People's Voice Podcast

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caBy Robert Griffiths and John Foster The UK-EU trade agreement is a compromise between the interests of British state-monopoly capitalism on the one side and those of German and French monopoly capital – represented by their states and the EU – on the other.The Communist Party of Britain has consistently pointed out that the big monopoly capitalists of Britain and the EU have sufficient interests in common to reach a deal, however unlikely the prospect at any particular time. But such an agreement was never intended by either side to benefit the working classes and peoples of England, Scotland, Wales or the other countries of Europe.This new deal frees Britain from the sovereignty of the EU, but not from the sovereignty of big business whether British, European or American. It seeks to maintain the domination of capitalist free market rules and policies across a European single market, enforced through British law, World Trade Organization rules and new UK-EU arbitration mechanisms.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.ca“Capitalism a super-spreader” says Communist Party's Ontario leadership PV Ontario BureauThe Communist Party of Canada's Ontario Executive Committee is demanding immediate action in the face of ongoing governmental failure to address the second wave of the pandemic. In a statement on January 26, the Communist Party said that “Ford's failure is a result of his government consistently siding with corporate interests whenever they conflict with human health.”As Ontario heads into its second month of lockdown, and its third month for Toronto and Peel region, there are many indicators of failure in Ontario's ongoing second wave. Late last year, Ford reluctantly announced a province-wide lockdown for Boxing Day, allowing residents to complete their holiday preparations and quickly intensifying community spread. The premier and various ministers hold regular press conferences at which they insist people, besides the millions of essential workers in the province, take personal responsibility and stay home. Despite declaring another state of emergency, the government has tried to play down aspects of the crisis where health experts and many others are asking them to act. For example, the government is denying the continued under-staffing of long-term care (LTC) homes, the need for paid sick days and another moratorium on evictions.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.ca“They took all the trees / And put them in a tree museum / Then they charged the people / A dollar and a half just to see 'em”So wrote Joni Mitchell in 1970. She, of course, meant this as irony – a slap-down to the “chop it – pave it – sell it” economy, as well as to the hyper-consumerist culture that emerges from (and supports) it.Based on his government's shiny new climate plan, it doesn't seem like Justin Trudeau gets irony.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caBy Greg Godels Biden's first week or so in office proved eventful. He began to aggressively undo much of what Trump undid of the Obama presidency. In essence, he is returning US politics to 2016. For those who longed only for the exit of Trump and a return to what they saw as the comforting past, the Biden victory is cause for celebration.For those who want an answer to a raging pandemic that has taken more US lives than World War 2, for those who fear for the future of the millions newly unemployed by the pandemic, for those millions in arrears on their rent and eventually facing eviction and for the nearly three million households forced into forbearance on their mortgage payments, there is little yet to celebrate.Despite the formal changing of the guard, the distance between the haves and have-nots in the US continues to grow. And more and more working people are pressed into the army of the have-nots. The catastrophic pandemic year has further brought mass insecurity and fear, prompting a strong pullback in consumer spending over the last three months.It is doubtful that 2016 answers will solve 2021 problems.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caAs the Executive Policy Committee of Winnipeg's City Council rushes to pass its 2021 budget, it's hard not to see this document as a direct rebuke to community health and a show of deadly complacency against a growing social movement to defund the police. This movement extends in two important and related directions – against the active role and behaviour of the Winnipeg Police Service, and against the ongoing and deepening depletion of funds for essential services throughout the city, while the police budget only grows.This dynamic – of overfunded security forces and underfunded communities – is too typical. Police-Free Schools Winnipeg has been talking about this for months, where Winnipeg School Division alone spends almost half a million dollars on nine armed police officers, while scrambling for substitute teachers, remote learning resources and protective equipment in a pandemic. Schools cut back on nurses, a necessity for student health, whilst investing in the appearance of safety. This is to say nothing of the direct, negative impacts of police presence on racialized, newcomer, low-income and disabled students. The Police-Free Schools Winnipeg campaign commenced from the acute reality and firsthand experience of funding shortfalls in classrooms, while police budget and presence expand with enthusiastic approval from city council.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caThere is a bitter irony in the fact that Cuba, a country which sent emergency medical brigades around the world to help fight the coronavirus pandemic, is forced by the US blockade to confront shortages of medical supplies in its own borders. But this is the reality imposed by imperialism.Longtime Cuba solidarity activist Keith Ellis is coordinator for the Medical Supplies Fundraising Campaign launched by the Canadian Network on Cuba (CNC). He says that in the current situation, “Cuban hospitals, in different parts of the country, are struggling to acquire some very urgently needed items, mainly due to the US illegal blockade.” The three-month campaign launched on January 8 and will raise $50,000 to fill and ship a container with the critical supplies that Cuba needs. “The CNC has obtained a list of some of these items which we are attempting to source from suppliers of medical equipment in the Toronto area.”Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caIf you're like us, you were pretty happy to see the arse end of 2020. The pandemic meant that the better part of 10 months was spent in some form of lockdown-distancing isolation and the accompanying economic crisis threw millions of people in this country into deep and ongoing financial uncertainty.Governments across the country – at federal and provincial levels – have used the pandemic and crisis as a pretext for squeezing workers of their rights, while rewarding huge corporations. This has taken many forms: rubber-stamping COVID-related workplace health inspections, overriding collective agreements, limitations on protests against resource extraction projects, use of police against Indigenous land defenders, changing labour legislation to strip unions of their hard-earned rights, mass evictions of people who cannot afford their rent because of COVID-related unemployment or any of the massive privatization campaigns that threaten to shift enormous amounts of public wealth to corporate coffers.On top of all this, we were subjected to a seemingly never-ending US election campaign that brought all the worst elements of reactionary right-wing capitalism into our homes on an hourly basis. And, while we relish the end of Trump's presidency, the outcome hardly inspires hope or confidence for progress or peace in the near future.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caBy B Prasant, Kolkata The farmers' sit-in has now passed two months. In the rainy winter cold of northern India, 171 of the demonstrators have succumbed to the extreme weather, mostly the elderly and the ill. None of the central or state governments have come forward with medical assistance. But the kisan (farmers and peasants) are more resolute than ever, and more united than ever, in their struggle to force the government to withdraw the three farm bills and the anti-people electricity legislation.During our one-and-a-half-day stay with the protesters, we noted how those who were severely sick received emergency treatment in the 30-bed camp hospital that has been set up at the Singhu border and run by doctors and nurses from Delhi and the adjoining districts. The doctors themselves have contributed medicines and life-saving equipment.The peasants and farmers remain in high spirits. Every day, rain or shine, from the break of dawn to the very late afternoon when icy winds start to gust fiercely across the open fields, they organize demonstrations at every blocked highway crossing. These occasions are marked by speeches, slogan-shouting and hearty singing.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caThe Communist Party of Quebec (PCQ) is concerned about the alarming numbers of new cases of COVID-19 infection. With more than 2,500 cases daily for the past few days, there is a real danger of overloading our health care system to the point where inhumane choices will have to be made, especially since all specialists agree that any increase in the number of infections will have delayed repercussions on the number of hospitalizations. We can expect the worst. This is why we understand the decision of public health authorities to proceed with a new lockdown.However, these numbers are far from inevitable. They are the result of decades of deliberate underfunding and privatization of the public health system in an effort to commodify it.A new lockdown is nothing more or less than an admission of failure, a flagrant example of the collapse of our public health system. It is no coincidence that here, as everywhere else in the world, it is where budget cuts to healthcare have been deepest that the pandemic is spreading the fastest. In Italy, which was the epicenter of the pandemic last spring, 10 years of underfunding and privatization resulted in a 37 billion euro deficit and the loss of 150,000 hospital beds. In Britain, now in its third lockdown, successive austerity measures since the 1980s have left the health care system a shortfall of more than 10 billion pounds and the loss of 160,000 beds.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caAmong the series of crises that the coronavirus pandemic has caused and exposed in Ontario, one of the most dramatic is in housing. Homeless people have been exposed to the virus in overcrowded shelters and, as a result, encampments have grown exponentially. Across the province, municipalities have already bulldozed these encampments or are threatening to do so.Ontario's unemployment rate has doubled since the pandemic began. After CERB finished and the emergency freeze on evictions was lifted in August, thousands of tenants were left unable to pay rent and have been evicted or are in the process of being evicted. The tenants involved are disproportionately low-income and racialized people.The Ford government further weakened tenants' rights when it passed Bill 184, the perversely named Protecting Tenants and Strengthening Community Housing Act, which heavily favours landlords in the eviction process. At Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB) hearings, only 3 percent of tenants have representation, while 80 percent of landlords do. At the end of 2020, the LTB began an online blitz of hearings, with the goal of evicting at least 100 families each day.