A good interview to explicitly state that US "makes war ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, and when a tragedy ... occurs, it is a blessing to the Pentagon."
As we may all know that US invades a country citing humanitarian reasons, but the real reasons are always clandestinely something else & that invasion usually further destabilize the political & economic situation of that country or region. US invasion makes that country, region, & the world much more worse. Period.
The world has forgotten about these Nigerian school girls & moved on to other disasters. Boko Haram & other groups of its sorts are still operating in the region. 2 years onwards & US has again started bombing Libya to apparently get rid of ISIS there. By the way, Libya is also an oil-exporting country, & similar to Nigeria & Iraq, has a large oil reserve. So the question is once again that just like invasions of Iraq (to get rid of Saddam & his brutal government) & Afghanistan (to get rid of Taliban & Al-Qaeda), & a much-more subdued "invasion" of Nigeria (using Boko Haram as an excuse), is US now trying to invade Libya to control its oil riches & further expand the reaches of its AFRICOM unit?
Nigeria, on the other hand, under its new leader, Mr. Buhari, is spending billions on new arms & weapons, & foreign military trainers to further train its military to get rid of terrorist groups. Those billions, instead of being invested in the country to further improve the infrastructure & living conditions of Nigerians, are flowing through Western military-industrial complex to countries like US & France etc. If poor countries spend those billions on their own people, the so-called "terrorism" would die out by itself. The public join these kinds of groups out of frustration & anger at the political, economic, & social inequality & injustices in their countries.
US & European countries were, & still are, looking at Chinese influence increasing at a fast pace in the whole continent of Africa -- the continent which has always been exploited for its human & mineral riches -- & just couldn't sit on the sidelines. So, using excuses like Qaddafi's brutal government, terrorism, & rebel groups of Kony & the like, US & European countries are trying to "retake" Africa from Chinese hands. In this struggle of power & this wave of neocolonialism, Africans will surely lose big because there's nothing beneficial for them in this struggle, but the Western power elites (political & financial) will make big gains.
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JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: So, Glen, we've seen a lot of press about the kidnapping of an estimated 276 girls in Nigeria. ...
You recently wrote an article titled "Kidnapped Girls Become Tools of U.S. Imperial Policy in Africa". Can you just walk us through your argument?
GLEN FORD, EXEC. EDITOR, BLACK AGENDA REPORT: Well, you know, this deal with the Boko Haram, this terrible kidnapping of the Nigerian school girls, is for the United States manna from Heaven. It has allowed them to make a huge breakthrough, in terms of penetration of West Africa. Just recently it was announced that a meeting -- which was actually called by France, but France said it was the Nigerians' idea -- a meeting has resulted in an agreement between Nigeria and its four neighbors, who are colonies of the French (Nigeria was a British colony), that these countries will share intelligence and will be provided with training expertise and, we can assume, money by the West. Well, the West means AFRICOM plus France.
So already we're seeing structural changes in the region, bringing it even more tightly into the AFRICOM web. We're seeing structural changes in terms of how tightly the United States and France have become. They at some points were competitors for influence in Africa. Now they work hand-in-glove, AFRICOM working with what is still in effect the French Foreign Legion in Africa after the operation in Niger, now that kind of cooperation deepening in Nigeria. So the noose is tightening.
And when we're talking about new and improved groupings, alliances, configurations in West Africa as a response to this Boko Haram threat, we're really talking about a situation in which Africa is permitted no defense except those defenses that are approved by the Americans and Europeans. And, of course, that is not a defense against European and American neocolonialism, but only a defense against other Africans. Africans can only then defend themselves against each other, but not against their former colonizers and the great danger presented by the United States.
DESVARIEUX: But then, Glen, it's clear that this is pretty horrific. Your heart can't help but want to try to help these nearly 300 girls that were kidnapped before their final exams. How do you think the United States could be of assistance in a more positive way?
FORD: Let's make this real clear. The United States can be of no assistance to Africa. All assistance that would be beneficial is totally theoretical and, in a practical sense, will never be forthcoming. We know what the United States is about in Africa. It is setting up networks of bases and relationships with the military class in order to control the political and therefore the economic destiny of Africa. It does not have good intentions for Africa. So a conversation about what can the United States do to help is counterproductive.
What the United States did do is launch a war against Libya, which as a net result has set the northern part of the continent ablaze, destabilized the region. It has resulted directly in the strengthening of Boko Haram. The weapons that just spilled across Libya's border with the fall of Gaddafi's regime, which was a bulwark against jihadism, are now in all kinds of hands that do pose threats to the stability of governments. And when those governments feel unstable, they run to the Europeans and the United States to bolster their stability and become even more neocolonial in nature.
DESVARIEUX: So, Glen, if I'm understanding you correctly, if the United States can't be of any assistance in a positive way, then how do we resolve this issue? How do we get back these girls?
FORD: Africa has to resolve its own issues. Everyone has compassion for the Nigerian schoolchildren. But remember, this is an internal African affair, a Nigerian affair, and those fighters from Boko Haram are Nigerians. The United States does not have any legitimate interest here. Every human being of course empathizes with children in distress. Africa's full of children in distress. Six million people have died in the eastern Congo since 1996, many, many of them children. The United States is complicit in those deaths. The United States's intentions are not good. If it is able to locate through its intelligence apparatus the location of these girls, that does not mean that the United States will prevent them from being killed. In fact, U.S. and French involvement, this war-making machinery, the pressures that are being put on all the governments, may make it more likely that the girls are killed. We don't know that, but we do know one thing: the United States doesn't really care. It benefits from the almost universal outrage at Boko Haram, because it provides a unique and almost miraculous opening for the further expansion of AFRICOM.
DESVARIEUX: Okay. Let's talk some more specifics here. Like, who are we talking about when we're saying interests are concerned with the U.S. getting more involved in Africa. Who's going to benefit here?
FORD: Oh, the oil companies benefit. And, of course, they are interlocking. Some of them are American. Others are European. They are quite concerned not just about guerilla activity in Nigeria, the golden location for oil in Africa; they're also concerned about Nigerians wanting their legitimate share of oil revenues, and the people in the surrounding regions which also have lots of oil. This is the main concern of big oil companies, and therefore the main concern of the governments that protect them.
And so they want to create domestic situations in Nigeria, in Benin, in Cameroon, in Niger, in which the civil society is unable to make demands of the multinational corporations that exploit their resources. The United States, of course, with AFRICOM, will be there to lend its weight to the multinational corporations. Schoolgirls are really not at the center of U.S. policy in Nigeria today. What's at the center of U.S. efforts today is to weave these five nations, Nigeria and its four neighbors, into a more malleable bloc for manipulation by the Americans and the French.
DESVARIEUX: Now let's talk about the resistance. Is there actually any resistance behind the president's plan to get more involved in Nigeria? Is there any opposition coming from Congress or any political leaders?
FORD: No. And, in fact, the Congressional Black Caucus has made it quite clear through its individual members that President Obama has a blank check as far as they're concerned, that all they're worrying about is the safety of the girls. That is the blank check that the United States government sought in Central Africa when Obama, two years ago, used the mere presence of Joseph Kony and his much-diminished Lord's Resistance Army to justify sending in about 100 special forces troops on permanent duty in Central Africa. Earlier this year he doubled the size of that contingent, all based upon humanitarian grounds. This country makes war ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, and when a tragedy such as with the schoolgirls in Nigeria occurs, it is a blessing to the Pentagon.
