07 December 2012

Brian Ferguson: "Full Spectrum: The Military Invasion of Anthropology"

Posted by AJP member Max Forte:

This and the previous post feature two chapters by Brian Ferguson dealing with the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System, and broader issues of militarization, global surveillance, and cultural counterinsurgency that arise. One of the chapters was nearing publication, but the very sad passing of our friend and colleague, Neil L. Whitehead, this past March has apparently hindered one of the projects. Both papers are published here with the expressed permission of Brian Ferguson. I am also using the opportunity to draw attention to some key passages.

Ferguson, R. Brian . (2011). "Full Spectrum: The Military Invasion of Anthropology." In Neil Whitehead and Sverker Finnstrom (eds.), Virtual War and Magical Death (pp. ##). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.


Global Scouts and Virtual Empire: Militarizing Anthropology and Neuroscience

Ferguson's chapters presents material that remains as important to current discussions on the future of anthropology as at any time during the zenith of debates around the Human Terrain System:
"this chapter draws on a flotilla of other manuals, reports, and proposals, to demonstrate just how deeply entrenched and programmatically wide-ranging are the military’s cultural demands. Anthropologists need to understand that the Department of Defense and other security agencies are already taking what they want from anthropology, and their appropriation of people and knowledge could transform the discipline in the years to come." (p. 1)
The Pentagon, as outlined by one of his sources, envisions a system of "global scouts" trained in anthropology, as part of the broader cultural turn in its plans for global surveillance and global counterinsurgency:
"At the heart of a cultural-centric approach to future war would be a cadre of global scouts, well educated, with a penchant for languages and a comfort with strange and distant places. These soldiers should be given time to immerse themselves in a single culture and to establish trust with those willing to trust them... Global scouts must be supported and reinforced with a body of intellectual fellow travelers within the intelligence community who are formally educated in the deductive and inductive skills necessary to understand and interpret intelligently the information and insights provided by scouts in the field. They should attend graduate schools in the disciplines necessary to understand human behavior and cultural anthropology." (p. 9)
It seems as if no stone is to be left unturned, with the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) settings its sights on neuroscience as well, with plans for "exploring the potential of neuroscience research and development and its applications to understanding human dynamics," since advances in using neuroscience "to understand the basis for human cognition, including non-invasive sensor technologies, may be applicable for understanding perception, the neurological origins of trust and compliance, and the neuroscience of persuasion–all relevant to the topic addressed in this report"--and the key goals here are trust and compliance, basic elements of indoctrination and submission. DARPA's interest in neuroscience extends to its applications for what are essentially propaganda operations, and efforts to stem the impact of competing ideas: "The broad concept is to develop quantitative neuroscience tools and techniques to predict the effects of 'ideas' within diverse populations" (p. 9).

As Ferguson shows throughout his chapter, what the Pentagon envisions--fantastic and magical as it may be--is a "virtual war simulacrum" that is built on "cultural awareness" and "ethnographic intelligence." The idea is to model the world, to create "a computer copy of the real world, the ultimate divination machine," with the actual or potential "Areas of Operations" including much if not most of the planet, "mostly directed at peoples of color, in areas where modernism has not extirpated 'traditional' identities and loyalties" (p. 11). DARPA envisions a world of "secure predictability" as Ferguson comments, but one based on very flawed assumptions, self-deception--and, we may add, opportunity for expensive research. The faith of DARPA is naive, as Ferguson argues, "justified neither by advances in social sciences, or in hard sciences such as molecular biology, where greater knowledge means recognition of expanding dimensions of ignorance" (p. 12).

Expeditionary Democracy, Armed Social Engineering and Militarized Wilsonians

Among the many sections that deserve close attention is one dealing with the goals of U.S. counterinsurgency in transforming whole societies, where "stability" actually means submitting others to U.S. dominance, rather than further normalizing any local status quo. Ferguson deals with ideas and policies of armed social engineering, development and civil governance, and of course neoliberal restructuring: "One important goal, in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world (for instance Mexico), is to effect the transfer of communal landholdings to clear, transferable individual titles–showing, if there was any doubt, that Pentagon world restructuring is neoliberal world restructuring" (p. 7).

What I found especially striking was the following quote in Ferguson's work from Pentagon analyst Kalev Sepp:
"Call it militant Wilsonianism, call it expeditionary democracy, call it counterinsurgency, but this is... decidedly not stabilizing. It is an overturning of nations. It is, at its core, a revolution. American soldiers are the instruments of this revolution... The army would have to lead revolutions on a scale so vast as to completely eclipse what the USA experienced in breaking from Great Britain’s imperial rule, or in reconstructing the defeated slave states of the South following the American Civil War" (p. 7).
Ferguson also points out that a proposal by anthropologist Anna Simons and David Tucker, “Improving Human Intelligence in the War on Terrorism: The Need for an Ethnographic Capability” was submitted to the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Net Assessment in 2004. It has not been made public. The overarching goal is for the Pentagon to achieve a deeper and more insidious global reach, by bringing in "cultural awareness" and "human terrain intelligence," with the Pentagon acquiring "anthropology-level knowledge of a wide range of cultures," extending well beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, to Africa, the Pacific, and Latin America (p. 8).


Militarizing Open Access

Ferguson also addresses a number of issues and subjects raised on ZA in previous years, that remain pertinent with all of the orchestrated American hoopla about "open access publishing" that remains curiously oblivious, even now, about the practical benefits of such plans for the military and intelligence apparati. Interesting also is absence of any discussion of the ethics of facilitating military and intelligence research.
"Perhaps the broadest connection of the military and anthropology is already at hand, not through funding new work, but through the diligent mining and absorption of normal, published research and dissertations. The most important fount of anthropological data will not be from HTS social scientists, but from what security people call 'open sources.' The head of military intelligence in Afghanistan concludes open source information makes up 90% of the intelligence future, clandestine work merely being more dramatic. The standard operating procedure now for Human Terrain Teams is to pose a problem for the Reachback Cells stateside to investigate through open source materials." (p. 15)
Ferguson issues another important warning, similar to those made on ZA before:
"All anthropologists working in any area of potential interest to U.S. security agencies–and that is much of the world–should understand that any ethnographic information they publish, any sort of explanation of why those people do what they do, may be assimilated into the great network of security data bases and modeling systems, and through them made available to military, intelligence, and other security practitioners." (p. 16)
Throughout this strong chapter, Ferguson convincingly argues that the Pentagon's "cultural revolution" will have "a profound impact on anthropology and its intellectual environment." As he explains, summarizing key sections of his chapter:
"People with degrees from BA to PhD will find work with the military as teachers and analysts. (What may be distasteful for a tenured professor may seem quite different for a young person trying to set up a job, life and family). Campuses and social sciences will reorient to security needs. Militarily-oriented culture-seekers will filter into anthropology teaching programs. Militarily useful anthropology will be trained into soldier-anthropologist hybrids, who then can reproduce their own. Academic research will be funded and otherwise channeled into security relevant topics. All 'open source' work with possible security relevance will be assimilated into the great security networks and nodes of synthesis, analysis, and prediction." (p. 17)
It was especially encouraging to see that one of the central arguments advanced on ZA resonates in Ferguson's conclusions and recommendations, and hopefully more will heed this:
"One response to this global challenge would be to reorient scholarly efforts in a countervailing directions–studying, publishing, and teaching more on US militarism and its consequences, at home and abroad." (p. 19)

Past articles of related interest:

Brian Ferguson: "Plowing the Human Terrain: Toward Global Ethnographic Surveillance"

Posted by AJP member Max Forte:

This and the next post feature two chapters by Brian Ferguson dealing with the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System, and broader issues of militarization, global surveillance, and cultural counterinsurgency that arise. One of the chapters was nearing publication, but the very sad passing of our friend and colleague, Neil L. Whitehead, this past March has apparently hindered one of the projects. Both papers are published here with the expressed permission of Brian Ferguson. I am also using the opportunity to draw attention to some key passages.

