This photograph and article is from the Vancouver Sun on Wednesday 19th 2009.
It shows 3 new Quad cranes arriving at Deltaport. The cranes were made in China and transported by a Chinese ship.
So we are importing from the exporters the means to import from the exporters.
Whither lessons from British colonial history?
The trinkets and baubles imported from China filling every store and sometimes whole malls are all price driven, never directed by quality or ethics - ethics both in terms of buying local and the exploitation of the workers in China making this crap.
In order to keep up with demand (read addiction) for this low cost unethical crap, China is demanding more and more energy, including coal from Canada.
Add to the story above the recent announcement of the Chinese government investment of C$1.74 Billion in Teck Resources - it's all about cheap coal - three stories here:
What this really looks like - Canada ripping itself apart to provide energy to China to pollute at will while producing unnecessary goods to fuel Canadian obsession with 'drive to the bottom' wages. Can you say Walmart, Costco and a hundred other retailers without a trace of moral fibre selling this crap to a million consumers without a trace of moral fibre.
Exploitation is apparently fine as long as we don't have to see it - either as in the picture above or in the sweat shops where our 'low cost' (cost to whom?) goods are made.
This is what China wants - coal - which if burned here is 'bad', which if exported to China and burned is apparently 'good', firstly because it creates Canadian jobs, and secondly keeps the stream of slave labour produced trinkets going. A stream which destroyed Canadian jobs in the first place.
How many cloth bags (99% made in China btw) will it take to wipe out or equalize the CO2 produced by this coal when it is burned in China with few environmental cares?
Sickening all round.
1./ Read the label - stop buying Chinese made goods
2./ Repeat above
3./ Buy fewer goods of better quality from producers who value their tradition, their quality and their workers - preferably from the country where you live to keep local jobs for local people.
These are the ways to reduce the Chinese demand for Canadian coal, fueling this disgusting mess.
I had been wondering for a while why the phrase 'civil society' as mis-used and abused by Sullivan and his cronies (and council staff and journalists who sucked up to this phrase) had such a nasty ring to it.
Then I saw this piece in the New York Times and was reminded of Ralf Dahrendorf and his wonderfully stimulating re-working of Marxist theory - it's not so much money as power that is unfairly and unjustly distributed.
This lead to much innovative re-examining of what constitutes true consultation, participatory planning, and even the title of a recent DTES paper - I believe called 'Not about us without us.'
Truly empowering people breaks the power attached to money and indeed removes the power implicitly assocaited woth money.
Time to re-read "Class and Class
Conflict in Civil Society" (1957)
AS you'll seee these ideas are exactly what Fearless, W2 and other groups are achieving in the DTES and why the stale hierachical organizations - Portland Hotel Society as seen two weeks ago - find loose progress and achievment so threatening.
(From the link above:)
Organisations:
These would be voluntary associations, and non-governmental or
non-profit organisations, social movements, networks and informal
groups. These organisations make up the infrastructure of civil
society; they are the vehicles and forums for social participation,
"voice" processes, the expression of values and preferences, and
service provision.
Individuals:
Citizens and participants in civil society generally. This would
include people's activities in civil society such as membership,
volunteering, organising events, or supporting specific causes;
people's values, attitudes, preferences and expectations; and people's
skills and in terms governance, management and leadership.As
an analytic, conceptual term, civil society is very abstract, even
somewhat vague, and certainly highly complex, seemingly resistant to
any precise measurement. Yet as an operational definition, it refers to
the activities, values and other key characteristics of institutions,
organisations and individuals located among the market, the state and
the family. (end quote)
Ralf Dahrendorf, a German sociologist whose
experiences in Nazi Germany led him to develop a theory of liberalism
and human freedom that often went against the grain of German politics
in the postwar period, died Wednesday in Cologne. He was 80.
Roland Magunia/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images
Ralf Dahrendorf in 2004.
His death was confirmed in a statement from Chancellor Angela Merkel,
who said, "Europe has lost one of its most important thinkers and
intellectuals." The cause was cancer, said his wife, Dr. Christiane
Dahrendorf.