A good interview to highlight couple of the points I've been blogging about since last year:
1. When "terrorists" attacked France last year, I blogged that nobody is looking at the real reasons behind the motivations of why these young people became or did what they did. Of course, what they did was wrong, but why did they do it. Just blaming Islam for its "hateful speech towards non-Muslims" is not sufficient enough reason.
The reason I said was these youths were venting their frustrations after watching & suffering injustices, mostly because of discrimination; racial, linguistic, religion, ethnicity etc. They were lashing out at an unjust & unfair society. Of course, their way of lashing out or venting their frustrations was wrong. In the same vein, the "terrorist" groups operating in several other 3rd-world countries are also lashing out after suffering injustices; perceived or otherwise. Be they "terrorist" groups be Boko Haram or ISIS or Al-Nusra or Al-Qaida etc.
As this Nigerian activist explains that there is a huge imbalance of wealth in Nigeria, in the North & the South, & I would add on to it that imbalance, & the perceived injustice growing out of it, drove many to join an amalgam of these groups that are collectively called, Boko Haram.
2. Then, the Nigerian activist goes on to explain how US foreign policy, multinational oil companies, IMF, & World Bank supported corruption in Nigeria or came up with monetary policies which, in effect, further exacerbated the wealth imbalance in the country, which, in turn, created the current conditions of lawlessness & "terrorism".
As I have also blogged previously that the governments of developed countries, through their foreign policies & support of their multinational companies, effectively plunder & rob the developing countries of their natural & intellectual resources, which, in turn, create a wave of cheap labour force for their own countries (immigration) & create more wealth for their own companies.
The Nigerian activist stated how Nigerian economy & politics are heavily dependent & thus "shaped by multinational corporations. ... We are running an economy that is based, basically, on oil rents, collection of royalties and rents from oil production by transnational oil corporations. They have overbearing influence on the political development of the country and on the economy. ... And so right now the oil companies operate above the law, because the government would not do anything ... whatsoever to offend them or to make them lose their profit. And so they break the law with absolute impunity."
He then goes on to explain how the overbearing & devastating influence of IMF & World Bank hobbled & effectively disabled the Nigerian economy & economic development. "... the influence of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank has also been very significant in dislocating the pattern of growth of the Nigerian economy and African economy generally that was visible between--in the early '70s through the early 1980s. And that, of course, happened through the introduction of structural adjustment programs that opened up the economy for dumping of products from the Global North, from North America, from Europe, from Japan, Australia, and then also killing local production, local industries, killing local agriculture, and, making these countries kind of dependent on ... foreign aid and stuff like that. So we've seen a situation where the negative influence of multinational corporation has played a very, very big role in keeping our nation from being on the right path of progress."
Ironically enough, we've seen the devastating impact of these structural adjustment programs within European Union, too, within the past 5 years or so. European Union was effectively made by richer countries of Europe (Germany & France) to basically push their products on to the poorer economies of Europe (Greece, Portugal etc.). So, while Germany enjoyed positive trade balances due to exports to these countries, it also effectively killed the industries of Greece (& negative trade balances due to heavy imports) & made it dependent on German imports. When economy tanked, there was nothing to support Greek economy & it nosedived disastrously.
So, yes, I concede that there are corrupt politicians in developing countries & there is widespread corruption. But, the corruption can be overtaken if developed countries of the Global North stop meddling in the internal affairs of those countries. Political & economic meddling hobbles & destroys any chances of progress developing countries have & effectively push them back further in the hole.
Since, the developing countries keep trying to climb out the hole but the walls are kept out of reach by developed countries, economic development & proper distribution of wealth never takes place. That, in effect, create the perfect conditions for wrong elements of the society to rile up the young population against their own & any foreign influences. Then, the Global North (or developed countries) label those people "terrorists" & try to root them out with any means necessary. That in turn create more chaos & destruction without actually solving the problem, since, the root of the problem was never looked upon, deliberately or otherwise.
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Nigeria is in a state of semi-chaos. And the question I have, and I think most people following this story have, is: how did Nigeria get to a point where such events can take place?
Now joining us to help give some historical context to all of this ... is Nnimmo Bassey. He's a Nigerian architect, environmentalist, an author, a poet. He chaired the Friends of the Earth International from 2008 through 2012. He was executive director of Environmental Rights Action for two decades. And he now is the director of the Mother Earth Foundation.
So can you just give us quickly what's happening now on the ground in Nigeria and a little bit about who the Boko Haram is and what they represent?
NNIMMO BASSEY, DIRECTOR, HEALTH OF MOTHER EARTH FOUNDATION: As you said, Nigeria is undergoing very difficult times at the moment. But these had been building up over time. Usually in the past we had incidents of clashes over religious differences between the Muslims and Christians in the northern part of the country, but these were on-and-off incidents. But what we're seeing now is a sustained aggression by a diversity of groups who are generally grouped under the label Boko Haram. Boko Haram does not appear to be one single organization that has a command structure as such, but an amalgam of groups who share perhaps a philosophy of just wreaking destruction in the nation.
Nigeria gained political independence in 1960, but the structure was not perfect. And just as the nation was getting its act together, 6 years into independence, the military struck. ... the year after the military struck, Nigeria faced a civil war ... from a number of reasons. And when the Civil War ended in 1970, Nigeria wealth from oil revenue, crude oil revenue. And then, at that time, the military head of state said Nigeria had the problem of how to spend money, not how to make money. So that kind of settled the philosophy.
JAY: Before you get into the oil politics, 'cause I know it's such a big story, from after independence, 1960s and so on, it's at the height of the Cold War, and much of African politics, as I understand it, was shaped by the Cold War. What was the role of US policy in the development of the military dictatorship in Nigeria?
BASSEY: ... we had military rule in Nigeria from 1966 ... and this went on for about 3 decades, with just a little space of time that they left in 1979 and came back in 1983.
And also in this time, the US has maybe made a few noises against military dictatorship more generally. I believe the US was not really obviously against the governments in power. And, of course, Nigeria was a very strong frontline state against apartheid in South Africa at a time when US was ambivalent, the US was ambivalent about what was going on in South Africa. So it wasn't really a very smooth relationship all through this time.
But the military were not politicians, generally. They were just young man who grabbed power for whatever purpose. And they had to run the country down to the ground. And so what we're seeing now manifesting in the country now is a result of several years of misrule, both by politicians and by the military, and right now have been in meetings where the past military rulers go to great pains to explain that they cannot be to blame, because they always work with politicians. And, of course, with the local politicians, they also work with politicians from the US, from Europe, and from elsewhere.
But we had a situation where wealth has been concentrated in a few hands across the nation. If you look at statistics, right now the ... GDP, gross domestic product, is said to be growing at a rate of more than 6% per year, and just a couple of weeks ago the government announced: by recalculating the gross domestic product, Nigeria is now the biggest economy in Africa, bigger than South African economy.
But at the same time, what is not being told to the world, what is not being announced clearly, is that poverty is increasing rapidly also. So you have a situation where 70% of the population live in poverty, and then wealth is concentrated in a few hands. And in the northern part of the country, this disparity is much more sharper because of years of negligence, especially in educational sector, because some people ... manipulate the poor and the marginalized, children, especially, and the youth, into not obtaining suitable education, but just being put in a state where they have to depend on the rich for daily handouts and occasional days of festivities. And so you find in the northern part of the country very deep and desperate poverty besides incredible wealth here of a few people. And so over the years, this has built up. This has resulted in discontent, especially amongst the poor, young people.