Ferguson, R. Brian. (2011). "Plowing the Human Terrain: Toward Global Ethnographic Surveillance." In Laura A. McNamara and Robert A. Rubinstein (eds.), Dangerous Liaisons: Anthropologists and the National Security State (pp. 101-126). Santa Fe: SAR Press. 


Lethality

Brian Ferguson begins by accepting that "those who advocate or sign up for the HTS have good intentions," though he is more generous than I am in making such a generalization. Ferguson adds that, "they hope to use ethnographic understanding to save lives and lessen the destruction of war." However, as he argues in this chapter, "the information they gather in the field also can be used to help identify enemies for 'kinetic' targeting, the application of military force. That is why participation in Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) crosses the ethical line" (p. 101). The issue of lethal targeting, and specifically of supplying the kind of information that can be used to sort out who the enemy is and thus to refine targeting, has been a persistent and controversial point in the debates around HTS. This raises two problems: 1) by focusing on issues of lethal targeting, HTS advocates have tended to narrow their responses to this issue, thereby dismissing any discussion of the many other ways that their work broadly serves the interests of U.S. imperial domination; and, 2) much of the evidence supplied to sustain the targeting argument tends to be circumstantial and suggestive. However, I think the focus in Ferguson's chapter is a valid one, and I believe he has done the best job yet of making a convincing argument. Few writers, however, remind readers that a formal war crime was also committed by a Human Terrain Team, when Don Ayala executed a detainee, one of the most glaring examples of the lethal side of HTS. Ferguson at least supplies information that shows that violence was always a latent capacity of HTS, to the extent that many of its team members carried weapons. More broadly however, Ferguson argues that, "Anthropologists must not help militaries figure out whom to kill. More than that, the HTS folds into a projected worldwide monitoring of indigenous peoples for security threats by the Department of Defense (DoD). Anthropologists should not do that either" (p. 101).

Scandal

Among the passages that struck me was the one in which Ferguson explains that if HTS "were anything but a Pentagon program, it would be dead by now":
"three team members killed in the line of duty, one convicted of manslaughter, one under investigation for espionage, loud whistle-blowing about incompetence in multiple areas, inadequate training, unacceptable scholarly and anthropological standards, unclear and unworkable chains of command, intractable personality collisions from top to bottom, sudden changes in management and training locations, inability to recruit competent social scientists, appointment of unqualified personnel and cronies, an investigative finding of sexual harassment and creating an intolerable work atmosphere, abrupt pay cuts midstream followed by resignation of many civilian employees, and so on" (p. 102).

The Humanitarian and the Military Faces of HTS

Ferguson points out how the idealistic vision of "war without blood" is one that, "appeals to humanitarian sentiments," however, "that goal is conspicuously absent in articles written for military audiences. In those writings the point is that anthropology can help our side fight smarter and prevail" (p. 104). Thus, "HTS has two faces--one for the military and one for the public. The public relations campaign has been remarkably successful, but available facts do not support this claim of harm reduction" (p. 104). Ferguson goes in detail through the available accounts that provide evidence, both direct and suggestive, that Human Terrain Teams either explicitly or indirectly provide tactical information that could be used for lethal targeting purposes, even specifying individuals by name or position in a village as being a likely threat to U.S. forces. In addition, HTTs provided the kinds of measures needed for profiling whole segments of local populations as likely insurgents, would be insurgents, or supporters of insurgency. By zeroing in on HTS claims that they help soldiers avoid misunderstandings, to understand that not all locals are enemies, Ferguson rightly asks:  "But how can one better understand who is not the enemy without better understanding who is the enemy?" (p. 117). In other instances he finds that, "the mapper of human terrains is directly charged with identifying 'significant persons of influence' in a mission area and their connections to 'threat organizations'" (p. 118).

Military officers themselves have also written against "sugarcoating what these teams do," about how cultural information is inextricably tied to the intelligence process and to sorting out the local population to determine potential enemies (pp. 118-119). As Ferguson unveils, "whether HTTs are used for lethal targeting depends on the intentions of the commander" (p. 119), and as one HTS supporter, Col. Martin Schweitzer remarked, if he had an HTT during his first tour of duty, "I would've used it to have a better understanding of the population so I could eliminate them. You can do that with the HTT, but that doesn't win the fight" (p. 119).

"Anthropology" Does Not Make War or Domination "Better"

While Ferguson says that "an anthropologized Department of Defense might well mean less blundering around, less shooting and bombing" (even though he himself has found to evidence to warrant such a claim)," he notes that "a well-run imperium always finds ways to reduce the bloodshed," and that therefore there is at least nothing remarkable about the claims that U.S. military and political leaders are looking for "humane" ways to fight war. This is now a routine part of their sales pitch. Ferguson makes the interesting point that "increased power means decreased use of force," though this opens up debates on how that power is attained and maintained, and the very conception of power that he is using (apparently non-coercive) is also open to debate. Ferguson's basic argument here is that "if HTS works as its proponents say it does, it could be an important tool in strengthening US hegemony":
"However chimerical the vision of global ethnographic surveillance may be, the capacity the HTS is helping to build cannot be seen as being in the interests of the indigenous peoples of the world--the people to whom anthropology is most responsible--unless their interests coincide with incorporation into a neoliberal US empire" (p. 126)
Many thanks to Brian for circulating these papers for wider distribution and discussion.

10 November 2012

The Red Poppy: Symbol of the New Militarism


The Red Poppy: Symbol of Peace or Symbol of War?

By Nora Loreto,
November 10, 2012
rabble.ca

Right after Halloween and just as every store is switching from its fall motif to Christmas-themed displays, most Canadians adorn the red poppy until November 11.

The poppy, crystallized as a symbol of war and remembrance from John McCrae's poem In Flanders Fields, is worn by most Canadians for a few weeks leading up to November 11. 

Most Canadians, except me.

Growing up, I was deeply involved in Remembrance Day ceremonies in my hometown. Twice, I went to Holland to sing at Remembrance Day ceremonies. I spoke at Legions on the importance of remembrance as being necessary to peace.

But, as the Canadian government has demonstrated its support for foreign wars, the symbol of the poppy has been hijacked. While it remains a symbol of peace and remembrance for many, it has also become a symbol of support of Canada's current war ambitions.

Wrapped together with the yellow ribbon and a maple leaf, the poppy symbolizes a great myth: that there exists "just war" and that, through war, Canadians have been granted their freedom. Canada has been engaged in such a war for a decade, in Afghanistan.

When I see billions of dollars spent on fighter jets, the same amount of money that could eliminate tuition fees for all Canadian college and university students, I question what exactly we are remembering.

When I see veterans dying as a result of suicide, that Canadians are coming home with post-traumatic stress disorder and are being deserted by the government that sent them to Afghanistan, I question what exactly we are remembering.

When I see statistics of the quality of life in Afghanistan or the rise in civilian deaths since the invasion in 2001, I question what exactly we are remembering. 

Because, if we truly meant that we supported an end to all wars when we wear our poppies, surely Canadians could prevent our government from marching toward war. If our desire to remember led to a stated political will to end war, Canadian troops would have never been sent to Afghanistan in the first place.

The red poppy has instead become so normalized that it's simply something that we wear. We leave them on our sun visors in our cars. We lose them. We buy others. We say we remember but we don't do what's next to turn our remembrance into action.

Remembrance isn't enough to stop war.

In 1933, in England, the Cooperative Women's Guild started to distribute white poppies as symbols of peace. Rather than glorify and honour the dead of one particular country, the white poppy commemorates all war dead and calls for and end to all war.

The Peace Pledge Union continues to distribute these white poppies and, in 2005, actually came to an agreement with the British Legion on distributing the white poppy. In Canada, many pacifist and anti-war organizations make their own white poppies and distribute them in time for Remembrance Day.

Remembrance Day remains a political public holiday that, for me, is an important time to talk about Canada's role in war today.

