One of the most predictably salient features of hate movements is how completely out-of-touch with reality their narratives are. They depend on the big lies, and their followers believing them, to survive.
Sometimes, however, their attempts to stretch their false persecution complexes (and all hate movements depend on these...as they have to assert the absurd idea that those who are victimized, be it people of colour, Jews, women or whoever is the scapegoat, are actually those who are doing the victimizing) are even more than usually farcical and ridiculous.
A good example is this the recent A Voice for Men (AVfM) "outrage" at a panel that I was a part of this past Monday.
Organized by OPIRG TO this panel sought to combat the attempts by misogynists, in alliance with the American based hate site AVfM, to establish so-called men's rights clubs on campuses in Canada and specifically at U of T. They have done this under the guise of a supposedly "moderate" group, CAFE, that now has plans to have a speaker on campus who thinks declining male enrollment in university can be partly attributed to attempts to fight rape on campus by women. Seriously.
These same groups are planning an event at Queen's Park on Saturday that seeks in part to expose the "fact" that "men are subject to rampant false sexual, Domestic Violence and rape allegations".
But, it seems the "scoop" of the week for them, was their "infiltration" of a "secret feminist meeting" by some coward that they have called "Agent Green". Honestly. It would be hard to make this up!
Of course, as I have linked to above, this "secret" meeting was actually a highly publicized event that was advertised all over U of T campus as well as online through social media and that was open to the public with no restrictions at all. They have a very odd definition of "secret". Due to the fact that women at U of T have been intimidated and harassed by these groups, the organizers requested that it not be recorded; a request that we all suspected would not be and that was not, respected.
"Agent Green", like James Bond, managed to make his way into the dangerous public "secret" assembly and, well no doubt soiling himself with fear the whole time, recorded a public event that had a virtually full capacity attendance. What a brave guy! Well done!
So, as it is now all over Facebook and Twitter and there is no difference anymore, here without further ado is the recording of the "secret" feminist meeting. It will make it very clear, from the excellent panel and audience discussion why we need to fight the Men's Rights Movement and its radically reactionary agenda.
Please note that you have to skip to the seven minute mark. It would seem that Agent Green is something of an amateur and was too scared to turn the recording device on in the public hall itself. So the first part are sounds of him breathing heavily and his pants swishing while he set up his sting. That took real courage.
The rest is a fantastic discussion and panel dealing with the MRA. Glad it is "out there"!
Please note: The sound quality sucks, which likely has something to do with the idiocy of how it was recorded. The points come through well though. Thanks "Agent Green". Your role playing at being a CSIS guy paid off well. You are going to get our ideas out to thousands of people that would have never heard them.
Original Description:
7:00-9:00-PANEL
What’s Wrong with the MRA? The Problem of Men’s Rights Organizing
Speakers: Steph Guthrie (Academy of the Impossible), Jeff Perera (White
Ribbon Project), Ashleigh Ingle (Graduate Student Union, University of
Toronto), Michael Laxer (Rabble)
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, room 2211
252 Bloor Street West
Men’s Rights Activists are cropping up at North American universities,
building their “social movement” under the guise of promoting free
speech and equality. In actuality, what the MRAs promote and peddle is
anti-feminist and misogynist ideology and politics. Their proponents
have gone as far as to incite harassment against those who speak out
against them and websites like A Voice for Men have publicly slandered
and targeted women. Last year, students and community members in
Toronto challenged the MRAs by protesting their events on the University
of Toronto campus. Since the MRAs consider the University of Toronto to
be a key recruiting ground for their cause, and we’ve seen how the
University of Toronto administration is all too happy to host them here,
this panel will present a case for why Men's Rights organizations and
activists are dangerous and why we should build towards an organized
feminist movement that can respond to them.
*There will be no
video or audio recording of this event. Any oppressive language and/or
actions will not be tolerated, and those engaging in such behavior will
be asked to leave the event*
Speaker Bios:
Jeff
Perera is a Community Engagement Manager for the White Ribbon Campaign,
the world’s largest effort to engage men in re-imaging masculinity and
help end gender-based violence. Jeff also founded Higher Unlearning, an
online space to explore how ideas of gender & masculinity play out
in everyday life.
Steph Guthrie is a feminist advocate and
community organizer who uses social media and interactive events to
spark and sustain conversations about gender justice, labour, politics
and education. She is a faculty member and lifelong learner at Academy
of the Impossible.
Ashleigh Ingle is a feminist and an
anarchist who organizes with working people and students at the
University of Toronto and in the community. She is the current chair of
the Women and Trans people caucus of the U of T Graduate Students'
Union. She participates in grassroots feminist organizing at the
University and hopes to see the response to the presence of MRAs to be
the creation of a militant feminist movement capable of responding to
the manifestations of white supremacy and patriarchy faced by students
and workers at the University of Toronto and beyond.
Michael
Laxer is blogger for rabble.ca, a two-time former candidate and former
election organizer for the NDP, was a socialist candidate for Toronto
City Council in 2010 and is on the executive of the newly formed
Socialist Party of Ontario.
Update: After the MRA rally in Toronto on September 28 ( a rally that was a total fiasco, as you can read about in this manboobz post) some photos were posted of the rally on Facebook. As an FYI to anti-MRA activists and other feminists for future events you hold, the man wearing the Men's Rights Edmonton placard on himself was at the public Disorientation 2013 anti-MRA panel. Could he be Agent Green? He clearly is not a feminist ally! (Should the above link to the photos no longer work, I will upload a photo of the door crasher).
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Start your own revolution: Towards a new independent socialist electoral activism.
Politics in Canada and more broadly is a very regimented,
leader-driven game. From multiple, seemingly different perspectives, we
often end with the same result. The hegemonic discourse of
neo-liberalism and the overwhelming desire of those in power to stay in
power, as well as the subversion by apparatchiks of party "democracy"
exists to such an extent that political parties, their members and
their caucuses are really mass powerless mouthpieces for their leaders
and the backroom strategists that advise those leaders. This has meant
that the room to maneuver and to fight for a leftist discourse in
electoral terms has narrowed considerably.
While some insist that getting this-or-that candidate nominated, or this-or-that resolution passed at some farcically irrelevant party convention can turn the tide, the evidence of the last 30 years is unequivocal. When the left, in Canada embodied in the NDP, has been in or out of power they have, in economic terms, lost. The right has set the policies and the framework for these policies and the "left" has capitulated to them. This is why, for example, having had the NDP in "power" in Manitoba for many years now has made little difference at all to that province's rates of inequality, people living in poverty or child poverty versus the rest of the country. The NDP has capitulated in advance to the essentially consumerist middle class ideas that drive our politics, so their election or reelection is basically meaningless in any fundamental sense.
Would they have been better and would they be better than the Tories? Yes. Of course. But the same can be, was, and could still be said of the Liberal Party many times. It is not only not an inspiring argument, it is a tiredly old and facile one from any actually socialist point-of-view. If being "better" than the hard right movements that have successfully dismantled the post-war social compromise welfare state is the objective, then that is not hard to achieve. If largely doing the bidding of business lobbyists while talking in "progressive" terms about "getting results", and if being unwilling to stand up for principle, the poor and the marginalized while collecting salaries that place one within the top 2% of income earners is the objective, then the job has been well done.
Leftist discourse has been reduced in meaning in Canada to the point that we have begun to actually believe that fighting to lift ATM fees, take the HST off home heating or to make it more affordable to help contribute to global warming by facilitating the singularly selfish lifestyle choice of driving cars to work in a metropolitan area with mass transit, are "leftist" causes as opposed to the neo-Nader, liberal, consumerist irrelevances that they actually are.
Less than much ado about nothing, they are a sad shadow of when the capitalists used to be actually scared of the left and the possibility of its victory. Now they, at worst, would see it is as a short term inconvenience, like a stock market crash or bad press from a class action lawsuit.
So, apologies to Lenin, what is to be done?
The task of building a new left party faces the tremendous obstacles of not only the institutionalized power bases of the already elected MPs, MPPs, MLAs, MNAs and their staffs and organizers, it also faces the sectarianism of the left generally, the reality that many union leaderships, as in the United States, have bought into a "reformist" strategy where "reform" really means a defensive posture against reaction, and it faces the anti-electoralism of the many in the "social movement" or "neo-anarchist" wing of the left who, understandably, think it is all a big farce.
It also faces the reality that Canada is a huge country and that
starting a new electoral project is inhibited by obvious problems like a
lack of money, the vast distances between activists, inertia, the odd
left wing version of apathy and the natural and inevitable distrust of
the "new". It is also inhibited by the desire of people to be a part of
a "winning team" even if that team is really not winning much of
anything at all other than some elections.
