joe hill by phil ochs by billy bragg

Joe Hill - Phil Ochs - Billy Bragg. That's quite a trio right there.

Don't mourn, organize!

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george galloway speaks on revolutions in middle east; mini-conference on women and revolution

If you're in Toronto and interested in a progressive perspective on the revolutions in the Middle East, you could learn a lot at either or both of these.

George Galloway speaks on revolution in the Arab world

Monday, March 14
Doors open: 6:15 p.m.
Event begins: 7:00 p.m.

Trinity-St. Paul's Centre
427 Bloor Street West

Tickets: $10 and up, or pay what you can. There are no advance ticket sales; please arrive early to guarantee admission.

Event on facebook

In the first few weeks of 2011, revolutions have swept across the Arab world, toppling dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, and threatening to topple one in Libya. Uprisings are also underway in Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere, as people all across the region - including in Saudi Arabia - stand up against tyranny and oppression.

Please join us for this special event to hear long-time anti-war and Palestine solidarity campaigner George Galloway talk about the current situation in the Arab world, and what we can do in Canada to support the Arab peoples' struggle for liberation.

A discussion period will follow Mr. Galloway's speech.

Organized by the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War

* * * *

Women, Resistance and Revolution

Revolution is sweeping the Arab world. In Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt and now Libya, women are playing a central role in these movements. In so doing they are defying stereotypes and inspiring struggles all over the world by showing the possibility of genuine women's liberation. At the same time, the government of Stephen Harper continues to attack women's rights here in Canada. Join the International Socialists for this one-day conference as we examine the roots of women's oppression, why it persists today and what can be done to fight it.

Saturday, March 19, 11:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
OISE room 4414
252 Bloor St West (St. George Subway)

11:30am: registration

12-1:15pm: The origins of women's oppression and why it persists

1:30-2:45pm: Women, Islamophobia and revolution in the Middle East

3-4:30pm: The new sexism and how we fight back today

$10 or pay what you can

Organized by the UofT International Socialists

Information and registration:
international.socialists@utoronto.ca
416.972.6391
IS Canada

Event on Facebook

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must-watch video: michael moore to wisconsin protesters: america is not broke

Michael Moore gives the progressive troops in Wisconsin a great boost.

"America is not broke, and neither is Wisconsin. . . . America is awash with wealth, it's just not in your hands." Don't miss this, it's very good.

I wish Moore had mentioned the trillions of dollars the US is spending on the largest military budget in history. But it's still great stuff, and worth watching the whole thing.

Story here on TPM.

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zibwawe activists arrested, charged with capital offence for discussing world events: your help needed

On Saturday, February 19, Zimbabwean police raided a meeting of the International Socialist Organisation. 52 people were arrested - students, union members and workers - and are still being detained at Harare Central prison. Please see below for how you can help.

The Central Intelligence Organisation infiltrated the meeting, where people were discussing the events in the Middle East and the fall of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. Munyaradzi Gwisai, the director of the Labour Law Center, is among those detained.

The most recent report is that none have been released and that they are being charged with treason. This is a very serious charge that carries the death penalty.

This directly from Ashley Fataar, Claire Ceruti and Shone Igene of the group Keep Left, South Africa:

Our contact went to court this afternoon. All 52 were at court an hour before the Magistrate arrived. The prosecutor looked surprised that the Magistrate – and the lawyers for the accused – wanted the comrades to appear in the court. It took ages before everyone was brought in, and named, and accounted for.

Meanwhile, the prosecution had sprung new charges on the accused at the last minute – the lawyers for the accused weren’t even aware of them until they all got to court. The extra charge is Treason. The first charge of "Plotting to subvert the government through unconstitutional means" is now just the back-up charge.

Having had all the charges read out to them, at least five did not understand what they were being charged for, understandably. So the Magistrate ordered all the 52 to report back tomorrow (Thursday). They are now spending their fifth night in jail.

After the case was adjourned, the women prisoners were then handcuffed and had leg irons placed on them. They have been taken to the maximum security jail called Chikurubi on the outskirts of Harare. Lawyers have still been denied access to them to explain what they are being charged for.

These are simply delaying tactics to deny the comrades their freedom. What they are being charged for means that the case will have to go to the High Court - a further delay as more papers get prepared.

We are asking comrades to also organise protests outside their nearest Zimbabwean embassy as a matter of urgency, where possible.

What you can do:

1. Call the Zimbabwe Embassy in Ottawa. It doesn’t matter what time of day; leave a message). 613.421.2824 For speaking notes, see sample letter, below.

2. Send an email.

Embassy of the Republic of Zimbabwe in Ottawa, Ontario: visa@zimottawa.com
Embassy of the Republic of Zimbabwe in London, England: zimlondon@yahoo.co.uk
Please cc: ashley_fataar@yahoo.co.uk, shanthabloemen@gmail.com, socialismfrombelow@gmail.com

Please also cc your own Member of Parliament.

Here's a sample letter, to modify as you see fit:

To: The Ambassadors of the Republic of Zimbabwe in Ottawa, Canada & London, England
Ms. Florence Zano Chideya
Mr. Gabriel Mharadze Machinga

I am writing to demand that your government drop the charges of "treason" against those who met to discuss current events in Northern Africa. It is appalling that on February 20, over 50 people who were participating in an academic debate were arrested, beaten, and charged with treason. This form of repression is unacceptable in any democracy. Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are fundamental human rights that must be respected.

I understand that those arrested are being held in Harare Central prison. I also understand that among those arrested is Munyaradzi Gwisai, the director of the Labour Law Center and a former elected Member of Parliament. I am calling on your government to drop all charges and release all detainees immediately.