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caBy Corinne Benson From what I have unfortunately had to witness personally, it is hard to imagine making Alberta's workers' compensation laws worse.I have been to the funerals of two Chilean Canadians, who escaped being dumped into the sea by Pinochet only to die from preventable diseases – silicosis and mesothelioma – that they contracted in their workplaces in Canada. In one of these cases, I personally witnessed the day-by-day effect which the illness had on the worker and his family. I heard how they barely could feed themselves while they were on welfare. I heard how the Workers' Compensation Board (WCB) would phone him, knowing he was going to die, to ask if he was willing to work part-time. I heard of his children mopping up the blood which he vomited as a result of the silicosis. Finally, the court gave them a settlement, saying that the WCB had not given any consideration of how their treatment of him affected his mental health, but every battle along the way was agonizing.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caFarmers in India are fighting a historic struggle for their very survival as farmers. Under cover of the COVID crisis, the far-right government of Narendra Modi passed three pro-corporate agriculture bills which hand control of the sector to monopolies like Ambani, Adani and other multinational domestic and foreign agribusiness firms.These laws mean that, for the first time since India's independence from British colonialism, big corporations will be allowed to encroach into agriculture and achieve super profits.Indian agriculture is crumbling under neoliberal policies, which were introduced in 1991. The peasantry was able to survive throughout all the years since, but the current laws introduced by Modi will remove whatever lifeline is left for them. These policies are pushing agriculture into a deep crisis – in 2019 alone, more than 40,000 farmers died by suicide in the context of agriculture-related debts and other difficulties.The global capitalist economy is gripped in recession and the neoliberal trajectory has exposed itself as a total failure for solving this crisis. In response, the capitalist class is intensifying its effort to maximize profits; hence, it is seeking new areas of economic activity and markets. The new agriculture laws will allow corporations to control agricultural production, purchasing, storage, marketing and procurement. They will dismantle the Minimum Support Price (MSP) mechanism which guarantees prices for many crops and will privatize public places (known as mandis) where farmers bring crops and government agencies buy them. Corporations will be allowed to open private mandis, buy and hold food grain stocks, and have long-term farm leases. Large-scale contract farming will be allowed. It will be the corporations who decide what crops will be grown, seed type and all other decisions related to agriculture production and sale.This will seriously jeopardize India's food security, by creating artificial shortages of food grains while facilitating a massive rise in prices and dismantling the public distribution system.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caProgressive Filipino organizations in North America and Europe are being warning that the government of Rodrigo Duterte is preparing to export its deadly campaign against left-wing activists to those regions.The National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) was formed in December 2018, to implement Duterte's “whole nation approach” for defeating the ongoing insurgency by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People's Army (NPA). The NTF-ELCAC has an annual budget of nearly 20 billion pesos (over $500 million CAD), approximately the same amount as the government's Department of Environment and Natural Resources. While the task force is oriented toward the Maoist CPP and NPA, it has also targeted activists in the labour and peasant movements, women's organizations, youth and students. It has also directed its violence against members of the Communist Party of the Philippines-1930 (PKP-1930), a Marxist-Leninist party that does not presently participate in armed struggle.Duterte's anti-communist campaign includes widespread use of “red-tagging.” This is the practice of labelling people deemed to be political opponents as communists or terrorists (the two are synonymous in the government's vocabulary), thereby opening them up to a range of repressive measures such as interception and recording of communication, detention without charges, restrictions on travel and personal liberties, examination of bank records and seizure of assets. The campaign also includes outright violence – assault, kidnapping, torture, disappearance and murder.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caThe Communist Party of Canada extends its full support to India's farmers who are struggling against mass, brutal police and government repression to protect their farms and their livelihoods from the catastrophic consequences of new laws imposed by the fascist Modi government in September.The new laws will corporatize agriculture and throw hundreds of millions of small and marginal farmers into bankruptcy and starvation. The current market protections for farmers will evaporate, including government procurement policies and minimum price guarantees, government staple food quotas, state subsidies, marketing boards, farmers' co-ops, the co-op banking system which provided farmers with cheap loans and the system of Commission agents which advanced funds to small and marginalized farmers.The new laws will enable the agricultural monopolies to dictate what crops will be grown, what the price of food will be to surviving contract producers and to consumers. They will enable unprecedented corporate price-fixing and profiteering in food production and will give the food monopolies the ability to create massive food shortages in order to do it.These neoliberal laws, in line with World Trade Organization (WTO) demands that countries eliminate farm-gate price controls, income subsidies and other assistance to small farmers, have stripped small farmers of their power to negotiate with government and corporations, and their legal rights to take disputes to court.  The new laws force them to accept resolution from third parties named by the fascist Modi government.