The Unrealized Power of the Working Class

Lessons from the 2005 CLC Convention
By Alex Levant
From briarpatch Magazine

Solidarity Forever – the anthem of the labour movement – begins with the following words: “When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run, there can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.”

Today, there is very little inspiration among the Canadian working class, and our power remains largely unrealized. The question is: Why?

The Current State of the Labour Movement
My recent experience at the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) Convention in Montreal in June, where I served as a delegate from the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), sheds some light on the current state of the labour movement.

The most significant event was the election for President – the first in 15 years. The incumbent Ken Georgetti beat challenger Carol Wall with 1084 to 643 votes (62 percent to 37 percent). However, it was Wall and her supporters – mostly public sector workers from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), CUPE, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), some Steelworkers, and many others – who were celebrating, while the winner appeared sullen and defeated. Why? Because the vote was stacked.

The incumbent had the support of virtually the whole labour establishment, which ensured his re-election. The CLC's 20-member Executive Committee selected Georgetti to head the slate of the establishment, which included Secretary-Treasurer Hassan Yussuff and Executive Vice-Presidents Barb Byers and Marie Clark Walker (all incumbents whose positions were not contested). The leaders of all the largest unions (with the notable exception of CUPW's Deborah Borque) instructed “their” delegates to vote for the incumbent. Several major unions, including the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), Steelworkers, Hotel and Restaurant Employees and the Union of Needle Trades, Industrial and Textile Employees, went so far as to bar Wall from addressing their caucuses. Indeed, the challenger was never permitted to address the convention. instead, she shuttled to all the various evening caucuses and forums to speak to as many delegates as possible, while the incumbent presided over the whole convention.

Under these circumstances, all Georgetti had to do to win was breathe. While not technically an election victory, Carol Wall's 37 percent – the highest recorded percentage against a CLC incumbent – represents a crushing defeat for Georgetti.

Delegates' frustration with the labour establishment is entirely understandable. It is no secret that our labour movement is losing ground. Since the mid-1980s, the percentage of unionized workers has dropped from 40 percent to 30 percent overall, and from almost 30 percent to only 18 percent in the private sector. Public sector density has remained steady, but governments now routinely break strikes using back to work legislation. We are working longer hours with less job security, and our social services continue to be cut and privatized.

The CLC's response to these grave problems has been timid and largely ineffective. There were many good resolutions passed at this convention, but little was said or done to show how they would be actualized. The CLC has focused almost entirely on lobbying governments rather than mobilizing its members, and this dead-end strategy continues to guide its work. Its “Action Plan”, which was unveiled on the final day of convention when many delegates had already left, clearly demonstrates what type of action it intends to pursue:

“These actions will include advocacy and lobbying; education and training of activists, labour councils, staff and affiliates; political action and campaigns; local actions such as demonstrations and rallies; coalition building; communications and media campaigns; and international solidarity actions.”

What is particularly disturbing about this “action plan” is that it does not mention even once the one action that is the greatest strength of the labour movement: strike action. Given this ineffective strategy, it is no wonder that many of the 3.2 million workers represented by the CLC do not even know that they are members, or what the CLC even is.

Despite the sorry state of the labour movement, Georgetti campaigned on his record of “results,” and urged delegates to focus on the positive. The election results, however, demonstrate that a significant number of union officials (a layer comprised largely of local executive officers) are not falling for it.

Wall is certainly far more progressive than Georgetti, and would inject some desperately-needed life into the labour establishment. Her achievements are quite impressive: former CLC Vice-President representing workers of colour, national negotiator for PSAC, Communications Energy and Paperworkers' first Human Rights Director, and the list goes on. She also understands that the CLC must shift its focus from lobbying to mobilizing:

“I believe that the single-minded focus on back room lobbying has been to our detriment. Lobbying government is important, but we need to mobilize our members if we want to be a force for change in society.”

In some ways, this election was a near coup, which put Wall in a strong position to run for President again at the next convention in 2008. However, it is unclear how she would be able to actualize this objective if she had been elected, or if she wins next time.

The Problem Is Not Just Bad Leadership
This convention demonstrated not only the weakness of the labour establishment, but also the weakness of the opposition. This weakness is not simply a matter of failing to successfully run progressive candidates for leadership positions. Some of the top CLC brass are yesterday's radicals who were supported by the opposition. As Wall correctly states, many of them “came to do good, but stayed to do well.” But even the most progressive leaders, once elected, find themselves isolated in a vast bureaucracy that is much more powerful than their individual abilities and best intentions; they often end up blaming their activist base for abandoning them.

In contrast to the analysis advanced by Geoff Bickerton, labour critic for Canadian Dimension, the problems of the labour movement are deeper than bad leadership. Rather, it is the relationship between the leadership and the membership that requires our attention.

If the opposition to the labour establishment is serious about shifting the focus from lobbying governments to mobilizing members, it will have to force structural reform onto the agenda in order to democratize the labour movement. The shift from lobbying to mobilizing simply cannot happen within existing structures because mobilization requires the meaningful participation of the broadest layers of union membership, from the top leadership, to the leaders of union locals, to rank-and-file activists and members. The current structural relationship among these layers of the labour movement frustrates union democracy, as was clearly evident by the way in which the election for President was managed at the recent CLC convention.

This structure (which has been in place since the “postwar compromise” of the mid-1940s) establishes a whole layer of union officials whose interests differ from the majority of union members. While rank-and-file members make a living from their places of work, and directly benefit from the collective agreements they manage to win, the top union officials make their living from the union itself. Consequently, they do not experience attacks on workers in the same way as rank-and-file members, and, indeed, have a special interest in maintaining the union institution in its current form.

In his recent analysis of the Hospital Employees Union strike in 2004, professor of Labour Studies David Camfield explains this phenomenon as follows:

“The union institution provides officials with their livelihood… For officials to keep on being officials, the union institution must be preserved… strikes and other forms of mass direct action that fall outside labour law's narrow definition of a legal strike bring with them the risk of huge fines or other serious damage to union institutions. Officials generally try to preserve good bargaining relationships with employers, which militancy can hurt.”

This structure has a debilitating effect on the membership as well, disconnecting the majority of members from their unions. As sociologist Clarice Kuhling has pointed out, in today's unions the terrain of struggle has increasingly shifted from the workplace to the arbitration hearing. Consequently, the agents of struggle are no longer the workers themselves, but a whole layer of professional union staff representatives who administer and often negotiate collective agreements on the members' behalf.

This alienation of the rank-and-file from their unions, coupled with the disconnection of the leadership from the membership, has created a situation where electing progressive leaders like Wall, on its own, would not suffice to transform the labour movement into an effective fighting force for working people. This effort can only work as part of a broader strategy that is oriented towards transforming the relationship between the leadership and the rank-and-file, which would require considerable structural reform.

From Postwar Compromise to Post-Compromise War
Labour historians like Craig Heron, Errol Black and Jim Silver have identified the “postwar compromise” of 1945-48 as a key turning point in the history of the Canadian labour movement. Bolstered by growing working class militancy, the labour movement won legal concessions that forced the bosses to recognize unions. Rather than having to “strike for recognition,” workers could now vote to form a union. Moreover, unions no longer had to collect dues payments on the shop floor, but were legally guaranteed automatic dues payments from all union members, which ensured their financial security.

But this victory came at a price, because it fundamentally transformed the way unions function. Everything from how to organize a union, to when to go on strike, to how to resolve on-the-job disputes with the bosses was now governed by a set of legal procedures.

As a result, union leaders no longer had to rely on inspiring and mobilizing workers in order to settle disputes with employers, but could focus almost exclusively on navigating the legalese of labour relations. This is why the need arose to rely on staff and labour lawyers, and why the battleground shifted from the workplace to the arbitration hearing.

Furthermore, this shift in the terrain of struggle also created a new policing role for labour leaders. The vast bureaucratic apparatus consisting of elected officials and hired staff not only had to represent the interests of rank-and-file members within the new rules of legal struggle, but also to ensure that members adhere to these rules.

In a recent keynote address to the Alberta Federation of Labour, Canadian labour historian Bryan Palmer described the postwar compromise as follows:

“This was a victory for workers, won by wrestling concessions long denied from capital and the state. But it was largely won on capitalist terms. And a price was paid. The union check-off meant the old shop floor and workplace solidarities, garnered as shop stewards and activists collected union dues and talked to union members, faded. Complicated grievance procedures, the significance of lawyers, who played more and more of a role in defining the nature of contract relations, and the rise of an expanding layer of labour officialdom, all made unionism more and more distant from its ranks.”

Furthermore, over the last three decades this postwar compromise has become increasingly one-sided, as the ruling class has clawed back many of the gains won by workers in the aftermath of World War Two, resulting in a con-siderable drop in living standards since the mid-1970s. The unions, for their part, have largely continued to hold up their end of the “class truce,” playing by the old rules, and policing its members to do the same.

Part of the reason for this complacency has to do with the manner in which this claw-back has occurred. While many of our gains have been eroded, the bosses have not yet attacked the fundamental structure of the postwar labour movement. The laws that establish how to organize a union continue to exist, as do the automatic dues provisions. We have been left with the shell of the postwar unions: gutted institutions which union officials hang on to for dear life, while many of their members no longer see their purpose.

Ideas on How to Move Forward
The above critique of the postwar labour movement in no way suggests a return to pre-WWII unions. These problems did not begin with the postwar compromise, but were exacerbated by it. Moreover, neither the current form of the labour movement nor its predecessors can adequately address the unique challenges posed by the realities of work in the era of capitalist globalization.

Rather than concentrated in large factories, today's workforce is fragmented into smaller workplaces. This dispersion is further exacerbated by the relative rise of employment in the service sector. One in five jobs is now part time. Moreover, capital has acquired a new mobility to cross borders as a result of so-called “free trade” agreements, while workers' mobility is increasingly restricted. As a result, working class identity and solidarity have been eroded, and Canadian workers increasingly identify more closely with their employers than with workers of other countries, who are often seen as competitors for their jobs. This restructuring of work calls for a restructuring of the labour movement.

Some elements of an effective response have been suggested by writers like Kim Moody, editor of Labor Notes , who advocates adopting the principles and tactics of Social Movement Unionism – a new approach initiated in the mid-1990s in Brazil, South Africa, and South Korea.

In contrast to “business unionism,” which treats members like clients who receive a service from union officials in exchange for payment in the form of dues, Social Movement Unionism relies on rank-and-file members in the day-to-day struggle with the bosses. This entails greater internal democracy, which develops their capacities, and helps to overcome their disconnection from their unions.

In an effort to respond to the fragmentation of industrial labour in the current era of globalization, Social Movement Unionism attempts to broaden its agenda to include community interests. It also seeks to make international solidarity a cornerstone of its strategy, and avoids “partnering” with management against competition from workers in other countries. As Chris Schenk, Research Director of the Ontario Federation of Labour put it, “Borderless capital demands borderless unionism.”

Some aspects of Social Movement Unionism have already been taken up by a number of Canadian unions, such as CAW, CUPE, and CUPW. However, where we are weakest is in the fostering of internal democracy. This is partly because the current structure of the labour movement poses a barrier to such reform.

