Openers

Rumours of his disease are greatly exaggerated...

We start this week on the same issue as George Bush's daily briefings begin: “Is Castro dead yet?”

It appears as though the CIA's “Fact Creation Division” has churned out new reports that the ancient Cuban President, revolutionary, and asterisk in global capitalism's claim on universal domain over the Earth, has Parkinson's disease. The Miami Herald received the “leak” and became the latest media source to “break” this story, which incited a collective, orgasmic screech audible in parts of Southern Ontario, emanating from Miami's Cuban exile population who have been waiting for decades to reclaim their position as the wealthy elite overlords of Cuba.

To prove his detractors wrong, Castro delivered a five-hour speech to a group of student leaders in Havana to mark 60 years since he began his law studies, and 50 years since he began making up his own laws. He mocked the CIA reports of his supposed disease with his elocutive endurance, and drew attention to the fact that even if he did have Parkinson's, Pope John Paul II had Parkinson's, which didn't prevent him from delivering excruciatingly long, inaudible and largely unintelligible soliloquies to his followers.

Castro maintains that he will step down when he is no longer physically able to raise his middle finger northward to the United States, and that the smooth transition to his brother Raul will not interrupt the eternal reign of his egalitarian paradise. He noted that being able to offer hundreds of “spare” doctors from Cuba's exceptional universal health care system to George Bush during the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina was probably the most he's giggled in all of his years of figuratively mooning U.S. Presidents.

Although the American media translators made no mention of it, Castro quite possibly could have also argued that, “So what if I did have Parkinson's – at least I didn't go the latter half of my Presidency with Alzheimer's like Reagan. People still voted for the guy when he firmly believed he was a house cat.” [e]


Over 5 years

If for some catastrophic reason I ever ask Ralph Goodale for a job, I'll know to be very wary of the declared conditions of my employment. “I'll start you off with $100,000,” he may say, “over five years.” Then a year later, he may come to me and announce that he's giving me the day off that I took last month. Then, when the union starts talking strike, he would say he's magically found an extra million dollars in the accounting (that he was gonna tell us about in February, but since a strike is coming...) that he will invest in a new “Workers Are Happy Fund” to be administered by a separate group of people he will hire to achieve the objective of making workers happy.

I think I may start “Goodaling” in my daily life. At my high school reunion, I can say I make $75,000... over five years. I can brag to my co-workers three weeks in a row about the same three-point buzzer beater I scored in my basketball league. When it's my turn to take out the garbage, I can invest the time instead to set up a sub-committee of friends who will deliberate about the objective of getting the garbage to the curb.

Give it a try: the next time you're at the bar, tell 'em about the one day on the golf course when you shot a 67... over the first five holes, or that your love-making lasts an hour... cumulatively over the last sixty exhilarating sessions.

Thankfully, all Canadians except for people who wear Liberal red on election day see through the electioneering buy-off spree. But if the world cared about Canada, it would be watching us like a 90s teen drama, pleading to the TV screen that the character with the jerky, abusive partner won't go back to him. “Not again! He doesn't even apologize – he's just throwing gifts at you to get you back!”

A man in Montreal put it best: “It's like a man courting a woman. What matters is after the marriage." We've been in the marriage for twelve years, and it ain't loving.

But we know that in the end, she'll always take him back. [e]


TV or Dinner?

The Liberals casually tossed tax cuts into the election mix this week. Their words say “low and middle-income Canadians,” but the numbers show a different story. The debate, ironically, was framed to perfection by the Globe and Mail, which ran a story applauding the tax-cut plan because a “middle-income” family of four could buy a new 27' TV or “modest computer upgrade” with their tax savings. This depiction of the priorities of a middle-income family of four leads one to wonder how “overtaxed” we are as a country when new TVs are celebrated while family farms are closing, health care is strapped, tuition is sky-high, food banks are overwhelmed, 1 million children still live in poverty here and 3,000 people die every day around the world of preventable causes exacerbated by poverty. I don't want to be a nag, but there are bigger problems than a lack of televisions for families making $60,000 a year who – come on – are doing just fine.