My white poppy has turned a little grey as I wear it on my jacket year-round. But wearing a poppy isn't enough. All Canadians who support peace, whether they wear a white poppy, a red poppy, a poppy with a fleur-de-lys in the centre or nothing, must actively oppose any government agenda that seeks to send more Canadians to participate in foreign conflict.

Otherwise, wearing a poppy is an empty gesture, a socialized custom that has become as normal as dressing up for Halloween.

31 July 2012

The Kanishka Program and the Securitization of the Social Sciences in Canada

The following three reports were recently published on Zero Anthropology, focusing on the role of the Ministry of Public Safety working in collaboration with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to distribute funds under the "Kanishka Program". Drafting social scientists into serving the national security state to perform surveillance on Canadians, and engage in public propaganda exercises, is the explicit intention of the program. The program violates the core ethical principles of many disciplines and, ironically, would likely face a severe challenge under the official ethics instruments that govern all SSHRC funding. This program has been advanced with no public discussion or debate and academics have generally remained silent, until now. 

  • Insidious Security
  • SSHRC, Kanishka and the Questions They Ask
  • Some of the Preliminary Questions We Need to Ask
“As part of the Kanishka Project, Public Safety Canada is investing up to $3.7 million to support, in full or in part, with SSHRC, research and related activities addressing issues related to terrorism and counter-terrorism.”
  • Taking Hostages: Research Funding to “Prevent Terrorism”
  • Instructing Academics on What (Not) to Research
On May 30, 2012, both Vic Toews and Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, announced the awarding of the first $1.1 million for Kanishka applicants. Vic Toews had this to say: 
“Terrorism and violent extremism are global threats and Canada is not immune. I’m pleased to announce the funding awarded to the first six innovative research projects that will help build Canada’s knowledge and understanding of the complex issue of terrorism. Threats evolve, and we must strive to improve our knowledge and understanding to more effectively address these threats. With initiatives like the Kanishka Project, we are taking action to help build the resilience of our communities against the threats we face today.”
  • Complying with “Counter-Terrorism,” Practicing Domestic Counterinsurgency
  • From Scholarship to Police Work: Academic Support for Counter-Terrorism
  • Repeat After Me! “Harmony, Not Critique”
“The Prevent element would focus on providing positive alternative narratives that emphasize the open, diverse and inclusive nature of Canadian society and seek to foster a greater sense of Canadian identity and belonging for all. Programs would be aimed at raising the public’s awareness of the threat and at empowering individuals and communities to develop and deliver messages and viewpoints that resonate more strongly than terrorist propaganda”.

25 May 2012

Statement of Canadian and International Solidarity with the Quebec Student Strike


Please click here to sign the pledge

For more than 100 days, hundreds of thousands of Quebec university and college students, backed by dozens of student unions and associations, have held hundreds of daytime and dozens of nighttime demonstrations to affirm that education is a right. They are also expressing a complete rejection of measures that are designed to fundamentally reorient society toward increased privatization of public services, the commodification of education, and the enclosure of public space. The Canadian public has a stake in this struggle, just as Quebec taxpayers have funded university education only to see their public investment increasingly siphoned off by private/corporate interests which are now threatening to divest the public even more. All this has taken place without any public debate, which is essential in a society that committed itself to free public education as part of a hard won social contract.

Indeed, one of the reasons that Quebec has the lowest tuition fees in Canada is due to the fact that for the last forty years, Quebec students have stood up to governments every time that they tried to renege on this goal of working toward free higher education. Regardless of the party in power, technocrats have always tried to “balance the books” on the back of students, and generation after generation of students have taken to the street and said “no”. The difference between Quebec tuition fees and those in other parts of Canada and North America is the product of this sustained vigilance and activism by students, since 1968. The current government saw this historical legacy of social movements as a potential for the growth of its income. If the government has its way, it plans to wipe out the historical material gains of the student movement within five years, and will call it “catching up” with the neighbours.

Faced with calls from students, professors, trade unions, and many others across the country for a reasoned public consultation and negotiation, the ruling Liberal Party under Premier Jean Charest responded first with silence, then with denunciations, mockery, half-hearted attempts at limited talks, and all the while meeting students in the streets with violence. Most recently, the Charest government has sought to criminalize dissent, passing Public Law 78 which severely curtails basic democratic rights to freedom of expression and public assembly and is reminiscent of the War Measures Act of the 1970s when then Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau blatantly infringed on people’s civil liberties. It also needs to be understood as a law in line with legislation passed with increasing frequency around the world as elites, under the banner of “austerity,” attempt to facilitate a new round of accumulation by dispossession, bankrupting social support systems and engaging in an historically unprecedented transfer of public wealth into private hands in an effort to rescue global capitalism. The criminalization of dissent is an elite strategy aimed at stifling the popular rage generated as a result of this dispossession. The passing of this law has had the reverse effect intended, actually increasing the strikers’ resolve and galvanizing new people to join in condemning this draconian measure. This law has also been vigorously criticized as a violation of citizens’ rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by the Quebec Bar Association, and denounced by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, La Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs d'université (FQPPU), and a dozen or more faculty unions in the province.

The blame for the current mass political conflict in Quebec lies at the feet of the government itself. Indeed, its actions have transformed the university into a frontline for social struggle. The university, in accordance with government initiatives, has increasingly become an institution ruled in an arbitrary, profit-motivated manner by elites drawn from the corporate world (some with ties to the weapons industry and others with ties to despotic regimes). As tuition fees have increased and academic labour made more precarious, university administrations have swollen in both size and cost while dramatically reducing student representation in some universities’ governing bodies. University administrations and boards of governors – bodies charged with acting as stewards for publicly-funded and supposedly accountable institutions dedicated to critical research and education – have come to increasingly resemble corporate board rooms, with compensation packages to match. All of this has come at the expense not only of funds devoted to teaching and research but of the mandate of the university itself which is being transformed into little more than an appendage for corporate profiteering.

Youth and students are the future of any society and yet this fact is of no concern for political and economic elites intent on enriching themselves by dispossessing the vast majority of their capacity to live with dignity. To the elite demand that they shoulder their “fair share” of this betrayal, youth and students are responding with a resounding “no” to their own marginalisation. The Charest government has adopted these recent measures as a direct attack on the student movement itself which has a long history in Quebec of vigorously defending the principal of publicly-funded education. The older generation of elites who themselves benefitted from Quebec’s low cost and nearly free education are denying the same open access to the current generation of youth and students, while opportunistically attacking vulnerable members of society such as women, workers, immigrants and refugees, and the poor of all ages.

The brutality of police forces – condemned by Amnesty International – has only increased the movement’s resolve. Police violence has involved the use of tear gas, pepper spray, other chemical irritants, various types of concussion and sound grenades, severe beatings with batons, and agents provocateurs, badly injuring many dozens of students. Hundreds of protesters have been arrested and each is now threatened with thousands of dollars in fines and even jail time. The government has handed the police the power to pronounce the legality – or lack thereof – of any given protest, linked to the student strike or not. Despite this, the streets continue to swell with students and their diverse allies exercising their collective power in a determined struggle for a public, accessible, democratic, and critical education system and a society commensurate with it.

Therefore:
·     We publicly declare our solidarity with the Quebec student strikers and their struggle for free, democratic, and critical education.
·      Furthermore, we support calls for initiating a broad, democratic assembly to analyze, debate, and come up with fair solutions that brings politics back to support those social sectors most in need.
·      In addition, we call for a suspension of any planned increase in student fees and for the abolition of tuition fees and student debt.
·      We also demand that Public Law 78 be repealed and that the Government of Quebec commit itself to respecting the rights of students, and to avoid the mass use of indiscriminate force against citizens who practice their right to free expression and peaceful assembly.
·      We thus remind Canada, as one of the states that ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and that it committed itself, without reservation, to Article 13.2(c) (“higher education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education”). We also urge the government of Quebec to respect the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, particularly Article 3 on the freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly, and Article 40 on the right to a free public education.