Because of labour officials' attachment to unions in their current form, Social Movement Unionism can only fully emerge in response to pressure from an opposition movement that is driven by rank-and-file members. But such an opposition movement will not fall from the sky. Given the current disconnection of the majority of union members from their unions, rank-and-file initiatives are exceptionally rare. Such a profound shift will require leadership and support from various layers of the labour movement.

In the absence of a rank-and-file opposition movement, however, all the best leadership in the world will still fall short. As we have seen, not only are our problems deeper than bad leadership, but these problems cannot be resolved by better leaders alone.

Consequently, an effective opposition must focus on developing members' capacities and building a membership-driven movement, as well as running candidates who share a vision of a fundamentally different unionism and who are willing to risk their privileged positions to attain it. While union conventions are a vital part of this effort, at the end of the day such a movement will not emerge in response to resolutions, but from the way in which we fight our struggles in the workplace.

This is a long-term project. But if our unions are able to break out of their current form, and can restructure to respond to the new world of global labour and global capital, the union's inspiration may yet run through the workers' blood, which is always the bosses' greatest fear, and still our greatest hope.

Canada’s Military Lobby

By Steven Staples
From Canadian Dimension
2006

In this country today a battle is being waged over Canada’s role in the world. On the one side is a powerful alliance between those who want Canadians to give up their sovereignty and integrate with the United States and those who reject a role as a peace-broker and embrace the Bush doctrine of military and economic totalitarianism. On the other side are the majority of Canadians, who steadfastly refuse to give up the idea that Canada should be an independent force for good in an increasingly unipolar and violent world.

The most powerful lobby in Canada is composed of corporations engaged primarily in finance, energy, manufacturing and natural resources, with military industries making up only a small part. Canada’s corporate lobby is not driven by a demand for more military contracts — though it will not object to them — but by greater integration with the U.S. market as a whole.

Organizations like the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI) have in the past promoted deregulation, privatization and especially free trade. Its greatest achievement was the 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, which was later expanded to NAFTA in 1994. More recently, the BCNI — renamed the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) — was alarmed by the closing of the Canada-U.S. border after 9/11. As the U.S.’s ambassador to Canada at the time explained to an audience of CEOs in Toronto, “Security will trump trade.”

In response, the CCCE launched a campaign to support the Bush Administration’s security and military agenda — be it the invasion of Iraq or assistance with “Star Wars” — under the dual assumptions that U.S. security measures won’t impact Canadian trade because we will be inside their “security perimeter”; and that the ensuing goodwill with the President would help end U.S. protectionist measures like softwood-lumber tariffs (despite the fact these are determined by the U.S. Congress).

As CCCE president Tom d’Aquino exhorted a 2003 meeting of mandarins in Ottawa, “Now we must integrate our plans for achieving economic advantage within North America with a strategy for assuring the security both of our own borders and of the continent as a whole.”

The Military Lobby
Much smaller but no less successful than the corpora-te lobby, the military lobby comprises corporations seeking contracts and hawkish policy groups, or “think tanks.” Organizations like the Conference of Defence Associations and various academics funded by the Department of National Defence (DND) produce a steady stream of hawkish reports and analysis for the media and politicians.

On the industry side, the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries reports that in 2000 (the latest figures available) there were more than 1,500 firms with significant defence interests (i.e. more than $100,000 in defence revenues) comprising an industry worth roughly $7 billion per year.

A third of the industry’s revenues are derived from arms exports, half of that to the United States. As a result, both the Washington-based Congressional Research Service and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ranked Canada as the sixth-largest global arms exporter in 2004.

These companies build everything from wheeled tanks to tactical helicopters. But most Canadian defense companies are branch plants or subcontractors, building components for U.S. systems, like gearboxes for the Apache helicopter.

According to Project Ploughshares, the industry is dominated by a handful of companies who typically win the lion’s share of Canadian military contracts: CAE Inc., General Dynamics Canada and General Dynamics Land Systems Canada, SNC-Lavalin Group, Bell Helicopter Textron and Bombardier. Half of the top-ten companies are foreign-owned or -controlled, and only six of the ten actually rely on military contracts for more than 20 per cent of their revenue.

Finally, one cannot exclude the DND itself from the military lobby. It spends millions of dollars each year on public relations, including public-opinion polling, cultivating favourable coverage from journalists and funding conservative think tanks and university research institutes.

Military Lobby Successes
Studies on the difference between Canadian and American values frequently conclude that Canada has a much less militaristic political culture than its American neighbour. Canadians consistently put health care, the environment and the economy at the top of priority lists and defense at the bottom. Even more, Canadians are much more likely to support the United Nations, international law and diplomacy over military solutions to international conflicts.

Public opinion, and its impact on Canada’s political system, is therefore the main obstacle to the military-corporate complex in Canada. Chief amongst the lobby’s goals is to convince Canadians to give up the notion of peacekeeping and accept the U.S.-led “war on terrorism” as a Canadian priority, whether through a stronger defense of the homeland (immigration) or military interventions abroad (Afghanistan).

The military lobby has achieved many victories:

Dollar for dollar, the military’s $15-billion spending is the seventh-highest among the 26-member NATO alliance, and 15th-highest in the world.

The 2005 federal budget added $12.8 billion over five years to the military, and the Conservatries will top that by $5.3 billion, putting spending much higher than at any time during the Cold War.

In the last federal election, all the national political parties supported these massive increases to military spending, including the NDP.

The media’s support for joining the U.S. “missile-defense” program was near total, despite widespread public skepticism and opposition.

Once a top-ten contributor of soldiers to UN peacekeeping activities, today we can fit all our Blue Helmets onto a single school bus — less than sixty, out of more than 60,000 UN peacekeepers worldwide, are Canadians.

Our 2,300-troops-strong effort in Afghanistan, a counterterrorism mission currently under U.S. command, is a proving ground for the adoption of U.S. war-fighting doctrine and a symbolic end to Canadian/UN peacekeeping.

…And Military Lobby Failures
The military-corporate complex does not win every time, as proven when tens of thousands of Canadians who opposed the invasion of Iraq neutralized the lobbying effort to join the “Coalition of the Willing.” And again, taking advantage of the minority government and public distrust of the Bush Administration, peace groups prevented the Martin government from joining the U.S. “missile-defence” shield.

Sufficiently aroused or organized, Canadian public opinion can prevent the government from adopting the military-corporate complex’s agenda. Its lobby can always be rebuffed when Canadians become informed and act upon their values.

Another IMF Crash

By Mark Weisbrot
From The Nation

Franklin Serrano, an economist at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, recently lamented the large proportion of graduate students in economics who leave for the United States. "But there is something worse than them leaving. It's when they come back." "Brain damage," he says, "is worse than brain drain."

Argentina is the latest Latin American economy to be mismanaged into a crisis by US-trained economists. Unemployment is above 17 percent, the economy is in its fourth year of recession and the country is now in the process of defaulting on its unpayable foreign debt. It's not easy being the poster child of neoliberalism.

Argentina's currency has been pegged to the US dollar since 1991. This worked for a while, but in the past few years the peso has become highly overvalued. Rather than devalue the currency, the country piled up mountains of debt to prop it up and watched its interest rates soar as investors demanded ever higher risk premiums. For comparison, imagine the United States borrowing $1.4 trillion (70 percent of our federal budget) in order to keep our own overvalued currency from falling.

This is not the first time in recent years that the IMF has burdened a country with billions of dollars of debt in order to prop up an overvalued currency. In 1998 it did the same thing in Brazil and Russia, with predictable results. In both cases the currency collapsed rather quickly in spite of the loans. And in both cases the economy responded positively to the devaluation, with Russia in 2000 registering its highest growth in two decades. The fund's argument in the case of Brazil and Russia was that if the currency was devalued, the result would be runaway inflation. But that never happened.

The IMF has also insisted on budget austerity for Argentina--which makes about as much sense during a recession as high interest rates. First in line for cuts have been state pensions, salaries, unemployment benefits and other social spending, insuring that the burden of "adjustment" will continue to fall, as it usually does, on those who can least afford it. And even the debt "restructuring"--i.e., default--now under way may not lead to economic recovery: If the currency remains fixed at a rate that investors still see as overvalued, the crisis will continue until it collapses.

Why does the IMF seem incapable of learning from repeated failures? The interest of foreign bondholders cannot be overlooked: The longer the fixed exchange rate holds, the smaller will be the losses of US lenders--even if the peso eventually collapses. But there has been a broader political concern as well: Argentina has done everything that Washington has told it to do, and the economy is a wreck. As a result the Bush Administration, despite its distaste for IMF "bailouts," was reluctant to be seen as abandoning the Argentine government. It kept pouring money in until it became clear that Argentina's debt could never be repaid.

The sacrifice of Argentina's economy for the sake of Washington's imperial interests and the interests of "emerging market" bondholders fits a pattern at the IMF, including some of the most high-profile interventions of recent years. In Russia and the transition economies, the first priority has been to execute a rapid, irreversible change to a market-driven society, regardless of the economic consequences.

Russia lost half its national income in about five years of IMF-led transition, an economic decline never before seen in the absence of war or natural disaster. In Asia, the fund's desire to open these economies to US capital flows--in countries that because of their high savings rates had little need for foreign borrowing--caused a severe financial crisis in 1997-98. The fund then exploited the crisis to further open these economies, worsened it with exorbitantly high interest rates and fiscal austerity and convinced the governments of the region to guarantee the debt owed to foreign lenders.

The IMF is able to decide these major economic policies for dozens of countries because it sits atop a creditors' cartel, much like the OPEC oil cartel. Those who refuse to take the fund's "advice" find themselves ineligible for credit from the World Bank and other multilateral lenders--like the Inter-American Development Bank or G-7 governments--or even for private credit.

The fund's aid packages are generally reported approvingly in the press as "bailouts." But it is the bankers and bondholders, particularly foreign, who are being bailed out; the people, especially the poor, are tossed overboard. Over the longer term, the neoliberal program of the IMF and the World Bank--and their ability to enforce it--has contributed to a substantial decline in economic growth over the past twenty years throughout the vast majority of low- and middle-income countries. In Latin America, per capita GDP has grown a mere 6 percent over the past two decades, as compared with 75 percent in 1960-80.

As Latin America's economies grind to a halt, dragged down by the recession in the United States, the dismal reality of this long, failed economic experiment is sinking in. The reign of US-trained economists and their sponsors in Washington may be coming to an end.

The Threat of Hope in Latin America

By Naomi Klein
From The Nation
2005

When Manuel Rozental got home one night last month, friends told him two strange men had been asking questions about him. In this close-knit indigenous community in southwestern Colombia ringed by soldiers, right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas, strangers asking questions about you is never a good thing.

The Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca, which leads a political movement that is autonomous from all those armed forces, held an emergency meeting. They decided that Rozental, their communications coordinator, who had been instrumental in campaigns for agrarian reform and against a Free Trade Agreement with the United States, had to get out of the country--fast.

They were certain that those strangers had been sent to kill Rozental--the only question was, by whom? The US-backed national government, which notoriously uses right-wing paramilitaries to do its dirty work? Or was it the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), Latin America's oldest Marxist guerrilla army, which does its dirty work all on its own? Oddly, both were distinct possibilities. Despite being on opposing sides of a forty-one-year civil war, the Uribe government and the FARC wholeheartedly agree that life would be infinitely simpler without Cauca's increasingly powerful indigenous movement.

