robinmackinnon.com/archives/wal©mart-polemic – #comments !  

ni hao gou gou!  ni qu zai nar?

… breakfast in Beijing …

… and early morning traffic.

Noodles, noodles – hen duo de mian tiao!

 qi jiu ba / 798 …

How much is that doggy in the window?

 Any number of people are waiting to pounce with criticism of you no matter what you do or don’t say about either this or that or both.  That happens to be one of the prisms of reality that we must all deal with by some means or other.   We may, as individuals in a world of others including/excluding ourselves, be more or less bothered by this fact.  To some extent, we will inevitably be persuaded to shift our position this way or that way at one time or another according to those winds that may buffet us with this or that suboptimal result.  

We may limit ourselves for fear of losing our job, not getting a job, going to jail or losing our head.  We may, in less dire circumstances, hold our tongues for fear of causing offense, injury or revenge fantasies to arise in others within our social/socio-economic sphere, and this is undeniably the wisest course of action in many personal situations.  Nevertheless, it may also be the case that if we stifle what otherwise is best said aloud, for fear of whatever cringing denial and back-lashing may arise in the face of the naked facts, we cut out our tongues to spite the truth.

Some of us cannot bear even to speak certain truths aloud, alone, in front of a mirror.  Some of us are mired in it all, tired of it all, lost in a feedback loop of dread.  Where is this going?

You may be one of those people who wants a lot of plastic/polyethylene/polyester shit, and you want it cheap.  Maybe you don’t ‘want’ it.  Maybe you dream mahogany and jade dreams but all you’ve got coin for is plastic.  I know where you’re coming from.  I’ve been to the dollar store.  I’ve also been to China.

I bought a lot of stickers of Canadian flags and hearts and such and took them back to China.  One of the girls I gave the stickers to told me she wants to grow up and be the CEO of transnational corporations.  I’m not sure what to say to her about this aspiration.  What do you say to a child who says they want to join a gang, sell crack, and work their way to the top of the pyramid scheme?  

 "Wal Mart is China’s seventh largest export market. It bought $18 billion in goods from China in 2005 and $22 billion in 2006. More than 12 percent of China’s exports to the United States end up at Wal Mart stores and trade with retailers accounts for 1 percent of China’s GNP."

I guess my young friend has already got a pretty good idea about which side her bread will be buttered on, eh?

‘s own audit of 12,500 factories in 2004 found 9,900 violations of working conditions serious enough to suspend a factory or put it on notice – despite advance notice of factory inspections.

 is publicly charged with human right’s violations in at least 25 countries (China chief among them), worldwide.

is the largest private employer in the US.

 is a cancer – the full bore appetite of amerikan kapitalist kulture unleashed on the bloated bellies of consumers and desperate workers alike.

"David Kelley is a philosopher with The Atlas Society, formerly The Objectivist Institute.  He rebukes the anti-capitalist point of view and said it is incorrect to accuse Wal-Mart of earning high profit margins "at the expense of others."

"Workers are there voluntarily … They’re not serfs," he said. "Their alternatives might not be great, but there is nothing in the nature of life that guarantees you’re going to have a job that offers everything."

Kelley said customers have choices either to go buy a bar of soap at the local Wal-Mart or go to a mom and pop store and pay a few cents more. Most of the time, they choose Wal-Mart.

"Consumers are voting with their feet," he said. "If you complain about that, you’re complaining about freedom."

Mr. Kelley has a point which is difficult for me to concede given that he apparently is a – mouthpiece for the raving nonsense now famously known as ‘objectivism’/whipping boy for Ayn Rand’s ghostly ego, but that’s a polemic for another day.  

In this much he is correct: wAl©MaRt can’t sell what the people won’t buy, after all.  

Human society needs an enema, and that’s a mighty dangerous procedure if you’ve got your head stuck in your arse. 

…irony is not lost on some people.  People have to live on it, make thin soup of it, choke on it for decades or centuries.  They know the taste of it everywhere they go on their own land.  Myself, I cannot escape it either. A lot of people with skin like mine have very strange ideas about when history began and to whom the world belongs.  I don’t understand them – neither the people nor their ideas – even if I look just like they do.  They speak as though the words coming out of their mouths are clean; meanwhile, they cannot get any further from the truth than where they are.  Such a place does not exist.