Education is a right!


Since the protests began, at least 2,500 demonstrators have been arrested, a tally which was published after this statement was produced.

18 May 2012

Ten Points Everyone Should Know About the Quebec Student Movement

Ten Points Everyone Should Know About the Quebec Student Movement

By: Andrew Gavin Marshall

This article was originally published at: http://www.andrewgavinmarshall.com

Reprinted from the Montreal Media Coop (CMM)

The student strikes in Quebec, which began in February and have lasted for three months, involving roughly 175,000 students in the mostly French-speaking Canadian province, have been subjected to a massive provincial and national media propaganda campaign to demonize and dismiss the students and their struggle. The following is a list of ten points that everyone should know about the student movement in Quebec to help place their struggle in its proper global context.
  1. The issue is debt, not tuition
  2. Striking students in Quebec are setting an example for youth across the continent
  3. The student strike was organized through democratic means and with democratic aims
  4. This is not an exclusively Quebecois phenomenon
  5. Government officials and the media have been openly calling for violence and “fascist” tactics to be used against the students
  6. Excessive state violence has been used against the students
  7. The government supports organized crime and opposes organized students
  8. Canada’s elites punish the people and oppose the students
  9. The student strike is being subjected to a massive and highly successful propaganda campaign to discredit, dismiss, and demonize the students
  10. The student movement is part of a much larger emerging global movement of resistance against austerity, neoliberalism, and corrupt power

1) The issue is debt, not tuition: In dismissing the students, who are striking against a 75% increase in the cost of tuition over the next five years, the most common argument used is in pointing out that Quebec students pay the lowest tuition in North America, and therefore, they should not be complaining. Even with the 75% increase, they will still be paying substantially lower than most other provinces. Quebec students pay on average $2,500 per year in tuition, while the rest of Canada’s students pay on average $5,000 per year. With the tuition increase of $1,625 spread out over five years, the total tuition cost for Quebec students would be roughly $4,000. The premise here is that since the rest of Canada has it worse, Quebec students should shut up, sit down, and accept “reality.” THIS IS FALSE. In playing the “numbers game,” commentators and their parroting public repeat the tuition costs but fail to add in the numbers which represent the core issue: DEBT. So, Quebec students pay half the average national tuition. True. But they also graduate with half the average national student debt. With the average tuition at $5,000/year, the average student debt for an undergraduate in Canada is $27,000, while the average debt for an undergraduate in Quebec is $13,000. With interest rates expected to increase, in the midst of a hopeless job situation for Canadian youth, Canada’s youth face a future of debt that “is bankrupting a generation of students.” The notion, therefore, that Quebec students should not struggle against a bankrupt future is a bankrupted argument.

2) Striking students in Quebec are setting an example for youth across the continent: Nearly 60% of Canadian students graduate with debt, on average at $27,000 for an undergraduate degree. Total student debt now stands at about $20 billion in Canada ($15 billion from Federal Government loans programs, and the rest from provincial and commercial bank loans). In Quebec, the average student debt is $15,000, whereas Nova Scotia and Newfoundland have an average student debt of $35,000, British Columbia at nearly $30,000 and Ontario at nearly $27,000. Roughly 70% of new jobs in Canada require a post-secondary education. Half of students in their 20s live at home with their parents, including 73 per cent of those aged 20 to 24 and nearly a third of 25- to 29-year-olds. On average, a four-year degree for a student living at home in Canada costs $55,000, and those costs are expected to increase in coming years at a rate faster than inflation. It has been estimated that in 18 years, a four-year degree for Canadian students will cost $102,000. Defaults on government student loans are at roughly 14%. The Chairman of the Canadian Federation of Students warned in June of 2011 that, “We are on the verge of bankrupting a generation before they even enter the workplace.” This immense student debt affects every decision made in the lives of young graduates. With few jobs, enormous housing costs, the cutting of future benefits and social security, students are entering an economy which holds very little for them in opportunities. Women, minorities, and other marginalized groups are in an even more disadvantaged position. Canadian students are increasingly moving back home and relying more and more upon their parents for support. An informal Globe and Mail poll in early May of 2012 (surveying 2,200 students), “shows that students across Canada share a similar anxiety over rising tuition fees” as that felt in Quebec. Roughly 62% of post-secondary students said they would join a similar strike in their own province, while 32% said they would not, and 5.9% were undecided. In Ontario, where tuition is the highest in Canada, 69% said they would support a strike against increasing tuition. A Quebec research institution released a report in late March of 2012 indicating that increasing the cost of tuition for students is creating a “student debt bubble” akin to the housing bubble in the United States, and with interest rates set to increase, “today’s students may well find themselves in the same situation of not being able to pay off their student loans.” The authors of the report from the Institut de recherche et d’informations socio-economique explained that, “Since governments underwrite those loans, if students default it could be catastrophic for public finances,” and that, “If the bubble explodes, it could be just like the mortgage crisis.” In the United States, the situation is even worse. In March of 2012, the Federal Reserve reported that 27 percent of student borrowers whose loans have gone into repayment are now delinquent on their debt.” Student debt in the United States has reached $1 trillion, “passing total credit card debt along the way.” It has become a threat to the entire existence of the middle class in America. Bankruptcy lawyers in the US are “seeing the telltale signs of a student loan debt bubble.” A recent survey from the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA) indicated, “more than 80 percent of bankruptcy lawyers have seen a substantial increase in the number of clients seeking relief from student loans in recent years.” The head of the NACBA stated, “This could very well be the next debt bomb for the U.S. economy.” In 1993, 45% of students who earn a bachelor’s degree had to go into debt; today, it is 94%. The average student debt in the United States in 2011 was $23,300, with 10% owning more than $54,000 and 3% owing more than $100,000. President Obama has addressed the situation by simply providing more loans to students. A recent survey of graduates revealed that 40% of them “had delayed making a major purchase, like a home or car, because of college debt, while slightly more than a quarter had put off continuing their education or had moved in with relatives to save money,” and 50% of those surveyed had full-time jobs. Between 2001 and 2011, “state and local financing per student declined by 24 percent nationally.” In the same period of time, “tuition and fees at state schools increased 72 percent.” It would appear that whether in the United States, Canada, or even beyond, the decisions made by schools, banks, and the government, are geared toward increasing the financial burden on students and families, and increasing profits for themselves. The effect will be to plunge the student and youth population into poverty over the coming years. Thus, the student movement in Quebec, instead of being portrayed as “entitled brats” elsewhere, are actually setting an example for students and youth across the continent and beyond. Since Quebec tuition is the lowest on the continent, it gives all the more reason that other students should follow Quebec’s example, instead of Quebec students being told to follow the rest of the country (and continent) into debt bondage.

3) The student strike was organized through democratic means and with democratic aims: The decision to strike was made through student associations and organizations that uniquely operate through direct-democracy. While most student associations at schools across Canada hold elections where students choose the members of the associations, the democratic accountability ends there (just like with government). Among the Francophone schools in Quebec, the leaders are not only elected by the students, but decisions are made through general assemblies, debate and discussion, and through the votes of the actual constituents, the members of the student associations, not just the leaders. This means that the student associations that voted to strike are more democratically accountable and participatory than most other student associations, and certainly the government. It represents a more profound and meaningful working definition of democracy that is lacking across the rest of the country. The Anglophone student associations that went on strike – from Concordia and McGill – did so because, for the first time ever, they began to operate through direct-democracy. This of course, has resulted in insults and derision from the media. The national media in Canada – most especially the National Post – complain that the student “tactics are anything but democratic,” and that the students aren’t acting in a democratic way, but that “it’s really mob rule.” Obviously, it is naïve to assume that the National Post has any sort of understanding of democracy.

