NDP supports jailing youth and funding corporate criminals

The New Democratic Party recently revealed it would like to fund 2500 more cops, give more money to prosecution (which will only further criminalize and limit the options of youth) and keep military spending at the same level as the Conservatives! The NDP is supposed to be the most "progressive" of the three parties. The truth is it is the most progressive. And that's not only deplorable, it's also unacceptable.

Even former NDP organizers, Andrew Klochek and Michael Laxer think that the NDP "would do nothing to alter the political economy of the country" and that "the time has come to fight state capitalism itself."

The old white boy's club: Jack Layton (L) is just like the rest!

Boycott the elections! Let's fight the whole system!
 


The following is excerpted from a recent article Klochek and Laxer wrote for rabble.ca, the full text of which is available here.



Over the last 40 years, the ideology of neo-liberalism has won every battle in its attempts to reshape our society...
With the willing complicity of our self-proclaimed voices of the left, we have instituted a system of socialism and welfare for the rich. The effect of this political order is to prop up the failures of our societies' wealthiest while abandoning everyone else, including our societies' most vulnerable, by stealing tens of millions of their dollars to fund CEO slush funds and salaries.
While workers were forced to make concessions and millions of them lost their jobs, CEO's salaries went nowhere but up, all subsidized by your tax dollars. Instead of using the power of government to declare war on poverty, we have declared war on the poor and the middle class.
The issue is not that the NDP supported stimulus spending in order to save jobs. The issue is that in supporting these measures, they did so without actively calling for fundamental changes to the system that required bailouts in the first place. As a result, in the final analysis they basically called for the government to back up the tremendous social inequality that is represented by these same CEOs who forced this bailout and yet are now making over 150 times what the average worker does.
...
In the face of this system, the NDP, which once articulated a vision for an alternative economic order, now merely argues for changes that are cosmetic, not structural. Rather than help organize citizens at grassroots levels to fight this assault in their communities, they offer band-aid solutions while editing their language and image in the vain hope that they can marginally increase their seat total in an election which, even if they won, would do nothing to alter the political-economy of the country....
The time has come to fight, not individual aspects of the state-capitalist system, but rather State Capitalism itself. The time has come to fight against the corporations that have moved our jobs to China, impoverishing workers there while destroying jobs at home. The time has come to fight against the system that has ensured that many of our fellow citizens work most of their lives in temporary labour without health insurance or retirement benefits. The time has come to stand up against the neo-feudalism that creates a society where individual debt is at an all time high while CEOs, "movie stars" and entertainers earn more in a day than most hard-working Canadians will in a year or even a decade, and where they get totally different treatment by the legal system. Rest assured, if the person who stole the $50 TV out of your house is caught they will likely go to jail as opposed to an investment banker who screwed people out of their entire livelihoods.
The time has come to stand up against the daily violence of the system with its destruction of good jobs in Canada and its entrenchment of poverty in the third world, all designed to satisfy an unsustainable consumerism.
...An organized grassroots movement can alter the political landscape more effectively than a political party that won an election on a platform patched together from focus groups and pollsters. Focusing on short-term electoral victory may bring more immediate gratification compared with the hard work of building a grassroots movement that will reawaken opposition to the existing socio-economic order. But where has this led us? The left has done focused on short-termism for 30 years and we have only lost.
There is an alternative.

Will voting bring real change? 

The following article on the boycott was published by Basics News.

By Louise Jones

As the election nears, Canada’s three major parties all claim they’ll take action that will help workers and their families. But the track record of these parties tells a drastically different story.

The Conservative Party

One of the first things the Harper minority government did when it came to power in 2006 was to withdraw billions of dollars from Aboriginal communities, even though the Kelowna agreement guaranteed these funds. His government also eliminated the Status of Women Canada, a federal agency focused on promoting women’s equality, illegally defunded KAIROS, a faith-based charity organization critical of Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza and spent more than one billion dollars to violently quash dissent in Toronto during the G20 protests. And that’s just to name a few of the current government’s memorable moments.