But it's not the middle-income families who are stealing away with these tax cuts: the very wealthy get the same income tax cut as the middle-class family, and more than the low-income one – pocket change for the well-off but a month's worth of meals for a food bank user. Worst, banks, oil companies and other corporations making record profits are getting millions back while small and medium businesses struggle in endangered small-town economies.

Two questions: (1) are Canadians genuinely generous enough to reject this blatant vote-grabbing tax cut and insist that the government do its real job and provide quality public goods and services? (2) Is there an alternative way to make the tax system work more efficiently to redistribute the wealth warped by the market?

A: (1) Hopefully; (2) Yes! Next week in edSpective! [e]


Sweet and sour sugar

In the latest case of a scientific study making humankind collectively stupider, researchers at the University of Cincinnati have concluded that sweet snacks and drinks may actually help us to lose weight. Before you reach for that six-pack of Pepsi for breakfast, let's look deeper: the study found that rats consuming sugary foods and drinks produced lower levels of glucocorticodes, hormones produced by psychological or physical stress that help us survive and recover from stress (kind of like a stress immune system), but have “been linked to increased abdominal obesity and decreased immune function when produced in large amounts,” according to the study's authors.

First, remember that this is regular sugar, NOT aspartame, which gave lab animals seizures and brain tumours until Ronald Reagan became President and replaced the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner with his friend Arthur Hayes, who subsequently overturned a clear decision by an FDA Board of Inquiry against approving aspartame in 1981. It remains moderately likely that diet pop will still kill you in 10, 25 or 40 years if it hasn't yet.

Second, the study says “large amounts” of stress are required to increase obesity. It does NOT say that “large amounts” of sugar will offset it. So for the sizey proportion of chunky North Americans whose main stress is the obesity caused by their overconsumption of sugary foods, the answer is NOT more sugar. It is a bit more balance, perhaps a few more natural sugars, like fruit. It could also be reducing stress by working less and exercising more. But what kind of news story is common sense?

Finally, the mainstream media missed the real sugar news story: the thousands of Haitians who are lured across the border into the Dominican Republic to work as virtually indentured slaves on sugar plantations. They are not allowed to return home and are forced to spend their pitiful pay on plantation-sold food, barred from even growing their own gardens in their crowded shanty ghetto at the edge of the plant. Check out the great documentary by Brian McKenna – Big Sugar – and where you can buy fairly traded sugar in Canada and the U.S. [e]


Kids strike back at their McOppressors*

Bill Cosby was right: kids do say the darndest things. First, 12 year-old Craig Kielburger said that children around the world shouldn't be enslaved to make our carpets and firecrackers, grow our sugarcane, or satisfy our pedophiles' desires. The darn kid started something, because then 9 year-old Ryan Hreljac said the billion-plus people around the world with water-borne diseases should have access to clean water. Now, two 10 year-old boys from Western Canada are making the ultimate sacrifice for pre-teen boys and asking others to do the same: they are boycotting McDonald's for a whole day in protest of U.S. intransigence over the softwood lumber dispute. Forgoing the nutritionally questionable, meat-like oral-consumption products peddled at them by that infernally manipulative clown and purple blob is no easy task for children whose bloodstreams lack the levels of foreign chemicals of adults.

Basic injustice doesn't escape the eyes of a ten year-old, but the facts do. Little Craig didn't understand that poor kids VE to work for dirt-poor wages to feed their poor families (who are poor because they have so many darn kids) and, more importantly, to feed our affluent lifestyles and levels of consumption in the developed world. Tiny Ryan didn't get it that Africans have the option to either move somewhere that has clean water (just not Canada because we're tired of poor people coming here and going on welfare) or to buy clean water from the friendly multinational corporation that owns their country's clean water (and the rain, for that matter). And naïve Luke and Matthew can't be blamed for being ignorant of the fact that about two-thirds of McDonald's locations in Canada are owned by Canadians, and so their boycott is only hurting really rich Canadians just trying to get by, instead of really rich Americans who are evil. Plus the wood in McDonald's burgers comes from Brazilian rainforests, not western Canada.