And the problem generally across the nation has been that over--the years of military rule has made even the civilian politicians behave sometimes like--as if they were military overlords. And elections have not been fair and free most of the time. And politicians were very, very readily amenable to using political talks, some of whom have been armed with weapons. And if you look at the crisis that occurred in the South in about--around 2005 in the Niger Delta, in the oil fields, where militancy heightened, you find that some of the young people who were involved in this militancy had worked as help to politicians through elections, but they would not receive what they were promised at the end of the day. And so the politicians used to use and then dump them.
And a similar thing also occurred in the northern part of the country, but we are not in a position to say exactly how what has become the Boko Haram phenomenon grew, from what was the root. What is known is that the amalgam of groups generally operating under this name or under this nomenclature believe that anything Western must be rejected, especially Western education. And so they will fund a lot of attacks on schools, on public institutions, and then on the military, on whatever they feel would hurt the government.
But what has become very reprehensible is that over the past few months, these insurgents (as they're labeled these days) have concentrated on killing defenseless children, some in their sleep in their hostels, in secondary school hostels. They've recently ... abducted over 200 girls from a hostel in a school at Chibok in northeastern Nigeria. In Abuja about two weeks ago they set off explosions in a very densely packed motor park, a public transportation hall on the outskirts of Abuja, killing innocent workers and children who were either on their way to school or to their offices.
JAY: How much has the interests of big Western oil companies shaped the politics of Nigeria? I mean, you're talking about a handful of very, very wealthy, and in the north tremendous poverty, where all these events are taking place. But in terms of over the last decades, how much has Nigerian politics been shaped either by, you know, Western/American oil companies, and even directly with US CIA and such involvement?
BASSEY: Well, let me speak about how the Nigerian economy and politics have been shaped by multinational corporations. They've been very key in shaping the way politics has developed in the country and how the economy has grown. We are running an economy that is based, basically, on oil rents, collection of royalties and rents from oil production by transnational oil corporations. They have overbearing influence on the political development of the country and on the economy. In fact, the national budget of Nigeria has always been about ... what should be the benchmark of the price of crude oil. And so crude oil has been a determinant factor right from the early 1970s, when oil revenue became the major source of foreign exchange for the country. And so right now the oil companies operate above the law, because the government would not do anything ... whatsoever to offend them or to make them lose their profit. And so they break the law with absolute impunity.
...
Now, because of the heavy dependence on oil revenue, as I said, these corporations have very heavy influence on politics. And rich people in the country are rich because they have a slice of oil revenue, not because they engaged in anything productive. And so we run a kind of voodoo economy, something that is more or less maybe beginning to change now because there are other sectors of the economy that are contributing to progress, and that is getting a bit more productive than before.
But as I say this, the influence of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank has also been very significant in dislocating the pattern of growth of the Nigerian economy and African economy generally that was visible between--in the early '70s through the early 1980s. And that, of course, happened through the introduction of structural adjustment programs that opened up the economy for dumping of products from the Global North, from North America, from Europe, from Japan, Australia, and then also killing local production, local industries, killing local agriculture, and, making these countries kind of dependent on ... foreign aid and stuff like that. So we've seen a situation where the negative influence of multinational corporation has played a very, very big role in keeping our nation from being on the right path of progress.
I really can't say much on this story, since it might be considered overtly anti-American & then who wants to deal with its "consequences". But, this is still a great opinion piece on one of the most powerful men in the world. Reading this piece reminded me of a piece Canadian Business magazine did back in August 2013 in which it showed that Henry Kissinger is the only man in the world who is a member in all of the 3 most powerful & elitist organizations in the world (World Economic Forum, Bilderberg Group, & Trilateral Commission).
Henry Kissinger is also the one who said that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." In my personal experience, whoever loves power so much, he/she will certainly abuse it & will hurt a lot of people in the process. This piece made me think that the way this man thinks, he has done & will still do anything to achieve what he wants more, which is, power. We try to teach our children that "with great power comes great responsibility," but, as this piece suggests, Kissinger's hunger for power almost makes him a sociopath.
As the piece below states how Kissinger supported prolonging the Vietnam war & the secret Cambodian war, in which hundreds of thousands people died. His powerful actions in the hallowed halls of government irreversibly changed the lives of millions around the world, from Latin America to North America to Asia. He apparently loved to attack other countries to show American military prowess. He loved more violence, government secrecy, militarism & ruling with the classic dictatorial "divide & conquer."
The piece ends with an excellent, & rather unfortunate, line that the world's humanity still has dark days ahead, since, his methods are still being employed by the American government & he is still deeply involved with the foreign policies of US governments.
But, hey, he will not be tried, for his actions, in the International Criminal Court (ICC) or any other court of justice in this world. Per my last quote picture of Criminal Minds here, the society is definitely not taking the place of thousands of victims & on their behalf demanding any atonement for Kissinger's push for military actions against innocent people around the world. At least dictators like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Joseph Stalin, Robert Mugabe, & several others from Latin America, Africa, or Asia killed innocent people of their own country. Henry Kissinger's actions made the life hell for thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Panama & who knows wherever else. So who is the bigger dictator here? Where is the justice coming from the largest self-anointed "just" & "fair" country of the world?
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In 1950, Henry Kissinger - who would go on to serve as an inordinately powerful US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State - wrote that "life is suffering, birth involves death".
As historian Greg Grandin documents in his just-released book "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman", the man's "existentialism laid the foundation for how he would defend his later policies". In Kissinger's view, Grandin explains, life's inherently tragic nature means that "there isn't much any one individual can do to make things worse than they already are".
Of course, the victims of Kissinger-sanctioned military escapades and other forms of inflicted suffering might beg to differ. Among the countless casualties are the dead and maimed of the Vietnam War - a disaster Kissinger fought to prolong despite recognising that it was unwinnable - and the secret US war that was launched on neutral Cambodia in 1969.
'Power for power's sake'
A pet project of Kissinger and then-President Richard Nixon, the bombing of that country killed more than 100,000 civilians in four years, according to Ben Kiernan, the director of Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program.
To this day, the cluster bombs with which the US saturated sections of southeast Asia continue to wreak deadly havoc.
And from Chile to Panama to Iraq to Angola to East Timor, there's no dearth of evidence linking increased earthly suffering to Kissingerian policy & tradition, which still exert a preponderant influence over the US political establishment. (Complaints could even be filed by impoverished victims of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Kissinger unofficially helped negotiate years after leaving office.)
As Grandin notes, Kissinger had an "outsized role… in creating the world we live in today, which accepts endless war as a matter of course".
Embracing the pursuit of "power for power's sake", Kissinger advocated for war in order to "show that action is possible", Grandin writes, and to thus maintain American power - the purpose of which "is to create American purpose". With such an approach to existence, it's perhaps no wonder the former statesman found the whole phenomenon to be rather dismal.
Campaign against history
Grandin details Kissinger's contributions to the "rehabilitation of the national security state" in the US around a "restored imperial presidency", which, he contends, was based on "ever more spectacular displays of violence, more intense secrecy, and an increasing use of war and militarism to leverage domestic dissent and polarisation for political advantage".
A key aspect of Kissinger's own dominant role in contemporary history is his philosophy of history itself, which Grandin summarises as follows: "For Kissinger, the past was nothing but 'a series of meaningless incidents'". According to this mindset, under no circumstances must history be seen as a collection of causal relationships capable of guiding current policy choices.
The concept of blowback, for example, is conveniently disappeared - such that Kissinger, for one, is excused from having to acknowledge the reality that US military aggression against Cambodia in fact helped propel the Khmer Rouge to power. Instead, further US military aggression was deemed to be the proper antidote to the new state of affairs.
