Category Archives: Neoliberal Economics

Activism, Class War, Democracy, Economics, Equality, Family, Health, Journalism, Media, Neoliberal Economics, Poverty, Society, Soft Fascism

Unspinning the Bush Veto Spin

4 Comments

Not that Bush needs to veto much. He simply issues signing statements indicating the executive branch will not abide by this or that of the legislation he’s signing. Soft Fascism ‘R Us.

But now the folks at the radically right Media Research Center have spun coverage of this nasty veto thusly:

Again exploiting children and mothers to advance the goal of expanding federal spending and dependency, ABC’s World News led Wednesday night by giving voice to the media-political establishment’s astonishment that President Bush would veto a bill to provide health insurance “for children.”

It’s hard to reply to this other than to say that the very first clause has simply been spun backwards. Poor children cannot depend on private insurers, so they depend on the government to keep them from illness and death. Bastards, eh!

And black is white, war is peace…

So after 4 decades of socialized medicine in Canada, it turns out that all progressives do is look for excuses to increase government budgets, not the other way around.

Activism, Canada, Class War, Democracy, Equality, First Nations, MexAmeriCanada, North American Union, Security and Prosperity Partnership, Society, Soft Fascism, USA

Moving Past Complacency in Protest

Leave a comment

Activists need some inspiration. Salutin’s piece in the Globe today [see below] is key to reminding us of the necessity of a fight, not just a polite march through some streets to a park for a peaceful rally. That’s important. However, the injustices seeping into the fabric of our rapidly decaying democracy need to be challenged radically, in part to wake up a complacent public distracted by Canadian Idol, iPhones and the fall TV line up.

Neglect of social, political and economic for First Nations, the creeping SPP and our recent success in outing the agent provocateurs at Montebello [though we still need an inquiry and a government to topple because of it] all should remind us of what is at stake.

Indeed, the success with the rock-carrying masked cops in Quebec should let us know that the anti-democratic elites running our country are desperate to undermine dissent.

Their desperation is our vindication of the importance of what they are doing and what we need to do to stop them.

Mild social change can be polite. But when elites are transforming our democracies into soft fascism, the stakes are incredibly higher. Perhaps the biggest indication of this is in the USA where habeas corpus has now been declared optional and the population is largely unaware of it and certainly too complacent to do anything about it.

George w.Caesar is not Jack Bauer. In the backs of too many people’s minds, I think he is seen that way. This kind of complacency will be our undoing.

Salutin’s piece is a welcome tonic.

A Canadian labour moment: Don’t apologize, never placate
The Globe And Mail
Friday, August 31, 2007
Rick Salutin

Labour Day weekend, 2007.

Canadian labour had a good moment two weeks ago at the Montebello protest. Union leader Dave Coles denounced three undercover cops posing as anarchists and cradling rocks to give the protest a bad name. They retreated behind police lines, not a normal anarchist tactic. But he went a step too far for my taste, in shouting, “This is a peaceful demonstration.” He sounded perhaps overeager to placate TV viewers or police or maybe the people who write editorials in places such as The Globe and Mail. To be sure, it was a peaceful protest, but radical movements such as labour have been most effective when they had a touch of menace.

Uh-oh, I’m having a Dave Coles moment. I don’t mean they should be violent or threaten violence. But they need a sense of implacable determination that takes them beyond any desire to seem respectable. The best example is the movement for Indian independence led by Gandhi. He more or less invented non- violence as a political tactic. Yet, he didn’t shun violence when it arose and, in cases, courted it. He wouldn’t instigate or retaliate, but lots of bloodshed was involved. Here’s 90-year-old Baji Mohammed, “one of India’s last living freedom fighters,” interviewed recently: “On August 25, 1942, we were all arrested and held. Nineteen people died on the spot in police firing … Many died thereafter … Over 300 were injured. More than a thousand were jailed … Several were shot or executed. There were over a hundred shaheed (martyrs) … ” Others, such as Nelson Mandela, went to jail for causes that did involve armed resistance. But I’m saying the key is not violence, it’s relentless determination.

A sense of commitment at any cost draws the attention of others, and sometimes their respect, especially if every normal recourse has failed, sometimes for centuries. I’m thinking of the case of Shawn Brant, the Mohawk leader who spoke eloquently for native protests that recently closed Highway 401 and the CN rail line. He was jailed and has twice been denied bail. In an eloquent plea of her own, his wife, Sue Collis, compared his situation to labour protests against Mike Harris in Ontario 11 years ago. Then, she says, “economic repercussions … far surpassed” those of the recent one, “yet no labour leader was ever jailed, let alone charged.” So why is Shawn Brant in jail? I’d say there was an implacability in his expression; he cut his opponents no moral slack. He didn’t threaten, but he didn’t try to mollify, either.

In its heyday, the labour movement had this kind of single-minded, almost stoic conviction. Its main weapon, the strike, was non-violent but aroused feelings comparable to those during war, toward scabs or bosses. In that frame of mind, there is no need felt to placate the other side and none at all for respectability. What would you want it for?

I think a society benefits from this kind of challenge. It clarifies choices and discourages endless avoidance. Sue Collis writes that, after the Mohawk blockades in June, polls showed “71 per cent of Canadians wanting actions on land claims and 41 per cent of Ontarians prepared to acknowledge rail blockades as justified.” There’s also a social loss when fierceness and passion vanish almost entirely from movements such as labour or the environment. I sympathize with the dismay of green veterans at the rise as a green icon of Al Gore – who couldn’t even beat George Bush in his home state in 2000 or fight the battle of the Florida recount with bloody-mindedness, despite its dire implications.

Sue Collis writes that, after the second bail hearing, she found herself “contemplating the best way to tell my children that they would have to wait an unknown period of time before seeing their dad, and wondering how to explain … why.” From a very minimally comparable experience, I’d recommend playing them a Peter, Paul and Mary song: “Have you been to jail for justice? I want to shake your hand …”

Canada, Class War, Conservative Party of Canada, Deep Integration, Democracy, Imperialism, MexAmeriCanada, Mexico, North American Union, Security and Prosperity Partnership, Soft Fascism, USA

No to MexAmeriCanada: Vancouver Protests the SPP

4 Comments

Tearing up the Magna Carta

We are witnessing the dismantling of the Magna Carta with the North American Union, The Security and Prosperity Partnership [SPP] and the North American Competitiveness Council.

Almost 800 years ago we somehow wrestled the elites of the British monarchy to issue the Magna Carta, a bill of rights for humanity, optimistically anyway.

Business elites in government and the corporate world are now taking over, completely unapologetically, in an almost Taoist spin. The SPP, against which there was vigorous protest today across the country, is a secretly negotiated international agreement/treaty designed to harmonize and integrate the NAFTA countries. It is not being ratified by the “democratically” elected legislatures in the three countries, nor are citizens able to provide input into its design. There is no national election or referendum on our embrace of it.