Prominent indigenous leaders in northern Cauca have been kidnapped or assassinated by the FARC, which seeks to be the exclusive voice of Colombia's poor. And indigenous authorities had been informed that the FARC wanted Rozental dead. For months rumors had been circulated that he was the worst thing you can be in the books of a left-wing guerrilla movement: a CIA agent. But that doesn't mean the strangers were FARC assassins, because there had been other rumors too, spread through the media by government officials. They held that Rozental was the worst thing you can be in the books of a right-wing, Bush-bankrolled politician: "an international terrorist."

On October 27 the Indigenous Council, representing the roughly 110,000 Nasa Indians in the region, issued an angry communiqué: "Manuel is no terrorist. He is no paramilitary. He is no agent of the CIA. He is a part of our community who must not be silenced by bullets." The Nasa leaders say they know why Rozental, now living in exile in Canada, has come under threat. It is the same reason that this past April two peaceful indigenous villages in Northern Cauca were turned into war zones after the FARC attacked police posts in the town centers, giving the government an excuse for a full-scale occupation.

All of this is happening because the indigenous movement is on a roll. In the past year the Nasa of northern Cauca have held the largest antigovernment protests in recent Colombian history and organized local referendums against free trade that had a turnout of 70 percent, higher than any official election (with a near unanimous "no" result). And in September thousands took over two large haciendas, forcing the government to make good on a long-promised land settlement. All these actions unfolded under the protection of the Nasa's unique Indigenous Guard, who patrol their territory armed only with sticks.

In a country ruled by M-16s, AK-47s, pipe bombs and Black Hawk helicopters, this combination of militancy and nonviolence is unheard of. And that is the quiet miracle the Nasa have accomplished: They revived the hope killed when paramilitaries systematically slaughtered left-wing politicians, including dozens of elected officials and two Unión Patriótica presidential candidates. At the end of that bloody campaign in the early nineties, the FARC understandably concluded that engaging in open politics was a suicide mission. The key to the Nasa's success, Rozental says, is that they are not trying to take over state institutions, which "have lost all legitimacy." They are instead "building a new legitimacy based on an indigenous and popular mandate that has grown out of participatory congresses, assemblies and elections. Our process and our alternative institutions have put the official democracy to shame. That's why the government is so angry."

The Nasa have shattered the illusion, cherished by both sides, that Colombia's conflict can be reduced to a binary war. Their free-trade referendums have been imitated by nonindigenous unions, students, farmers and local politicians nationwide; their land takeovers have inspired other indigenous and peasant groups to do the same. A year ago 60,000 marched demanding peace and autonomy; last month those same demands were echoed by simultaneous marches in thirty-two of Colombia's thirty-three provinces. Each action, explains Hector Mondragon, well-known Colombian economist and activist, "has had a multiplier effect."

Across Latin America a similarly explosive multiplier effect is under way, with indigenous movements redrawing the continent's political map, demanding not just "rights" but a reinvention of the state along deeply democratic lines. In Bolivia and Ecuador, indigenous groups have shown they have the power to topple governments. In Argentina, when mass protests ousted five presidents in 2001 and '02, the words of Mexico's Zapatistas were shouted on the streets of Buenos Aires. At this writing, George W. Bush is on his way to Argentina, where he will discover that the spirit of that revolt is alive and well.

As in northern Cauca, governments attempt to brand these indigenous-inspired movements as terrorist. And not surprisingly Washington is offering military and ideological assistance: There has been a marked increase in US troop activity near the Bolivian border in Paraguay, and a recent study by the National Intelligence Council warned that indigenous movements, although peaceful now, could "consider more drastic means" in the future.

Indigenous movements are indeed a threat to the exhausted free-trade policies Bush is currently hawking, with ever fewer buyers, across Latin America. Their power comes not from terror but from a new terror-resistant strain of hope, one so sturdy it can take root in the midst of Colombia's seemingly hopeless civil war. And if it can grow there, it can take root anywhere.

You Do What You Eat

Marco Visscher
FromOde Magazine

Forget tougher punishments and hiring more police. The solution to crime and violence is on your plate. Here’s how healthy food can reduce aggressive behaviour.

At first glance there seems nothing special about the students at this high school in Appleton, Wisconsin. They appear calm, interact comfortably with one another, and are focused on their schoolwork. No apparent problems.

And yet a couple of years ago, there was a police officer patrolling the halls at this school for developmentally challenged students. Many of the students were troublemakers, there was a lot of fighting with teachers and some of the kids carried weapons. School counsellor Greg Bretthauer remembers that when he first came to Appleton Central Alternative High School back in 1997 for a job interview: “I found the students to be rude, obnoxious and ill-mannered.” He had no desire to work with them, and turned down the job.

Several years later, Bretthauer took the job after seeing that the atmosphere at the school had changed profoundly Today he describes the students as “calm and well-behaved” in a new video documentary, Impact of Fresh, Healthy Foods on Learning and Behavior. Fights and offensive behaviour are extremely rare and the police officer is no longer needed. What happened?

A glance through the halls at Appleton Central Alternative provides the answer. The vending machines have been replaced by water coolers. The lunchroom took hamburgers and French fries off the menu, making room for fresh vegetables and fruits, whole-grain bread and a salad bar.

Is that all? Yes, that’s all. Principal LuAnn Coenen is still surprised when she speaks of the “astonishing” changes at the school since she decided to drastically alter the offering of food and drinks eight years ago. “I don’t have the vandalism. I don’t have the litter. I don’t have the need for high security.”

It is tempting to dismiss what happened at Appleton Central Alternative as the wild fantasies of health-food and vitamin-supplement fanatics. After all, scientists have never empirically investigated the changes at the school. Healthy nutrition—especially the effects of vitamin and mineral supplements—appears to divide people into opposing camps of fervent believers, who trust the anecdotes about diets changing people’s lives, and equally fervent sceptics, who dismiss these stories as hogwash.

And yet it is not such a radical idea, that food can affect the way our brains work—and thus our behaviour. The brain is an active machine: It only accounts for two percent of our body weight, but uses a whopping 20 percent of our energy. In order to generate that energy, we need a broad range of nutrients—vitamins, minerals and unsaturated fatty acids—that we get from nutritious meals. The question is: What are the consequences when we increasingly shovel junk food into our bodies?

It is irrefutably true that our eating habits have dramatically changed over the past 30-odd years. “Convenience foods” has become a catch-all term that covers all sorts of frozen, microwaved and out-and-out junk foods. The ingredients of the average meal have been transported thousands of kilometres before landing on our plates; it’s not hard to believe that some of the vitamins were lost in the process.

We already know obesity can result if we eat too much junk food, but there may be greater consequences of unhealthy diets than extra weight around our middles. Do examples like the high school in Wisconsin point to a direct connection between nutrition and behaviour? Is it simply coincidence that the increase in aggression, crime and social incivility in Western society has paralleled a spectacular change in our diet? Could there be a link between the two?

Stephen Schoenthaler, a criminal-justice professor at California State University in Stanislaus, has been researching the relationship between food and behaviour for more than 20 years He has proven that reducing the sugar and fat intake in our daily diets leads to higher IQs and better grades in school. When Schoenthaler supervised a change in meals served at 803 schools in low-income neighbourhoods in New York City, the number of students passing final exams rose from 11 percent below the national average to five percent above. He is best known for his work in youth detention centers. One of his studies showed that the number of violations of house rules fell by 37 percent when vending machines were removed and canned food in the cafeteria was replaced by fresh alternatives. He summarizes his findings this way: “Having a bad diet right now is a better predictor of future violence than past violent behaviour.”

But Schoenthaler’s work is under fire. A committee from his own university has recommended suspending him for his allegedly improper research methods: Schoenthaler didn’t always use a placebo as a control measure and his group of test subjects wasn’t always chosen at random. This criticism doesn’t refute Schoenthaler’s research that nutrition has an effect on behaviour. It means most of his studies simply lack the scientific soundness needed to earn the respect of his colleagues.

Recent research that—even Schoenthaler’s critics admit—was conducted flawlessly, showed similar conclusions. Bernard Gesch, physiologist at the University of Oxford, decided to test the anecdotal clues in the most thorough study so far in this field. In a prison for men between the ages of 18 and 21 in England’s Buckinghamshire, 231 volunteers were divided into two groups: One was given nutrition supplements along with their meals that contained our approximate daily needs for vitamins, minerals and fatty acids; the other group got placebos. Neither the prisoners, nor the guards, nor the researchers at the prison knew who took fake supplements and who got the real thing.

The researchers then tallied the number of times the participants violated prison rules, and compared it to the same data that had been collected in the months leading up to the nutrition study. The prisoners given supplements for four consecutive months committed an average of 26 percent fewer violations compared to the preceding period. Those given placebos showed no marked change in behaviour. For serious breaches of conduct, particularly the use of violence, the number of violations decreased 37 percent for the men given nutrition supplements, while the placebo group showed no change.

The experiment was carefully constructed, ruling out the possibility that ethnic, social, psychological or other variables could affect the outcome. Prisons are popular places to conduct studies for good reason: There is a strict routine; participants sleep and exercise the same number of hours every day and eat the same things at the same time. Says John Copas, professor in statistical methodology at the University of Warwick: “This is the only trial I have ever been involved with from the social sciences which is designed properly and with a good analysis.” As a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study, Gesch emerges with convincing scientific proof that poor nutrition plays a role in triggering aggressive behaviour.

Indeed, the study proves what every parent already knows. Serve soda and candy at a children’s birthday party and you’ll get loud, hyperactive behaviour followed by tears and tantrums.

It works like this: Blood-sugar levels jump suddenly after you eat sugar, which initially gives you a burst of fresh energy. But then your blood sugar falls, and you become lethargic and sleepy. In an attempt to prevent blood-sugar levels from falling too low, your body produces adrenalin, which makes you irritable and explosive.

But sugar can’t be the only problem. After all, high blood-sugar levels mainly have a short-term effect on behaviour, while the research of Schoenthaler and Gesch indicates changes over a longer period. They suggest it is much more important that you get the right amount of vitamins, minerals and unsaturated fatty acids because these substances directly influence the brain, and therefore behaviour.

If these findings prove true, and they do look convincing, then we should be sounding an alarm about good nutrition. What are the long-term implications of the fact that the quality of our farmland has sharply declined in recent decades? The use of artificial fertilizer for years on end has diminished the levels of important minerals like magnesium, chromium and selenium, therefore present in much lower concentrations in our food.

The eating habits of children and young people also should be a cause for serious concern. Their diets now are rich in sugar, fats and carbohydrates, and poor in vegetables and fruit. Add to this an increasing lack of exercise among kids, and the problem becomes even worse. The World Health Organization (WHO) talks of an epidemic of overweight among children. Obesity, the official name for serious weight problems, is said to absorb up to six percent of the total health budget—a cautious estimate as all kinds of related diseases cannot be included in the exact calculation. Think of what this situation will look like when the current generation of overweight kids hits middle age.