4) This is not an exclusively Quebecois phenomenon: I am an Anglophone, I don’t even speak French, I have only lived in Montreal for under two years, but the strikers are struggling as much for me as for any other student, Francophone or Anglophone. Typically, when others across Canada see what is taking place here, they frame it along the lines of, “Oh those Quebecois, always yelling about something.” But I’m yelling too… in English. Many people here are yelling… in English. It is true that the majority of the students protesting are Francophone, and the majority of the schools on strike are Francophone, but it is not exclusionary. In fact, the participation in the strike from the Anglophone schools (while a minority within the schools) is unprecedented in Quebec history. This was undertaken because students began mobilizing at the grassroots and emulating the French student groups in how they make decisions (i.e., through direct-democracy). The participation of Anglophone students in the open-ended strike is unprecedented in Quebec history.

5) Government officials and the media have been openly calling for violence and “fascist” tactics to be used against the students: With all the focus on student violence at protests, breaking bank windows, throwing rocks at riot police, and other acts of vandalism, student leaders have never called for violence against the government or vandalism against property, and have, in fact, denounced it and spoken out for calm, stating: “The student movement wants to fight alongside the populace and not against it.” On the other hand, it has been government officials and the national media which have been openly calling for violence to be used against students. On May 11, Michael Den Tandt, writing for the National Post, stated that, “It’s time for tough treatment of Quebec student strikers,” and recommended to Quebec Premier Jean Charest that, “He must bring down the hammer.” Tandt claimed that there was “a better way” to deal with student protesters: “Dispersal with massive use of tear gas; then arrest, public humiliation, and some pain.” He even went on to suggest that, “caning is more merciful than incarceration,” or perhaps even re-imagining the medieval punishment in which “miscreants and ne’er-do-wells were placed in the stockade, in the public square, and pelted with rotten cabbages. That might not be a bad idea, either.” This, Tandt claimed, would be the only way to preserve “peace, order, and good government.” Kelly McParland, writing the for National Post on May 11, suggested that it was now time for Charest to “empower the police to use the full extent of the law against those who condone or pursue further disruption,” and that the government must make a “show of strength” against the students. If this was not bad enough, get ready for this: A member of the Quebec Liberal Party, head of the tax office in the Municipal Affairs Department, Bernard Guay, wrote an article for a French-language newspaper in Quebec in mid-April advocating a strategy to “end the student strikes.” In the article, the government official recommended using the fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s as an example in how to deal with “leftists” in giving them “their own medicine.” He suggested organizing a political “cabal” to handle the “wasteful and anti-social” situation, which would mobilize students to not only cross picket lines, but to confront and assault students who wear the little red square (the symbol of the student strike). This, Guay suggested, would help society “overcome the tyranny of Leftist agitators,” no doubt by emulating fascist tyranny. The article was eventually pulled and an apology was issued, while a government superior supposedly reprimanded Guay, though the government refused to elaborate on what that consisted of. Just contemplate this for a moment: A Quebec Liberal government official recommended using “inspiration” from fascist movements to attack the striking students. Imagine if one of the student associations had openly called for violence, let alone for the emulation of fascism. It would be national news, and likely lead to arrests and charges. But since it was a government official, barely a peep was heard.

6) Excessive state violence has been used against the students: Throughout the three months of protests from students in Quebec, the violence has almost exclusively been blamed on the students. Images of protesters throwing rocks and breaking bank windows inundate the media and ‘inform’ the discourse, demonizing the students as violent, vandals, and destructive. Meanwhile, the reality of state violence being used against the students far exceeds any of the violent reactions from protesters, but receives far less coverage. Riot police meet students with pepper spray, tear gas, concussion grenades, smoke bombs, beating them with batons, shoot them with rubber bullets, and have even been driving police cars and trucks into groups of students. On May 4, on the 42nd anniversary of the Kent State massacre in which the U.S. National Guard murdered four protesting students, Quebec almost experienced its own Kent State, when several students were critically injured by police, shot with rubber bullets in the face. One student lost an eye, and another remains in the hospital with serious head injuries, including a skull fracture and brain contusion. The Quebec provincial police – the SQ – have not only been involved in violent repression of student protests in Quebec, but have also (along with the RCMP) been involved in training foreign police forces how to violently repress their own populations, such as in Haiti. Roughly 12,000 people in Quebec have signed a petition against the police reaction to student protests, stipulating that the police actions have been far too violent.  In late April, even before the Quebec police almost killed a couple students, Amnesty International “asked the government to call for a toning down of police measures that… are unduly aggressive and might potentially smother students’ right to free expression.” The Quebec government, of course, defends police violence against students and youths. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) – Canada’s spy agency – has recently announced its interest in “gathering intelligence” on Quebec student protesters and related groups as “possible threats to national security.” Coincidentally, Prime Minister Stephen Harper dismantled the government agency responsible for oversight of CSIS, making the agency essentially unaccountable. In reaction to student protests, the City of Montreal is considering banning masks being worn at protests in a new bylaw which is being voted on without public consultation. Thus, apparently it is fine for police to wear gas masks as they shoot chemical agents at Quebec’s youth, but students cannot attempt to even meagerly protect themselves by covering their faces. The federal Conservative government of Stephen Harper is attempting to pass a law that bans masks at protests, which includes a ten-year sentence for “rioters who wear masks.” Quebec has even established a secretive police unit called the GAMMA squad to monitor political groups in the province, which has already targeted and arrested members of the leading student organization behind the strike. The police unit is designed to monitor “anarchists” and “marginal political groups.” Some political groups have acknowledged this as “a declaration of war” by the government against such groups. Spokesperson for the largest student group, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, stated that, “This squad is really a new kind of political police to fight against social movements.” The situation of police repression has become so prevalent that even the U.S. State Department has warned Americans to stay away from student protests in the city, “as bystanders can quickly be caught up in unforeseen violence and in some cases, detained by the local police.”