I have copied my own Member of Parliament, [add the name of your MP here].

Canadians are demanding that all charges are dropped immediately, and that every person arrested on Saturday is released quickly, without further harm and without retribution.

Sincerely,

[your name, your city], Canada

For more information:

Socialist Worker UK

New York Times

Toronto Sun

AP

In Ottawa, there will be a small picket at the Zimbabwe Embassy. More details to follow. You can email me for information.

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ted rall on the limits of leftist humour

I meant to include this in my earlier post about Ted Rall's new book. Just as well, it's worth reading on its own.

Advo­cate: Speak­ing of the Left: in your book you are pretty harsh on some very well liked and admired fig­ures on the Left. Michael Moore, for instance, and the Yes Men, whom I think are really hilar­i­ous...

TR: They are hilarious.

Advo­cate: So, what’s up with that? What’s the prob­lem with what they do? Aren’t they allies in your cause?

TR: I would say the rea­son I picked them is because they are so good. They are the best that the offi­cial Amer­i­can Left has to offer, in the same way that Obama is the best, in terms of the main­stream polit­i­cal sys­tem, that the sys­tem has to offer.

Michael Moore has got this immense audi­ence of tens of mil­lions of peo­ple, his movies can open up in hun­dreds of the­atres, he can talk about things that no one else can talk about, he’s got this great Mid­west­ern folksy sen­si­bil­ity, he has a gen­tle deliv­ery; he’s really kind of a genius. And his TV show was even bet­ter than his movies I think. And the Yes Men are great too.

And I am sure you’re ask­ing your­self, ok what are you talk­ing about, why are you down on these guys so much, and it’s because they don’t go there. Like Jon Stew­art and Col­bert, this kind of dis­sent val­i­dates the offi­cial sys­tem by say­ing “look at the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal sys­tem; it’s so big and open minded that it even allows a guy like Michael Moore or the Yes Men or John Stew­art to oper­ate.” And the impli­ca­tion is, it’s not that bad.

But you notice that they mar­gin­al­ize peo­ple who actu­ally call for rad­i­cal change, like Howard Zinn or Ralph Nader. Those peo­ple are not allowed to get their mes­sage out. So you’re allowed to go up to the edge of ridi­cul­ing, but you can’t call for real change; all you can do is poke gen­tle fun, or not so gen­tle fun, but it’s got to be all in fun. You can’t call for the actual sys­tem to be replaced, and that was really the argu­ment I was try­ing to make there.

I would argue that Michael Moore has indeed called for the system to be replaced, but as Rall says, he has couched these demands in humour. People like Moore, Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Chris Rock and others function like court jesters: they are given freedom to ridicule leaders and speak truths others can't get away with, but no one in power takes them seriously. Stewart, with his softball interviews with right-wing celebrities and obeisance to some false notion of balance, is especially jester-like.

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ted rall, tunisia, egypt, wisconsin and revolution

I've been meaning to post this interview with cartoonist and activist Ted Rall ever since Allan said, "You must read this - he sounds exactly like us."

Rall's new book is The Anti-American Manifesto; this interview is in the CUNY [City University of New York] Graduate School Advocate.

Reluctant Revolutionary: An Interview With Ted Rall

Advo­cate: . . . In your new book you explic­itly advo­cate the use of rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence. It’s hard to get any more rad­i­cal than that and I can’t imag­ine the deci­sion to write such a book was an easy one to make. Indeed, in con­ver­sa­tions with friends about the book I’ve found that even the men­tion of rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence is almost uni­ver­sally greeted with dis­dain, shock, or dis­be­lief. I am really inter­ested in how you came to this deci­sion to write the book, the events or ideas that led you to this argu­ment, and why you felt com­pelled to write this book now?

Ted Rall: Well, it was a very dif­fi­cult deci­sion, from a career stand­point as well as from the stand­point of being a sim­ple Amer­i­can cit­i­zen. As a stu­dent of his­tory I am well aware of the fact that rev­o­lu­tion is dan­ger­ous and vio­lent and bru­tal and can make things worse before they make things bet­ter, so it’s not a deci­sion to be taken lightly. I want to be very clear that even though the book is a call to arms and a call to get rid of the cur­rent gov­ern­ment, and it does def­i­nitely defend the use of vio­lence (I would say that there is no such thing as non-violent rev­o­lu­tion; no rad­i­cal change has ever taken place with­out vio­lence or the cred­i­ble threat of vio­lence), but I think there is a ten­dency to sen­sa­tion­al­ize the vio­lent aspect of the book. Most rev­o­lu­tion­ary activ­ity is inher­ently non-violent actu­ally. It’s just that vio­lence is part of the revolutionist’s tool­box; it has to be, oth­er­wise there is no way to cred­i­bly remove the state. The rich and the pow­er­ful don’t give up wealth and power vol­un­tar­ily so you can’t fight it non­vi­o­lently with­out effec­tively tying one hand behind your back.

In terms of the deci­sion to write the book I kind of fol­lowed a sim­ple, log­i­cal process, which is to ask myself and many other peo­ple whether there was any pos­si­bil­ity that this sys­tem, the Democ­rats and the Repub­li­cans and the cor­po­ratist cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem that they sup­port, could or would address any of the really seri­ous press­ing prob­lems that are faced by the Unites States today  —  whether those are income inequal­ity or the envi­ron­ment and cli­mate change, or sky­rock­et­ing deficits, or war and mil­i­tarism, or health­care  —  and I don’t think so.