This is the height of arrogance, and people are mostly in the dark, thanks to highly concentrated corporate media that fails to exercise its free press responsibilities by ignoring much criticism and playing down its threats to democracy and sovereignty.

With rallies across the country, at times up to 250 people marched and rallied in Vancouver in a coordinated effort to educate the largely oblivious pedestrians surrounding them about the SPP and its threat to democracy.

The North American Union, or Security and Prosperity Partnership, moved one step closer to its anti-democratic formation today as Prime Sinister Stephen Harper decided to not receive an anti-SPP petition with over 10,000 signatures:

The Council of Canadians is demanding that the Harper government cease all SPP talks until the agreement is brought before parliament and the public.

“If they are unwilling to accept paper petitions, how credible is the claim that leaders will view or hear, through video feed, the message of protesters outside the summit?”

I have no faith that the “Three Amigos” will respect democracy. In fact, Mexico’s Fox wasn’t an original amigo as he preceded the newly “elected” Calderon and Paul Martin was Canada’s first friendly representative to this cabal. This is a strong indication of how similar the Liberals and Conservatives are in selling out democracy.

Even the moniker “Three Amigos” has the happy benefit of painting the trio as a group of benign beer buddies shooting pool, having some good clean fun. Maybe watching some NASCAR, perhaps.

So as the Amigos of MexAmeriCanada meet to rubber stamp what their ministers have been hacking together for months now, all in secret with no legislative oversight or sanctioning, we get the odd happy, grinning, hand-shaking announcements from the goodfellas now and then.

Meanwhile, the toxic, parasitical plague virus that is capitalism is Borg-ifying North America with the massive North American SuperCorridor, a quarter-mile wide stretch of movement from Mexico to Canada containing car, truck, rail, data, oil and water transportation. Resistance is futile. You will become one with the Borg. It will be a secure zone like behind the metal detectors at airports and it will convert the pathetic 20th-century attempts at efficient transportation into a highly assimilated movement system. Click to see the images in their full glory!

The top point of the highway is Winnipeg, which will extend north to Churchill and West to Vancouver. And oh, do they have plans from the Winnipeg node. Note the flourish of movement out west and to the Asia-Pacific. This is special because the recent treaty signed between BC and the Tsawwassen First Nation allows land to be sucked out of the Agricultural Land Reserve for parking intermodal containers at DeltaPort.

And Churchill allows us to go polar to trade with Asia.

The Face of Vancouver Protest

The almost 200 marchers flowed through downtown Vancouver late this afternoon from Canada Place to the Robson Street steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, stopping and blocking key intersections for up to 15 minutes for speeches and chants. The occasional burst of horns lasted only 20-30 seconds at most.


Speeches in intersections reflected how much the SPP is becoming a focal point for broad social protest. First Nations activists, anti-imperialists, Marxists, socialists, civil society advocacy groups, nationalist groups and scores of individuals came together to reject various elements that the SPP is entrenching in our new North American Union.

The march took a winding tour of some of the corporations who now belong to the NACC’s Corporate Legislature: Manulife, Scotia Bank, Bell Canada.

They stopped at the Canadian Forces Recruitment Centre to protest our military partnership with US imperialism, smearing red paint on the sidewalk, walls and windows, laying symbolic corpses, and posting large stickers. When protesters and police came too close to each other at times, dueling video cameras from members of each side appeared to document each other.


Some semblance of democracy still exists in Canada, albeit over 2,000 kilometres away from Montebello as Vancouver city policy on bikes and in cars blocked traffic while the protest occupied streets. They also blocked the entrance to the CF Recruitment Centre and other targets of protest, all the while filming elements of the protest and taking notes like the mostly non-corporate media present.

The march ended at the Art Gallery with the Raging Grannies, the Carnival Band, representatives from MAWO, StopWar.ca, and the Council of Canadians supporting a garish effigy of George w.Caesar dangling a Stephen Harper puppet behind a security barricade.

Signs reflected the general mood of the rally: “SPP is Treason”, “Stop the North American Union, We’d Rather Be Canadian, Eh!”, “Harper=Sellout”.

While corporate, government and media elites in North America continue to smooth over the neoliberal globalizing western imperialism introducing us to a well-marketed Soft Fascism, the hundreds of millions of North Americans need to get aware, educated and mobilized.

The Canada-US Free Trade Agreement ended up being the subject of the 1998 federal election. The federal Liberals seized power in 1993 on a promise to not sign NAFTA. They did anyway. MAI died in the late 1990s because citizen groups objected to corporate rights trumping democracies. The lesson? Democracy is bad for business.

After the MAI, though, the corporate neo-feudalists just got craftier by negotiating these agreements in secret, often under the cover of post-9/11 hysteria, ignored legislative ratification and began to alter our whole social, economic and political landscape regardless of citizens’ thoughts.

Democracy is something to fight for, something wrestle away from the grasp of the government, media and corporate elites whose 21st century neoliberal, neo-feudal imperial agenda is now marching almost effortlessly over the dying corpse of our democratic institutions. If we don’t fight for our democracy, perhaps we deserve to have it euthanized while we’re watching American Idol and checking out the best price on plasma TVs at Future Shop.

Activism, Class War, Democracy, Equality, Justice, Morality, Neoliberal Economics, Poverty, Privatization, Society, Vancouver, Work

The NPA Union-Busters: an Open Letter to Vancouver City Council

1 Comment

If you agree with this posting, I strongly encourage you to email the Vancouver Mayor and City Council with a letter explaining just what you expect of them. Feel free to even copy this letter, sign it and send it to them at mayorandcouncil@city.vancouver.bc.ca which will forward to each of them.

Dear Mayor and Council,

For those of you who have no interest in vindictively punishing your highly valued staff in your 3 unions, I commend you. I encourage you to continue to lobby the others of you, the NPA I assume (correct me if I’m wrong), to bargain fairly.

I don’t know if you NPA union-busters are trying to save enough money from wages to pay off the Wilcox consultants or if you just like watching people suffer, but your refusal to meet your workers for more than 5 hours over THE LAST 6 DAYS is abhorrent and offensive to me.

I am ashamed that I live in this wonderful city when our “leaders” sink to this level of crass disrespect for the workers who support our social fabric, the workers you speak so highly of.

Your behaviour will not go unpunished in November 2008 when citizens wielding ballots all over the city will remember each one of you NPA social pariahs.

“Sam’s Strike” can only exist with 5 NPA councillors continually supporting him.

17% over 5 years for workers in neighbouring municipalities is a fair settlement. As a citizen of Vancouver I would support those kind of numbers. Pay equity for library workers who suffer from gender discrimination IN THE 21ST CENTURY, IN CANADA, is due. We should be ashamed to delay it any longer.

