These 1 percenters are doing what the global Occupy movement demanded back in 2011. They’re sharing their wealth with the 99 percent. The post These 1 percenters are sharing their wealth with the 99 percent appeared first on The Canadian Progressive.
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Michal Rozworski: Podcast: What’s next for anti-austerity in Portugal and Greece?
http://rozworski.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Podcast151028-Portugal-and-Greece.mp3 Two updates from Southern Europe this week: Catarina Principe brings us up-to-date on the situation in Portugal and Andreas Karitzis recounts the search for a new politics in Greece after (and under the rule of) Syriza. My first guest, Catarina Principe, is an prominent activist in Portugal’s Bloco,
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: In conversation with Chris Hedges
Photo by Artemas Liu We are living in revolutionary times that are ripe for rebellion. So says Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Chris Hedges in his newest book “Wages of Rebellion” in which he explains that a major uprising will soon inevitably erupt in the United States. With increasing environmental destruction,
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: The Great Unraveling with Chris Hedges
Photo by epSos.de Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges joins us for an evening in Toronto to speak about “The Great Unraveling.” Revolutions come in waves and cycles. We are again riding the crest of a revolutionary epic, much like 1848 or 1917, from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: In Ecuador, Fight for Mankind; In Greece, Fight for Greece!
Presidents Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Evo Morales of Bolívia, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brasil, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, in Fórum Social Mundial for Latin America • Photo by Fabio Rodrigues Pozzebom Greece is white, it is European, and therefore eyes of entire Western
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Beyond teamsters and turtles: Jobs, justice, climate
Photo by Matt Brown Jobs, Justice, Climate is the slogan of what we hope will be a massive march in Toronto on July 5 and Vancouver on July 4. To my knowledge it’s the first action in Canada that has linked jobs with the battle for climate change in a
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Why Students Are Joining the March for Jobs, Justice and the Climate
Photo by chesapeakeclimate Canada’s ready for a new kind of climate movement. On July 5th, we’re marching for climate and economic justice in Toronto, Canada. RSVP for the March for Jobs, Justice and the Climate at http://jobsjusticeclimate.ca. If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from that
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Dissenting Big Time: E.P. Thompson, C. Wright Mills and Making the First New Left All That’s L
E.P Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays & Polemics. Edited by Ca Winslow. Monthly Review Press, 2014 E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays & Polemics Edited by Cal Winslow Monthly Review Press, 2014 Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Make the Rich Panic
Photo by Dorret It does not matter to the corporate rich who wins the presidential election. It does not matter who is elected to Congress. The rich have the power. They throw money at their favorites the way a gambler puts cash on his favorite horse. Money has replaced the
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Fighting austerity in Québec is tied to Canada and colonialism
Photo by Gerry Lauzon Cracks in the fatality of austerity are quickly spreading outward on the streets in Montréal. Thousands and thousands are actively joining a growing grassroots protest movement that is bold, broad and powerful. Today’s massive demonstration is a public illustration of a grassroots movement in motion, one
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Tariq Ali: The Time Is Right for a Palace Revolution
Photo by Rafael Tovar PRINCETON, N.J.—Tariq Ali is part of the royalty of the left. His more than 20 books on politics and history, his seven novels, his screenplays and plays and his journalism in the Black Dwarf newspaper, the New Left Review and other publications have made him one
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Naomi Klein – This Changes Everything – Interview on CBC’s The National
I think I need to get this book. Filed under: Politics Tagged: Climate Change, Naomi Klein, Social Movements, This Changes Everything
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Why We Need Professional Revolutionists
Photo by David Berkowitz No revolt can succeed without professional revolutionists. These revolutionists live outside the formal structures of society. They are financially insecure—Vladimir Lenin spent considerable time in exile appealing for money from disenchanted aristocrats he would later dispossess. They dedicate their lives to fomenting radical change. They do
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Campaign against Alberta tar sands given massive boost by Quebec public
Photo by Letartean Quebec’s movement against climate disaster has been given a major boost by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the former student leader who just received the Governor General’s Literary Award for his book on the 2012 student strike. Nadeau-Dubois announced Sunday night, during his appearance on the popular television program Tout
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: Opening Up to Media Democracy
In January 2008, Canadian Dimension published a theme issue on Big Media highlighting the need for progressives to organize a movement to “break the monopolies” and democratize communication policy. Articles addressed why media reform should be a democratic priority in light of struggles over fair and affordable access to the
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: Upstart party Podemos emerging as third political power, says new poll | In English | EL PAÍS
Upstart party Podemos emerging as third political power, says new poll | In English | EL PAÍS. New party Podemos has taken a further step toward becoming the third power on the Spanish political scene, according to the latest opinion poll from the Center for Sociological Research (CIS). The group
Continue readingCanadian Dimension | Articles: Demilitarize McGill
Universities are not just sites of knowledge production and job-market preparation, they also play host to the development of bombs and UAV simulation software, and the use of secluded drone hangars. Demilitarize McGill is a group working to end these activities at McGill, and has existed in its current form
Continue readingPample the Moose: Silencing or Strategic Manoeuvring? Professor Strong-Boag, International Women’s Day and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
For the past three days, my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been filled with a series of re-posts and re-tweets related to Professor Veronica Strong-Boag’s blogpost about International Women’s Day (IWD) for the (still-to-be-opened) Canadian Museum for Human Rights. According to the detailed report on ActiveHistory.ca, containing Strong-Boag’s post and
Continue readingPample the Moose: Silencing or Strategic Manoeuvring? Professor Strong-Boag, International Women’s Day and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
For the past three days, my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been filled with a series of re-posts and re-tweets related to Professor Veronica Strong-Boag’s blogpost about International Women’s Day (IWD) for the (still-to-be-opened) Canadian Museum for Human Rights. According to the detailed report on ActiveHistory.ca, containing Strong-Boag’s post and commentary about the story, she had been commissioned by the Museum to write a post about IWD for their collective blog. When she submitted the blogpost, it was initially approved, and then withdrawn when the communications department expressed concern over her comment on the current Conservative government. As a result, historians from coast to coast have been decrying the “censorship” and “silencing” of Strong-Boag by the museum (and speculating that the current federal government might have had a hand in this).
