People's Voice Podcast

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By Robert Griffiths and John Foster 

The UK-EU trade agreement is a compromise between the interests of British state-monopoly capitalism on the one side and those of German and French monopoly capital – represented by their states and the EU – on the other.

The Communist Party of Britain has consistently pointed out that the big monopoly capitalists of Britain and the EU have sufficient interests in common to reach a deal, however unlikely the prospect at any particular time. But such an agreement was never intended by either side to benefit the working classes and peoples of England, Scotland, Wales or the other countries of Europe.

This new deal frees Britain from the sovereignty of the EU, but not from the sovereignty of big business whether British, European or American. It seeks to maintain the domination of capitalist free market rules and policies across a European single market, enforced through British law, World Trade Organization rules and new UK-EU arbitration mechanisms.

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“Capitalism a super-spreader” says Communist Party’s Ontario leadership 

PV Ontario Bureau

The Communist Party of Canada’s Ontario Executive Committee is demanding immediate action in the face of ongoing governmental failure to address the second wave of the pandemic. In a statement on January 26, the Communist Party said that “Ford’s failure is a result of his government consistently siding with corporate interests whenever they conflict with human health.”

As Ontario heads into its second month of lockdown, and its third month for Toronto and Peel region, there are many indicators of failure in Ontario’s ongoing second wave. Late last year, Ford reluctantly announced a province-wide lockdown for Boxing Day, allowing residents to complete their holiday preparations and quickly intensifying community spread. The premier and various ministers hold regular press conferences at which they insist people, besides the millions of essential workers in the province, take personal responsibility and stay home. Despite declaring another state of emergency, the government has tried to play down aspects of the crisis where health experts and many others are asking them to act. For example, the government is denying the continued under-staffing of long-term care (LTC) homes, the need for paid sick days and another moratorium on evictions.

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“They took all the trees / And put them in a tree museum / Then they charged the people / A dollar and a half just to see ’em”

So wrote Joni Mitchell in 1970. She, of course, meant this as irony – a slap-down to the “chop it – pave it – sell it” economy, as well as to the hyper-consumerist culture that emerges from (and supports) it.

Based on his government’s shiny new climate plan, it doesn’t seem like Justin Trudeau gets irony.

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By Greg Godels 

Biden’s first week or so in office proved eventful. He began to aggressively undo much of what Trump undid of the Obama presidency. In essence, he is returning US politics to 2016. For those who longed only for the exit of Trump and a return to what they saw as the comforting past, the Biden victory is cause for celebration.

For those who want an answer to a raging pandemic that has taken more US lives than World War 2, for those who fear for the future of the millions newly unemployed by the pandemic, for those millions in arrears on their rent and eventually facing eviction and for the nearly three million households forced into forbearance on their mortgage payments, there is little yet to celebrate.

Despite the formal changing of the guard, the distance between the haves and have-nots in the US continues to grow. And more and more working people are pressed into the army of the have-nots. The catastrophic pandemic year has further brought mass insecurity and fear, prompting a strong pullback in consumer spending over the last three months.

It is doubtful that 2016 answers will solve 2021 problems.

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As the Executive Policy Committee of Winnipeg’s City Council rushes to pass its 2021 budget, it’s hard not to see this document as a direct rebuke to community health and a show of deadly complacency against a growing social movement to defund the police. This movement extends in two important and related directions – against the active role and behaviour of the Winnipeg Police Service, and against the ongoing and deepening depletion of funds for essential services throughout the city, while the police budget only grows.

This dynamic – of overfunded security forces and underfunded communities – is too typical. Police-Free Schools Winnipeg has been talking about this for months, where Winnipeg School Division alone spends almost half a million dollars on nine armed police officers, while scrambling for substitute teachers, remote learning resources and protective equipment in a pandemic. Schools cut back on nurses, a necessity for student health, whilst investing in the appearance of safety. This is to say nothing of the direct, negative impacts of police presence on racialized, newcomer, low-income and disabled students. The Police-Free Schools Winnipeg campaign commenced from the acute reality and firsthand experience of funding shortfalls in classrooms, while police budget and presence expand with enthusiastic approval from city council.

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There is a bitter irony in the fact that Cuba, a country which sent emergency medical brigades around the world to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, is forced by the US blockade to confront shortages of medical supplies in its own borders. But this is the reality imposed by imperialism.