This is the end of the NPA in Vancouver: your obvious desire to corrode our civil society is your undoing.

Your offense is obscene.

It is time to bargain a contract, not rewind our labour culture to the 19th century. Get to the table and do your job!

Activism, British Columbia, Class War, Corporations, Democracy, Economics, Equality, Labour Theory of Value, Neoliberal Economics, Poverty, Society, Vancouver, Work

The End of "Mayor" Sam Sullivan

3 Comments

Welcome Peter Ladner, NPA’s next mayoral candidate.

Sam Sullivan has unofficially ended his term as mayor at 11:03AM today as CUPE announced a tentative settlement in North Vancouver. We have passed the tipping point in the regional dispute.

Sullivan’s strategy has been absurd, ill-conceived and ill-informed at best, arrogant and destructive at worst. In fact, however, it is not a new strategy: it has a historic [and historically foolish] basis: Boulwarism.

It’s all about rejecting bargaining entirely and starting “negotiating” with a final offer that won’t budge from threats or strikes. It inherently opposes the rights of workers to negotiate with management.

In light of the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent ruling that BC’s Bill 29 is illegal and that collective bargaining is protected under the Charter, “Mayor” Sam’s tactics are in the spirit of what the Supreme Court opposes, as are the abuses the HEU suffered earlier in the decade and BC teachers’ loss of the right to bargain wages, working conditions and class sizes.

But “Mayor” Sam is always right. Until he is embarrassingly wrong. Here’s how it looks today:


Richmond, Surrey, Delta, Burnaby and North Vancouver have got Vancouver surrounded with contracts that aren’t punitively designed to punish labour because it is organized. Vancouver has had the strength to bargain unfairly with the GVRD’s bargaining support, until now as the 5 largest municipalities around Vancouver have or will settle by tomorrow. Vancouver’s bargaining strength is virtually gone. Richmond and Surrey, that do not use the GVRD bargaining stick, helped set a pattern that the other 3 cities have recognized, and in doing so have constrained the GVRD’s scope to push Vancouver’s agenda and support Vancouver’s internal turmoil.

Keith Baldrey wrote in the Coquitlam Now on July 25, 2007, “the BC economy has undergone significant changes (forestry, while still big, is not the huge industry it once was) and the power of organized labour has diminished in the past two decades. …The economy is doing well, and employees consider themselves deserving of a bigger portion of that richer economic pie.”

The truth is broader though. Sure, the better economy means the workers ought to share in it. But the truth is that even when the economy was not so good in recent decades, corporate profits and management salaries have done well, often at the expense of workers, whose purchasing power today is close to half of what it was 30 years ago.

People often complain—especially during civic strikes like now–that union workers are lazy whiners who seek opportunities to strike while “real” workers in the private sector don’t have job security or finite hours of work or good working conditions. Their goal seems to be to make unionized workers have to suck it up and suffer the same kind of crappy jobs, wages, working conditions, hours of work and lack of protections that non-union workers are forced to endure.

Unions have spent the better part of two centuries agitating for change: weekends, a 40 hour work week [hopefully to decline further for quality of life concerns and higher meaningful employment rates], no children working 12-hour 7-day weeks in coal mines [except in BC now, thanks to Campbell’s neoLiberal regime, children as young as 12 can get their asses to work], overtime pay, holidays, vacations, health and safety provisions, etc. So many of these benefits have become so valued that society as a whole has adopted them into legislation: the Labour Code, minimum wages, collective bargaining rights to support democracy in the workplace. And now the Supreme Court has joined our side.

So while many non-union workers think unionized workers get too much, my question to them is don’t you deserve as much too? Why try to stop others from being treated with dignity at work because you aren’t. Should we all have a labour race to the bottom so we’re all back in sweatshops? Stop the insanity.

And as Baldry writes that the power of unions has declined, it is because unionization, particularly private sector unionization, has declined. Instead of trying to drag other workers down to lower levels of treatment, it’s time increase the level and breadth of unionization, particularly in the private sectors. Why aren’t bank workers unionized? They are often treated like moronic cogs on a product-shilling wheel while the big banks in Canada regularly post quarterly profits [not revenues!] in the billions?

Sam Sullivan doesn’t get it. Actually, he does get it. It’s just that he rejects it while claiming in his inaugural address to support it:

“Vancouver is blessed with highly skilled staff who maintain our status as the most liveable city in the world. Tightening labour markets will present challenges over the next five years to attract, retain and develop our work force. All of us should be grateful for the front line workers who serve us so well. Our recruitment theme ‘Powered by Innovation’ should be more than a slogan as we provide interesting and rewarding careers.”

Intelligent city councils surrounding Vancouver get it too and they don’t reject it. CUPE workers get it because they know they deserve to be treated with respect…as do all other workers, despite what our arrogant, anti-social premier and mayor believe.

So thanks for the memories, “Mayor” Sam Sullivan. Let your lame duck mayoralty begin.

And, Peter Ladner, the tide is turning. Remember that as you build your NPA leadership campaign.

British Columbia, Class War, Democracy, Justice, Neoliberal Economics, Olympic Games, Society, Vancouver, Work

Sam’s Strike: The Arrogance of the Man and “The Man”

Leave a comment

It is clear to me that Sam’s Strike is all about the Vancouver mayor’s deluded sense of autocracy [see below].

While other municipalities are being lined up to support Vancouver’s mean-spirited refusal to bargain in good faith, we wait to watch how long Sam can go thinking that the world will actually revolve around him and his idea that through his immense, sheer will, thousands of people who are actually committed to building community will crack under his might and give in to his petty demands.

His mayoralty is a shame.

Vancouver is the only city in Canada that has had three strikes in the last decade. In a strong economy, to not reward public workers, but instead to demand job insecurity and a contract term to expire days after the Olympics ends is just plain mean. It’s also representative of the grand golden straitjacket of neoliberalism that erodes the social fabric we’ve spent generations building.

Talks with CUPE 15 break down, city fails again to bargain worker issues

[July 28, 2007 08:53 PM]

VANCOUVER – CUPE 15, the union representing striking Vancouver inside workers, returned to the bargaining table yesterday at 9:30 a.m. tabling a 5 year package that addressed Mayor Sullivan’s concern about labour stability through the Olympics, with an understanding that the city was prepared to deal with issues that were also important to the union.

Despite this CUPE 15 movement, the City of Vancouver once again refused to bargain and spent less than 2 hours and 22 minutes over a period of two full days speaking with the union. The rest of the time, the city committee “caucused” while union negotiators sat and waited.

“We knew something was wrong when we arrived at the table and the City of Vancouver did not even have their two top decision makers in the room or in the building,” says CUPE 15 president, Paul Faoro. “You would have thought that with a strike coming into its second week, civic services at a halt and nearly 5,500 Vancouver city workers on the street, that General Manager Mike Zora and City Manager Judy Rogers would have made it a priority to attend and negotiate a settlement. What else could be more important?”