Two and two
The forcible severing of cause from effect has also come in handy in places like Afghanistan, a country whose history is often reduced to one date: September 11, 2001. But go a bit further back in time, as Grandin does, and you'll find that the conversion of the country into a base for transnational jihad was in no small part an effect of policies put into place by - who else? - Kissinger.
These included facilitating destabilising behaviour vis-a-vis Afghanistan by the shah of Iran, Pakistani intelligence, and Saudi Arabia, and encouraging the flow of weapons to radical Islamists.
Naturally, none of this history prompted an internal questioning of US qualifications to spearhead the post-9/11 war on terror. Now, nearly 14 years and trillions of dollars later, it might be a good time to start putting two and two together - particularly given the expansion of the war to encompass the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an entity the US helped create in the first place.
Dark days
In an interview last year with radio host Todd Zwillich, Kissinger defended his infamous bombing of Cambodia on the following grounds: "The current administration is doing it in Pakistan, Somalia". The "it" apparently refers to Barack Obama's covert drone strikes on countries with which the US is not at war.
But as Grandin points out, this retroactive justification fails to account for the fact that "what [Kissinger] did nearly half a century ago created the conditions for today’s endless wars". In Cambodia and elsewhere, he "institutionalised a self-fulfilling logic of intervention", whereby US "action led to reaction [and] reaction demanded more action".
Of course, if power depends on the constant proof that "action is possible", this seems like a pretty logical - if sociopathic - arrangement.
As for Kissinger's shadow, it doesn't appear to be budging anytime soon - portending many a dark day ahead for humanity.
Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.
A few months ago, I blogged about how universities in US are laying out the red carpet for children of rich parents. That is skewing the education paradigm in favour of the rich. Well, this news from the UK is highlighting how the social favouritism for the rich doesn't stop at the school but continues on to working lives.
Now, this news may surprise that lot in the world, who think that there is merit & fairness in the Western world. In the Western world, most jobs, & definitely the good ones, are only available through the "power of Networking." Of course, employees of certain socio-economic background keep similar friends, & hence, when the boss says that a vacancy is coming up in a department (marketing, finance, human resources etc.), employees tell their friends (who are like them) about that vacancy.
Eventually, people of a certain socio-economic background end up in the same company. Promotions take place from that employee pool. And then, those people hire the same; other people in their own image. After all, it's just human psychology that we like other people who seem similar to us; in values, in finances, in habits, in education etc.
So, of course, the good jobs in the top firms will go to the people who are of a certain "posh" class. It doesn't matter what education or how good a person was in school, anymore; it all comes down to who you are friends with, nowadays. This is the case everywhere around the world.
At the end of the day, the so-called "modern" society is going back to the days of dark ages, when the few select elites of the society used to have everything in the society working for them; from politics to finances to education and work for their kids.
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Thousands of working-class people are being denied jobs at top firms, as they effectively need to pass a “poshness test” to join elite employers, according to the official body set up by the Government to promote social mobility.
Executives are more likely to judge potential recruits by how they speak than by how well they might do the job, research by Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility & Child Poverty Commission found.
Its review shows that more than two-thirds of the job vacancies in elite legal & City firms are filled by university graduates who have been through private or grammar schools. By comparison, nearly 90% of schoolchildren have a comprehensive education, compared to just 7% attending fee-paying schools & 4% going to selective grammar schools.
Discrimination comes about because the managers who conduct job interviews do not like working-class accents, the commission reported, but are impressed by young people who have travelled widely, which naturally favours those from well-off families.
One employer frankly admitted his firm’s recruitment practices were loaded against young working-class applicants. But, he asked: “How much mud do I have to sift through in that population to find that diamond?”
Even when a working-class youth is on first rung of the ladder, he or she is likely to be passed over for promotion because of “the tendency of more senior professionals to promote in their own image & thus ‘misrecognise’ merit,” the commission said.
“This research shows that young people with working-class backgrounds are being systematically locked out of top jobs,” said Mr. Milburn, the former Labour Cabinet minister who chairs the commission. “Elite firms seem to require applicants to pass a ‘poshness test’ to gain entry. Inevitably that ends up excluding youngsters who have the right sort of grades & abilities but whose parents do not have the right sort of bank balances.
“Thankfully, some of our country’s leading firms are making a big commitment to recruit the brightest & best, regardless of background. They should be applauded. But for the rest this is a ‘wake up & smell the coffee’ moment. “In some top law firms, trainees are more than 5 times likely to have attended a fee-paying school than the population as a whole. They are denying themselves talent, stymieing young people’s social mobility & fuelling the social divide that bedevils Britain. ”
The “poshness test” is one way in which Britain’s social divide is widening, despite the rise in the number of professional jobs, which is expected to increase by 2 million in the next 5 years.
Research has previously shown that graduates whose parents can support them while they do unpaid work have a marked advantage, because almost a third of graduates recruited for full-time jobs in the top firms have already worked for them, usually as unpaid interns. It has also been found that most major firms tend to recruit graduates from just 19 universities.
The commission, which advises the government on social mobility, has examined the recruiting history of 13 elite firms employing 45,000 of Britain’s highest paid professionals.
They concluded that the recruiting practices are now so skewed in favour of “poshness” that many of the firms’ own senior executives would have not been hired under the criteria now used.
Between 60% & 70% of job offers made by the leading accountancy firms are to graduates of the 24 leading universities that make up the Russell Group.
...
But on a positive note, some firms have acknowledged that A-level results are not always a good indicator of performance, & have stopped taking them into account. In one firm that was studied, more than 10% of recruits would have failed if they had been judged on their school results.
Dr. Louise Ashley, of Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the research, urged firms to recruit from a wider range of applicants, & make sure that those from “diverse” backgrounds were not at a disadvantage. “Selection processes which advantage students from more privileged backgrounds remain firmly in place,” she said.
A very long read but definitely a very interesting one. If it doesn't mention "Stephen Harper" or "Canada," then one might easily confuse the article with an article about a dictator from an African country or one from the Middle East or even a country from Asia (China) or South Asia (Pakistan). And this guy has been the face of Canada for almost 10 years, & he may yet win again on October 19th, 2015, for another 4 years.
I liked the article even more so because it showed how much "democracy" there really is in Canada. As I always say in my blog posts that there is no such thing as democracy anywhere in this world (maybe, in Iceland, but then it's a very small homogenic society). The only difference between Western "democracy" & Eastern "democracy" (in other words, democracy of the developing world) is that one democracy is all smoke-&-mirrors & the other one actually shows outright that there is no such thing as democracy.
On top of that, this article specifically mentions that a large section of the Canadian public is clueless about the government & ministers (20% of Quebecers don't even know which political party is the ruling party of Canada). Funny thing is that this statement reaffirms what I already say in my blog posts that Canadian public is far more busy with sports, food, beer & where my next paycheque is coming from. It doesn't have time to analyze & think how the government is screwing it around.
Since, the article is quite long in itself, I'll leave you to read it. But before I do that I'll copy & paste one paragraph which, very nicely, summarizes the whole article, & in essence, the actions of the ruling political party of Canada for the past decade:
"In the 11 years since he became leader of the country’s Conservatives, the party has been fined for breaking electoral rules, & various members of Team Harper have been caught misleading parliament, gagging civil servants, subverting parliamentary committees, gagging scientists, harassing the supreme court, gagging diplomats, lying to the public, concealing evidence of potential crime, spying on opponents, bullying & smearing. Harper personally has earned himself the rare rebuke of being found to be in contempt of his parliament."
