Time for a Climate of Change

All last week, the bad news about climate change tore through science circles like a twister through Kansas.

First, the International Energy Association (IEA) reported that global greenhouse gas emissions hit record highs in 2010, threatening to catapult Earth over the 2 degree Celsius temperature rise that, scientists predict, will lead to cataclysmic changes.

Already we’re up about one degree – attributed to anthropogenic causes.

That doesn’t sound like much but it’s enough to melt glaciers, cause widespread drought, wildfires, flooding, famine and extreme weather.

Which we're seeing already. Russia and Pakistan last year. Manitoba and Mississippi this year.

Says meteorologist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, “There is good reason to believe that, with as much as an additional 1C or so warming, we might set in motion the irreversible collapse of the continental ice sheets. Their eventual melting would lead to more than 20 feet of global sea level rise--by any assessment, a catastrophic outcome.”

And none of that counts what is already in the system – i.e. those emissions that we haven’t really measured or felt the effects of yet.

“We”  being the operative word.

It’s widely acknowledged that some of the worst polluters – including Canada and the U.S. – will be able weather the coming storms for a lot longer than those wretched millions living in low-lying coastal areas, in rapidly-drying up parts of Africa, South America and Asia and every place where the cost of food takes up the largest chunk of the household budget.

The IEA’s numbers were reinforced Tuesday when the US government’s Earth Systems Research Laboratory announced that 2011 world green house gas emissions were climbing even higher than last year.

Canada, on a per capita basis, has much to answer for. Population and economic growth, oil and gas exports and our love of light trucks have been among the key drivers of our rising emissions. Then there's Alberta oil sands mining which, according to Environment Canada, spews more greenhouse gases than all the cars on our roads combined.

“Unfortunately, far too many are in denial and political action is at a standstill,’’ observes  Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Senior Scientist at the Boulder, Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Once the problem is so obvious to everyone, it is far far too late to do anything about it.”

Simply put, although there is some political disagreement, the general scientific consensus is that, in order to head off mass extinctions, huge migrations of climate refugees and, yes, even global warring, carbon dioxide in the air should be cut back to 350 parts per million (ppm) from the current 390 ppm (or so). 

That sense of urgency is why many in scientific circles are advocating non-violent civil disobedience (NVCD) to shake up governments, industry and media.

Even climate change superstar Al Gore has called for NVCD, which involves breaking the law to protest or to call attention to laws or government policies perceived to be unjust.

Three years ago, he said in a speech to the Clinton Global Initiative, "I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”

Enough with the greenwishywashing, more and more scientists are saying.

Well-known American environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben founded the grass-roots group 350.org, which attempts to get people all over the world agitating for laws, regulations and policy aimed at reducing GHG (greenhouse gas emissions) reductions.

“We need to do (civil disobedience) on a mass scale," McKibben, author of many books including Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, tells me. “We need to do it in a way that makes one thing clear to all onlookers: in this fight, we are the conservatives. The radicals are the people who want to alter the composition of the atmosphere.”

The idea is spreading.

“Non-violent civil disobedience is justified when there is a history of long-standing harm or violation of people's fundamental rights; when legal and policy means have failed to reduce the harms and violations; and when there is little time remaining to address the problems,” University of New England professor John Lemons and Penn State’s Donald Brown wrote in last month’s Journal of Science and Environmental Politics.

“Simply put, people do not have the right to harm others who have not given their consent to be harmed, and this is exactly what the USA and other countries continue to do,” Lemons told me.

(For more on the theories of justice and civil disobedience, read this. And then read this, the case of one US activist who faces a possible 10 year sentence and up to $750K in fines, even though he never hurt a fly.)

Environmental activists have long engaged in civil disobedience.

Greenpeace, to name one group, has long specialized in it.

In 2009, 20 activists were arrested after they scaled Parliament’s west block, covered it with banners demanding government action on climate change. 