Given these very real obstacles, we are faced by the even greater ones of our society's and movement's "leadership cults." For all the talk of wanting to do something new and to construct a new set of social power relations, it is depressing how leftists within their own organizations have entirely adopted the structures of the elites and political movements that they are seeking to supplant. It is depressing how obedience to the leader is seen as a virtue despite the obvious inequality, lack of democracy and historically noxious reality that such obedience implies and reflects.
Overly respecting or playing the sheep to your "leaders" is a fool's game, and the leadership concept itself inevitably leads to inequity, undermines true democracy, creates false and shallow partisanship, and leads drips to get their backs up about even minor criticisms. A new world is never born by adopting the institutions of the old.
While Quebec Solidaire has begun to chart a new path in collective governance ideas, we in the rest of the country cannot wait for the consciousness of the English Canadian socialist left to catch up.
So, to paraphrase the great leftist singer Billy Bragg, it is time to start your own revolution, and cut out the middle people, the power brokers, the parties, the sycophants, the hacks, the careerists and the opportunists. If the structures do not exist yet, it is time to start to create them yourself with your local friends and comrades. It is time to take back power from the self-appointed, party backed, mouthpieces of institutionalized "leftism".
Where to start? Start with municipal elections. If you are in Ontario, for example, these are coming in 2014, they cost very little ($100) to register in, and you get as many as nearly ten months to get out and make your ideas heard. Ten months to talk to neighbours, friends, co-workers, fellow students, and whoever will listen to the message that, as a comrade Andrew Klochek put it at the founding convention of the Socialist Party of Ontario, "It is never too late to write the future."
There are more choices than the paltry four "versions" of the same thing that we are being offered, and there are more outcomes that are possible than the depressing ones we have been taught to expect.
Start by telling the naysayers that it is not about winning, it is not about you, it is not about immediate "power," it is about something much bigger than that. It is about turning the tide in a real way. It is about making those in real positions of power uncomfortable and accountable again. It is about empowering citizens to be angry in an anti-capitalist sense and to no longer want to reform the system in minor ways, but rather to reject it entirely. It is about saying this can be done without leader worship, "democratic centralism" or the sheer idiocy of "solidarity with the leadership" in pathetic social democratic "campaigns" that seek to change little at all.
You can do it yourself. You do have that power. You may not, and in most cases will almost certainly not, "win" in the short term, but if worrying about losing, or desperately trying to talk to people "where they are" had been the tactics of our socialist ancestors we would all be living in the dark ages of the early industrial era still. It is usually an excuse for wanting to "win" anyway.
The only real change occurs when you shift the discourse. That never happens by "talking to people where they are." Doing that is the window dressing of do nothing parliaments and parliamentarians.
Take the fight to the people. Directly. Change the discussion. Directly. Do not wait for some politically appointed and partisan driven committee paid for by a party or government to decide that one minor part of what is important to you and your community is something they might do something about one day. Say it yourself and forget the talking heads.
You can stop interpreting and talking about how bad the world is, and you can instead change it. Marx was right.That is the point.
There has never been a better time for a grassroots, insurrectionist politics in defiance of political leaders and parties. There has never been a better time for citizens to cut the parties and politicians out. They are already irrelevant.
Make politics relevant again.
Run for office, any office, on an independent socialist or syndicalist campaign and start a new discussion in your community.
Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau and their machines are not going to do it for you. They are never going to talk about what matters to you. They are only going to talk about what can get them a seat here-or-there. Most municipal, provincial and federal politicians are nothing but a sad reflection of whatever their "leader" says they are or whatever opportunist stance can get them closer to reelection. That is why no one cares who they are unless they do something "off script", which they basically never do. Almost no one who does not live there can name or cares about an MP or MPP who is outside their own riding who is not in cabinet.
Why should they? These MPs are paid over $100,000 a year (in many cases well over) to say Yes Minister or Prime Minister and leap up like sheep during a vote as expected.
Cut them out. Be unexpected. Fight back.
You have nothing to lose. And you just might, one day like the early socialists did, change society.
While some insist that getting this-or-that candidate nominated, or this-or-that resolution passed at some farcically irrelevant party convention can turn the tide, the evidence of the last 30 years is unequivocal. When the left, in Canada embodied in the NDP, has been in or out of power they have, in economic terms, lost. The right has set the policies and the framework for these policies and the "left" has capitulated to them. This is why, for example, having had the NDP in "power" in Manitoba for many years now has made little difference at all to that province's rates of inequality, people living in poverty or child poverty versus the rest of the country. The NDP has capitulated in advance to the essentially consumerist middle class ideas that drive our politics, so their election or reelection is basically meaningless in any fundamental sense.
Would they have been better and would they be better than the Tories? Yes. Of course. But the same can be, was, and could still be said of the Liberal Party many times. It is not only not an inspiring argument, it is a tiredly old and facile one from any actually socialist point-of-view. If being "better" than the hard right movements that have successfully dismantled the post-war social compromise welfare state is the objective, then that is not hard to achieve. If largely doing the bidding of business lobbyists while talking in "progressive" terms about "getting results", and if being unwilling to stand up for principle, the poor and the marginalized while collecting salaries that place one within the top 2% of income earners is the objective, then the job has been well done.
Leftist discourse has been reduced in meaning in Canada to the point that we have begun to actually believe that fighting to lift ATM fees, take the HST off home heating or to make it more affordable to help contribute to global warming by facilitating the singularly selfish lifestyle choice of driving cars to work in a metropolitan area with mass transit, are "leftist" causes as opposed to the neo-Nader, liberal, consumerist irrelevances that they actually are.
Less than much ado about nothing, they are a sad shadow of when the capitalists used to be actually scared of the left and the possibility of its victory. Now they, at worst, would see it is as a short term inconvenience, like a stock market crash or bad press from a class action lawsuit.
So, apologies to Lenin, what is to be done?
The task of building a new left party faces the tremendous obstacles of not only the institutionalized power bases of the already elected MPs, MPPs, MLAs, MNAs and their staffs and organizers, it also faces the sectarianism of the left generally, the reality that many union leaderships, as in the United States, have bought into a "reformist" strategy where "reform" really means a defensive posture against reaction, and it faces the anti-electoralism of the many in the "social movement" or "neo-anarchist" wing of the left who, understandably, think it is all a big farce.
Given these very real obstacles, we are faced by the even greater ones of our society's and movement's "leadership cults." For all the talk of wanting to do something new and to construct a new set of social power relations, it is depressing how leftists within their own organizations have entirely adopted the structures of the elites and political movements that they are seeking to supplant. It is depressing how obedience to the leader is seen as a virtue despite the obvious inequality, lack of democracy and historically noxious reality that such obedience implies and reflects.
Overly respecting or playing the sheep to your "leaders" is a fool's game, and the leadership concept itself inevitably leads to inequity, undermines true democracy, creates false and shallow partisanship, and leads drips to get their backs up about even minor criticisms. A new world is never born by adopting the institutions of the old.
While Quebec Solidaire has begun to chart a new path in collective governance ideas, we in the rest of the country cannot wait for the consciousness of the English Canadian socialist left to catch up.
So, to paraphrase the great leftist singer Billy Bragg, it is time to start your own revolution, and cut out the middle people, the power brokers, the parties, the sycophants, the hacks, the careerists and the opportunists. If the structures do not exist yet, it is time to start to create them yourself with your local friends and comrades. It is time to take back power from the self-appointed, party backed, mouthpieces of institutionalized "leftism".
Where to start? Start with municipal elections. If you are in Ontario, for example, these are coming in 2014, they cost very little ($100) to register in, and you get as many as nearly ten months to get out and make your ideas heard. Ten months to talk to neighbours, friends, co-workers, fellow students, and whoever will listen to the message that, as a comrade Andrew Klochek put it at the founding convention of the Socialist Party of Ontario, "It is never too late to write the future."
There are more choices than the paltry four "versions" of the same thing that we are being offered, and there are more outcomes that are possible than the depressing ones we have been taught to expect.
Start by telling the naysayers that it is not about winning, it is not about you, it is not about immediate "power," it is about something much bigger than that. It is about turning the tide in a real way. It is about making those in real positions of power uncomfortable and accountable again. It is about empowering citizens to be angry in an anti-capitalist sense and to no longer want to reform the system in minor ways, but rather to reject it entirely. It is about saying this can be done without leader worship, "democratic centralism" or the sheer idiocy of "solidarity with the leadership" in pathetic social democratic "campaigns" that seek to change little at all.
You can do it yourself. You do have that power. You may not, and in most cases will almost certainly not, "win" in the short term, but if worrying about losing, or desperately trying to talk to people "where they are" had been the tactics of our socialist ancestors we would all be living in the dark ages of the early industrial era still. It is usually an excuse for wanting to "win" anyway.