. . . When Obama refused to be the new FDR I knew that, Obama being about the best most pro­gres­sive, smartest pres­i­dent we were gonna get out of this sys­tem, I knew that the time had arrived to call for rev­o­lu­tion. Now I wish that other peo­ple were doing it, I wish that I could join some­one else’s move­ment. I don’t want to stick my neck out; it’s not fun to attract all of this heat, but no one else is doing it. There’s no Left what­so­ever in the United States. All there is is wimpy lib­er­als. So, I wrote this book in order to start a con­ver­sa­tion. This is not rev­o­lu­tion for dum­mies, this is not a how-to guide, this is not the anar­chists’ cook­book. If you are pick­ing this up look­ing for how to over­throw the US gov­ern­ment buy another book; this is not that book. This is a book that cre­ates the space to have a dis­cus­sion that is just not even part of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. Amer­i­can pol­i­tics occurs strictly between the Ds and the Rs. We don’t even talk about the Greens and the Lib­er­tar­i­ans, much less the pos­si­bil­ity of get­ting rid of the sys­tem entirely.

Advo­cate: Along those same lines, how has your life changed since the pub­li­ca­tion of the book? What’s the last month been like for Ted Rall? What have you learned about Amer­ica, par­tic­u­larly con­cern­ing the sub­ject of this book?

TR: I guess many things did not come as a sur­prise. The fact that the media and the polit­i­cal sys­tem are so deeply entrenched and unwill­ing to con­sider actual change came as no sur­prise. The fact that there are many very reac­tionary, hate­ful peo­ple who defend the sta­tus quo no mat­ter what came as no sur­prise either. But what did come as a sur­prise were the huge crowds that came out to my book sign­ings, which indi­cated to me that there is a thirst for talk­ing about these sorts of options. Many, many peo­ple have been over the sys­tem for a long time, but that con­ver­sa­tion doesn’t take place, so I pro­vided a forum for that kind of dia­logue to hap­pen. What I’ve learned, and it’s kind of what I sus­pected, is that there are a lot of peo­ple out there like me. I wouldn’t have writ­ten the book if I thought I was alone. I don’t think I’m such a unique thinker. A lot of peo­ple can look at the same set of cir­cum­stances and draw sim­i­lar con­clu­sions, and they have. So in terms of how my life has changed, I mean, it hasn’t really, except for being very, very busy doing inter­views, but that’s about it.

I've always said that, despite the persistent, ignorant and usually imaginary fear of socialism and communism that runs through US history, the real danger to US democracy has always been from forces on the right. I've blathered about this ad nauseum on wmtc, no need to flog the "fascist shift" theme here. Now, events in the Middle East, the successful leftist movements transforming South America, and the sudden spark of progressive engagement emanating from Wisconsin and rippling through other states, are combining to give me new hope. These events are reminders that none of us can predict the future.

No people's movement, no matter how successful, has ever known the outcome of their struggle in advance. All we can do is keep on keepin' on.

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reading list redux: taibbi in rolling stone, elliott in mother jones

A few weeks ago, I highlighted three long magazine articles that, taken together, demonstrate so much of what is wrong with the profit-driven system that dominates our world. They document how capitalism is destroying the environment, health care, and in general, people's lives.

Well, I'm back to repeat myself. This story by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone is a brilliant piece of investigative journalism almost guaranteed to amaze you. The depth and breadth of corruption - in both financial and legal systems designed to increase the wealth and power of giant banks while destroying low- and middle-income Americans - are simply mind-boggling. Do yourself a favour and read this: "Invasion of the Home Snatchers: How the courts are helping bankers screw over homeowners and get away with fraud".

If you are interested in health care, and why it needs to be publicly financed, why profit needs to be removed from the system, don't miss "Making A Killing," by Carl Elliott in Mother Jones. An excerpt and links to important sidebars are in my post here.

And the third story I had highlighted is really a series of articles and analysis about the BP disaster, also in Mother Jones. It may be the definitive investigation of how BP is burying the evidence of their crimes against our planet.

I will try to post about these stories again, but I can't guarantee anything.

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capitalist destruction: our health, our environment, our communities: three great articles

I've been working my way through a trio of long magazine articles, courtesy of our public library, that I must share with you.

From a writer's perspective, these are exactly the kind of journalism I once aspired to (and had a small taste of). Enormous amounts of time and work go into pieces like this - background interviews that don't appear in the story, hours tracking down leads, many more hours spent simply observing, reams of interview transcripts, countless rounds of editing. This is something no blogger or reporter can do on her own. Magazines have to pay for this, or it can't be done - which is why it has become so rare.

From a political perspective, these stories are about widely different subjects, but one common thread runs through them all.

If you read only one of these stories, I strongly recommend "Making A Killing," by Carl Elliott in Mother Jones, an exposé of the corrupt, profit-generating business of clinical drug trials. If there was ever an argument for getting the profit motive out of health care, this is it.

Documents unsealed in related civil suits suggest an alarming pattern of deception. Sales reps were instructed to tell doctors that Seroquel doesn't cause diabetes, even though the company knew about the link to diabetes as early as 1997. Internal correspondence reveals company officials discussing how to hide or spin potentially damaging studies. "Thus far, we have buried trials 15, 31, 56," wrote a publications manager in 1999. "The larger issue is how do we face the outside world when they begin to criticize us for suppressing data."

