Where Are the Women at Occupy Wall Street? Everywhere—and They're Not Going Away

“Where my feminists at?” read a sign propped against a bench at the entrance to Zuccotti Park on Thursday night as a General Assembly meeting began to echo over the human microphone.

Five days of observing working group meetings, sitting in on General Assemblies and talking to women at the occupation suggests that the answer to the sign’s question is a resounding “everywhere.” Women have been entrenched in the day-to-day (running meetings, procuring food) and long-term (analyzing structure, building solidarity) work of Occupy Wall Street from day one, and are committed to sticking around. Thanks to the women involved, as well as a number of their allies, OWS has tweaked its “horizontal” structure to ensure a maximum diversity of participation. They are doing this work not only for themselves, the OWS women say, but for the movement. “ ‘Liberation is not the private province of any one particular group,’ ” says Shaista Husain—an activist from the CUNY media and culture studies department, who has been working with Occupy Wall Street since it began—quoting Audre Lorde. Elevating the voices of women and people of color, she says, isn’t about “identity politics” but about sustainability, building “a viable meaningful protest against the hegemony of the rich.”

Supercommittee Democrats Offer Major Capitulation

Very distressing news broke during this morning’s meeting of the supercommittee: aides told Reuters that Democratic members of the committee have proposed $2.5 to $3 trillion in deficit reduction measures, including $400 billion in cuts to Medicare—a half of which would come from benefits.

The Democratic proposal consists of an even split between tax increases and spending cuts, and also $200 to $300 billion in new stimulus spending that would be paid for because interest payments on the debt would be lowered if the plan passed. The $400 billion in Medicare cuts would be split evenly between beneficiaries and providers. It was reportedly a formal proposal advanced by Senator Max Baucus, though Clyburn is said to object to the Medicare cuts.

The supercommittee has largely been deliberating behind closed doors, but as far as anyone knows the Republicans have not proposed anything this concrete. This begs serious questions, once again, about Democrats’ negotiating techniques in the ongoing budget and debt ceiling dramas.

Occupy Canada: Eviction Notice Surprises Halifax Protesters In Downtown Square

HALIFAX - Occupy Nova Scotia protesters mulled their options Wednesday after getting an eviction notice to leave the public square in front of Halifax City Hall.

Mayor Peter Kelly wants the group to move to another space by the early evening of Nov. 6 so the Grand Parade can be cleaned up and readied for ceremonies marking Remembrance Day and Kristallnacht in Germany when more than 30,000 Jews were arrested by the Nazis in 1938.

Protest spokesman Stuart Caldwell said the mayor's directive came as a bit of a surprise and they haven't worked out a response yet.

"We're sort of waiting to see how this is going to play out. We've discussed it at great lengths and at this point we are exploring our options," said Caldwell.

He said the protesters want to speak to city officials to see if a compromise can be reached over the patchwork collection of tents pitched in front of city hall. About 70 people have been camping out peacefully in the square, which is home to the city's cenotaph, for the past two weeks.

Occupy Vancouver Dominates City's Mayoral Race

Vancouver mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton is turning up the pressure on Mayor Gregor Robertson to force an end to the Occupy Vancouver protest on the lawn of the downtown art gallery.

The city councillor says she is introducing a motion to have council give those in the encampment a week to move. She calls the activists and protesters that have set up the elaborate tent city on the site "squatters."

Robertson, who is running for a second term as mayor in the upcoming civic election on Nov. 19, has suggested the city can't do much about the encampment, because the art gallery lawn they are occupying is actually provincial land.

Abolishing the gun registry: following the links as suggested

It’s not fair, I suppose, to expect Public Safety Minister Vic Toews to have cleaned up all the inconsistencies on federal government websites in advance of his announcement yesterday that the long-gun registry is about to be, not only dismantled, but obliterated so all that expensively compiled data on guns can never be used again.

Still, I found it surprising that at the bottom of the background document his department provided yesterday, Abolishing the Long-Gun Registry: Proposed Reforms to the Firearms Act and Criminal Code, I found a note helpfully suggesting a visit to the RCMP’s Canada Firearms Program website.

Surprising because the RCMP has routinely provided, on that very website, sensible information about the registry and its usefulness, all running counter to Toews’ overheated arguments. Indeed, when I dutifully followed the link provided, I found myself reading the latest “facts and figures” released on the registry, under this brief explanatory note:

The registration of firearms links firearms and their licensed owners, thereby enhancing owners’ accountability for safe storage and use of firearms. A centralized, on-line, secure database of firearms information helps police and other public safety officials carry out investigations efficiently and effectively enabling them to quickly trace a firearm to its last lawful owner.

It’s hard to square that common-sensical summary of the aim of the registry with Conservative MP Candice Hoeppner’s comment yesterday, as she stood with Toews to announce the scrapping of the registry, that it had “unfairly targeted law-abiding Canadians, specifically law-abiding firearms owners, as criminals for simply owning a long gun.”

Regardless of whether the registry was worth the cost or not, how is it reasonable to declare that asking gun owners to register their weapons was tantamount to calling them criminals?

