The federal Conservative party's "family values" guy, Vic Toews, who currently serves in Stephen Harper's cabinet as President of the Treasury Board, and was a former Minister of Justice in Progressive Conservative Premier Gary Filmon's government in the 1990s — as well as, Minister of Justice and Attorney-General, in the early part of Harper's lingering, undeserved mandate — seems to be in a spot of personal trouble.
Now, Mr. Harper and Mr. Toews (the latter, a socially conservative right-winger, and even prior to the emergence of the current scandal was something of an embarrassment to the Prime Minister) up until a month, or so, ago was slated for a federal appointment to Manitoba's Court of Queen's Bench. Hey, it all could have worked out so well. Harper gets rid of an old fogey (he's 55, but he looks much older, don'tcha think?), putting him out to pasture in the sinecure of the Courts, and Toews gets to make blue collar criminals miserable while offering white collars thieves an opportunity to carry on with their dirty deeds.
But no, it is not to be. No Court appointment for Mr. Toews will be in the offing, it would seem. And why not offer the old fascist homophobe a cushy retirement within the luxuriant confines of the august Manitoba Court system? Yes, folks, there is a story to be told, a juicy scandale du jour.
Mr. Toews is "embroiled in a messy divorce" after fathering a child last fall with a much younger woman. So, it'll be no $232,000 a year job for the federal MP often dubbed the "minister of family values". In Mr. Toews' crowd you just don't go around knocking up a much younger woman who is not your wife. Particularly when you've fashioned yourself as an ethically pure saint, a man who knows the "true" way, a family man with family values.
Tch, tch, Mr. Toews. But it could be worse. Just ask poor ol' Larry Craig.
Although, for the most part, VanRamblings concurs with the sentiments expressed by Carlin in the video (may he rest in peace), we believe there is hope for our future. What that means, though, is citizen involvement in the life of the society. Change will come slowly, but change will come.
Hailed as a great speech, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's inaugural 1961 address to the world held out hope for a better future.
How different our times are today: as ever increasing amounts of scarce financial resources are spent on armaments and we watch as our sons and daughters die in far off lands for reasons unclear to almost all of us, as homeless sleep in our streets, when far too many children live in poverty and want, and when division and indifference define the body politic.
The most popular video in the blogosphere — so popular in fact that Google Video and YouTube.com were forced to take it down despite millions of visitors logging onto their sites — comedian Stephen Colbert’s evisceration of the President of the United at the recent Washington Press Corps dinner constitutes an act of bravery rivalled only by the actions of Cindy Sheehan this past year, as she has traveled the globe.
If you haven’t had a chance to watch Stephen Colbert’s video, it's available by clicking on the picture above (or by clicking on the Google Video link, which actually provides a better video, even if Google’s lawyers have the folks at Google pull the video from time to time).
On November 11, 1999 Terry Kelly was in a Shoppers Drug Mart store in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. At 10:55 a.m. an announcement came over the store’s PA system asking customers who might still be on the premises at 11:00 a.m. to give two minutes of silence in respect to the veterans who had sacrificed so much for all of us.
Terry found himself moved by the store’s role in adopting the Legion’s “two minutes of silence” initiative, and felt that the retail outlet’s contribution in educating the public to the importance of remembrance was both appropriate and laudable.
When 11 o’clock arrived, an announcement was again made asking for “two minutes of silence” to commence. All customers, with the exception of a man who was accompanied by his young daughter, showed their respect.
Terry’s chagrin at the conduct of the father who was demanding service from the store’s clerks rather than show appropriate respect, in the process setting a poor example for his daughter, was later channeled into a beautiful piece of music, titled A Pittance of Time. VanRamblings today presents Mr. Kelly’s award-winning, moving video of A Pittance of Time.
VanRamblings first became aware of the divide between Muslim Arab immigrants and the majority French population seven years ago during a screening of Jeanne and the Perfect Guy when, in the film’s opening scene, the Muslim, Arab and black janitorial staff at a chic Paris travel agency break out into song decrying the exploitative treatment each experiences at the hands of the French, and the pervasive sense of exclusion each feels, their diaspora to France hardly welcome despite the necessity of their labours.
