People's Voice Podcast

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.ca

By Corinne Benson 

From what I have unfortunately had to witness personally, it is hard to imagine making Alberta’s workers’ compensation laws worse.

I have been to the funerals of two Chilean Canadians, who escaped being dumped into the sea by Pinochet only to die from preventable diseases – silicosis and mesothelioma – that they contracted in their workplaces in Canada. In one of these cases, I personally witnessed the day-by-day effect which the illness had on the worker and his family. I heard how they barely could feed themselves while they were on welfare. I heard how the Workers’ Compensation Board (WCB) would phone him, knowing he was going to die, to ask if he was willing to work part-time. I heard of his children mopping up the blood which he vomited as a result of the silicosis. Finally, the court gave them a settlement, saying that the WCB had not given any consideration of how their treatment of him affected his mental health, but every battle along the way was agonizing.

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Farmers in India are fighting a historic struggle for their very survival as farmers. Under cover of the COVID crisis, the far-right government of Narendra Modi passed three pro-corporate agriculture bills which hand control of the sector to monopolies like Ambani, Adani and other multinational domestic and foreign agribusiness firms.

These laws mean that, for the first time since India’s independence from British colonialism, big corporations will be allowed to encroach into agriculture and achieve super profits.

Indian agriculture is crumbling under neoliberal policies, which were introduced in 1991. The peasantry was able to survive throughout all the years since, but the current laws introduced by Modi will remove whatever lifeline is left for them. These policies are pushing agriculture into a deep crisis – in 2019 alone, more than 40,000 farmers died by suicide in the context of agriculture-related debts and other difficulties.

The global capitalist economy is gripped in recession and the neoliberal trajectory has exposed itself as a total failure for solving this crisis. In response, the capitalist class is intensifying its effort to maximize profits; hence, it is seeking new areas of economic activity and markets. The new agriculture laws will allow corporations to control agricultural production, purchasing, storage, marketing and procurement. They will dismantle the Minimum Support Price (MSP) mechanism which guarantees prices for many crops and will privatize public places (known as mandis) where farmers bring crops and government agencies buy them. Corporations will be allowed to open private mandis, buy and hold food grain stocks, and have long-term farm leases. Large-scale contract farming will be allowed. It will be the corporations who decide what crops will be grown, seed type and all other decisions related to agriculture production and sale.

This will seriously jeopardize India’s food security, by creating artificial shortages of food grains while facilitating a massive rise in prices and dismantling the public distribution system.

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Progressive Filipino organizations in North America and Europe are being warning that the government of Rodrigo Duterte is preparing to export its deadly campaign against left-wing activists to those regions.

The National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) was formed in December 2018, to implement Duterte’s “whole nation approach” for defeating the ongoing insurgency by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA). The NTF-ELCAC has an annual budget of nearly 20 billion pesos (over $500 million CAD), approximately the same amount as the government’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources. While the task force is oriented toward the Maoist CPP and NPA, it has also targeted activists in the labour and peasant movements, women’s organizations, youth and students. It has also directed its violence against members of the Communist Party of the Philippines-1930 (PKP-1930), a Marxist-Leninist party that does not presently participate in armed struggle.

Duterte’s anti-communist campaign includes widespread use of “red-tagging.” This is the practice of labelling people deemed to be political opponents as communists or terrorists (the two are synonymous in the government’s vocabulary), thereby opening them up to a range of repressive measures such as interception and recording of communication, detention without charges, restrictions on travel and personal liberties, examination of bank records and seizure of assets. The campaign also includes outright violence – assault, kidnapping, torture, disappearance and murder.

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The Communist Party of Canada extends its full support to India’s farmers who are struggling against mass, brutal police and government repression to protect their farms and their livelihoods from the catastrophic consequences of new laws imposed by the fascist Modi government in September.

The new laws will corporatize agriculture and throw hundreds of millions of small and marginal farmers into bankruptcy and starvation. The current market protections for farmers will evaporate, including government procurement policies and minimum price guarantees, government staple food quotas, state subsidies, marketing boards, farmers’ co-ops, the co-op banking system which provided farmers with cheap loans and the system of Commission agents which advanced funds to small and marginalized farmers.

The new laws will enable the agricultural monopolies to dictate what crops will be grown, what the price of food will be to surviving contract producers and to consumers. They will enable unprecedented corporate price-fixing and profiteering in food production and will give the food monopolies the ability to create massive food shortages in order to do it.

These neoliberal laws, in line with World Trade Organization (WTO) demands that countries eliminate farm-gate price controls, income subsidies and other assistance to small farmers, have stripped small farmers of their power to negotiate with government and corporations, and their legal rights to take disputes to court.  The new laws force them to accept resolution from third parties named by the fascist Modi government.

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The Lima Group is a Canada-led organization dedicated to the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. In January 2019, National Assembly member Juan Guaidó tried to declare himself president of Venezuela, and Lima Group countries—with the exception of Saint Lucia—recognize Guaidó as president.