The link between food and health is better understood by most people than the relationship between food and behaviour, so health has become the driving force behind many public campaigns to combat overweight. A discussion has arisen in a number of countries about introducing a tax on junk food, the proceeds of which would be spent on promoting healthy eating. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced in May he planned to spend an extra 280 million pounds (the equivalent of 420 million euros or $500 million U.S.) on improving school lunches after the famous television chef Jamie Oliver began speaking out on the issue.

Yet with crime a major political issue almost everywhere, it’s surprising more leaders have not embraced the idea of healthy eating as a recipe for safe streets and schools. After Gesch published his findings in 2002 in The British Journal of Psychiatry, the study was picked up by European and American media. The newspaper headlines were clear: “Healthy eating can cut crime”; “Eat right or become a criminal”; “Youth crime linked to consumption of junk food”; “Fighting crime one bite at a time.” Then the media went deafeningly silent.

Perhaps that’s because the relationship between nutrition and violence continues to be controversial in established professional circles. During their educations, doctors and psychologists are given scant training in nutrition, criminologists provided little awareness of biochemistry, and nutritionists offered no hands-on experience with lawbreakers or the mentally ill. As a result, the link between food and behaviour winds up in no-man’s-land. Even researchers interested in the subject are discouraged—not least of all because you can’t get a patent on natural nutrients like vitamins and minerals. Far more effort goes into pharmaceutical, rather than dietary, solutions.

The Netherlands currently is the only country where Gesch’s research is being explored. Plans to test the findings about nutrition supplements and behaviour further are being set up in 14 prisons, with nearly 500 subjects. Ap Zaalberg, leading the project for the Dutch Ministry of Justice, remembers how he and his colleagues reacted when they first heard of Gesch’s study. “Disbelief,” he states resolutely. “This was surely not true. But when I looked into the issue more closely, I landed in a world of hard science.”

Zaalberg knows diet is not the only factor that determines whether someone exhibits aggressive behaviour. “Aggression is not only determined by nutrition,” he states. “Background and drug use, for example, also play a role. Yet I increasingly see the introduction of vitamins and minerals as a very rational approach.” “Most criminal-justice systems assume that criminal behaviour is entirely a matter of free will,” Gesch says. “But how exactly can you exercise free will without involving your brain? How exactly can the brain function without an adequate nutrient supply? Nutrition in fact could be a major player and, for sure, we have seriously underestimated its importance. I think nutrition may actually be one of the most straightforward factors to change antisocial behaviour. And we know that it’s not only highly effective, it’s also cheap and humane.”

Cheap it is. Natural Justice, the British charity institution chaired by Gesch, which is researching “the origins of anti-social and criminal behaviour,” estimates it would cost 3.5 million pounds (5.3 million euros or 6.4 million U.S. dollar) to provide supplements to all the prisoners in Great Britain. That is only a fraction of the current prison budget of 2 billion pounds (3 billion euros or 3.6 billion U.S. dollar).

It seems the link between nutrition and antisocial behaviour shows great promise as both political issue and human-interest story. How much longer will politicians concentrate on police and stricter surveillance as the answer to crime? When will they realize healthy food can help create a healthier society? After all, people would not only be more productive, but the cost of health care and of the criminal-justice system would decline. As is the case for a man’s love, the way to safety may be through the stomach.

As Bernard Gesch notes, “Few scientists are not convinced that diet is fundamental for the development of the human brain. Is it plausible that in the last 50 years we could have made spectacular changes to the human diet without any implications for the brain? I don’t think so. Now, evidence is mounting that putting poor fuel into the brain significantly affects social behaviour. We need to know more about the composition of the right nutrients. It could be the recipe for peace.”

This Election will not end the Impasse
of Canadian Democracy(excerpt)

By Greg Albo and Brian Evans
From briarpatch magazine
2005

By a margin of 171 to 133, the united parliamentary forces of the Conservatives, Bloc Quebecois and New Democratic Party felled the federal Liberal Government of Paul Martin at 7:09 pm of November 28 on a motion which simply read “This House has lost confidence in the government.” Thus the 38th Parliament of Canada ended. On January 23, 2006 the peoples of Canada will vote for a new government. Watching MP’s stand and vote ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ was somehow moving.

Witnessing a government going down to defeat puts one, however inadvertently and ideologically distanced, in touch with history. But it is too often the history of those who have power and wield it toward their own ends. The latest national opinion polls point to the likelihood of another Liberal minority government. It seems we will be watching the final voting returns in January to see what happens in British Columbia for the precise constitution of party representation. Much else in Canadian politics will remain, we all recognize sadly in advance, all too much the same.

The moving and inspiring lines which conclude Woody Guthrie’s “The Ballad of Tom Joad” speak to what is strikingly absent from Canadian political debate and action today. Guthrie wrote:

“Ever’body might be just one big soul
Well it looks that a way to me.
Everywhere that you look in the day or night
That’s where I’m gonna be, Ma,
That’s where I’m gonna be.

Wherever little children are hungry and cry
Wherever people ain’t free.
Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights
That’s where I’m gonna be, Ma.
That’s where I’m a gonna be.

It’s a song of courage and resistance at an ever so human a scale. And here again, seventy years removed from that great economic horror of the Depression, working people, their families, their communities still are, and will be, bruised, battered and beaten unless there is a concerted resistance. When Guthrie penned these lines workers were mobilizing and pushing back, and their political allies, both social democrats and socialists, were reliable stalwarts in the class battles. As we move into another election it is again painfully clear how much must be rebuilt on the Left - politically, organizationally, and culturally.

The defeat of the Martin Liberal government has again revealed all the old dilemmas and the stark setting that is neoliberal times. The balance of electoral forces is the same stalemate that it has been for more than a decade (and much longer if one looks at the longer term impasse on the national questions and elected governments adventuring outside the boundaries neoliberal policies). The Liberals will be difficult to dislodge, not because they are popular, but because they are the party of the ‘lesser evil’ in the minds of a large plurality and command a national electoral presence practically on that basis alone. This ‘national’ presence for the Liberals is further distorted by the single-member plurality-system which systematically allows the Liberals to claim proportionately more seats than their popular vote.

The BQ and Conservatives, under the well-tread leaderships of Gilles Duceppe and Stephen Harper, possess regional strengths at opposite ends of the country; while the NDP, under the (post-) modernizing leadership of Jack Layton, has pockets of support scattered here and there. British Columbia may be the exception at this point, with three of the parties contesting the province. In the cases of all the parties, their current programmes make for a distinctive embrace - or compromise with - neoliberalism. This is what, it needs to be said, national electoral calculation in Canada has come to: the Liberals as the natural governing party by fear, by accident, by lack of an alternative, but not by positive mandate.

The initiating reason why the Martin Liberal government should not have continued on (or still should have for some) is not the substantive issues of this election. The Gomery Inquiry findings on fraudulent expenses in Quebec to support ‘national unity’ certainly indicated the basic bankruptcy of federalist forces in dealing with the ‘national question’. The government deserved to fall on this basis alone for the rot at the centre of the Canadian state was again revealed for all to see. And the ‘adscam’ was certainly an offence to working people inside and outside Quebec who earn their dollars the old fashioned way - through labour. The circus that has been Ottawa over the last numbers of months as the scandal daily ebbed and flowed added to the sense of parliamentary alienation from what is happening in the daily lives of Canadian workers. This is the stark reality that in the months and years to come the attack on living standards of workers by the rulers of Canada, those on the governing benches in Parliament as well as those in the corporate offices across the country, will no doubt continue.

The billions being promised over the last few weeks for aboriginal poverty reduction programs, tax cuts, an aerospace strategy, labour market training and adjustment, health care and so on is such a mixed bag that one is left wondering if there is anyone in Ottawa who engages in any kind of medium to long-term thinking, planning and prioritizing any more. Like most Liberal election promises over the last years, except for the tax cuts most of these will come to nought.

There are indeed more than a few issues to be dealt with. For one, pensions needs to be assured, as 25 years of restructuring, layoffs and the poor quality of new jobs has put at risk the retirement incomes of many workers. The same period of public sector shrinkage has severely damaged public infrastructure, access to public goods and services, redistributional programmes, the quality of work in the public sector, and the capacity of the state to transcend, or at least contain, some of the worst contradictions produced by capitalist markets. The abuse of the EI fund by turning in into a slush fund for a whole manner of things including national debt reduction, while taking income away from unemployed workers, needs attention. The growing poverty among children, in the suburban high-rises holding recent migrants and the marginalized, and in the Northern reserves across the country, is shocking. And there is, of course, the entire disaster that is Canada’s international trade policy from NAFTA to the WTO and the lead role that Canada is playing in further attempting to constitutionalize corporate property rights and neoliberal principles in trade agreements (notably in the WTO Doha round ministerial meeting next month in Hong Kong).

The Canadian state has been re-made precisely to limit democratic access, control and capacity-building, and to expand its role in strengthening private property rights, expanding the market and shrinking the state, and fostering the internationalization of both Canadian and foreign capital. Over the past quarter century governments of every hue, national, provincial and local, have participated, in varying degrees, in the reinventing Canada as a good place to do business. By necessity, this has also meant workers accepting lower standards of living and expecting less in the way of public services. We keep getting neoliberalism even when we think we are throwing the last bunch of neoliberals and their policies out. Hence the democratic impasse that exists in Canada: falling voter participation rates, especially among working class people, and deepening alienation from the political process.

Whatever happens on election night will have little consequence for the many issues that are of real and concrete importance to Canadian workers. None of the political parties, including the NDP, are addressing these issues (although the discourse around healthcare may be in part an exception). New Democrats, in their efforts to recreate themselves as the ‘authentic’ liberal party beyond the old political antagonisms that are in the way of new social partnerships, are leaving workers and unions to the side, and even re-tacking party positions on ‘law and order’ and Canada’s military stance. As a small symbolic example, not so long ago, New Democrat politicians walked on picket lines and mobilized their memberships in anti-war rallies and against Canadian imperialist interventions, such as in Haiti. They don’t like doing that anymore. It is not what a modernizing party, creating a new market-friendly civic politics and appealing to the corporate mass media, is about.

What does all this imply for the Left in the coming election? In a wider political sense, it points to the need to rebuild the resources of hope and struggle necessary to defend the popular classes and marginalized and to advance an alternative to capitalism. In more immediate electoral terms, it is to try to ensure another minority Parliament with more progressive voices than the last and fewer arch neoliberal ones. This is to vote for the NDP in English Canada and the BQ in Quebec. In some ridings, however, where the NDP is a negligible presence there is a case to be made for a vote for the Liberals to keep out a reactionary conservative. The choices all around are baleful. But there also needs to be some clear principles, something rare in Canadian politics these days, and a number of concrete issues that the Left needs to work on raising during the election to the extent we are able.

On constitutional issues, the rights to self-determination for Quebec and, at last, settlement of issues of national determination, land claims, constitutional status for First Nations are principles to be clear about.

Another is that the coming Parliament address the long-standing demand for reform of the electoral system, and development of a system of proportional representation, something that the existing parties are more frequently making noises about, but letting slide depending upon their individual electoral calculations. On international affairs, it needs to be insisted that Canada withdraw troops immediately from the Middle East, allow refuge for war resistors from the US, and butt-out of the affairs of Haiti. These interventionist adventures have been imperialist disasters that the Canadian state needs to be held accountable for.

