26 Years since the Sabra and Shatila Massacres

From Palestine House:

"26 years after Sabra and Shatila, massacres, the Massacres against our people are continuing in different shapes and means.

The struggle of our people shall continue until we achieve our national goals and until the last Palestinian refugee returns to his/her home in historic Palestine. Then and only then we might forgive, but we shall never forget.

26 years ago, on September 16, 1982 the Lebanese Forces working under the command of the butcher, Ariel Sharon entered Sabra and Shatila Camps in Beirut and killed hundreds of unarmed Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

Sabra and Shatila massacre was not the first or the last massacre against the Palestinian people. It was one of a series of massacres committed by the Zionist forces.

Deir Yasin, Kofor Kasem, Qibya, Tantoura, Jenin , Hebron…….."

Hey why not?

She Ain’t No Union Maid

By Ron Jacobs

The recent selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential nominee has revived the media’s interest in what they love to call the white working class in the United States. Her husband, write commentators across the spectrum, is a union member. He is what we like to think of when we talk about the US working class. Well, besides the fact that Mr. Palin is one-quarter Yu’pik, his union membership is another aspect of his person that makes him a non-typical member of the US working class. In fact, not only is union membership at historical lows in the US, a good number of the workers joining unions these days are not white. Neither are they in jobs that pay well like those in the Alaskan energy industry (according to his tax records Todd Palin earned close to 93,000 in 2007 from his energy industry job and other earnings as a salmon fisherman.)

Back in the 1970s, the US Left was much stronger than it is today. This was true not only in the nation’s schools, but also in its workforce. Part of the reason for this was the intentional strategy of many Left formations to seek work in the labor force and organize among the workers. Several of my friends began working in factories making everything from bricks in Maryland to auto parts in Michigan. Others took jobs as bus drivers or laborers building Washington DC’s subway system. Some became pressmen and some went into the fields to work picking fruit and vegetables. A couple even ended up in West Virginia’s coal mines. It was the efforts of these individuals and their cadres that helped foment the upsurge in militant labor activity across the US in the early to mid-1970s. Wildcats in the mines and auto plants. Militancy among the pressmen during newspaper strikes in DC and elsewhere. Communists elected to union positions on the floor and in district offices.

Behind this leftist surge into the workforce were some very intense debates regarding the nature of the US working class. There were those groups that still considered this class to be composed of white males. Subsidiary to this perception was the unspoken assumption that these men, while understanding the issues of labor, were essentially reactionary when it came to issues of race, gender and culture. The ultimate media representation of this stereotype was the US television character Archie Bunker on the popular TV show All In the Family. It’s not that this perception came out of nowhere, as unions had historically excluded blacks and others from the construction and other trades. Perhaps foremost among leftist groups that perceived the US working class in this way were the Revolutionary Unions. These affiliated regional organizations eventually whittled away dissenters and coalesced under one Revolutionary Union that evenually became the Revolutionary Communist Party (which was a different creature than the current RCP). Their perception of the working class as reactionary and culturally conservative led them to imitate what was in actuality the most reactionary part of the US working class. The wrongness of their analysis became apparent to many in the RU and elsewhere on the Left when the RU found themselves aligned with some of the most reactionary and racist elements of the movement against school busing in Boston.

Meanwhile, others on the Left saw a different trend in the US working class and focused their attention on that trend. Put simply, these leftists recognized that the US working class was changing from the enclave of white men to a workplace where people came from all parts of US society: blacks, immigrants, women and the young. Seeing this demographic change and realizing that it was probably a trend that would continue, many of these groups organized among the new workers. This naturally led to workplace divisions, but it also gave a new life to workplace organizing. Indeed, one could reasonably argue that the existence of certain unions owe their continued existence to the realization by the US Left of the 1970s that this new element of the US working class would not only respond to union organizing efforts, but would also eventually become the majority demographic in certain sectors of the labor force.