The Lima Group has faced criticism within Canada and from member states’ politicians and journalists. Dr. Maria Paez Victor, a Venezuelan sociologist living in Canada, explained: “Unable to get the Organization of American States (OAS) votes needed to agree to their nefarious plot, this group of governments with no official international standing, few democratic principles, most led by known discredited leaders… allied itself, throwing all of its diplomatic and economic support behind a man who self-proclaimed himself president of Venezuela in a public plaza, violating the country’s constitution and all electoral rules. So much for the ‘respect for the rule of law’ that the Canadian Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland so frequently spouts.”

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Presstitutes: Embedded in the Pay of the CIA 

Author: Udo Ulfkotte

Publisher: Progressive Press, 2019

Review by Tim Pelzer

It is well documented that the CIA uses the media to spread disinformation. After 1945, in what is known as “Operation Mockingbird,” the agency recruited journalists in major US media to promote its anti-communist Cold War perspective. According to former CIA agent turned whistleblower Philip Agee, the agency has journalists on its payroll across Latin America. In Presstitutes: Embedded in the pay of the CIA, Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor for the mass daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), reveals how the CIA and the German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) use the German media to manipulate and shape public opinion.

The BND recruited Ulfkotte while he was in university and then placed him at FAZ. As a naive young man, he was thrilled to work for his country’s intelligence agency. “However, looking back, l was corrupt, l was manipulative and dealt in disinformation.”

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On September 2, Karl Dockstader from One Dish One Mic Indigenous media was arrested while covering the land defense at 1492 Land Back Lane near Caledonia, Ontario. People’s Voice editor Dave McKee spoke with Karl about that conflict, the struggle against colonialism and the criminalization of Indigenous media.

DM: Can you give an overview of what is happening at 1492 Land Back Lane? It’s a struggle that has received very little, if any, attention in mainstream media.

KD: It all really goes back to 1492, but this most recent land reclamation was initiated on July 19, when a group of Haudenosaunee land defenders saw that an intensive urban development was set to start the heavy construction phase of building homes on land that was a farm for the last century or so, and that for a thousand years before that was traditional hunting territory. There was supposed to have been a moratorium on the territories in the Haldimand Tract, because of the activity that happened in 2006 around the Kanonhstaton and Douglas Creek land reclamation. The federal government, the Crown, the provincial government and the County of Haldimand – the powers that be – are not interested in any way in giving land back to Indigenous people. So, they took land back. And in the words of land defender Skyler Williams, “We took this land back forever.”

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As I move away from the massive kisan (farmers and peasants) assemblage at the Singhu border between the province of Haryana and Delhi, a heavy drizzle starts to add to my misery in the bone-chilling cold of late Indian winter. I plan to drive along several narrow link roads to gain access to the otherwise blocked NH 44 highway, and then to move into the city en route to the airport.

Soon I have to stop as the car is surrounded by several dozen Sikh kisan. They come bearing not only pennants, flags and festoons as souvenirs of my stay, but touchingly, pots of home-cooked food: they remain curiously bare-chested even as the icy rain persists.

Asked why, their aged mukhiya (village head) informs me that the entire gathering would sing and dance in the fierce wintry downpour and shout slogans for a couple of hours to show the jan-virodhi (anti-people) Modi government that “even nature could not cow them down.”

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Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.ca

The defeat of Donald Trump in the US presidential election is an important victory for the progressive and democratic forces in the US who worked tirelessly over the past four years to expose and build broad opposition to the racist, misogynist, reactionary and pro-fascist agenda of the Trump administration.

Trump’s defeat is a victory for all those opposing the drive to authoritarianism, reaction, war and fascism in the US, though the battle is far from over and the new administration continue to be the agents and stewards of the most powerful and violent imperialist power on earth.

President-elect Biden, like all US Presidents before him, represents the interests of Big Business, the transnational corporations and the military-industrial complex, and his job is to protect and expand US corporate profits and US imperialism. Wall Street supports Biden because he is predictable, accountable and dependable, and will work to restore stability at home and US imperialism’s influence, authority and trade globally.

Working people who expect more from the new government will be disappointed. For the working class, the unemployed, farmers, women and youth who have been the victims of Republican and Democratic Party policies over decades, there will be little relief and no fundamental change. For that, they will need a working class party that will fight for their interests and for working class power.

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Henry Norman Bethune was an accomplished surgeon, a communist internationalist and a forgotten hero of Canadian history. As a member of the Communist Party of Canada he fought with anti-fascist forces in Spain and later volunteered in the National Revolutionary Army of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. He was born in Gravenhurst, Ontario on March 4, 1890, and died in the Chinese province of Hebei on November 12, 1939. Despite his enormous courage and deeply felt global solidarity, Bethune has been commemorated quite differently by his native country on the one hand, and the country for which he gave his life on the other.

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