These symbolic manoeuvres fall in line with the larger conservative policy trend to divert taxpayers money away from social programs. This money is instead spent on security at home, to better protect the political and economic elite, and abroad, where a handful of corporations make a literal killing from imperialist occupations. The current conservative government allocates $30 billion for fighter jets and $13 billion for what mainstream media have termed “US-style mega prisons.”

While it was a Liberal government that first sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001, the Conservatives extended the mission two times, most recently saying Canadian soldiers will remain in the country in a “training capacity” until 2014. Testimony from Afghani people and Wikileaks documents revealed that NATO forces fund warlords and even the Taliban themselves as they attempt to establish a west-friendly regime in a land rich with minerals.

The Liberal Party

Historically, the Liberals have dominated parliamentary politics in Canada. The Liberal Party was in power for 17 of the last 30 years alone. During this time, the richest one per cent of Canadians nearly doubled their wealth, from 7.7 per cent in the late 1970s to 13.8 per cent today, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Meanwhile, according to the United Way of Greater Toronto, the number of those living in poverty in Toronto has doubled since 1990, to nearly 30% of all families.
How did the Liberals facilitate this massive shift of wealth from the poor to the rich? Like the Conservatives, they cut taxes on corporations, privatized state assets and axed social spending. Paul Martin slashed corporate tax rates from 28 per cent to 21 per cent when he was in government and as leader of the party in the 1990s, Jean Chrétien severely restricted access to unemployment insurance and privatized CN Rail and Petro Canada.



The Liberals, as with the NDP, portray themselves more progressively in opposition than when they act in power. For example, Michael Ignatieff’s announcement of a $500 million childcare plan is a stripped down version of unfulfilled pledges for national childcare programs that Liberal leaders have made since the 1980s. (On the childcare note, despite repeated calls from women’s and anti-racist organizations, neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives have bothered to address the abysmally low pay, exhausting hours and violence faced by the overwhelmingly Filipino women in the federal Live-In Caregiver (LCP) program.)

New Democratic Party

The NDP has never won at a federal level but the party has won many provincial elections across Canada. Although the party tends to oppose corporate tax cuts during campaign time, NDP leaders have actually given corporations tax breaks at the provincial level. In the last decade, NDPer Lorne Calvert reduced the corporate income tax rate from 17 per cent to 12 per cent in Saskatchewan and Gary Doer, the former NDP premier of Manitoba, cut the rate by nearly 30 per cent to “provide business with a competitive environment,” as he put it.
Despite being the party of choice for major unions like the Canadian Auto Workers, the NDP does not treat the working class radically different than other parties. When Chrétien cut 45,000 public sector jobs, current NDP leader in Ontario Andrea Horwath responded by saying, “everyone knows that times are tough…[public sector workers] have to do their part as well.” Bob Rae, the NDP premier of Ontario from 1990 to 1995, imposed a wage freeze on public sector unions. Michael Harcourt, who ran the BC government in the 1990s, cut off welfare to some of the province’s most impoverished, referring to them as “deadbeats and varmints.” Although the NDP has introduced some legislation that aims to cushion the blow of capitalist exploitation, the response of the NDP to the pressures to promote economic growth is to fall in line with the other two parties, by cutting corporate taxes and social spending.

From a foreign policy standpoint, the NDP is now critical of the war in Afghanistan but the party didn’t raise any objections until 2006, when the occupation was more than four years old. In Nova Scotia, the provincial NDP government has partnered with Lockheed Martin in energy development and frequently praises the company for employing Atlantic Canadians in producing military technology. Lockheed Martin is one of the biggest military contractors in Afghanistan and the Palestinian occupied territories. Like the other two parties, the NDP responds to pro-Israeli lobbyists in Canada. NDP MP Svend Robinson was stripped of his Middle East portfolio when he accused Israel of war crimes and many NDP condemned the use of the term “apartheid” to describe the gross injustice Palestinians face. Most recently, on March 20, 2011, the NDP lined up with the other parties in supporting the imperialist military aggression against Libya.

Vote with your feet?