Besides, it's only fair that the American lumber industry be compensated for its inefficient, privately-run tree farm system that makes it unable to compete with Canada's more flexible, publicly-run stumpage fee system. Don't they know that free trade frowns on public-anything systems, let alone those that allow adjustment to save jobs in struggling communities?

And don't they know that McDonald's is a good corporate citizen that offers an excellent benefits package to its part-time staff, including:**
- Free uniforms
- Discounts on McDonald's food at their restaurant ALL the time
- McDonald's Gold Card membership for discounts on great merchandise from top national, regional and local retailers
- Discounts on computers and other products using McDonald's group buying power
- Extracurricular Crew activities including movie nights, sports teams, parties, and picnics
- A scholarship Program
- Service and Recognition Awards that reward their contribution with jewelery and gift items
- Opportunities for advancement
- Limitless free smiles
- Up to two free angioplasties as needed before their 22nd birthday

So before you parents out there go letting your nosy kids grow a conscience for all of us, make sure they have their facts straight. Our hardened adult experience has taught us that the hunger, disease and poverty of the world is neither our fault nor fixable. We don't need children running amok with their ideals of justice, equality, fairness, and empathy to think they can change stuff and in the process pop our intricately designed, comfortably numb bubbles.

* I am working on making my sarcasm more evident. I neither believe nor endorse any of the thoughts expressed in this article, but I have heard the arguments made enough times to take them sufficiently seriously to mock their utter ridiculousness. I'll let y'all come to your own conclusions about what I really mean, and keep working on that sarcasm.
** This list is from the actual McDonald's Canada web site, with the exception of the last two. Part-timers are the overwhelming majority of McDonald's employees. Full-timers get more adult benefits like group insurance and profit sharing, and those at corporate and regional headquarters get full health and other benefits. [e]


This Week's Quiz: Yes or No (and learn!)

Young people have been at the forefront of some of the most famous political campaigns in history, from Vietnam to the anti-sweatshop movement. Which of the following are actual campaigns initiated by young people?

(1) “Vow of Silence”
(2) “Paper airplanes at teacher”
(3) “Nike shoe send-off”
(4) “Give the darn rabbit some Trix”
(5) “Students against sweatshops”
(6) “I should be able to wear Naked Ladies on my t-shirt”
(7) “Homies Unidos”
(8) “Ernie is not gay”
(9) “All rights for all children”
(10)“Peel Board anti-Coke campaign”


Answers:

(1) YES: My friend Joe first went a week without speaking in 2000 to raise funds for the wicked cool Free The Children (FTC). In Joe's memory, FTC's youth members hold an annual event on March 1st in which they "speak to the world" with their silence in recognition of those children who don't have a voice: child labourers, children in poverty, children who are abused and neglected, and children who are not able to attend school. www.freethechildren.org
(2) YES: Another of Joe's ideas, only this one was purely motivated by mischief. It did, however, succeed in temporarily making the teacher disappear in the middle of class.
(3) YES: A school in California boxed up almost 1,000 pairs of Nike shoes and sent them to then-CEO Phil Knight, with a note indicating that no student at that school would buy Nike merchandise again until Nike began treating its employees overseas fairly.
(4) NO, although those jerk kids who never let the poor spokesrabbit have any of the cereal were so hopped up on sugar that they really deserved to get roughed up a bit. I'm right and you know it.
(5) YES: What started on university campuses across the U.S. spread to high schools along the east coast and eventually across the country and to Canada – students united in refusing to allow their school uniforms, merchandise and sports equipment to be made in sweatshop conditions, and succeeding in installing mandatory codes of conduct in their administrations' procurement policies. www.studentsagainstsweatshops.org
(6) NO, although I'm sure there was an official campaign going on at my high school in Grade Ten.
(7) YES: This gang violence prevention and intervention organization works with youth in El Salvador and now Los Angeles, and develops creative alternatives to youth violence and drugs through access to alternative education, leadership development, self esteem building, and health education programs. www.homiesunidos.org
(8) NO, adults from James Dobson's Focus on the Family was behind this campaign to inspire children to become homophobes – not really, although I imagine the idea was tossed around.
(9) YES: In response to a mock election in which Canadian children were asked to vote for their favourite right in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Free The Children argued that kids shouldn't have to choose between their fundamental rights.
(10) YES: A young fellow in the Peel Region School Board wondered why there were only Coke machines in his high school. His digging revealed a less-than-openly-public contract between Coca Cola and the school board giving exclusive right to sell the sugary beverage in all schools. Other nasty details of the deal included financial rewards for meeting sales quotas. Soft drink giants Coke and Pepsi are moving to replace their sodas in schools with equally sugary fruit drinks. [e]