Which brings us back to the selection of Sarah Palin as the 2008 GOP VP nominee. The selection was quite obviously made with two elements of US society in mind—the socially conservative Christian fundamentalists that serve as the GOP’s voting base and the US working class. It is my contention that the latter element is a misnomer. It is not the US working class that the GOP is chasing with Palin’s nomination. It is the reactionary element of the white part of that working class. The pretense by the GOP, the media and others in US society that this element of the working class is “the working class” is not only incorrect, it is (at the least) unconsciously nativist, if not outright racist. After all, the working class is composed of a very large percentage of women, blacks, Latinos and others with non-US national origins. Many, if not most, of this part of the working class do not share Sarah Palin’s (and the Christian conservative base she represents) apparent views on the war in Iraq, women’s rights, race, and even the ultimate goodness of the US capitalist system. Instead of reminding US voters that Palin is nothing more than a right wing Republican that believes that the Iraq war is a mission from God, which is exactly what George Bush is, the media present her to the US public as a real representative of the working class. The Democrats seem to share that view. Yet, if they listened to their rank and file, the Democratic leadership would know better. Instead, they share with the media the essentially elitist view that the working class is mostly white and mostly reactionary. Consequently, they look for ways to pander to this element of the US voting public while ignoring the rest of us who work for somebody else to make a living, are not reactionary, and want nothing to do with Sarah Palin and her sidekicks John McCain and the US right wing.

Reproduced from ZNet

Israeli army open fire of Gazan fishermen and international activists

On the 1st September 2008, the first day of Ramadan, several volunteers with the Free Gaza Movement and the International Solidarity Movement accompanied a small fleet of seven fishing vessels from Gaza City port.

The fishermen exercised their right to fish in Gazan territorial waters, providing them with a livelihood and providing food for the besieged people of Gaza. The fishing fleet reached approximately nine miles offshore and began trawling along the Gazan coast, well within international limits. Usually the Israeli Navy prevents Gazan fishing vessels from accessing beyond six miles and in many cases only three miles, by attacking the boats, sometimes lethally, or by arresting the fishermen. However, this day’s fishing resulted in a highly successful catch due to the ability to access richer fishing grounds further offshore.

Two Israeli Naval gunboats approached the fleet soon after leaving port and began firing “warning shots” shortly afterwards. They were aware that internationals were on some of the boats. The Israeli Navy continued shooting multiple times at the fishing vessels, one of which was fired upon at least seven times. They also deployed explosive charges in the water and attempted to de-stabilise some of the boats by creating a strong wake. Communication was established with the Israeli Navy via VHF radio, informing them that everyone onboard were unarmed civilians and requesting that the Israeli Navy stop shooting.

The volunteers will continue to join Gazan fishing expeditions on a regular basis and will monitor Israeli aggressions towards the fishermen. Video and written documentation will be posted publicly and made available to journalists. The Israeli Navy will not be informed as to when the volunteers will join the fishermen, nor the ports they will sail from, since this is not within their jurisdiction. Also no indication will be made as to which vessels have internationals onboard.

Sky News: Israel denies excessive force in rubber bullet killings

The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons

By Ian Angus

Will shared resources always be misused and overused? Is community ownership of land, forests and fisheries a guaranteed road to ecological disaster? Is privatization the only way to protect the environment and end Third World poverty? Most economists and development planners will answer “yes” – and for proof they will point to the most influential article ever written on those important questions.

Since its publication in Science in December 1968, “The Tragedy of the Commons” has been anthologized in at least 111 books, making it one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific journal. It is also one of the most-quoted: a recent Google search found “about 302,000” results for the phrase “tragedy of the commons.”

For 40 years it has been, in the words of a World Bank Discussion Paper, “the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues.” (Bromley and Cernea 1989: 6) It has been used time and again to justify stealing indigenous peoples' lands, privatizing health care and other social services, giving corporations 'tradable permits' to pollute the air and water, and much more.

Noted anthropologist Dr. G.N. Appell (1995) writes that the article “has been embraced as a sacred text by scholars and professionals in the practice of designing futures for others and imposing their own economic and environmental rationality on other social systems of which they have incomplete understanding and knowledge.”

Like most sacred texts, “The Tragedy of the Commons” is more often cited than read. As we will see, although its title sounds authoritative and scientific, it fell far short of science.

Garrett Hardin hatches a myth

The author of “The Tragedy of the Commons” was Garrett Hardin, a University of California professor who until then was best-known as the author of a biology textbook that argued for “control of breeding” of “genetically defective” people. (Hardin 1966: 707) In his 1968 essay he argued that communities that share resources inevitably pave the way for their own destruction; instead of wealth for all, there is wealth for none.

He based his argument on a story about the commons in rural England.