None of the parliamentary parties in Canada truly represent the people as they all prioritize the needs of investors and so-called “security” over the needs of the people both in Canada and abroad. In a true democracy, we should be able to actually influence the economic, environmental and education policies that affect our everyday lives. Instead, we’re given the option to vote for one of a handful of pro-capitalist parties every four years.

For this reason, a coalition of anti-capitalist groups has launched a boycott campaign to draw attention to the lack of real democracy in Canada and inspire a conversation about how we can fight for a truly egalitarian and democratic society. After 150 years of this so-called democratic system, the boycott campaign is calling on Canadians to organize for real people’s power.

Why I Don't Endorse Voting in the May 2nd Elections [English]

By Rowland Túpac Keshena 

This was originally posted on the excellent blog Speed of Dreams.

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal – Emma Goldman

With the announcement of the dissolving of the current Harper settler government in Ottawa and the scheduling of yet another election (the 3rd in my 5 1/2 years of being in Canada) for May 2nd, the topic has come up a lot in my circle of friends and other contacts of who one should vote for, or shouldn’t vote for, and why. Indeed, this discussion started to pop up before the official announcement of the election, as it was pretty clear that the government was going to fall. So I’ve had quite a bit of time to put some thought into my answer to this now very common question.

So what do I think? Well, as the title of this post would I hope imply, I don’t endorse voting in the federal election, or actually provincial elections either when those roll around. None of the major federal parties (Green, Conservative, NDP & Liberal) reflect my views on things. This of course should be obvious. I consider myself a revolutionary communist, I don’t really try and conceal that, and of course none of the major parties, even the most left elements of the NDP, espouse politics even remotely close to that. But then again, I don’t endorse voting for the Communist Party of Canada (original flavour or Marxist-Leninist), or the so-called revolutionary elements within the NDP either. So obviously my objections to the elections run a little deeper than the fact that there are no communists on the ballot.

The quote from Emma Goldman that I started off with touches on the surface of what I actually believe. As she said, so aptly, if voting was going to change anything, they’d make it illegal. She means that voting ain’t gonna change shit! So why isn’t voting going to change anything? Sure it might bring about more or less superficial changes in society (welfare, queer rights etc.), but the fact is that the very basis of Canadian, and for that matter wider North American, society is what prevents, and always has, and always will prevent, “change” through the electoral process.

At its core North America (the states popularly known as the United States, Canada and Quebéc) is a settler-colonial society. This means that the principal contradiction, the one that defines all class struggle in the society between the working class and the bourgeoisie, is between the colonizer and the colonized. Some leftists, especially those who advocate voting for parties like the NDP and even most that don’t, will not fully interrogate this, but it is the reality of the situation here.

So what does this translate into in terms of electoral politics?

It means this: all political parties that run in elections, even the most left-wing of the social democratic formations, are parties of a settler-colonial government, vying on behalf of this or that element within the settler nation (or nations, in the case of Canada) labour aristocracy to be chief exploiter of the colonized peoples. These parties, again we include the most supposedly left-wing factions, will NEVER be interested in any kind of meaningful national self-determination for the colonized nations. This is not because they’re not smart, and don’t realize the nature of things, it is because of the very opposite in fact. They know the game. They know the score. They know that their very existence is rooted in the existence of the colonial state, and as such they have a vested national and class interest in the maintaining of the current colonial state of affairs.

Working with or within these formations of the colonizer labour aristocracy and complete and utter waste of time and energy for serious revolutionaries on this continent, and in this country. Again, as it bears repeating, even the most left-wing factions, both in and outside the social democratic NDP organizations, because they do not want to alienate the core of their labour aristocracy voting bloc, will never take anything resembling a strong anti-imperialist stance, on any issue, and definitely will never do anything approaching true internationalism with the anti-colonial struggles WITHIN North America, aside from perhaps every once in a while saying some harsher than usual words regarding the abuse of the “rights” of the colonized, which are of course “rights” understood in a Fanonian sense as something to be granted, and thus also taken away, by the colonial state.

So that’s why I do not endorse voting for any of the parties in the May 2nd election. I hope you, whether you are Native or an ally, will give some thought to this if you choose to enter the voting booth come next month.