One of those potentially damaging studies led back to the University of Minnesota. . . . In the late 1990s, a clinical trial known as Study 15 unexpectedly failed to show that Seroquel was any better than Haldol, a generic antipsychotic that's been on the market since the 1960s. In fact, on the main measures, Seroquel performed worse than Haldol. The study also showed that Seroquel increased the risk of weight gain and diabetes. Internal correspondence repeatedly refers to Study 15 as a "failed study," and company officials discuss possible ways to spin or bury it. "I am not 100% comfortable with this data being made publicly available at the present time,". . . .

Even more alarming are internal documents suggesting that AstraZeneca was designing clinical trials as a covert method of marketing Seroquel. In 1997, when Dr. Andrew Goudie, a psychopharmacologist at the University of Liverpool, asked AstraZeneca to fund a research study he was planning, a company official replied that "R&D is no longer responsible for Seroquel research — it is now the responsibility of Sales and Marketing." The official also noted that funding decisions would depend on whether the study was likely to show a "competitive advantage for Seroquel."

Another set of documents from 2003 describes a glucose metabolism study apparently designed to fend off the charge that Seroquel causes patients to gain weight and become diabetic. One slide describes two purposes for the study: a "regulatory" purpose and a "commercial" purpose. The regulatory purpose was to "produce data that will help us defend the Seroquel label." The commercial purpose was to "produce data that will enable us to generate commercially attractive and competitive messages in relation to diabetes and weight." . . .

Many clinical studies place human subjects at risk—at a minimum, the risk of mild discomfort, and at worst, the risk of serious pain and death. Bioethicists and regulators spend a lot of time and energy debating the degree of risk that ought to be permitted in a study, how those risks should be presented to subjects, and the way those risks should be balanced against the potential benefits a subject might receive. What is simply assumed, without much consideration at all, is that the research is being conducted to produce scientific knowledge. This assumption is codified in a number of foundational ethics documents, such as the Nuremberg Code, which was instituted following Nazi experiments on concentration camp victims. The Nuremberg Code stipulates that an "experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society," and "the degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment."

But what if a research study is not really aimed at producing genuine scientific knowledge at all? The documents emerging in litigation suggest that pharmaceutical companies are designing, analyzing, and publishing trials primarily as a way of positioning their drugs in the marketplace. This raises a question unconsidered in any current code of research ethics. How much risk to human subjects is justified in a study whose principal aim is to "generate commercially attractive messages"?

If you read Elliott's story, don't miss these two important sidebars: "What Happens When Profit Margins Drive Clinical Research?" and "Poor Reviews: Profit pressures gut guinea pigs' only safeguard: institutional review boards".

Next, also from Mother Jones, a series of reports and analysis on the BP disaster and cover-up: BP's Deep Secrets. This was a cover-story package of six different articles; the lead story by Julia Whitty is especially important.

And finally, from the November 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reports from Florida: "Invasion of the Home Snatchers: How the courts are helping bankers screw over homeowners and get away with fraud".

The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby­rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.

The Real Reason America’s Cities and Towns Are Broke

The rocket docket wasn't created to investigate any of that. It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville judge, the Honorable A.C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes.

. . . When I went to sit in on Judge Soud's courtroom in downtown Jacksonville, I was treated to an intimate, and at times breathtaking, education in the horror of the foreclosure crisis, which is rapidly emerging as the even scarier sequel to the financial meltdown of 2008: Invasion of the Home Snatchers II. In Las Vegas, one in 25 homes is now in foreclosure. In Fort Myers, Florida, one in 35. In September, lenders nationwide took over a rec­ord 102,134 properties; that same month, more than a third of all home sales were distressed properties. All told, some 820,000 Americans have already lost their homes this year, and another 1 million currently face foreclosure. . . .

You've heard of Too Big to Fail — the foreclosure crisis is Too Big for Fraud. Think of the Bernie Madoff scam, only replicated tens of thousands of times over, infecting every corner of the financial universe. The underlying crime is so pervasive, we simply can't admit to it — and so we are working feverishly to rubber-stamp the problem away, in sordid little backrooms in cities like Jacksonville, behind doors that shouldn't be, but often are, closed.

And that's just the economic side of the story. The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis — and, of course, in capitalism we're not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let's mention it anyway — shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence. The monster in the foreclosure crisis has no face and no brain. The mortgages that are being foreclosed upon have no real owners. The lawyers bringing the cases to evict the humans have no real clients. It is complete and absolute legal and economic chaos. No single limb of this vast man-­eating thing knows what the other is doing, which makes it nearly impossible to combat — and scary as hell to watch.

Have you spotted the common theme? Clinical drug trials that produce both unsafe drugs and massive profit for university researchers, pharmaceutical companies - and the people who are supposed to be overseeing them. The destruction of the environment by one the world's largest corporations and the bottomless resources they've committed to avoiding responsibility. Millions of Americans losing their homes because of massive financial fraud, in which the perpetrators walk away without losing a penny, the public pays for their privilege, people the world over suffer extreme deprivations, and finally, the corrupt financial and legal systems will profit further from the loss.

What drives each of these human-made disasters? Profit.

Capitalism is collapsing, and we are all paying the price.

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tunisia, egypt, who is next? around the globe, revolutions

Revolution is spreading. On the heels of massive protests and demonstrations throughout Europe, Tunisians take back their country, and now Cairo rises up against Mubarak.

This morning the Canadian mainstream media is all agog with a speech out of Washington DC that will change absolutely nothing. CBC Headline: Obama urges people to create brighter future! ( Oh gosh, does he really?!) Meanwhile, much of the world is actually trying to do just that.