The only real change occurs when you shift the discourse. That never happens by "talking to people where they are." Doing that is the window dressing of do nothing parliaments and parliamentarians.
Take the fight to the people. Directly. Change the discussion. Directly. Do not wait for some politically appointed and partisan driven committee paid for by a party or government to decide that one minor part of what is important to you and your community is something they might do something about one day. Say it yourself and forget the talking heads.
You can stop interpreting and talking about how bad the world is, and you can instead change it. Marx was right.That is the point.
There has never been a better time for a grassroots, insurrectionist politics in defiance of political leaders and parties. There has never been a better time for citizens to cut the parties and politicians out. They are already irrelevant.
Make politics relevant again.
Run for office, any office, on an independent socialist or syndicalist campaign and start a new discussion in your community.
Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau and their machines are not going to do it for you. They are never going to talk about what matters to you. They are only going to talk about what can get them a seat here-or-there. Most municipal, provincial and federal politicians are nothing but a sad reflection of whatever their "leader" says they are or whatever opportunist stance can get them closer to reelection. That is why no one cares who they are unless they do something "off script", which they basically never do. Almost no one who does not live there can name or cares about an MP or MPP who is outside their own riding who is not in cabinet.
Why should they? These MPs are paid over $100,000 a year (in many cases well over) to say Yes Minister or Prime Minister and leap up like sheep during a vote as expected.
Cut them out. Be unexpected. Fight back.
You have nothing to lose. And you just might, one day like the early socialists did, change society.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Love in the time of homophobia: The right of LGBT couples to be couples in public
If you are a heterosexual, chances are you have
never really given much thought to the daily public displays of
affection that we make with our girlfriends or boyfriends, husbands or
wives, all the time.
You very likely kiss your partner hello or goodbye in basically any context without any hesitation, hold hands while strolling down the street, stare into each others eyes and touch romantically while lying on that blanket in the park, and put arms around each other at the movies or in a restaurant while waiting for your food to come.
You never worry about what neighbourhood, venue or restaurant you are doing this in, thinking that some might not be accepting of it, because all are. You don't worry if children or "families" are around.
This is the day-to-day behaviour of love and it is accepted and expected. No one notices when you do this, and if they do notice they likely smile and think that it is sweet, cute or heartwarming.
Which it is.
Except, that is, if you are doing the exact same things and are an LGBT couple.
Over a year ago a young couple in my community started a new initiative for the South Etobicoke (West Toronto) neighbourhood I live in. Bram Zeidenberg and Jamie Berardi had had enough of the homophobia and lack of an LGBT public presence where they lived and they did something about it. They started the Lakeshore Villages LGBT Community Group, went door-to-door to neighbourhood businesses getting them to put up stickers supporting inclusion, made presentations to and got the endorsement of local Business Improvement Areas and during the last Pride Week, for the first time in this part of the city, the commercial strip had many businesses flying pride flags.
Yet just this past weekend they had to organize a local protest and awareness picnic to stand up against treatment that they say they received at the hands of a local diner's waitress when they sat on the same side of a booth together as a couple.
While the owner of the diner denies many of their claims, there can be little doubt that public displays of affection and small levels of intimacy by LGBT couples are held to an entirely different standard than those of heterosexual couples and that what are seen as perfectly ordinary expressions of love in the one case are labeled as lewd, inappropriate or "disturbing to children" or families in the other.
In fact, of course, many of these seemingly ordinary actions for heterosexual couples result in glares, abuse, harassment and violence for LGBT couples. A common sentiment is that any intimacy between LGBT couples, no matter how minor, belongs behind closed doors or "in the bedroom" as if a kiss is akin to sex. Thus the restaurant owner in the above incident allegedly saying that Mr. Zeidenberg should “leave his relationship at home”.
This is something that heterosexual couples are simply never asked to do.
In addition, the threat or specter that LGBT couples supposedly present to "families" or "children" is constantly raised. It is raised even by many of those who claim to be fine with LGBT rights, unless, of course, they actually see members of the LGBT community in the real world acting like everyone else does. It is usually framed something like "I have no problems with gays/lesbians/trans people, but they really should keep it to themselves and not force my kids to watch it."
After I had gone with my kids to the rally that was held in Mimico by the Lakeshore Villages LGBT Community Group last Sunday, Mr. Zeidenberg put up a message on my Facebook wall that read:
This comment made me very sad. Not because of what he said, with which I agree entirely, but because he felt he needed to say it all. Because of the fact that so many people do still think that children and "families" need to be "protected" from LGBT citizens or couples.
In fact, a report released in 2010 by the Southern Poverty Law Center listed the myth that "Gay men molest children at far higher rates than heterosexuals" as the number one myth propagated by the anti-gay movement. It is a profoundly widespread and destructive myth. And it is completely false.
What is actually harmful to children, however, especially children who may be starting to feel that they do not fit into the heteronormative construct that surrounds them, is to be told and taught by their parents or role models that being an LGBT couple is abnormal, dangerous, or "acceptable" but still something not to be talked about or seen. This is truly harmful.
More to the point, it is also simply wrong. Morally, ethically and in every sense. The notion that LGBT couples should have to behave in a way that would seem prudish by Victorian standards so that citizens who cannot adapt to the 21st Century are not made to feel "uncomfortable" is disgraceful.
Heterosexual citizens and couples are the people who need to get past this. It is incumbent upon us to change. It is not to the LGBT community and couples to accommodate the bigotry and biases that we hold.
The sight of a couple in love is one of the most life affirming things that we are fortunate enough to be able to witness almost daily. I want my children to grow up in a society where LGBT couples kissing, holding hands and sitting beside each other at a diner booth is seen as an equal part of this affirmation of human love.
In the end, you are not truly free to love and to exercise your human rights as equals if you are not able to do so publicly. You are not really free to love if the love must be expressed in the bedroom or in the closet alone for it to be without the danger of humiliation, discrimination or violence.
Heterosexual couples do not have to worry about this or think about it at all. It is time that this was true for every couple.
You very likely kiss your partner hello or goodbye in basically any context without any hesitation, hold hands while strolling down the street, stare into each others eyes and touch romantically while lying on that blanket in the park, and put arms around each other at the movies or in a restaurant while waiting for your food to come.
You never worry about what neighbourhood, venue or restaurant you are doing this in, thinking that some might not be accepting of it, because all are. You don't worry if children or "families" are around.
This is the day-to-day behaviour of love and it is accepted and expected. No one notices when you do this, and if they do notice they likely smile and think that it is sweet, cute or heartwarming.
Which it is.
Except, that is, if you are doing the exact same things and are an LGBT couple.
Over a year ago a young couple in my community started a new initiative for the South Etobicoke (West Toronto) neighbourhood I live in. Bram Zeidenberg and Jamie Berardi had had enough of the homophobia and lack of an LGBT public presence where they lived and they did something about it. They started the Lakeshore Villages LGBT Community Group, went door-to-door to neighbourhood businesses getting them to put up stickers supporting inclusion, made presentations to and got the endorsement of local Business Improvement Areas and during the last Pride Week, for the first time in this part of the city, the commercial strip had many businesses flying pride flags.
While the owner of the diner denies many of their claims, there can be little doubt that public displays of affection and small levels of intimacy by LGBT couples are held to an entirely different standard than those of heterosexual couples and that what are seen as perfectly ordinary expressions of love in the one case are labeled as lewd, inappropriate or "disturbing to children" or families in the other.
In fact, of course, many of these seemingly ordinary actions for heterosexual couples result in glares, abuse, harassment and violence for LGBT couples. A common sentiment is that any intimacy between LGBT couples, no matter how minor, belongs behind closed doors or "in the bedroom" as if a kiss is akin to sex. Thus the restaurant owner in the above incident allegedly saying that Mr. Zeidenberg should “leave his relationship at home”.
This is something that heterosexual couples are simply never asked to do.
In addition, the threat or specter that LGBT couples supposedly present to "families" or "children" is constantly raised. It is raised even by many of those who claim to be fine with LGBT rights, unless, of course, they actually see members of the LGBT community in the real world acting like everyone else does. It is usually framed something like "I have no problems with gays/lesbians/trans people, but they really should keep it to themselves and not force my kids to watch it."
After I had gone with my kids to the rally that was held in Mimico by the Lakeshore Villages LGBT Community Group last Sunday, Mr. Zeidenberg put up a message on my Facebook wall that read:
So terrific to see so many families and kids at our event. We are a family too and no matter what some people might think, children do NOT need to be protected from seeing two individuals in love. There is nothing harmful or offensive about a same-sex couple sitting next to one another in a family restaurant.