Now, in fall 2005, after almost two weeks of violent clashes between youth and police, as the world looks on in stunned disbelief at the destruction of the social fabric in France, many of us our looking for answers as to why “a tsunami of inchoate youth rebellion” is engulfing France.
As Doug Ireland writes in his piece, Why Is France Burning? The Rebellion of A Lost Generation, “To understand the origins of this profound crisis for France, it is important to step back and remember that the ghettos where festering resentment has now burst into flames were created as a matter of industrial policy by the French state.”
It is the result of thirty years of government neglect: of the failure of the French political classes — of both right and left — to make any serious effort to integrate its Muslim and black populations into the larger French economy and culture; and of the deep-seated, searing, soul-destroying racism that the unemployed and profoundly alienated young of the ghettos face every day of their lives, both from the police, and when trying to find a job or decent housing.
In the course of his essay, Ireland suggests that the events of the past two weeks can be attributed to institutionalized racism and a long, inglorious exploitation of 10% of the population who have consistently been locked out of political decision-making, and denied access to basic education, housing and social services. The history of such treatment of the Muslim, Arab and black population dates back almost a half century.
During the post-World War II boom years of reconstruction and economic expansion, the government recruited labourers and factory and menial workers from France’s foreign colonies. These immigrant workers, primarily from North Africa, were desperately needed to allow the French economy to expand due to the shortage of manpower caused by two World Wars, killing many French men, and slashing native French birth-rates. Moreover, these immigrant workers were favoured by industrial employers as passive, unlikely to strike and cheaper to hire. Literacy, too, was a disqualification, because an Arab worker who could read could educate himself about politics and become more susceptible to organization into a union.
Upon arrival and since, these Arab workers were and are warehoused in huge, high-rise low-income housing ghettos — known as cités (Americans call them ‘the projects’) — specially built and deliberately placed out of sight in the suburbs so that their darker-skinned inhabitants wouldn’t “pollute” the larger metropolitan centres. Now 30, 40, and 50 years old, these high-rise human warehouses in the isolated suburbs are dilapidated, sinister places, housing the hopeless and the alienated, an undereducated, oppressed and rage-filled population of the dispossessed.
People Are Mad As Hell and Unwilling To Take It Anymore
A seismic rift developed between the classes in America this past week, the results of which may be unclear at this juncture but are sure to be as devastating to the body politic of the United States — and perhaps beyond their shores — as the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the American South.
This past week, as tens of thousands of New Orleans’ citizens awaited rescue from the cataclysmic effects of Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. government — woefully miscalculating the level of destruction they would face — failed to respond in a timely, humane, responsible and competent manner to one of the most devastating domestic crises in American history.
As conservative columnist David Brooks writes in his incisive New York Times essay ...
On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged. Last week in New Orleans, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed. The first rule of the social fabric — that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable — was trampled.
Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are. Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970s. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence ... All we can be sure of is that the political culture is about to undergo some big change.
To point out just how incompetent and staggeringly ineffectual the Bush administration was in its response to the rapidly deteriorating situation in New Orleans, CNN’s Tom Foreman set about to examine what is being said about Katrina today by Department of Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff compared to what was said in the past. Chertoff Fact Check consists of video clips of the various positions taken by DHS Secretary Chertoff and FEMA Director Michael Brown before and after Katrina struck.
The response by the Bush administration to the needs of its citizens can be characterized as cruel and heartless and assuredly nothing less than incomprehensible and unforgivable. In words that haunt the soul, Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish, appearing Sunday on Meet the Press, said, “the cavalry never came.” You can read the transcript, but the video is so much more powerful. The video is accessible by clicking on the permalink here, and then clicking on one of the video links.
As a coda to tonight’s post, VanRamblings offers another video, one of the harrowing pieces of television reportage as you’re ever likely to see watch. The video is accessible by clicking on the permalink here, and then click on either one of the video links. While Aaron Brown on CNN stated, “We have turned the corner,” Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera and Shepard Smith reported on the thousands of people trapped in what Geraldo called “this Hell on Earth” at the convention center. No one had been bused out. Shepard was on the I-10 and is devastating in his description of the “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of people denied exit, all of whom were left without food, water or medicine, for days.
