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People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths.

- Raoul Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life

From the Harper Index a few words on who is pressuring police forces in Canada to acquire Tasers, and a few other goodies about AECL and those medical isotopes. Also a confession from a former Tory cabinet aid who warns Canadians against the Harper government. These guys are good.

December 31, 2007: Earlier this month news emerged that longtime Stephen Harper ally Ken Boessenkool became a registered lobbyist of Taser International after the Taser shooting death of a passenger at Vancouver's international airport. Opposition members accuse him of having stage-managed the government's response to the event. Boessenkool has always been one of Harper's most influential and least known colleagues. The following article originally was posted in June following Boessenkool's prominent role in federal budget allocations and the follow- up debate last spring. What is a bit interesting is that Boessenkool has some connections with drug companies promoting a vaccine for cervical cancer and the fundamentalists don't like this. Is this an example of the "falling out amongst thieves"? The neo-cons and the fundamentalists are gradually heading in the direction of the divorce court and real libertarians of whatever specific beliefs should do what they can to help things along.

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from the first chapter of bell hooks’s We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity.

When we read annals of history, the autobiographical writings of free and enslaved black men, it is revealed that initially black males did not see themselves as sharing the same standpoint as white men about the nature of masculinity. Transplanted African men, even those coming from communities where sex roles shaped the division of labor, where the status of men was different and most times higher than that of women, had to be taught to equate their higher status as men with the right to dominate women, they had to be taught patriarchal masculinity. They had to be taught that it was acceptable to use violence to establish patriarchal power. The gender politics of slavery and white-supremacist domination of free black men was the school where black men from different African tribes, with different languages and value systems, learned in the new world, patriarchal masculinity.

Writing about the evolution of black male involvement in patriarchal masculinity in the essay Reconstructing Black Masculinity I write:

Although the gendered politics of slavery denied black men the freedom to act as men within the definition set by white norms, this notion of manhood did become a standard used to measure black male progress. The narratives of Henry Box Brown, Josiah Henson, Frederick Douglass, and a host of other black men reveal that they saw freedom as that change in status that would enable them to fulfill the role of chivalric benevolent patriarch. Free, they would be men able to provide for and take care of their families. Describing how he wept as he watched a white slave overseer beat his mother, William Wells Brown lamented, Experience has taught me that nothing can be more heart-rending than for one to see a dear and beloved mother or sister tortured, and to hear their cries and not be able to render them assistance. But such is the position which the American slave occupies. Frederick Douglass did not feel his manhood affirmed by intellectual progress. It was affirmed when he fought man to man with the slave overseer. This struggle was a turning point in Douglass’s life: It rekindled in my breast the smoldering embers of liberty. It brought up my Baltimore dreams and revived a sense of my own manhood. I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before—I was a mannow. The image of black masculinity that emerges from slave narratives is one of hardworking men who longed to assume full patriarchal responsibility for families and kin.

This testimony shows that enslaved black males were socialized by white folks to believe that they should endeavor to become patriarchs by seeking to attain the freedom to provide and protect for black women, to be benevolent patriarchs. Benevolent patriarchs exercise their power without using force. And it was this notion of patriarchy that educated black men coming from slavery into freedom sought to mimic. However, a large majority of black men took as their standard the dominator model set by white masters. When slavery ended these black men often used violence to dominate black women, which was a repetition of the strategies of control white slavemasters used. Some newly freed back men would take their wives to the barn to beat them as the white owner had done. Clearly, by the time slavery ended patriarchal masculinity had become an accepted ideal for most black men, an ideal that would be reinforced by twentieth-century norms.

Despite the overwhelming support of patriarchal masculinity by black men, there was even in slavery those rare black males who repudiated the norms set by white oppressors. Individual black male renegades who either escaped from slavery or chose to change their circumstance once they were freed, often found refuge among Native Americans, thus moving into tribal cultures where patriarchal masculinity with its insistence on violence and subjugation of women and children was not the norm. Marriages between Native women and African-American men during reconstruction also created a context for different ways of being and living that were counter to the example of white Christian family life. In southern states enclaves of African folk who had escaped slavery or joined with renegade maroons once slavery ended kept alive African cultural retentions that also offered a subculture distinct from the culture imposed by whiteness.