It's so exciting! I wish I had time to follow it all more closely. I'm filled with awe and more than a little envy.

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how to save the public library (a fry truck experience)

I have two papers due on the same day, and one of them is the most dreaded assignment for the most dreaded class of my entire degree. At least that will soon be over with! Unfortunately, though, this leaves me with little brain or time to blog.

I will use this as an opportunity to post one of my papers. The last time I posted a paper, it sparked some interesting discussion. At the very least, this will help me feel like my blog is not a total waste of pixels. Plus, this paper earned me fries! I got them yesterday. They were just the way I like them: super well-done, crispy.

This was my final paper for the course Foundations of Library and Information Science. From a choice of topics I chose this:

Select one type of library or information centre. Discuss the most serious challenges facing that institution today, paying particular attention to its foundational values, principles and assumptions. What kinds of activities (research, services, education, staffing, funding, etc) might turn these challenges into opportunities?

I've removed the citations or turned them into links where possible.

* * * *

Privatization, Digitization, and How the Public Library Can Survive:
the Four Rs

The most serious challenges facing the public library today are unchecked capitalism, the disintermediation brought by digital technologies, and the intersection of the two. This paper explores the present and potential effects of those challenges on the health and future of public libraries in North America. With a nod to the Canadian Library Association's President’s Council on the 8Rs, this paper proposes the 4Rs needed to turn these challenges into opportunities: relevancy, reinvention, raising awareness, and resistance.

The dominant economic model and social spending priorities

When discussing the challenges facing public libraries, funding generally tops the list. Funding, however, is a symptom of an underlying disease. First-world societies around the globe are suffering through drastic cutbacks of public-sector spending. In the United Kingdom, 500,000 workers will be jettisoned from public payrolls in the next four years. Widespread library closures are expected; as many as one out of every four librarians may lose her job over the next year. In the United States, cities and states cannot afford adequate public services; public libraries have resorted to charging fees, reducing hours and closing branches to survive. Although the situation is Canada is not as dire, Canadian municipalities have never recovered from the spending cuts of earlier decades. At the same time, in 2010 U.S. businesses earned profits at the highest rate since statistics have been kept, totaling $1.66 trillion in the third quarter alone. The tax structure ensures that the public coffers enjoy no corresponding rise in wealth, and a full 54% of the U.S. federal budget feeds a military-industrial complex that is largely privatized. Viewed through this lens, the public library suffers not from a mere lack of funds, but from an economic system that privileges private-sector profit over public welfare.

Digitization leading to a perception of obsolescence

The public library is also challenged by digitization and the disintermediation of the internet. In information school classes, professional journals and library blogs, one constantly encounters the question, "Can Google replace the library?". Titles such as "Where is the librarian in the digital library?" and "Competing with Google in a special library" abound. While many professions grapple with the encroachment of technology on jobs once thought to be immune to automation, librarians are unusual in the persistent gap between the librarian's understanding of her job and the public's understanding of it. Class discussions and student field reports demonstrate that library users underestimate and under-value the work of librarians, observations supported by research. While citizens may research medical or legal questions online, they still see a doctor when they are ill or hire a lawyer to represent them in court. After gathering information online, how many people consult a librarian? Indeed, our profession's core values may unintentionally contribute to our own demise, as we encourage independent information-seeking.

The perception that the internet has rendered librarians obsolete creates an easy, if mistaken, budget solution: their expensive professional salaries become a logical target for the budget axe. Without professional staff, the library becomes a mere book repository run by clerks. In several U.S. cities, human interaction has been eliminated entirely with the introduction of automated "book lockers," which resemble vending machines. The demise of the public library speaks to issues much larger than protecting our profession; it widens the digital divide. Many people depend upon the library for both computer use and internet access. Inadequate funding decreases public access to education and information – an injustice to the community, and a danger to democratic values. If we want a society that values education, inquiry, self-government and freedom of information for all citizens, regardless of socioeconomic status, then we must protect the public library as an essential service.

Four Rs: relevancy, reinvention, raising awareness, resistance

Public libraries can address this challenge with a four-pronged approach:
* relevancy – stay relevant to the community,
* reinvention – make the library an indispensable community centre,
* raising awareness – promote the reinvented library, and
* resistance – fight for a society that values public services.

Relevancy. If libraries are to continue to receive public funding, they must remain relevant to the communities they serve – a seemingly simple statement, but a complex, controversial, and sometimes contradictory mandate. Relevancy may focus on collection development, with a robust collection of popular novels and movies. Or relevancy may be framed in educational terms: Baldwin feels the "'give 'em what they want' philosophy" is a dangerous mistake, and proposes librarians become "knowledge provocateurs," helping users access "real information" through alternate news sources. For Birdi, Wilson and Tso, relevancy presupposes empathy – the human touch that distinguishes the library from an internet search engine. Not only will relevancy be defined differently by different libraries, that definition should evolve with each community's needs. Relevancy should be an ongoing conversation – a process more than a product – that includes input from users, gathered through surveys, usage tracking, focus groups, and other methods. In an era when the need for the public library is being questioned, librarians cannot afford to ignore or dismiss this discussion.