Two gay Iranian teenagers — one 18, the other believed to be 16 or 17, were executed last week for the “crime” of homosexuality. The two youths — identified only by their initials as M.A. and A.M., were hanged on Tuesday, July 19th in Edalat (Justice) Square in the city of Mashhad in north-eastern Iran, on the orders of Court No. 19. The hanging of the teens was also reported by the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
(The two boys) admitted to having gay sex (probably under torture) but claimed in their defence that most young boys had sex with each other and that they were not aware that homosexuality was punishable by death. Prior to their execution, the teenagers were held in prison for 14 months and severely beaten with 228 lashes.
Ruhollah Rezazadeh, the lawyer of the youngest boy, had appealed that he was too young to be executed and that the court should take into account his tender age. But the Supreme Court in Tehran ordered him to be hanged. Under the Iranian penal code, girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 can be hanged.
WikiNews reports that Iran in Focus “claimed that the two were hanged not for gay sex, but for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy at knife point. Neither the Iranian Student’s News Agency nor another report from the National Council of Resistance of Iran made this allegation.” Direland Pressnotes that the accusation of rape in reports came days after international outrage and detailed reports by other Iranian news agencies. They suggest the report is a ploy of the Iranian government to justify its actions.
“The allegation of sexual assault may either be a trumped-up charge to undermine public sympathy for the youths — a frequent tactic by the Islamist regime in Iran — or it may be that the 13-year-old was a willing participant but that Iranian law ... deems that no person of that age is capable of sexual consent and that therefore any sexual contact is automatically deemed in law to be a sex assault,” said OutRage!’s Peter Tatchell.
“This is just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists in Iran,” Tatchell remarked. “The entire country is a gigantic prison, with Islamic rule sustained by detention without trial, torture and state-sanctioned murder.”
Tatchell told reporters that according to Iranian human rights activists, more than 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed in Iran since the ayatollahs seized power in 1979.
In an article published in The Nation this past week, author and social commentarian Naomi Klein eviscerates the U.S. government in respect of its response to the peoples devastated by the December 26th tsunami, calling U.S. foreign policy “stunningly inept,” corrupt and incompetent.
In the body of the article, Klein defines “the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering.”
As in other reconstruction sites, from Haiti to Iraq, tsunami relief has little to do with recovering what was lost. Although hotels and industry have already started reconstructing on the coast, in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India, governments have passed laws preventing families from rebuilding their oceanfront homes. Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly relocated inland, to military style barracks in Aceh and prefab concrete boxes in Thailand. The coast is not being rebuilt as it was — dotted with fishing villages and beaches strewn with handmade nets. Instead, governments, corporations and foreign donors are teaming up to rebuild it as they would like it to be: the beaches as playgrounds for tourists, the oceans as watery mines for corporate fishing fleets, both serviced by privatized airports and highways built on borrowed money.
In January, Condoleezza Rice sparked a small controversy by describing the tsunami as “a wonderful opportunity” that “has paid great dividends for us.” Many were horrified at the idea of treating a massive human tragedy as a chance to seek advantage. But, if anything, Rice was understating the case. A group calling itself Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters says that for “businessmen-politicians, the tsunami was the answer to their prayers, since it literally wiped these coastal areas clean of the communities which had previously stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, casinos and shrimp farms. To them, all these coastal areas are now open land!”
Click on the picture above for a visual and auditory representation of the 14 tenets of facism, as outlined in an article titled Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles — available in the latest issue of Free Inquiry magazine, a publication of the independent Council for Secular Humanism.
Seeking to end poverty and to put an end to war, fighting for a living wage for all of our work, and continuing the struggle to achieve pay equity in the global market, each March 8th, on every International Women’s Day since 2000 — and again in 2005 — women in over 60 countries will, and have, engaged in grassroots organizing activities to demand together that society invest in caring not killing, that the money squandered on wars across the globe instead be directed to the needs of our communities.
