January 23, 2015

Genuine job creation action needed to combat Manitoba’s more accurate jobless rate of 8.3%

The overwhelming majority of Aboriginal people are workers and they among the most oppressed and exploited part of the working class in Manitoba, says the Communist Party.

Excluding Treaty First Nations workers living on reserves from the Labour Force Survey is an official reinforcement of the racist view that Aboriginal people do not value work or contribute to the economy.

Manitoba and other prairie provinces should stop bragging about their low jobless rate and end the long, agonizing jobs crisis. The racist exclusion of Aboriginal people from the labour force survey is a big reason why Manitoba, of all the prairie provinces, is a low-wage province.

The Communist Party of Canada – Manitoba demands that the Conservative government end the racist exclusion by immediately including all workers in the Labour Force Survey.

The truth is that for centuries Aboriginal people have been the backbone not just of the fur trade but of Manitoba’s industrial, mining, farm labour and manufacturing industries. And today their racist-inspired joblessness is a weapon for big business to depress wages for all workers.

Refusing to consider Aboriginal people as part of the working class, the Conservative government is whitewashing the real rate of unemployment for all workers.

This is a much more significant jobless crisis in areas with high numbers of Treaty Aboriginal people, such the Prairie provinces.

For example, in Manitoba, the official rate is 5.2% (35,000 jobless).Counting the labour force on reserves (at an estimated 70% jobless rate and 68.5 participation rate), Manitoba’s actual unemployment rate is an estimated 8.3 per cent, or about 60% higher ( 65,000 jobless actively looking for work).*

Aboriginal leaders report that unemployment rates reach 90 per cent on many reserves.

One of the biggest anchors dragging down wages in Manitoba is the high rate of unemployment.

The real rate of unemployment should include discouraged workers, people who simply have given up actively looking for work. The real rate of unemployment is higher than the official rate.

Adding the officially excluded working class in Manitoba means that the real rate is higher still.

The real challenge for working people is to mount a strong campaign for genuine job-creation policies, such as a shorter work week with no loss in pay or a plan to build 1,000 child care centres and 10,000 homes. All job creation initiatives and hiring must have affirmative action for Aboriginal nations which have higher rates of unemployment, which in all likelihood means all of them.

Unemployment is more than a reckless waste of labour power, it is “a constant dead weight upon the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital.” (Engels,Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).

* * * *

Information: Darrell Rankin, Leader, Communist Party of Canada – Manitoba (204) 586-7824
* * * *

*Calculations for Manitoba:
In 2011, about 105,815 Treaty First Nation people lived in Manitoba.

105,815 Treaty FN in province = X
61,267       Treaty FN on reserves (X x 57.9%) = Y
50,300       Population 15 years old and over, assuming the proportion is the same as for the province Y x 82.1% = Z
34,456       Labour force, assuming the participation rate is the same as for the province. Z x 68.5% = ZZ
24,119       Number unemployed on reserves, assuming a 70% jobless rate. ZZ x 70%

679,200 Labour force without reserves
35,300       Number unemployed in province off-reserve – 5.2%

713,656 Labour force with reserves included
59,419       Total actual number jobless – 8.3%

Considering there are a high number of discouraged workers on reserves and the authoritative reports by First Nations leaders that rates often reach 90%, the 70% rate is probably the most accurate figure. This is a cautious figure.

Sources
1. http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-011-x/2011001/tbl/tbl03-eng.cfm
2. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/lfss01b-eng.htm

Attached in pdf.
1. News release
2. Expanded summary and calculation of table information

By James Thompson

Hypocrisy or diplomacy

Certainly all rational people understand that the current negotiations between Cuba and the USA are complex and progress will not be smooth.

One way to smooth the negotiations would be to remove the element of hypocrisy constantly being hammered by the US negotiators.

One impediment to progress is the demand by the US for Cuba to improve their stance on “human rights.”