That the madness of privatization of pensions, the healthcare system, water supplies and energy sources, schools and universities be stopped is something that a wide set of social forces should be gathered around in the election campaign. And it should be insisted that Canada implement and advance the Kyoto principles rather than beat a retreat from its international treaty obligations - the Liberal Party’s operating principle par excellence — at every opportune moment. In other words, the election should become a moment of political resistance and capacity building of the Left, not one more instance of accommodation, and wishing the NDP into being something they are not and no longer even want to become.

We need a million Joads on the streets and 308 in Parliament. Failing that, let’s continue to build political alternatives as best as we can. And not forget to enjoy the holidays. By the way, those stakes to hold up your lawn sign, their great for growing tomatoes, so take one from every party that offers (just don’t put the sign up) and get your local conservative campaign to drive you to the poll on election day … even if it’s only a block away.

Our Country's Shameful Human Rights Record
Canada opposes recognizing water as a basic human right

BY Kathleen Ruff
From CCPA Monitor
2006

Five million people die unnecessarily every year from lack of clean water. Each day, 6,000 children die from water-borne diseases. The United Nations estimates that, if current trends continue, more than two-thirds of the world’s population by 2025 will not have enough access to water.

“No single measure would do more to reduce disease and save lives in the developing world than bringing safe water and adequate sanitation to all,” says UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. According to Friends of the Earth’s Report Nature For Sale: The Impacts of Privatizing Water and Biodiversity, access to clean water and sanitation would save an estimated $125 billion a year in direct medical expenses and other costs related to preventable water-related diseases.

At the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000, all 189 members of the UN agreed on eight goals to achieve drastic reductions in poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation, and discrimination against women. A key target of that plan is to halve the number of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.

“There is no chance of reaching the Millennium Development Goals. . . without a major redirecting of water infrastructure investments away from centralized mega-projects and toward low-cost, decentralized, and community-based schemes,” says a 2006 Report by the International Rivers Network. Making Water Infrastructure Work for the Poor argues that the goals can be reached if the needs of the poor are put front and centre, with the focus on local, environmentally sustainable technologies.

The needs of the poor and the environment are not, however, the focus of the huge transnational water corporations. As demands intensify on the world’s finite supply of available clean water, they see an opportunity for immense profits. They view water as a potential multi-trillion-dollar annual business. At present, it is still mostly under public control, but these corporations aim to take it over as a marketplace commodity to be sold for profit.

“Water promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th,” says Fortune magazine.

Already, supplying water is a $400 billion profit-driven industry. And, using the clout of the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, the transnational water corporations are seeking to dominate world water policy so as to secure greater privatization and guarantee increased profits.

The World Water Forum, held every three years, is attended by government representatives from around the world. It is organized by the World Water Council and puts out statements and recommendations for world water policy. While appearing to be a bona fide UN organization, the World Water Council is, in fact, an entity set up by the World Bank and the transnational water corporations with a strong pro-privatization agenda.

While corporations want water to be treated as a commodity sold for profit, citizen groups around the world are working to have water recognized under national and international law as a basic human right. Canadians strongly believe that water must stay under public stewardship so as to meet the needs of people and the planet.

The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights agrees. It says that water is a human right and that governments have a responsibility to provide clean water to all citizens. “Water should be treated as a social and cultural good, and not primarily as an economic good,” the UN Committee has declared. The World Health Organization, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention to End Discrimination Against Women all recognize the human right to water.

The UN Committee, made up of independent human rights experts, monitors how well--or how badly--countries that have ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights are implementing the rights in the Covenant. The Covenant covers basic rights essential for human life–such as food, shelter, and health care–and requires governments to progressively implement these rights to the maximum of their available resources.

Canada ratified this Covenant over five decades ago. The United States never did ratify it.

Since 1995, the Committee has issued strong statements on the right to water:

"Water is a limited natural resource and a public good fundamental for life and health. The human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights.”
“The continuing contamination, depletion and unequal distribution of water is exacerbating existing poverty.”

Governments have an immediate obligation to take “deliberate, concrete and targeted” steps towards the full realization of the right to water for all, particularly for vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. Governments must adopt effective legislative and other measures to restrain third parties, such as corporations or other entities, from denying equal access to adequate water and from polluting water resources. Governments must establish “an effective regulatory system. . . which includes independent monitoring, genuine public participation, and imposition of penalties for non-compliance.” Governments have an obligation to recognize the right to water within their national political and legal systems and to adopt a national water strategy and plan of action.

In order to ensure that there is sufficient and safe water for present and future generations, governments should adopt comprehensive and integrated strategies that address unsustainable extraction, diversion, and damming of water resources, contamination of watersheds, impacts of proposed development, assessing the impact of climate changes, deforestation, and loss of biodiversity. A country’s policy on water should be developed through “a participatory and transparent process.” Unaffordable increases in the price of water violate the Covenant and, “under no circumstances shall an individual be deprived of the minimum essential level of water.”

But the Canadian government, without any public or parliamentary debate, has taken a position against the human right to water. Canada was the only country to take this stand at a 2002 meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission, saying: "Canada does not accept that there is a right to drinking water and sanitation."

This is bad news in the struggle for human rights in the world. If there is no human right to water, then the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which protects the most basic rights necessary for human survival and dignity, is dangerously weakened.

Canada’s position also spells disaster for both Canadian and world water policy. It jeopardizes public ownership and oversight of water policy; and it voids government accountability for the well-being of people, the planet, and future generations, leaving this precious resource at the mercy of the predatory, destructive ambitions of profit-driven transnational corporations and the behind-closed-doors machinations of international trade deals.

Canada’s track record on water, in fact, violates all of the standards set by the Human Rights Committee as listed above. When Canada appeared before the Committee in May of this year to explain its human rights record, the Committee specifically chastised Canada for its denial of the human right to water and “strongly recommended” that Canada change its position.

At the same time as Canada opposes the human right to water at the UN, it has no problem at the World Bank supporting the forced privatization of water in developing countries--a policy that has caused immense suffering, illness, and deaths.

This policy violates the democratic rights of people in developing countries, as well as all the standards for water management spelled out by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It makes a mockery of the sovereignty of these countries.

In South Africa, for example, under World Bank pressure, water services were privatized in Johannesburg and other cities, leading to astronomical price hikes which people could not pay. Over 10 million people were cut off from water. In 2000, in Kwa-Zulu Natal, the country’s biggest cholera outbreak occurred as a result of changing the free communal tap system to a privatized, pre-paid metering system. Over 120,000 people were infected with cholera and more than 300 people died.

Since 1990, according to the Catholic organization Development and Peace, "a third of World Bank loans were conditional upon some form of privatization of water services. This trend is growing."

Independent research organizations, such as the Halifax Initiative, document how privatization schemes have been carried out in a climate of non-transparency and non-accountability, and have frequently involved bribes and corruption. "Water privatization in developing countries is an ongoing disaster," says the World Development Movement.

“The World Bank is the single most influential institution in setting water infrastructure investment priorities in developing countries,” says the International Rivers Network. The World Bank’s April 2002 private sector development strategy explicitly specifies public services such as water as “frontier” sectors for private investment. Its International Finance Corporation branch finances private corporate purchases of public assets, and its Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency insures private purchasers against commercial and political risks.

If a privatization plan does not bring in the profits the corporation expected, the corporation can demand compensation from the developing country at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). The Centre’s role is to protect corporate profits; the public interest, the environment, and human rights are not protected.

The U.S. corporation Bechtel sued Bolivia for $25 million at the ICSID after it was driven out of Cochabamba by a popular uprising against Bechtel’s disastrous privatization of the city’s water services. Enron and its water services subsidiary Azurix Corporation filed a claim at the ICSID against Argentina after the collapse of their privatization of Buenos Aires’ water supply.

In contrast, no international body exists where corporations can be sued and fined for dangerous and irresponsible behaviour that violates human rights and environmental responsibilities.

Bad publicity over the disastrous record of water privatization projects has caused the World Bank to lessen the use of the term “privatization” in public documents. A survey, however, by the World Development Movement of 42 “Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers” approved by the IMF and the World Bank as of March 2005, found that 38 of the 42 plans included privatization provisions, and that 27 explicitly included provisions for private sector involvement in the provision of water services.

Through the leadership of Kairos, which represents 11 Canadian churches and church agencies, more than 230,000 Canadians have sent cards to our previous and present prime ministers calling on the government to recognize water as a human right and oppose its privatization. The Canadian government (both previous and present) has ignored them.

In addition to supporting water privatization through the World Bank, Canada is actively pursuing the privatization and deregulation of a broad range of water-elated services in the WTO negotiations on the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).

In 1997 alone, as a result of World Bank and WTO pressure, some US$157 billion worth of publicly-owned resources were transferred to private corporations around the world—a 70% increase over the previous year.

Corporations have no human rights responsibilities under international human rights law. Governments do. By denying the human right to water, the Canadian government washes its hands of a legal responsibility to manage water for the well-being of the public and the environment.

Canada has no up-to-date national law or strategy for managing Canada’s water resources. No debate has taken place in Parliament, nor any public discussion or involvement of civil society. Canada’s sovereignty over its water resources is vulnerable under trade regimes, just as Canada threatens the water sovereignty of developing countries through the World Bank and the WTO.

This climate of non-transparency and non-accountability extends beyond the issue of water. When Canadians are asked, they cite human rights as a top priority. They want action taken to end poverty and hunger and to protect the human right to water--both in Canada and around the world.

Unfortunately, Canadians are not being asked. Instead, key decisions, hostile to human rights, are being made behind closed doors. This is not the way it's supposed to happen in a democracy. Human rights don't belong in the dark, where they die. Openness and public participation are essential.

Here are other crucial decisions taken without parliamentary or public debate. The Canadian government has: argued that the interests of corporations under trade agreements should take priority over the human rights of Canadians; the government is arguing in court that rights in Canadian laws and in the Constitution do not apply to proceedings of NAFTA tribunals; told Canadian courts that, when deciding cases, they should not give force to provisions in international human rights laws that Canada has ratified; put the interests of agribusiness ahead of the rights of 1.4 billion people around the world who rely on farm-saved seed by seeking to end the ban on terminator seed (seed that is genetically engineered to become sterile after first harvest); sought to dilute a UN treaty to outlaw forced disappearances; and failed to take action on recommendations made to Canada by UN human rights bodies; instead of allowing for debate and follow-up, the government buried the recommendations down a black hole in Ottawa.

These decisions not only downgrade human rights, but also lack democratic legitimacy. When people's basic human rights are denied, such as the right to food, water and shelter, their dignity and security as human beings are violated. This violation diminishes us all.

We are told that strong measures are necessary to confront violence and bring about security in the world. It is well-known that denial of basic human rights leads to social conflict and violence. Canada should be building justice and security in the world by being a human rights leader, not a human rights downsizer.

(Kathleen Ruff is a former director of the B.C. Human Rights Commission, which in 2002 the provincial Liberal government downsized out of existence.)