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caThe Lima Group is a Canada-led organization dedicated to the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. In January 2019, National Assembly member Juan Guaidó tried to declare himself president of Venezuela, and Lima Group countries—with the exception of Saint Lucia—recognize Guaidó as president.The Lima Group has faced criticism within Canada and from member states' politicians and journalists. Dr. Maria Paez Victor, a Venezuelan sociologist living in Canada, explained: “Unable to get the Organization of American States (OAS) votes needed to agree to their nefarious plot, this group of governments with no official international standing, few democratic principles, most led by known discredited leaders… allied itself, throwing all of its diplomatic and economic support behind a man who self-proclaimed himself president of Venezuela in a public plaza, violating the country's constitution and all electoral rules. So much for the ‘respect for the rule of law' that the Canadian Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland so frequently spouts.”Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caPresstitutes: Embedded in the Pay of the CIA Author: Udo UlfkottePublisher: Progressive Press, 2019Review by Tim PelzerIt is well documented that the CIA uses the media to spread disinformation. After 1945, in what is known as “Operation Mockingbird,” the agency recruited journalists in major US media to promote its anti-communist Cold War perspective. According to former CIA agent turned whistleblower Philip Agee, the agency has journalists on its payroll across Latin America. In Presstitutes: Embedded in the pay of the CIA, Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor for the mass daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), reveals how the CIA and the German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) use the German media to manipulate and shape public opinion.The BND recruited Ulfkotte while he was in university and then placed him at FAZ. As a naive young man, he was thrilled to work for his country's intelligence agency. “However, looking back, l was corrupt, l was manipulative and dealt in disinformation.”Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caOn September 2, Karl Dockstader from One Dish One Mic Indigenous media was arrested while covering the land defense at 1492 Land Back Lane near Caledonia, Ontario. People's Voice editor Dave McKee spoke with Karl about that conflict, the struggle against colonialism and the criminalization of Indigenous media.DM: Can you give an overview of what is happening at 1492 Land Back Lane? It's a struggle that has received very little, if any, attention in mainstream media.KD: It all really goes back to 1492, but this most recent land reclamation was initiated on July 19, when a group of Haudenosaunee land defenders saw that an intensive urban development was set to start the heavy construction phase of building homes on land that was a farm for the last century or so, and that for a thousand years before that was traditional hunting territory. There was supposed to have been a moratorium on the territories in the Haldimand Tract, because of the activity that happened in 2006 around the Kanonhstaton and Douglas Creek land reclamation. The federal government, the Crown, the provincial government and the County of Haldimand – the powers that be – are not interested in any way in giving land back to Indigenous people. So, they took land back. And in the words of land defender Skyler Williams, “We took this land back forever.”Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caAs I move away from the massive kisan (farmers and peasants) assemblage at the Singhu border between the province of Haryana and Delhi, a heavy drizzle starts to add to my misery in the bone-chilling cold of late Indian winter. I plan to drive along several narrow link roads to gain access to the otherwise blocked NH 44 highway, and then to move into the city en route to the airport.Soon I have to stop as the car is surrounded by several dozen Sikh kisan. They come bearing not only pennants, flags and festoons as souvenirs of my stay, but touchingly, pots of home-cooked food: they remain curiously bare-chested even as the icy rain persists.Asked why, their aged mukhiya (village head) informs me that the entire gathering would sing and dance in the fierce wintry downpour and shout slogans for a couple of hours to show the jan-virodhi (anti-people) Modi government that “even nature could not cow them down.”Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caThe defeat of Donald Trump in the US presidential election is an important victory for the progressive and democratic forces in the US who worked tirelessly over the past four years to expose and build broad opposition to the racist, misogynist, reactionary and pro-fascist agenda of the Trump administration.Trump's defeat is a victory for all those opposing the drive to authoritarianism, reaction, war and fascism in the US, though the battle is far from over and the new administration continue to be the agents and stewards of the most powerful and violent imperialist power on earth.President-elect Biden, like all US Presidents before him, represents the interests of Big Business, the transnational corporations and the military-industrial complex, and his job is to protect and expand US corporate profits and US imperialism. Wall Street supports Biden because he is predictable, accountable and dependable, and will work to restore stability at home and US imperialism's influence, authority and trade globally.Working people who expect more from the new government will be disappointed. For the working class, the unemployed, farmers, women and youth who have been the victims of Republican and Democratic Party policies over decades, there will be little relief and no fundamental change. For that, they will need a working class party that will fight for their interests and for working class power.Read the article in full.