Oh Canada.

Our home and native land.

Irony is not lost on some people.

Alanis Obamsawin’s documentary, INCIDENT AT RESTIGOUCHE, is an essential source of irony, recounting events in Listuguj – Gespe’g, Mi’gmaq territory, in June of 1981.  This kind of irony wakes the dead.

The trouble seems to be much rooted in the fact that this region of Mi’gmaq territory is more popularly known as South-Eastern Quebec, la belle province, Canada.  Back in ’81, Quebec’s Minister of Fisheries under Premier René Lévesque was one serenely ironic master of logic-manipulation by the name of Lucien Lessard.   On June ninth of that year Lessard ordered the Mi’gmaq of Restigouche (now Listuguj) to remove their nets from fishing waters acknowledged as their territory under treaty in 1752.  Lessard would go on to assert by fantastical circumlocution that he was only acting as a conservationist, although the sovereign right to fish under sudden edict accounted for less than 0.5% of total commercial fishing quotas in the region. 

Within 48 hours, an armed and belligerent force of 400 Quebec provincial police and fisheries wardens descended to enforce Lessard’s order on the population of roughly 1500, raiding the reserve to find and shred about half a dozen nets left in the water.  First Nations groups from across the country arose in solidarity; barricades were built.   A second police raid on the reserve and on the water made plain the face of dominant cultural policy in Canada.  Native people were criminalized, yet again, for defending their sovereignty over land in accordance with "peace and friendship" treaties which never ceded their inalienable right to live on that land by their own means.

In the film, Lessard is confronted by his own epic contribution to the annals of IrOnY, and Obamsawin is razor sharp.   His proclaimed intentions to ‘negotiate’ in a meeting with the band council at Restigouche fell somewhat below par  when Obamsawin reminded him of an exchange between himself and the Chief who explained how difficult it was for native people to understand that the Quebec people can fight so hard to declare their sovereignty from Canada all the while failing in every way to acknowledge the sovereignty of First Nations people in Quebec.

Lessard replied, "You can’t have sovereignty, because to have sovereignty one must have one’s own culture, language and land."

Where have you heard this kind of shite lately, eh… ?

Shite seems to envelop the world by means of whirlpool action – round and round and round we go.

 GET MORE history/IrOnY: here.

Something beyond irony, something bloody and obliterating has been going on which colonizers and their servants the world over refuse to see.  I encourage those who think Israel is ‘just defending itself’ to look at things as they really are.

There are certainly those who believe that the modern Jewish state of Israel is the will of G-d. Some of these people (a violent minority) are illegal settlers in the Occupied territories who shoot at lit windows in Palestinian homes at night, harass, assault and terrorize Palestinian people daily, incessantly, with impunity.  Most illegal settlers in the Occupied territories are simply greedy, as all grassroots colonizers are.

If they can hold ‘their’ ground for ten years, any unpaid portion of the very cheap loans the government gave them to bulldoze/buy/build on stolen land will be forgiven.  Hey – that sounds just like how the West was won!  A land without a people for a people without a land …

There are also many courageous Jewish people all over the world who say “not in my name!” and pour out their hearts in the cause of peace for all peoples.

If you are a North American of predominantly European origin, it is highly likely that you are the descendant of (generations of) people who felt quite justified in their support for a militarized, socially and culturally entrenched occupation of these territories and genocide against the indigenous peoples who were already living here.  Their reasons certainly varied.  Some were building a ‘New Jerusalem’, egged on by the voices in their heads.  Many others were victims of desperate circumstances in Europe and seeking a better life in the ‘new world’; nonetheless, the fact that this ‘better life’ included the extermination of indigenous peoples seems to have had little or no effect on their individual and collective aims and strategies.