This comment made me very sad. Not because of what he said, with which I agree entirely, but because he felt he needed to say it all. Because of the fact that so many people do still think that children and "families" need to be "protected" from LGBT citizens or couples.
In fact, a report released in 2010 by the Southern Poverty Law Center listed the myth that "Gay men molest children at far higher rates than heterosexuals" as the number one myth propagated by the anti-gay movement. It is a profoundly widespread and destructive myth. And it is completely false.
What is actually harmful to children, however, especially children who may be starting to feel that they do not fit into the heteronormative construct that surrounds them, is to be told and taught by their parents or role models that being an LGBT couple is abnormal, dangerous, or "acceptable" but still something not to be talked about or seen. This is truly harmful.
More to the point, it is also simply wrong. Morally, ethically and in every sense. The notion that LGBT couples should have to behave in a way that would seem prudish by Victorian standards so that citizens who cannot adapt to the 21st Century are not made to feel "uncomfortable" is disgraceful.
Heterosexual citizens and couples are the people who need to get past this. It is incumbent upon us to change. It is not to the LGBT community and couples to accommodate the bigotry and biases that we hold.
The sight of a couple in love is one of the most life affirming things that we are fortunate enough to be able to witness almost daily. I want my children to grow up in a society where LGBT couples kissing, holding hands and sitting beside each other at a diner booth is seen as an equal part of this affirmation of human love.
In the end, you are not truly free to love and to exercise your human rights as equals if you are not able to do so publicly. You are not really free to love if the love must be expressed in the bedroom or in the closet alone for it to be without the danger of humiliation, discrimination or violence.
Heterosexual couples do not have to worry about this or think about it at all. It is time that this was true for every couple.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Sexual Harassment on the street, the MRA & hate speech: A discussion with host Sarah Luca of Womyn's Word
We touch on topics related to street sexual harassment, the Men's Rights Movement, how men can act as feminist allies, and the fight against public and online misogyny.
The interview was prompted by an article I wrote for rabble.ca, Sexual harassment on the street: Taking misogynist hate speech seriously
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Putting Your Ideas & Principles into Action. How to Start Your Own Activist Municipal Campaign: A Workshop for Activists who Want to Run for Municipal Office in Toronto & Ontario in 2014
Tired of the Toronto
transit farce? Upset that the choices municipally seem to often be
between different shades of right wing? Want to see social issues,
poverty, housing, tenant's rights, the environment, worker's rights,
women's rights, LGBT rights and the issues that matter to you put front
and centre in a campaign?
Then start your own municipal revolution and cut out the power brokers, pundits and parties.
Run for municipal office in Ontario in 2014. Be it for Councillor, Mayor or whatever office in your community you wish, bring a leftist agenda to the people and to the discussion in your neighbourhood.
You can do it. You can effect the discussion. Take your message directly to your neighbours and the people.
We want to help get you started.
Join us October 6 at the 519 in downtown Toronto for a workshop for Leftist citizens of any stripe that are interested in running. Even if you have just considered doing it, come out to find out what is involved.
519 Community Centre
519 Church St.
Toronto.
Sunday, October 6th
1 p.m.
We will be covering issues like how and when you can register, when you can start campaigning, when you can open an office or put up signs, who you can legally get donations from, how to find an auditor, how to maximize your impact if you are running a low budget campaign, who to reach out to for help, how to manage keeping track of your expenses and much more.
Michael Laxer, a socialist candidate for Toronto City Council in 2010 will discuss the lessons he learned from his first campaign, what he would and will do differently, the impact that running can have and what goals you need to set for a first, insurgent campaign.
Joey Schwartz, an expert on election rules and finances who has been an organizer on multiple campaigns, will then do an in-depth look at the rules, important dates and what you need to know to get going and to do it right.
This will be followed by an extensive Q&A session and a chance for you to meet and network with other like minded activists.
This event is 100% non-partisan, is not affiliated with any party or left wing group or formation and is open to anyone on the left. It is open to anyone in Ontario.
The event will also be free. We do ask that you preregister so that we will have space and materials available for you.
You can preregister or ask any questions by emailing us at michaellaxer@hotmail.com or posting a comment.
You can find the event and track developments on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/events/156400347891773/
Make sure that the principles, ideas and policies that would and will change your community get heard!
519 Community Centre
519 Church St.
Toronto.
Sunday, October 6th
1 p.m.
Then start your own municipal revolution and cut out the power brokers, pundits and parties.
Run for municipal office in Ontario in 2014. Be it for Councillor, Mayor or whatever office in your community you wish, bring a leftist agenda to the people and to the discussion in your neighbourhood.
You can do it. You can effect the discussion. Take your message directly to your neighbours and the people.
We want to help get you started.
Join us October 6 at the 519 in downtown Toronto for a workshop for Leftist citizens of any stripe that are interested in running. Even if you have just considered doing it, come out to find out what is involved.
519 Community Centre
519 Church St.
Toronto.
Sunday, October 6th
1 p.m.
We will be covering issues like how and when you can register, when you can start campaigning, when you can open an office or put up signs, who you can legally get donations from, how to find an auditor, how to maximize your impact if you are running a low budget campaign, who to reach out to for help, how to manage keeping track of your expenses and much more.
Michael Laxer, a socialist candidate for Toronto City Council in 2010 will discuss the lessons he learned from his first campaign, what he would and will do differently, the impact that running can have and what goals you need to set for a first, insurgent campaign.
Joey Schwartz, an expert on election rules and finances who has been an organizer on multiple campaigns, will then do an in-depth look at the rules, important dates and what you need to know to get going and to do it right.
This will be followed by an extensive Q&A session and a chance for you to meet and network with other like minded activists.
This event is 100% non-partisan, is not affiliated with any party or left wing group or formation and is open to anyone on the left. It is open to anyone in Ontario.
The event will also be free. We do ask that you preregister so that we will have space and materials available for you.
You can preregister or ask any questions by emailing us at michaellaxer@hotmail.com or posting a comment.
You can find the event and track developments on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/events/156400347891773/
Make sure that the principles, ideas and policies that would and will change your community get heard!
519 Community Centre
519 Church St.
Toronto.
Sunday, October 6th
1 p.m.
Monday, September 9, 2013
M is for misogyny: From frat boy chants to society
From the Atlantic:
"SMU boys, we like them young. Y is for your sister. O is for oh so
tight. U is for underage. N is for no consent. G is for grab that ass."
To the Pacific: "Y-O-U-N-G at UBC we like em young Y is for yourrr sister O is for ohh so tight U is for under age N is for noo consent G is for goo to jail."
We have all heard about the Canadian university rape chants by now. Many of us may remember hearing or are hearing similar chants or sentiments at our university "Frosh Weeks" and beyond.
Student unions attempted to excuse or hide it (before apologizing), administrators have been quick, rightfully, to condemn it, but it is what it is. A profoundly disturbing realization that young men, and sadly some women, will participate in collective chants glorifying raping underage girls as a mechanism to belong and to fit in. That this culture of abusive, violent male behaviour is seen by many men as a way to draw men together. That it is seen as a way of telling the other young men they are wishing to bond with that they too have no problem with being a "man", that they too are a man who wants young women, whether or not the young women want them, and that they are not some "sissy". That feeling this way about women is expected and anticipated if you wish to be a part of or bond with the male group.
As with all collective chants, from the bleating of the sheep in Animal Farm to the chants of drunken sports fans, it reflects a desire to be a part of a collective. It turns out that this collective regards making a joke of rape a rite of passage.
And this collective is very large; far larger than the university frat boy idiotic reflections of it.
In fact, like other ideologically hegemonic ideas and oppressions, manifestations of this kind of mass misogyny should come as no surprise. But it does. It does because, despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we chose to see misogyny as a secondary issue and to label its manifestations as anomalies or "jokes". We say that it is "natural", it is "boys being boys" and that there is "nothing you can do about it". We celebrate pathetic male singers and entertainers whose whole motif is to degrade, belittle, objectify and dismiss women. Men in positions of power regularly protect other men and young men, such as high school football stars, when they are accused of rape. Why would we expect reflections of this in broader society or in university to be any different?
Given the inherent violence and degrading nature of the depictions
of women in the porn/video game/ music video culture, and given the
extraordinary violence against women manifested in the vast bulk of
Hollywood horror or thriller films, it is not hard to understand why
young men reflect it as they try to fit in and conform in what for most
of them is their first time "outside the nest".
In reality why would we expect any different from the boys of a society that has made a pop song about anal rape a runaway hit, that has a music video "culture" in which it is actually surprising to see a video by a male pop artist in which women are not objectified, that has ingrained pornography so much into the very fabric of the day-to-day that it is becoming increasingly inseparable from "mainstream" entertainment and advertising, that exploits and sexually objectifies primarily its youngest citizens, both male and female, for male gratification and that holds up the desires of men, no matter how destructive or exploitative, as some kind of litmus test of "freedom"?