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

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caIn some ways, the spring lockdown associated with the COVID-19 pandemic came as a boon to the Canadian state, which, over the winter of 2019-2020, saw a series of increasingly successful examples of resistance to its colonial projects explode into unprecedented large-scale demonstrations of solidarity in nearly every major city.The loud calls to respect Indigenous sovereignty and account for the ongoing effects of colonization found common voice with a sweeping international movement to address anti-Black racism, police violence and the consequences of racism, historical and ongoing. These actions, growing from a fertile history of struggle (more recently Idle No More and Black Lives Matter) and driven by egregious new attacks, seriously challenged the ability of federal and provincial governments to continue portraying themselves as caring patriarchs or partners in the development of either group.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caThe Ontario Tories have more than doubled the exemption from the Employer Health Tax (EHT) announced in the Ontario budget (and included in the budget bill), increasing it from $490,000 in payroll to $1 million. Currently, employers with payrolls over $400,000 have to pay 1.95 percent of that, so the additional savings for a business with $1 million – $5 million in payroll would be $9,945.This change would make permanent a temporary change that was introduced earlier this year “due to COVID.”The government is also increasing the level of payroll before employers have to make monthly EHT payments. Previously, employers with an annual Ontario payroll over $600,000 had to make monthly EHT instalment payments. With this legislation, that will change to $1.2 million after the end of this calendar year. Another perk.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caOn November 16, François Legault's Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) government presented its “Plan for a Green Economy 2030” to the people of Quebec. It's considered long overdue by the environmental movement, the trade unions and everyone who fears the climate apocalypse, as well as by Legault's allies in the ruling class, who advocate the economic model that has led us to the precipice we face today.The plan's content will not surprise anyone. The focus is on electrification of transport and heating with a ton of money for the private sector, subsidies for research into “renewable” natural gas and other “innovative” sectors, while targeting greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions to 37.5 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Funding for the first 5 years of the plan is not even the same amount of money set aside to pay down government debt. Furthermore, a significant amount will be paid directly to the private sector, which amounts to paying those who are largely responsible for the crisis, instead of making them pay.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caSpread your legs Alberta. Australian mining corporations are already preparing to open-pit mine in the Bighorn area of the Rocky Mountains. Since 1976 the Coal Development Policy has guided land use over many aspects of coal development, including open-pit coal mining and coal exploration in some of Alberta's most environmentally sensitive areas. This policy was developed with extensive public consultation, to create a fair balance between environmental protection, economic development and the social needs of all Albertans.But on June 5, Jason Kenney's United Conservative government rescinded the Coal Development Policy. Recent documents show that at least seven months before announcing the cancellation, the provincial Minister of Environment and the Minister of Economic Development, Tourism and Trade held conversations with coal companies that supported development in these sensitive areas. The lack of public consultation in parks and lands use runs counter to the UCP election commitments to increase consultation in parks and land use decisions and to increase tourism in Alberta.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caNewfoundland and Labrador's new premier, Andrew Furley, entered the provincial legislature in October, after winning a byelection in the riding of Humber-Gros Morne which had been left vacant by previous Liberal leader Dwight Ball. Ball is remembered for leading the province into a period of what could generously be called “tough decisions” in 2016, including an austerity budget which was widely protested. The costs of the ongoing hydro dam on Innu lands in Labrador have become an endless source of criticism and worry over the province's future, and the COVID 19 pandemic has also taken its toll. The oil sector in particular is in a rocky place; the industry that was supposed to bring Newfoundland and Labrador into prosperity after the collapse of our once enormous fishery now seems on the brink of throwing thousands of workers under the bus, and no serious plans are in place for a just transition to a green economy.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caNovember 23, 2020 is a significant day in the history of the People's Republic of China and possibly of the world. China Central Television (CCTV) announced that 9 counties in Guizhou Province, one of the poorest provinces in the country, have been lifted out of absolute poverty. With the results in these last few localities, living standards in all of the 832 previously poor counties across China's 22 provinces are now above the poverty line. The Chinese government's ambitious Poverty Alleviation Campaign, the largest of its kind in human history, is ending victoriously.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caThe recent agreements that both the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have signed with Israel, establishing full diplomatic relations, are a boon to US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.The two politicians desperately need some wind in their sails – Trump to revive his flagging re-election campaign, and Netanyahu to cover the stain corruption for which he is being legally pursued.The mainstream corporate media has portrayed these agreements as peace accords that bring security, stability and prosperity to the signatory states and to the region as a whole. Canadian politicians and pundits gave themselves calluses tweeting out their congratulations. It all seems so lovely, especially during this time of global pandemic and economic chaos.