What I said, What the Globe and Mail said.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/personal-finance/household-finances/your-say-are-todays-20-somethings-worse-off-financially/article2441072/?from=2445245

  
The Globe and Mail ran an article, a few days ago, in which they asked: From the Quebec student protests to reports of youth unemployment, there are no shortage of stories suggesting young people are facing tough financial times in Canada. But are things really worse, or are young people today spoiled? We asked readers of all generations to weigh in. 

So I have two sons 32 and 28, and, I work with, and try to change the world with, a lot of young people, and so I thought I would weigh in -- I even sent a picture.   Apparently though (I should have known) they were not interested in real answers,  just superficial info -- they said nothing about length or editing for length but they completely changed the tone of my submission and published it along with my picture (I am number 13) 

My submission, as published, is at Number 13 -- I tried to keep it personal assuming that was what they wanted -- Here is what I actually submitted.  The bolded parts are what they printed.



From what I can see people in their 20's have it harder than previous generations, at least back to the 40's.   The golden age ran from the 40's to about 1980 and I am a boomer, and old enough to have benefited.  But,  my children, and their children (I have 2 grandchildren) will be worse off than my generation, AND one of my children is a lawyer. The other has a good job at a high tech company.  Still,  they are more severely limited than my generation.

When I was young,  I went to College and then University and, although both my partner and I had student loans, we were able to pay them off (living on our own and not with parents) along with (eventually) having two kids, before we were 40.   We went to university with a baby, and later two,  and had daycare subsidy that covered most of the cost.  With two people working at minimum wage in NS, today, daycare subsidy is very low, making it hard for two people to work without family support.   (we provide the family support!)  You cannot really expect to get anywhere today without a university degree, but if you have a baby when young, ever being able to afford to go slips away quickly -- how can one find $6000 a year for tuition (and that is not counting the kind of tuition that my other son paid at a professional school - $17,000 a year in tuition alone!) and more for living costs -- student loans will not cover the costs - one is expected to pay on their own.

 When I was young, most work was full time and permanent if you wanted it. Much work these days is part time or casual (my daughter in law drives a school bus, and although the pay is not bad - she only works around 4-5 hours per day) The rest is shift work – when I was young,  people in heath care, fire and police worked shifts;  and the guys who worked at the car plants,  and they got paid very well to make up for it.   Today almost all work from Tim Horton's to retail, to education, is shift work, making childcare and transportation difficult, as we have not apparently kept up with the fact that people need childcare and transportation at all hours, and it is simply not provided – one has to figure it out on one's own through one's own expense/provision.   

 I have no idea how this generation makes it at all!  I am going to get OAS at 65 (and I am already tired) - waiting an additional two years means that there is pressure on young people to save for retirement , but they cannot even pay the rent so they will just be poor, with certainty,  when they get old.  More than 40% of Canadians have no pension but CPP, last time I checked.  With  the employer cuts in pensions, to feed profit in the private sector, and pressure to match those cuts in the public sector, soon far fewer people will not have a retirement plan.   I am worried about the future for my children, and grand children.  

 Although I am a boomer,  I am not to blame for these drastic changes, elimination of the safety net and increasing costs from speculation (land and energy) and the investment casino.  I have fought the inequality in society all my life - the concentration of wealth at the top eating up all of the productivity increases of the last thirty years means that my children will not be better off than their parents.   In fact, they are worse off than any generation post war, because they have no hope for the future.  I have no sense that they have opportunity, or hope.  