(The term “commons” was used in England to refer to the shared pastures, fields, forests, irrigation systems and other resources that were found in many rural areas until well into the 1800s. Similar communal farming arrangements existed in most of Europe, and they still exist today in various forms around the world, particularly in indigenous communities.)

“Picture a pasture open to all,” Hardin wrote. A herdsmen who wants to expand his personal herd will calculate that the cost of additional grazing (reduced food for all animals, rapid soil depletion) will be divided among all, but he alone will get the benefit of having more cattle to sell.

Inevitably, “the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd.” But every “rational herdsman” will do the same thing, so the commons is soon overstocked and overgrazed to the point where it supports no animals at all.

Hardin used the word “tragedy” as Aristotle did, to refer to a dramatic outcome that is the inevitable but unplanned result of a character's actions. He called the destruction of the commons through overuse a tragedy not because it is sad, but because it is the inevitable result of shared use of the pasture. “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

Where's the evidence?

Given the subsequent influence of Hardin's essay, it's shocking to realize that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that the “tragedy” was inevitable – but he didn't show that it had happened even once.

Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self-regulation by the communities involved. One such process was described years earlier in Friedrich Engels' account of the “mark,” the form taken by commons-based communities in parts of pre-capitalist Germany:

“[T]he use of arable and meadowlands was under the supervision and direction of the community...

“Just as the share of each member in so much of the mark as was distributed was of equal size, so was his share also in the use of the 'common mark.' The nature of this use was determined by the members of the community as a whole. ...

“At fixed times and, if necessary, more frequently, they met in the open air to discuss the affairs of the mark and to sit in judgment upon breaches of regulations and disputes concerning the mark.” (Engels 1892)

Historians and other scholars have broadly confirmed Engels' description of communal management of shared resources. A summary of recent research concludes:

“[W]hat existed in fact was not a 'tragedy of the commons' but rather a triumph: that for hundreds of years – and perhaps thousands, although written records do not exist to prove the longer era – land was managed successfully by communities.” (Cox 1985: 60)

Part of that self-regulation process was known in England as “stinting” – establishing limits for the number of cows, pigs, sheep and other livestock that each commoner could graze on the common pasture. Such “stints” protected the land from overuse (a concept that experienced farmers understood long before Hardin arrived) and allowed the community to allocate resources according to its own concepts of fairness.

The only significant cases of overstocking found by the leading modern expert on the English commons involved wealthy landowners who deliberately put too many animals onto the pasture in order to weaken their much poorer neighbours' position in disputes over the enclosure (privatization) of common lands. (Neeson 1993: 156)

Hardin assumed that peasant farmers are unable to change their behaviour in the face of certain disaster. But in the real world, small farmers, fishers and others have created their own institutions and rules for preserving resources and ensuring that the commons community survived through good years and bad.

Why does the herder want more?

Hardin's argument started with the unproven assertion that herdsmen always want to expand their herds: “It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. ... As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain.”

In short, Hardin's conclusion was predetermined by his assumptions. “It is to be expected” that each herdsman will try to maximize the size of his herd – and each one does exactly that. It's a circular argument that proves nothing.

Hardin assumed that human nature is selfish and unchanging, and that society is just an assemblage of self-interested individuals who don't care about the impact of their actions on the community. The same idea, explicitly or implicitly, is a fundamental component of mainstream (i.e., pro-capitalist) economic theory.

All the evidence (not to mention common sense) shows that this is absurd: people are social beings, and society is much more than the arithmetic sum of its members. Even capitalist society, which rewards the most anti-social behaviour, has not crushed human cooperation and solidarity. The very fact that for centuries “rational herdsmen” did not overgraze the commons disproves Hardin's most fundamental assumptions – but that hasn't stopped him or his disciples from erecting policy castles on foundations of sand.

Even if the herdsman wanted to behave as Hardin described, he couldn't do so unless certain conditions existed.

There would have to be a market for the cattle, and he would have to be focused on producing for that market, not for local consumption. He would have to have enough capital to buy the additional cattle and the fodder they would need in winter. He would have to be able to hire workers to care for the larger herd, build bigger barns, etc. And his desire for profit would have to outweigh his interest in the long-term survival of his community.

In short, Hardin didn't describe the behaviour of herdsmen in pre-capitalist farming communities – he described the behaviour of capitalists operating in a capitalist economy. The universal human nature that he claimed would always destroy common resources is actually the profit-driven “grow or die” behaviour of corporations.