With keen critical insight Rudolph Byrd, co-editor of the anthology Traps: African American men on Gender and Sexuality, offers in his groundbreaking essay The Tradition of John the mythopoetic folk hero John as a figure of alternative masculinity. Byrd explains:

Committed to the overthrow of slavery and the ideology of white supremacy, John is the supreme antagonist of Old Massa and the various hegemonic structures he and his descendants have created and, most disheartening, many of them predictably still cherish. In John’s various acts of resistance are reflected his most exemplary values and attributes: motherwit, the power of laughter and song, self-assertion, self-examination, self-knowledge, a belief that life is process grounded in the fertile field of improvisation, hope, and most importantly, love. And his aspirations? Nothing less than the full and complete emancipation of Black people from every species of slavery. These are the constitutive elements and aspiration that together comprise the tradition of John. In these days of so many hours, it is a mode of black masculinity grounded in enduring principles that possess … a broad and vital instrumentality.

Clearly, the individual black males who strategized resistance to slavery, plotted paths to freedom, and who invented new lives for themselves and their people were working against the white-supremacist patriarchal norm. They were the men who set the stage for the black male abolitionists who supported more freedom for women. Alexander Crummell in his address before the Freedman’s Aid Society in 1883 spoke directly to a program for racial uplift that would focus on black women, particularly on education. He announced in his address that: The lot of the black man on the plantation has been sad and desolate enough; but the fate of the black woman has been awful! Her entire existence from the day she first landed, a naked victim of the slave-trade, has been degradation in its extremest forms.

Frederick Douglass spoke regularly on behalf of gender equality. In his 1888 talk I Am a Radical Woman Suffrage Man he made his position clear:

The fundamental proposition of the woman suffrage movement is scarcely less simple than that of the anti-slavery movement. It assumes that woman is herself. That she belongs to herself, just as fully as man belongs to himself—that she is a person and has all the attributes of personality that can be claimed by man, and that her rights of person are equal in all respects to those of man. She has the same number of senses that distinguish man, and is like man a subject of human government, capable of understanding, obeying, and being affected by law. That she is capable of forming an intelligent judgment as to the character of public men and public measures, and she may exercise her right of choice in respect both to the law and the lawmakers… nothing could be more simple or more reasonable.

Nineteenth-century black leaders were concerned about gender roles and exceptional black men supported gender equality. Martin Delaney stressed that both genders needed to work equally for racial uplift.

Like Frederick Douglass, Delaney felt that gender equality would strengthen the race, not that it would make black females independent and autonomous. As co-editors of the North Star, Douglass and Delaney had a masthead in 1847 which read right is of no sex—truth is of no color. At the 1848 meeting of the National Negro Convention Delaney presented a proposal that began: Whereas e fully believe in the equality of the sexes, therefore…. Without a doubt black males have a historical legacy of pro-women’s liberation to draw upon. Even so there were black male leaders who opposd Douglass’s support of rights for women. In the essay Reconstructing Black Masculinity I state that most black men recognized the powerful and necessary role black women had played as freedom fighters in the effort to abolish slavery, yet they still wanted black women to be subordinated. Explaining further:

They wanted black women to conform to the gender norms set by white society. They wanted to be recognized as men, as patriarchs, by other men, including white men. Yet they could not assume this position if black women were not willing to conform to prevailing sexist gender norms. Many black women who had endured white-supremacist patriarchal domination during slavery did not want to be dominated by black men after manumission. Like black men, they had contradictory positions on gender. On one hand they did not want to be dominated, but on the other hand they wanted black men to be protectors and providers. After slavery ended, enormous tension and conflict emerged between black women and men as folks struggled to be self-determining. As they worked to create standards for community and family life, gender roles continued to be problematic.