The Wild East

Life in the highrise jungle of urban post-communism is not for the fainthearted.
Richard Swift takes the measure
of a new capitalism – that’s all shock and no therapy.
From New Internationalist
2004

THEY are mostly apartmentdwellers, these sceptical survivors who have lived for decades under communism. If you are lucky enough to be invited into their homes, their hospitality is exemplary. Scarce food and drink flow with unparalleled generosity. While they have memories and often connections back to a village somewhere, their life and fate these days is decidedly urban.

Housing is a huge problem for them. Overcrowding is the norm. Privacy is at a premium. Whoever can buy an apartment, does so. For most, a single-family dwelling is inconceivable. Young marrieds have to stay with their family – maybe even share a room with a sibling or two. But at its best there is a warmth and cosiness to this kind of apartment living. It could be in an older downtown building with some residual charm. More likely it is in some kind of Soviet-era monstrosity on the outskirts of town. Whether in an Eastern European city like Sofia or the capital of a former Soviet republic like Tashkent – whether in the architectural wonder of Lviv in the western Ukraine or Tbilisi in the far reaches of the Georgian Caucasus – postcommunist people are taking great care and pride ‘doing up’ their often cramped home interiors.

Meanwhile, the public realm outside their doors often festers with neglect. Corridors, elevators and stairwells are festooned with garbage and graffiti. Social certainties like guaranteed apartments are simply disappearing. So too are secure jobs, pensions, free (if inadequate) education and healthcare, affordable (if uninspiring) food, access to recreation. Postcommunist economies are being ‘reformed’: marketized and privatized in ways suggested by Western consultants paid for by the World Bank or USAID.

This destruction is intended. The views of just one US economist sums up the Washington Consensus: ‘Any reform must be disruptive on an historically unprecedented scale. An entire world must be discarded, including all its economic and most of its social and political institutions.’ The aim is to create Middle America on the Volga. ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their need’ gives way to ‘if you can’t make money from it, then don’t do it’.

Not that most people were happy with communism. But with communism’s collapse, they were promised more democracy. Instead they are getting political bosses and fixed elections. If the economy had to be reformed, they wanted more opportunity. Instead they are getting oligarchy and corruption.

The champions of the unfettered market call it ‘creative destruction’, a phrase that comes from the conservative economic historian Joseph Schumpeter who saw it as ‘the essential fact about capitalism.’ And for the people in what used to be the communist world there has been destruction aplenty. Destruction of jobs. Destruction of living standards. Destruction of entire industries. Destruction of health. Destruction of lives.

Life expectancy is down. Suicides are up. So are alcoholism, drug abuse, prostitution and crime as people try desperately to cope. The severity of this crisis varies. The formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe and the tiny Baltic republics seem to have coped best with the changes. But even here (see the articles on Hungary and Romania) people are scrambling just to survive.

Economic shock therapy
Hardest hit have been most of the countries that used to make up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Outside the glitzy downtowns of cities like St Petersburg, Kiev or Yerevan where the few prosperous New Russians, New Ukrainians or New Armenians gather, poverty has reached staggering proportions.

Between 1990 and 1999 the number of people living on two dollars a day or less more than tripled. Back in 1989, 14 million people in the USSR lived in poverty. Nine years later the number had skyrocketed to 147 million. This region has undergone a depression and demodernization unprecedented in peacetime over the last century. One Russian scholar estimates the destruction to be equivalent to a ‘medium-level nuclear attack’.

The creative part of this ‘creative destruction’ is a bit more elusive. Certainly it takes a certain creativity to survive as an entire way of life gives way under your feet – as all that is solid melts. But creativity in the sense that Schumpeter meant – the profit in the market ledger – has in this part of the post-communist world been, by and large, an export industry. A lot of the loot from entrepreneurial pillage is now stored in offshore bank accounts or invested in villas in locations like the French Riviera. Two billion dollars a month was spirited out of Russia alone under the corrupt Yeltsin regime. Even the capital that stays in the post-communist world is mostly devoted to speculative purposes or high-end retail – night clubs, fancy cafés, glitzy shops beyond the imagination of most people. Russians were so disgusted with the corruption and chaos under Yeltsin that, for some at least, the autocratic order of Putin and his new cabinet comes as a relief.

It’s capitalist utopia these days – everything is up for sale. That’s certainly the impression that my colleague Andrew Kokotka (the designer of this issue) and I got as we travelled through the former Soviet Union. People trotted out their worldly goods in the weak sunshine of a Kiev afternoon and spread them out on blankets. Or maybe it was from the trunk of their car beside the river in Tbilisi in Georgia. Every electricity pole was covered with tear-off posters for all manner of goods and services. A middle-aged woman named Astghik approached us on the streets of the Armenian capital, Yerevan, with a plastic bag full of necklaces that she maintained would keep our blood pressure in check – absolutely necessary when experiencing ‘creative destruction’. Astghik needed the money so she could pay her children’s (poorly paid) teachers extra so they would not ignore her kids in school. Yes, classroom attention has become a commodity too.

So has medical care. Armenian friends described how a doctor told them their young son ‘looks fine now but next week he might be dead’ as she tried to convince them he suffered from salmonella poisoning. After all, treating salmonella (whether you have it or not) is a lot more lucrative than taking care of a simple case of stomach flu. If you pass your exams and want to graduate – a little something for the principal will be in order. If you are in the army and due your leave, your commanding officer has his hand out. Or say you need a passport or another of the myriad documents necessary to manoeuvre through life. What are often taken for granted as simple rights in the West have become ‘negotiable exchanges’ in this part of the world.

No match for bourgeois decadence
Communism was always supposed to be about the future, but somehow it always felt more like the past. Whether it was old ladies with headscarves and stick brooms sweeping out Red Square or the denunciations of everyone from Kafka to the Rolling Stones for ‘bourgeois decadence’, one got the sense of a world run by a bunch of old fogies. Their values were mostly small ‘c’ conservative – go slow, be stable and predictable, don’t rock the boat. Sure, there were the early days of real revolutionary fervour and debate. Then came social engineering on a grand scale: Stalin’s forced march collectivization The champions of the unfettered market call it ‘creative destruction’ and industrialization and Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution resulted in the death of millions. But this kind of brutal radicalism (more akin, some would claim, to fascism) gave way to a plodding system where crimes and dysfunctions leant more toward the predictable and irritating. You knew what you could get away with and what was dangerous. Injustice and oppression abounded, but the system provided a certain level of welfare for those who lived under it. Resignation gradually replaced fear.

The myth of the system’s radicalism was sustained by both those who controlled it and its enemies in the West. For the former it provided proud credentials for their ‘scientific’ rule. For the latter it proved that no alternative to corporate power was desirable.

Still, it was a way of life to which people adapted with a shrug of the shoulder and a wicked joke at the expense of communist pretension. In the West much concern was expressed about the sad fate of those living under the communist yoke. Oddly there is no such outcry now. Instead those pushed to the margins of mere existence are fed with ‘ no pain, no gain’ sermons about ‘ staying the course’ of reform. The main concern of the free-enterprise zealots has not been the suffering but rather the fear that post-communist politicians would shrink from administering the necessary policies to create a viable capitalism.

The politics of convenience has replaced the concerns about human rights violations that marked the Cold War. When Boris Yeltsin launched a military assault against the Russian Parliament in the fall of 1993, the West, led by the Clinton regime in Washington cheered him on. Although an odd precedent for democracybuilding, their man-in-Moscow was seen as the best hope to continue with brutal economic reforms.

Today, turning blind eyes to unholy alliances with despotic leaders is common practice. So Kuchma in the Ukraine or Aliyev in Azerbaijan are wooed and coddled despite blatantly undemocratic practices. The worst case is probably that ‘warrior against terrorism’ the President of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov – the recipient of US troops and much Western largesse who now runs a vicious police state. Uzbekistan currently holds some 6,000 Muslims in custody for simply practising their religion outside official Government-approved channels.

A kleptocracy has emerged almost everywhere in this region. Those who had power and position under communism have repositioned themselves as either economic oligarchs or political bosses. In many cases they are one in the same. In Eastern Europe this process has in part been kept in check by a relatively open political system. Elsewhere the looting of public wealth has been pretty crude. Russia and Armenia have emerged with some of the most severe gaps between wealth and poverty in the world.

The system takes a ride
In a car on the way to Ukraine’s airport at Kiev, a police officer looms with a torch out of the early morning fog. Our driver is deemed to be drunk (at 6am in the morning!) and a ‘fine’ of $100 is required if we are to catch our flight. The amount is half of what our friend makes in an entire month. It’s a common story: the kind of corruption that occurs at the top gets into the very bones of a society as people follow the examples, of their élites at a micro-level. It’s not so much a question of morality as it is one of survival.

An ugly political culture is emerging. Cars blow up mysteriously or people just disappear. Deaths occur in police custody. Assaults by some quasi-official security force take place on offices and computers. Important documents are removed. A key figure or potential witness to a corrupt deal gets killed in a runof- the-mill robbery. It smacks of organized crime vendettas where the motive is revenge or cover-up.

Overt political motivation is here too. It is widely believed that the bombings that killed dozens in Moscow apartment buildings before the second brutal Chechen war – a war that cemented Vladamir Putin’s strongman image – were the work not of Chechen terrorists but of some murky department of the Russian security service. Then there is the Ukrainian journalist – a thorn in the side of the Kuchma regime – whose head turned up in the woods outside Kiev.

For most of the population this is simply theatre to be observed with a shake of the head or a shrug of the shoulders. Proof of the failure of society to free itself from the iron grip of the state. Proof that nothing ever changes.

I thought of different ways to take the measure of post-communist life in a market economy. What would the Rand Corporation do for instance? Ah-hah, I thought... a focus group. So I got together a group of Armenian students for a discussion. They were just entering their teens when the old system came apart. Now they were university students and finding it very tough. On the positive side, they said that they had more freedom to speak their minds now and that life was more interesting. They all felt their access to the internet was very important for democracy.

But education was very expensive and depended on a massive family effort. All lived at home. They recalled the days of free education when students could travel anywhere in the communist world. They worried for Armenia. They worried about jobs: that many must now go to Russia for work. They worried too that foreigners were buying up essential services – the Italians had the water, the Russians the electricity. They especially worried about the growing gap between rich and poor. They wondered why they couldn’t have the best of both worlds: the new freedoms but also the equality and the guaranteed security of the old system. Good question.

Life After Communism

In the ‘transition’ from communism, the suffering of the people of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been great, while the hoped-for freedom from exploitation and autocracy remains elusive.
The NI maps some of the costs of market-driven shock therapy.

Post-communist meltdown in Russia
• Throughout the entire Yeltsin transition period, flight of capital away from Russia totalled between $1 and $2 billion US every month.

• Each year from 1989 to 2001 there was a fall of approximately 8% in Russia’s productive assets.

• Although Russia is largely an urban society, 3 out of every 4 people grow some of their own food in order to be able to survive.

• Male life expectancy went from 64.2 years in 1989 to 59.8 in 1999. The drop in female life expectancy was less severe from 74.5 to 72.8 years.

Transition costs – shock therapy• The increase from 1990 to 1999 in the percentage of people living on less than $1 a day was greater in the former communist countries (3.7%) than anywhere else in the world.