The US negotiators should consider this biblical passage before making demands on Cuba:

John 8:7

And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”

They also might want to consider this old saying “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.”

The US negotiators have reached the apex of hypocrisy when they demand that Cuba improve its human rights record.

Cuba has never unleashed nuclear weapons on foreign or domestic metropolises such as the US did to Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Cuba has never firebombed a city such as was done to Dresden, Germany.

Cuba has never bombed foreign countries throughout the world such as the US has done in Latin America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Cuba has never committed genocide against foreign or domestic populations such as the US has done to Native Americans, African Americans and Latinos in the USA and to the peoples of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Cuba has never supported the Israeli government’s oppression and slaughter of Palestinian people. Cuba did not support and fought against apartheid in South Africa while the US stood firmly behind the fascists in South Africa.

Cuba has never maintained foreign military bases such as Guantánamo in which people are unjustly detained, and tortured. The word “hypocrisy” is not sufficient to describe the travesty of the US demands for Cuba to improve its human rights record while the US is violating human rights on Cuban soil.

Cuba has never placed economic sanctions and/or embargoes on a foreign country which resulted in that country’s people’s economic deprivation and misery.

Cuba does not have a history of supporting Nazis and fascists such as the US has done in the Ukraine and many other places in the world.

Cuba does not have a history of barbaric foreign policies of “regime change” of democratically elected governments in foreign countries such as the US has done in Grenada, Panama, Cuba, Venezuela, Yugoslavia, all socialist countries and all anti-imperialist countries around the world.

Cuba has never allowed its police force to murder with impunity young people of African descent.

Cuba has never supported terrorist organizations within its own country who have bombed the airliners of foreign countries such as was done to the airliner carrying the Cuban fencing team in a flight from Venezuela to Cuba. Cuba has never supported perpetrators of terrorism such as Luis Posada Carriles. Mr. Carriles remains free in the USA today even though it is well documented that he has murdered many Cubans.

The US negotiators have not budged in their stubborn adherence to Cuba remaining on the US list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” If the US negotiators want to negotiate in good faith, they must insist that the USA be placed on the US list of “state sponsors of terrorism.”

By BRADLEY KLAPPER and MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
Published: Yesterday
http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_289563/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=2tmFgO4G

HAVANA (AP) – The United States and Cuba closed two days of historic talks in Havana with some progress toward restoring diplomatic ties after a half-century of estrangement, but sharp differences over the role of human rights in their new relationship.

“As a central element of our policy, we pressed the Cuban government for improved human rights conditions, including freedom of expression,” said Roberta Jacobson, the top U.S. diplomat for Latin America and most senior American official to visit the island country in more than three decades. In Spanish, however, her statement said the U.S. “pressured” Cuba on the issue.

“Cuba has never responded to pressure,” Josefina Vidal, Cuba’s top diplomat for U.S. affairs, responded.

The comments by Jacobson and Vidal reflected longstanding positions of their governments and it wasn’t immediately clear whether the issue, which has previously blocked closer U.S.-Cuban relations, would pose a threat to the new diplomatic process.

Yet it laid bare the pressures each side faces at home – the U.S., from Republican leaders in Congress and powerful Cuban-American groups and Cuba, from hardliners deeply concerned that rapprochement could undermine the communist system founded by Fidel Castro.

In the first face-to-face talks since last month’s declaration of detente, the two countries laid out a detailed agenda for re-establishing full diplomatic relations. Further talks were planned.

Jacobson hailed a morning session as “positive and productive,” focusing on the mechanics of converting interest sections into full-fledged embassies headed by ambassadors. But she also spoke of “profound differences” separating the two governments and said embassies by themselves would not mean normalized ties.

“We have to overcome more than 50 years of a relationship that was not based on confidence or trust,” Jacobson told reporters.

Along with human rights, Cuba outlined other obstacles in the relationship. Vidal demanded that Cuba be taken off the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. However, she praised Obama for easing the U.S. trade embargo and urging the U.S. Congress to lift it entirely.