Reinvention. This paper proposes that the best way for libraries to remain relevant is to reinvent themselves as community centres – a one-stop shop, so to speak, for a variety of services tailored to the needs of its community. Free computer classes, high-speed internet access, resume workshops, education and career research, and space for book clubs are only a few obvious possibilities. McKenzie et. al study libraries that offer storytime for parents and toddlers, and a meeting space for a knitting group. Fisher, Durrance and Hinton describe the rich programs of New York City's Queens Borough Public Library (QBPL), aimed at the borough’s burgeoning and diverse immigrant population. The QBPL's workshops in language, literacy, employment, and cultural understanding offer tremendous potential for users, and position the library as an indispensable resource. In the Mississauga Library System, users can join an English conversation circle, research their ancestry, or borrow a pedometer as part of a program to encourage physical activity. The possibilities are limited only by imagination and budget, and creative programming may result in increased funding.

Raising awareness. Programs are useless if people don't know they exist. Libraries must exploit every means available to promote their programs – social networking media, community newspapers, outdoor signage, email alerts, public school visits, brochures. The QBPL, for example, distributes millions of multilingual brochures annually and taps into ethnic media outlets. We must be alert to new and creative ways to trumpet our services and present libraries as the essential service we believe they are. Combining the first three Rs – reinventing the public library as a community centre with an emphasis on relevancy, then promoting those programs in the community – will ultimately translate into more library users. More users help justify continued funding.

Resistance. The final "R" in the 4R plan is resistance, used in the political sense: actively opposing government policies that destroy public services. Rather than see ourselves in competition with other public-sector employees for a slice of a shrinking public-sector pie, we should strive to make a larger pie. Author Philip Pullman made this connection when speaking out against the massive cuts to library services announced in the U.K.:

Those who think that every expert can be replaced by a cheerful volunteer who can step in and do a complex task for nothing but a cup of tea are those who fundamentally want to see every single public service sold off, closed down, abolished. . . . [T]he delusion that has gripped every politician in the western world for 30 years or so now is that when you lower taxes, the commercial world will take care of everything. The destruction of the library service is part of a wider malaise.

This activism can take many forms – lobbying the government, working to elect representatives committed to the public sector, writing letters to newspapers, blogging, leafletting. Resistance should especially include supporting other municipal workers in their struggles – teachers, transit workers, nurses, sanitation workers. We must look beyond the issues of our own profession, and help create a society that is willing to support public services. If we want a world that values public libraries, we have to create it.

Conclusion

While it may appear that the greatest challenge facing public libraries today is a shortage of resources, the developed world has sufficient wealth to maintain stellar libraries. However, the dominant economic system impedes the adequate funding of libraries and other essential public services. If libraries are to survive and thrive, librarians must keep libraries relevant and must raise awareness of library programs within their communities. This paper proposes a reinvention of the public library as a multifaceted community centre. From a broader perspective, librarians must join the struggle to create a society that values and maintains healthy public services.

[references not linked above]

Abram, S. (2005). Competing with Google in a special library. Information Outlook, 9(11), 46-47.

Baldwin, M. (2006). Librarians as knowledge provocateurs. Verso, 11(4), 11-14.

Birdi, B., Wilson, K., & Tso, H. M. (2009). The nature and role of empathy in public librarianship. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 41(2), 81-89.

Borgman, C. (2001). Where is the librarian in the digital library? Communications of the ACH, 44(5), 66-67.

Fisher, K., Durrance, J., & Hinton, M. (2004). Information grounds and the use of need-based services by immigrants in Queens, New York: A context based, outcome evaluation approach. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(8), 754-66.

Harris, R. (2008). Their little bit of ground slowly squashed into nothing: Technology, gender, and the vanishing librarian. In G. J. Leckie & J. E. Buschman (Ed.), Information Technology in Librarianship: New Critical Approaches. (pp. 165-180). Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

McKenzie, P., Prigoda, E., Moffatt, K., & McKechnie, L. (2006). Behind the program-room door: The creation of parochial and private women’s realms in a Canadian public library. In J. E. Buschman & G. J. Leckie (Eds). The Library as place: History, community, and culture (pp. 117-134). Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

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"looking for eric" and "h2oil": a feel-good comedy and its opposite

Movie Season (the opposite of Baseball Season) is in full swing. We've been seeing a lot of good movies, as well as plowing through our The Larry Sanders Show box, but for now I want to mention only two titles.

For a feel-good, intelligent comedy, I highly recommend Ken Loach's "Looking for Eric". And if your heart knows the joy and pain of a deep love of a sport or a team, you will appreciate this even more. No spoilers here. Just see it. (Although it's an English film, you might want to watch it with English subtitles. It helped us enjoy the movie considerably.)

And for exactly the opposite... "H2Oil" is a documentary about the abomination that is the Canadian tar sands. Writer-director Shannon Walsh brings you to a First Nations community who are slowly being wiped out by the tar sands, and their efforts to fight the governments of Alberta and Canada, and oil industry giants.

We meet the community's doctor, who spoke out about what he saw and was charged with professional misconduct. He is actually a hero with the full support of the community.

We see the connection between the oil industry and the government of Alberta - and now, of course, the government of Canada.

We see the inextricable connection between this dirtiest, most destructive resource-extraction practice on the planet and the ongoing and future crisis of fresh water.

It's an excellent film - short, clear, compelling, heartbreaking. Especially if you are unfamiliar with the tar sands, please see it.

I have only one issue with this movie. One of the people interviewed is Andrew Nikiforuk, who wrote the book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. He is clearly an expert on the subject; I respect his part in the film and I look forward to reading his book. The bit I'm highlighting may have been a function of editing - what the filmmakers wanted to say - or may be a difference in our worldviews.

Towards the end of the movie, Nikiforuk ties the horrors of the tar sands to the developed world's appetite for oil. In this view, our unsustainable consumerist culture drives tar-sands production.