Worse it occurs in a context where the backlash against the equality gains of women and the women's movement grows daily. From the rapid, alarming and profoundly reactionary growth on Canadian university campuses of the Men's Rights Movement and of its absurd notions of "reverse sexism" and the need for "men's equality", to the political expressions of forms of these same ideas in mainstream politics, to the increasing and farcical idea that men and boys are "falling behind" or that education and civil society have been "feminized", these chants and examples of collective male misogynist outbursts were and are a basic and integral facet of a society dominated by men in which part of "being a man" and relating to men consists of telling other men that you are the same kind of disgraceful example of a man that they are.
The point is that they are not the exception. They are simply an uncomfortable expression of the norm.
Acknowledging how deeply ingrained and how common such male "chat" and thinking is, as well as how obviously wrong it is, would mean putting our safely constructed, male worldviews at risk. To acknowledge one's own complicity in oppression is simply a ne plus ultra, a Rubicon we as men are seemingly mentally incapable of crossing almost entirely out of our own self-interest.
This is reflected in the overwhelming male consensus around issues like pornography and prostitution and our basic sense of entitlement to them. It is reflected by our so often expressed desire to claim that "men" are being just as "victimized" as women or that women`s issues are secondary or no longer relevant. But we do so by talking about issues related to class, race and even the expectations that Patriarchy sets for men, none of which are centred around the oppression of men as men, an oppression which simply does not exist outside of an LGBT context.
It is reflected in examples like Hugo Schwyzer, a man who basically demanded to be acknowledged as a feminist, who taught "Women's Studies" courses that included supposed "analysis" of porn, and who has now admitted, among other things, that he slept with his students and even a much younger porn star at the time. He essentially used "feminism" as a way to get entirely inappropriate sexual gratification. There is little more predictably male than that.
It easier to think that it is the fault of women that we as men fail or suffer injustice than to accept that we do so in a society whose power institutions and relations were created by other men. Better even to deny that men have power or are primarily responsible for Capitalism or Patriarchy at all.
This is how rape culture, Patriarchy and misogyny are an ideological hegemony. They are not only accepted and excused, they are a fundamental and day-to-day part of a society's power relations. They define and are therefore expressed as a part of our basic cultural conformism and discourse.
Be it at water coolers, in gym change rooms, football team meetings, strip clubs or wherever men congregate or relate as men to each other, the type of discourse and misogyny seen at these campuses always rears its ugly head eventually.
The terrible and horrific reflection of these "antics" in real terms is the persistence of daily male violence and harassment against women in our society on a mass scale, from rape to spousal or partner abuse.
While they were done in a public forum and in a way that has brought deserved punishment and critical attention, the Frosh chants are really no different from countless other expressions of these kinds of misogynist backslapping "jokes" and thinking that men engage in together all the time.
To the Pacific: "Y-O-U-N-G at UBC we like em young Y is for yourrr sister O is for ohh so tight U is for under age N is for noo consent G is for goo to jail."
We have all heard about the Canadian university rape chants by now. Many of us may remember hearing or are hearing similar chants or sentiments at our university "Frosh Weeks" and beyond.
Student unions attempted to excuse or hide it (before apologizing), administrators have been quick, rightfully, to condemn it, but it is what it is. A profoundly disturbing realization that young men, and sadly some women, will participate in collective chants glorifying raping underage girls as a mechanism to belong and to fit in. That this culture of abusive, violent male behaviour is seen by many men as a way to draw men together. That it is seen as a way of telling the other young men they are wishing to bond with that they too have no problem with being a "man", that they too are a man who wants young women, whether or not the young women want them, and that they are not some "sissy". That feeling this way about women is expected and anticipated if you wish to be a part of or bond with the male group.
As with all collective chants, from the bleating of the sheep in Animal Farm to the chants of drunken sports fans, it reflects a desire to be a part of a collective. It turns out that this collective regards making a joke of rape a rite of passage.
And this collective is very large; far larger than the university frat boy idiotic reflections of it.
In fact, like other ideologically hegemonic ideas and oppressions, manifestations of this kind of mass misogyny should come as no surprise. But it does. It does because, despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we chose to see misogyny as a secondary issue and to label its manifestations as anomalies or "jokes". We say that it is "natural", it is "boys being boys" and that there is "nothing you can do about it". We celebrate pathetic male singers and entertainers whose whole motif is to degrade, belittle, objectify and dismiss women. Men in positions of power regularly protect other men and young men, such as high school football stars, when they are accused of rape. Why would we expect reflections of this in broader society or in university to be any different?
In reality why would we expect any different from the boys of a society that has made a pop song about anal rape a runaway hit, that has a music video "culture" in which it is actually surprising to see a video by a male pop artist in which women are not objectified, that has ingrained pornography so much into the very fabric of the day-to-day that it is becoming increasingly inseparable from "mainstream" entertainment and advertising, that exploits and sexually objectifies primarily its youngest citizens, both male and female, for male gratification and that holds up the desires of men, no matter how destructive or exploitative, as some kind of litmus test of "freedom"?
Worse it occurs in a context where the backlash against the equality gains of women and the women's movement grows daily. From the rapid, alarming and profoundly reactionary growth on Canadian university campuses of the Men's Rights Movement and of its absurd notions of "reverse sexism" and the need for "men's equality", to the political expressions of forms of these same ideas in mainstream politics, to the increasing and farcical idea that men and boys are "falling behind" or that education and civil society have been "feminized", these chants and examples of collective male misogynist outbursts were and are a basic and integral facet of a society dominated by men in which part of "being a man" and relating to men consists of telling other men that you are the same kind of disgraceful example of a man that they are.
The point is that they are not the exception. They are simply an uncomfortable expression of the norm.
Acknowledging how deeply ingrained and how common such male "chat" and thinking is, as well as how obviously wrong it is, would mean putting our safely constructed, male worldviews at risk. To acknowledge one's own complicity in oppression is simply a ne plus ultra, a Rubicon we as men are seemingly mentally incapable of crossing almost entirely out of our own self-interest.
This is reflected in the overwhelming male consensus around issues like pornography and prostitution and our basic sense of entitlement to them. It is reflected by our so often expressed desire to claim that "men" are being just as "victimized" as women or that women`s issues are secondary or no longer relevant. But we do so by talking about issues related to class, race and even the expectations that Patriarchy sets for men, none of which are centred around the oppression of men as men, an oppression which simply does not exist outside of an LGBT context.
It is reflected in examples like Hugo Schwyzer, a man who basically demanded to be acknowledged as a feminist, who taught "Women's Studies" courses that included supposed "analysis" of porn, and who has now admitted, among other things, that he slept with his students and even a much younger porn star at the time. He essentially used "feminism" as a way to get entirely inappropriate sexual gratification. There is little more predictably male than that.
It easier to think that it is the fault of women that we as men fail or suffer injustice than to accept that we do so in a society whose power institutions and relations were created by other men. Better even to deny that men have power or are primarily responsible for Capitalism or Patriarchy at all.
This is how rape culture, Patriarchy and misogyny are an ideological hegemony. They are not only accepted and excused, they are a fundamental and day-to-day part of a society's power relations. They define and are therefore expressed as a part of our basic cultural conformism and discourse.
Be it at water coolers, in gym change rooms, football team meetings, strip clubs or wherever men congregate or relate as men to each other, the type of discourse and misogyny seen at these campuses always rears its ugly head eventually.
The terrible and horrific reflection of these "antics" in real terms is the persistence of daily male violence and harassment against women in our society on a mass scale, from rape to spousal or partner abuse.
While they were done in a public forum and in a way that has brought deserved punishment and critical attention, the Frosh chants are really no different from countless other expressions of these kinds of misogynist backslapping "jokes" and thinking that men engage in together all the time.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
It's still time for an adult conversation about taxes
Written with Matt Fodor
In a 2009 article in the Toronto Star, progressive economist Hugh Mackenzie commented on the "strange debate that separates taxes from the services they pay for." This is a problem across the political spectrum. Mackenzie criticized the tendency of the Canadian Left to "[campaign] for better public services as if they can be provided free. Better services won't cost us anything because the higher taxes needed to pay for those services can be paid by people we don't know. People who make a lot more money than we do. Big corporations but not small businesses."
Mackenzie was referring to the British Columbia NDP's campaign against the carbon tax as well as the campaigns against the HST "tax grab" by the NDP in both B.C. and Ontario. This continues today with the Ontario NDP's opposition to road tolls in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area to pay for much needed transit improvements, which eerily echoes Rob Ford’s “war on the car” narrative.