“It was a first meeting. This is a process,” Vidal said. In the next weeks, she said, the U.S. and Cuba will schedule a second round of talks, which may or may not be the time to finalize an agreement.

Issues on Thursday’s agenda included ending caps on staff, limits on diplomats’ movements and, in the case of the U.S. building, removing guard posts and other Cuban structures along the perimeter.

Earlier, the two countries disputed whether human rights had even been discussed at all. Jacobson said the U.S. raised it in the morning meeting; Vidal said it had not come up.

Gustavo Machin, Cuba’s deputy chief of North American affairs, later said the delegations spent time in an afternoon session discussing U.S. human rights problems – a reference to recent police killings of black men in Missouri and New York. Cuban state media said the Cuban delegation also complained about the detention of prisoners at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay.

A U.S. official said the difference in Jacobson’s statements was unintentional and that the English version – that the U.S “pressed the Cuban government for improved human rights conditions, including freedom of expression” – reflected the delegation’s position.

The U.S. and Cuba also talked about human trafficking, environmental protection, American rules to allow greater telecommunications exports to Cuba and how to coordinate responses to oil spills or Ebola outbreaks.

The need for at least one future round of talks could set back U.S. hopes of reopening the embassies before April’s Summit of the Americas, which Obama and Castro are expected to attend.

Still, after so many years of mutual suspicion, each side stressed the importance of the collegial atmosphere in Havana that included long working lunches and a dinner together.

“Look at my face,” Machin said, smiling. “It reflects the spirit in which we’ve been talking up ’til now.”

© 2015 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

William Blum

Official website of the author, historian, and U.S. foreign policy critic.

The Anti-Empire Report #136

By William Blum – Published January 20th, 2015

138

Murdering journalists … them and us

After Paris, condemnation of religious fanaticism is at its height. I’d guess that even many progressives fantasize about wringing the necks of jihadists, bashing into their heads some thoughts about the intellect, about satire, humor, freedom of speech. We’re talking here, after all, about young men raised in France, not Saudi Arabia.

Where has all this Islamic fundamentalism come from in this modern age? Most of it comes – trained, armed, financed, indoctrinated – from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. During various periods from the 1970s to the present, these four countries had been the most secular, modern, educated, welfare states in the Middle East region. And what had happened to these secular, modern, educated, welfare states?

In the 1980s, the United States overthrew the Afghan government that was progressive, with full rights for women, believe it or not   , leading to the creation of the Taliban and their taking power.

In the 2000s, the United States overthrew the Iraqi government, destroying not only the secular state, but the civilized state as well, leaving a failed state.

In 2011, the United States and its NATO military machine overthrew the secular Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi, leaving behind a lawless state and unleashing many hundreds of jihadists and tons of weaponry across the Middle East.

And for the past few years the United States has been engaged in overthrowing the secular Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. This, along with the US occupation of Iraq having triggered widespread Sunni-Shia warfare, led to the creation of The Islamic State with all its beheadings and other charming practices.

However, despite it all, the world was made safe for capitalism, imperialism, anti-communism, oil, Israel, and jihadists. God is Great!

Starting with the Cold War, and with the above interventions building upon that, we have 70 years of American foreign policy, without which – as Russian/American writer Andre Vltchek has observed – “almost all Muslim countries, including Iran, Egypt and Indonesia, would now most likely be socialist, under a group of very moderate and mostly secular leaders”.   Even the ultra-oppressive Saudi Arabia – without Washington’s protection – would probably be a very different place.

On January 11, Paris was the site of a March of National Unity in honor of the magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose journalists had been assassinated by terrorists. The march was rather touching, but it was also an orgy of Western hypocrisy, with the French TV broadcasters and the assembled crowd extolling without end the NATO world’s reverence for journalists and freedom of speech; an ocean of signs declaring Je suis Charlie … Nous Sommes Tous Charlie; and flaunting giant pencils, as if pencils – not bombs, invasions, overthrows, torture, and drone attacks – have been the West’s weapons of choice in the Middle East during the past century.

