[Peace-discuss] Why Unions Need to Join the Climate Fight

["E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森"]

"Anthropogenic Climate Change" is apparently a Scam,
and an exploitative Shock Doctrine itself.

Caveat Emptor.

But judicious use of resources and eliminating waste
is always a good idea.


On 09/05/13 6:40, David Green wrote:
> Thanks David. Just the kind of thinking I'm trying to encourage in my 
> campaign.
>
>     *From:* David Johnson <davidjohnson1451 at comcast.net>
>     *To:* Undisclosed-Recipient at yahoo.com
>     *Sent:* Wednesday, September 4, 2013 2:40 PM
>     *Subject:* Why Unions Need to Join the Climate Fight
>
>
>     A little long but if you have the time, well worth the read.
>     David J.
>     “Our goal is transformative. To reassert common interest over
>     private interest."
>
>     "Our goal is to change our workplaces and our world. Our vision is
>     compelling."
>
>     "It is to fundamentally change the economy, with equality and
>     social justice, restore and strengthen our democracy and achieve
>     an environmentally sustainable future."
>
>     " This is the basis of social unionism
>     ( as opposed to corporate unionism )
>      – a strong and progressive union culture and a commitment to work
>     in common cause with other progressives in Canada and around the
>     world.”
>
>     "Brothers and Sisters, all I would add is: don’t say it if you
>     don’t mean it. "
>
>     " Because we really, really need you to mean it."
>     *By Naomi Klein - September 3rd, 2013*
>     /Naomi delivered the following speech on September 1, 2013 at the
>     founding convention of UNIFOR <http://www.newunionconvention.ca/>,
>     a new mega union created by the Canadian Autoworkers and the
>     Canadian Energy and Paper Workers Union./
>
>     I’m so very happy and honoured to be able to share this historic
>     day with you.
>
>     The energy in this room – and the hope the founding of this new
>     union has inspired across the country – is contagious.
>
>     It feels like this could be the beginning of the fight back we
>     have all been waiting for, the one that will chase Harper from
>     power and restore the power of working people in Canada.
>
>     So welcome to the world UNIFOR.
>
>     A lot of your media coverage so far has focused on how big UNIFOR
>     is – the biggest private sector union in Canada. And when you are
>     facing as many attacks as workers are in this country, being big
>     can be very helpful. But big is not a victory in itself.
>
>     The victory comes when this giant platform you have just created
>     becomes a place to think big, to dream big, to make big demands
>     and take big actions. The kind of actions that will shift the
>     public imagination and change our sense of what is possible.
>
>     And it’s that kind of “big” that I want to talk to you about today.
>
>     Some of you are familiar with a book I wrote called The Shock
>     Doctrine. It argues that over the past 35 years, corporate
>     interests have systematically exploited various forms of mass
>     crises – economic shocks, natural disasters, wars – in order to
>     ram through policies that enrich a small elite, by shredding
>     regulations, cutting social spending and forcing large-scale
>     privatizations.
>
>     As Jim Stanford and Fred Wilson argue in their paper laying out
>     UNIFOR’s vision, the attacks working people in Canada and around
>     the world are facing right now are a classic case of The Shock
>     Doctrine.
>
>     There’s no shortage of examples, from the mass slashing of
>     salaries and layoffs of public sector workers in Greece, to the
>     attacks on pension funds in Detroit in the midst of a cooked up
>     bankruptcy, to the Harper government’s scapegoating of unions for
>     its own policy failures right here in Canada.
>
>     I don’t want to spend my time with you proving that this ugly
>     tactic of exploiting public fear for private gain is alive and
>     well. You know it is; you are living it.
>
>     I want to talk about how we fight it.
>
>     And I’ll be honest with you: when I wrote the book, I thought that
>     just understanding how the tactic worked, and mobilizing to resist
>     it, would be enough to stop it. We even had a slogan: “Information
>     is shock resistance. Arm yourself.”
>
>     But I have to admit something to you: I was wrong. Just knowing
>     what is happening – just rejecting their story, saying to the
>     politicians and bankers: “No, you created this crisis, not us” or
>     “No, we’re not broke, it’s just that you are hording all the
>     money” may be true but it’s not enough.