Will private ownership do better?

That leads us to another fatal flaw in Hardin's argument: in addition to providing no evidence that maintaining the commons will inevitably destroy the environment, he offered no justification for his opinion that privatization would save it. Once again he simply presented his own prejudices as fact:

“We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust – but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.”

The implication is that private owners will do a better job of caring for the environment because they want to preserve the value of their assets. In reality, scholars and activists have documented scores of cases in which the division and privatization of communally managed lands had disastrous results. Privatizing the commons has repeatedly led to deforestation, soil erosion and depletion, overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, and the ruin of ecosystems.

As Karl Marx wrote, nature requires long cycles of birth, development and regeneration, but capitalism requires short-term returns.

“[T]he entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profits, stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations. A striking illustration of this is furnished by the forests, which are only rarely managed in a way more or less corresponding to the interests of society as a whole...” (Marx 1998: 611n)

Contrary to Hardin's claims, a community that shares fields and forests has a strong incentive to protect them to the best of its ability, even if that means not maximizing current production, because those resources will be essential to the community's survival for centuries to come. Capitalist owners have the opposite incentive, because they will not survive in business if they don't maximize short-term profit. If ethanol promises bigger and faster profits than centuries-old rain forests, the trees will fall.

This focus on short-term gain has reached a point of appalling absurdity in recent best-selling books by Bjorn Lomborg, William Nordhaus and others, who argue that it is irrational to spend money to stop greenhouse gas emissions today, because the payoff is too far in the future. Other investments, they say, will produce much better returns, more quickly.

Community management isn't an infallible way of protecting shared resources: some communities have mismanaged common resources, and some commons may have been overused to extinction. But no commons-based community has capitalism's built-in drive to put current profits ahead of the well-being of future generations.

A politically useful myth

The truly appalling thing about “The Tragedy of the Commons” is not its lack of evidence or logic – badly researched and argued articles are not unknown in academic journals. What's shocking is the fact that this piece of reactionary nonsense has been hailed as a brilliant analysis of the causes of human suffering and environmental destruction, and adopted as a basis for social policy by supposed experts ranging from economists and environmentalists to governments and United Nations agencies.

Despite being refuted again and again, it is still used today to support private ownership and uncontrolled markets as sure-fire roads to economic growth.

The success of Hardin's argument reflects its usefulness as a pseudo-scientific explanation of global poverty and inequality, an explanation that doesn't question the dominant social and political order. It confirms the prejudices of those in power: logical and factual errors are nothing compared to the very attractive (to the rich) claim that the poor are responsible for their own poverty. The fact that Hardin's argument also blames the poor for ecological destruction is a bonus.

Hardin's essay has been widely used as an ideological response to anti-imperialist movements in the Third World and discontent among indigenous and other oppressed peoples everywhere in the world.

“Hardin's fable was taken up by the gathering forces of neo-liberal reaction in the 1970s, and his essay became the 'scientific' foundation of World Bank and IMF policies, viz. enclosure of commons and privatization of public property. ... The message is clear: we must never treat the earth as a 'common treasury.' We must be ruthless and greedy or else we will perish.” (Boal 2007)

In Canada, conservative lobbyists use arguments derived from Hardin's political tract to explain away poverty on First Nations' reserves, and to argue for further dismantling of indigenous communities. A study published by the influential Fraser Institute urges privatization of reserve land:

“[T]hese large amounts of land, with their attendant natural resources, will never yield their maximum benefit to Canada's native people as long as they are held as collective property subject to political management. ... collective property is the path of poverty, and private property is the path of prosperity.” (Fraser 2002: 16-17)

This isn't just right-wing posturing. Canada's federal government, which has refused to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, announced in 2007 that it will “develop approaches to support the development of individual property ownership on reserves,” and created a $300 million fund to do just that.

In Hardin's world, poverty has nothing to do with centuries of racism, colonialism and exploitation: poverty is inevitable and natural in all times and places, the product of immutable human nature. The poor bring it on themselves by having too many babies and clinging to self-destructive collectivism.

The tragedy of the commons is a useful political myth – a scientific-sounding way of saying that there is no alternative to the dominant world order.

Stripped of excess verbiage, Hardin's essay asserted, without proof, that human beings are helpless prisoners of biology and the market. Unless restrained, we will inevitably destroy our communities and environment for a few extra pennies of profit. There is nothing we can do to make the world better or more just.