Democracy and its problems preoccupied Mr.
Dahrendorf for his entire career as a scholar and as a politician in
West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. As a high school student he had
been imprisoned by the Nazis for spreading leaflets opposing the
regime, and early in his life he developed a deep suspicion of what he
called "closed, encompassing systems."
Mr. Dahrendorf
championed liberal pluralism, which he defined as a social system that
recognizes divergent interests and aspirations and puts institutions in
place that allow them to be expressed.
Democracy is "about
organizing conflict and living with conflict," he told an audience at
the Institute of International Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1989.
"The world isn't simple, nor should it be
simple," he continued. "It's rich because it's complicated. Let's learn
to live with this."
He explored these ideas in "Class and Class
Conflict in Civil Society" (1957), which famously proposed the
counter-Marxist idea that power, rather than property, defined social
class. Later books like "Society and Democracy in Germany" and "Modern
Social Conflict" pursued similar themes.
"As a scholar he was
always addressing human value problems in democracy, especially
freedom, but he was also deeply involved in the civic life of Germany,"
said Neil J. Smeltser, an emeritus professor of sociology at Berkeley.
"He bridged the gap between social theory and social practice as well
as anyone I can think of."
Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf was born in
Hamburg, where his father, a Social Democratic politician, was arrested
and removed from his job by the Nazis in 1933. The family moved to
Berlin soon after. Mr. Dahrendorf's father was arrested again in 1944,
and a few months later, Ralf was arrested by the Gestapo for anti-Nazi
activities and sent to a concentration camp in Poland. He was released
as Soviet forces advanced in 1945.
At the University of
Hamburg, Mr. Dahrendorf studied philosophy and classics, earning a
doctorate in philosophy in 1952. He went on to earn a second doctorate,
in sociology, at the London School of Economics, where he studied under
Karl Popper. It was Mr. Popper's "Open Society" that provided the
answers, he once said, to the great questions of modern industrial
society posed by Marx.
After teaching at the universities of
Saarbrücken, Tübingen and Konstanz in West Germany, and at Stanford in
California, he ran for a seat in the regional Parliament of
Baden-Württemberg. In 1969 he was elected to the federal Parliament as
a Free Democrat. He was a junior foreign minister in Willy Brandt's
first government and in 1970 became a European commissioner.
At a time when liberal democracy was under attack, Mr. Dahrendorf, as
both a university professor and a politician, held fast to the
principles of pluralism and personal freedom. His convictions were
Social Democratic with a libertarian spin.
He favored laws and
policies that encouraged personal freedom, a sense of citizenship and a
broadening of social, economic and political opportunities. Germany's
problems, he argued, stemmed from a belief in absolute answers and in
the yearning for an all-powerful leader to put them into effect.
In
1974 he was invited to become director of the London School of
Economics, a post he held for the next decade. He later wrote a history of the school.
He
returned to Germany to become chairman of the social sciences
department at Konstanz University, but in 1987 he accepted the position
of warden of St. Antony's College, Oxford. He became a British citizen
in 1988 and was made a life peer under the name Lord Dahrendorf of
Clare Market in the City of Westminster in 1993.
In addition to
Dr. Dahrendorf, his third wife, he is survived by three daughters,
Nicola, Alexandra and Daphne, and one grandchild.
The Grand March for Housing drew support from a wide range of groups and individuals across British Columbia, all of whom have had enough of the pain and distress caused by homelessness they see everyday, and are calling for all three levels of government to stop talking and act.
This shot shows the marchers gathered at the Art Gallery in front of the ironic excesses of the Georgia development.
While this shot is of a white board where people were encouraged to write their comments - the 'shovel' sums it up.
The march was passionate but peaceful, as several streams of marchers united before gathering at the Vancouver Art Gallery to hear speeches and entertainment. More about the coalition and future events can be found here: http://www.citywidehousingcoalition.org/
Outside Pathways as the march assembled, the Streams of Justice group's banner.
Looking east from the steps of the Art Gallery as the crowd grows.
Thousands of Downtown Eastside residents have problems that aren't being dealt with, Police Chief Jim Chu says.