Shortly after the ActiveHistory piece was published, Franca Iacovetta, professor of Canadian history at the University of Toronto, and the current president of the International Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, published a condemnation of “the effort to silence Canada’s leading women’s historian” on the Berks website. Since that time, PressProgress has added their voice into the mix, commenting on the irony of a human rights museum censoring a commissioned blog. Both of these pieces have also received extensive coverage on Facebook and Twitter.
I have a somewhat different take on these events from many of my historian colleagues, and would posit a working theory. I suspect that Prof. Strong-Boag might have known full well (or at least strongly suspected) that her blogpost for International Women’s Day, which only includes one reference to Canadian governments past or present and does so to highlight the “anti-woman record” of “Canada’s Conservative government”, was never going to be approved by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The museum has been mired in controversies and funding crises for years – even before it has opened to the public. The people who commissioned the post probably were hoping for a broad overview of the history of International Women’s Day, or perhaps a post that included some discussion of how Canada’s governments (past and present) have dealt with women’s issues. This is not what they received, and someone probably balked at the fact that the sole reference in the post to Canada’s governments was a partisan attack on the current Conservative administration. An offer to add more detail to support the assessment of the current government as “anti-woman” was probably even less welcomed.
Here’s where I think the story gets interesting. By being “censored”, Strong-Boag has ensured that her message gets diffused to a much wider readership than the original blogpost itself likely would have been. It is a fairly standard social movement tactic to try to create a situation (a “grievance” to use the social movement scholarly jargon) that will lend itself to media exposure, with the movement able to cast itself as the aggrieved party. This helps to generate broader-based support for the movement, which is crucial to resource mobilization. I very strongly suspect that the vast majority of people who have commented and re-posted this story have never before read the blog of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and would not have seen the post had it simply been posted there. I had to scroll back to August 2013 to find a post on the CMHR blog that had a comment on it. It also isn’t a blog with a rich history of guest postings – only six names of guest bloggers appear on their contributors roll. The ActiveHistory.ca website, on the other hand, has a widespread readership among Canadian historians and engenders a lot of commentary. The Berks is the main conference on women’s history in North America. Far from being silenced, the decision by the CMHR to remove the post as written from their site has meant that Strong-Boag got a series of major platforms to attack the Harper government’s record on women’s rights, and along the way to damage the CMHR’s reputation and cast suspicion (possibly warranted, although this is unproven) of a sinister federal hand behind the removal of the blogpost. Meanwhile, there is no post for International Women’s Day on the CMHR blog.
To be perfectly clear, I don’t disagree with Strong-Boag’s stance on the Harper government’s policy record. But nor am I surprised that the museum would have shied away from her post. Strong-Boag engaged in a direct partisan attack. A paragraph discussing past-and-present Canadian governments’ decidedly mixed record on women’s issues (perhaps including Trudeau-era restrictions on the National Action Committee on the Status of Women’s lobbying efforts that were linked to their government funding, or the successive failures of a series of federal governments to make any meaningful progress on the childcare agenda) might possibly have made it past the communications officers at the CMHR. At the very least, it would have been harder for a communications officer to defend the removal of a blogpost that presented a more balanced critique of the less-than-stellar record of Canada’s federal governments (Liberal and Conservative) on women’s issues that placed the current claw-backs in their historical context. But to me, the section on the current government in the post as currently written reads as an isolated (if deserved) swipe at the government of the day and explicitly partisan.
If this was a deliberate strategic move on Strong-Boag’s part, it has worked beautifully, so kudos to her for getting her message disseminated. Far more people have read her account of IWD than likely would have ever seen it on the CMHR blog. I just find it a little bit disingenuous to speak of silencing and censorship in what appears to me to be a case of a museum trying not to appear to be overtly partisan in its public communications. Even if it could have been claimed that this was a “guest post”, the museum would have been held accountable in the media, and with their various funders, for the content that appeared.
UPDATE (March 9, 3:10 PM): The story is now on the CBC website, with additional commentary from Strong-Boag, and a reply from the museum’s blog editor.
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