>
>     It’s not even enough when you can mobilize millions of people in
>     the streets to shout “We won’t pay for your crisis.” Because let’s
>     face it – we’ve seen massive mobilizations against austerity in
>     Greece, Spain, Italy, France, Britain. We’ve occupied Wall Street
>     and Bay Street and countless other streets. And yet the attacks
>     keep coming.
>
>     Some of the new movements that have emerged in recent years have
>     staying power, but too many of them arrive, raise huge hopes, and
>     then seem to disappear or fizzle out.
>
>     The reason is simple. We are trying to organize in the rubble of a
>     30 year war that has been waged on the collective sphere and
>     workers rights. The young people in the streets are the children
>     of that war.
>
>     And the war has been so complete, so successful, that too often
>     these social movements don’t have anywhere to stand. They have to
>     occupy a park or a square to have a meeting. Or they are able to
>     build a power base in their schools, but that base is transient by
>     its nature, they are out in a few years.
>
>     This transience makes these movements far too easy to evict simply
>     by waiting them out, or by applying brute state force, which is
>     what has happened in far too many cases.
>
>     And this is one of the many reasons why the creation of UNIFOR,
>     and your promise of reviving Social Unionism – building not just a
>     big union but a vast and muscular network of social movements –
>     has raised so much hope.
>
>     Because our movements need each other.
>
>     The new social movements bring a lot to the table – the ability to
>     mobilize huge numbers of people, real diversity, a willingness to
>     take big risks, as well as new methods of organizing including a
>     commitment to deep democracy.
>
>     But these movements also need you – they need your institutional
>     strength, your radical history, and perhaps most of all, your
>     ability to act as an anchor so that we don’t keep rising up and
>     floating away.
>
>     We need you to be our fixed address, our base, so that next time
>     we are impossible to evict.
>
>     And we also need your organizing skills. We need to figure out
>     together how to build sturdy new collective structures in the
>     rubble of neoliberalism. Your innovative idea of community
>     chapters is a terrific start.
>
>     It’s also important to remember that you are not starting from
>     scratch. A remarkable group of people gathered a little less than
>     a year ago for the Port Elgin Assembly and produced what they
>     called the Making Waves agenda.
>
>     The most important message to come out of that process is that our
>     coalitions cannot just be about top-down agreements between
>     leaders; the change has to come from the bottom up, with full
>     engagement from members.
>
>     And that means investing in education. Education about the
>     ideological and structural reasons why we have ended up where we
>     are. If we are going to build a new world, our foundation must be
>     solid.
>
>     It also means getting out there and talking to people face to
>     face. Not just the public, not just the media, but re-invigorating
>     your own members with the analysis we share.
>
>     But there’s something else too. Another reason why we can’t seem
>     to win big victories against the Shock Doctrine.
>
>     Even when there is mass resistance to an austerity agenda, and
>     even when we understand how we got here, something is stopping us
>     – collectively – from fully rejecting the neoliberal agenda.
>
>     And I think what it is is that we don’t fully believe that it’s
>     possible to build something in its place. For my generation, and
>     younger, deregulation, privatization and cutbacks is all we’ve
>     ever known.
>
>     We have little experience building or dreaming. Only defending.
>     And this is what I’ve come to understand as the key to fighting
>     the Shock Doctrine.
>
>     We can’t just reject the dominant story about how the world works.
>     We need our own story about what it could be.
>
>     We can’t just reject their lies. We need truths so powerful that
>     their lies dissolve on contact with them. We can’t just reject
>     their project. We need our own project.
>
>     Now, we know Stephen Harper’s project – he has only one idea for
>     how to build our economy.
>
>     *HARPER’S ONE IDEA*
>
>     Dig lots of holes, lay lots of pipe. Stick the stuff from the
>     pipes onto ships – or trucks, or railway cars – and take it to
>     places where it will be refined and burned. Repeat, but more and
>     faster. Before anyone figures out that this is his one idea, and
>     what has allowed him to maintain the illusion that he is some kind
>     of responsible economic manager, while the rest of the economy
>     falls apart.
>
>     It’s why it’s so important to this government to accelerate oil
>     and gas production at an outrageous pace, and why it has declared
>     war on everyone standing in the way, whether environmentalists or
>     First Nations or other communities.
>
>     It’s also why the Harper government is willing to sacrifice the
>     manufacturing base of this country, waging war on workers,
>     attacking your most basic collective rights.
>
>     This is not just about extracting specific resources – Harper
>     represents an extreme version of a particular worldview. One that
>     I sometimes call “extractivism”. And others times simply call
>     capitalism.