The demands of the global women’s strike — a day when women do neither paid, nor unpaid work — include ...
Payment for all caring work — in wages, pensions, land and other resources.
Pay equity for all — women and men — in the global market.
Food security for breastfeeding mothers, paid maternity leave and maternity breaks.
Accessible clean water, healthcare, housing, transport and literacy.
Non-polluting energy and technology.
Protection and asylum from all violence and persecution, including by family members and those in positions of authority.
Freedom of movement.
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Marie Curie
From Ghana, where women and girls have taken to the street of Anum to demand an end to war, and support for issues of importance to women; in Guyana, where multi-racial demonstrations have protested against the country’s 25-year history of racial segregation and violence; in India, where mass rallies and workshops of Tribal and Dalit women have demanded an end to the wage discrimination of the caste system, and an end to rape by individual men, employers and the police; in Uganda, where rural women have won free and accessible healthcare, the right to clean water close to their homes, and the respect of their husbands; to Peru, where domestic workers’ organizations in Lima took over a community radio station to press the government to implement legislation to provide benefits and rights to domestic workers — strike action has brought about needed change and empowered women, children and men to take more, and increasingly effective, action to create a more caring, just and equitable world.
Change comes slowly, but change comes only through action and struggle.
Amid the guns, drugs and enormous expenses claims, Hunter Stockton Thompson created a new style of writing — gonzo journalism — and a generation of adherents. In the days after Thompson’s suicide, journalists from across the globe have weighed in on the importance of Thompson’s contribution to the canon of late twentieth century political discourse.
From Eric Homberger’s chronicling of Thompson’s life, published in The Guardian, to Tom Wolfe’s historical merry prankster retrospective, through to the perspective offered by author and political commentator Williams Rivers Pitt, to the voice of the man himself (audio via What Really Happened), when all is said and done all that is left to declaim is that Thompson will be sorely missed.
Thompson took pride in being the wild man of American journalism.
“As a journalist, I somehow managed to break most of the rules and still succeed,” he told biographer William McKeen. “It’s a hard thing for most of today’s journeymen journalists to understand, but only because they can’t do it.”
There is no more cogent evocation of what Thompson meant to political discourse than his writing on the passing of Richard Milhous Nixon, He Was A Crook. As Alexander Cockburn writes in counterpunch, “How Thompson said goodbye to Richard Nixon is as good a way to remember the high priest of gonzo as any ...”
Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing — a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family.
It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he’s gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive — and he was, all the way to the end — we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws. That was Nixon’s style — and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don’t fight fair, bubba. That’s why God made dachshunds.
The remainder of Thompson’s Nixon retrospective is available here.
From 1971 to 1973, John Negroponte — confirmed by the Bush administration this past week as the first U.S. National Intelligence director — was the officer-in charge for Vietnam at the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger. During that period, former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Michael Levine was conducting undercover operations in Saigon, Thailand, and Cambodia where the U.S. government was smuggling heroin into the U.S. The government was utilizing caskets and body bags of those "Killed In Action" to smuggled the heroin.
From 1981-1985, Negroponte was assigned as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, where he illegally assisted the Contra war, aiding the Reagan administration in ‘disappearing’ close to 300 political opponents in classic death squad fashion. He supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, which the Contras used as a secret detention and torture centre. From 1989 to September 1993, Negroponte was ambassador to Mexico where he directed U. S. intelligence services in assisting the war against the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas.
According to the New York Times, under the diplomatic cover of his role as ‘ambassador’, Negroponte organized right wing death squads in Central America, leaving tens of thousands of people dead in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua as they murdered to prop up pro-U.S. dictatorships under President Ronald Reagan. The Times credits Negroponte with ‘carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinista government in Nicaragua’ during his tenure as U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985.