These contradictions became the norm in black life.

In the early part of the twentieth century black male thinkers and leaders were, like their white male counterparts, debating the question of gender equality. Intellectual and activist W.E.B. DuBois writing on behalf of black women’s rights in 1920 declared: We cannot abolish the new economic freedom of women. We cannot imprison women again in a home or require them all on pain of death to be nurses and housekeepers. … The uplift of women is, next to the problem of color and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause. Influenced by the work of black woman anti-sexist activist Anna Julia Cooper, DuBois never wavered in this belief that black women should be seen as co-equal with black men. Despite the stellar example of W.E.B. DuBois, who continually supported the rights of women overall, black males seemed to see the necessity of black females participating as co-equals in the struggle for racial uplift with the implicit understanding that once freedom was achieved black females would take their rightful place subordinate to the superior will of men. In keeping with sexist norms, sexist black folks believed that slavery and racism sought the emasculation of Afro-American men and that the responsibility of black folks to counter this, that black women were to encourage and support the manhood of our men.

As editor of the Women’s Page of the newspaper the Negro World, Amy Jacque Garvey, wife of the radical thinker Marcus Garvey, declared: We are tired of hearing Negro men say, There is a better day coming while they do nothing to usher in that day. We are becoming so impatient that we are getting in the front ranks and serve notice that we brush aside the halting, cowardly Negro leaders…. Mr. Black Man watch your step! … Strengthen your shaking knees and move forward, or we will displace you and lead on to victory and glory. This passage gives a good indication of the fact that educated black women struggled to repress their power to stand behind their men even as they were continually questioning this positionality. Outspoken women’s rights advocates in the latter part of the nineteenth century, like Anna Julia Cooper, were more militant about the need for black women to have equal access to education and forms of power, especially economic power.

Throughout the 1900s black men and women debated the issues of gender equality. White-supremacist capitalist patriarchy’s refusal to allow black males full access to employment while offering black females a place in the service economy created a context where black males and females could not conform to standard sexist roles in regard to work even if they wanted to. It was the participation of black women in the workforce that led to the notion that black women were matriarchal leaders in the home. In actuality, black female workers often handed their paychecks over to the males who occupied the patriarchal space of leadership in the home. Simply working did not mean black women were free. The gender roles that black folks formed in the twenties, thirties, and forties were complex. It was not a simple world of black women working and therefore exercising power in the home. Many contemporary black folks forget that in the world of the eraly twentieth century black people were far more likely to live with extended kin. A black woman who worked as a maid, a housekeeper, a laundress, etc., was far more likely to give her money toward the collective good and not for her own use or power.

While social critics looking at black life have continually emphasized the notion that black men were symbolically castrated because black women were often the primary breadwinners, they have called attention to the reality of the working black woman giving away her earnings. Not all black families cared about black women earning more as long as black males controlled their earnings. And now that a vast majority of white women in this nation work and many of them earn more than their white male spouses, the evidence is there to confirm that men are less concerned about who earns more and more concerned about who controls the money. If the man controls the money, even if his wife is wealthy, the evidence suggests that he will not feel emasculated. Black men and women have always had a diversity of gender roles, some black men wanting to be patriarchs and others turning away from the role. Long before contemporary feminist theory talked about the value of male participation in parenting, the idea that men could stay home and raise children while women worked had already been proven in black life.

Black women and men have never been praised for having created a diversity of gender roles. In the first essay I wrote about black masculinity more than ten years ago the lengthy arguments I made are worth quoting again here:

Without implying that black women and men lived in gender utopia, I am suggesting that black sex roles, and particularly the role of men, have been more complex and problematized in black life than is believed. This was especially the case when all black people lived in segregated neighborhoods. Racial integration has had a profound impact on black gender roles. It has helped to promote a climate wherein most black women and men accept sexist notions of gender roles. Unfortunately, many changes have occurred in the way black people think about gender, yet the shift from one standpoint to another has not been fully documented. For example: To what extent did the civil rights movement, with its definition of freedom as having equal opportunity with whites, sanctioned looking at white gender roles as a norm black people should imitate? Why has there been so little positive interest shown in the alternative lifestyles of black men? In every segregated black community in the United States there are adult black men married, unmarried, gay, straight, living in households where they do not assert patriarchal domination and yet live fulfilled lives, where they are not sitting around worried about castration. Again it must be emphasized that the black men who are most worried about castration and emasculation are those who have completely absorbed white-supremacist patriarchal definitions of masculinity.