Last week, two members camped out in an 'Arctic survival pod' suspended from an oil rig off the coast of Greenland, in an effort to stop a Scottish oil firm from drilling. The activists demand to know how Cairn Energy would cope with a BP Deepwater Horizon-style disaster if something goes wrong in pristine Arctic waters.

Noted Australian climate advocate Clive Hamilton (Affluenza: When Too Much is Not Enough, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist The Truth About Climate Change) insists that the moral obligation to act now trumps obedience to the law.

“Those who engage in civil disobedience are usually the most law-abiding citizens—those   
who have most regard for the social interest and the keenest understanding of the democratic process,” he emails from Cambridge where he is a visiting professor at Oxford.

Civil disobedience has a long and proud tradition, of course. It helped bring about civil rights in the US, end the Vietnam war, and kept loggers out of BC’s Clayoquot Sound. African-Americans boycotted bus lines and defiantly drank out of “whites-only” public water fountains, young men publicly burned their draft cards and thousands blockaded roads to keep pulp and paper companies out old growth forests.

The member-supported Council of Canadians has engaged in all sorts of civil disobedience, including sandbagging towns and provincial legislatures to point out how rising sea levels would affect them.

“It’s not an action to be taken lightly,’’ says Andrea Harden-Donahue, the Council’s Energy and Climate Justice campaigner. “We do believe that all other democratic means should be pursued first and continue to be pursued, even with a civil disobedience strategy.

“But we feel that it is justified to address climate change, especially given that the Harper government has refused to take action, and because of the urgency.”

Most lawmakers – and even most people -- don’t seem to think much of the tactic. Witness police actions against non-violent stunts such as teddy bear catapults at global summits, or citizen complaints of tied up traffic during protests and sit-ins. How many Canadians say that last year’s peaceful protestors at the Toronto G20 Summit should have just stayed home if they didn’t want to be tackled, cuffed with plastic cables and tossed into cages without charges?

“People from across the political spectrum love to praise civil disobedience-- as long as we're talking about past social movements,” observes US journalist Will Potter, author of Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement under Siege. “For instance, on the very same day that members of Congress were breaking ground for a new memorial honoring Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his activism, a bill was passed labeling civil disobedience as ‘terrorism’ if it is done by animal rights and environmental activists.”

“Most people are divorced from the history of social change,” notes Greenpeace Canada’s climate and energy campaigner Mike Hudema, author of An Action a Day Keeps Global Capitalism Away. “From the eight-hour workday, to women's right to vote, to the end of slavery -- all of these involved good people willing to break the law.”

One much talked-about recent case of civil disobedience within the scientific community is that of NASA climatologist and Columbia University professor James Hansen who, along with others, was charged with obstructing police and impeding traffic in West Virginia, while protesting  mountain-top coal mining.

Here he is on Letterman a couple of years ago, talking about his then just-published book, Storms of my Grandchildren. It's a great interview.

Hansen, who calls climate change “the great moral challenge of this century,’’ has been helping other activists who get into legal trouble, including six Greenpeace members tried in 2008 for vandalizing a coal power station’s smokestack. With his expert testimony, they convinced the court that, despite all the expensive havoc they wreaked, even greater damage – climate change – was being prevented from hurting people.

The decision shocked both government and industry: The activists were found not-guilty by reason of "lawful excuse” -- a judgement which opens the door for more climate justice civil disobedience.

In Canada, we have a somewhat similar but different defence, the defence of necessity. Conceivably, it could be used like the defence of "lawful excuse" was in the UK.

 “We do believe that the law, and actions taken within the law, are ultimately necessary to addressing the problem of climate change,’’ explains Andrew Gage, acting executive director of West Coast Environmental Law in Victoria, BC.

Tomorrow the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change begins in Bonn.

Wait for a lot of blather and political positioning, but not much commitment for change – or even a commitment to make a commitment for change from developed nations. Meanwhile, the poor nations who will take the brunt of climate change will just have to take it.

Me, I am glad I am getting on in years so I won’t have to see what’s coming. I always felt and, as it turns out, scientist Michael Mann sees it the same way, that, well, here's how he in an email: "Of all the early 70s distopian movies, Soylent Green was actually the most prophetic in terms of providing a vision for a worst case anthropogenic climate future..."