Negroponte could give lessons to the most brutal dictatorships in the world on how to organise death squads, assassinate opponents and terrorise popular movements into submission
Negroponte, during his term as ‘ambassador’, oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from $4 million to $77.4 million a year. Much of that money was funnelled to the death squads in neighbouring Nicaragua and El Salvador
Negroponte concealed murder, kidnapping and torture by a CIA equipped and trained Honduran military unit, Battalion 3-16
Negroponte, while at the U.S. embassy in Vietnam, coordinated pro-U.S. death squads from 1964 to 1968
Dave Lindorff, writing in Counterpunch, calls the nomination by President George Bush of John Negroponte both ‘obscene and predictable’.
Seems that Jon Stewart is mad as hell and he just ain’t gonna take it any more.
Appearing on CNN’s Crossfire, the Daily Show’s acerbic host took Crossfire hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson to task for “hurting America,” by failing to take journalism as a serious endeavour, by failing to hold politician’s feet to the fire, and by turning their show into nothing more than Spin Alley. “Now don’t you think that for people watching at home, that’s kind of a drag? That you’re literally walking to a place called Deception Lane?”
Both Dave Cullen and Salon magazine’s Charles Taylor weigh in on what Stewart accomplished by demanding that Crossfire “confront tough issues, instead of being the political equivalent of pro wrestling.”
Video of Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire is made available by The Free Speech Zone.
In a September 17th column in Salon magazine (hidden behind a subscription firewall) political columnist and author Joe Conason writes that “there is no reason to give up, regardless of any flaws in the Kerry-Edwards campaign or the Bush-Cheney convention bounce.” That ‘bounce’ has fallen flat, according to Conason, returning the presidential race to a virtual dead heat, according to several new polls.
The new Harris Interactive/Wall Street Journalpoll, completed on September 13th, shows Kerry with 48 percent, Bush with 47 percent and Ralph Nader with 2 percent, an almost identical result to the Harris poll taken before the Republican Convention, when Kerry was ahead by 1 point.
Late last week, the Economist released a new YouGov poll, which employs online technology developed by a British survey firm, and found Bush ahead of Kerry by a single point, 47 to 46. “To the magazine’s editors this represents an ‘impressive’ result for Bush,” writes Conason, “because more than 56 percent of the voters polled by YouGov say they are ‘dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time’.”
Democracy Corps, run by James Carville and Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, completed a new poll of 1,003 voters on September 14th, which also showed Bush one point ahead, 49 to 48 percent. Greenberg’s poll includes lots of data suggesting that voters want a new direction — and that independents, in particular, are deeply dissatisfied with Bush.
The latest survey by Investor’s Business Daily and the Christian Science Monitor, completed September 12th, actually shows Kerry ahead by two points among registered voters and tied with Bush among ‘likely’ voters. Conason suggests that “for a useful discussion of this distinction and why it may not be meaningful at this stage” that readers consult Ruy Teixeira’s Donkey Rising blog, “which provides smart, professional and duly skeptical analysis of media polls.”
Too often, the left tends to adopt a defeatist ‘sky is falling’ attitude at the first hint of trouble allegedly impacting on the viability of the more progressive party, or candidate, running in a federal, provincial / state, or municipal election, seeming to give up the cause and awarding the win in the early going to the corporatist, right-wing candidate or party.
With 48 days to go, though, before Presidential election day in the United States, to believe that the ‘game is over’ and that Bush is all but a shoo-in for a second term in office would be, at best, wrong-headed and just plain asinine. As one-time New York Yankees coach Yogi Berra put it so cogently oh so many years ago, “It ain’t over ’til its over.”
Earlier this year, KPMG released its annual ranking of Canada’s most respected corporations, the silver medal awarded to WestJet, Canada’s western-based, national, privately owned airline. “Today, corporate reputation matters more than ever,” said KPMG partner Bill Dillabough in announcing the results. “We at KPMG are proud to draw attention to the importance of respect and integrity in the business world.”
Canadian Auto Workers’ Jim Stanford wonders how it is that a company ...
with revelations (not yet proven in court) that it snooped confidential information on Jetsgo (its low-cost competitor), in addition to hacking similar data from Air Canada ... with first-half profits down by half, and the profit margin (as a share of revenue) at its lowest ever ... paying its workers sub-average wages and offering no pension plan ...
could possibly have been provided with a much sought after designation by one of the world’s most prestigious corporate advisers? We wonder, too.