7) The government supports organized crime and opposes organized students: The government claims that it must increase the cost of tuition in order to balance the budget and to increase the “competitiveness” of schools. The government has ignored, belittled, undermined, attempted to divide, and outright oppress the student movement. The Liberal Government of Quebec, in short, has declared organized students to be enemies of the state. Meanwhile, that same government has no problem of working with and supporting organized crime, namely, the Montreal Mafia. In 2010, Quebec, under Premier Jean Charest, was declared to be “the most corrupt province” in Canada. A former opposition leader in the Montreal city hall reported that, “the Italian mafia controls about 80 per cent of city hall.” The mafia is a “big player” in the Quebec economy, and “is deeply entrenched in city affairs” of Montreal, as “more than 600 businesses pay Mafia protection money in Montreal alone, handing organized crime leaders an unprecedented degree of control of Quebec’s economy.” The construction industry, especially, is heavily linked to the mafia. The Montreal Mafia is as influential as their Sicilian counterparts, where “all of the major infrastructure work in Sicily is under Mafia control.” In 2009, a government official stated that, “It’s Montreal’s Italian Mafia that controls what is going on in road construction. They control, from what we can tell, 80 per cent of the contracts.” In the fall of 2011, an internal report written by the former Montreal police chief for the government was leaked, stating, “We have discovered a firmly rooted, clandestine universe on an unexpected scale, harmful to our society on the level of safety and economics and of justice and democracy.” The report added, “Suspicions are persistent that an evil empire is taking form in the highway construction domain,” and that, “If there were to be an intensification of influence-peddling in the political sphere, we would no longer simply be talking about marginal, or even parallel criminal activities: we could suspect an infiltration or even a takeover of certain functions of the state.” Quebec Premier Jean Charest, for several years, rejected calls for a public inquiry into corruption in the construction industry, even as the head of Quebec’s anti-collusion squad called for such an inquiry. An opposition party in Quebec stated that Jean Charest “is protecting the (Quebec) Liberal party – and in protecting the Liberal party, Mr. Charest is protecting the Mafia, organized crime.” After the leaked report revealed “cost overruns totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, kickbacks and illegal donations to political parties,” Charest had to – after two years of refusing – open a public inquiry into corruption. The Quebec mafia have not only “run gambling and prostitution and imported stupefying amounts of illegal drugs into Canada, but they have extended their influence to elected civic and provincial governments, and to Liberal and Conservative federal governments through bribery and other ‘illustrious relations’.” The Federal Conservative Party of Canada, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper as its leader, received dozens of donations from Mafia-connected construction and engineering firm employees. The Mafia-industry has also donated to the Federal Liberal Party, but less so than the Conservatives, who hold power. In Quebec, government officials have helped the Mafia charge far more for public-works contracts than they were worth. These Mafia companies would then use a lot of that extra money to fund political parties, most notably, the Liberals, who have been in power for nine years. A former Montreal police officer who worked in the intelligence unit with access to the police’s confidential list of informants was suspected of selling information to the mafia. In January of 2012, he was found dead, reportedly of a suicide. In April of 2012, fifteen arrests were made in Montreal by the police in relation to corruption charges linked to the Mafia. Among them were one of the biggest names in the construction industry, with 14 individual facing conspiracy charges “involving municipal contracts associated with the Mascouche water-treatment plants [that] are connected to big construction, engineering and law firms that have been involved in municipal contracts and politics across the Montreal region for decades. And the individuals have been around the municipal world for years.” One Quebec mayor has even been charged. The Montreal police force has “not been very interested, and it should be,” in helping the anti-corruption investigation. Two of those who were arrested included Quebec Liberal Party fundraisers, one of whom Charest personally delivered an award to in 2010 for his “years of service as an organizer.” All three of Quebec’s main political parties were connected to individuals arrested in the raids. Canada’s federal police force, the RCMP, have refused to cooperate with the Mafia-corruption inquiry in handing over their massive amounts of information to the judge leading the inquiry. Quebec Education Minister Line Beauchamp, who has been leading the government assault against the students, attended a political fundraiser for herself which was attended by a notorious Mafia figure who personally “donated generously to the minister’s Liberal riding association.” As these revelations emerged, Beauchamp stated, “I don’t know the individual in question and even today I wouldn’t be able to recognize him.” At the time, Beauchamp was the Environment Minister, and was responsible for granting the Mafia figure’s company a favourable certificate to expand its business. Beauchamp claimed she did not know about the deal, but as head of the Ministry which handled it, either she is utterly incompetent or a liar. Either way, she is clearly not fit for “public service” if it amounts to nothing more than “service to the Mafia.” The fact that she is now responsible for increasing tuition and leading the attack on students speaks volumes.  Line Beauchamp, when questioned about taking political contributions from the Mafia, stated, “Now that the information is public and the links well established, I would not put myself in that position again.” Well isn’t that reassuring? Now that it’s public, she wouldn’t do it again. That’s sort of like saying, “I wouldn’t have committed the crime if I knew I was going to be caught.” The notion that Beauchamp didn’t know whom this Mafia figure was who was giving her money is absurd. It’s even more absurd when you note that one of Beauchamp’s political attaches was a 30-year veteran of the Montreal police force. As one Quebec political figure commented about the Liberal Government’s Mafia links: “They refuse to sit down with a student leader but they have breakfast with a mafioso … where is the logic in that?” Indeed. It’s clear that the Quebec government has no problem working with, handing out contracts to, and taking money from the Mafia and organized crime. In fact, they are so integrated that the government itself is a form of organized crime. But for that government, and for the media boot-lickers who follow the government line, organized students are the true threat to Quebec. National newspapers declare Quebec students following “mob rule” when it’s actually the government that is closely connected to “mob rule.” The students are challenging and being repressed by a Mafioso-government alliance of industrialists, politicians, financiers and police… yet it is the students who are blamed for everything. The government gives the Mafia public contracts double or triple their actual value, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more), while students are being asked to pay nearly double their current tuition. There’s money for the mob, but scraps for the students.

8) Canada’s elites punish the people and oppose the students: It’s not simply the government of Quebec which has set itself against the students, sought to increase their tuition and repress their resistance, often with violent means, but a wide sector of elite society in Quebec and Canada propose tuition increases and blind faith to the state in managing its repression of a growing social movement. As such, the student movement should recognize that not simply are Jean Charest and his Liberal-Mafia government the antagonists of social justice, but the whole elite society itself. As early as 2007, TD Bank, one of Canada’s big five banks, outlined a “plan for prosperity” for the province of Quebec, and directly recommended Quebec to raise tuition costs for students. Naturally, the Quebec government is more likely to listen to a bank than the youth of the province. Banks of course, have an interest in increasing tuition costs for students, as they provide student loans and lines of credit which they charge interest on and make profits. The Royal Bank of Canada acknowledged that student lines of credit are “very popular products.” Elites of all sorts support the tuition increases. In February of 2010, a group of “prominent” (i.e., elitist) Quebecers signed a letter proposing to increase Quebec’s tuition costs. Among the signatories were the former Premier of Quebec for the Parti Quebecois, Lucien Bouchard.  In early May, a letter was published in the Montreal Gazette which stated that students need to pay more for their education in Quebec, signed by the same elitists who proposed the tuition increase back in February of 2010. Initially, this group of elitists had proposed an increase of $1,000 every year for three years. The letter then calls for the application of state power to be employed against the student movement: “It is time that we react. We must reinstate order; the students have to return to class… This is a situation when, regardless of political allegiances, the population must support the state, which is ultimately responsible for public order, the safety of individuals and the integrity of our institutions.” The “integrity” of institutions which cooperate with the Mafia, I might add. What incredible integrity! The letter was signed by Lucien Bouchard, former Premier of Quebec; Michel Audet, an economist and former Finance Minister in the first Charest government in Quebec; Françoise Bertrand, the President and chief executive officer of the Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec (The Quebec Federation of Chambers of Commerce), where she sits alongside the presidents and executives of major Canadian corporations, banks, and business interests. She also sits on the board of directors of Quebecor Inc., a major media conglomerate, with former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on its board. Another signatory was Yves-Thomas Dorval, President of the Quebec Employers’ Council, who formerly worked for British American Tobacco Group, former Vice President at Edelman Canada, an international public relations firm, was a director at a pharmaceutical corporation, head of strategic planning at an insurance company, and previously worked for the Government of Quebec and Hydro-Quebec. Joseph Facal, another signatory to the letter demanding higher tuition and state repression of students, is former president of the Quebec Treasury Board, and was a cabinet minister in the Quebec government of Lucien Bouchard. Other signatories include Pierre Fortin, a professor emeritus at the Université du Québec à Montréal; Michel Gervais, the former rector of Université Laval; Monique Jérôme-Forget, former finance minister of Quebec and former president of the Quebec Treasury Board, member of the Quebec Liberal Party between 1998 and 2009, was responsible for introducing public-private partnerships in Quebec’s infrastructure development (which saw enormous cooperation with the Mafia), and is on the board of directors of Astral Media. Robert Lacroix, another co-signer, was former rector of the Université de Montréal is also a fellow at CIRANO, a Montreal-based think tank which is governed by a collection of university heads, business executives, and bankers, including representatives from Power Corporation (owned by the Desmarais family). Another signatory is Michel Leblanc, president and CEO of the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, a prominent business organization in Montreal, of which the board of directors includes a number of corporate executives, mining company representatives, university board members, bankers and Hélène Desmarais, who married into the Desmarais family. Another signatory is Claude Montmarquette, professor emeritus at the Université de Montréal, who is also a member of the elitist CIRANO think tank, which as a “research institution” (for elites) has recommended increasing Quebec’s tuition costs for several years. Another signatory was Marcel Boyer, a Bell Canada Professor of industrial economics at the Université de Montréal, Vice-president and chief economist at the Montreal Economic Institute, is the C.D. Howe Scholar in Economic Policy at the C.D. Howe Institute, Member of the Board of the Agency for Public-Private Partnerships of Québec, and Visiting Senior Research Advisor for industrial economics at Industry Canada. At the Montreal Economic Institute, Boyer sits alongside notable elitists, bankers, and corporate executives, including Hélène Desmarais, who married into the Desmarais family (the most powerful family in Canada). At the C.D. Howe Institute, Boyer works for even more elitists, as the board of directors is made up of some of Canada’s top bankers, corporate executives, and again includes Hélène Desmarais. The Desmarais family, who own Power Corporation and its many subsidiaries, as well as a number of foreign corporations in Europe and China, are Canada’s most powerful family. The patriarch, Paul Desmarais Sr., has had extremely close business and even family ties to every Canadian Prime Minister since Pierre Trudeau, and all Quebec premiers (save two) in the past several decades. The Desmarais’ have strong links to the Parti Quebecois, the Liberals, Conservatives, and even the NDP, and socialize with presidents and prime ministers around the world, as well as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and even Spanish royalty. Paul Desmarais Sr. has “a disproportionate influence on politics and the economy in Quebec and Canada,” and he especially “has a lot of influence on Premier Jean Charest.” When former French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave Desmarais the French Legion of Honour, Desmarais brought Jean Charest with him. Quebec author Robin Philpot commented that Desmarais “took him along like a poodle,” referring to Charest. The Desmarais family has extensive ties to Canadian and especially Quebec politicians, have extensive interests in Canadian and international corporations and banks, are closely tied to major national and international think tanks (including the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group), and even host an annual international think tank conference in Montreal, the Conference of Montreal. The Desmarais family have had very close ties to Prime Ministers Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, and even Stephen Harper, and to Quebec premiers, including Lucien Bouchard, who co-authored the article in the Gazette advocating increased tuition. The Desmarais empire also includes ownership of seven of the ten French newspapers in Quebec, including La Presse. The Desmarais family stand atop a parasitic Canadian oligarchy, which has bankers and corporate executives controlling the entire economy, political parties, the media, think tanks which set policy, and even our educational institutions, with the chancellors of both Concordia and McGill universities serving on the boards of the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank of Canada, respectively, as well as both schools having extensive leadership ties to Power Corporation and the Desmarais family. It is this very oligarchy which demands the people pay more, go further into debt, suffer and descend into poverty, while they make record profits. In March of 2012, Power Corporation reported fourth quarter profits of $314 million, with yearly earnings at over $1.1 billion. Canada’s banks last year made record profits, and then decided to increase bank fees. At the end of April, it was reported that Canada’s banks had received a “secret bailout” back in 2008/09, from both the Bank of Canada and the U.S. Federal Reserve, amounting to roughly $114 billion, or $3,400 for every Canadian man, woman, and child (more than the cost of yearly tuition in Quebec). And yet Quebec youth are told we suffer from “entitlement.” And now banks are expected to be making even more profits, as reported in early May. As banks make more record profits, Canadians are going deeper into debt. The big Canadian banks, along with the federal government, have colluded to create a massive housing bubble in Canada, most especially in Toronto and Vancouver, and with average Canadian household debt at $103,000, most of which is held in mortgages, and with the Bank of Canada announcing its intent to raise interest rates, Canada is set for a housing crisis like that seen in the United States in 2008, forcing the people to suffer while the banks make a profit. The head of the Bank of Canada (a former Goldman Sachs executive) said that Canadian household debt is the biggest threat to the Canadian economy, but don’t worry, Canada’s Finance Minister said he is working in close cooperation with the big banks to intervene in the housing market if necessary, which would likely mean another bailout for the big banks, and of course, hand the check to you! So, Canada has its priorities: every single Canadian man, woman, and child owes $3,400 for a secret bank bailout to banks that are now making record profits and increasing their fees, while simultaneously explaining that there is no money for education, so we will have to pay more for that, too, which is something those same banks demand our governments do to us. When the students stand up, they are said to be “brats” and whining about “entitlements.” But then, what does that make the banks? This is why I argue that Canada’s elites are parasitic in their very nature, slowly draining the host (that’s us!) of its life until there is nothing left the extract.