Just this past week, in a truly amazing statement when asked about taxes, this from Tom Mulcair:
On the surface, the "people we don’t know" argument seems appealing.
After all, the Left has long fought for progressive taxation – based on
the ability to pay – as a key means of redistribution and raising the
revenue to pay for welfare state measures and public investments.
Progressives have rightfully condemned the changes of the tax system
over the past two decades that have benefited affluent Canadians. By
increasing taxes on “people we don’t know”, so the argument goes, we can
provide "tax relief" to hard-working, middle income Canadians and
"everyday families."
This argument is problematic for several reasons. It underemphasizes the issue of revenue and the devastating impact of tax cuts in Canada, as well as the redistributive power of public spending. The argument is also contradicted by the experience of the Nordic countries, which have the most advanced welfare states and lowest levels of inequality among OECD countries.
Further, it helps to reinforce the complete illusion that taxes are, in fact, a "burden" upon the "middle class" at all, an illusion that furthers right wing ideological ideas and objectives. It feeds into false 99 per cent fantasies that mislead with the facile notion that social inequality and economic injustices can be rectified exclusively by making "them" (big business, the rich, etc.) pay, while not increasing taxes on, say, a household with $100,000 in annual income (a household that would, one might note, fall well within the parameters of the 99 per cent).
As we will show, this reluctance to confront the socially negative ramifications of tax cuts for the middle class and this capitulation to the notion of taxes as a "burden" upon the middle class, has severely limited the ability of government, of any ideological stripe, to actually implement or re-implement social programs and polices that played a direct role in lessening inequality and its consequences. The "War on Poverty" that governments declared at the height of the post war period of "social compromise" was actually succeeding and it was founded and predicated upon far higher personal income taxes for citizens of all classes.
Also, these ideas underestimate the highly disparate nature of "need" within the so-called 99 per cent. They equate the desire of a household with an income of $100,000 a year to finance the mortgage on a large house, or buy a second car that they feel they "need", with the ability of a family with an income of $35,000 a year to send their kids to "public" summer programs (which are no longer free in most centres), to access increasingly expensive higher education, to have properly government funded daycare, or any number of other programs that would fundamentally alter their lives and social mobility. These "needs" are highly different morally and ethically.
Over the past two decades, neoliberalism has been consolidated as the economic orthodoxy in Canada, at all levels of government and is now supported by political parties of all stripes. In order to cultivate popular support for neoliberalism, the positive role of government came under a media and corporate assault. Public services were demonized as overly generous and bureaucratic; the more efficient private sector could do it better.
Tax cuts were sold as a means of freeing Canadians of taxes and giving them more money to spend. Taxes were thus not a positive investment in society but a burden to be avoided. There developed a culture of tax revolt that crossed class and ideological lines.
As Marxist economist Leo Panitch put it:
It is true that the right-wing line that “there aren’t enough rich people, so why bother taxing them?” is a self-serving one that can easily be refuted. At the same time, we need to recognize that working and middle class Canadians benefit far more from quality public services, paid for by taxation, than from tax cuts.
Tax cuts have also had a devastating impact at the provincial level. While this is true across Canada, taking the example of the past nearly twenty years of fiscal policy in Ontario, a key component of the Common Sense Revolution of Mike Harris was a 30 per cent personal income tax cut. This cut and its preservation and expansion over the years by both the Tories and Liberals, fundamentally changed Ontario politics. Once in place, the province could not return to previous levels of spending for health, education, welfare and municipalities, and no major political party has dared to suggest reversing it.
The profound effects that this has had are not widely understood as they have been not only compounded by further tax cuts, personal and otherwise, under the provincial Liberals, but also by the fact that a generation of complete cross-ideological subservience to the underlying concept of tax cuts have led them to become so ingrained in our political and economic culture that they fundamentally narrow the scope of the possible in terms of redistributive or social program options.
The tax cuts remove at a bare minimum between $12 and 14 billion a year from the coffers of the government of Ontario. This dramatically limits not only attempts to preserve social programs and infrastructure, but basically makes it impossible to expand them in any meaningful sense. It has also led, in Ontario and across the country, to large increases in the structural debt of many provinces, a fact that is significant as it means that more money is spent servicing the debt every year, essentially meaning that it is spent paying interest to largely foreign financial concerns as opposed to on services for citizens.
In the case of Ontario, for example, the amount spent servicing the debt is $10.6 billion a year, which is greater than what the province spends on any other single program or service, like welfare or transit, other than health and education.
After two decades of tax cutting, both the federal and provincial governments have lost billions of dollars of revenue. By 2009, tax cuts under both Liberal and Conservative governments since 1995 had deprived the federal treasury of about $50 billion annually. We need to restore the fiscal capacity of the state to pay for welfare state measures and much needed public investments. In the current context, calls for "tax relief" -- even if ostensibly from the Left -- are dangerous and wrong.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, in its Alternative Budget noted that raising the top federal income tax rate from 29 per cent to 35 per cent for those earning $250,000 or more would yield about $3 billion annually. A Financial Transactions Tax would raise $4 billion, while an inheritance tax on very large estates would yield $1.5 billion. Closing tax loopholes -- including by taxing capital gains at the same rate as wage and salary income and by cracking down on tax havens -- would bring in about $10 billion. Erin Weir notes that raising the corporate tax rate to 19.5 per cent would raise $7-8 billion; restoring the 22 per cent corporate tax rate would raise $11-12 billion. All of these are worthy proposals that should be adopted.
Yet we should not be under the illusion that these tax proposals -- or even stiffer ones -- on "people we don’t know" -- would restore the fiscal capacity of the state that has been undermined over two decades of neoliberalism, let alone allow the state to provide "tax relief" to the "middle class or entirely do away with consumption taxes such as the GST. It has been long understood that consumption taxes are an excellent way of raising revenue, and provide a more steady revenue stream to the treasury than taxation on income, which fluctuates during economic downturns. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, each percentage point cut to the GST costs the federal government $7 billion annually; Harper’s GST cut alone thus costs the federal government $14 billion annually.
Looking in comparative perspective, there is a strong correlation between direct spending and equality; countries with higher taxation are more equal. It is for this reason, that it is important to recognize not only the redistributive function of taxation, but also its role in financing welfare states and providing benefits that fall to low-income and dependent workers. Taxation as a percentage of GDP in Canada in 2011 was 31 per cent, below the OCED average of 33.8 per cent. This was far below that of Sweden (44.5 per cent) and Denmark (48.1 per cent), though ahead of the U.S. (25.1 per cent).
As Hugh Mackenzie notes: "Nations that have the most highly developed systems of public services pay for them with all kinds of taxes, including sales taxes and payroll taxes that everyone contributes to because everyone knows there is no such thing as a free lunch."
The Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark and Norway all have a Value Added Tax (VAT) of around 25%, far higher than the GST/HST, which finances the welfare state. The Nordic model is notable for its reliance on transfers, which do the heavy lifting in terms of countering inequality. While personal income taxes are higher than in Canada, they also pay much higher levels of consumption and payroll taxes. Yet the net impact of the tax-and-transfer system is progressive. Rather massively so. In part, this is for the obvious reason that because the affluent spend more, the net impact of consumption taxes are progressive if they are spent on human need.
Indeed, the redistributive power of public spending -- on healthcare, education, pensions and an array of other public services -- should not be ignored. A CCPA report, Canada’s Quiet Bargain, found that more than two thirds of Canadian households receive more than 50 per cent of their income in public services, a far better deal than the market and far more than they pay in taxes. This was even more true before the tax-cutting mania of the past two decades.
The taxation of private consumption can fund the provision of public goods (such as parks, public transit, public housing, etc.) that are more ecological than private goods. Furthermore, public goods provision has the effect of decommodification which is as important as progressive taxation in terms of moving toward socialist relations in capitalist societies.
Beyond this there is the basic morality of attempting to put a break on consumption. Whenever one speaks of obviously environmentally or socially beneficial taxes or revenue tools like taxing gas or fuel consumption or whenever one opposes populist campaigns to cut them, some on the left will talk of examples of how "ordinary people" cannot afford to pay them. Even when this is true, there are many other means, such as rebates, to rectify the impact on those who are genuinely harmed by such taxes.
But what they never talk about are the wealthy homeowners who will get gas tax cuts, the reckless or irresponsible users of cars or air conditioning or home heating who will get tax cuts, or the reality that if we wish to alter social behaviour and to change patterns of consumption, taxing behaviour that is environmentally destructive or anti-social in its implications is not regressive at all. It is one of the primary goals of socialist politics to shift society away from the wanton or reckless behaviour of not only corporations, but also the consumerist society that they have manufactured. This is simply impossible in any meaningful way without altering the behaviour of consumers, especially those whose consumption patterns reflect their higher incomes.