• The number of people living in ‘poverty’ in the former Soviet Republics rose from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million even prior to the crash of the rouble in 1998.

Economic success
Poland was the only ‘transition' country moving from a command to a market economy to have a greater Gross Domestic Product in 1999 than it did in 1989.1 GDP growth between 1990 and 2001 was negative or close to negative in every country of in the region with Russia (-3.7), Georgia (-5.6), Ukraine (-7.9), Moldova (-8.4) and Tajikistan (-8.5) faring the worst.

Equality
Slovakia tops the Gini index as the most equal country in the world. Russia and Armenia are amongst the most unequal.

Privatization
Between 1993 and 1995, 20,000 out of 27,000 Russian state enterprises were privatized. The Government sold them for about 10% per cent of their true value.

The state rolls back in
Despite its transition to a market economy the bureaucracy in Russia has grown dramatically. The Soviet bureaucracy under Brezhnev (Soviet centralism) made up about 12 million people. It ballooned to 18 million under Gorbachev (restructure). Under Yeltsin (transition) the number of state functionaries in Russia alone exceeded that for the whole Soviet Union in Gorbachev’s time.

Soviet resurrections
Of the 20 current presidents of Eastern European nations (excluding the former Yugoslavia) and countries which used to be part of the Soviet Union 11 are former party insiders (called nomenklatura).

The Ego of them all
Turkmenistan ‘President for Life’ Saparmurat Niyazov has erected a golden statue of himself that rotates 24 hours a day so that it always faces the sun and has renamed the months and days of the week to honour himself, his mother and his favourite national heroes.

Cutting Corporate Welfare

By Ralph Nader
From Third World Traveler
2000

Corporate welfare-the enormous and myriad subsidies, bailouts, giveaways, tax loopholes, debt revocations, loan guarantees, discounted insurance and other benefits conferred by government on business-is a function of political corruption. Corporate welfare programs siphon funds from appropriate public investments, subsidize companies ripping minerals from federal lands, enable pharmaceutical companies to gouge consumers, perpetuate anti-competitive oligopolistic markets, injure our national security, and weaken our democracy.

At a time when the national GDP is soaring, one in five children lives in deep poverty, one might expect that a public effort to curtail welfare would focus on cutting big handouts to rich corporations, not small supports for poor individuals. But somehow the invocations of the need for stand-on-your-own-two-feet responsibility do not apply to large corporations.

At a time when even growing federal budget surpluses do not persuade our nation's political leaders to devote public resources to repairing and enhancing the built elements of our commonwealth-such as the nation's schools, bridges, clinics, roads, drinking water systems, courthouses, public transportation systems, and water treatment facilities-one might expect to see calls to divert taxpayer monies from flowing into private corporate hands and instead direct them to crying public needs. But somehow the cramped federal budget-as well as similarly situated state and local budgets-always has room for another corporate welfare program.

This is a deeply rooted problem, one which cuts across party lines. Democrats and Republicans are both culpable for the proliferation of corporate welfare spending. Indeed the leading Congressional crusader against corporate welfare has long been outgoing House Budget Committee Chair John Kasich, R-Ohio, and efforts to forge bipartisan coalitions to take on corporate welfare founder more on lack of Democratic support than Republican.

Patching the corporate drain on public resources will require an informed and mobilized citizenry that both forces changes in our systems of campaign finance, lobbying and political influence, and demands careful and critical scrutiny by the media, Congressional committees and ultimately the citizens who lose out from government transfers of resources, privileges, and immunities to corporations...

THE POLITICAL ORIGINS OF CORPORATE WELFARE
It is raw political power that creates and perpetuates most corporate welfare programs. There is no serious public policy argument for why television broadcasters should be given control of the digital television spectrum-a $70 billion asset-for free. The endless tax loopholes that riddle the tax code-such as an accelerated depreciation schedule that's worth billions to oil companies-cannot be explained by any exotic theory of fair taxation. Local taxpayers rather than billionaire team owners pay for the new sports stadiums and arenas that dot the American landscape because of the political leverage sports teams and their allies gain through corporate cash and the threat to move elsewhere.

An examination of corporate welfare is, therefore, at one important level, an examination of the state of our political democracy. Unfortunately, the burgeoning corporate welfare state does not speak well for the state of democratic affairs. The following examples, discussed in more detail later in this pamphlet, illustrate how political payoffs-what former Member of Congress Cecil Heftel, D-Hawaii, calls "legalized bribery"-distort decision-making so that the public commonwealth is corporatized to enrich the already-rich.

The savings and loan debacle
Perhaps still the largest corporate welfare expenditure of all time-ultimately set to cost taxpayers $500 billion in principal and interest-the S&L bailout is in large part a story of political corruption, the handiwork of the industry's legion of lobbyists and political payoffs to campaign contributors. The well-connected S&L industry successfully lobbied Congress for a deregulatory bill in the early 1980s, which freed the industry from historic constraints and paved the way for the speculative and corrupt failures that came soon after. Then more industry campaign contributions and lobbying led the Congress to delay addressing the problem - resulting in more S&L failures and skyrocketing costs for corrective measures. When Congress finally did address the problem, it put the bailout burden-totaling hundreds of billions of dollars-on the backs of taxpayers, rather than on the financial industry.

The costs of S&L deregulation and the subsequent bailout were, and remain, severe both in monetary terms and in the mutation and eventual destruction of an industry that contributed to broader home ownership among all Americans. "In the end," writes economics commentator William Greider, "the goal of housing was thrown over the side and the government's regulatory system was perversely diverted to a different purpose- "socializing" the losses accumulated by freewheeling bankers and developers by making every taxpayer pay for them." Congress even refused in the bailout legislation to include measures to empower consumers to band together into financial consumer associations-a modest quid pro quo that would have imposed zero financial cost on taxpayers or financial institutions and that would have enabled consumers to act on their own to prevent future S&L-style crises and bailouts.

Of the many factors contributing to the S&L debacle, which festered throughout the 1980s and into the early l990s, none was more important than industry lobbying money and campaign cash. "Leaving aside the financial and economic complexities," writes economics commentator William Greider, "the savings and loan bailout is most disturbing as a story of politics-a grotesque case study of how representative democracy has been deformed."

"At every turn, any effort to rein in the thrifts' powers and accountability has been shackled," Representative Jim Leach, R-Iowa, then a House Banking Committee member and now the Committee chair, told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. "If there ever has been a case for campaign finance reform, this is it."The giveaway of the digital television spectrum".

In 1996, Congress quietly handed over to existing broadcasters the rights to broadcast digital television on the public airwaves-a conveyance worth $70 billion-in exchange for... nothing. Although the public owns the airwaves, the broadcasters have never paid for the rights to use them. New digital technologies now make possible the broadcast of digital television programming, (the equivalent of the switch from analog records to digitized compact disks), and the broadcasters sought rights to new portions of the airwaves. In recent years, the Federal Communications Commission has, properly, begun to recognize the large monetary value of the licenses it conveys to use the public airwaves-including for cell phones, beepers, and similar uses-and typically auctions licenses. The 1996 Telecommunications Act, however, prohibited such an auction for distribution of digital television licenses, the most valuable of public airwave properties, and mandated that they be given to existing broadcasters.

How to explain this giveaway, especially when other industries, such as data transmission companies, were eager to bid for the right to use the spectrum. Look no further than the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). The broadcasters are huge political donors, donating about $3 million in the 1995-1996 election cycle. They have close ties to key political figures, most notably Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Mississippi; NAB head Eddie Fritts is Lott's college friend. Lott took good care of his buddy, threatening the FCC in no uncertain terms if it failed to promptly oversee the transfer of the licenses to the broadcasters.

Above all, the broadcasters are able to leverage their control over the most important media into influence over politicians. Not surprisingly, the nightly news was silent on this giant giveaway. Few if any Members of Congress were willing to challenge the giveaway. Most feared that bucking the industry would result in slanted news coverage in the next election. Those few who feel secure in their position figure it is not worth taking on the broadcasters-given the fealty of their fellow Members to the industry; they conclude, why bother.

And again, the giveaway not only represents the failure of our working democracy, but an additional erosion. Congress and the FCC failed to include provisions in the legislative and regulatory allocation of the spectrum to force the broadcasters to serve the public interest in concrete ways-for example, by providing free air time for political candidates, or by ceding partial control of the airwaves to citizen groups to air civic programming. (A vague public interest obligation imposed on the broadcasters remains without concrete definition, but preliminary efforts to specify those obligations are underwhelming.)

The 1872 Mining Act
This nearly 130-year-old relic of efforts to settle the West allows mining companies to claim federal lands for $5 an acre or less and then take gold, silver, lead or other hard-rock minerals with no royalty payments to the public treasury. Thanks to the anachronistic 1872 Mining Act, mining companies-including foreign companies-extract billions of dollars worth of minerals a year from federal lands, royalty free.

Legislative efforts to repeal or reform the mining giveaway regularly fail, blocked by senators from western states. These senators are not standing up for their states' best economic interests; the giveaway mines create few jobs and massive environmental problems with high economic costs in foregone tourist and recreational revenues and uses. The senators are standing up for the mine companies, which pour millions in campaign contributions into the Congress.

From 1987 to 1994, the mining companies gave $17 million in campaign contributions to congressional candidates-a small price to pay to preserve their right to extract $26 billion worth of minerals, royalty free, during the same period. More recently, in the 1997-1998 election cycle, the industry-led by the National Mining Association, Cyprus Amax Minerals, Drummond, Phelps Dodge and Peabody Coal-rained more than $2 million in contributions on congressional candidates.

Those campaign donations are concentrated on a relatively small number of key members who go to bat for the industry-including Senators Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico, and Representatives J.D. Hayworth, R-Arizona, and Don Young, D-Alaska. Because of the way the Congress, especially the Senate, functions, it is much easier to block changes in the status quo than to enact changes. The industry's focused contributions ensures it has enough heavyweights and devotees on call in the Congress to block the perennial efforts to reform the 1872 Mining Act.

The mining industry, along with other resource extractive industries, has helped create and fund a front group, People for the West!, that claims to represent the interests of western state citizens but somehow always manages to lobby for corporate positions-such as maintenance of the Mining Act.

Tax loopholes and subsidies
If anyone needs convincing about the need for campaign finance and political reform they need look no further than the Internal Revenue Code. The Code is riddled with calculated loopholes exemptions, credits, accelerated depreciation schedules, deductions and targeted exceptions-many of unfathomable consequence even to trained experts-that are carefully crafted to benefit one or a handful of companies and exist solely because well-paid lobbyists representing fat cat campaign contributors managed to convince a legislator to insert a special provision in long, complicated tax bills.

The origin of many of the corporate tax loopholes is the stuff of Washington legend. It represents one of the worst distortions of our political democracy. Well-heeled lobbyists, who spin through the revolving door between government and K Street and represent high-donor corporate interests, facilitate backroom deals that save their clients millions (or billions). The taxpayers, of course, lose commensurate amounts.