No reference was made to the fact that the American military, in the course of its wars in recent decades in the Middle East and elsewhere, had been responsible for the deliberate deaths of dozens of journalists. In Iraq, among other incidents, see Wikileaks’ 2007 video of the cold-blooded murder of two Reuters journalists; the 2003 US air-to-surface missile attack on the offices of Al Jazeera in Baghdad that left three journalists dead and four wounded; and the American firing on Baghdad’s Hotel Palestine the same year that killed two foreign cameramen.

Moreover, on October 8, 2001, the second day of the US bombing of Afghanistan, the transmitters for the Taliban government’s Radio Shari were bombed and shortly after this the US bombed some 20 regional radio sites. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the targeting of these facilities, saying: “Naturally, they cannot be considered to be free media outlets. They are mouthpieces of the Taliban and those harboring terrorists.”

And in Yugoslavia, in 1999, during the infamous 78-day bombing of a country which posed no threat at all to the United States or any other country, state-owned Radio Television Serbia (RTS) was targeted because it was broadcasting things which the United States and NATO did not like (like how much horror the bombing was causing). The bombs took the lives of many of the station’s staff, and both legs of one of the survivors, which had to be amputated to free him from the wreckage.

I present here some views on Charlie Hebdo sent to me by a friend in Paris who has long had a close familiarity with the publication and its staff:

“On international politics Charlie Hebdo was neoconservative. It supported every single NATO intervention from Yugoslavia to the present. They were anti-Muslim, anti-Hamas (or any Palestinian organization), anti-Russian, anti-Cuban (with the exception of one cartoonist), anti-Hugo Chávez, anti-Iran, anti-Syria, pro-Pussy Riot, pro-Kiev … Do I need to continue?

“Strangely enough, the magazine was considered to be ‘leftist’. It’s difficult for me to criticize them now because they weren’t ‘bad people’, just a bunch of funny cartoonists, yes, but intellectual freewheelers without any particular agenda and who actually didn’t give a fuck about any form of ‘correctness’ – political, religious, or whatever; just having fun and trying to sell a ‘subversive’ magazine (with the notable exception of the former editor, Philippe Val, who is, I think, a true-blooded neocon).”

Dumb and Dumber

Remember Arseniy Yatsenuk? The Ukrainian whom US State Department officials adopted as one of their own in early 2014 and guided into the position of Prime Minister so he could lead the Ukrainian Forces of Good against Russia in the new Cold War?

In an interview on German television on January 7, 2015 Yatsenuk allowed the following words to cross his lips: “We all remember well the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany. We will not allow that, and nobody has the right to rewrite the results of World War Two”.

The Ukrainian Forces of Good, it should be kept in mind, also include several neo-Nazis in high government positions and many more partaking in the fight against Ukrainian pro-Russians in the south-east of the country. Last June, Yatsenuk referred to these pro-Russians as “sub-humans”   , directly equivalent to the Nazi term “untermenschen”.

So the next time you shake your head at some stupid remark made by a member of the US government, try to find some consolation in the thought that high American officials are not necessarily the dumbest, except of course in their choice of who is worthy of being one of the empire’s partners.

The type of rally held in Paris this month to condemn an act of terror by jihadists could as well have been held for the victims of Odessa in Ukraine last May. The same neo-Nazi types referred to above took time off from parading around with their swastika-like symbols and calling for the death of Russians, Communists and Jews, and burned down a trade-union building in Odessa, killing scores of people and sending hundreds to hospital; many of the victims were beaten or shot when they tried to flee the flames and smoke; ambulances were blocked from reaching the wounded … Try and find a single American mainstream media entity that has made even a slightly serious attempt to capture the horror. You would have to go to the Russian station in Washington, DC, RT.com, search “Odessa fire” for many stories, images and videos. Also see the Wikipedia entry on the 2 May 2014 Odessa clashes.

