Vancouver Province

September 28, 2007

Municipal leaders from across B.C. yesterday voted firmly in favour of boosting the minimum wage from $8 to $10 an hour. (Keep reading…)

CCPA Manitoba September 27,2007

It is perplexing that in 21st century Canada it could be a punishable offence for one person to say to another, peacefully, in a public place, “I’m in trouble and need help.” Yet that is the effect of laws such as City of Winnipeg Bylaw No. 128/2005 that criminalize the act of panhandling. Other Canadian and American cities have enacted similar legislation, underscoring a clash of competing values: social “hygiene” vs. freedom of expression; middle-class discomfort vs. underclass economic need; commercial interests of downtown business owners vs. beggars’ right to plead for subsistence. (Keep reading…)

A Socialist Project e-bulletin …. No. 56… September 9, 2007 _______________________________________________________________ (Keep reading…)

Special to Canadian Dimension, August 12, 2007

Jornaleros line the corners along East Oakland’s High Street. Additional groups of mostly young men wait along San Leandro Street and International Boulevard. An occasional car or pick up truck stops, all run to the vehicle and a few get in to clean a yard, paint a house or carry furniture. For three consecutive days, I counted more than 300 Central American and Mexican men in an approximately one square mile area. Hundreds more hang out at other intersections from San Francisco to San Jose, as they do in scores of other cities throughout the United States. (Keep reading…)

Relay August 3

A drastic reduction in the adequacy of income support pay- ments is key to the neoliberal agenda. This is especially true in a country like Canada that had earlier seen the consolidation of a basic social infrastructure. However much the balance is tilted in favour of the employers, employment insurance (EI) and welfare payments limit the desperation of the unemployed and the degree to which those with jobs can be forced to make conces- sions. Massive reductions in federal EI and provincial social as- sistance rates have been a focus of governments in the last fifteen years and the Mike Harris ‘Common Sense Revolution’ in On- tario was a very big part of this process. (Keep reading…)

The Dominion August 3, 2007

Living conditions deteriorating from cuts, Olympic preparations, says group (Keep reading…)

June 14, 2007 The Nation

Twenty years ago it was risky to point out the growing inequality in America. I did it in a New York Times essay and was quickly denounced, in the Washington Times, as a “Marxist.” If only. I’ve never been able to get through more than a couple of pages of Das Kapital, even in English, and the Grundrisse functions like Rozerem. (Keep reading…)

New York Times January 15, 2006

For a few weeks in the summer of 1995, Jen Kern spent her days at a table in the Library of Congress in Washington, poring over the fine print of state constitutions from around the country. This was, at the time, a somewhat-eccentric strategy to fight poverty in America. Kern was not a high-powered lawyer or politician; she was 25 and held a low-paying, policy-related job at Acorn, the national community organization. Yet to understand why living-wage campaigns matter - where they began, what they mean and why they inspire such passion and hope - it helps to consider what Kern was doing years ago in the library, reading obscure legislation from states like Missouri and New Mexico. (Keep reading…)

Winnipeg Free Press Fri May 4 2007

AS the provincial parties unveil their platforms piece by piece — ensuring that each announcement is louder, flashier and more awe-inspiring than the last — we can be quite sure that one issue will be left off the agenda. Despite the fact that Manitoba continues to have one of the highest rates of child and family poverty in the country (19.2 per cent), one of the highest proportions of full-time working families who fall below the poverty line (11 per cent), and some of the lowest average weekly earnings in Canada (only Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia are lower), the issue of poverty remains a whisper. It is as if our strategy to reduce poverty is to ignore it. Unfortunately, not talking about it has only made matters worse. (Keep reading…)

Globe and Mail Report on Business 24/04/07

Chicago — Chicago’s legendary local politics are about to reverberate in the hallways of some of the world’s largest retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (Keep reading…)