To take one recent egregious example, a conference committee, reportedly acting in response to instructions from then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, inserted a tax break-not included in the previous House or Senate versions-in the 1997 tax bill that provided special benefits for Amway Corporation and a few others. The tax break came a few months after Amway founder Richard De Vos and his wife Helen De Vos each gave half million dollar soft money contributions to the Republican National Committee. The revision to Internal Revenue Code Section 1123 applies to two Amway affiliates and four other companies, and will cost taxpayers $19 million over 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Another extraordinary example occurred the same year. In July 1997, the House and Senate Republican leadership, with the apparent awareness of the Clinton White House, slipped a one-sentence provision into the tax bill that would have saved the tobacco industry $50 billion on the money it was expected to pay as part of a federally approved settlement of the state's lawsuits against the industry. Once the provision was publicly disclosed, many Members of Congress claimed not to have known it was included in the complicated tax bill. Revealed in the light of day, this massive tax favor for an industry falling rapidly out of political favor quickly withered. Both Congressional chambers soon voted to repeal the tobacco industry tax credit-a sign that, despite the fundamental flaws in the political system, news coverage and public outrage can still thwart corporate efforts to loot the treasury.

Pentagon merger subsidies
No government agency is cozier with industry than the Department of Defense, and corporate welfare is pervasive at the agency famous for cost-overruns, waste, fraud, and abuse. Among the most galling of Defense Department corporate welfare handouts is the Pentagon's merger subsidy program, which pays defense contractors to merge, lessening competition for government bids and increasing the lobbying power of newly combined defense megafirms.

The Pentagon subsidy plan began in the early and mid l990s, when it decided to encourage consolidation in the defense sector. The industry asked for and won encouragement in the form of payments to cover the costs of consolidation-including extravagant "golden parachute', bonuses to executives of acquired companies.

When Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta, taxpayers paid for $30 million in bonuses for company executives-an outrage that Representative Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, finally ended with a legislative amendment barring future "payoffs for layoffs."

Levels of industry concentration in the defense sector are now so high that the antitrust authorities are beginning to intervene to block some new mergers among primary contractors. But other defense mergers continue to proceed-with the help of the U.S. taxpayer.

Hijacking local democracy
Perhaps nothing illustrates the ruthlessness and shameless power plays of the corporate welfare kings than their extortionate demands for state and local subsidies on threat of picking up and moving elsewhere. And no case illustrates the hijacking of democratic procedures more clearly than billionaire Paul Allen's buying of an especially-made-for-Allen Washington state referendum to approve $300 million in public subsidies to build a football stadium for his Seattle Seahawks. Mega-billionaire Allen, co-founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates and one of the richest men in the world, bought the referendum both literally and figuratively.

In a stunningly brazen maneuver, he paid the state of Washington for the costs of running the special referendum election in June 1997. Although later challenged as a violation of the state's constitution, the state Supreme Court upheld the private financing of the election. But even the Supreme Court majority which upheld the constitutionality of the election purchase blanched at its political ramifications. "Troubling questions may arise, such as whether any wealthy entity could persuade the legislature to place a measure on the ballot provided the costs of the election were paid," wrote Justice Barbara Madsen for the majority.

Having paid for the issue to get on the ballot, Allen then waged a $6.3 million campaign-the most expensive in Washington state history-to convince voters to support the $300 million public subsidy to the stadium. He devoted $2.3 million to radio and TV ads. In total, Allen outspent opponents of the referendum by a 42-to-1 margin. Allen's investment proved just enough: Washington voters, initially opposed by overwhelming numbers to the idea of public funding for the stadium, approved the referendum with a 51 percent majority.

DOUBLE STANDARDS FOR THE POOR AND THE POWERFUL
Simply to acknowledge the existence of corporate welfare is to point to the enormous discrepancies in influence and allocation of resources in our country.While President Clinton and the Congress have gutted the welfare system for poor people-fulfilling a pledge to "end welfare as we know it"-no such top-down agenda has emerged for corporate welfare recipients. The savage demagoguery directed against imaginary "welfare queens" has never been matched with parallel denunciations of gluttonous corporate welfare kings-the DuPonts, General Motors and Bristol-Myers-Squibbs that embellish their palaces with riches taken from the public purse.

While the minimal government benefits still afforded the poor are provided only to the most impoverished, no such "means testing" is applied to corporate welfare beneficiaries. By and large, the bigger the company, the more it extracts in government supports. The many government programs to benefit small business-some merited, some not-do not come close to the subsidies lavished on large multinational corporations. When Daimler-Chrysler threatens to move a factory expansion out of the city of Toledo unless the city effectively evicts an entire neighborhood, turns the land over to the automaker, and arranges hundreds of millions in federal, state and local tax benefits and other subsidies, Toledo rushes to comply. If "Joe's Garage" were to make such demands the city would laugh. (In fact, in Toledo's desperate rush to please Daimler-Chrysler, the city has undertaken what appears to be a campaign of harassment and intimidation designed to push a local auto body repair shop-Kim's Auto Body-out of business, and out of the way of Daimler Chrysler's plans to expand its grounds. Note the word choice: those are plans to expand the grounds, not the factory. Kim's and the surrounding neighborhood is located not where factory construction will take place, but where Chrysler would like to place shrubbery.)

The new welfare law sets strict time limits for how long poor people can receive government supports, but no such time limitations attach to government handouts to big business. When it comes to the myriad federal government subsidies, even the names of the beneficiaries are often unknown and almost never centrally compiled for the public, the media, or even government officials. Tax loopholes and tax subsidies generally renew themselves automatically, meaning corporations can take advantage of them into perpetuity (or at least until there is a periodic revamping of the entire tax code, and even such revisions of the tax code usually leave key loopholes in place), without the loophole ever being reexamined. While there are detailed reporting requirements for what remains of welfare for the poor, when it comes to corporate welfare, there are few organized, regular, and current reporting requirements and data compilations, easily accessible by the public.

The welfare law denies benefits even to legal immigrants in this country; corporate welfare, by contrast, is far more non-discriminating-Uncle Sam subsidizes foreign corporations as well as domestic businesses. Can you imagine the Congress deciding to extend the welfare for people program to cover poor Canadians? Maybe not, but the federal government provides millions of dollars in subsidies to Canadian mining companies every year. Tax loopholes enable foreign multinationals doing business in the United States to pay proportionally less than their U.S. counterparts. Chrysler has become Daimler-Chrysler, with its headquarters, top executives and annual shareholder meetings in Germany, yet there is no abatement in Uncle Sam's corporate welfare payments to the company that in 1979 was saved from bankruptcy and collapse by a U.S. taxpayer bailout.

SOCIAL NEEDS SHUNTED ASIDE FOR CORPORATE GREED
Implicit in the juxtaposition of corporate welfare and welfare for poor people is the opportunity cost of subsidies for big business: government money wasted on Ford, Chevron, and Con Ed is not available to meet pressing national needs.
To focus on one critical area, at no time in recent history have we more needed a program to construct rebuild, or repair crumbling bridges, schools, drinking water facilities, sewer lines, docks, parks, mass transit systems, libraries, clinics, courthouses, and other public amenities and infrastructure. Too many of our roads and bridges are decrepit, school roofs across the nation are leaking or falling in, the public water system does not deliver safe drinking water for millions, the reach of public transportation systems is dwindling, even the great national park system is decaying.

Consider the following sampling:
* A prerequisite to any serious effort to educate the country's children to be creative, inventive, and dynamic workers, entrepreneurs, consumers, and citizens is providing them with functioning physical facilities, but one in three schools across the United States is "in need of extensive repair or replacement, " according to a 1995 General Accounting Office report. Fixing the schools, the GAO estimates, will cost $113 billion over three years.

* The Centers for Disease Control estimates one million people become sick every year from bad water, with about 900 deaths occurring. The EPA estimates nearly $140 billion will be needed over the next 20 years for water system investments to install, upgrade, or replace failing drinking water infrastructure.

* Maintaining the public transit system at current levels, the Department of Transportation estimates, will cost $9.7 billion a year. Improving the infrastructure to a condition of "good" would require upping annual expenditures to $14.2 billion a year. However, maintaining or slightly upgrading the public transit is not nearly enough. We need to restore the many large urban public transit systems that were bought and dismantled by a GM-led conspiracy (resulting in a 1949 federal antitrust conviction) earlier this century, and then move beyond. Bold new investments are needed to create a modern mass transit system conducive to livable cities, one which brings community residents closer together, combats the momentum towards sprawl, guarantees lower-income groups the ability to travel efficiently in metropolitan areas, abates air pollution, and improves transportation safety.

* As a society we have failed to respect the foresight of Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and the other conservationist founders of the national park system, neglecting to invest sufficient resources to maintain, let alone properly expand, the parks. A Park Service-estimated funding gap of nearly $9 billion has left animal populations at risk, park amenities in substandard or unusable conditions and many national historical artifacts in danger of being lost to posterity.

The hideous disparities between taxpayer subsidies showered on corporate behemoths and unmet social needs are highlighted most clearly in state and local cases, where the revenue and expenditure pools are less complicated than at the federal level.

Consider the case of Cleveland, Ohio. The city has earned renown for a downtown featuring two new publicly financed stadiums, a publicly financed sports arena, a taxpayer-supported rock-n-roll hall of fame, and glittering new buildings receiving millions in tax abatements that come directly out of the school system's revenue stream. At the same time as the city has doled out millions to developers, almost a quarter of the city's schools are so shoddy they should be replaced rather than repaired, according to an architectural and engineering report commissioned by the city school board. Decaying sewers led to a massive downtown flood in January 2000 after a sewer pipe burst. In 1991, one day after the city approved $300 million in financing for a new baseball stadium and basketball arena, the Cleveland school district announced it was phasing-out scholastic athletics for lack of money to equip students and pay coaches and referees.

What is the conceivable rationale for a corporate welfare profligacy that spends hundreds of millions on luxury-box-equipped, amenity-filled stadiums designed for the comfort of the wealthy spectators while fiscal constraints force the shut down of participatory high school sports activities.

THE CORPORATE WELFARE MENTALITY
Yet another indicator of the perversion of sensible thinking engendered by the corporate welfare lobby is the degree to which corporate welfare has been normalized inside the Beltway in Washington, D.C., in state capitols and in city halls across the country.

Consider the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV). PNGV is a federal government subsidy program ostensibly designed to speed auto industry production of more fuel efficient cars. Its real-world effect, however, has been to forestall any toughening of federal fuel efficiency standards. It has also vectored research investments to a dirty technology, diesel, and permitted the major U.S. automakers (now including Daimler-Chrysler) to collude on do-nothing "research"-suppressing the competition that might result in genuine innovation and, most importantly, deployment of new technologies.

For the entirety of the Clinton administration, the Big Three automakers have hoodwinked Congress and the executive branch with this program that has not even achieved a functioning prototype. Now, with growing concerns over global warming and rising gas prices, it would seem that patience with the industry scam might run out.

No way. Instead, Vice President Gore has bragged about his involvement with PNGV as a sign of his commitment to the environment. Well-intentioned, environmentally-minded members of Congress are loathe to criticize the program, because the Capitol Hill mindset now conceives a subsidy program to the Big Three as an aggressive environmental program-never mind how the industry has used the program to thwart meaningful regulation of fuel efficiency-and they have trouble imagining alternatives.