The jobs are being held onto by the old who have no pensions, and cannot retire,  and soon will have no OAS for an additional two years, keeping them from giving up their jobs.   Then, although there is a labour shortage (so they say) there are no jobs for the young.   The unemployment rate among young people is 20%+ and keep in mind that the rate wouldn't change if everyone of them was doing their best to find work.    The economy theoretically woks like this -- if there is a shortage of labour the price of labour would increase, but this we see, does NOT happen.   To ensure it doesn't happen, employers, instead of raising the wage,  or improving working conditions to attract workers, now just import under new federal rules, which allow it,  those who have no rights (temporary foreign workers) and will work cheaply under bad conditions.   For example, In Guysborough County N.S. a fish plant advertised for workers at about .30 over minimum wage (there is about thirty percent unemployment rate) and there was no shortage of takers.  However when they offered the job to locals they were offering a 6 day,  48 hour work week, every week of the year, with no benefits or sick pay.  It was not the work itself but the fact that one had to completely devote one's life to the job – a job with no room for promotion – that put off the Locals (assuming as the employer claims that no one local would take the work) maybe locals were interested but the plant went for temporary foreign workers - 9 Phillipina's who have no rights, don''t mind working 6 days a week (or who are desperate enough for the cash to send home) They should be allow to properly immigrate and bring their families - but more to the point why is this employer allowed to set wages and working conditions so far from the norm in Canada and then import workers to do it instead of providing decent jobs for people already here?  Just one more nail in the coffin of my children and grand-children's future.   They are worse off than the generations before – they will also inherit a planet that is about to create hunger and refugees due to climate change and an economic system that sees North Americans better off than others, especially in the south, and the 1-10% able to meet all crises while leaving the average worker in the dust.  The twenty somethings have plenty to complain about.

Occupy Our Food Supply

On this Global Day of Action, called Occupy Our Food Supply, a day about our food and food sovereignty, food supply, and food and planet devastation -- I had the privilege of hearing Vandana Shiva (and guests) speak in person, in Halifax, NS.  The morning was called "A Feast of Conversation about Women , Men and Food".  Sponsored by the EAC, Oxfam and Mount St. Vincent University.



I heard today about the  need to organize to take back our food, our seed and our soil.  I heard that our food system is part of a global system that is hurting the planet and hurting women, in particular.  A system that puts profit, mono-culture and dead seed (terminator seeds) before the needs of people and the planet.  I heard Vandana Shiva be inspiring and call us to action - not necessarily large planet-changing action - but things that we can do here at home.  She did warn us, at the same time,  not to think small! We can take on even the largest corporations and win.

The morning began with a presentation by Marnina Gonick, a Women's Studies professor at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax.  She talked about sex and gender - that sex is about biological characteristics, and that gender is socially constructed.  She spoke briefly about how we sometimes think we are past gender inequality, in the "west" , but that much inequality remains - women, for example,  still do most of the housework and childcare even while working fulltime.  Men still dominate in business, religion, sports and still make significantly more money than women.  

As we heard later from Dr. Shiva this is a problem in most of the world.   So as we went through the speakers and conversations,  in the morning,  we were asked to think about "what difference does gender make?  And what difference does difference make"  especially when thinking about food.   The overarching question was "How does putting Women's Rights and Gender Justice at the heart of food system conversation help mobilize change?"  and that is what we spent the morning thinking and talking about.

Dr. Shiva spoke of the following, and although not in her words, I am doing my best to paraphrase and precis what she said:  

80% of food worldwide today comes,  not from large agri-business,  but from small farms/plots,  and the majority of them are worked by women.   Women's work though is generally invisible.      Why, Dr. Shiva asked is that work invisible?   Because,  Global Capital assumes that that nature is dead and that women don't work!  The challenge is to make that work visible.

Several times Dr. Shiva mentioned the violence of the green revolution, and the book that she wrote about it, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Ecological degradation and political conflict in Punjab, 1992, Zed Press, New Delhi.  That was about the punjab in 1984 - always described as religious strife but was in fact about land and water and debt.

She mentioned the violence of Union Carbide and the Bhopal criminal disaster that still has meant no justice,  especially for the women that primarily carry on the fight.  Dow bought union carbide and says that they have no liability for the Bhopal disaster - but when you buy a company you buy not just their assets but also their liabilities - but still there is no justice for the victims of Bhopal.  There is a campaign now to remove Dow as a sponsor of the London Olympics as they have refused to actually negotiate (though the Indian gov. is also culpable by accepting, on behalf of the victims, a paltry settlement)   This, Dr. Shiva pointed out, was just a part of the violence perpetrated on the planet by the fertilizer and now giant food production companies, like Cargill.   Fertilizer comes out of munitions research - It is war chemicals used in agriculture and their names reflect that like Roundup- and Dr. Shiva rhymed off others that I cannot recall. . .

Monoculture,  she went on to say, is like war - it is conformist, highly regimented and not at all chaotic, like life. 

She had us imagine the picture of many combines going across a field at once - looks like tanks massing on a battle field. 
 
On the contrary - living soil can only be handled by living hands.

