ONDP’s Horwath shifts slightly to the left
2017 2017-05Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 11 →
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... Big farms produce big flu epidemics plus his lack of French.
Socialist Caucus members distributed nearly 600 copies of Turn Left magazine, and collected over $245 in donations. And that was quite an achievement, given that this ONDP convention was rather poorly attended. According to the Credentials Committee, only 738 delegates arrived, eliminate basic civil liberties and imprisoned, in the name of “national security,” many those who refused to repudiate their political ideas. Witch-hunting legisla tion aimed at purging communists and socialists from the U.S. trade unions and from public employment more generally was approved by compliant courts.
Today, the Trump administration’s dangerous saberrattling has met with across-the-board bipartisan sup port—this time with stated or implied threats of war, if not nuclear war.
North Korea and Syria are placed front and center in the U.S. crosshairs one day, while China and Russia are demonized and threatened the next. Meanwhile, U.S. troops, overt and covert, are in combat throughout the Middle East and beyond.
Out Now!
The antiwar movement’s historic demand, “U.S. Out Now!” has rarely been more urgent. And we must add: “No to the Obama-era ‘Pivot to Asia,’” where 60 percent of the entire U.S. armada is today stationed in the Pacific region. “Self-determination for all oppressed nations!”
With regard to nuclear weapons, any sane movement must stand opposed to their very existence, not to men tion their deployment. We hear no U.S. government ob jections today to the nuclear weapons of the U.S.-backed vaccines or drugs that we haven’t even invented yet.
This is why any effort going toe-to-toe with influ enza, Ebola, or HIV is a losing battle. I’m not opposed to vaccines or drugs or medicine more generally, but the notion that you are going to go toe-to-toe with that kind of evolutionary machine is ridiculous. We don’t have the capacity to do that. So we have to address the broader sociological and ecological context and hopefully maneuver our way to arrive at a détente with many a pathogen. We could maneuver a lot of pathogens to a place where they couldn’t do as much damage.
Except, we’re going in the other direction! If I wanted to select for a strain of influenza that would do maxi mum damage and spread around the world, I would produce my hog and poultry exactly the way agribusi ness does it. That arises out of the fact that Big Ag separated out ecology from economy. And that goes deep into the heart of the Victorian origins of capital ism and the capacity of the bourgeoisie to manipulate the world, which includes the premise that as a class they can separate themselves out from the world they seek to manipulate.
I get asked all the time if there is a right way to mass produce food, but the people who ask me don’t want the answer I give. Immediately, we could institute out of 1059 who “registered,” and 1347 who were eligible to participate. An un derwhelming turnout of 54 per cent of those eligible to be delegates should be a source of concern for the party brass.
Socialist Caucus and Momentum can didates for provincial Executive did well.
They received 7.4 to 40 per cent of the votes cast by delegates in a range of elec tions, held either on the main floor or in regional caucus meetings. Dirka Prout, John Orrett, Jason Baines and this writer earned the best results. This represents an improvement on our average scores at the federal NDP convention in Edmonton in April 2016.
Conclusion apparent: even at an ONDP convention such as this, it is clear that rad ical socialists can count on a significant base of support, demonstrating strong roots, and showing the progress of efforts to construct a revolutionary presence in side the actually existing workers’ move ment in English Canada. n Pakistani dictatorship, or to those of the murderous Indian regime of the reactionary Narendra Modi, or to those of the racist, colonial settler state of Zionist Israel. These repressive governments, we are assured by U.S. imperialism, can be counted on to act responsibly! And there is no mention in the corporate media that South Korea itself stands awash with nuclear weapons in the hands of the still present U.S. military.
The Trump administration, which has embraced au thoritarian governments the world over (Philippines, Saudi Arabia, India, etc.) as “friends and partners who share the goal of fighting terrorism,” has made clear, as in the past, that U.S.-backed dictators require no con demnation! In the well-chosen words of an earlier U.S. imperialist president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, referring to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
With regard to U.S. threats of war against North Korea, we must begin our response to this existential threat to all humanity by demanding the immediate, uncondition al, and total abolition of U.S. imperialism’s nuclear ar senal. This is the starting point of building a world free from all nuclear weapons. We must reject any “rights” or justification of U.S. imperialism in proclaiming itself the bully cop of the world. n three practical changes that would maneuver danger ous disease out of poultry and livestock:
If agriculture is about piling in 15,000 birds togeth er, that’s going to select for greater virulence. Well we can’t do that anymore, so somehow we have to space them out a little bit more across the food landscape.
And we can’t do genetic monoculture anymore; there have to be different varieties. And we have to al low them to reproduce on site, to allow the immune resistance to develop to any circulating pathogen. Agribusinesses don’t do that now. The birds and hogs can’t reproduce on site—all the breeding is done off shore and for morphometric characteristics, not for immune response. We want our birds that are infected and survive to be able to pass on their immunological adaptations to the next generation. That’s how nature works to our benefit.
So there! Three immediately practical things! But those are things that would in essence end the busi ness model of livestock production—because the whole point of raising them as monoculture now is to make a shitload of money.
The system says it wants solutions in the concrete, but in this case these can’t be applied unless the broader shifts in our economic structure are imposed as well. And they must be. As the farmers will tell us, we’ve reached a boundary condition. We’ve come up to a point where the economics cannot survive the epidemiology it produces. n SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2017 11
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SOCIALIST ACTION