“There is one thing I give the city credit for,” says Faoro. “Consistency. The City of Vancouver has consistently failed to bargain and continues to frustrate the process to this day.”

CUPE 15 presented a complete written package to the city for negotiation on Friday morning. The city refused to respond in writing to the proposal.

“Frankly, we have had enough of this circus, and we suspect the public has had enough too. What is it going to take for the city to realize that manipulation and game-playing is not going to bring about a collective agreement?” says Faoro. “How much does the public have to be inconvenienced and how long do our members have to walk the picket-line without a paycheque, unable to provide the services they are proud to deliver to the residents of Vancouver?”

CUPE 15’s chief negotiator, Keith Graham, says the city is still holding onto their “final offer”, tabled on July 9th, 2007. This is the same offer that union members voted down by an overwhelming 89% because it had takeaways and failed to address issues of importance to the union, like job security (no-contracting out language), improvements for auxiliaries, whistleblower protection and harassment resolution language.

Description of major CUPE 15 issues:
Contrary to common belief, CUPE 15’s current collective agreement has no language in it that protects Vancouver’s inside workers from contracting out. At any moment, the city of Vancouver can outsource whatever services they choose, eliminating jobs and compromising the quality and stability of public services. It is for this reason that CUPE 15’s primary concern is to negotiate language that provides them with job security through the term of the agreement.

“We recognize that is it reasonable for the city of Vancouver to secure labour stability through the Olympics, but it is also reasonable for city workers to seek job security,” says Faoro. “Mayor Sullivan and his management staff have given us no reason to trust that they won’t just contract out our jobs one-by-one over the next 5-years.”

Another major issue that the union would like to see addressed is improvements for auxiliary workers, whom have no right to be scheduled by seniority, no benefits, no statutory holiday pay and have gone from temporary and occasional work relief to a massive under-compensated labour pool. In parks, for instance, two-thirds of the workforce is made up of “auxiliary workers” who are kept in this position for years and years.

CUPE 15 would like to see more of these jobs converted into full-time jobs with benefits and negotiate improvements for remaining auxiliaries that include scheduling by seniority. Right now, management can and does decide to call into work an auxiliary with less than a day on the job over an auxiliary worker with 14 years service with the city.

The union has also made it a priority at the bargaining table to negotiate harassment resolution language and whistleblower protection – contract language that protects workers from discipline and/or job loss when they speak out on an issue of public concern, like water safety, equipment maintenance, safety procedures, etc.

Union package to city of Vancouver, July 27, 2007:

Using the contract ratified in Richmond as a starting point, CUPE 15 tabled a wage increase of 21 percent over 5 years that they clearly stated was negotiable. The package also included proposed benefit improvements and the above-mentioned priorities.

The city claimed that the union’s package amounted to a total cost of 30 percent and was not “affordable and reasonable”. Faoro says the city’s calculation is more “phantom costing” and just an excuse not to begin negotiations in earnest.

“It is frustrating to be at the bargaining table with people who clearly do not understand or are pretending not to understand how negotiations work,” says Faoro. “The idea is both sides present their position and you end up somewhere in between.”

Robin Jones, CUPE National representative and chief negotiator for CUPE 394 and CUPE 718,
the two Richmond locals that ratified a deal last week is available to comment to the media on the total cost of his committee’s initial proposal to the city, which he says began at about 40% cost to the city of Richmond.

“We asked for almost 12 benefit improvements, we agreed to only two in the end, glasses and dietician services. We asked for a $2 an hour shift differential, we agreed to only $1 an hour in the end. We asked for $1.50 an hour dirty pay, we agreed to 75 cents, we asked for 100 percent benefit coverage and we ended up with only 80 percent in the end and the list goes on,” says Jones. “That’s how negotiations work and today we have a signed collective agreement and both sides are happy. But you can’t get there if one party is not willing to negotiate.”

CUPE 15 represents Vancouver’s 2,500 inside city workers who normally work at city, parks, Ray-Cam, and Britannia Community Centre.

Activism, Canada, Class War, Conservative Party of Canada, Deep Integration, Democracy, Imperialism, Neo-Conservatism, North American Union, Security and Prosperity Partnership, Society, Soft Fascism, USA

Police States ‘R Us

Leave a comment

A 25 km security perimeter is fascinating, as is turning away cars with more than 5 people in them.

But forcing a public centre to not rent space for a public meeting is astonishing.

Essentially, the right to free public association is arbitrarily over.

This is the context in which the new North American Union is being negotiated. Democracy and transparency and civil rights as variables. Welcome to the New World Order.

MEDIA RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 11, 2007

RCMP, U.S. Army block public forum on the Security and Prosperity Partnership

The Council of Canadians has been told it will not be allowed to rent a municipal community centre for a public forum it had planned to coincide with the next Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) summit in Montebello, Quebec on August 20 and 21.

The Municipality of Papineauville, which is about six kilometres from Montebello, has informed the Council of Canadians that the RCMP, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) and the U.S. Army will not allow the municipality to rent the Centre Communautaire de Papineauville for a public forum on Sunday August 19, on the eve of the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership Leaders Summit.

“It is deplorable that we are being prevented from bringing together a panel of writers, academics and parliamentarians to share their concerns about the Security and Prosperity Partnership with Canadians,” said Brent Patterson, director of organizing with the Council of Canadians. “Meanwhile, six kilometres away, corporate leaders from the United States, Mexico and Canada will have unimpeded access to our political leaders.”

As well as being shut out of Papineauville, the Council of Canadians has been told that the RCMP and the SQ will be enforcing a 25-kilometre security perimeter around the Chateau Montebello, where Stephen Harper will meet with George W. Bush and Felipe Calderón on August 20 and 21. According to officials in Montebello, there will be checkpoints at Thurso and Hawkesbury, and vehicles carrying more than five people will be turned back.

Founded in 1985, the Council of Canadians is Canada’s largest citizens’ organization, with members and chapters across the country. The organization works to protect Canadian independence by promoting progressive policies on fair trade, clean water, safe food, public health care, and other issues of social and economic concern to Canadians.

Activism, British Columbia, Education, Neoliberal Economics, Society

Poisoning a Community: What Forces Teachers to Leave

1 Comment

Jeepers. This piece [see below] was terrifying, mostly because of the angry abuse making up many of the comments at the website.

“It’s just a job.” That’s a scary phrase. But I can relate to it. I quit just before I got to that place, and that was after 12 years teaching in first a pretty good climate leading to a steadily soul-destroying climate.

I still deal with the regret of spending almost a decade wanting to become a teacher, doing the training and getting a job, then building professional competence, only to see it assaulted by political forces. Reforming from within is something so many are capable of doing without becoming too bitter. I have immense respect for them. The price became too high for me.