 

She talked about how corporations are given the status of people - but they are NOT people!  They do  not have minds, they cannot think, they don't have ideas and they should not be able to patent life.  As they have no intellect - they cannot have intellectual property.

She talked about not just the sexism, and how women are the ones that have protected the seed, and nurtured the soil, even in the face of monoculture,  but the racism in the multi-national food industry that they call the less nutritious white rice superior and the dark coloured, highly nutritious  millets traditionally used by women in India, inferior.    She went on to talk extensively about the vocabulary of seed and the implications.

She then made several excellent points about productivity.  I have thought a lot lately about how we move to a sustainable economy - how do we stop the insistence on "growth" to be productive?   in this vein Dr. Shiva mentioned that if you consume what you produce it is not considered "productive" - so there is a tendency to want to move to monoculture and exporting food as this is then rated as an improvement in productivity,  though people may have gone from feeding themselves to starving!  In addition, these days a lot of "food" is grown to make bio-fuels and run cars and/or to feed animals.   It is totally untrue, she insisted, that large scale agriculture produces more food, in fact, as she put it:  TLC (tender loving care) produces more yield than NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium- the ingredients of chemical fertilizers - you know the kind that you can use to make bombs)  Monoculture is NOT more productive. We just count it that way.  (See Who's Counting by Marilyn Waring - just my suggestion,  not mentioned by Dr. Shiva)

So the food system is occupied by the corporations and we need to re-occupy our food. Food should be for people not for profit.   Not just food, either but other agricultural products - as Dr. Shiva said, 95% of all cotton grown in India is BT cotton and the seed is owned and controlled by Monsanto.  The seed once planted cannot be used to gather seed - it must be purchased every year and cannot be saved.  In order to buy the seed, you need to get into substantial debt.   This is a major reason for the increase in the number of farmer suicides in India in the last ten years - 250,000!

The boundary between reality and spin, Dr. Shiva said, has dissolved and we have to work very hard to see reality.   We need to support diversity and women and she drew our attention to a group - Diverse Women for Diversity. - part of her organization - Navdanya for which there were several fundraisers during her visit to Nova Scotia.

Dr, Shiva returned later from some Q & A - but in the meantime there was a presentation about the Local situation by Dr. Patti Wiliams.  She spoke about the  N.S. Participatory Food Costing project.   She talked about how food is too expensive for families that earn a low income (just fyi - almost 30% of Nova Scotians earn minimum wage) - not that food costs too much, she reassured us as farmers have to make a decent living, too.  But that income inequality in society means that women (who earn less) and especially single mothers do not have enough income to feed their children nutritious meals.

She showed a video that is worth taking in - spoken word and typography. . .   It is only a minute long and worth watching. . .


Tim Merry - Kinetic Typography from Jeff Harper on Vimeo.


In Nova Scotia there is a LOT going on -- time to seize the moment - we have a wave of people wanting to buy local,  an explosion of farmer's markets and lots happening with the N.S. Food Security Network.

When Dr. Shiva returned after we had "conversations at our table" I seem to have recorded what sound like a lot of aphorisms -- all of them good - but she was answering questions which I did not record and all of this is great stuff.  So here it is, as well as I could record it:

Silence is not neutral.  It mans that you are taking the side of the oppressor if you do not speak out.

Life is about meaningful work, and serving the community, not about money.

I am part of the web of life - think of us all as microrhizome fungi - (I think I have that right?) spreading out as a network below ground but all networked together - a great picture (and made me want to find out more about it!)

Corporations claim intellectual property - stealing the knowledge from indigenous peoples and then profiting from it.  There is no intellectual property in this area - it is piracy - and is in fact called bio-piracy!

We can fight the corporate control of food - we do not need the billions that they have to win against them - we need solidarity and networking and we can beat them [Hey - we can be like the fungus!]

Through most of history we have eaten food that is good for us, now we are eating food that is a curse for us.  High fructose corn syrup should NOT exist.

The knowledge of sharing is where we create abundance.  the culture of sharing is what we need to build.

Everyday Ghandi said "make me more womanly" .  Women have relationships to each other and to the soil and seed. . . men need to nurture a relationship soil, seed, the eath that is more like women.  To be non-violent is a cultivated trait - men need to be partners, and it is a benefit for them. . .  Men, who have got used to the system of dominance, will ind life more joyful if they engage in partnerships with women.