9) The student strike is being subjected to a massive and highly successful propaganda campaign to discredit, dismiss, and demonize the students: In the vast majority of coverage on the student strike and protests in Quebec, the media and its many talking heads have undertaken a major propaganda campaign against the students. The students have been consistently ignored, dismissed, derided, insulted and attacked. One Canadian newspaper said it was “hard to feel sorry” for Quebec students, who were “whining and crying” and “kicking up a fuss,” treating Canada’s young generation like ungrateful children throwing a collective tantrum. In almost every article about the student strike, the main point brought up to dismiss the students is that Quebec has the lowest tuition costs in North America. The National Post published a column written by a third-year political science student at McGill University in Montreal stating that, “Quebec students must pay their share,” and advised people to “ignore the overheated rhetoric from student strikers,” and that, “Jean Charest must go full steam ahead.” The student author, Brendan Steven, is co-founder of McGill’s Moderate Political Action Committee (ModPAC), which is an organizing mobilizing McGill students in opposition to the strike. Steven’s organization attacked striking student associations as “illegitimate, unconstitutional shams” and attacked the democratic functioning of other student associations holding general assemblies. Steven complained that the democratic general assemblies “are being invented on a whim.” Brendan Steven not only gets to write columns for the National Post, but gets interviewed on CBC. Steven’s anti-strike group sent a letter to the McGill administration complaining about pro-strike students on the campus, writing, “This group violates our democratic right to access an education without fear of harm,” and added: “We are demanding the McGill administration take action against this minority group before the current conflicts escalate into disasters. They have proven they will not remain peaceful.” As a lap-dog boot-licking power worshipper, Brendan Steven has a future for himself in politics, that’s for sure! Back in January, Steven wrote an article for the Huffington Post in which he explained that the reason why CEOs get paid so much is because “they’re worth it.” He referred to Milton Friedman – the father of neoliberalism – as a “great economic thinker.” Back in November of 2011, Steven wrote an article for the McGill Daily entitled, “Do not demonize authorities,” and then went on to justify police violence against protesting students engaged in an occupation of a school building, which he characterized as “an inherently hostile act.” Steven later got an opportunity to appear on CBC’s The Current. Margaret Wente, writing for the Globe and Mail, wrote that, “It’s a little hard for the rest of us to muster sympathy for Quebec’s downtrodden students, who pay the lowest tuition fees in all of North America.” She then referred to the striking students as “the baristas of tomorrow and they don’t even know it.” Wente then attempted to explain the Quebec students by writing: “Now I get it: The kids are on another planet.” Interesting how she used the word “kids” to just add a little extra condescension. But it seems clear that Wente “gets” very little. In an August 2011 column, Wente tried to explain why poor black communities in Britain and America were experiencing riots and gang activity, placing blame on “single-mothers” and “family breakdown,” and explained that, “Rootless, unmoored young men with no stake in society are a major threat to social order.” Explaining this demographic in economic terms, Wente wrote: “They are, quite simply, surplus to requirements.” In another column, Wente argued that helping deliver much-needed humanitarian supplies to Gaza would “enable terrorists.” Wente also wrote an article entitled, “The poor are doing better than you think,” suggesting that it’s not so bad for poor people because they have air conditioning, DVD players, and cable TV. Wente has been consistently critical of the Occupy movement, and suggested in another article that, “the biggest economic challenge we face today is not income inequality, greedy corporations, Wall Street corruption or the concentration of wealth among the top 1 per cent. It’s the increasing failure of young men with high-school degrees or less to latch on to the world of work.” Of course, in Wente’s world, the inability of young men to get a job has nothing to do with income inequality, greedy corporations, Wall Street corruption or the concentration of wealth. In another article criticizing the Occupy movement, Wente managed to argue that it was not Wall Street and bankers that have destroyed the economy and left people without jobs, but rather what she refers to as the “virtueocracy,” blaming unions, single mothers who gets masters degrees in social sciences, and people who want to work at NGOs and non-profits, doing “transformational, world-saving work.” So it’s Wente’s “insightful” voice which is “informing” Canadians about the student movement in Quebec. Other Canadian publications writing about the Quebec student strike have headlines like, “Reality check for the entitled,” repeating the idiotic argument that because Quebec students pay less than the rest of Canada, they shouldn’t be “complaining” about the hikes. Andrew Coyne wrote a syndicated column in which he claimed that, “Quebec students know violence works,” framing the protest at which police almost killed two students as an action “of general rage the students had promised.” With no mention of the student who lost an eye, or the other student who ended up in the hospital with critical head injuries, Coyne talked about a cop who “was beaten savagely” and “lay helpless on the ground.” No mention, of course, of the police truck that drove into a group of students moments later, or the fact that the cop who was “beaten savagely” got away with minor injuries, unlike the students who were shot in the face with rubber bullets. By simply omitting police brutality and violence, Coyne presented the student movement as itself inherently violent, instead of at times erupting in violent reactions to state violence, which is far more extreme in every case. The Toronto Sun even had an article which claimed that the students have employed tactics of “thuggery” and “violent criminal behaviour.” Publications regularly ask their readers if Quebec students have “legitimate” grievances, if they are fighting for “social justice,” or if they are just “spoiled brats.” A syndicated column from the Vancouver Sun by Licia Corbella was titled, “How rioting students help make me grateful.” She discussed her latest visit to church where the pastor advised: “Parents, do not provoke your children to anger by the way you treat them,” and mentioned how parents anger their children by “belittling them, underestimating them and not treating them as individuals.” Corbella then took particular note of how parents provoke and enrage children “when we give them a sense of entitlement.” With the word “entitlement,” Corbella naturally then began thinking about Quebec students, as according to Corbella’s pastor, “entitlement leads to rage.” Corbella wrote that rioting “is, in essence, what a spoiled two-year-old would do if they had the ability.” She further wrote: “In Quebec, these entitled youth, who believe the rest of society MUST provide them with an almost free education or else, have blocked other students from accessing the educations they paid for, burned vehicles, smashed shop windows, looted property and severely beaten up a police officer who got separated from the rest of his colleagues.” Again, no mention of the two students who were almost killed by police at the same event. Corbella quoted someone interviewed on TV, endorsing the claim that the student protests are “starting to resemble terrorism,” though she took issue with the word “starting.” This is the result of creating, according to Corbell, “an entitlement society.” Apparently, the pastor’s lesson about not “belittling” the young did not sink in with Corbella. An article in the Chronicle Herald asked, “What planet are these kids on?” The author then wrote that, “the irony is that these students now want the system to accommodate their desires and for someone else to pay the bill,” and that, “students should stop making foolish demands.” Other articles claim that students “need a lesson in economics.” After all, the fact that the majority of economists, fully armed with “lessons in economics,” were unable to predict the massive global economic crisis in 2008, should obviously not lead to any questioning of the ideology of modern economic theory. No, it would be better for students to learn about the ocean from those who couldn’t see a tsunami as it approached the beach. Another article, written by a former speechwriter to the Prime Minister of Canada, wrote that the student arguments were vacuous and that the youth were in a “state of complete denial.” Rex Murphy, a commentator with the National Post and CBC, referred to the student strike as “short-sighted” and that student actions were “crude attempts at precipitating a crisis.” Student actions, he claimed, were the “actions of a mob” and were “simply wrong,” and thus, should be “condemned.” The CBC has been particularly terrible in their coverage of the student movement. With few exceptions, the Canadian media have established a consensus in opposition to the student protests, and use techniques of omission, distortion, or outright condemnation in order to promote a distinctly anti-student stance.