Now I have stepped out of the classroom to find more politically powerful tools to address the underlying hyper-individualistic ideological and neoliberal economics motivations for destroying the public, universal, communitarian, society-building education system in exchange for one that worships the inherent god of free-market economics.

But I still resent having my vocation stolen from me by a poisoned climate. Yet, I am still optimistic. Optimistic and unwavering in my belief that when my children turn 5, they will have a rewarding public school experience despite others’ attempts to defund and undermine it for their own material greed, misanthropy and hatred of “the inferior”.

Oh, yes, the soul-destroying climate:

– parents who blindly stand behind their students who are caught cheating, insisting that the teachers are lying, despite evidence, perhaps because they feel being a good parent means always believing your child
– arbitrary statistical school “performance” goals that encourage fudging enrollment in provincial government exam courses
– the institutional mentality that increasingly needs to pound square peg students into round holes
– “customer” satisfaction surveys
– corporate “food” companies building food fairs in cafeterias
– parents claiming I am discriminating against their students because I didn’t catch all the other cheaters on the test, therefore their students shouldn’t be “consequenced”
– labour flexibility = servitude
– functionally illiterate administrators who believe they are inspiring
– administrators soliciting parents to complain to them about teachers instead of following district policy asking them to show enough respect for the teachers to speak to them first
– administrators trying to subvert any due process to get teachers to quit
– administrators soliciting students to complain about unfavoured teachers
– high stakes testing
– the ignorance-championing view that what cannot be measured with “objective,” “verifiable” statistics is not worth teaching
– new teachers having to justify their grade distribution to their administrators as a statistical whole, rather than an aggregate of actual individual students’ achievement
– staff meetings split into 4 different groups in different rooms to keep the staff from discussing contentious issues affecting the entire learning community
– the Fraser Institute–with its website and publications riddled with spelling errors–promoting myopic, research-rejecting educational values
– teachers who welcome and even champion government violations of their labour and human rights
– Ministry staff and government functionaries who believe consulting stakeholders means refusing to speak with BCTF representatives because they are a special interest group, different from all the other special interests
– legislating used car salespeople to have a self-regulating professional body, but removing teachers’ ability to have the same
– students who feel it is a human rights violation to be asked to handwrite or not write formal essays w/ txt msg abrev’s and shit, u no?
– Emery Dosdall
– Christy Clark
– Gordon Campbell

http://thetyee.ca/Views/Teacherdiaries/2007/03/28/GoodbyeClass/

Why I Left the Classroom
Teaching changed, so I changed my life.
By Shaun Cunningham
Published: March 28, 2007
TheTyee.ca

One in five teachers leaves the profession within the first five years of teaching. Or is it one in thirteen, as the Ontario government claims? Whatever the stats, they don’t reveal how many vanishing teachers were young and restless, old and exhausted, or, like myself, somewhere in between.

Based on what I’ve overheard in the public school staff rooms of British Columbia, about 98 per cent of teachers say they seriously consider getting out about once a day. The other two per cent are, of course, either Buddhists or medicated. I am one of these. Gone, that is, not medicated.

My own stand-up performance lasted 15 years, thus outlasting by ten years all those who leap from the ship within the first five years. It’s not so much that I’m a slow learner, but rather that this is how long it took me to achieve the spectacular kind of burn-out which hasn’t been seen since one of my Junior High math teachers declared in the middle of class, “This doesn’t add up”, left the room, and was never seen again.

Teaching was my identity and I miss it. So the answer to why I left isn’t simple. The answer, “to look after my children” brings sighs, nods of knowing commiseration, and the occasional hug from young mothers who barely know me. But in truth, I have a kind of laundry list of items which, taken together, may or may not constitute the dirt on why I and so many teachers leave the best profession on earth.

Numbers that add up

Those who believe that the 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. school bells constitute the parameters of teachers’ working hours subscribe to one or more illusions. One of these is perhaps based on recollections of the kind of schooling that depended primarily on textbooks, workbooks and on matching words to pictures. A second might be the vision of a teacher standing before a group of “average students” who are all able to learn at roughly the same rate and in roughly the same way.

Teachers now stand before a group of individuals. Each of their learning styles, their needs, their contexts, abilities and disabilities needs identification, respect, modification and thought. In one split class of 29 students, I was faced with 19 different “labels,” nine of which required completely individualized education plans. After countless meetings and forms, at June’s end that particular year, I waved good-bye to a group who seemed not to be significantly hampered by my inability to meet their needs. I, on the other hand, was mute with both exhaustion and a sense of personal failure.

Given the expectation of individualization, textbooks (where updated versions exist in sufficient numbers) have become only semi-useful tools of instruction. Many teachers run, by necessity, a “resource-based classroom.” This involves locating, evaluating, modifying and adapting material wherever you can find it. When two parents asked for homework in advance so as to pack it along on a trip to Disneyland, I suggested that they would need to make room for me. “I’m the program,” I said. “What time do we leave?”

Discussing this often inspires lectures from experts on education, most of whom work at jobs outside the field — like my Uncle Bob, for example. He had 40 or 50 kids in his room and his teacher carried a stick and wasn’t afraid to use it. He refers to these times as “the good old days,” which is why no one wants Uncle Bob at Thanksgiving dinner.

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll

When did I get so conservative that I wanted to skip the class debating session and work on negative integers instead? Well, the day I intervened to stop a vote on who was hotter, Hillary Duff or Britney Spears, that’s when.

The voice in my head says, “I
can’t believe I’m talking about this with 30 twelve-year-olds and I REALLY can’t believe that kid just asked that question in public. Is this something to discuss openly? In a classroom? Is my face red? Is this really in the curriculum?”

Yes, it is. Everything is: reading, writing, arithmetic, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

The hat rack

Teacher training programs provide hats, which are trendy in style, to suit the basic tasks of daily organization, instruction and assessment. There are many of them, but they’re quickly outdated. Then teachers add their own new hats in the day-to-day dealings with 30 students, which we wear proudly into staff rooms: “Hey! Check out my new counsellor cap!” Each new one makes us feel as though we have responded, made a difference in young lives.

We collect more hats in our service to school-based managers, formerly known as principals. The boards themselves, who often speak as though CEOs of a publicly traded company, remind our captains never to remove their “fiduciary duty” fedoras. Where budgets rule, the quality of leadership is determined by numbers.

By year three, my headgear had expanded from the day-wear of a classroom teacher into the evening-wear of other roles: Attender of Many Meetings (some of which are called to cancel the initiatives announced at the last), Neurologist, Pharmacist, Public Speaker, Filer of Documentation, Punching Bag, Conscientious Objector. . . .

As I sat at home one night ignoring my own kids while polishing my union helmet before another evening meeting, it finally hit me. “Hey! This is just another hat!”