>
>     *EXTRACTIVISM*
>
>     It’s an approach to the world based on taking and taking without
>     giving back. Taking as if there are no limits to what can be taken
>     – no limits to what workers’ bodies can take, no limits to what a
>     functioning society can take, no limits to what the planet can take.
>
>     In the extractivist mindset, labour is a commodity just like the
>     bitumen. And maximum value must be extracted from that resource –
>     ie you and your members – regardless of the collateral damage. To
>     health, families, social fabric, human rights.
>
>     When crisis hits, there is only ever one solution: take some more,
>     faster. On all fronts.
>
>     So that is their story – the one we’re trapped in. The one they
>     use as a weapon against all of us.
>
>     And if we are going to defeat it, we need our own story.
>
>     *CLIMATE CHANGE – DON’T LOOK AWAY*
>
>     So I want to offer you what I believe to be the most powerful
>     counter-narrative to that brutal logic that we have ever had.
>
>     Here it is: our current economic model is not only waging war on
>     workers, on communities, on public services and social safety
>     nets. It’s waging war on the life support systems of the planet
>     itself. The conditions for life on earth.
>
>     Climate change. It’s not an “issue” for you to add to the list of
>     things to worry about it. It is a civilizational wake up call. A
>     powerful message – spoken in the language of fires, floods, storms
>     and droughts – telling us that we need an entirely new economic
>     model, one based on justice and sustainability.
>
>     It’s telling us that when you take you must also give, that there
>     are limits past which we cannot push, that our future health lies
>     not in digging ever deeper holes but in digging deeper inside
>     ourselves – to understand how ALL our fates are interconnected.
>
>     Oh, and one last thing. We need to make this transition, like,
>     yesterday. Because our emissions are going in exactly the wrong
>     direction and there’s very little time left.
>
>     Now I know talking about climate change can be a little
>     uncomfortable for those of you working in the extractive
>     industries, or in manufacturing sectors producing carbon-intensive
>     products like cars and planes.
>
>     I also know that despite your personal fears, you haven’t joined
>     the deniers like some of your counterparts in the U.S. – both of
>     your former unions have all kinds of great climate policies on the
>     books.
>
>     And this isn’t some recent conversion either: the CEP courageously
>     fought for Kyoto all the way back in the 90s. The CAW has been
>     fighting against the environmental destruction of free trade deals
>     even longer. [Former CEP President] Dave Coles even got arrested
>     protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. That was heroic.
>
>     But...how to say this politely?...I think it’s fair to say that
>     climate change hasn’t traditionally been your members greatest
>     passion.
>
>     And I can relate: I’m not an environmentalist. I’ve spent my adult
>     life fighting for economic justice, inside our country and between
>     countries. I opposed the WTO not because of its effects on
>     dolphins but because of its effects on people, and on our democracy.
>
>     The case I want to make to you is that climate change – when its
>     full economic and moral implications are understood – is the most
>     powerful weapon progressives have ever had in the fight for
>     equality and social justice.
>
>     But first, we have to stop running away from the climate crisis,
>     stop leaving it to the environmentalist, and look at it. Let
>     ourselves absorb the fact that the industrial revolution that led
>     to our society’s prosperity is now destabilizing the natural
>     systems on which all of life depends.
>
>     I’m not going to bore you with a whole bunch of numbers. Though I
>     could remind you that the World Bank says we’re on track for a
>     four degrees warmer world. That the International Energy Agency –
>     not exactly a protest camp of green radicals – says the Bank is
>     being too optimistic and we’re actually in for 6 degrees of
>     warming this century, with “catastrophic implications for all of
>     us”. That’s an understatement: we haven’t even reached a full
>     degree of warming yet and look at what is already happening.
>
>     *CLIMATE CHANGE – IS HAPPENING NOW*
>
>     97% of the Greenland ice-sheet's surface was melting last summer –
>     as Bill McKibben says, we’ve taken one of the great features of
>     the planet and broken it.
>
>     And then there are the extreme weather events. Hell, I was in Fort
>     McMurray this summer and the contents of the town’s museum –
>     literally, its history – was floating around in the water.
>
>     I was trying to get interviews with the big oil companies but
>     their headquarters in Calgary were all empty as the downtown was
>     dark and the city was frantically bailing out from the worst flood
>     it has ever seen.