In 1844 Friedrich Engels described a similar argument as a “repulsive blasphemy against man and nature.” Those words apply with full force to the myth of the tragedy of the commons. •

Ian Angus is editor of Climate and Capitalism and an associate editor of Socialist Voice.

Works Cited

Appell, G. N. 1993. “Hardin's Myth of the Commons: The Tragedy of Conceptual Confusions.”

Boal, Iain. 2007. “Interview: Specters of Malthus: Scarcity, Poverty, Apocalypse.” Counterpunch, September 11, 2007.

Bromley, Daniel W. and Cernea Michael M. 1989. “The Management of Common Property Natural Resources: Some Conceptual and Operational Fallacies.” World Bank Discussion Paper.

Cox, Susan Jane Buck. 1985, “No Tragedy on the Commons.” Environmental Ethics 7.

Engels, Friedrich. 1892. “The Mark.”

Engels, Friedrich. 1844. Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy.

Fraser Institute. 2002. Individual Property Rights on Canadian Indian Reserves.

Hardin, Garrett. 1966. Biology: Its Principles and Implications. Second edition. San Francisco. W.H. Freeman & Co.

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.”

Marx, Karl. [1867] 1998. Marx Engels Collected Works Vol. 37 (Capital, Vol. 3). New York: International Publishers

Neeson, J.M. 1993. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge University Press.

Raise the Rates: The Vital Struggle Against Ontario’s Sub-Poverty Welfare System

By John Clarke

A drastic reduction in the adequacy of income support payments is key to the neoliberal agenda. This is especially true in a country like Canada that had earlier seen the consolidation of a basic social infrastructure. However much the balance is tilted in favour of the employers, employment insurance (EI) and welfare payments limit the desperation of the unemployed and the degree to which those with jobs can be forced to make concessions. Massive reductions in federal EI and provincial social assistance rates have been a focus of governments in the last fifteen years and the Mike Harris ‘Common Sense Revolution’ in Ontario was a very big part of this process.

The dramatic and confrontational Harris years have given way to a more sedate pace of social retrogression under the direction of the McGuinty Government. Nonetheless, once inflation is taken into account, 760,000 people on social assistance in Ontario will be poorer when McGuinty goes to the polls than they were when he began to implement his rather dubious agenda of ‘change’ in this province. At least a 40% reduction in the spending power of welfare cheques has taken place since 1995. Harris’s work has not been reversed under the Liberals. It has really only been consolidated.

The demand to ‘Raise the Rates’ by 40% has been a major focus of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty’s (OCAP) activities since McGuinty took power. We have challenged the Liberals on their broken promises and duplicity. It has, however, been a very difficult period by virtue of a very serious demobilization of social resistance. We have not seen major protests or campaigns to place demands before the regime in Queen’s Park. The myth of a kinder and gentler Liberal Ontario has been able to take hold in this situation. Until recently, a major political mobilization around Provincial anti-poverty demands seemed beyond our grasp. A broad-based coalition of union and community organizations, under the name of ‘Toronto Anti Poverty’ is now planning a September march on the Ontario legislature. Several initiatives underlie this development.

After a couple of years of raising the demand for a major welfare increase from the Liberals, OCAP came across a provision within the rules of the system known as the Special Diet Policy. This allowed for a monthly payment of up to $250 a month per person on assistance, if a qualified medical provider diagnosed the need. One of the most important fights we’ve ever taken up came out of this. We reasoned that this obscure provision was never intended to be widely known and that, even where people on assistance applied for it, would in most cases by denied by the bureaucracy of the system. However, we asked ourselves what would happen if we could organize to ensure that thousands could obtain access to medical providers ready to fill in their applications for the Supplement. Moreover, we posed the question of how the matter would be affected if this mass of applicants had serious levels of support to ensure they could not be turned away empty handed when they put in their forms.

Throughout 2005, a Special Diet Campaign unfolded that provided concrete answers to these questions. Over 8,000 people passed through community clinics in Toronto that OCAP initiated and these spread to other Ontario towns. While the direct results of our efforts were significant, of much greater importance was the degree to which an awareness of the Special Diet spread spontaneously through poor communities. In that year, spending on the Supplement by Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support offices in this Province went up by $40 million.