Flip flopping

In theory, schooling is about “the basics,” and in reality, at report card time at least, it returns to those roots. Between this tri-annual grounding, however, schooling has become very much about the societal ill du jour and about ideology. What’s on the talk show tonight may well be in your classroom in the form of a draft document by the end of the week. Then cancelled shortly after. I recall gulping down supper before heading off to do an evening workshop on “How to read your Year 2000 report card.” My fork froze halfway to my mouth when I heard Mike Harcourt announce on the TV news that the Year 2000 program was dead.

Though not funny at all really, it became a form of entertainment for my teacher wife and I. “Wait for it!” we would say, while listening to a talk or call-in show. Sure enough, someone would say, “Schools need to do more about this.”

Of course, schools need to address the ills of a society. It’s just that some of these ills are diagnosed awfully quickly and the prescription tends often to be a program apparently hashed out in the back of a cab on the way to a booksellers’ convention.

If the governments used the same method to plan public health as they do for education, medical treatments would be determined by the callers to yesterday’s phone-in show.

‘Flexibility’

My son, at seven years of age, got mad at me for referring to my students as “my kids.” “They’re not your kids, Dad,” he said. “I am.”

I tried to keep that fact in front of me afterward when trying to manage how much of my life became occupied with the dilemmas of the troubled little souls I dealt with. It didn’t work. “My students” came to inhabit my thoughts, my planning and my approach to what was needed as surely as my own kids did. Sometimes, in those cases where students were in serious trouble or seriously troubled by their own circumstances, where I was not getting through, they took up even more space in my head. What was I to do — adopt them? No room in the house.

I took to phoning those radio talk shows instead. “Listen,” I said. “If you’re going to ask teachers to deal with all the complex issues and dynamics of the day (in between the regular public bashings, that is), you’re going to need smaller classes. There’s a reason that people don’t have 30 kids when they decide to raise a family.”

The answer to this demand, sadly, was a new 2002 contract that replaced class size limits with “flexibility.”

Feeding the students

By at least one measure, B.C. tops the provinces with the highest rate of child poverty. Those who dispute the numbers might visit what now constitutes a typical classroom. Depending on the locale, you will find an alarming number of children coming to elementary school without proper wear on cold days, without nutritious — or any — lunch, without sleep, without acquaintance with books and quite likely, without the slightest conviction that their schooling might change anything about their contexts and choices. The children of poverty require you to work at the level of need for which a degree in social work might have been better preparation. And when you have a choice between finding a warm spot for a kid to eat the school-provided, clandestine lunch or finding a replacement bulb for the overhead projector you need for the afternoon lesson on addition, it’s the math that goes by the wayside.

Until, that is, the quiet and loud demands for care become overwhelming and you realize you don’t feel you are making the kind of difference that needs to be made. You can too easily relate to the prejudice promoted by conservative governments and think-tanks. You begin sounding like someone else, speaking resentfully of “all these needs.”

Getting revenge

When I was a student, my own experience of schooling was mostly abysmal. Part of the rationale for becoming a teacher, I have always claimed, was “revenge.” I thought the best way to overcome the bitterness I felt was to join the ranks and do the job better, make schools better. Ten years into the profession, I recognized in myself an exhaustion akin to that which my Grade 11 social studies teacher must have been feeling when he had us spend the year copying notes from a textbook while he sat reading the newspaper at his desk.

Though I spent very little time at my desk — and no part of my day on “personal reading,” I asked a friend for a favour when I saw the potential for burn-out coming on. “When you see me starting to fizzle, when you see that look that says, ‘Please kill me’ on my students’ faces, tell me,” I said. I didn’t want to stick around and torture kids more than the general experience of life in school already burdens some of them.

Unfortunately, my friend left town too soon. It became my own responsibility to spot the signs and, sure enough, they accumulated. Meeting-by-meeting, form-by-form, minister-by-minister, and kid-by-kid. So I left.

I have great admiration for those who remain to fight with the kind of wide-ranging involvement energy, time and conviction required. As for me, I volunteer in my children’s own schools now and I write thank-you notes to their teachers at the slightest provocation. Perhaps I’ll give it another try someday, but only after practicing the mantra it seems to require: “It’s just a job. It’s just a job. It’s just a job.”

Shaun Cunningham was a B.C. elementary school teacher for 15 years, who recently moved to New Brunswick. This week, he started substitute teaching in his daughter’s school.

Class War, Corporations, Democracy, Economics, Equality, Karl Marx, Labour Theory of Value, Media, Neoliberal Economics, Technology

Class War: A Labour Day Greeting Card!

Leave a comment

Last year at Labour Day I wrote about how I began reading Mark Steyn’s pearls of shit.

He was waxing on about how the world is so great and technology will save us and humans can trump an instant karma planet that may not endure us much longer. We should all stop whining and have faith in the Fortune 500 R&D divisions to conjure up the next fuel for global pillaging.

But class war is on my mind this year. And since it’s Labour Day, it’s important to point out that your labour is worth more shit and less value than ever before in recent generations. AND IT’S OUR FAULT because we are letting “them” do it to “us.”

And I know that it sounds like the “typical” bleeding heart anti-establishment tone to blame some “them” but there is a “them”, and Greg Palast has defined “them” quite neatly [see his whole piece below]. And as much as all this data relates to the USA, Canada is a syncophantic replica of this economic beast.

Just a few timbits of a sense of “them”:

50.4% = amount of US income earned by the richest quintile

5.9% = the amount the US median income dropped since Bush’s election-rigging machine stole the White House

83% = the amount of stock market shares owned by the richest US quintile

53% = the amount of stock market shares owned by the richest 1% of the US

3% = the amount of all US private assets owned by the poorest 50% of Americans

As a country’s economy grows and wealth increases, the Gini Index measures the income disparity within that nation. One of the things that demonstrates who gets the benefit from economic increases is to examine the relationship between wages and productivity. When a nation’s productivity increases, you would think that the wages of the workers who are producing more effectively would reflect that improvement.

Since 2003, the reverse has happened in the US. Productivity increased while median wages declined 2% after adjusting for inflation. In the first half of the decade, worker compensation [wage plus benefits] has been half of US productivity increases. However, the share of wage income earned by the richest 1% of Americans nearly doubled to 11.2% in the last 30 years.

“As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the [US’s] gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s.” Wages 6 months ago reflected just 45% of the US GDP, while 36 years ago wages represented 53.6% of their GDP. In fact, a Goldman Sachs report concluded, “the most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor’s share of national income.“

Corporate profits are predominantly earned by the richest quintile of Americans these days. They are “them”.

“Since last summer, however, the value of workers’ benefits has also failed to keep pace with inflation, according to government data.“

Dividends per share rise when large and small corporations cut benefits to workers. Dividends are largely distributed to the top income quintile of Americans.