Conservation can become the basis of production.   (In answer to a question about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault)  We need to keep seed adapting while the climate changes - we need to turn to the women to the soil and the seed, and away from monoculture and chemicals and nurture the soil - that will keep seed and the food supply secure.

Centralized systems of corporate control (a few companies control the world's food, a few companies are the world's retailers etc.) create hunger - not our inability to grow enough.

Monoculture produces commodities, not food. You can have more and more of may or few commodities but still have hunger.  Food distribution systems are driven by subsidy and profit.  50% of the food in the world is wasted - monoculture and shipping long distances creates waste.  Shipping means breeding food for long shelf life instead of taste, quality and nutrition. (breeding for rocks!) "fresh" means that you can eat it right away - not bred for shipping long distances.

Soil organisms are what feed us.

Asked what she recommened that we do/action we should take Dr. Shiva said:

No monoculture of the mind!  We do not all have to take the same action.   We need local activists, people working for organics, to create and nurture farmer's markets, we need research - how can we overcome monoculture and the practice of making high cost, low quality food, cheap?  We need to make corporations pay the real cost of what they produce and sell.  We need to protect seed and soil and build a global seed campaign.

So ends my notes on a talk by Vandana Shiva and others on the Day of Action on food - Let's re-occupy food!

Musings on Valentines Day but not about it.

Have a number of unrelated things to talk about but feeling like a blog post anyway. . .

First the Federal Cons who have today tabled  Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act and to amend theCriminal Code and other Acts that will let the police (and maybe the government and/or its agencies) get information about your web identity and data about you WITHOUT A WARRANT.  What the hell is this?  As an excuse they are suggesting that if you have nothing to hide it won't affect you (where have I heard this before?   And in addition, yesterday the Minister Vic Toews suggested that if you oppose this act you must be some sort of pedophile/pornographer.   Sheesh . . .  Stand for Civil Liberties and stand  accused of heinous crimes.  Good article in the Globe and mail -- "Stand with Us or with the child Pornographers".

Or this article by John Ibbitson that asks - why  do the Cons supporters want the Long From Census and the Gun registry gone because they are such an invasion of privacy but want to allow such invasive surveillance of citizens on the internet?

You can sign a petition to oppose this bill and "stop online spying"  at: http://openmedia.ca/mp

Then of course we have the so-called "omnibus crime bill" - coming soon to a court near you.  We have a few mandatory sentences already though the new bill expands that -- so judges are bristling about losing their discretion based on the facts of the case, and one has refused to impose a minimum sentence. 

"An Ontario Superior Court judge has refused to impose a mandatory three-year sentence on a man caught with a loaded handgun, putting the courts on a collision course with the federal government’s belief in fixed sentences that provide judges with little discretion."

And from an article by Armine Yalnizyan -- CCPA Senior Economist -- in the Globe & Mail -- comes an analysis of corporate taxes and the issues it raises, along with the list of workers being attacked and asked to take less across the country:

Newly aggressive demands that workers give up income join the decades-old demands that governments give up revenue. The implicit deal is that lower taxes create more investment and competitive cost structures create more demand. Both supposedly create more (good-paying) jobs. Lower taxes, check. Lower payroll costs, check. More good-paying jobs here at home: Insert sound of crickets chirping.

In case that's not clear - the government reduces taxes for corporations so that they will invest in Canada and "create jobs" .  They also attack workers and collective agreements, and support private firms doing so,  so that there is a better "business climate" so that the companies will invest in Canada and "create jobs" but no matter how low the taxes, how educated and reliable and productive the workforce, even how profitable the company -- waddya' know - no jobs - just increasing shareholder profits - and in Canada lots of money flowing to parent corporations in the U.S. and other countries.

If new economic and political realities are not enough to bum you out on this Valentines Day , then think of the planet (not sure why I want you to be bummed out - just finding it hard to be optimistic myself this morning)  graphically - a reprise of the 1972 Big Blue marble photo was taken in January and NASA says:

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web's most widely read meteorologist, explains, "The US and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western US is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s."

We are in deep doo-doo. . . Lots of extreme weather data in the article on Al Jazeera quoted above and then this:

In the face of such data - statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet - you'd think we'd already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we're witnessing an all-out effort to... deny there's a problem.

And so it goes. . . Have a great day.