 “I don’t think most people realize how little time we have left,’’ warns Lester Brown, founder of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute and author of the just-published World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse.  “The cliff is not that far away.’’

But hey, the disaster folks will make a buck.

JUST A NOTE: In order to do this post, I spoke to many distinguished and committed scientists. I just want to thank those that I cited, as well as those I didn't, including Scott Mandia and Ray Weymann.

HEATING UIPDATE: Well, here's a surprise.

The UN climate talks re-opened in Bonn on Monday with developing countries increasingly resentful that money promised 18 months ago to help them adapt to climate change has not been made available.

New research by the World Resources Institute (WRI) shows that the world's 21 developed countries and the European commission have publicly announced pledges of $28bn in "fast-track" money after a commitment made in Copenhagen in 2009. While this is close to the $30bn promised for the 2010-2012 period, only around $12bn has actually been budgeted for by countries and as little as around 30% has been delivered in some cases.

Women's Work

Stumbled across this stunning -- in so many ways -- National Film Board documentary the other day. 

It is totally worth 94 minutes of your time to get to know New Zealand political economist Marilyn Waring.  Her ideas, boiled down to their most basic, relate to how what women do and contribute count for nothing in a world measured by leading, lagging and other economic indicators.

For example, activities which involve monetary transactions count as production even when they involve the degradation of the earth's resources, such as strip-mining. A sunset has no value, nor a mountain, and trees only count when they have been chopped down and sold. At the same time, Waring criticizes traditional economics for not finding a way to value community well-being. By current thinking, war and disaster are 'good for the economy' because they create jobs such as arms production and clean-up.

As Gloria Steinem wrote in the introduction to Waring's book, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth, she will change your worldview. She certainly helped me crystallize many inchoate ideas I have had about women's work and place in the world.

Sometimes this film, which requires zero expertise in economics, just blew me away. It even helped me formulate today's treeware column about childcare.

But Waring's about so much more than that. My young economist friend Aaron Braaten tweeted back at me the other day that Waring, one of his idols, was years ahead of her time when this film was made in 1995.

Unfortunately, she still is years ahead of her time.

But at least, now, there's a realization that, while it's still a man's world, women make it go round.

If you have an iPhone, get the free NFB app and watch it on your commute or in bed or wherever you are. Or sit at the computer.

Just don't miss it.

In all the Cons' command

I've been having some fun messing with the national anthem, thanks to the Harper government's commitment, announced during yesterday's throne speech, to castrate gender neuter O Canada. 

With a little help from some Facebook and Twitter friends, here's what I have so far:

Oh Canada! Our home on native land.

True hetero love, in all the Cons command.

We stand on gays for thee.

Green Assassin has a real good version here.

Understand that I am not opposed to this move. First because the anthem has been changed many times, and isn't even a good translation of the original French.  Second because women deserve to be acknowledged as well -- especially since there are many serving in Afghanistan where two have already lost their lives.

And that's without making much of our golden girls' performances at the Olympics. How many times did they stand up for Canada while the anthem played?

Although, when you think about it, ''all thy sons' command'' is not inaccurate when you consider the male-female ratio in Parliament, provincial legislatures, corporate boardrooms ...

Anyway.

As others have noted, this sop to women -- oh gee thanks and whoop-de-do -- hardly makes up for the government's disregard for women and families in the federal budget brought forth today. Not only are EI premiums rising while corporate taxes drop, but Harper still has not solved the daycare dilemma.

Today Finance Minister Jim Flaherty tossed a bone to single parent families with this: 

To save on tax on the $100 per month for children under the Universal Child Care Benefit, single parents will be able to report the income on the tax return of a child under the age of 18.

Which will work out great for richer families. Poor families .. not so much.

Meanwhile, there's this:

Split families: Parents who share custody of children more or less equally will now also be eligible to share the Child Tax Benefit, Universal Child Tax Benefit and the GST/HST credit.