The colonial project in North America was one of redeeming the land by declaring ownership of it.  In Canada, indigenous peoples were either murdered or contained on reservations and bound as property of the state under the Indian Act; the people referred to under the act as Indians were (continue to be) described by immigrants to North America as [violent, subhuman, dirty, child-like, heathen, savage, etc…] Following centuries of resistance, those who had survived the tens of millions of Indigenous peoples slaughtered by colonial adventure found themselves subject to phase 2 of the operation to erase them from the world.  By the 19th century, the process of social, economic and cultural quarantine of First Nations, Inuit and Metis people was augmented to include the kidnapping, abuse and violent ‘reeducation’ of their children.  The Indian Residential School system in Canada, which was an essential part of both a physical and cultural genocide and the destruction of First Nations communities, was founded on the philosophy of […killing the Indian to save the child.]. Canada’s Residential school system closed it’s last door in Saskatchewan, 1996.

Sing it with me: “O’ Canada … our home and native land …”.

Presumably, since our Prime Sinister Harper so recently stood up in the Canadian House of Commons Ill Repute and made his terribly moving apology to First Nations people on behalf of Canada/Canadians, I no longer have to break my neck proving to anyone that the colonial processes which resulted in the foundation of this country were highly criminal against the sovereign peoples already living on this land and revolved around a systematic, long-term policy of genocide toward them … do I?

Quoting directly from Mr. Harper’s “apology” on June 11, 2008: “There is no place in Canada for the attitudes that inspired the Indian Residential Schools system to ever prevail again.”

Apparently, he didn’t really mean it.

His silence burns like white phosphorous – all the way to the bone.

If you are prepared for intellectual honesty at least, what is going on between Israel and the indigenous inhabitants of the lands Israel has stolen / continues to occupy looks quite different from what you can read in most newspapers or see on most television networks.

The nature of *our existence as modern states *(Britain, France, Holland, the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Israel, etc…) is deeply rooted in our denial and defense of the racism driving our societies and our willingness to perceive peoples indigenous to the lands we covet as less entitled to peace and freedom than ourselves – disposable, subhuman.  Insisting that it is our right to continue in this way  is the talk of war criminals.
History IS repeating itself.

On my way out the door yesterday afternoon, cbc reported that the Israeli “defense” forces were marching into Gaza.  A couple of days ago it was reported that the airforce had “run out of things to bomb” and was revisiting previous targets.  A Norwegian doctor at a hospital in Gaza has reported that “they bombed a fruit market” – is that some kind of improvisation? Gaza or Guernica?

I made fast friends with a very fine fellow named Jeffrey, and we walked and talked our way south-easterly to catch up with a great column of people coming up Yonge Street from Dundas Square …

When cbc reports that “more than a thousand protesters” came out to denounce Israeli state terrorism, are they deliberately misrepresenting the facts or … are they just unable to estimate any number bigger than that?

Several thousand peaceful people (estimates in the crowd ranged from 5-6 thousand…) arrived at Bloor and Avenue road and occupied the intersection … all kinds of people, all colours and all ages, young families, students, grandparents, pipers and labour unionists.

…pipers?

Yes, Bagpipers.

Most governments say and do nothing, lift not one finger to assist or speak up on behalf of the people of Gaza (indeed – all of the people of the Occupied territories) terrorized by the state of Israel for 60 years.  Even worse, other governments including Canada applaud in public when Israel blockades Gaza in order to starve the people into submission; nevertheless – tens of thousands millions of people in the streets all over the world will not be silent.

If governments will neither speak nor act in defense of the Palestinians who live in the most densely populated prison/concentration camp on earth denied dignity, basic sewage, sufficient food, medicine, fuel, employment, etc, etc…, then, one may be driven to wonder:  What is it you would have a million and a half people who are penned and treated like rats DO for your ease and convenience?

Should the Palestinian people simply lay down and starve to death instead?

If you had been born in Gaza in 1967 and were still living there today – how might your perspective on all this be altered ?

I am not the first person to suggest that THE GRAND OFFENSIVE is one in a long line of GRAND experiments being conducted on the bodies and minds of the people of GAZA, one much more intensely focused and concentrated than various related experiments that are being performed on the people of Israel, not to mention everyone, everywhere else.