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...
As Harper tries for a fourth term in office at the Canadian federal election ..., he is trailed by an extraordinarily long list of allegations. ... In Canada, some of the prime minister’s men & women have been accused not simply of cheating to win elections but of conspiring to jam the machinery of democratic government.
Some of these allegations have been proved. In the 11 years since he became leader of the country’s Conservatives, the party has been fined for breaking electoral rules, & various members of Team Harper have been caught misleading parliament, gagging civil servants, subverting parliamentary committees, gagging scientists, harassing the supreme court, gagging diplomats, lying to the public, concealing evidence of potential crime, spying on opponents, bullying & smearing. Harper personally has earned himself the rare rebuke of being found to be in contempt of his parliament.
... Yet this deeply unpopular politician has won 3 elections in the last 9 years. Although the Liberals are showing a late lead in the polls, Harper’s emphasis on his record on security & the economy may yet put a fourth in his trophy cabinet next week. That is what makes Harper’s politics interesting, that he has perfected the tactics of taking & holding power – in spite of the demands of democracy.
His people have been caught out more often than most. That may be because they are more brazen than most ... . But, at heart, Harper’s team are not that different from politicians across the developed world who have discovered that democracy is a pretty sweet theory but that, in reality, if you want to get hold of power & use it, there are all kinds of devious moves available that have very little to do with that antique idea.
* * *
Start with the business of winning an election. During Harper’s first successful run, back in January 2006, his party bumped up against the limit that it was allowed to spend in its national campaign – $18.3 million Canadian dollars ($9.15m). But it still had money in the bank, & the race was very tight. So it channelled more than $1 million down to 67 local candidates who had their own budgets & who then paid for a blitz of TV advertising during the final fortnight of the campaign. Harper squeaked home with 21 more seats than the liberals, & managed to form a minority government with 36% of the vote. Some of the local Conservatives were worried that this was illegal, but Harper’s national director dismissed them with contempt. “What a bunch of turds,” he emailed.
The national officials evidently had persuaded themselves that they had the law on their side. Elections Canada, the official body that enforces polling law, disagreed. As one of its investigators put it: “You could argue that they stole the election.” Team Harper duly suffered the indignity of police raiding their headquarters in Ottawa, seizing their computers & paperwork, & the further embarrassment of having 4 senior officials charged with criminal offences. The Conservatives fought Elections Canada to the last ditch, repeatedly challenging it in the courts. Finally, the prosecution accepted a plea bargain. The charges against the 4 officials were dropped, while the party as an organisation pleaded guilty to illegal campaign spending & paid $282,000 in fines & restitution. That was in March 2012, more than 6 years after the offence, by which time this particular scandal had cobwebs on it, & Harper had won 2 more elections, in November 2008 & May 2011.
If the path to electoral crime is rarely trodden, there is a close alternative, what Nixon’s people called “ratfucking” – acts of sabotage to damage an opponent. Not exactly criminal. Not always. So, for example, when the current Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau (son of the former prime minister, Pierre) held an open-air press conference in Ottawa, he found himself being heckled by a group of young protesters waving placards. They were later revealed by the Huffington Post to be interns working for the Prime Minister’s Office.
In the fortnight before polling day in 2011, Liberal supporters started receiving nuisance calls from people who claimed to be Liberal party workers – calling Jewish voters on the sabbath, waking up others in the middle of the night. Liberals said this was Conservatives trying to alienate their support. Then, in the final 3 days before the vote, Elections Canada received a series of complaints about “robocalls” – recorded messages sent by automatic dialling – that told voters quite falsely that their polling station had been moved. By election day, anxiety was rising among officials, as internal emails recorded: “It seems that Conservative candidates are pretending that Elections Canada or returning officers have changed the polling stations … They have actually disrupted the voting process … It’s right across the country except Saskatchewan … It appears it is getting worse.” This looked like a national campaign to suppress the Liberal vote by scattering it away from the polling booths.
Some of those voters told the Guardian that they had first received a call from the Conservatives asking how they planned to vote. Sandra McEwing, a stage manager from Winnipeg, said: “My answer was unequivocal, like, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ I hung up after that.” Others say they gave similar replies. All then say they received robocalls or live calls, sending them to a polling station that did not exist or to a distant one where they had no right to vote. Some of these voters were in ridings, or electoral districts, where the eventual margin of victory was tiny. Bill Hagborn, president of the Liberal association in a riding in Ontario, told of a bus full of aboriginal voters, who were very unlikely to vote Conservative, & who were misdirected by calls & ended up not voting at all. That riding – Nipissing-Timiskaming – went to the Conservatives with a majority of only 18.
With Team Harper back in power, a group of voters from 6 ridings went to federal court to challenge the results of the election. After a seven-day hearing, the trial judge, Mr. Justice Mosley, issued a devastating verdict: “I am satisfied that it has been established that misleading calls about the locations of polling stations were made to electors in ridings across the country & that the purpose of those calls was to suppress the votes of electors who had indicated their preference in response to earlier voter-identification calls.”
The judge declined to order new elections – the evidence did not reveal whether the calls had actually swung the result – but the declaration of national fraud was powerful stuff. And perhaps even more serious, he found that “the most likely source” of the phone numbers that had been used was the Conservative party’s central database, the Constituent Information Management System (Cims), which is believed to hold the names & addresses of every voter in Canada, together with profiling information that has been gathered by party workers or bought from commercial data-gatherers.
The judge specifically avoided identifying the Conservative party as a whole, or its candidates, as having organised the fraud. However, he went on to complain that it had “engaged in trench warfare in an effort to prevent this case from coming to a hearing on the merits”, which had included “transparent attempts to derail this case”.
Meanwhile, Elections Canada had been investigating. Spurred on by news coverage, voters from 261 of the 308 ridings filed complaints about calls that either caused nuisance or misled them about their polling station. The investigators struggled. When they tried to get records of phone numbers that had called the complainants, they failed in 92.5% of cases. With the 7.5% where they succeeded, they then failed to find the owners of 40% of the phone numbers they had identified, including many that were registered across the border in the US. “We were running into brick walls all over the place,” as one investigator put it. With one startling exception.
In relation to the riding of Guelph in Ontario, the Conservatives who had engaged in “trench warfare” to impede the civil court, handed Elections Canada a group of witnesses who identified an ambitious young party worker, Michael Sona, as a culprit, adding crucially that he had acted without authority, as a “rogue activist”. Sona’s name was rapidly leaked to newspapers. Investigators were able to follow a trail of electronic footprints from the local Conservative office, where Sona worked, to a telemarketing company that had sent out a robocall to more than 7,000 Liberal households, diverting them from their polling stations. Sona was arrested, prosecuted & jailed for 9 months for interfering with an election. He says that he is innocent, a decoy thrown out to protect the real culprits. Others say he is a maverick who set up his own relatively clumsy scheme without the blessing of his party.
But what about all the other ridings? Elections Canada in April 2014 published a report in which it acknowledged the difficulties it had encountered, & reported that – with the exception of Guelph – that it had been unable to find any concrete evidence of dubious activity. This left open the possibility that voters in these ridings had been victims of something far more sophisticated than the clumsy operation for which Michael Sona had been blamed. In Ottawa today, political insiders claim to have heard Conservative workers boasting of using call centres in the US, India or the Philippines.