With less than 50 days to the U.S. election and some polls reporting a 10-point lead over John Kerry, George W Bush’s re-election as President looks a breeze. Despite his dodgy past, he has successfully sold himself as a ‘hero’ War President and defender of traditional U.S. values. How did he do it? Bush’s people have run riot over Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry’s record, so what about the President’s?
President Bush under fire
Although Time magazine last week reported a double-digit lead for incumbent President George W. Bush — the so-called ‘post convention bounce’ — Newsweek will publish a story this week that shows Bush’s double-digit lead has narrowed to six points following revelations made public in the last few days of cocaine use by the President while vacationing at Camp David, deliberate fudging by the President of his military service in the National Guard, the right-to-life President’s alleged assistance in helping a girlfriend secure an abortion in the 1970s, and the President’s close ties to the bin Laden family.
In a story published yesterday in Great Britain’s Glasgow Sunday Herald, Investigations Editor Neil Mackay explores “Bush’s charge sheet for alleged wrongdoing — sex, drugs, cowardice, cruelty; [as well as other of] his alleged failings and foibles [which] are imperial in stature.”
Bush has wrapped himself in the Stars and Stripes since the horror of Sept. 11. His presidency has pushed a simple message: America is in danger and he’s the man to keep the people safe; he’ll take the fight against the terrorists abroad and he’s proud of U.S. troops.
If that is the case, why is Bush mired in a scandal about his Vietnam-era service, or lack of, with fresh allegations that he was able to sneak out of serving his country overseas because his daddy was famous, powerful and rolling in cash?
Being proved to be a little yellow-bellied about fighting in Vietnam would be mere collateral damage to the Bush campaign compared to the all-out nuclear holocaust which would ensue if the allegations made about Dubya’s cocaine use and abortion-fixing, in biographer and muck-raker Kitty Kelly’s forthcoming book on the Bush family, stand up to scrutiny.
Since his days in Yale, Bush has been strongly anti-intellectual and rampantly pro-business. Until the age of 30, he didn’t really do very much of anything, but by 1977 he started to use his family’s powerful connections to raise money for an oil business.
The most questionable business venture of Bush’s oil career came while he was with the Harken Energy Corporation. Harken made investments in the Middle East in the run-up to the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam. At the time, Bush Sr was the 41st President of the USA and Bush Jr was on the board of Harken. Harken took a pasting on the stockmarket. In June 1990, Harken consultants said only ‘ drastic action’ could save the company. Bush sold his entire stock in Harken before information about the dire state of the company was known publicly — despite a legal requirement on him to notify the Securities Exchange Commission ...
When governor of Texas between 1995 and 2000, Bush presided over more than 120 executions — that accounts for about a third of the executions in the entire USA during the same period. Bush objected to a bill to stop the state executing people with mental problems. He also vetoed a unanimous bill by the Texas legislature requiring the appointment of a lawyer to an accused within 20 days.
Neil Mackay asks a series of critical questions, deserving of answers before the American people go to the polls on November 2nd: “Is President George W Bush, who weaves a narrative about himself as a man of God, actually a charlatan? Is he really a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Is his faith a sham? Is he more bad boy than born again? More playboy than penitent?”
These are just a few of the issues in debate, as the American people and the world community await answers about Bush’s shrouded past.
In 2002, a group of angry girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen blew a fuse, initiating a vicious attack on a woman who they perceived to be a hooker.
The woman was walking down the street at around midnight, dazed, shoes in hand. One member of the group of girls hanging out decided to punch the woman and knock her to the ground. Gang mentality led to more of the girls becoming involved, and the woman was kicked to the ground, at one point one of the girls even dancing on her face.
The innocent woman was, in fact, the dazed victim of a recent sexual assault. But had she been a prostitute, the actions of the girls would hardly have mitigated the crime. So how should the girls’ crime be addressed?