I do not dispute that consumer culture and the lust for material things is unsustainable. I acknowledge that, as individuals, we have a role to play in reducing our society's dependency on oil. But our individual lifestyles are not what drives environmental nightmares like the Alberta tar sands. Similarly, our individual lifestyles did not cause the BP gulf disaster.

What drives it is profit.

What drives it is capitalism.

Under a capitalist system, the earth's resources - which rightly belong to all of us and should be shared according to our needs - are controlled for profit by a few, at the expense of the many.

A small segment of society reaps vast riches from the tar sands, while the most vulnerable - in this case the First Nations people who live downstream, and the land and animals they depend on - die horrible deaths. The rest of us will suffer later, as the glacial ice fields are quickly depleted so the shareholders of Suncor and BP and Exxon Mobile can buy a new Porsche.

You and I can shop less, use public transit when it's available, reuse and recycle. And we should. But no matter how green our lifestyle, none of it will make a significant difference as long as the resources of our earth are controlled by private companies for speculation and profit.

Pointing fingers at people forced to drive to work because their town built sprawling roads instead of investing in public transit is another form of victim-blaming. What's driving the tar sands - and what's killing the planet - is capitalism.

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resistance is not futile: resistance is everything

I think a lot about resistance: about what it means when ordinary people refuse to yield to powers much stronger than themselves. I've been thinking of the many forms acts of resistance can take, why people resist, what it means.

Last summer in Toronto, groups of people walked the streets of their city to show that they could, to defy the sudden existence of martial law that claimed they couldn't.

All over the UK, students are in the streets and occupying buildings, resisting massive cuts to education funding. The situation in the UK and throughout Europe is very dire - but the people whose system caused the pain are not suffering. A friend who lives in London and I were emailing recently, and she summed it up this way:

...they are closing libraries, cutting everything, raising university tuition fees by 200% and sales tax is now 20%! Bankers are getting huge bonuses still. We work with quite a few financial services firms and it's like they are living in a different universe. Although of course they are taking the opportunity to lay off as many as they can as well even though they are continuing to make huge profits. Barclays doesn't serve tea anymore at meetings to 'cut back'.

Some of my friend's British compatriots are employing a brilliantly creative strategy of resistance to library closures. (Many thanks to Deang for sending this story.)

A town has emptied its library in a bid to fight plans to close it down.

People in Stony Stratford, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, have spent the week withdrawing their maximum allowance of books in protest against council plans to close it as part of budget cuts.

And today they said the plan had been a success, with all 16,000 books withdrawn from the library.

Today, as they celebrated the empty shelves, Emily Malleson from Friends of Stony Stratford Library (FOSSL) said they were amazed at how everyone in the town had pulled together.

She said it was calculated that books were being checked out at a rate of around 378 per hour - smashing the usual rates.

"A local resident mentioned the idea, maybe as a bit of a joke, but we thought it was a great idea so we put it to FOSSL," she said.

"I went home, put it on Facebook and emailed everyone I could think of and it's just gone absolutely mad."

They planned to start the campaign on Wednesday, but keen supporters of the library started taking books out the week before.

And in just over a week, the shelves were emptied, with the final books withdrawn yesterday.

"People were going in last night to get books and there weren't any left, "she said.

"I think it's a very simple but clever idea and it's given something that people can act on and make their voice heard.

I love this for so many reasons: how this town values and protects its library, how people united can fight back, how a few organizers with a good idea can spark rebellion. I also love the story because it's about reading as resistance.

Reading has been used as act of political resistance through the ages. Countless books and movies depicting ordinary people struggling against totalitarianism will bring you to hidden books, an echo of children secretly reading books forbidden by their authoritarian schoolmasters, now with potentially fatal consequences.

I recently saw this connection in two differnt novels. (Still in the works: a winter-break "what i'm reading" post.) In The Chosen One, an excellent young-adult novel by Carol Lynch Williams, a young person's resistance to her parents' oppressive religion - and a forced marriage to a man four times her age - begins with reading. Her rebellion begins in the library, until the library becomes - literally - her means of escape.

In Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, after a man risks his life to save a Jewish boy, they read together, working their way through the man's vast library, the education of that boy becoming an ongoing act of resistance.

Reading as resistance isn't about beating the enemy: it's about maintaining some human dignity, stubbornly clinging to a shred of one's own humanity. That has been the case for all the subjugated peoples of the world who have refused to speak the language of their oppressors. At least in private, and often at great cost, people the world over will insist on speaking the language of their own people. It's a way of saying: we still exist.

Also in Fugitive Pieces, a shopkeeper in the Nazi-occupied Greek village hides oranges, saving the scarce fruit - and their desperately-needed nutrition - for the neediest families. The shopkeeper could be killed on the spot: hiding an orange as an act of courageous resistance.

Food can become an instrument of resistance. The movie "Hunger" depicts the refusal of food as the ultimate resistance: the 1981 IRA hunger strike, led by Bobby Sands in 66 days of self-inflicted torture. First we see an earlier form of protest, as the political prisoners in Northern Ireland refuse to wash or change their clothes, covering the walls of their cells in their own excrement, making their captors' jobs as disgusting and difficult as possible.

When the guards haul off the men for forced bathing - heavy accent on forced - the prisoners lash out with feet and fists and teeth, individual naked men fighting back against a small army decked out in face shields and batons. It's a stunning scene. I thought: this is what resistance means. Never going quietly. Never being docile. Fighting every inch of the way. Resistance means: we will not go quietly.