However, they can prove nothing, & Elections Canada not only found no such clues but enraged Harper’s opponents by concluding that its inability to find evidence of activity outside Guelph amounted to positive evidence that there had been no such activity. This contradicted the finding of Mr. Justice Mosley & implied that all of the complainants from outside Guelph had been tainted by confusion, delusion or dishonesty. No culprit other than Michael Sona has been brought to book.
Effectively cleared of responsibility, the Conservatives pushed back hard. When Elections Canada asked for more powers to help it investigate future fraud claims, the House of Commons backed them. The Harper government, however, denied the body the powers it wanted & removed its entire investigations branch, transferring it to the office of the public prosecutor, where it is no longer answerable to parliament. Meanwhile, the Conservative MP who had acted as Harper’s spokesman on the robocalls affair – his parliamentary secretary, Dean Del Mastro – was jailed for breaking spending limits in his own riding & submitting false records. The sentencing judge told him that he had indulged in “the antithesis of democracy”.
* * *
...
Harper is a master tactician. Knowing that there is a block of rightwing voters who have nowhere else to go, he has been willing to defy them in search of wider support: adopting liberal positions on abortion & gay marriage; veering leftwards to pump public money into the economy to avoid recession in 2008; reaching out to the migrants who now fill the suburbs of traditionally Liberal cities such as Toronto. He studies the stats. He makes the numbers add up. Harper has his roots in the same ideological soil as Thatcher & Reagan: cutting tax & rolling back the state; tough on crime & even tougher on the unions; boosting families & national pride; a solid economy that rewards those who work hard.
And then there were the tactics that were to attract such notoriety. They reflected the man’s character – clever and harsh – moves that turned a democratic election into a mere sequence of manoeuvres. ...
...
It meant money – millions in private donations to fund the campaign, & millions more in state giveaways in order to encourage the voters. ... Harper gave his electorate a high-profile gift when he first took power in 2006, by cutting the Canadian sales tax, GST. It cost the exchequer some $12 billion, but it purchased popularity. At times, it meant descending into old-fashioned, US-style pork-barrel politics, pouring public money into ridings that were politically important. An investigation by the Globe and Mail this year found that 83% of the Harper government’s new infrastructure projects had gone to the 52% of ridings that were in Conservative hands.
And it meant investing heavily in the politically profitable new science of microtargeting. This was the original reason for the Conservatives creating the Cims database, in which was stored every conceivable item of intelligence about voters. Other parties have since caught up, but at that time it allowed the Conservative party to target the “market segments” it needed for victory – not just with policy, but with favours. A $500 tax break for children to do ballet or hockey in the 2006 budget was good for a middle-class segment (this was doubled in 2014). A break for tradespeople’s tools could buy another. The Canadian writer Susan Delacourt, who tracked this in her book, Shopping For Votes, told of the finding in the Cims database that people who owned snowmobiles were potential Conservative voters. The Harper government has pledged $35 million to create new trails for snowmobiles.
These tactics have proved particularly effective in a world in which people are becoming alienated from politics itself. In Canada, nearly 40% of the electorate did not bother to vote at the 2011 election. Among voters under 24, more than 60% stayed away (compared with 35.3% in 2006). A poll in Quebec province two months ago found that as the federal election campaign was launched, 20% of respondents could not name the political party that was running the country. Delacourt cites one of Harper’s political marketers, Patrick Muttart, saying that much of Conservative activity was aimed at voters who paid no attention to politics & who needed messages that were “brutally simple”.
In power as in elections, Harper’s rule has been to keep winning, whatever it takes. Even parliament – the embodiment of the popular will – is merely an obstacle to be dealt with. Soon after the November 2008 election, as he began his second minority government, Harper launched an “omnibus bill”, which contained so many provocative proposals that he united the previously divided opposition parties, which decided not just to vote against the bill but to form a coalition that could replace his government. Harper didn’t want that. So he prorogued parliament. He needed the consent of the Queen’s representative, the governor general, to do so. He got it. And so the parliament that threatened him was simply suspended until the political storm passed.
A year later, Harper was in deep trouble again, over press reports that Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan had handed over Taliban prisoners to local security forces, who had then tortured them. Harper’s government had denied the claims, which amounted to allegations of war crime, but it was caught out badly in November 2009 when a Canadian diplomat & a general separately went public with evidence that parts of the government had known about this for more than 3 years. When the opposition united once more to demand the release of paperwork on the subject, Harper refused … & then persuaded the governor general to prorogue parliament again. There was a chorus of protest, led by professors of law & politics, but Harper scorned them. The elected representatives of the people were simply locked out for 3 months.
The following year, Harper clashed again with the rights of parliament. In July 2010, he announced that his government would buy 65 F-35 fighter jets, costing a total of $15 billion – the most expensive military purchase in Canadian history. The new Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, reckoned the real price would be even higher & accused Harper of deliberately understating it. Harper refused to hand over the paperwork that would disclose the truth about the F-35s & about the cost of a clutch of other policies. In March 2011, the speaker of the House of Commons ruled that this was a contempt of parliament, & the House then passed a vote of no confidence in Harper’s government. There was an election (involving the robocalls), which Harper won. Ignatieff quit. And 11 months later, it emerged that the true cost of the F-35s was nearly twice what Harper had claimed. In 2007, his second year in office, the National Post disclosed that Team Harper had drawn up a guidebook for the Conservative chairs of parliamentary committees, advising them how to use delays, obstruction & confusion to block difficult inquiries. In opposition, Harper said he would reform the Senate, so that its members would be elected. In office, he changed his mind, kept the power to select them himself & appointed 59 new senators so that he had a built-in majority in the upper house. The House of Commons found itself being swamped with omnibus bills, which included dozens of contentious proposals that could not be properly debated in the time available. At the daily Question Period, when ministers traditionally provide information, Harper’s parliamentary secretary, Paul Calandra, gave answers so obstructive that, after a volley of complaint, he ended up apologising to the house, in tears.
Harper clamped down hard on senior officials whose job was to monitor the behaviour of the state. A report by the auditor general found that defence officials had misled ministers & parliament, & whitewashed cost overruns & delays in a determined effort to ensure Canada purchased the F-35 jet. Kevin Page, parliamentary budget officer, reported experiencing “significant amounts of intimidation” & that his office budget was cut by 30%. Linda Keen, head of Canada’s Nuclear Safety Commission, challenged Harper over the safety of the Chalk River nuclear site: she was denounced & sacked. Peter Tinsley, chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission, attempted to investigate the torture of Taliban prisoners who had been detained by Canadian forces: he lost his job. Beverley McLachlin, chief justice of the supreme court, blocked Harper’s choice for a new high court judge: she was denounced in terms which caused a wave of complaint that Harper was interfering in the independence of the judiciary.
* * *
As Harper launched his election campaign 10 weeks ago, he faced the tricky coincidence that one of his closest allies, Senator Mike Duffy, was sitting in court in Ottawa, charged with fraud. The trial is not yet finished, & Duffy has pleaded not guilty, but, whatever the outcome, the case has exposed in embarrassing detail the behaviour of the core of Team Harper – the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), which has been described eloquently by the Globe and Mail as “a 90-person juggernaut of political strategists, ‘issues managers’ & party enforcers who exercise strict control over cabinet, the houses of parliament & the bureaucracy.”
Duffy has been an Ottawa character for years, famous as a TV journalist & notorious for his Conservative bent, which paid off in January 2009 when Harper appointed him as a senator for the small eastern province of Prince Edward Island.