How is having to register a rifle or shotgun more of an affront than all of the elements of gun control that the Conservatives hasten to say they will retain, including the need to get a licence to own a gun, to pass a training course, to clear a police background check, and, yes, to register restricted firearms like handguns?

All these rules will continue to apply to law-abiding Canadians, and the imposition of them hardly amounts to calling those gun owners criminals. The registry was no different. Pretending it was is cynical in the extreme.

Origin
Source: Maclean's  

What could go wrong with a low-bid garbage contract?

After the city decided to contract out all garbage service west of Yonge Street on Monday, I wrote a post outlining how some customer-service trouble the city recently uncovered with another of its private contractors points to an area of possible worry. Blogger Matt Elliott of Ford for Toronto has an excellent post summarizing what it means (risk) and what it doesn’t mean (more money in the budget for other things, better service).

I want to explore the idea of risk a bit, partly because some advocates of contracting out services scoff at the possibility it exists. As the reliably cartoonish Sue-Ann Levy of the Sun put it, “We kept hearing that the bid was too low — as if the idea of a contractor being efficient was beyond their grasp.” But then some of her other arguments involved calling Councillor Krystin Wong-Tam “Wrong-Turn” and suggesting that Councillor Ana Bailao’s failure to conduct proper due diligence on the entire contract in three working days was some kind of sign she cares only about pandering to unions. Perhaps we’ll not take Sue-Ann’s arguments too seriously. But still, what exactly is it—other than the concept of efficiency—that these people who suggested taking a bit more time to study the bid were afraid of?

Opposition cries foul over Harper’s unilingual Auditor-General pick

Sheila Fraser’s successor can’t speak French and the opposition is outraged.

Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae says his caucus will oppose the nomination of Michael Ferguson, a former New Brunswick auditor and deputy minister. And NDP MP Yvon Godin has gone one step farther, filing a letter of protest to the Official Languages Commissioner.

“I wish to point out that the government is violating its own rules,” Mr. Godin wrote to Graham Fraser, referring to the Auditor-General’s job description, which says “proficiency in both official languages is essential.”

“The series of unilingual appointments made by the Conservative government to key positions is not a good sign for Canada’s linguistic duality,” he said.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently named Mr. Justice Michael Moldaver, who is also unilingual, to the Supreme Court of Canada. And Mr. Harper’s new director of communications, Angelo Persichilli, struggles with French.

NATO delays decision to end Libyan mission

BRUSSELS—NATO unexpectedly postponed a definite decision to end its bombing campaign in Libya as consultations continued Wednesday with the UN and the country’s interim government over how and when to wind down the operation.

Last week, the alliance announced preliminary plans to phase out its mission on Oct. 31. NATO’s governing body — the North Atlantic Council, or NAC — was expected to formalize that decision Wednesday.

Air patrols have continued in the meantime because some alliance members were concerned that a quick end to NATO’s seven-month operation could lead to a resurgence in violence.

On Wednesday, spokeswoman Carmen Romero said NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen was consulting with the United Nations and Libya’s National Transitional Council.

“The NAC will meet with partners on Friday to discuss our Libya mission and take a formal decision,” she said, adding that there was an “ongoing process” in the UN Security Council.

Occupy protesters defy calls to leave London cathedral

LONDON—St. Paul’s Cathedral has welcomed visitors for 300 years, but for almost a week its heavy oak doors have been shut, locked because of an anti-capitalist protest camp outside the landmark building.

Church officials say the campsite is a health hazard, and on Wednesday London’s Anglican bishop asked the demonstrators to leave. But the protesters are settling in for a long stay, and accuse the church of choosing the wrong side in the standoff between capitalism and idealism that has spawned sit-ins from New York to Sydney.

“We want this church to open,” said a 50-year-old protest spokesman who gave his name as Akira. “We were shocked that they closed it.”

In recent days authorities in several cities around the world have swooped in to evict encampments of anti-corporate demonstrators inspired by New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement. But London’s campsite has grown since protesters erected tents near the base of the cathedral steps on Oct. 15. They had hoped to camp outside the nearby London Stock Exchange, but were stopped by police. Cathedral officials initially permitted the protesters to stay.

CETA: A Threat to Local Democracy

This week, European Union trade officials are in Canada to meet with their Canadian counterparts on what might be the final round of negotiations on a huge new trade agreement called CETA - the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. Because it will affect every Canadian, it is urgent that we get a debate going in this country on this massive new free trade deal.

Unlike some other trade agreements, CETA has had very little media attention or public profile. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the Harper government has kept CETA under wraps and negotiated it in secret. We only know the perimeters of CETA through unofficial reports, the Europeans themselves, who are very open about their demands, and through a now dated leaked draft of the text. The Harper government is ideologically driven by a belief in the privatization, deregulation and strengthened corporate power that attend trade deals like CETA and others it is negotiating, and does not encourage debate on any of them.

The other reason CETA has had little opposition is that many Canadians have an out-dated view of Europe as having higher social, environmental, and worker standards and believe that diversifying our trade away from the U.S. to a more enlightened jurisdiction such as Europe must be a good thing. Indeed, a few years ago, I would have felt the same way.