Black people begin to support patriarchy more as more civil rights were gained and the contributions black women made to the struggle for black liberation were no longer seen as essential and necessary contributions.

—bell hooks (2004), We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, pp. 2–12.

George H. Smith gives Ron Paul a quasi-endorsement:

But of course, every endorsement is conditional, to the extent that it is principled and thought-out. But this is precisely why I do appreciate Smith making his stance clear, instead of just issuing blanket moral indictments of people. Institutions matter, true, but people act, not institutions. Libertarians should be talking about this, rather than using this as an excuse to excommunicate each other.

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

- Mark Twain

I'm a few days late on this but union farm workers deserve what help we can give them.

Buy Union for the Holidays Enjoy high quality food and wine this holiday season, while knowing that the workers who picked it for you will have a happy holiday too. UFW contracts provide good wages and paid holidays for farm worker families. When you buy these union labels you help make union companies successful, and encourage non-union companies to get with the program. When you go to your next holiday gathering, why not put a smile on the hosts’ faces with a thoughtful gift of union wine? Union-grown produce makes a great side dish for your holiday table. WINE Chateau Ste. Michelle Columbia Crest Saddle Mountain Farron Ridge North Star Snoqualmie St. Supery Dollarhide Ranch Scheid Vineyards Inc. Balletto ALMONDS Montpelier STRAWBERRIES Coastal Berry Co. LLC Swanton Berry ROSES Armstrong Jackson and Perkins (J&P) Meilland Star Roses NURSERY/FLOWERS L.E. Cooke VEGETABLES Andy Boy Muranaka* *Only with the UFW Black Eagle. APPLES Mann's CA Apples Elwin R Mann DATE Patos Dream Date Garden MUSHROOMS Monterey Mushrooms Prime Mushrooms Ariel Mushrooms Family Farms Mushrooms Del Fresh California Mushroom Farms Inc. San Martin Mushrooms CITRUS (Lemons, Oranges, Grapefruit, Tangerines) Sunkist* Sunworld* Airdrome* Big Jim* *Only with the UFW Black Eagle. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT! Please share this list with friends & family

And for once here is some good news for people who definitely need it. A new union contract gives D'Arrigo farm workers better wages, health care benefits and paid holidays. These are improvements unheard for non-union workers. Remember in the United States private employers are not required to recognize federal or state holidays or pay wages on these days.

It took more than 30 years, but more than 1,400 workers at D’Arrigo Bros now have a contract and enjoy some basic employment privileges most workers take for granted.

Under the UFW contract, workers get five paid holidays each year – including Christmas Day and Thanksgiving. Paid holidays for farm workers are, for the most part, unheard of.

Farm workers often toil in the fields 10 hours a day, six days a week and do so without any type of healthcare coverage.

Under the contract signed with D’Arrigo, workers and their families are entitled to health insurance that includes vision and dental that is 100 percent paid by the employer. Looking toward the future, the contract includes negotiated healthcare increases for the next three years so workers don’t have to worry about unexpected increases in healthcare premiums.

When it comes to wages the D’Arrigo worker will also benefit. Hourly workers will receive a 4.5 percent wage increase over the next three years.

There will also be significant increases in the amount paid to piece rate workers.

It also guarantees the worker the right to a three-step grievance process in which a union representative is present. This would help resolve problems such as disciplinary actions or unfair firings.