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caWith the rise of the far right it is worth considering the issue of identity politics and the left. This is a type of politics that takes identity, often essentialized, as the central category for organization and analysis. Its left-wing variant is suspicious of power, preferring to engage in academic taxonomies of oppression which prove incapable of addressing underlying causes.On the right, identity politics is leveraged to deliberately divide and fracture workers, pitting them against each other, most frequently on the basis of race, gender, religion or nationality.The left variant of identity politics emerged from the post-modern paradigm that has come to dominate much of progressive politics within the academic world. As the past thirty years have shown, a politics that over-emphasizes individual identity and difference over the potential to unite disparate groups under shared class interests leaves much to be desired. Nevertheless, the focus on identity and difference is necessary, even if it served as an over-correction to certain historical tendencies on the left that treated the working class as a homogeneous, abstract, uniform mass.The problem here is not universality but rather abstract universality. In the overreaction against such descriptions, the post-modern position throws the baby of concrete universality out with the bath water of abstract universality. Forgoing universality as a concept and reveling in difference has led to nothing but the fracturing of progressive forces into small cliques incapable of pursuing a collective emancipatory project with the power to address the needs of the majority in society.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caAs People's Voice goes to press, Western governments are escalating their threats to intervene in Belarus against the elected government of Alexander Lukashenko. In response, a growing number of voices around the world are warning of the dangers of intervention to the people of Belarus and of the region. Here, we reprint an analysis from the Party of Labour of Austria. In the wake of the presidential election in Belarus, there has been over a week of escalating clashes and protests. The clearly defeated opposition accuses the government of electoral fraud, while the re-elected President Lukashenko considers himself to be in office legally. It is impossible for us to verify how the election process was conducted and how the votes were counted. The view propagated by the opposition candidate Tikhanovskaya, that she actually won with about 80 percent of the vote, is an assertion for which there are no clues or evidence. This version seems implausible, even if one has doubts about the official result. However, it was clear long before the vote that the opposition would not recognize the result in the event of defeat. This makes it obvious that this is a planned staging.  Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caNot one step further behind!The coronavirus pandemic coincided with forecasts of the coming economic recession. The combination, as we know, has been cataclysmic and both have had an overwhelmingly negative impact on women. The recovery from both must put jobs, services and supports for women at the forefront of the rebuilding agenda – governments must invest in the public social infrastructures that will assist women in moving toward equality in the workplace. The disaster also reminds us that inequality will continue as long as the capitalist system remains. Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caThe Constitutional Court's ruling, that abortion of terminally ill fetuses is unconstitutional, has sparked a nationwide outrage and a wave of protests that has terrified the authorities.Thousands of people have been taking to the streets of Polish cities since October 22, despite bans and the pandemic. The protest is gaining momentum and the situation developing into a turning point. Demonstrations are not only taking place in large cities, where resistance to the imposition of clerical morality has always been strong, but also in smaller centers. Several hundred gatherings, blockades and marches have taken place, including in cities and towns considered to be bastions of the PiS [the ruling, right-wing populist Law and Justice party]. They have mostly involved young people, who have no experience in similar activities or no specific political views. This is an accelerated course in civil disobedience for them. The slogan “this is war,” adopted as one of the main ones during the social mobilization, shows there is no lack of radicalism. The protests have surpassed the expectations of many left groups.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caIn 1972, the impoverished and oppressed people of Nicaragua suffered a terrible crisis when an earthquake struck the capital of Managua. An estimated 5000 people were killed, and the city centre was destroyed. International humanitarian aid flowed to the country, including blood and plasma donations from all over the world. Perversely, then dictator Anastasio Somoza intercepted large amounts of the emergency blood donations, which he then exported from his stricken country, at a huge profit.Almost 60 years later, Alberta premier Jason Kenney seems to be taking a page from Somoza's playbook. His government's Bill 204, The Voluntary Blood Donations Repeal Act, will cast aside legislation that guarantees blood and plasma as public resources and open the field to corporate blood banks who sell blood products for profit on the international market.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caOn July 19 in the evening, land defenders moved onto unceded Haudenosaunee lands that were close to being heavily developed. Free, prior and informed consent to develop these lands was not attained. A construction project to be named Mackenzie Meadows would effectively destroy the ability to resolve the disputed status of the land and this heavy land alteration was and is set to begin.Land defenders stopped this development and have renamed the land 1492 Land Back Lane and intend to keep it as Haudenosaunee territory, in the words of one of the many land defenders Skyler Williams, “forever.”Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caIt should be a no-brainer. Meng committed no crime in Canada or in the United States (whose government demanded that she be detained in Vancouver). While she stands accused of “illegal” trade with Iran, through Huawei Corporation of which she is CFO, neither Meng nor Huawei nor China have broken any international or Canadian laws in this regard. All international trade sanctions against Iran were lifted with the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – the “Iran nuclear deal” that was reached between Iran and the P5+1 powers (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China—plus Germany). Read the full article here.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caNo foreign interference, no imperialist coup!The Communist Party of Canada denounces the interference in the internal affairs of Belarus, by the United States, European Union and NATO countries. The Party calls on the Canadian government to immediately stop its involvement in the campaign to destabilize the country, and to normalize relations with the elected government of Alexander Lukashenko.Official reports indicate that the presidential election held on August 9 was clearly won by Lukashenko, who was supported by many progressive forces including the Communist Party of Belarus. Opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya received only 10 percent of the official vote yet has claimed victory and called for a transfer of power. Within hours of the election, Tsikhanouskaya met with US First Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun and announced a “Coordination Council” to mobilize anti-government protests.Read the article in full.

 Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caOn July 19 in the evening, land defenders moved onto unceded Haudenosaunee lands that were close to being heavily developed. Free, prior and informed consent to develop these lands was not attained. A construction project to be named Mackenzie Meadows would effectively destroy the ability to resolve the disputed status of the land and this heavy land alteration was and is set to begin.Land defenders stopped this development and have renamed the land 1492 Land Back Lane and intend to keep it as Haudenosaunee territory, in the words of one of the many land defenders Skyler Williams, “forever.”Read the article in full.

 Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caUntil COVID-19 triggered the current economic crisis, the “great economic meltdown” of 2007-08 was the largest, most widespread and protracted capitalist crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In response to that deep recession, ruling circles of finance capital and their governments around the world used state treasuries to bail out corporate losses to the tune of tens of trillions.In Canada, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper announced it would spend around $30 billion to stimulate the economy, overwhelmingly in the form of corporate bailouts.Read the article in full. 

 Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caAmid yet another zoonotic disease, COVID-19, it is even more urgent that the public has full transparency and access to information about intensive animal farming. But federal and provincial governments continue to placate the powerful agribusiness industry – which is optimizing profits by further concealing what occurs behind closed doors.  At the behest of lobby groups for agribusiness, the Ontario government has passed Bill 156, The Security from Trespass and Protecting Food Safety Act. The bill erodes the rights of investigative journalists and whistleblowers, who have been paramount in exposing animal and worker abuse rights and brings an even greater cloak of secrecy around this exploitative industry.Read the article in full. 

 Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caThe Prime Minister's decision to prorogue Parliament until September 23 is an effort to position the Liberals as defenders of the 7 million people who lost their jobs this spring, the 8.4 million who needed CERB and the 4.5 million who will still need CERB after it wraps up August 29.Media reports about job creation and economic recovery are overblown and out of sync with the reality of a 28 percent unemployment rate among women and 24 percent among men. These more than 5 million people include the officially registered unemployed, those who have given up looking for work, and those who are working less than 50 percent of the hours worked before the crisis. Many working people have seen their savings evaporate and are hanging on by a thread.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caIn a statement issued August 7, three days after the huge explosion in the port of Beirut which killed scores of people and left 300,000 homeless, the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP) called for renewed and escalating protests aimed at bringing down the government, which it holds responsible for the tragedy.“The national catastrophe which occurred after the destruction of Beirut's port and many neighborhoods of the capital, resulting in hundreds of martyrs and thousands of causalities, can only be considered a major crime against the nation. This crime is committed by a political authority who has a big record of neglect, corruption and a lack of national responsibility.”Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caIn 2002 the Quebec National Assembly adopted the Act to Combat Poverty and Social Exclusion. This law obliges the Quebec government to establish a national strategy including actions that “must address both the causes and the consequences of poverty and social exclusion to ensure that all persons concerned may obtain the support and encouragement their situation requires and may, on their own, achieve self-sufficiency, and participate actively in the life and advancement of the community.”The “national strategy” was to have reduced poverty levels in Quebec to the lowest in the industrialized world by 2013.This, of course, did not happen.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caNew Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs has called a snap election for September 14, well in advance of the 2022 date established by the provincial Legislative Assembly Act, which mandates that a general election be held every four years on the third Monday in October.This election comes after the Liberals refused Blaine Higgs' ludicrous “deal” to keep his minority Conservative government in power until 2022 or until the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, while removing the ability of the opposition to raise criticism – an attempt by Higgs to subvert democracy. In spite of the pandemic, public health and the public interest, Higgs and the Tories are opportunistically vying to seize power at a time when the federal Liberals are at their weakest due to the WE Charity scandal. The Tories are aiming for a majority government, which would free them to continue inflicting their campaign of austerity on New Brunswickers. Higgs is running on a campaign of stability while taking full credit for New Brunswick's success with the pandemic, despite the major contributions from the other three parties in the minority government.Higgs' history, however, states the obvious – he is neither for working people, nor for their health.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caMuch of the world is facing a crisis around the use and abuse of various sorts of substances, with different countries taking different approaches to the issue. The United States has generally focused on prohibition, enforcement and corrections; the Netherlands and Portugal have tried legalization and drug therapies for users. Still, headlines worldwide indicate many deaths each day from overdoses.The Business of Drugs, a six-part documentary series on Netflix, features former CIA analyst Amarylis Fox exploring issues around six different types of illegal drugs. For leftist critics of drug prohibition, this series provides excellent examples of how capitalism is a major cause of the drug crisis – both in terms of why people use drugs in the first place and the fact that the US, in particular, currently lacks a planned or coherent response to this crisis. Perhaps the most politically salient episodes are the ones on cannabis and opioids. Fox herself ends the series with a clear critique of “unregulated capitalism.”Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caManitoba's Conservative government has used the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic crisis as an opportunity to ram through legislation aimed at privatizing the province's forests, parks, water infrastructure and flood control.Read the article in full. 