It was nearly 4 years later, in December 2012, when a diligent journalist, Glen McGregor of the Ottawa Citizen, reported that Duffy had told Senate authorities that his cottage in Prince Edward Island was his real home & had been claiming public money for the expense of living in Ottawa. The Senate’s internal economy committee hired a firm of auditors, Deloitte, to check the housing claims of all senators, including Duffy. When the PMO realised that Duffy might be tempted to talk to his old friends in the press, it aimed – as an internal email put it – “to prevent him from going squirrely in a bunch of weekend panel shows.”
Harper’s then chief of staff, Nigel Wright, persuaded the Conservative Party Fund, which is partly funded by the taxpayer, to stump up $32,000 to pay off Duffy’s debt for him, although the troubled senator would be allowed to pretend that he was repaying the money himself. Since, as his own emails disclosed, Wright thought it was “morally wrong” that the senator had taken the money, this looked rather like an attempt to use taxpayers’ money to repay money that had been taken from the taxpayer. In the event, it turned out that Duffy owed much more. With Duffy pleading poverty, Wright quietly paid the $90,100 himself. (He had made millions in the world of finance before joining Team Harper.)
Duffy managed to keep his seat until a second diligent journalist, Robert Fife of CTV, disclosed that it was Wright who had paid Duffy’s debt & that the Senate’s report had been “sanitised”. In an avalanche of embarrassment, Mike Duffy was dumped by the Conservatives & charged by the police; Wright resigned, & Stephen Harper denied knowing anything about the cover-up. At the end of May, an Ipsos-Reid poll suggested that only 13% of Canadians believed him.
Harper’s leadership style is all about control – of information & of people. In 2010, Harper provoked fury by cancelling the national census & then scrapping a series of long-term surveys, thus effectively concealing the facts about significant trends in Canadian society, including poverty, inequality, housing need & health. In a report in March, the information commissioner, Suzanne Legault, complained that Canada’s Access to Information law “is applied to encourage a culture of delay … to deny disclosure. It acts as a shield against disclosure. The interests of the government trump the interests of the public.”
* * *
The Harper government’s obsession with control may look simply like a means to maintain power. But it can achieve something more important, to reverse the flow of influence: instead of government responding to people, the electorate become passive recipients of state decisions. Consider the case of climate change.
Harper has never made any secret of his support for the oil industry. Emerging from his formative years in Alberta, he was a founder member of the neoconservative Reform party, which was baptised with a $100,000 cheque from the head of Gold Standard Oils. Soon after taking power in 2006, Harper started to clamp down on research into global warming. He got rid of his own science adviser & killed the climate-change section of the Department of Foreign Affairs. He shut down the official website on climate change & tried to cut funding for the Polar Environment Atmosphere Research Laboratory, which had been at the forefront of monitoring deterioration in the ozone layer as well as climate change.
But he opened his door to the other side of the argument. The Polaris Institute thinktank reported in December 2012 that 45 oil lobbyists had been allowed to work inside Harper’s government & that during the previous four & a half years, officials & ministers had held some 2,700 meetings with the oil lobby. By contrast, the Climate Action Network had managed just six.
Having changed the flow of information into government, he then dramatically changed the direction outwards to his electorate. A new protocol required all government scientists to ask for clearance from the PMO before speaking publicly. As a result, important research has been buried, stalled or misrepresented, including an analysis of changes in snowfall, an inquiry into the loss of ozone over the Arctic, & research on the impact of a 2C rise in global temperature. Meanwhile, the government department that oversees the oil & gas industries increased its advertising budget from less than $250,000 in 2010 to a massive $40 million only two years later.
Activists, too, felt the rough hand of government. Harper set aside $8 million to check the activity of charities, including environmental groups, to stop them campaigning politically. David Suzuki, the Gandalf-like founding father of the Canadian green movement, stepped down from his own charitable foundation so that he could speak freely without the organisation being attacked. In British Columbia, a green group called Dogwood Initiative, reported that material that it had obtained under the Access to Information law revealed that it had been under “illegal surveillance” by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
Having distorted the flow of information, Harper then moulded the policy to fit. Ever since he first took power in February 2006, he has been promising action on climate change, particularly in relation to the carbon that is released from Canada’s huge reserve of tar sands, now the third-biggest reservoir of oil on the planet.
After a false start in 2006 with a bill that was killed by parliament for being too weak, he launched a sleek new vehicle – “Turning the Corner” – in March 2007, with new emissions targets for each sector of the economy, crucially including oil and gas. It could all come in to force as early as 2010, he said. But the sleek new vehicle was soon diverted into the oil lobby’s bog, where it stalled & stuck in endless negotiation. At one point, in February 2013, Harper’s environment secretary, Peter Kent, said the rules were “very close” to being finalised. Four months later, Kent was out of the job, later reflecting ruefully that perhaps he had been “pushing too hard”. To this day, Canada still has no emissions rules for its oil & gas sector.
In the background, Harper’s government announced a “cap & trade” system to cut emissions in 2008, then dropped the plan in 2011. It failed to hit the targets that it had agreed at the Copenhagen summit in 2009, scrapped a raft of environmental rules, &, in 2011, became the first government to back out of the Kyoto protocol, which the Liberals had ratified in 2002. When the Centre for Global Development, in 2013, ranked 27 developed nations according to their handling of the environment, it placed Canada at number 27.
* * *
Canada’s current election campaign has followed a path that is now familiar. The Conservatives have more money. Harper has stopped public funding for political parties, which yields a financial advantage to his own party, with its Cims database full of potential private donors. In a neat symbol of its purchasing power, the Conservative party has been accused of buying likes on Facebook (it declined to comment, saying it was an “internal party matter”). His team have restricted the flow of information to voters: the prime minister makes speeches & holds photocalls but avoids questions from the press. With few exceptions, Conservative candidates have been told not to take part in public debates. Big issues are raised, but it is the small issues that dominate. Canada’s most idolised hockey player, Wayne Gretzky, may not be a political thinker, but his endorsement of Harper made big headlines. The collapse in the price of oil may have driven the Canadian economy into recession, but Harper is microtargeting market segments by offering a new tax break for home renovations & for those who belong to organisations such as the Rotary Club.
At a point when the party was slipping backwards in the polls, Harper’s team came up with a brilliantly successful wedge issue, insisting that no Muslim woman should be allowed to take the oath of Canadian citizenship while wearing a niqab. In the past 4 years, the number of women who wanted to wear the niqab while taking the oath has reached a grand total of two. But this became a big issue as it split off two sections of voters in Harper’s favour: the “old stock” Canadians, who fear Muslim migrants as intruders, & liberal feminists, to whom one of Harper’s ministers appealed by describing the niqab as “a medieval tribal custom that treats women as property rather than people”. For speaking up in favour of a Muslim woman’s right to choose what she wears, the leader of the centre-left New Democratic party, Tom Mulcair, was punished with a disastrous collapse in his poll ratings, while Harper surged upwards.
Harper has the natural advantage of an opposition which is divided between Mulcair’s NDP & Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. He also has the advantage of what looks like a form of voter suppression which, unlike robocalls, is legal – a requirement that voters produce an official document in addition to their voter card to prove that they have a home in the riding. Harry Neufeld, who has been running elections in Canada since 1982, said he estimated that at least 250,000 qualified electors would be denied a vote. These are likely to be people who would not vote Conservative – students, the poor, aboriginal people. “I believe the legal changes amount to systematic manipulation,” he said. “It saddens me to see this happening in Canada. It reduces the perceived integrity of our national elections. And it damages our reputation as a country with deep democratic values.”
Nick Davies is the bestselling author of Flat Earth News, on falsehood & distortion in the media, & a former Journalist of the Year. His latest book, Hack Attack, is out now in paperback.