Longtime Cuba solidarity activist Keith Ellis is coordinator for the Medical Supplies Fundraising Campaign launched by the Canadian Network on Cuba (CNC). He says that in the current situation, “Cuban hospitals, in different parts of the country, are struggling to acquire some very urgently needed items, mainly due to the US illegal blockade.” The three-month campaign launched on January 8 and will raise $50,000 to fill and ship a container with the critical supplies that Cuba needs. “The CNC has obtained a list of some of these items which we are attempting to source from suppliers of medical equipment in the Toronto area.”

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If you’re like us, you were pretty happy to see the arse end of 2020. The pandemic meant that the better part of 10 months was spent in some form of lockdown-distancing isolation and the accompanying economic crisis threw millions of people in this country into deep and ongoing financial uncertainty.

Governments across the country – at federal and provincial levels – have used the pandemic and crisis as a pretext for squeezing workers of their rights, while rewarding huge corporations. This has taken many forms: rubber-stamping COVID-related workplace health inspections, overriding collective agreements, limitations on protests against resource extraction projects, use of police against Indigenous land defenders, changing labour legislation to strip unions of their hard-earned rights, mass evictions of people who cannot afford their rent because of COVID-related unemployment or any of the massive privatization campaigns that threaten to shift enormous amounts of public wealth to corporate coffers.

On top of all this, we were subjected to a seemingly never-ending US election campaign that brought all the worst elements of reactionary right-wing capitalism into our homes on an hourly basis. And, while we relish the end of Trump’s presidency, the outcome hardly inspires hope or confidence for progress or peace in the near future.

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By B Prasant, Kolkata 

The farmers’ sit-in has now passed two months. In the rainy winter cold of northern India, 171 of the demonstrators have succumbed to the extreme weather, mostly the elderly and the ill. None of the central or state governments have come forward with medical assistance. But the kisan (farmers and peasants) are more resolute than ever, and more united than ever, in their struggle to force the government to withdraw the three farm bills and the anti-people electricity legislation.

During our one-and-a-half-day stay with the protesters, we noted how those who were severely sick received emergency treatment in the 30-bed camp hospital that has been set up at the Singhu border and run by doctors and nurses from Delhi and the adjoining districts. The doctors themselves have contributed medicines and life-saving equipment.

The peasants and farmers remain in high spirits. Every day, rain or shine, from the break of dawn to the very late afternoon when icy winds start to gust fiercely across the open fields, they organize demonstrations at every blocked highway crossing. These occasions are marked by speeches, slogan-shouting and hearty singing.

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The Communist Party of Quebec (PCQ) is concerned about the alarming numbers of new cases of COVID-19 infection. With more than 2,500 cases daily for the past few days, there is a real danger of overloading our health care system to the point where inhumane choices will have to be made, especially since all specialists agree that any increase in the number of infections will have delayed repercussions on the number of hospitalizations. We can expect the worst. This is why we understand the decision of public health authorities to proceed with a new lockdown.

However, these numbers are far from inevitable. They are the result of decades of deliberate underfunding and privatization of the public health system in an effort to commodify it.

A new lockdown is nothing more or less than an admission of failure, a flagrant example of the collapse of our public health system. It is no coincidence that here, as everywhere else in the world, it is where budget cuts to healthcare have been deepest that the pandemic is spreading the fastest. In Italy, which was the epicenter of the pandemic last spring, 10 years of underfunding and privatization resulted in a 37 billion euro deficit and the loss of 150,000 hospital beds. In Britain, now in its third lockdown, successive austerity measures since the 1980s have left the health care system a shortfall of more than 10 billion pounds and the loss of 160,000 beds.

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Among the series of crises that the coronavirus pandemic has caused and exposed in Ontario, one of the most dramatic is in housing. Homeless people have been exposed to the virus in overcrowded shelters and, as a result, encampments have grown exponentially. Across the province, municipalities have already bulldozed these encampments or are threatening to do so.

Ontario’s unemployment rate has doubled since the pandemic began. After CERB finished and the emergency freeze on evictions was lifted in August, thousands of tenants were left unable to pay rent and have been evicted or are in the process of being evicted. The tenants involved are disproportionately low-income and racialized people.

The Ford government further weakened tenants’ rights when it passed Bill 184, the perversely named Protecting Tenants and Strengthening Community Housing Act, which heavily favours landlords in the eviction process. At Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) hearings, only 3 percent of tenants have representation, while 80 percent of landlords do. At the end of 2020, the LTB began an online blitz of hearings, with the goal of evicting at least 100 families each day.

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