But maybe “them” have been hurting by this as well. “At the very top of the income spectrum, many workers have continued to receive raises that outpace inflation, and the gains have been large enough to keep average income and consumer spending rising.” OK, maybe not.

But why is it so easy to blame “us” for “them” screwing us out of living or just wages?

If you think people deserve a share in the value or wealth they create, you understand the Labour Theory of Value, and you are in good company with two of the fathers of capitalism: Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Sadly, though, neoliberal free trade economics of global corporate neofeudal rape and pillage reject such quaint notions and liken you–in your support of the Labour Theory of Value–to Karl Marx: not so much a fan of classical or neoliberal economics.

And when I say that it’s our fault that we continue to allow ourselves to be abused by the richest quintile or 1% of Americans [or Canadians or OECD world], it is because of how Marx connected the Labour Theory of Value to social order. More egalitarianism comes when more people are able to share in the fruit of their labour. This is not happening so much anymore. During the communism scares of the early 20th century, labour was able to make great gains in wages, benefits and social welfare as capital feared Red Revolutions across the industrial world. With the Evil Empire gone, and only a few marginalized “Red” nations remaining, there is less incentive to buy off labour.

“Polls show that Americans are less dissatisfied with the economy than they were in the early 1980’s or early 90’s. Rising house and stock values have lifted the net worth of many families over the last few years, and interest rates remain fairly low.” Plus, “global trade, immigration, layoffs and technology — as well as the insecurity caused by them — appear to have eroded workers’ bargaining power. Trade unions are much weaker than they once were.“

And then there’s Wheel of Fortune, reality television and the other elements of what make up today’s religion as the opiate of the masses. Class warfare belongs to another time and place. We see Hummers driving down our street and we think we’re in the blessed world of economic birthrights. “We” are “them” so warfare is against ourselves. Except the economic statistics show we’re being bled like the frog in the pot on a slow heat.

But then again, in a global sense, the OECD world is the world’s top economic quintile. If the workers of the industrialized world unite against our oppressors, that’s just us in the top 2-19% income group going after the top 1%. Is that really a class war?

Horatio Alger, Jr, 19th century American pulp novelist, championed the great American rags to riches dream. As long as the poorest four quintiles of North American population continue to think that we’re just one raise away from getting our Hummer, we will refuse to recognize that class politics that allow the irony-free American “president” to chuckle while claiming to be the president of the “haves” and the “have-mores”.

And if the Irish saved western civilization after the fall of Rome and through the Dark Ages, perhaps the ascendent political movements of Latin and South America with their focus on human over corporate centred economic development will save the myopic greed of the class rulers of North America.

=====


TODAY’S PIG IS TOMORROW’S BACON (a Labor Day recipe)

By Greg Palast
September, 3 2006

Some years from now, in an economic refugee relocation “Enterprise Zone,” your kids will ask you, “What did you do in the Class War, Daddy?”

The trick of class war is not to let the victims know they’re under attack. That’s how, little by little, the owners of the planet take away what little we have.

This week, Dupont, the chemical giant, slashed employee pension benefits by two-thirds. Furthermore, new Dupont workers won’t get a guaranteed pension at all — and no health care after retirement. It’s p
art of Dupont’s new “Die Young” program, I hear. Dupont is not in financial straits. Rather, the slash attack on its workers’ pensions was aimed at adding a crucial three cents a share to company earnings, from $3.11 per share to $3.14.

So Happy Labor Day.

And this week, the government made it official: For the first time since the Labor Department began measuring how the American pie is sliced, those in the top fifth of the wealth scale are now gobbling up over half (50.4%) of our nation’s annual income.

So Happy Labor Day.

We don’t even get to lick the plates. While 15.9% of us don’t have health insurance (a record, Mr. President!), even those of us who have it, don’t have it: we’re spending 36% more per family out of pocket on medical costs since the new regime took power in Washington. If you’ve actually tried to collect from your insurance company, you know what I mean.

So Happy Labor Day.

But if you think I have nothing nice to say about George W. Bush, let me report that the USA now has more millionaires than ever — 7.4 million! And over the past decade, the number of billionaires has more than tripled, 341 of them!

If that doesn’t make you feel like you’re missing out, this should: You, Mr. Median, are earning, after inflation, a little less than you earned when Richard Nixon reigned. Median household income — and most of us are “median” — is down. Way down.

Since the Bush Putsch in 2000, median income has fallen 5.9%.

Mr. Bush and friends are offering us an “ownership” society. But he didn’t mention who already owns it. The richest fifth of America owns 83% of all shares in the stock market. But that’s a bit misleading because most of that, 53% of all the stock, is owned by just one percent of American households.

And what does the Wealthy One Percent want? Answer: more wealth. Where will they get it? As with a tube of toothpaste, they’re squeezing it from the bottom. Median paychecks have gone down by 5.9% during the current regime, but Americans in the bottom fifth have seen their incomes sliced by 20%.

At the other end, CEO pay at the Fortune 500 has bloated by 51% during the first four years of the Bush regime to an average of $8.1 million per annum.

So who’s winning? It’s a crude indicator, but let’s take a peek at the Class War body count.

When Reagan took power in 1980, the One Percent possessed 33% of America’s wealth as measured by capital income. By 2006, the One Percent has swallowed over half of all America’s assets, from sea to shining sea. One hundred fifty million Americans altogether own less than 3% of all private assets.

Yes, American middle-class house values are up, but we’re blowing that gain to stay alive. Edward Wolff, the New York University expert on income, explained to me that, “The middle class is mortgaging itself to death.” As a result of mortgaging our new equity, 60% of all households have seen a decline in net worth.

Is America getting poorer? No, just its people, We the Median. In fact, we are producing an astonishing amount of new wealth in the USA. We are a lean, mean production machine. Output per worker in BushAmerica zoomed by 15% over four years through 2004. Problem is, although worker productivity keeps rising, the producers are getting less and less of it.

The gap between what we produce and what we get is widening like an alligator’s jaw. The more you work, the less you get. It used to be that as the economic pie got bigger, everyone’s slice got bigger too. No more.

The One Percent have swallowed your share before you can get your fork in.

The loot Dupont sucked from its employees’ retirement funds will be put to good use. It will more than cover the cost of the company directors’ decision to hike the pension set aside for CEO Charles Holliday to $2.1 million a year. And that’s fair, I suppose: Holliday’s a winning general in the class war. And shouldn’t the winners of war get the spoils?

Of course, there are killjoys who cling to that Calvinist-Marxist belief that a system forever fattening the richest cannot continue without end. Professor Michael Zweig, Director of the State University of New York’s Center for Study of Working Class Life, put it in culinary terms: “Today’s pig is tomorrow’s bacon.”

Olympic Games, Politics

Vanoc, the Whore

1 Comment

I’m not at all surprised that Vanoc, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics Committee has whored itself with McDonald’s by endorsing their program to indoctrinate impressionable pre-pubescents through its new “nutrition” and “fitness” presentations in BC elementary schools.