>
>     And not even the provincial NDP had the courage to say: this is
>     what climate change looks like and we are going to have a lot more
>     of it if those oil companies get their way.
>
>     We know that this climate emergency is only getting more dire. And
>     our excuses about why we can’t do anything about it – why it’s
>     somebody else’s issue – are melting away.
>
>     But engaging on climate does not mean dropping everything else you
>     are doing and turning into a raving environmentalist.
>
>     Because I know that the fights you are already waging against
>     austerity, against new free trade deals, against attacks on unions
>     have never been more important.
>
>     Which is why I’m not calling you to drop anything.
>
>     *CLIMATE CHANGE – IS AT THE HEART OF ALL OUR EXISTING DEMANDS*
>
>     My argument is that the climate threat makes the need to fight
>     austerity all the more pressing, since we need public services and
>     public infrastructure to both bring down our emissions and prepare
>     for the coming storms.
>
>     Far from trumping other issues, climate change vindicates much of
>     what the left has been demanding for decades.
>
>     In fact, climate change turbo-charges our existing demands and
>     gives them a basis in hard science. It calls on us to be bold, to
>     get ambitious, to win this time because we really cannot afford
>     any more losses. It enflames our vision of a better world with
>     existential urgency.
>
>     What I’m going to show you is that confronting the climate crisis
>     requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook –
>     and that we do so with great urgency.
>
>     *CLIMATE ACTION = THE LEFT AGENDA*
>
>     So I’m going to quickly lay out what I believe a genuine climate
>     action plan would look like. And it’s not the market-driven
>     non-sense we hear from some of the big green groups in the U.S. –
>     changing your light bulbs, or carbon trading and offsetting. This
>     is the real deal, getting at the heart of why our emissions are
>     soaring.
>
>     And you will notice that a lot this will sound familiar. That’s
>     because much of this agenda is already embraced in the vision of
>     your new union, not to mention everything you have been fighting
>     for in the past.
>
>     First of all, we need to revive and reinvent the public sphere. If
>     we want to lower our emissions, we need subways, streetcars and
>     clean-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to
>     everyone.
>
>     We need energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit
>     lines. We need smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy.
>     We need garbage collection that has, as its goal, the elimination
>     of garbage.
>
>     And we don’t just need new infrastructure. We need major
>     investments in the old infrastructure to cope with the coming
>     storms. For decades we have fought against the steady starving of
>     the public sphere.
>
>     Again and again we’ve seen how those decades of cuts have left us
>     more vulnerable to climate disasters: superstorms bursting through
>     decaying levees, heavy rain washing sewage into lakes, wildfires
>     raging as fire crews are underpaid and understaffed. Bridges and
>     tunnels buckling under the new reality of heavy weather.
>
>     Far from taking us away from the fight for a robust public sphere,
>     climate change puts us right in the middle of it – but this time
>     armed with arguments that raise the stakes significantly. It is
>     not hyperbole to say that our future depends on our ability to do
>     what we have so long been told we can no longer do: act
>     collectively. And who better than unions to carry that message?
>
>     The renewal of the public sphere will create millions of new, high
>     paying union jobs – jobs in fields that don’t hasten the warming
>     of the planet.
>
>     But it’s not just boilermakers, pipefitters, construction workers
>     and assembly line workers who get new jobs and purpose in this
>     great transition.
>
>     There are big parts of our economy that are already low-carbon.
>
>     They’re the parts facing the most disrespect, demeaning attacks
>     and cuts. They happen to be jobs dominated by women, new
>     Canadians, and people of colour.
>
>     And they’re also the sectors we need to expand massively: the
>     care-givers, educators, sanitation workers, and other service
>     sector workers. The very ones that your new union has pledged to
>     organize. The low-carbon workers who are already here, demanding
>     living wages and respect. Turning low-paying low-carbon jobs into
>     higher-paying jobs is itself a climate solution and should be
>     recognized as such.
>
>     Here I think we should take inspiration from the fast-food workers
>     in the United States and their historic strikes this past week.
>     They are showing how this organizing can be done. Maybe it will
>     turn out to be the first uprising in a sustained rebellion
>     fighting for both real wages and real food! One in which the
>     health of the workers and the health of society are inextricably
>     linked.