Ed Musing

This morning was miserable. Yesterday's snow had crossed that thin line into frozen rain, and it was pouring. However, desperate for that most remarkable of natural uppers – the athlete's endorphin high – I set out for my morning jog.

It's amazing how a 20-minute, easy jog boosts the spirits and the creativity. In the midst of writer's block during my Masters thesis, a good quick jog reset my train of thought and reinvigorated my confidence.

Even more amazing was how refreshing this morning's jog was. The rain pounded down hard and soaked my hair. My waterproof bike jacket kept me relatively dry, and I enjoyed every moment. I also noticed that I was alone on a jogging path along the Rideau Canal that's normally packed with morning joggers.

Rain is one of the most exhilarating sensations in the world when you don't care about getting wet. When you're dressed up or carrying papers, it sucks. But when you can just stand (or jog or best of all dance) out in the rain and welcome it down on you, preferably near-naked, it is the best that nature has to give.

So when you're feeling down on a rainy day, give in. There is no need to be naked or to be exercising. You can even put on a waterproof jacket or outfit. It's the lost last line of the Satchel Paige quote: Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like no one is watching. And enjoy the rain without fear of getting wet. [e]


Solutions: Fair Trade Part II

Last week's edSpective included a letter that I – and, if this whole experiment of mine is working as intended, you – sent to Prime Minister Paul Martin about free trade. To his eternal credit, the PM replied to my e-mail personally (and I know when an e-mail is personally replied to, as I myself have been known to write e-mails on behalf of MPs):

“Dear Ed,

Again, you have grasped a complex situation with rare insight and acuity. I regret my pro-free trade grandstanding at the recent Summit of the Americas. If I told you that my aim was to impress Mr. Bush with my undying devotion to the holy grail of neo-liberalism, and from there to woo him into being fair on the softwood lumber issue, I would be lying.

I rake a ton of coin with free trade, dude. Well, my blind trust containing my Bermuda “holdings” does. I've been to Mexico too, and although I've never gotten around to leaving the gated communities where my friends who manage the maquiladoras live, it's pretty obvious that their workers live in worse squalor than they did on the farms they lost after we dumped all our subsidizes wheat and corn on their domestic market. Man you're good, pointing that out.

I'm glad you picked up on my “free trade must be fair trade” line – I thought it was golden and I knew you'd get especially upset at it. I gave my speech writer a raise for that line with the money earmarked for some affordable housing in Winnipeg. Turns out he resigned Wednesday for a lobbying job with the Canadian Free Trade Coalition – our entire budget for climate change doesn't have enough to compete with that salary!

But I digress. Where was I? Oh yeah, as always, you want me to abandon this brilliant “growth and competitiveness” line that has done so well for me personally and politically. People eat that stuff up, buddy. They get all scared that their jobs are at risk if we don't do everything possible to lower corporate taxes. They think their personal standard of living rises and falls with the GDP – all I have to do is mutter the word “recession” under my breath while I'm taking a leak in the men's room at the Press Club and the NDP loses 5 percentage points in the polls. You know, not even Alphonso Gagliano knows where most of that R&D money goes – I don't even know what R&D even stands for!