The state has a fundamentally important role to play in shifting patterns of behaviour through taxation, and when shifting people out of cars, or encouraging them to consume less gas, electricity, water and other resources, the progressive nature of implementing disincentives is clear. This is even more clear if these taxes and revenue streams are tied directly to social goals like mass transit expansion.
Our consumerist society is highly destructive and the patterns of consumption it has created are both unsustainable and morally wrong given the consequences to the planet and the disparities that exist in consumption globally. It will not be changed by goodwill. Next time anyone proposes blanket tax cuts to home heating or opposes taxing car use, ask yourself about how progressive it really is to give a tax break to heating millionaire's mansions, or to oppose encouraging car pooling or making sure that the person driving that empty SUV might be made to think again if fuel taxes are high.
Cutting consumption taxes on these fronts especially amounts to little more than revenue depleting, environmentally negative proposals that are boutique policy gifts and handouts to the upper middle and upper classes.
In terms of generating the revenue that will allow for the possibility of real social democratic governance and that will give the state the resources needed to implement a social agenda that will directly benefit the overwhelming majority of citizens, the "progressive" necessity is very clear.
Higher taxes in all forms.
The restoration of the GST to 7 per cent alone would significantly offset the cuts to the public sector. Further increases to the tax are essential components to the improvement and expansion of public services. Transfers to lower-income households must be significantly increased as well. We should fight for a return to more progressive taxation, and begin with calls for higher taxes on capital and on wealthy individuals. Given the more inegalitarian income distribution in Canada as compared to the Nordic countries, the progressive income tax needs to play a greater role in the tax mix. We welcome, for instance, the call by Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks for combined federal-provincial income tax rates of 60% and 70% on incomes over $500,000 and $2.5 million, as proposed in their book The Trouble With Billionaires.
We would propose the reversal of all income, corporate and sales tax cuts that have been implemented in the last 20 years. We would further propose the expansion of taxes on fossil fuel, natural gas and electricity consumption, as well as on cars and their usage, with an extensive rebate program to offset the impact on actually lower income citizens. For instance, a progressive carbon tax could be designed so the bottom 50 percent of households would be net beneficiaries, where 80 percent of households would receive at least some credit and the most affluent 20 per cent that have the biggest impact would pay the most.We would also favour revenue generating tools like heavily taxing luxury goods.
Altogether these proposals would generate tens of billions of dollars in extra revenue annually for the government.
We would suggest that this be used to build, to start, a national daycare program, a national housing strategy, free pharmacare, eye care & dental programs through transfers and incentives to the provinces, an anti-poverty strategy, a public transit infrastructure campaign and a transition to a 'green' economy as well as to reassert the state's role in the economy and in social justice in the many other ways that having these resources would allow.
As leftists we can fantasize about a coming revolution that will make taxation unnecessary and wipe away the state altogether. At the other end we can pretend that relatively minor tax increases on small groups of people or on corporations will solve everything like manna from heaven.
Or we can grow up.
Matt Fodor is a Toronto based writer and academic. He is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at York University.
Michael Laxer is a political activist, a two-time former candidate and former election organizer for the NDP, was a socialist candidate for Toronto City Council in 2010 and is on the executive of the Socialist Party of Ontario.
Photo: flickr/dibytes
In a 2009 article in the Toronto Star, progressive economist Hugh Mackenzie commented on the "strange debate that separates taxes from the services they pay for." This is a problem across the political spectrum. Mackenzie criticized the tendency of the Canadian Left to "[campaign] for better public services as if they can be provided free. Better services won't cost us anything because the higher taxes needed to pay for those services can be paid by people we don't know. People who make a lot more money than we do. Big corporations but not small businesses."
Mackenzie was referring to the British Columbia NDP's campaign against the carbon tax as well as the campaigns against the HST "tax grab" by the NDP in both B.C. and Ontario. This continues today with the Ontario NDP's opposition to road tolls in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area to pay for much needed transit improvements, which eerily echoes Rob Ford’s “war on the car” narrative.
Just this past week, in a truly amazing statement when asked about taxes, this from Tom Mulcair:
Mulcair seemed surprised when he was asked if taxes would go up under an NDP government.
"You’re the first person who’s ever asked me that," he said, adding quickly that they most definitely won't.
"I am categorical on that," he said. “Several provinces are now at the 50 per cent rate. Beyond that, you’re not talking taxation; you’re talking confiscation. And that is never going to be part of my policies, going after more individual taxes. Period. Full stop.”The Canadian Left, in seeking to justify this and similar stances, will often point to historic left-wing "anti-tax" moments, like the fight against the Poll Tax in the UK in the '80s. But in doing so they take the issue out of the present neo-Liberal context of an ideological campaign against the very idea of taxes. This campaign has been exceptionally successful and has been a critical component underpinning both the appeal of right wing populist ideas (and a major factor in why people support the right and its ideas even against their own seeming class interests) and the growth of rampant, "Gilded Age" levels of social inequality.
This argument is problematic for several reasons. It underemphasizes the issue of revenue and the devastating impact of tax cuts in Canada, as well as the redistributive power of public spending. The argument is also contradicted by the experience of the Nordic countries, which have the most advanced welfare states and lowest levels of inequality among OECD countries.
Further, it helps to reinforce the complete illusion that taxes are, in fact, a "burden" upon the "middle class" at all, an illusion that furthers right wing ideological ideas and objectives. It feeds into false 99 per cent fantasies that mislead with the facile notion that social inequality and economic injustices can be rectified exclusively by making "them" (big business, the rich, etc.) pay, while not increasing taxes on, say, a household with $100,000 in annual income (a household that would, one might note, fall well within the parameters of the 99 per cent).
As we will show, this reluctance to confront the socially negative ramifications of tax cuts for the middle class and this capitulation to the notion of taxes as a "burden" upon the middle class, has severely limited the ability of government, of any ideological stripe, to actually implement or re-implement social programs and polices that played a direct role in lessening inequality and its consequences. The "War on Poverty" that governments declared at the height of the post war period of "social compromise" was actually succeeding and it was founded and predicated upon far higher personal income taxes for citizens of all classes.
Also, these ideas underestimate the highly disparate nature of "need" within the so-called 99 per cent. They equate the desire of a household with an income of $100,000 a year to finance the mortgage on a large house, or buy a second car that they feel they "need", with the ability of a family with an income of $35,000 a year to send their kids to "public" summer programs (which are no longer free in most centres), to access increasingly expensive higher education, to have properly government funded daycare, or any number of other programs that would fundamentally alter their lives and social mobility. These "needs" are highly different morally and ethically.
Over the past two decades, neoliberalism has been consolidated as the economic orthodoxy in Canada, at all levels of government and is now supported by political parties of all stripes. In order to cultivate popular support for neoliberalism, the positive role of government came under a media and corporate assault. Public services were demonized as overly generous and bureaucratic; the more efficient private sector could do it better.
Tax cuts were sold as a means of freeing Canadians of taxes and giving them more money to spend. Taxes were thus not a positive investment in society but a burden to be avoided. There developed a culture of tax revolt that crossed class and ideological lines.
As Marxist economist Leo Panitch put it:
It also had to do with a tax revolt on the part of the working-class, which starts to see less and less for itself in the welfare state. Respectability leads this segment to increasingly deride that working class we now call the precariat. And many of them opt -- and the unions aren’t able to stop many of them opting (to some extent they’re even complicit in it) -- for the $200 a year they can save by voting for a government that offers them less taxes. A portion of the working-class opts for that. And the left was complicit in it when it opposed, for example, the sales tax. One needed to say and should be saying that Sweden’s value-added tax is 23 per cent. You can't have a welfare state without it.Jean Chretien and Paul Martin slayed the deficit by massively cutting public spending, and dismantling much of the progressive state that had been built up during the 1960s and 1970s. They then implemented personal and corporate tax cuts and also slashed the capital gains tax, the single most regressive tax cut in Canadian history. Tax-cutting has continued under Stephen Harper, who cut the GST by two points, implemented many boutique tax cuts for "middle class families" and continued to cut corporate taxes. The effect of these tax cuts has been to turn Canada into a more unequal and market-dominated society.
It is true that the right-wing line that “there aren’t enough rich people, so why bother taxing them?” is a self-serving one that can easily be refuted. At the same time, we need to recognize that working and middle class Canadians benefit far more from quality public services, paid for by taxation, than from tax cuts.
Tax cuts have also had a devastating impact at the provincial level. While this is true across Canada, taking the example of the past nearly twenty years of fiscal policy in Ontario, a key component of the Common Sense Revolution of Mike Harris was a 30 per cent personal income tax cut. This cut and its preservation and expansion over the years by both the Tories and Liberals, fundamentally changed Ontario politics. Once in place, the province could not return to previous levels of spending for health, education, welfare and municipalities, and no major political party has dared to suggest reversing it.