>
>     It should be clear by now that I am not suggesting some half-assed
>     token “green jobs” program. This is a green labour revolution I’m
>     talking about. An epic vision of healing our country from the
>     ravages of the last 30 years of neoliberalism and healing the
>     planet in the process.
>
>     Environmentalists can’t lead that kind of revolution on their own.
>     No political party is rising to the challenge. We need you to lead.
>
>     *HOW TO PAY FOR IT*
>
>     So the big question is: how are we going to pay for all this?
>
>     I mean, we’re broke, right? Or so our government is always telling
>     us.
>
>     But with stakes this high, crying broke isn’t going to cut it. We
>     know that it’s always possible to find money to bail out banks and
>     start new wars. So that means we have to go to where the money is,
>     and the money is with the fossil fuel companies and the banks that
>     finance them. We have to get our hands on some of their super
>     profits to help clean up the mess they made. It’s a simple
>     concept, well established in law: the polluter pays.
>
>     We know we can’t get the money by continuing to extract more. So
>     as we wind down our dependence on fossil fuels, as we extract
>     LESS, we have to keep MORE of the profits.
>
>     There’s lots of ways to do that. A national carbon tax and higher
>     royalties are the most obvious. A financial transaction tax would
>     be a big help. Raising corporate taxes across the board would too.
>
>     When you do that, suddenly, digging holes and laying pipe isn’t
>     the only option on the table.
>
>     Quick example. A recent study from the CCPA compared the public
>     value from a five billion dollar pipeline – Enbridge Gateway for
>     instance – and the value from the same amount of money invested in
>     green economic development.
>
>     Spend that money on a pipeline, you get mostly short-term
>     construction jobs, big private sector profits, and heavy public
>     costs for future environmental damage.
>
>     Spend that money on public transit, building retrofits and
>     renewable energy, and you get, at the very least, three times as
>     many jobs...not to mention a safer future. The actual number of
>     jobs could be many times more than that, according to their
>     modeling. At the highest end, green investment could create 34
>     times more jobs than just building another pipeline.
>
>     And how do you raise five billion dollars for public investments
>     like that? A minimal national carbon tax of ten dollars a tonne
>     would do the trick. And there would be five billion new dollars
>     every year. Unlike the one-off Enbridge put on the table.
>
>     Environmentalists, and I include myself here, have to do a much
>     better job of not just saying no to projects like Northern Gateway
>     but also forcefully saying yes to our solutions about how to build
>     and finance green infrastructure.
>
>     Now: these alternatives makes perfect sense on paper, but in the
>     real world, they slam headlong into the dominant ideology that
>     tells us that we can’t increase taxes on corporations, that we
>     can’t say no to new investment, and moreover, that we can’t
>     actively decide what kind of economy we want – that we are
>     supposed to leaving it all to the magic of the market.
>
>     Well – we’ve seen how the private sector manages this crisis. It’s
>     time to get back in there. This transition needs to be publicly
>     managed. And that will mean everything from new crown corporations
>     in energy, to a huge re-distribution of power, infrastructure and
>     investment.
>
>     A democratically-controlled, de-centralized energy system operated
>     in the public interest. This agenda is increasingly being
>     described as “energy democracy” and it’s not a new idea in the
>     union world – Sean Sweeney of the Global Labor Institute at
>     Cornell University is here today, and many fine trade unions –
>     including CEP - have been working on this agenda for years. It’s
>     time to turn energy democracy into a reality here in Canada.
>     “Power to the people” is a terrific slogan to start with.
>
>     As you all know, there have been some modest attempts by
>     provincial governments to play a more activist role in bringing
>     about a green transition, while resisting the pressure to double
>     down on dirty energy.
>
>     But in those cases, we’re starting to see something very
>     disturbing. In the provinces where governments have taken the most
>     positive, bold action, they’re getting dragged into trade court.
>
>     And that brings me to the last piece of a real progressive climate
>     agenda.
>
>     *TRADE*
>
>     It’s time to rip up so-called Free Trade deals once and for all.
>     And we sure as hell can’t be signing new ones.
>
>     You’ve fought them for decades now, since the CAW played such a
>     pivotal role in the battle against the first Free Trade deal with
>     the US. You’ve fought them because they undermine workers rights
>     both here and abroad, because they drive a race to the bottom,
>     because they hyper-empower corporations.