I'll just conclude by reiterating my point that while you are quite correct – that none of lower taxes, free trade, nor economic growth helps poor people – the overwhelming majority of Canadians buy it, and unless you can rally more (like, at least 20) Canadians to write me e-mails like yours, I remain unquaking in my chic dress shoes.

Your pal and life's frustration,

Paulie

P.S. How'd you like Ralph's “over five years” economic update – that was my idea in 1997 but I never had the guts to actually do it! That Goodale has gargantuan courage!”

------

How's my sarcasm? Of course, Paul Martin did not write that letter to me, and none of the things in it are necessarily true. Here's the real e-mail I received:

“Dear Mr. Gillis:

On behalf of the Right Honourable Paul Martin, I would like to thank you for your e-mail, in which you raised an issue that falls within the portfolio of the Honourable Jim Peterson, Minister of
International Trade.

Please be assured that the statements you made have been carefully reviewed. I have taken the liberty of forwarding your message to Minister Peterson so that he too may be made aware of your comments. I am certain that the Minister will give your views every consideration.

M. Bredeson
Executive Correspondence Officer
Agent de correspondance de la haute direction”

------------

Suffice it to say that none of Paul Martin, M. Bredeson, nor my friends at the International Trade department agree with my take on free trade. Some of them tell me to get my facts straight – that I don't see that day-in, day-out reality behind international trade negotiations. Some of them tell me to live in the real world. I can only say that these two realities are not the same. Perhaps the problem is that the trade negotiators negotiate at ritzy resorts in Argentina with leaders whose personal wealth far exceeds that of their average citizen, and operate in terms of real GDP instead of real people's lives. Salaries may be up in Mexican maquiladoras, but many of those jobs have fled to Asia for cheaper labour and more lax environmental standards because that's how free trade works. GDP per capita means nothing to those former farmers who now have no farm and no job.

Softwood lumber has convinced many Canadians that free trade sucks in practice (although as I have been reminded by a good and very knowledgeable friend, softwood lumber is a small percentage of Canada-U.S. trade, the rest of which – except the slowly dying North American auto industry – has done alright under NAFTA). But let's look at it in theory: people and countries each using their respective competitive advantages to make everyone more efficient and productive. Sounds good enough.

But free trade only works if everyone starts the competition even. Free trade in this world would be like a sumo wrestling tournament with several really fat guys and a hundred or more really scrawny ones. That normally could be chalked up to biological determinism, except that the fat guys got so huge by forcibly eating all the skinny guys' food for a number of centuries. They even made the skinny guys bring them their elaborate meals grown in the skinny guys' gardens. Now they're forcing the skinny guys into the wrestling ring to get annihilated, instead of maybe creating a separate league or giving them some time to eat and grow strong without having all their food get eaten by the fat guys. This unfair set-up means that the fat guys just get to eat more of the skinny guys' food in perpetuity. When the skinny guys try to sneak a snack on the side, the fat guys complain that it's not fair and threaten to take more food if the skinny guys don't stop it. And also, as in sumo wrestling tournaments, women's needs and perspectives are sidelined if not entirely ignored.

So the trade that is needed in today's world should NOT be free – it should be biased toward poor countries, allowing them to protect their growing domestic industries to get them competitive, or even to just protect things that are important to them – like in Canada, our publicly-run forest management, health care, education and (when Social Development Minister Ken Dryden rises from his slumber) child care system. Just as in Canada we know that, under free trade, opening any of these public goods to private investment would immediately open the door to a profit-based model instead of a quality- and universality-based one. Competition does NOT mean better quality, it means the lowest costs, which often translates to lower quality. The same goes for countries all over the world.

Free trade among equals would be cool. Free trade among such disparately unequal nations, given the origins of that inequality, in unfair and unjust. The “free trade” practiced today, in which the powerful nations selectively apply and ignore trade laws and rulings, and bully weaker nations into opening themselves up to be further exploited instead of protecting their public goods and domestic industries, is abhorrent. Picture a sumo wrestler sitting on an entire cross-country running team and you'll see the picture.