Which sounds great in principle. But I've been on this beat long enough to know that, when parents are at each others' throats over custody, child support and property, this could lead to even greater conflict..

On other issues relevant to women, I can't say there's a whole lot. Nor is there anything for seniors on small fixed pensions. Nothing on housing. Nothing on health care.

For this they needed the recalibration vacation? Give me the break they took!

But what really galls is that the anthem change is being blamed on us femi-nazis because, as you know,  women have have been storming Parliament Hill demanding abortion rights be mentioned, along with equal pay, in the song.

We feminists have so much influence on the Harper government. Snerk.

But ... what do you know?

The push came from an openly gay feminist named Nancy Ruth. That's Senator Nancy Ruth. That's Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth -- a woman I have a lot of time for actually.

But the truth is, tossing this into the political mix right now was strictly a Harper decision.

And it was as cynical as anything else he has done.

O CONada!

P.S. Heh.

Coming up short

The welfare of women continues to dominate the political agenda through the suspension of Parliament.

And so, a few items of note.

Over at Rabble.ca, Murray Dobbin nicely sums up how the Harper government has run "roughshod'' over women.

Nothing new there as regular Broadsides readers know. If I had the time, I would add in a lot more starting with the threats to our reproductive choices and the pending elimination of the long-gun registry.

By coincidence, Regina Mom today documented the dollar value of some of the cuts to programs that helped women achieve equal rights and economic parity.

Finally, NDP leader Jack Layton took advantage of the current political climate to issue a news release challenging party leaders to put Canadian women and children first.

Mr. Layton invited Mr. Harper, as well as Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe, to cooperate in 2010 to improve the lives of Canadian women and children. He outlined a series of concrete New Democrat proposals that, if embraced by the other parties, would mean real progress for women and children. Those proposals include:

• Employment Insurance rules that deny eligibility to six in ten women;
• adopting key recommendations of the 2004 Pay Equity Task Force;
• increasing support for women’s groups working to prevent violence;
• launching an inquiry into 520 missing or murdered Aboriginal women;
• launching a federal initiative to ensure every child has daily access to healthy food;
• boosting the Guaranteed Income Supplement to end poverty among seniors (overwhelmingly women).

It's stunning to me that, in this country, in this century, kids and seniors go hungry.

Who was it who said that, if you want to know the true measure of a man, watch how he treats old people, children and animals?

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Layton had an op-ed in today's National Post.

Canada is among the wealthiest nations in the world, yet 70% of Inuit preschool-age children live in homes where there is not always enough food. There are many mothers in Canada who live in unsafe places, who are going without food, electricity or heat because of persistent, deep poverty. These deprivations have a devastating effect on Canada's very youngest, evidenced by the fact that infant mortality rates in low-income neighbourhoods are almost double those in richer ones.

Mr. Harper acknowledges that the solutions to maternal and child health problems are "not intrinsically expensive." This holds true for Canadian women and children as well: Providing safe drinking water on reserves, addressing the affordable housing crisis, and funding organizations that support women and children are all relatively inexpensive compared to the health and social costs of poverty in Canada, which are estimated at more than $20-billion per year.

<SNIP>

To put the full consequences of (Harper's) indifference into perspective, imagine a city the size of Winnipeg full of children: That is the number of our kids who live in poverty in Canada today.

As a country, we have the ability to take decisive action to end this cycle of marginalization, and Mr. Harper has shown that he knows that investing in women and children will get the job done in the developing world. It will be pure hypocrisy if he refuses to make similar investments here at home.

Batteries not included

Found this on Facebook friend Peter Vickers' page:

So many gifts you can buy to improve the lives of women and children. Gifts that make a difference. Gifts that empower, enrich, enable. Gifts that can change the world.

In many poor countries, the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy. With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty.

Charities are in desperate straits this holiday season as Canadians struggle to pay the mortgage when so many have lost their jobs.But, for all the talk of what's happening in the automotive and media industries, to name two troubled sectors, we never hear about how the non-profit side of the economy is faring.