>
>     And you were right – even more right than you knew. Because not
>     only is corporate globalization largely responsible for soaring
>     emissions, but now the logic of free trade is directly blocking us
>     from making the specific changes needed to reduce climate chaos in
>     response.
>
>     A couple of quick examples.
>
>     Ontario’s Green Energy plan is far from perfect. But it has a very
>     sensible “buy local” provision so that wind and solar projects in
>     Ontario actually deliver jobs and economic benefits to local
>     communities. It’s the core principle of a just transition.
>
>     Well, the World Trade Organization has decided that this measure
>     is illegal.
>
>     The CAW is already in a coalition fighting back – but more green
>     policies will face the same corporate challenges.
>
>     Here’s another example. Quebec banned fracking – a courageous move
>     that has been taken up by two consecutive governments.
>
>     But a US drilling company is planning to sue Canada for $250-
>     million dollars under NAFTA’s Chapter 11, claiming the ban
>     interferes with its “valuable right to mine for oil and gas under
>     the St. Lawrence river.”
>
>     We should have seen this coming. A WTO official was quoted almost
>     a decade ago, saying that the WTO enables challenges against
>     “almost any measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
>
>     In other words, these maniacs think trade should trump everything,
>     including the planet itself. If there has ever been an argument to
>     stop this madness, climate change is it.
>
>     The battle lines have never been clearer. Climate change is the
>     argument that must trump all others in the battle against
>     corporate free trade. I mean, sorry guys, but the health of our
>     communities and our planet is just a little more important than
>     your god-given right to obscene profits.
>
>     These are moral arguments we can win.
>
>     And we don’t have to wait for governments to give us permission.
>     Next time they close a factory making fossil-fuel machinery –
>     whether cars, tractors, or airplanes – don’t let them do it.
>
>     Do what workers are doing from Argentina to Greece to Chicago:
>     occupy the factory. Turn it into a green worker co-op. Go beyond
>     negotiating a last, sad severance. Demand the resources – from
>     companies and governments – to start building the new economy
>     right now.
>
>     Whether that’s electric trains or windmills. Watch that factory
>     turn into a beacon for students, anti-poverty activists,
>     environmentalists, First Nations. All fighting together for that
>     vision.
>
>     Climate change is a tool. Pick it up and use it. Use it to demand
>     the supposedly impossible.
>
>     It’s not a threat to your jobs, it's the key to liberation from a
>     logic that is already waging a war on the entire concept of
>     dignified work.
>
>     So all we need is the political power to make this vision a
>     reality. And that power can be built on the urgency and science of
>     the climate crisis.
>
>     If we stay true to a clear vision that these changes are what is
>     required to stave off an ecological collapse, then we will change
>     the conversation.
>
>     We’ll escape from the clutches of narrow free-market economics,
>     where we are constantly told to ask for less and expect less and
>     we will find ourselves in a conversation about morality – about
>     what kind of people we want to be, about what kind of world we
>     want for ourselves and our kids.
>
>     If we set the terms of that conversation, we back Stephen Harper
>     up against the wall.
>
>     We finally hold him accountable for the lethal ideology he serves
>     – the one that he has been hiding behind that bland and boring
>     mask of his.
>
>     That’s how you shift the balance of forces in this country.
>
>     If UNIFOR becomes the voice for a boldly different economic model,
>     one that provides solutions to the attacks on working people, on
>     poor people, and the attacks on the Earth itself, then you can
>     stop worrying about your continued relevance.
>
>     You will be on the front lines of the fight for the future, and
>     everyone else – including the opposition parties – will have to
>     follow or be left behind.
>
>     *FIRST NATIONS*
>
>     I believe that a key to this shift is deepening your alliance with
>     First Nations, whose constitutionally guaranteed title to land and
>     resources is the biggest legal barrier Harper faces to his vision
>     of Canada as an extraction and export machine – a country-sized
>     sacrifice zone.
>
>     As my friend Clayton Thomas Mueller says, imagine if the workers
>     and First Nations actually joined forces in a meaningful coalition
>     – the rightful owners of the land, side by side with the people
>     working the mines and pipelines, coming together to demand another
>     economic model?
>
>     People and the earth itself on one side, predatory capitalism on
>     the other.
>
>     The Harper Tories wouldn’t know what hit them.