If the American people were forced to watch, listen, and read all the stories of neo-Nazi behavior in Ukraine the past few years, I think they – yes, even the American people and their less-than-intellectual Congressional representatives – would start to wonder why their government was so closely allied with such people. The United States may even go to war with Russia on the side of such people.

L’Occident n’est pas Charlie pour Odessa. Il n’y a pas de défilé à Paris pour Odessa.

Some thoughts about this thing called ideology

Norman Finkelstein, the fiery American critic of Israel, was interviewed recently by Paul Jay on The Real News Network. Finkelstein related how he had been a Maoist in his youth and had been devastated by the exposure and downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976 in China. “It came out there was just an awful lot of corruption. The people who we thought were absolutely selfless were very self-absorbed. And it was clear. The overthrow of the Gang of Four had huge popular support.”

Many other Maoists were torn apart by the event. “Everything was overthrown overnight, the whole Maoist system, which we thought [were] new socialist men, they all believed in putting self second, fighting self. And then overnight the whole thing was reversed.”

“You know, many people think it was McCarthy that destroyed the Communist Party,” Finkelstein continued. “That’s absolutely not true. You know, when you were a communist back then, you had the inner strength to withstand McCarthyism, because it was the cause. What destroyed the Communist Party was Khrushchev’s speech,” a reference to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 exposure of the crimes of Joseph Stalin and his dictatorial rule.

Although I was old enough, and interested enough, to be influenced by the Chinese and Russian revolutions, I was not. I remained an admirer of capitalism and a good loyal anti-communist. It was the war in Vietnam that was my Gang of Four and my Nikita Khrushchev. Day after day during 1964 and early 1965 I followed the news carefully, catching up on the day’s statistics of American firepower, bombing sorties, and body counts. I was filled with patriotic pride at our massive power to shape history. Words like those of Winston Churchill, upon America’s entry into the Second World War, came easily to mind again – “England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations would live.” Then, one day – a day like any other day – it suddenly and inexplicably hit me. In those villages with the strange names there were people under those falling bombs, people running in total desperation from that god-awful machine-gun strafing.

This pattern took hold. The news reports would stir in me a self-righteous satisfaction that we were teaching those damn commies that they couldn’t get away with whatever it was they were trying to get away with. The very next moment I would be struck by a wave of repulsion at the horror of it all. Eventually, the repulsion won out over the patriotic pride, never to go back to where I had been; but dooming me to experience the despair of American foreign policy again and again, decade after decade.

The human brain is an amazing organ. It keeps working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 52 weeks a year, from before you leave the womb, right up until the day you find nationalism. And that day can come very early. Here’s a recent headline from the Washington Post: “In the United States the brainwashing starts in kindergarten.”

Oh, my mistake. It actually said “In N. Korea the brainwashing starts in kindergarten.”

Let Cuba Live! The Devil’s List of what the United States has done to Cuba

On May 31, 1999, a lawsuit for $181 billion in wrongful death, personal injury, and economic damages was filed in a Havana court against the government of the United States. It was subsequently filed with the United Nations. Since that time its fate is somewhat of a mystery.

The lawsuit covered the 40 years since the country’s 1959 revolution and described, in considerable detail taken from personal testimony of victims, US acts of aggression against Cuba; specifying, often by name, date, and particular circumstances, each person known to have been killed or seriously wounded. In all, 3,478 people were killed and an additional 2,099 seriously injured. (These figures do not include the many indirect victims of Washington’s economic pressures and blockade, which caused difficulties in obtaining medicine and food, in addition to creating other hardships.)