Make no mistake, non-profits are not unimportant -- and they employ a lot of women.

Which is why I liked this oped by Jill Wyatt, CEO of Calgary's YWCA, brought to my attention by pal Francesca Dobbyn, executive director of the United Way in Bruce Grey.

One of the sectors in which women dominate is the not-for-profit or third sector. Almost 75 per cent of the employees in this third sector are women. But this sector is receiving considerably less media attention than other sectors during this recession, even as our community's needs increase.

<SNIP>

Far from not-for-profit, I believe there is great profit from what we do, but our bottom line is different. We save lives. We make a difference by building human capital. And we try to do more with less and less every single day.

<SNIP>

Believe me when I say you would miss us if we disappeared overnight. There are 161,000 charities in Canada with revenues of $112 billion. We employ 1.2 million people representing 7.2 per cent of the paid workforce--we have 11 times more workers than the automotive sector and two-and-a-half times the number of workers in the construction industry. We contribute 8.5 per cent of Canada's GDP, which is more than the retail, mining, and oil and gas industries combined.

Seems pretty straight-forward to me.

You know what you have to do.

Jammin'

Taking off for some R'n'R. Back Dec. 2.

Please give to the Star's Santa Claus Fund.

And, whatever you do, hold the fort.

Corporate Punishment

One of these days, soon, I am going to sneak out of the garret and go see Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. That despite how I believe -- without having seen it, mind you -- that it's probably mistitled.

It really should be called Corporatism: A Love Story.

The reason I raise this is my friend Carolyn sent me this link, about how 30 Republican senators in the US voted in favour of covering up gang rape (PDF), and protecting a corporation from any liability.

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. She was detained in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” (Jones was not an isolated case.) Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration.

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.” Speaking on the Senate floor yesterday, Franken said:

The constitution gives everybody the right to due process of law … And today, defense contractors are using fine print in their contracts do deny women like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court. … The victims of rape and discrimination deserve their day in court [and] Congress plainly has the constitutional power to make that happen.

But, to Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (R-Alabama) allowing rape victims access to legal reprisals is nothing but a "political attack" on Halliburton, the corporation that profited most handsomely from the Iraq invasion and occupation.

Sessions had support from 29 others, all Republican men, who voted against Franken's amendment.

That's almost one-third of the US Senate.

I bet these guys think government is too intrusive.

Which is why I want to bring to your attention the following quote which is on my Facebook profile. It's by Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the US:

''Unless you become more watchful in your states and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges, you will in the end find that the most important powers of government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations.''

Too late, I think.

Sick for profit

I haven't been discussing the health care debate in the US on Broadsides -- although I have been tweeting like mad about it.

But then I saw this:

Make it go viral. It must be seen.

My Canada includes ...

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED:

Yesterday's Canada Day column sure got some people worked up. 

You can tell by the comments on The Star's main web page. But you should see my email. Everything from high praise to low blows. I'm sure you can figure out why.

Here's the column, with some links and annotations.

My Canada includes:

Collective Bargaining: Yes, I know the strike by Toronto city workers means kids can't cool off in public pools, parents' best-laid summer child-care plans have gone awry and garbage bins are overflowing.

I feel your pain.

Just like most of you, I don't have 18 sick days a year to bank and cash out.

I also know that, without unions, many of us would be working in Dickensian conditions. 

How would you like to be a miner without a union ensuring that the company meets safety standards? Or a sweatshop worker without proper ventilation, light or even fire escapes?

Collective bargaining floats all our boats. Without it, there would be no minimum wage, no paid sick leave, no health and pension benefits, no vacations. Do you honestly believe workers would still get a fair break if the bottom liners had nothing to keep them in check?

It's not workers who drove us into this economic mess. Workers weren't paying themselves multi-million-dollar bonuses for running companies into the ground. In fact, as executive salaries were rising, workers' wages were falling.

This isn't the time to get rid of unions. This is the time to be strengthening them.