Long, grinding decades of displacement, isolation, deprivation, humiliation, degradation, collective punishment, deadly grim living conditions, impoverishment, bombing and bulldozing of homes, schools, hospitals and olive groves, imprisonment, countless beatings and killings are all instruments of pressure to be applied to *the subjects of the experiment. When carefully stage-managed, such constant pressures provoke uprising among the subjects that can be quite easily converted into justification for anything the experimenters decide to do next.  Dismissing initial conditions whenever promoting current conduct, strategies and outcomes is a vital component of this particular methodology.  Self-righteous indignation rains down, shattering the bodies of men, women and children in Gaza.

This time the sidewalk in front of the consulate was reserved …  not long after we arrived en masse they disappeared inside the building.

As Jeffrey pointed out, “All roads lead to … [Rome the US consulate]” … so we went south, to keep the blood moving in January air, to connect all the dots, in spite of the cold and the relentless darkness.

“FROM IRAQ TO PALESTINE …!”

“… OCCUPATION IS A CRIME!”

Stand up and be counted.

Before I continue, may I remind you that the people of Gaza have been illegally occupied by the state of Israel since 1967 – denied peace, economy, energy, food, medicine, (etc!). Babies have been born, grown, terrorized, imprisoned, beaten, bombed and murdered in Gaza for over forty years.  This is a wide open human wound.  Please don’t look away; look closer.

U.S. funded Israeli military forces took to the air over Gaza again today while I spent my afternoon with a big crowd of lovely people with a purpose.

This was interesting … “…THEY are TAUGHT TO KILL.”.  Who isn’t these days? It is important to point out that this is the only evidence I could find in my photo journal of the tiny gaggle of pro-killing-children-in-defense-of-Israel (a.k.a. COUNTER) protesters.

Let me put this another way: if you can’t have your beloved state of Israel without turning millions of people into refugees (on their own land) and/or displacing / bombing / starving / torturing / murdering them, indiscriminately, beyond disproportionately, then you should consider that it isn’t worth having, such as it is. (Canadians – take note: think about the Indian Act … now think again.)

We were gathered in front of the Israeli consulate, 180 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Canada… For whatever reason, the crowd I had joined kept growing while the one across the street remained a small, angry, static clot/mob which suddenly exited stage west – cold feet?  The ever increasing crowd of supporters of the people of Gaza suddenly overflowed their banks, occupying both sides of the street.  It was a beautiful, subtle, colourful bit of human poetry…

One gentleman I spoke to told me that as far as he knows, the consulate is on the seventh floor – he told me that the building’s elevators don’t stop on the seventh floor without special prearrangement.

We marched south, to the U.S. consulate …

I had met a precious young woman called Dua.  Her name means ‘prayer’ in Arabic.  We handed out leaflets together, moved with the crowd, smiled, discussed the mystery of hate and the miracle of love.  She sang to me. Go with God, Dua.  Peace be upon you and your family and everyone you love.

I fell in love with this guy instantly.  How could you not?!

He, possibly inspired by recent events at a press conference which needs no link, inspired others …

My toes have never been so warm on the concrete in December…

“Thank you, sweetheart.”
Ma’ salaam.

If I try to imagine how long it has taken and at what cost it has come about, that a black citizen of America should rise to the post of POTUS, I feel
gutted.

They called him a socialist and a muslim – as if those were, by definition – bad things.  They called him a terrorist.  Forgive them, even if they know exactly what they’re doing…?  Well… free to ride a bicycle.  Free to run for president – and win.

The first thing I heard by way of a result was the Dixville notch count in New Hampshire.  It’s long been the tradition in the tiny precinct of Dixville to close the polls at 12 a.m. on Election Day and count the ballots.  Dixville and the nearby polling station in the town of Hart’s Location combine their electoral efforts and proudly proclaim a 100% voter turn-out since 1948.  The first voters in the country to release their results set the tone for later in the evening: 32 for Obama and 16 for McCain (2 write-in votes for Ross Perot and none for Ralph Nader).

I don’t know about you, but … I was worried about these dang things …!
YIKES!   (Then again, I’m a Canadian, so… you can imagine why I would.)

Barrack Hussain Obama is the president-elect of The United States of America.

Maybe, just maybe, the crowd is bullet-proof.

The real question and what remains to be seen is: HOW FREE is HE?