>
>     But this is about more than strategic alliances. As we tell our
>     own story of a different Canada to stand up to Harper’s story
>     about endless extraction, we will need to learn from the
>     Indigenous worldview. The one that understands that you can’t just
>     take and take, but also care-take, and give back whenever you
>     harvest. That five-year-plans are for kids, and grownups think
>     about seven generations. A worldview that reminds us that there
>     are always unforeseen consequences because everything is connected.
>
>     Because building the kinds of deep coalitions that we need begins
>     with identifying the threads that connect all of our struggles.
>     And indeed that recognize they are the SAME struggle.
>
>     I want to leave you with a word that might help. Overburden.
>
>     *OVERBURDEN*
>
>     When I was in the tar sands earlier this summer, I kept thinking
>     about it. Overburden is the word used by mining companies to
>     describe the “waste earth covering a mineral deposit.”
>
>     But mining companies have a strange definition of waste. It
>     includes forests, fertile soil, rocks, clay – basically anything
>     that stands between them and the gold, copper, or bitumen they are
>     after.
>
>     Overburden is the life that gets in the way of money. Life treated
>     as garbage.
>
>     As we passed pile after pile of masticated earth by the side of
>     the road, it occurred to me that it wasn’t just the dense and
>     beautiful Boreal forest that was “overburden” to these companies.
>
>     We are all overburden. That’s certainly the way the Harper
>     government sees us.
>
>     - Unions are overburden since the rights you have won are a
>     barrier to unfettered greed.
>
>     - Environmentalists are overburden, because they are always going
>     on about climate change and oil spills.
>
>     - Indigenous people are overburden, since their rights and court
>     challenges get in the way.
>
>     - Scientists are overburden, since their research proves what I’ve
>     been telling you.
>
>     - Democracy itself is overburden to our government – whether it’s
>     the right of citizens to participate in an environmental
>     assessment hearing, or the right of Parliament to meet and debate
>     the future of the country.
>
>     This is the world deregulated capitalism has created, one in which
>     anyone and anything can find themselves discarded, chewed up,
>     tossed on the slag heap.
>
>     But “overburden” has another meaning. It also means, simply, “to
>     load with too great a burden”; to push something or someone beyond
>     their limits.
>
>     And that’s a very good description of what we’re experiencing too.
>
>     Our crumbling infrastructure is overburdened by new demands and
>     old neglect.
>
>     Our workers are overburdened by employers who treat their bodies
>     like machines.
>
>     Our streets and shelters are overburdened by those whose labour
>     has been deemed disposable.
>
>     The atmosphere is overburdened with the gasses we are spewing into
>     it.
>
>     And it is in this context that we are hearing shouts of “enough!”
>     from all quarters. This much and NO further.
>
>     We heard it from the fast food worker in Milwaukee, who went on
>     strike this week holding a sign saying, “I am worth more” and
>     helped set off a national debate about inequality.
>
>     We heard it from the Quebec Students last summer, who said “No” to
>     a tuition increase and ended up unseating a government and
>     sparking a national debate about the right to free education.
>
>     We heard it from the four women who said “No” to Harper’s attacks
>     on environmental protections and indigenous rights, pledging to be
>     Idle No More, and ended up setting off an indigenous rights
>     uprising across North America.
>
>     And we are hearing “Enough” from the planet itself as it fights
>     back in the only ways it can.
>
>     Everywhere, life is reasserting itself. Insisting that it is not
>     overburden.
>
>     We are starting to realize that not only have we had enough – but
>     that there is enough.
>
>     To quote Evo Morales, there is enough for all of us to live well.
>     There just isn’t enough for some of us to live better and better.
>
>     To close off, I want to read an excerpt from Article 2 of your
>     brand new constitution.
>
>     Words that many of us have been waiting a very long time to hear.
>     Words that you may have already heard today, but they bear
>     repeating. Here goes...
>
>     “Our goal is transformative. To reassert common interest over
>     private interest.
>
>     Our goal is to change our workplaces and our world. Our vision is
>     compelling.
>
>     It is to fundamentally change the economy, with equality and
>     social justice, restore and strengthen our democracy and achieve
>     an environmentally sustainable future.
>
>     This is the basis of social unionism – a strong and progressive
>     union culture and a commitment to work in common cause with other
>     progressives in Canada and around the world.”
>
>     Brothers and Sisters, all I would add is: don’t say it if you
>     don’t mean it.
>
>     Because we really, really need you to mean it.
>
>     Thank you.
>
>     END
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
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>    

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