10) The student movement is part of a much larger emerging global movement of resistance against austerity, neoliberalism, and corrupt power: In the coverage and discourse about the student movement, very little context is given in placing this student movement in a wider global context. The British newspaper, The Guardian, acknowledged this context, commenting on the red squares worn by striking students (a symbol of going squarely into the red, into debt), explaining that they have “become a symbol of the most powerful challenge to neoliberalism on the continent.” The article also adopted the term promoted by the student movement itself to describe the wider social context of the protests, calling it the “Maple Spring.” The author placed the fight against tuition increases in the context of a struggle against austerity measures worldwide, writing: “Forcing students to pay more for education is part of a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class to the rich – as with privatization and the state’s withdrawal from service-provision, tax breaks for corporations and deep cuts to social programs.” The article noted how the student movement has linked up with civic groups against a Quebec government plan to subsidize mining companies in exploiting the natural resources of Northern Quebec (Plan Nord), taking land from indigenous peoples to give to multibillion dollar corporations. As one of the student leaders stated, the protest was about more than tuition and was aimed at the elite class itself, “Those people are a single elite, a greedy elite, a corrupt elite, a vulgar elite, an elite that only sees education as an investment in human capital, that only sees a tree as a piece of paper and only sees a child as a future employee.” The student strike has thus become a social movement. The protests aim at economic disruption through civil disobedience, and have garnered the support of thousands of protesters, and 200,000 protesters on March 22, and close to 300,000 on April 22. Protests have blocked entrances to banks, disrupted a conference for the Plan Nord exploitation, linking the movement with indigenous and environmental groups. It was only when the movement began to align with other social movements and issues that the government even accepted the possibility of speaking to students. Unions have also increasingly been supporting the student strike, including with large financial contributions. Though, the large union support for the student movement was also involved in attempted co-optation and undermining of the students. At the negotiations between the government and the students, the union leaders convinced the student leaders to accept the deal, which met none of the student demands and kept the tuition increases intact. There was a risk that the major unions were essentially aiming to undermine the student movement. But the student groups, which had to submit the agreement to democratic votes, rejected the horrible government offer. Thus the Maple Spring continues. Quebec is not the only location with student protests taking place. In Chile, a massive student movement has emerged and developed over the past year, changing the politics of the country and challenging the elites and the society they have built for their own benefit. One of the leaders of the Chilean student movement is a 23-year old young woman, Camila Vallejo, who has attained celebrity status. In Quebec’s student movement, the most visible and vocal leader is 21-year old Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, who has also achieved something of celebrity status within the province. Just as in Quebec, student protests in Chile are met with state violence, though in the Latin American country, the apparatus of state violence is the remnants of a U.S.-supported military dictatorship. Still, this does not stop tens of thousands of students going out into the streets in Santiago, as recently as late April. Protests by students have also been emerging elsewhere, often in cooperation and solidarity with the Occupy movement and other anti-austerity protests. Silent protests are emerging at American universities where students are protesting their massive debts. California students have been increasingly protesting increased tuition costs. Student protests at UC Berkeley ended with 12 citations for trespassing. Some students in California have even begun a hunger strike against tuition increases. In Brooklyn, New York, students protesting against tuition increases, many of them wearing the Quebec “red square” symbol, were assaulted by police officers. Even high school students in New York have been protesting. Israeli social activists are back on the streets protesting against austerity measures. An Occupy group has resumed protests in London. The Spanish indignado movement, which began in May of 2011, saw a resurgence on the one year anniversary, with another round of anti-austerity protests in Spain, bringing tens of thousands of protesters, mostly youths, out into the streets of Madrid, and more than 100,000 across the country. Their protest was met with police repression. Increasingly, students, the Occupy movement, and other social groups are uniting in protests against the costs of higher education and the debts of students. This is indeed the context in which the ‘Maple Spring’ – the Quebec student movement – should be placed, as part of a much broader global anti-austerity movement.

So march on, students. Show Quebec, Canada, and the world what it takes to oppose parasitic elites, mafia-connected politicians, billionaire bankers, and seek to change a social, political, and economic system that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

Solidarity, brothers and sisters!

For a comprehensive analysis of the Quebec student strike, see: “The Québec Student Strike: From ‘Maple Spring’ to Summer Rebellion?”

For up to date news and information of student movements around the world, join this Facebook page: We Are the Youth Revolution.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People’s Book Project. He also hosts a weekly podcast show, “Empire, Power, and People,” on BoilingFrogsPost.com.
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