I am amazed by how many people resent unions. I wonder how many people realize, for example, that if it weren't for unions negotiating health benefits for their members, nobody would have health insurance today? Thank Tommy Douglas.

Collective bargaining is a human right.

Public Broadcasting: Fully funded public broadcasting is good for Canadian culture, which includes tens of thousands of workers who perform and produce programming.

It is also crucial in an era when private broadcasters fail to live up to their licence requirements to provide local news and other domestic content.

Greedy private broadcasters, who squat on the public airwaves, who benefit from tens of millions of cable subscription fees viewers are forced to pay, who buy US programming and shelve it just so their competition can't have it and who went on corporate shopping sprees while accumulating crushing debt loads are now crying the blues because they are having a few relatively lean years. This after decades of rolling in huge profits.

Well, boo-hoo-hoo. That's no excuse for not living up to the commitments they made for winning their licences.

Even more important, as much as I adore the Internet, it is no substitute for rigorous Canadian eyes and ears on all levels of government – as well as on Canadian corporations, which might otherwise rip off consumers while raping the environment.

CanWest Global and CTV give so much uncritical coverage to the Harper government that it is stunning complains aren't storming their signal towers. CTV might well have changed the course of history when it ran outtakes from an interview with former Liberal leader Stephan Dion, which made him seem like he couldn't understand English. The industry own standards council rapped the network for that.

Forget CTV and Global. They are beyond redemption, as they demonstrated during their campaign to make viewers pay for what they are now getting free – i.e. cable fees for local over-the-air stations.

CTV actually held open houses at its local stations, and got its on-air personalities to shill for these fees.

I'm talking CBC.

I'm talking excellent original and thought-provoking programming on CBC Radio's Ideas.

I'm also talking The National, which is now riddled with commercials and no longer has the weight or authority it used to have.

That's because, to sell ads, it has to produce eyeballs. That means more Michael Jackson, less Stephen Harper.

And that's not good for Canada.

I hate to say it but The National is too often pre-occupied with trivia. And CBC no longer has the resources to do consistent hard-hitting investigative journalism that answers to no advertisers.

Freedom of Expression: Excuse me but since when did the interests of Zionist lobby groups determine who or what Canadians can see and hear?

In recent months, to list just three examples, there have been concerted campaigns against the staging of Caryl Churchill's controversial Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza and an academic conference at York University where the so-called "one-state solution'' was to be discussed. We also saw British MP George Galloway be denied entry to the country for a speaking tour, just because he brought aid to bombed-out Gaza.

Now comes word that the only way the respected Al-Jazeera English news service, currently applying for TV distribution in Canada, can win the support of these same Jewish groups is to have them become consultants.

Journalistically speaking, that is hardly kosher.

Hoo-boy, did I hear about this one. The usual slurs of anti-Semitism, etc.

My answer? What part of this isn't true?

U.S. War Resisters: Canada's proudest moment this century was when it refused to join George W. Bush in his attack on Iraq.

Yet we deport Americans who didn't sign up to brutalize civilians.

If this, this and this don't count as brutalizing civilians, what does?

Those kids were hoodwinked, both by their government and its lapdog media, into thinking they were joining up to protect their country from terrorism and Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Rather than welcome them, we send them back over the border and to certain prison sentences.

That's not my Canada.

Is it yours?

So, here's the thing.

When former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, the man who won the Nobel prize for inventing UN peacekeeping, came up with the red and white maple leaf flag, he envisioned it as the sort of flag that would not be associated with war.

Kind of like the way the Norwegian flag is today.

It no longer is the case. 

Here's the other thing.

When John Lennon and Yoko Ono chose Canada as the venue for their Give Peace a Chance bed-in in 1969, they did it in part because they considered this country as the embodiment of anti-war values.

It no longer is the case.

As I wrote on the wall at the Imagine exhibit at Montreal's Musee des Beaux-Arts, ''John Lennon would not recognize Stephen Harper's Canada.''