The company also benefits. During the length of the contract, there will be no strikes, boycotts or other type of work interruption.

The UFW would like to thank the many people who helped make this victory possible.

Back In February I mentioned an article in Macleans about the hatred which neoconservative editors have for the internet. Well things really haven't changed. Here from the Financial post is more of the same from Terence Corcoran. More and more I understand why neocons are such enthusiast supporters for totalitarian regimes such as mainland China. Birds of a feather and all that. Mind you I didn't really like use of the term "telecom trotskyists" although the reference to the military "leader" of the Bolsheviks is a bit funny coming from a representative of people who migrated from "worse of" the Left to a similar position among conservatives. And for any "new" conservative to complain about government involvement in economic activity is a bit rich. For what it is worth most left libertarians of my acquaintance do not what any state interference within the Internet. Let's get things straight here who is doing what to whom! Without "your" regulations, Terence, kids would not be sued for "stealing" pop tunes. Without "your" regulations much of the current complexity of DVD formats would not exist. And I could not care less about the fate of the Hollywood film industry. In fact considering the quality of the product I would think that in a genuinely free market (a concept as foreign to the Financial Post as to any commie) that much of southern California would eventually return to fruit orchards and deserts.

Below is another little ditty from Bill Maher about conservative "think tanks". He even mentions ex-trot Wolfowitz in this incisive video editorial on Iraq. Gee, I wonder what Bill could do with Stephen Harper?

Ron Paul says he's against amnesty for migrants without government papers. I am too. Amnesty is a pardon for wrong-doing. Why would migrants without government papers need a pardon? They've done nothing wrong. But in the spirit of the season, the migrants might consider granting amnesty to the government thugs who have hounded them since they got here.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

The following was made reference to in LabourStart the online trade union website. It's from an end-of-the-year statement presented by the British Trade Union Congress (TUC). This is something to remember next time some editorial writer hands you a line about the "superior" conditions for workers in Canada. That's right people, the law within the European Union is a minimum of four weeks holiday every year. Aussi mes dames et messieurs please note this article suggests that "open source" editing in the Wiki system can be effective in keeping nutbars in check (in this case not completely so). Nothing is perfect, of course, but like the similarly named "open source" software points a finger in the right direction. Social democrats and liberals please take note.

Thanks to union campaigning and government action, the 2007 Christmas and Boxing Day bank holidays are the first that scrooge bosses won't be able to count against the European minimum of four weeks paid holiday.

While other European countries have always given their citizens four weeks paid holiday in addition to their public holidays, in the UK employers have been able to include bank holidays as part of their staff's four-week minimum holiday entitlement.

But after a sustained union campaign, the Government has closed this loophole and increased the UK's minimum holiday entitlement by adding eight days to the European four-week minimum (as we have eight bank holidays).

Increases in the minimum holiday entitlement have been staged. In October 2007, full-time workers gained an extra four days minimum leave a year, and in April 2009, the minimum leave entitlement will go up by a further four days.

The new right is not the same as a legal right to take bank holidays off work. Some jobs, such as the emergency services, require year round cover and other service related businesses, such as retail and leisure, expect to trade on many bank holidays. But the new right means that staff who work on a bank holiday will now get an extra day's leave on top of their four week minimum entitlement.

Following the change in October, Christmas Day and Boxing Day 2007 are the first two bank holidays that people on the legal minimum holiday entitlement will be compensated for if they work either day.

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: 'This is another victory for union campaigning. Without unions there would be no European minimum, we would not have those extra four days from October and we would have fewer bank holidays. Union members also get better holidays, an average of 29 days compared to 22 days for non-members.

'No-one should forget that when employer organisations and Euro-sceptics talk about red-tape and burdens on business they mean holiday rights such as these. I hope all of those who benefit this year will be decorating their Christmas trees with red tape to celebrate.

'But the campaigning goes on. We still want UK workers to have more bank holidays to catch up with the European average, and are backing a new Community Day bank holiday in October that will celebrate and encourage community and volunteer activity.'