Anyone who thinks the U.S. is the head sumo wrestler is right. But as long as Canada talks free trade and still has a Wheat Board and farm subsidies, we are one mammoth Japanese guy in a diaper.*

Fair trade is a perfectly legitimate alternative to the current trade paradigm. The good folks at International Trade Canada, to my knowledge, don't want to any cross-country runners to get sat on. They also don't want Canada to get sat on. However, we're pretty big boys who could stand to lose a little girth. Enacting rules that are biased toward poor countries, to allow them to develop domestic industries that keep and recycle profits locally, and to protect their public goods like health care, education and infrastructure – building their human and social capital** – might challenge our current, affluent standard of living. But we're well off and billions of people around the world are hungry. Surely we could suck it up, Canada: write the PM and the International Trade Minister and tell him that trade must be fair, period.

We've been trying trickle-down economics for a couple decades now, with little effect on poverty. It's time to see what trickle-up economics might look like. In this case, having more to lose is good because that means we'll surely have something left at the end.

* Not all sumo wrestlers are Japanese, and not all Japanese guys are mammoth sumo wrestlers.
** The only thing I remember from my development economics course in grad school.

P.S. Since writing the above article, the Prime Minister made waves at APEC by arguing that U.S. intransigence on softwood makes them – and the free trade areas and agreements they peddle – lose a lot of credibility with the people they are trying to convince. The fact that Martin is kow-towing to the anti-American sentiment in Canada on Election Eve aside, I guess some of those letters to the PM got sent after all! Bravo! [e]

Next week in Solutions: A fairer tax system!


Action Items:

E-Mail:
(1) Fidel Castro, President of Cuba (I can't find his e-mail, but this one is a joke anyways) – Get well soon, el Dictatore!
(2) Finance Minister Ralph Goodale (goodar@parl.gc.ca) – Nice try with the “over five years” trick, buddy. We're onto you!
(3) Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh (dosanu@parl.gc.ca) – Review your department's hasty approval of aspartame in the early 80s. Protect Canadians' health for a change and make the precautionary principle the top priority by applying a mandatory screen for negative side effects instead of analysing only the benefits of new chemicals and drugs.
(4) Prime Minister Paul Martin (pm@pm.gc.ca) – You're threatening to discredit the whole free trade system as it is currently set up! Keep up the fine work (that specific fine work, not the whole doing nothing and pretending you're doing stuff work). Trade must be fair, period.

Vote with your dollars:
(1) Buy fair trade in Canada and the U.S.
(2) Boycott McDonalds on December 3rd – just for the heck of it, do it for the kids![e]


Good News Stories of the Week

(1) American television audiences will get a dose of climate-change awareness on Sunday night when Triumph the Insult Dog (renowned for mocking celebrities to their faces with his patented “...for me to poop on” line) leads a comedy special on TBS at 8pm with Will Ferrell, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robin Williams and Leonardo DiCaprio. Earth to America is only the first injection required needed to reverse the daily dose of dumber that the tube spews out everyday,but it's a good start – a good idea, as Triumph would say, for me to crap all over. Canadian equivalent Ed the Sock was too buried in the late-night schedule to be available for comment.

(2) Last week's inclusion of Peterborough's recycling and green shopping site paid off big time, as my good pal Karina has found a great place to buy a Made-in-Canada oak rain barrel to collect rainwater for her garden, possibly her toilet flushing, and perhaps her partner Steve (my brother)'s showers. [e]

** E-Mail me your town's recycling and green shopping sites and other Good News Stories!**
** E-Mail me to be added to the Weekly “edSpective is up!” e-mail ListServe or to receive edSpective: UnCut, with all the original swears I shouldn't show my Grandma, my Mom, or the person seeking a new column for their national newspaper ** edspective@yahoo.ca