Vancouver
Police Chief Jim Chu is calling on the federal and provincial
governments to create an agency to deal exclusively with the
unmanageable social problems that afflict thousands of people living in
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES).
Chu says the agency should
be under the control of a "director for the most vulnerable," a civil
servant with the type of power given to heads of Crown corporations and
agencies.
It would be the director's job to oversee all the
government programs that now found in the area and hold the agencies
that deliver them accountable for producing measurable results.
The
recommendation is contained in the 59-page document Project Lockstep, a
united effort to save lives in the Downtown Eastside, to be released
today.
Chu also called for the VPD to move back to the Downtown Eastside to aid in the area's rehabilitation.
The
report argues that while there have been major efforts to improve the
state of affairs in the Downtown Eastside, they have failed. It says
"deliberate and unintended policies and changes have played significant
roles in the continuation and, or, worsening of the problems that are
concentrated in the area."
The number of Canadians who earned most of their income from the
arts topped 140,000 in Canada in 2006, according to a report based on
statistics from the 2006 census.
That made artists more numerous than auto workers -- about 135,000
Canadians worked in the auto sector in 2006 -- according to a report
from Hill Strategies in Hamilton, Ont., created for the Ontario Arts
Council, Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Canadian artists remain among the most impoverished of the working
poor, earning an average annual income of $22,700, about 37 per cent
less than the rest of the Canadian workforce.
And not all of that income is earned in the arts -- the census
doesn't ask how much artists might make as waitresses and busboys, says
Kelly Hill, president of Hill Strategies.
"Those earnings are included in the statistics. It's even more depressing from that standpoint," he told CBC News.
Fearing it would hurt the poor, demonstrators want proposed development quashed
WENDY STUECK
Copyright The Globe and Mail
June 24, 2008
VANCOUVER
-- Housing activists made a last-ditch effort to derail a Downtown
Eastside condominium project at a city hall hearing yesterday, claiming
the development would fuel "class hatred" and make it more difficult
for low-income people who live in the neighbourhood to obtain decent
housing and services.
"We need some indication that there is a future for poor people in
this neighbourhood - otherwise these condos are a slap in the face,"
Carnegie Community Action Project spokeswoman Wendy Pedersen said
yesterday at a development permit board meeting.
Ms. Pedersen and other activists attended the meeting to register
their objections to the 160-unit Greenwich condominium project, which
developer Concord Pacific has proposed for a downtown site at 58 West
Hastings St.
The area is now dominated by single-room accommodation hotels and the rough edges of Vancouver's drug trade.
VPD veteran says province must renovate 18 single-room occupancy hotels
Mike Howell Vancouver Courier
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
CREDIT: Photo-Dan Toulgoet Makeshift shelters, including Mark Tobiasson's lean-to in Oppenheimer Park, populate the Downtown Eastside.
A senior Vancouver police officer says homelessness in the Downtown Eastside is the worst he's seen in his 23 years on the job.
Supt. Warren Lemcke, commander for the north part of the city, said the dire situation won't change until the provincial government renovates the 18 single-room occupancy hotels it purchased over the last year.
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Canada's poorest postal code, is the result of flawed policy and poor decision-making. Today, a Victoria neighbourhood is headed down the same slippery slope.
Practical, rather than moral, grounds were the order of the day in the early 1980s when prostitution was chased out of Vancouver's middle-class West End and Mount Pleasant districts into the Downtown Eastside. The same situation occurred in 2003 in Victoria when sex-trade workers were pushed out of the downtown core and into Rock Bay and Burnside Gorge. Along with The Stroll came the drug dealers and higher crime rates.
The neighbourhood managed to absorb the influx because it is a strong and diversified community. The area comprises light industrial, middle- to lower-income single-family dwellings and condos, transient accommodation offered by single-room-occupancy motels, pockets of executive condo developments, office buildings, subsidized housing complexes, residential drug and alcohol treatment facilities, housing for the hardest-to-house and housing for federal prison parolees.
This community is now teetering on the edge of an abyss, at the bottom of which lies a hell similar to the Downtown Eastside. .