The three primary offenders, all under the age of sixteen, were handed a unique sentence, which the victim of their crime had a hand in determining. Through the Youth Restorative Action Project (YRAP), the consequence was constructed to foster a little empathy for the prostitutes whom the girls claimed to hate.
YRAP is a justice committee unique to Edmonton, the inspiration of Yasmina Semanac, a teenaged Serbian / Canadian who managed to escape her war-ravaged country. The YRAP panel is comprised of a group of youth who work with the courts to determine sentences for young people involved in “hate crimes and crimes of significant social issues.”
In this case, the panel called on Mark Cherrington, a youth worker involved in YRAP and Youth Menace, a radio show on the University of Alberta’s CJSR, a weekly programme hosted and produced by young offenders who’ve had contact with the criminal justice system. The programme exists to give voice to the young offender population, a group often invisible to the mainstream population.
Programmes often involve Cherrington transferring young offenders directly from the Law Courts to CJSR, where they are given the opportunity to discuss their situations, unedited and live on the air. “Somebody described [the show] as either brilliantly wonderful or a wonderful disaster depending on what show you turn on,” laughs Cherrington.
Youth Menace and YRAP are partners in crime fighting, a collaboration that allows for the opportunity for youth peer justice, which is to say justice outcomes developed and delivered by youth. The only requirement to be a panel member is that s/he is 25 years or younger and that they affirm a belief in the declaration of universal human rights.
In the case of the young women convicted of assaulting the woman on an Edmonton street, the young female offenders involved were instructed to make a two-hour radio documentary about child prostitution in their own backyards. The award-winning documentary, Children and Prostitution: Victims, All of Us, is as honest and provocative a document of child prostitution as you’re likely ever to hear, akin to the work of writer Harmony Korine, a youth himself, on Larry Clark’s film Kids, though here there is not an ounce of fiction or conjecture in the radio documentary.
The voices represented in Victims are all children and all girls. The documentary introduces a 16-year-old pimp who chews unendingly on candy because she’s trying to get off crystal meth; and a child prostitute who met her pimp by naively waving at him across the street from the public library because she thought he was cute. Two days later, she found herself working the streets for drug money.
“This piece is the first piece from the perspective of the child,” says Cherrington. “It’s not a ministerial statement, it’s not mid- to low-level bureaucrats talking about ‘we need to’ or ‘we should’ or ‘this is adequate or inadequate.’”
Peppered with original urban music, explicit songs all written by street kids from ihuman, an inner city arts studio, Children and Prostitution: Victims, All of Us is well-executed, although the voices of the girls couldn’t be more raw and unvarnished.
“It’s a testament, not a message,” says Cherrington. “At the end it goes back to the philosophy of Youth Menace: you may agree or disagree with what’s being said, but the bottom line is that you certainly have to respect it, and it needs to be listened to.”
According to many history books, Labour Day began in the United States when the Knights of Labor organized a parade on Sept. 5, 1882 in New York City.
As is often the case, the history books got one thing right and another wrong. The Knights did hold a parade in 1882, but the history of Labour Day began 10 years earlier, and in a place much closer to home.
On April 15, 1872, when Canada was just five years old, the Toronto Trades Assembly organized a “workingman’s demonstration” to call for the freedom of 24 imprisoned leaders of the Toronto Typographical Union.
The demonstration, which was attended by 10,000 people, included a parade and speeches that called for the repeal of a law criminalizing membership in trade unions.
Buoyed by the success of the demonstration, members of seven Ottawa trade unions organized a mile-long parade on Sept. 3, 1872, once again to protest laws that made union membership illegal.
But this wasn’t your average parade — marchers stopped at the home of then prime minister John A. Macdonald, literally picked up the PM, and took him to Ottawa City Hall by torchlight.
The prime minister was well aware of workers’ discontent with the law, and on the steps of the city hall, he promised marchers that his party would “sweep away all such barbarous laws from the statue books.”
Later that year, Mr. Macdonald and his party made good on his promise, and for the next decade, trade unions continued to hold annual parades and demonstrations.
On July 22, 1882, the Toronto Trades and Labour council decided to invite New Yorker Peter J. McGuire, the general secretary of the United