UPPITY WOMAN DATE (July 7/09): Marky Mark, with whom I used to spar on my old blog Azerbic during the Israel-Lebanon conflagration in 2006, has put up a blog post that says it all on the Zionist lobby question, which has exploded in the comments.

Here's an excerpt:

While I think Jewish community advocacy groups have the right to advocate for Israel, it has gotten to the point where it almost seems as if a response to a report from a human rights organization concerning Israel comes from B'nai Brith Canada before there is an official response from the Government of Israel. This makes no sense to me. Organizations created to serve the needs of Jewish Canadians should focus, first and foremost, on that mission.

Sure, most Jewish Canadians feel an affinity to Israel, consistent with connections felt by other "hyphenated" Canadians. All you have to do is watch a post-soccer tournament street party in Toronto to see that Jewish Canadians are not alone in that respect.

But Ms Zerbisias is correct in identifying that what local groups have been doing vis a vis Israel is clear-namely, endeavouring to shut down debate. I think this is wrong, as it is a debate in which Israel can more than hold its own, and I think it is catastrophic for Jewish Canadians because it puts "official" Jewish organizations at war (and one that is unnecessary) with leading progressive figures. And most important, it is morally wrong when it involves accusations of anti-Semitism where (as is almost always the case) that are unwarranted.

Thanks Mark. Who'da thunk, back in 2006, we'd have peace between you and me?

Breadwinners and losers

Last week, this post, about the U.S. stimulus plan billions were not all poured into the ground for male-oriented shovel-ready projects generated some heat. But then, the piece which it was all based on was a dishonest rant blaming feminists for just about every economic woe "burly'' American men face right now.

Here, also on the economy, is quite a different piece. Instead of setting men and women against each other, author Courtney Martin proposes ways that everybody can pull together and pull out of this financial mess.

But first, some men need to rethink their roles -- specifically, what it means to be a man. Too often, they think it would be emasculating to promote equal rights.

Men have a real stake in feminism, and no, it's not just getting laid more often.

For example, until men advocate for and take paternity leave in America's workplaces, women will always be viewed as "special" -- and not in a good way -- for taking time off after giving birth. The more men who "come out" at work as dedicated fathers, the more comfortable the next generation will be in advocating for family-friendly work policy. As Jeremy Adam Smith argues in his new book, The Daddy Shift, we need a "gradual movement away from a definition of fatherhood as pure breadwinning to one that encompasses capacity for both breadwinning and caretaking. … It is time for twenty-first century dads to go on the offensive." This overdue "daddy shift" will normalize the notion that all caregivers -- women and men -- have to juggle work demands and family responsibilities.

Another area in which men must and generally haven't stepped up to the plate is in advocating for less sexism in the media. When Bill O'Reilly called veteran White House Press Corps journalist Helen Thomas "the wicked witch of the east," where were her male peers to defend her right to be judged based on the quality of her work rather than the wrinkles on her face? And when David Letterman recently made an inappropriate joke about Sarah Palin's 14-year-old daughter Willow, Sean Hannity and a few other conservative pundits took it seriously, in order to claim that "Obama's surrogates" on the left only care about sexism against liberals. It wasn't a genuine stand against sexist commentary in the media; it was an attempt to score political points.

Why should men invest in this fight? Because until women are judged based on the quality of their work, not their conformity to gender stereotypes, men have no hope of being judged based on the full range of their humanity.

<SNIP>

Ultimately, so much of this comes down to framing. As long we use the language of "women's issues," we will be separate and unequal. But when we talk about worker's rights, health care, media integrity, and freedom from violence as quality-of-life issues, we will all become less endangered and more enlightened.

Which the point I was trying to make in that other post.

Handing a guy a shovel and a paycheque will not make this world a better place. Blaming feminists divides us instead of uniting us. If men and women have equal footing in the workplace, the home and the mediasphere, all our boats will float.

Incidentally, as recently-published research indicates, men with daughters understand that much more readily than do most  others.

And why is that? Because they come to recognize -- perhaps even resent -- how their daughters have fewer opportunities than their sons.