The case was, in legal terms, very narrowly drawn. It was for the wrongful death of individuals, on behalf of their survivors, and for personal injuries to those who survived serious wounds, on their own behalf. No unsuccessful American attacks were deemed relevant, and consequently there was no testimony regarding the many hundreds of unsuccessful assassination attempts against Cuban President Fidel Castro and other high officials, or even of bombings in which no one was killed or injured. Damages to crops, livestock, or the Cuban economy in general were also excluded, so there was no testimony about the introduction into the island of swine fever or tobacco mold.

However, those aspects of Washington’s chemical and biological warfare waged against Cuba that involved human victims were described in detail, most significantly the creation of an epidemic of hemorrhagic dengue fever in 1981, during which some 340,000 people were infected and 116,000 hospitalized; this in a country which had never before experienced a single case of the disease. In the end, 158 people, including 101 children, died.   That only 158 people died, out of some 116,000 who were hospitalized, was an eloquent testimony to the remarkable Cuban public health sector.

The complaint describes the campaign of air and naval attacks against Cuba that commenced in October 1959, when US president Dwight Eisenhower approved a program that included bombings of sugar mills, the burning of sugar fields, machine-gun attacks on Havana, even on passenger trains.

Another section of the complaint described the armed terrorist groups, los banditos, who ravaged the island for five years, from 1960 to 1965, when the last group was located and defeated. These bands terrorized small farmers, torturing and killing those considered (often erroneously) active supporters of the Revolution; men, women, and children. Several young volunteer literacy-campaign teachers were among the victims of the bandits.

There was also of course the notorious Bay of Pigs invasion, in April 1961. Although the entire incident lasted less than 72 hours, 176 Cubans were killed and 300 more wounded, 50 of them permanently disabled.

The complaint also described the unending campaign of major acts of sabotage and terrorism that included the bombing of ships and planes as well as stores and offices. The most horrific example of sabotage was of course the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner off Barbados in which all 73 people on board were killed. There were as well as the murder of Cuban diplomats and officials around the world, including one such murder on the streets of New York City in 1980. This campaign continued to the 1990s, with the murders of Cuban policemen, soldiers, and sailors in 1992 and 1994, and the 1997 hotel bombing campaign, which took the life of a foreigner; the bombing campaign was aimed at discouraging tourism and led to the sending of Cuban intelligence officers to the US in an attempt to put an end to the bombings; from their ranks rose the Cuban Five.

To the above can be added the many acts of financial extortion, violence and sabotage carried out by the United States and its agents in the 16 years since the lawsuit was filed. In sum total, the deep-seated injury and trauma inflicted upon on the Cuban people can be regarded as the island’s own 9-11.

__._,_.___

TeleSUR English, January 15, 2015

Since being elected, Bolivian President Evo Morales has carried out policies to create employment throughout the country. 

Bolivian Minister of Labor Daniel Santalla announced Wednesday that Bolivia has generated a half a million jobs in both the private and public sectors since 2006.

“There was major increase in employment throughout the country since 2006, according to the data we have, in both the public and private sector have created more the 500,000 jobs in the country,” he stated.

Santalla attributed the increased employment levels to the policies carried out under President Evo Morales’ administration, which has aimed to expand employment opportunities, especially for economically marginalized communities.

However, the minister also noted that the creation of jobs must also include the generation of “decent and dignified” forms of labor in which workers should receive benefits from social security.

Since 2005, the Bolivian government has made considerable progress in terms of improving labor legislation, including:

• Prohibiting unlawful firings
• Legalizing strikes
• No longer allows employers to fire women with children less then a year old
• Allows women to have paid day to go the gynecologist
• Providing three months of paid benefits after a worker is fired or resigns

Most importantly, from 2005-2013 Bolivia has achieved an increase in real minimum wage of 104 percent, higher than any other Latin American country, according to the International Labor Organization.

 

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Morales-Government-Generates-Massive-Jobs-Growth-in-Bolivia-20150115-0032.html