First of all, globally and locally, McDonald’s exploits minors as workers. They contribute to the destruction of the environment with their beef heavy menu. Their food is unhealthy, although marketing has told them to act more healthy with more healthy menu items lately. Their advertising preys on children’s lack of critical thinking capacity to guilt or nag their parents into consuming garbage food [sic] at McDonald’s.

A whoring organization by nature, Vanoc is in charge of exploiting the Olympics for corporate sponsorship. Their goal is not to keep the advertising pollution of corporations out of public schools. Their goal is not to encourage healthy lifestyles or else they wouldn’t even accept McDonald’s as an official Olympic sponsor. And their goal is not to keep corporate funding crutches out of schools, crutches that justify further government cuts to education.

So, as an official, Olympic sponsor, McDonald’s has vegetabled up its menu and approached the Vanoc whore to become sanctioned as a presentation provider in public schools. The fact that Vanoc reviewed McDonald’s program and approved it as an appropriate sponsor to present the Olympic message is disgusting to me. The true Olympic message is not about the billions in corporate sponsorship or the facilitation of branding children with corporate marketing and funding. That’s why Vanoc is a whore.

The fact that Vanoc says McDonald’s actually providing nutritional information of their “food” [sic] is a part of “offering healthier food choices” is sickening to me. Knowing what kind of heart attack inducing garbage is in a Big Mac makes the burger no more healthy. The only rational choice upon reading what is in the Big Mac is to not eat it.

But in the end, Vanoc, the whore, is encouraged merely by McDonald’s insufficient and incremental desire to be less toxic an entity. They fully support the fact that McDonald’s is “really changing their image.” This implies they’re fully aware of McDonald’s sour image. This also means that by trying to change, really trying, McDonald’s has earned the Vanoc sanction as more leverage for McDonald’s to get into schools–a place where they would love to permanently nest. And beyond the Vanoc seal of approval to go into schools, McDonald’s bribes schools with up to $500 in sports equipment for the ability to turn schools into pimps of their children’s brains.

But yes, since market research tells McDonald’s to offer more vegetables in their menu does not mean they care to really change beyond what local market conditions inspire? What kind of vegetarian menu options are there in McDonald’s restaurant in the Texas and Alberta beef belts?

But in the end, McDonald’s, like any other corporation that preys on children, wants unlimited access to the public education system. McDonald’s “other” program mentioned below does pre- and post-tests of children’s fitness levels throughout the school year. What an amazing concept. The PE teachers of BC should think about that as a basic way of evaluating children’s fitness improvement. McDonald’s has sure come up with a wonderful new educational program here. Maybe they should actually run BC’s PE programs. Except for the fact that the first thing that a PE teacher thinks of to evaluate students’ fitness level is precisely what that sexy McDonald’s program offers.

So, whore away, Vanoc and McDonald’s, but don’t expect people in the school system to roll over to your bribes. Even though there are enough neoliberal, greedy, unimaginative or just plain stupid school principals and staff committees around, more and more educational stakeholders are catching on to your whoring game.

Ronald McDonald fronts 2010 Olympic fitness pitch

Darah Hansen
Vancouver Sun

Monday, June 05, 2006

Ronald McDonald — the corporate frontman for fast-food giant McDonald’s Restaurants — is visiting elementary school children across the province to deliver a message of nutrition and fitness on behalf of the 2010 Olympics.

“The focus is not on french fries and burgers, but on making healthy food choices, working hard and being fit,” said Renee Smith-Valade, spokeswoman for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Games.

“We’re fully supportive of it,” she said.

The Go Active Canada interactive school show is one of two national fitness and nutrition programs being offered to elementary schools by McDonald’s Canada, a top Olympic sponsor. The programs are only brought into schools upon the schools’ invitation.

McDonald’s spokesman Chris Stannell said that under the interactive program, Ronald McDonald is visiting elementary schools to “offer and promote the idea of leading a balanced, active lifestyle.”

The presentation features video clips from Olympic athletes, such as champion diver Alexandre Despatie, who deliver personal messages on the importance of nutrition and fitness.

“We’ve really had tremendous positive responses from a number of principals, teachers and parents who are impressed with the way we carry out the program,” Stannell said. “It’s really focused on physical fitness and not Mcdonald’s.”

McDonald’s Canada also offers a fitness challenge to schools through a second program, in which participating students are tested on a series of six exercises in the fall and retested in the spring, aiming for an overall improvement in their fitness levels. Participating schools can earn up to $500 in sports equipment.

Stannell said the programs reflect McDonald’s dedication to “being part of the solution to health and wellness today.”

Not everyone is as pleased with the company’s involvement in schools.

Michelle Morton, whose 10-year-old daughter attends an elementary school in Squamish, said she was appalled to hear of Ronald McDonald’s appearance last week at two local schools in conjunction with the Olympic Games.

“Since when did the Olympics equal McDonald’s?” said Morton, who questioned the ethics of exposing children as young as five and six years old to McDonald’s’ corporate messages and logos.

Morton said she learned of the presentation through a friend of her daughter’s, whose own school, Mamquam elementary, is not participating in the fitness challenge.

Mamquam principal Ian Kent said his school chose not to participate because staff felt it didn’t tie in with other fitness initiatives at the school, not through any deliberate attempt to avoid the corporate connection.

He said the school was not aware of McDonald’s’ strong relationship with the program until this week, when presentations were delivered to students at Garibaldi Highlands elementary and Valleycliffe elementary.

Principals at Garibaldi Highlands and Valleycliffe did not return The Vancouver Sun’s phone calls.

Seb Amenta, principal of Stawamus elementary, however, said staff at his school felt “uncomfortable” with the McDonald’s’ connection after they attended the presentation at Garibaldi Highlands, along with approximately 55 students, in grades 2 to 7.

“My staff, when they went, said, ‘Oh, it was splashy. We couldn’t help but see the Big M everywhere,'” Amenta said.

“The sponsor was definitely visible.”

Amenta said the students who attended the presentation enjoyed it, and teachers were impressed with the overall message of fitness and good health. But, he said, schools must be extra vigilant about exposing children to corporate culture.

“Money can start to take over, and we can’t go there with our kids. They are too precious,” Amenta said.

Smith-Valade said parents can be r
eassured that Vanoc fully reviewed the program before giving its approval. She said Vanoc is satisfied McDonald’s is an appropriate sponsor to help deliver the Olympic message.

McDonald’s has worked hard in recent years to move in the direction of offering healthier food choices, including providing customers with nutritional information on the food offered, she said.

They are really changing their image, and we fully support that,” she said.

dahansen@png.canwest.com

Podcast at http://dgiVista.org/pod/2006.06.05.mp3
Podcast feed at http://dgivista.org/pod/Vista_Podcasts.xml