The profound effects that this has had are not widely understood as they have been not only compounded by further tax cuts, personal and otherwise, under the provincial Liberals, but also by the fact that a generation of complete cross-ideological subservience to the underlying concept of tax cuts have led them to become so ingrained in our political and economic culture that they fundamentally narrow the scope of the possible in terms of redistributive or social program options.
The tax cuts remove at a bare minimum between $12 and 14 billion a year from the coffers of the government of Ontario. This dramatically limits not only attempts to preserve social programs and infrastructure, but basically makes it impossible to expand them in any meaningful sense. It has also led, in Ontario and across the country, to large increases in the structural debt of many provinces, a fact that is significant as it means that more money is spent servicing the debt every year, essentially meaning that it is spent paying interest to largely foreign financial concerns as opposed to on services for citizens.
In the case of Ontario, for example, the amount spent servicing the debt is $10.6 billion a year, which is greater than what the province spends on any other single program or service, like welfare or transit, other than health and education.
After two decades of tax cutting, both the federal and provincial governments have lost billions of dollars of revenue. By 2009, tax cuts under both Liberal and Conservative governments since 1995 had deprived the federal treasury of about $50 billion annually. We need to restore the fiscal capacity of the state to pay for welfare state measures and much needed public investments. In the current context, calls for "tax relief" -- even if ostensibly from the Left -- are dangerous and wrong.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, in its Alternative Budget noted that raising the top federal income tax rate from 29 per cent to 35 per cent for those earning $250,000 or more would yield about $3 billion annually. A Financial Transactions Tax would raise $4 billion, while an inheritance tax on very large estates would yield $1.5 billion. Closing tax loopholes -- including by taxing capital gains at the same rate as wage and salary income and by cracking down on tax havens -- would bring in about $10 billion. Erin Weir notes that raising the corporate tax rate to 19.5 per cent would raise $7-8 billion; restoring the 22 per cent corporate tax rate would raise $11-12 billion. All of these are worthy proposals that should be adopted.
Yet we should not be under the illusion that these tax proposals -- or even stiffer ones -- on "people we don’t know" -- would restore the fiscal capacity of the state that has been undermined over two decades of neoliberalism, let alone allow the state to provide "tax relief" to the "middle class or entirely do away with consumption taxes such as the GST. It has been long understood that consumption taxes are an excellent way of raising revenue, and provide a more steady revenue stream to the treasury than taxation on income, which fluctuates during economic downturns. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, each percentage point cut to the GST costs the federal government $7 billion annually; Harper’s GST cut alone thus costs the federal government $14 billion annually.
Looking in comparative perspective, there is a strong correlation between direct spending and equality; countries with higher taxation are more equal. It is for this reason, that it is important to recognize not only the redistributive function of taxation, but also its role in financing welfare states and providing benefits that fall to low-income and dependent workers. Taxation as a percentage of GDP in Canada in 2011 was 31 per cent, below the OCED average of 33.8 per cent. This was far below that of Sweden (44.5 per cent) and Denmark (48.1 per cent), though ahead of the U.S. (25.1 per cent).
As Hugh Mackenzie notes: "Nations that have the most highly developed systems of public services pay for them with all kinds of taxes, including sales taxes and payroll taxes that everyone contributes to because everyone knows there is no such thing as a free lunch."
The Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark and Norway all have a Value Added Tax (VAT) of around 25%, far higher than the GST/HST, which finances the welfare state. The Nordic model is notable for its reliance on transfers, which do the heavy lifting in terms of countering inequality. While personal income taxes are higher than in Canada, they also pay much higher levels of consumption and payroll taxes. Yet the net impact of the tax-and-transfer system is progressive. Rather massively so. In part, this is for the obvious reason that because the affluent spend more, the net impact of consumption taxes are progressive if they are spent on human need.
Indeed, the redistributive power of public spending -- on healthcare, education, pensions and an array of other public services -- should not be ignored. A CCPA report, Canada’s Quiet Bargain, found that more than two thirds of Canadian households receive more than 50 per cent of their income in public services, a far better deal than the market and far more than they pay in taxes. This was even more true before the tax-cutting mania of the past two decades.
The taxation of private consumption can fund the provision of public goods (such as parks, public transit, public housing, etc.) that are more ecological than private goods. Furthermore, public goods provision has the effect of decommodification which is as important as progressive taxation in terms of moving toward socialist relations in capitalist societies.
Beyond this there is the basic morality of attempting to put a break on consumption. Whenever one speaks of obviously environmentally or socially beneficial taxes or revenue tools like taxing gas or fuel consumption or whenever one opposes populist campaigns to cut them, some on the left will talk of examples of how "ordinary people" cannot afford to pay them. Even when this is true, there are many other means, such as rebates, to rectify the impact on those who are genuinely harmed by such taxes.
But what they never talk about are the wealthy homeowners who will get gas tax cuts, the reckless or irresponsible users of cars or air conditioning or home heating who will get tax cuts, or the reality that if we wish to alter social behaviour and to change patterns of consumption, taxing behaviour that is environmentally destructive or anti-social in its implications is not regressive at all. It is one of the primary goals of socialist politics to shift society away from the wanton or reckless behaviour of not only corporations, but also the consumerist society that they have manufactured. This is simply impossible in any meaningful way without altering the behaviour of consumers, especially those whose consumption patterns reflect their higher incomes.
The state has a fundamentally important role to play in shifting patterns of behaviour through taxation, and when shifting people out of cars, or encouraging them to consume less gas, electricity, water and other resources, the progressive nature of implementing disincentives is clear. This is even more clear if these taxes and revenue streams are tied directly to social goals like mass transit expansion.
Our consumerist society is highly destructive and the patterns of consumption it has created are both unsustainable and morally wrong given the consequences to the planet and the disparities that exist in consumption globally. It will not be changed by goodwill. Next time anyone proposes blanket tax cuts to home heating or opposes taxing car use, ask yourself about how progressive it really is to give a tax break to heating millionaire's mansions, or to oppose encouraging car pooling or making sure that the person driving that empty SUV might be made to think again if fuel taxes are high.
Cutting consumption taxes on these fronts especially amounts to little more than revenue depleting, environmentally negative proposals that are boutique policy gifts and handouts to the upper middle and upper classes.
In terms of generating the revenue that will allow for the possibility of real social democratic governance and that will give the state the resources needed to implement a social agenda that will directly benefit the overwhelming majority of citizens, the "progressive" necessity is very clear.
Higher taxes in all forms.
The restoration of the GST to 7 per cent alone would significantly offset the cuts to the public sector. Further increases to the tax are essential components to the improvement and expansion of public services. Transfers to lower-income households must be significantly increased as well. We should fight for a return to more progressive taxation, and begin with calls for higher taxes on capital and on wealthy individuals. Given the more inegalitarian income distribution in Canada as compared to the Nordic countries, the progressive income tax needs to play a greater role in the tax mix. We welcome, for instance, the call by Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks for combined federal-provincial income tax rates of 60% and 70% on incomes over $500,000 and $2.5 million, as proposed in their book The Trouble With Billionaires.
We would propose the reversal of all income, corporate and sales tax cuts that have been implemented in the last 20 years. We would further propose the expansion of taxes on fossil fuel, natural gas and electricity consumption, as well as on cars and their usage, with an extensive rebate program to offset the impact on actually lower income citizens. For instance, a progressive carbon tax could be designed so the bottom 50 percent of households would be net beneficiaries, where 80 percent of households would receive at least some credit and the most affluent 20 per cent that have the biggest impact would pay the most.We would also favour revenue generating tools like heavily taxing luxury goods.
Altogether these proposals would generate tens of billions of dollars in extra revenue annually for the government.
We would suggest that this be used to build, to start, a national daycare program, a national housing strategy, free pharmacare, eye care & dental programs through transfers and incentives to the provinces, an anti-poverty strategy, a public transit infrastructure campaign and a transition to a 'green' economy as well as to reassert the state's role in the economy and in social justice in the many other ways that having these resources would allow.
As leftists we can fantasize about a coming revolution that will make taxation unnecessary and wipe away the state altogether. At the other end we can pretend that relatively minor tax increases on small groups of people or on corporations will solve everything like manna from heaven.
Or we can grow up.
Matt Fodor is a Toronto based writer and academic. He is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at York University.
Michael Laxer is a political activist, a two-time former candidate and former election organizer for the NDP, was a socialist candidate for Toronto City Council in 2010 and is on the executive of the Socialist Party of Ontario.
Photo: flickr/dibytes
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