The campaign, however, went beyond an effort to put more money into peoples’ pockets by utilizing a provision within the rules of the system. We very much presented this as a tactic that had to be linked to the bigger and more important issue of a major general increase in welfare income. This mix of a short term effective tactic and a broader goal tended to give a political focus to the campaign that captured imaginations and won support. Medical providers working at the community clinics organized themselves into a ‘Health Providers Against Poverty’ organization. A wide range of social agencies helped with clinics and spoke out to defend the right of their clients to access the Supplement. Many low-income communities, especially immigrant communities, used their informal internal communication networks to ensure that access to the Special Diet was obtained. Within the Somali community this assumed such a significant scale that a new organization, “OCAP Women of Etobicoke” was formed.

The very nature of opposition to our efforts by those in authority tended to increase the support and mobilization on the issue. Despite its supposedly ‘progressive’ Council majority, the City of Toronto did all it could to block access to the Special Diet. Welfare offices turned away hundreds of applicants, often in violation of their own rules. City politicians acted to limit these abuses only with the greatest reluctance and under considerable pressure. However, the huge numbers of people coming to Special Diet clinics had to back up their applications by joining in actions at local welfare offices or at City Hall to ensure they actually got what they were entitled to. This increased the level of organizing and could not fail to bring home to people that the process of applying for a dietary supplement, while necessary, posed the question of why a living income was not generally available?

The provincial government realized very well that greatly increased access to the Special Diet was beginning to call into question their role of quietly consolidating the social cutbacks of the Harris Tories. They acted in November of 2005 to revise the application form for the benefit in ways that would make it much harder to access. In fact, this measure by no means solved their problems. Lots of people did get cut off the Supplement but applications increased to a degree that was astounding. Moreover, after a year of working with the new rules, Health Providers Against Poverty felt able to resume the community clinics and reopen a channel for hundreds of people.

The ongoing agitation around the Special Diet, has meant that the issue of welfare rates has been kept alive. At the same time, agitation on the stagnant minimum wage has also been very significant in building a clamour on poverty issues. The well known efforts of NDP MPP Cheri Di Novo and her Federal counterpart, Peggy Nash, to put the issue of the minimum wage on the legislative agenda gained a very large amount of support and attention. Labour movement campaigns on the issue also put pressure on the Liberal government. OCAP is very critical of the degree to which electoral calculations and notions of political respectability led to these efforts focusing only on minimum wage levels and ignoring questions of social assistance income. However, that they contributed to a general sense that poverty had to be acted on is beyond dispute.

We should also acknowledge that the inaction of the McGuinty regime on poverty also revealed some disagreements at the top in society. The capitalist class is not a monolith and it has a (relatively) left wing along with its right wing. There are those in their ranks who question how far the process of impoverishment should go and can go before it creates adverse consequences and becomes self-defeating. So, we have TD Bank economists arguing for a higher minimum wage and increased social spending and we have the high profile Toronto Star ‘War on Poverty.’ Such divisions within the economically and politically powerful are important and provide an opening for a move to win concessions by those directly affected by the poverty they debate.

So it is that, for the first time in many years, a significant grouping of forces appears to be coming together to forge a common front challenge to poverty. Following a call issued by activists from the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee (TDRC), a working committee of union activists, social agency representatives and community organizers is now planning for a September rally at the Ontario legislature. Demands will focus on social assistance rates, the minimum wage and housing. Added to this is support for the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” demand of No One is Illegal. In this city, a demand that those without immigration status be able to obtain basic services without being handed over to immigration authorities is a key and vital anti poverty demand that we all wish to support.

Planning for the September action is in a relatively early stage at the time that this is being written but things are clear enough to sound a note of optimism. Dozens of organizations have already endorsed the event. An ambitious job of outreach in low-income communities is being set in motion. An impressive rally that includes a series of ‘feeder marches’ by participating organizations, is being developed. An event like this, in the lead up to the provincial election, could have serious political impact and set the stage for more sustained and province-wide mobilizing.

The question of raising social assistance rates and turning back the tide of poverty is not some humanitarian issue. It is a vital question for the ability of the working class population as a whole in terms of defending past gains. For too long, the issue has been treated as a low priority ‘good cause.’ It’s time to change that and build a movement that can place demands before governments that can’t be brushed aside.

John Clarke is a longtime activist with Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.

This article is reprinted from The Bullet