The State of the Union: Extreme Failure

Two takes on the state of the union to our south:

1. The Extreme Reality Makeover Show

‘Symbolic to our era like a sledgehammer to drywall, the biggest house that ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” ever made over — a sprawling, four-bedroom starter castle, a three-car garage mahal with a turret and all — has gone into foreclosure, in the ‘burbs south of Atlanta.’

2. It’s a Class War, Stupid
Election season will be packed with distractions, but the real issue is becoming a matter of life and death

By Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
Jul 15, 2008

I am a single mother with a 9-year-old boy. To stay warm at night my son and I would pull off all the pillows from the couch and pile them on the kitchen floor. I’d hang a blanket from the kitchen doorway and we’d sleep right there on the floor. By February we ran out of wood and I burned my mother’s dining room furniture. I have no oil for hot water. We boil our water on the stove and pour it in the tub. I’d like to order one of your flags and hang it upside down at the capital building… we are certainly a country in distress.

— Letter from a single mother in a Vermont city, to Senator Bernie Sanders

Seeds, crops and GMOs: New variety registration regulations threaten organic farming

Listen to this special Making the Links Radio program, “Seed Variety Control by Private Interests” on how the Canadian Food Inspection Agency seed regulations will be changed to accommodate the interests of private concerns and the transnational corporations who are pursuing genetically engineered seed production.

Host Don Kossick talks with organic farmer and National Farmers Union leader, Terry Boehm, about what these changes in seed variety registration will mean for farm communities and the organic farm movement in Canada.

The SOD position paper states, “The availability of high quality seed free from contamination by GMO varieties and seed that is certified organic or eligible for use in certified organic seed propagation is fundamental requirement for organic grain faming in Canada. The proposed Seed Variety regulation threatens quality, access, public accountability, and the buyers right to unbiased information about seed.”

Listen here.

The threatened future of Canada’s universal, public postal service

This is very frightening. On a related note, Canada Post is set to formally withdraw from the Publications Assistance Program (a key support for small media like Briarpatch) in April 2009, and plans to introduce “distance-related pricing” (meaning it will cost us more to send a magazine to Halifax or Toronto than to Saskatoon) [...]

Call for submissions: The Saskatchewan Issue

With worldwide demand for Saskatchewan resources and the skyrocketing prices of oil, natural gas, grain, potash and uranium, the province now leads the country in economic growth. Couple this trend with the recent election of the right-wing Saskatchewan Party, and Saskatchewan, the birthplace of Canadian socialism, is undergoing significant transformations, including a government attack on [...]

The state of the Canadian labour movement: Call for submissions

“Canada’s negative productivity growth under the Harper government has its roots in a deeper, longer-term trend: our emerging role as resource supplier to other, more advanced economies, and the abandonment by policy-makers of the pro-active tools that (until 1984) helped us boost productivity and diversify our economy.”
-Jim Stanford

“Over the past decade, union organizing in Canada has fallen off the map. The organizing of new union members has hit record fifty-year lows of 40,000 or so in over the past few years, less than a third of what is required if unions even want to tread water and keep up with employment growth. As a result, today only fifteen percent of those in private sector across Canada have union representation and protection. And with fewer members, there are of course, fewer resources for organizing.”
-John Peters

Briarpatch Magazine invites contributions to our November 2008 issue on the state of the Canadian labour movement. We are looking for feature articles, provocative essays, investigative reportage, news briefs, reviews, interviews, profiles, poetry, humour, and artwork that explores the issues surrounding the efforts of working people to gain and maintain some modicum of control over their lives, and their struggles for secure work and work with dignity.

Possible topics could include (but are by no means limited to):

• migrant workers in the tar sands;
• organizing the service sector;
• prospects for Canada’s manufacturing industry;
• “hewers of wood, drawers of water once more?”: labour rights and the resource boom;
• the Saskatchewan government’s attack on workers’ rights;
• the labour movement and the environment;
• international solidarity campaigns;
• the Canada/Colombia free trade agreement;
• John Cartwright’s “Action Agenda”;
• the labour movement and party politics;
• change and renewal within labour movement structures.

Queries are due by July 15, 2008. If your query is accepted; first drafts are due by August 15, 2008. Your query should outline what ground your contribution will cover, give an estimated word count, and indicate your relevant experience or background in writing about the issue. Please provide a brief writing sample.

Please review our submission guidelines before submitting. Send your queries/submissions to editor AT briarpatchmagazine DOT com.

We reserve the right to edit your work (with your active involvement), and cannot guarantee publication. We pay for the articles we publish, but not well.