CEOs have gambled that the government will not let them crash. Thus they have a get out of jail free card allowing them to behave irresponsibly knowing that the taxpayers will bail them out. Sounds like extortion to me. Ah, if only the taxpayers had bailed out Enron and Worldcom there wouldn’t be such hardship! Maybe.

2. Pay off their debts

Any kind of bailout package that shores up the insolvency of these financial institutions will allow them to survive another day, minimize some or most of the negative ripples they’ve instigated and keep the economy from tipping too far over the cliff overlooking depression. The US government today has guaranteed that these firms will survive another day, at least until the next crisis. But the US citizen has no true accountability from the financial sector or the government. While a future White House is required to prepare and monitor a payback plan, there is nothing actually requiring the $700,000,000,000 to be repaid to the consumers/taxpayers who have been lured into over-consumption in the first place.

3. Nationalize them

As the UK has done, instead of taking citizens’ and future citizens’ wealth to give to the irresponsible extortionists in their troubled financial firms, the government has nationalized some of the firms. This means the government, on behalf of current and future citizens, has taken actual ownership of the firms. Sure, they intend to sell them off again, but at least Joe and Margaret Citizen get an asset for their forced investment of wealth.

Fear-Mongering and Inducing Panic

So how is the USA coping with this crisis? The other night on Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN, queen of hysteria Suze Orman shared her thoughts. Her personal opinion is that the current crisis will not recover until the middle of the next decade. She continued by advising people who expect to retire in the next 10 years to get their money out of the market.

This is a fascinating and dangerous piece of advice. The first of the baby boomers are in their early 60s right now. In 10 years, most of the boomers will be in retirement age. Orman, has thus advised the largest portion of the biggest demographic blip of the last century to extract their wealth from the market.

Granted, the market is over-inflated. The bubble needs a correction. This explains some or most of the trillions of dollars of air leaking out of global markets in recent weeks. But when Orman says you can recover what you’re losing now after 10 years, boomers who can’t wait a decade to retire will be pulling out their cash, risking a run on the market.

Hysteria and fear-based withdrawal of wealth from a market tends to accelerate into a run as the desire to sell outpaces the desire to buy, causing stock prices to fall, potentially even below book value of companies themselves. At the same time, there is predatory buying, as we’re seeing now as behemoth corporations are buying up simply gigantic companies leading to less competition and more oligopolistic collusion.

The 1994 Mexican Peso Crisis

This kind of bailout is not completely new. In 1994, the Mexican peso crisis led to the USA orchestrating a $50 billion loan guarantee. Canada coughed up a hefty $1 billion, significant for a population of less than 30 million people then. The crisis came from the convergence of a number of incidents including the new Mexican government devaluing their currency, an act that was aggravated by a run by investors to dump the peso, thus compounding the tailspin.

US motivations for bailing out the weakening peso orbited around protecting US banks from bad loans. Does that sound familiar? So using taxpayer dollars to extend loans to support a foreign currency to keep domestic banks from suffering is a transfer of wealth from the mostly unborn future generations of Americans [and Canadians] indirectly to US banks that were greedy and stupid enough to extend such loans in the first place. But then, is it greed and stupidity when you behave like an extortionist and the system lets and encourages you?

The 1979 Chrysler Bailout

Another example of this capitalist extortion-based bailout involved Chrysler 30 years ago. In 1979 the US government spent $1.5 billion on loan guarantees for the virtually bankrupt Chrysler corporation. As one of the big 3 car makers in the USA, a bankrupt Chrysler would have meant a significant blow to the USA’s industrial capacity. The free market dictates that entrepreneurialism has rewards and risks. The fact that capitalist societies shelter capitalist activity with benefits like limited shareholder liability and bankruptcy protection seems to not be enough. When Chrysler was in dire need of assistance, the government intervened with taxpayer dollars to interfere with the hallowed free market of capitalists to protect the national economy from a body blow.