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caAlberta's provincial government has slated 164 provincial park sites – 37 percent of parks in the province – for closure or third-party “partnerships.” Jason Kenney's United Conservative Party also intends to remove protected area status from these parks.This involves 9 provincial parks, 149 provincial recreation areas and 6 natural areas, scattered widely all over the province. Ten of these have already been closed. Having their protected area status removed means that the parks are no longer subject to the province's Parks Act and related regulations, and the Parks Division of the Alberta government will no longer be the land manager. The lands will revert to being public lands under the Public Lands Act which, while maintaining some regulation, allows for a wider range of activities than on park lands. For example, agricultural production could be allowed, or the lands could be sold or transferred to a municipality.Read the article in full. 

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caActivists building an emboldened movement for progressive reformIndia, Ireland, Mexico, Norway and Kenya won the June 17 elections at the 74th United Nations Assembly for five non-permanent seats on the UN Security Council. The two-year terms start on January 1, 2021.The biggest loser was Canada, in its competition with Ireland and Norway for two available seats in the Western European and Other States Group. A total of 128 votes were needed to secure a two-thirds majority. Norway received 130 votes while Ireland got 128. Canada received just 108 votes. All efforts by the Canadian officials, including multiple phone calls to other countries' UN ambassadors, failed. This is the second loss, following one in 2010 under the Harper Conservative government.Read the article in full. 

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caUnited in action, Toronto's tenants descended upon John Tory's private residence on July 6, intending to deliver a mock eviction notice to the mayor. After years of casting futile ballots, petitioning groomed staffers and participating in patronizing consultations, disenfranchised neighbours have reached the conclusion that the only way to combat the deliberately engineered housing crisis is to take matters into their own hands.Tenants did not kick down the mayor's door with firearms on their hips. Tenants did not drag the mayor from his home in handcuffs, changing the locks behind him. Tenants did not throw the mayor into the streets of a city that views him as subhuman clutter obstructing the path of development.Far from this, Tory cowered behind the Toronto police – the country's most expensive gang of brutes – as they inflicted the violence they were established to impose. They twisted arms, yanked ankles, punched throats and maced eyes. “I have been around and am used to the fact that there are protests, including some directed at me, but I live in a condominium building and I am more concerned for my neighbours,” Tory snivelled the next day. Meanwhile, he has spent months looking the other way as a tidal wave of evictions approaches and threatens to swallow entire communities whole.Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caOn July 7, the United Conservative Party government of Jason Kenney introduced Bill 32, the Restoring Balance in Alberta's Workplaces Act. It's a massive omnibus bill that amends six different labour and employment relations acts. Don't be fooled by the title of the bill – it is, without a doubt, an attack on workers and unions to the benefit of corporations and the rich.An attack on one group of workers almost inevitably has repercussions on other workers. This bill must be halted!Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caOn June 25, Mark Austin and Candace Zinkweg were walking their dog in Dentonia Park in Toronto's east end. When their dog was bitten by an off-leash dog, they confronted the dogs' owners who quickly became very aggressive and threatening. Zinkweg was assaulted and suffered a concussion. The assailants hurled racist abuse at Austin, who is Black, and threatened him with gun violence, both during and after the incident. Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.ca Last week, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) made history with its largest ever anti-racism training event, hosting one thousand members and non-members in the English webinar on July 20 and more than 700 registrations for the French session on July 21. It ought to be remembered as a moment of moral clarity for a union whose membership constitute a dynamic substratum in Canada's organized working class. PSAC members are employed in all sectors of public administration, from program delivery, to integrity enforcement, to activities adjoining or directly engaged in the carcel state. They are in a unique position to passively observe, actively exploit or actively challenge the many intersections of structural oppression in Canada. It is my hopeful imagination that labour historians will look back at this moment as one small, but brave step by PSAC in the long march towards a just society. Read the article in full.

Welcome to the People's Voice Podcast. Visit us online at www.peoplesvoice.caWorkers in several industries across Québec are getting ready for what's beginning to look like one of the highest points of struggle in recent memory. Just like everywhere else, the COVID-19 pandemic has shaken up the economy, with governments and capital straining to contain progressive resistance to their corporate-friendly management of the crisis.But Québec's labour movement is fighting back.Read the article in full.