Michael Fassbender's harrowing, incredible performance as Sands causes you to question the very nature of human survival and sacrifice. Watching the effects of starvation on the human body and brain, you wonder, how could a human being choose this? Where do they find the strength? Inevitably, even a believer like me may be led to ask, what good does this do?

Then in the postscript you learn that 10 more men made the same choice - that the prison ultimately met all their demands - that during the hunger strike, Bobby Sands was elected to Parliament, opening the door for political recognition of Sinn Fein.

And suddenly the movie's title isn't about the needs of the body: it's about the human hunger for freedom.

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disaster capitalism is all around us (updated)

We're seeing disaster capitalism all around us, and it scares the hell out of me.

The tiny minority that autocratically makes decisions for the rest of us is using the banking and credit crisis that they created as a vehicle to carry in their right-wing agenda. History shows this will only further weaken the economies they claim to be assisting. That has been proven over and over again. But no matter, because these changes will further their real goals: a crippled public sector, smaller government helping fewer people, and an increase in wealth for the already rich.

I find this "austerity" - the wholesale slashing of public budgets - deeply frightening. People are being told that half their pensions have vanished into thin air. Being told they must survive on half their income. Social welfare benefits like child care and decent pensions, hard won over decades, are decimated in moments.

This is what the G8/G20 summit was about. Little wonder it was accompanied by the biggest show of police strength in Canadian history, as world leaders fear they'll be confronted by the kind of resistance occurring in Greece and in Spain.

If you've read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, you can watch videos from the "Shout Out For Global Justice" event that took place at Massey Hall on the eve of the G20 weekend. Rabble has video of almost every speaker. John Hilary, who spoke directly about the economic violence raining down on people all over the globe, is here.

I find the whole "austerity" agenda incredibly scary, frustrating and depressing. It is bad enough to live in a world where labour is socialized but profit is privatized. But the socialization of risk simply outrages me. Free marketeers plunge the global economic system into chaos, then working class and poor people are made to pay for it, either through outright bailouts, as in the US, or by slashing social budgets, as we are seeing all through Europe and will undoubtedly see here, too. (It has been happening in Canada in piecemeal fashion, for many years - not one giant cut but a steady chipping away.) The multi-million dollar bonuses don't stop. CEO salaries don't get slashed. No one pays but the workers and the poor.

I wouldn't feel quite as awful if I saw the potential in Canada for the general strikes and mass uprisings that have been happening in Greece, and now Spain. Or the kind of massive, spontaneous street marches you see in France whenever benefits are threatened. It would still be scary and depressing, but at least I would feel hopeful. But here in North America, we are sheep ready for slaughter.

From The Guardian:

The European right is capitalising on a crisis

Eurozone governments and European authorities are using the economy to justify pushing through rightwing policy changes

One thing should be made clear about the situation in the eurozone economies that is not clear at all if we rely on most of the news reports. This is not a situation where countries face a "dilemma" because they have overspent and piled up too much public debt. They do not face "tough choices" that will force them to cut spending and raise taxes while the economy is weak or in recession, in order to "satisfy financial markets".

What is really going on is that powerful interests within these countries – including Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal – are taking advantage of the situation to make the changes that they want. Perhaps even more importantly, the European authorities – including the European commission, the European central bank and the IMF – who are holding the purse strings of any bailout funds, are even more committed than the national governments to rightwing policy changes. And they are further removed from any accountability to any electorate.

. . . .

Unless the goal is to reduce wages and benefits in the public sector, weaken labour, redistribute income upward and reduce the size of government, then there is no time like the present to push these things through. We have a similar, although not yet as severe political problem, in the United States: deficit hawks are mounting a campaign to cut social security, even though it can make all promised payments for the next 33 years.

Ironically, the people who want to take advantage of the "crisis" in Spain are actually increasing the risk of more serious debt problems, since the debt burden will rise if the economy lapses into recession or years of stagnation because of their fiscal tightening measures. But they are willing to take these risks in order to accomplish their political objectives.

Read it here.

* * * *

In the past week or so, I've read two excellent posts linking the police state outside the G20 summit with the agenda inside it. Now I can't find either one! If this rings a bell for anyone, please send me the link or post it in comments and I will include it in this post. Thanks.

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Sarah's Socialist Sandwich

I've just returned from the bowels of the internet, and I'm feeling quite icky! I need to do a virus scan STAT! Apparently, the HuffPo has been running a story about Madame's speech in Canada on Saturday (click on the link at your own risk). They claim that since the Heaths went to Canada so that Madame's brother could receive treatment for a burn, that must mean that Madame supports socialized medicine. The LSM has really lost it now. In summary, Madame is smart, but she didn't have political opinions on health care policy when she was a young child. Also, her brother couldn't have received socialized health care because it didn't exist at that time in Canada, and when it did exist, it was only available to residents. Geesh!

However, I must say that I could very easily write a piece for the HuffPo using a JPEG of a cute, young Sarah eating a sandwich that I have saved on my hard drive . I don't want to give the crazies any ideas, but I think I'd like to pose as a HuffPo "journalist" for a moment:

Apparently, not only did the Heath family utilize universal health care from Canada, they also received government rationed food from the USSR. As you can see in the picture below, a young Sarah Heath is eating a sandwich. But that's not just any sandwich. That bread came from the USSR. Since you can see the USSR from anywhere in Alaska, it must take no time to travel there. So, the Heath family, rather than go to the store or bake their own bread, went to the USSR to stand in line for hours and hours to get their government rationed loaf of bread all so little Sarah could eat this sandwich.

Wow. I feel so dirty stooping so low and lying so much. Shame on me for even pretending.

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