Another one of those stories shining a bright light on millions of Ontarians precariously employed & how they are exploited by employers in Ontario. This story is not telling about people working in some far off developing country in Africa or Asia but right here in Canada.
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Show up to work one day & get fired for no reason?
Sorry about your luck.
In Ontario, not a single worker is protected from wrongful dismissal under the Employment Standards Act.
Hit with the flu & can’t make it into the office?
Consider sucking it up, because chances are you won’t get paid. You’ll be lucky to keep your job, in fact.
Have to put in extra hours one week to get the job done?
Whatever you do, don’t expect overtime pay. Or even to get paid at all.
Ontario’s outdated employment laws, currently under review, were designed to create basic protections for the majority of the province’s non-unionized workers.
Instead, millions are falling through the gaps created by a dizzying array of loopholes, from the dangerous to the downright bizarre.
Construction workers have no right to take breaks on the job.
Care workers aren’t entitled to time off between shifts.
Vets aren’t entitled to vacation pay.
Janitors have no right to minimum wage.
Cab drivers aren’t entitled to overtime pay.
And dozens of occupations, some that you’ve never even heard of, are exempt from basic rights entirely.
“Keepers of fur-bearing mammals” have no right to minimum wage.
Sod layers have no limits on their daily hours of work.
Shrub growers don’t get a lunch break.
The system is so complicated that the Ministry of Labour has developed a special online tool to help decipher who’s entitled to what.
But as the province reviews its antiquated Employment Standards Act, critics argue that its confusing web of exemptions makes it harder for the so-called precariously employed to defend their rights — & easier for bosses to ignore them.
“When you distil it down to what these exemptions are seeking to achieve, really they are to give employers more control over work & more control over wages,” says Mary Gellatly of Parkdale Community Legal Services.
“It sends the message to employers that they can get away without complying.”
The Act was first introduced in Ontario in 1968 to set basic work standards, especially for non-unionized employees who don’t have a collective agreement to provide extra protections.
But there are at least 45 occupations in Ontario that are exempt from a variety of its fundamental entitlements, many of them low-wage jobs in industries where precarious work is rife.
The Ministry of Labour says many of the exemptions are “long standing” & related to “the nature of the work performed.”
But York University professor Leah Vosko, who is leading research into employment standards protections for the precariously employed, says exemptions have come at least in part from industry pressure, leaving the Act a “complex patchwork that is difficult for workers & even officials to comprehend.”
Even when there are clear violations, speaking out can come at a cost.
Reprisal is illegal under the Act, meaning bosses can’t penalize employees for exercising their workplace rights. But the Act gives workers no protection against wrongful dismissal. Employers do not have to give cause for firing someone.
Unionized employees are generally protected by their collective agreements, & workers can sue employers if they think they have been unfairly terminated.
But most precarious, low-income employees are not unionized, & most do not have the money to take legal action against an employer, says Parkdale’s Gellatly.
“It’s the big reason why many people can’t do anything if they’re in a workplace with substandard conditions, because they can get fired without cause.”
Linda Wang, who worked at a Toronto cosmetics manufacturer for 4 years, was fired less than 2 weeks after she asked her employer for the extra pay she was owed for working a public holiday. She says no reason was given for her termination.
Wang, a mother of two, claims her employer repeatedly bullied her & her colleagues, & that she believes she was dismissed for asking for the wages.
She has filed a reprisal complaint with the Ministry of Labour, but Wang cannot afford to take her employer to court.
“I feel the system is against workers,” she says. “It’s in favour of employers.”
“Whatever job you have you put so much of yourself into it,” adds Gellatly. “The fact that employers can just fire you without a reason is incredibly devastating for folks.”
The Act also contains significant gaps when it comes to sick leave & overtime.
The legislation provides most workers with 10 unpaid days of job-protected emergency leave, which means they can’t be fired for taking a day off due to illness or family crisis.
Critics call this measure subpar by most standards, since it still causes many workers to lose a day’s income for being ill. An estimated 145 countries give employees some form of paid sick leave.
“Unfortunately, we stand out for our inadequacy,” says Brock University professor Kendra Coulter.
But the 10-day protected leave doesn’t apply to almost one in three of the province’s most vulnerable workers. An exemption that excludes employees in workplaces of less than 50 people from that right means 1.6 million workers in Ontario are not even entitled to a single, unpaid, job-protected sick day.
Fast-growing, low-wage sectors such as retail, food services & health care are most likely to be exempt according to a recent report by the Workers’ Action Centre.
While many small businesses voluntarily give their employees paid sick days, the loophole leaves many workers — especially the precariously employed — exposed.
Toronto resident Gordon Butler asked his employer, a small construction company in Markham, for one day off work after he sliced his thumb open on the job. He says his boss told him not to come back.
“I didn’t believe him,” says Butler, 44, who has an 8-month-old child. “I tried to plead with him, & he said ‘No, too bad.’ ”
“The way it’s stacked up right now is there are very few options for people who are in low-wage & precarious work to actually take sick leave when they’re sick,” says Steve Barnes, director of policy at Toronto’s Wellesley Institute, a health-policy think tank.
“They not only have to worry about lost income, but the potential for losing their jobs,” adds Brock’s Coulter. “It’s unkind & unnecessary.”
The stress caused by the province’s meagre sick leave provisions are compounded by exemptions surrounding overtime pay, to which around 1.5 million don’t have full access.
As a rule, employees should get paid time & a half after 44 hours a week on the job, according to the Employment Standards Act.
But in 2014, more than one million people in the province worked overtime, & 59% of them did not get any pay whatsoever for it, Statistics Canada data shows.
This, experts say, is partly because enforcement is poor. But in Ontario, a variety of occupations don’t even have the right to overtime pay, including farmworkers, flower growers, IT workers, fishers & accountants. Managers are also not entitled to overtime.
Vladimir Sanchez Rivera, a 45-year-old seasonal farmworker in the Niagara region, says he has worked 96-hour weeks doing back-breaking labour picking cucumbers & other produce.
“We don’t have access to protections when we are working in agriculture,” he says. “And our employers tell us that.”
Low-wage workers are even more likely to be excluded from full overtime pay coverage, according to the Workers’ Action Centre’s research. Less than one third of low-income employees are fully covered by the Act’s overtime provisions, compared to around 70% of higher earners, because they are more likely to work in jobs that aren’t eligible.
Workplaces can also sign so-called “averaging provisions” with their employees, which allow bosses to average a worker’s overtime over a period of up to 4 weeks.
That means an employee could work 60 hours one week & 50 the next, but not receive any overtime as long as they don’t work more than a total of 176 hours a month.
Critics say the measure means more work for less pay, & paves the way to erratic, unpredictable schedules.
“That’s a huge impact on workers & their families in terms of lost income & having to work extra hours,” says Parkdale’s Gellatly.
“It’s certainly not good for workers, for their families, & it’s not good for creating decent jobs in terms of rebooting our economy,” she adds.
For many of the precariously employed, falling through the gaps ruins lives.
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Proposed solutions
A recent report by the Workers’ Action Centre makes a number of recommendations to rebuild the basic floor of rights for workers. The proposed reforms include:
• Amending the ESA to include protection from wrongful dismissal
• Eliminating all occupational exemptions to ESA rights
• Repealing overtime exemptions & special rules
• Repealing overtime averaging provisions
• Repealing the emergency leave exemption for workplaces with less than 50 people
• Requiring employers to provide up to 7 days of paid sick leave