With these bailouts, what incentive do CEOs and entrepreneurs have to avoid running their corporations into the ground. If you owe the bank $300,000 for your mortgage, you work for the bank. If you owe the bank $300,000,000, the bank works for you because if you default on your loan, it goes out of business. This is the extortionist principle that has worked the last several weeks. Not so surprisingly, the threat of a massive foreign debt default by developing countries has never materialized despite its potential to reform the global trade and currency regime. So not everyone can pull of that kind of threat.

What the Bailout Doesn’t Do for Suffering People

By the time the House eventually voted for the amended bailout package today, some “members of the Congressional Black Caucus…said they changed course after securing commitments from presidential candidate Barack Obama that he would back legislation to help struggling consumers and homeowners facing foreclosures if he wins the White House.”

This is a nice sentiment, but when the bailout package is initially designed to help obscenely rich corporations instead of actual human beings suffering in this crisis, we see the clear priorities of the bailout’s supporters. We heard it too on CNN last weekend as announcers kept referring to the importance of helping “the financial firms that are suffering.”

Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine

The themes of Naomi Klein’s latest book on disaster capitalism fit well with the last few weeks. Extortionist capitalists have overextended their institutions past solvency. Since their existence is parasitically symbiotic with the bone marrow of the US society, letting them die would threaten the existence of the host. When the public purse comes to the rescue, we see a massive transfer of wealth from humans to the corporations (and their rich investors) that have contributed to their insolvency. The neoliberal agenda is advanced and the tens of millions of dollars the finance executives have been making in recent years looks like a good investment to shareholders since they can run the corporate profits up with unsustainable business practices and then get the people of the land to reimburse them for their irresponsibility.

Any time we see a fiscally conservative government cut taxes to the rich while increasing them to lower income groups, it is a wealth transfer from the poor and middle income groups to the rich. This is pure theft. What we’ve seen in recent weeks is the same pattern, all through the lens of a dire financial crisis.

Solutions

So what would really work to improve the situation we are in?

Firstly, the rapacious, over-consumptive social norm is unsustainable in any economic, social or ecological sense. Watch The Story of Stuff now if you haven’t yet!

Secondly, deregulated neoliberal capitalism allows a psychotic parasite to imprison us all. Society has the right to regulate its market activities. We need to enhance our regulatory capacity in many ways, including invoking our right to revoke the state-bestowed charters of corporations that are destructive in their behaviour.

Thirdly, we need to seriously re-think the notion of limited liability for shareholders. Allowing most of us in society to indirectly and ignorantly own stakes in dozens of corporations without having to worry about their destructive activities creates a culture of irresponsibility. Enacting investor liability will force us all to pay some attention to what our investments reap. It may throw a wet blanket on rampant, “innovative” entrepreneurialism, but I think we’ve seen enough of the horrible consequences of such innovation in recent generations that a little responsibility is necessary now. And in the end, the profit-maximizing corporate model is inherently unsustainable in a world of finite resources. Removing limited liability for investors will encourage most of us to explore more sustainable market models like co-operatives.

Fourth, we need to pull out the sledgehammers and destroy the crumbling vestiges of the economically imperialistic global trade and finance regime: the WTO, IMF and World Bank. That triumvirate of exploitation is being undermined monthly by countries and movements that reject the free trade cult in favour of trade and development plans that put people, social and physical infrastructure and the environment first.

Fifth, read what progressives are saying about the bailout, what problems will still exist, and alternative ways of addressing these toxic problems. Alternet.org is a good start. So is spending a minute and a half watching Dennis Kucinich explain a better focus than the bailout.

Some Common Sense

In the end, this crisis was inevitable. The overinflated market needed a correction. Housing bubbles in Vancouver and many other cities need to be corrected. Markets respond to positive and negative hysteria to create and deflate bubbles. And along the way regular people lose their life savings, homes and economic freedom. The collateral damage is simply intolerable. That is why the US House of Representatives initially voted down the bailout: they have to get re-elected every 2 years. The bailout saves Wall Street, not the citizens.

Without a fundamental rejection of market-based greed and over-consumption, this crisis will be far from the last one. As long as we neglect systemic changes, we will continue to suffer. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, our continental and global economic system is insane and so are we if we think it will fix itself while we ignore its systemic flaws. Shame on us if we let that happen.