Whilst walking through the university, I've just come accross a poster on blue paper, from a group calling itself "Blue Leaf" and claiming to be a voice from the "conservative resistance". In stark contrast to yesterday's national actions by the Canadian Federation of Students, demanding a lowering of tuition fees, Blue Leaf believes that freedom can only come from an elimination of subsidies toward higher education. Unconventional, bold and daring, I'll give them that, but that's all I'm giving them.

In big, bold capital letters at the top it declares that "Education is not a right". I beg to differ.

The history of servitude, slavery and unfree labour in general is replete with examples of debt-slavery, indentured servitude and various forms of apprenticeship which amount, simply, to the exploitation of labour based on the supposed costs of getting the person to work. A perfect example would be the years of indentured servitude which many Europeans were forced into for the expense of bringing them to the New World in the years of colonization. During those years they had few if any rights (though usually more than slaves), death rates were high and abuse was very common. This kind of exploitation continues right on today, just ask anyone at Labourready how much they've had taken off their paycheque for the van ride to the Oakville factories (and the hard hat, boots, and whatever else they're required to have but is not provided by either the factory they're making profits for or the agency which is making off with almost half their wages). And here we come to the issue of the cost of entry into the professional economy. Today becoming a Doctor or Lawyer can cost well over $100 000, and just about any other "real job" (in the terminology of people constantly trying to sell us college and university degrees) requires some sort of expensive education and certification process. As any student knows, the tuition (which has gone up, yet again, in the last year) costs are only the beginning. Start investing in books, living expenses (it's hard enough to make ends meet when you're not in full time school), course materials, computers (because handwritten assignments and old-fashioned book research isn't practical anymore) and other costs can easily put someone tens of thouands into debt in only a few years. Many just keep going, since OSAP doesn't start the threatening calls until you're out. Many others are forced into low-wage work outside of their fields. And a good number (roughly equal to the third in college, or third in university) simply never go in the first place.

An educated society is a rich society. Spending on education multiplies itself many times over as an educated and academically disciplined society grows older, and this is in no way limited to those taking courses that lead to big paycheques. As much as I hate to say it, our society needs more lawyers, or at least more legal knowledge, and the current high prices for buying a house, leaving your spouse or defending yourself from criminal charges are a result. With a six-figure debt you cannot simply go and give legal aid at an inner-city community centre, you have to find work at a corporate office. Worst of all, this kind of specialization (the idea that only a very small percentage of us should be able to understand the law or preform in court) keeps most of us away from the kind of legal knowlege which might help us defend ourselves and our communities from overzealous cops, invading developers or corrupt civic officials. The same can be said for many important forms of information which keep our society running, especially medical, scientific or even philosophical ideas. There are reasons that socieites like Cuba (for all of its faults) do so much better than many of their neighbours - free higher education enriches even the poorest of people.

We need to blur the lines between "students" and "citizens" and open up educational opportunities in sizes more manageable than the "full time job" which is most people's modern experience. Taking one or two classes at a time should be made easier and encouraged, and many courses should be broken down into single seminars or short serieses. With modern technology we can copy and distribute lectures, slideshows and course materials for next to no money and we should, providing anyone who wants access to that information without the corresponding paperwork free access to it. Papers written for assignments could be shared as a group to provide feedback (much more effective than a straight up "grade" out of 100), and left in a central collection to stand as examples to future students. Professional academic papers, should and must be available freely to all - since this kind of material usually only reaches the masses through short and misleading newspaper articles about a select few sensational studies. Everyone deserves free access to medical studies, philosophy papers and historical documentation, and the high price of housing stacks of vollumes is no longer an excuse (and $15/article for a 20 minute glance at something which might be relevant to a 300-word blog post is completely unacceptable). Certification options could then be opened up to those who studied the same materials on their own and were willing to write the necessary exams, and scholarly recognition opened up to those who, whether holding a degree or not, submitted scholarly papers and contributed to the understanding and debate of a topic.

And yes, I understand that University costs money. But education benefits far more than the students, and costs need not be anywhere near as high as they are now. The price of books is a The space exists around Hamilton in churches, theatres, parks, pubs and public school auditoriums to house tens of thousands in nightly lectures, times when most of these spaces are sitting empty anyway. There's also loads of grad students, grads and underemployed PHDs who'd love a shot at extra credit in exchange for teaching less formal classes on topics which they've studied. With the kind of computer equipment that exists in most living rooms these days, it wouldn't be hard to organize this kind of thing, and take note of who's attended what.

The roles of "teacher" and "student" are every bit as restrictive as "judge", "cop", or "leader". Everyone is better off if everyone is better educated, and just imagine what could be accomplished if even a small number of people followed their interests and learned what interested them without the fear of crippling debts or whether or not it would make them "employable". Information is free, infinitely reproducable and liberates people wherever it travels - we as a society have a duty to further it's spread wherever and whenever possible.

America's First (half) Black President.

Yesterday the voters sent a very clear message about how they feel regarding the last eight years of their government. For the first time in American history, they have a president who isn't (entirely) a white man. Now, this is a little more complicated than it sounds - he's half white, and that raises some uncomfortable questions about how we think about race. "One drop of black blood", they say, and you're not white any more - but one white parent and you can still be black? The "white" club sure has some high requirements of its members, which might tell ya something about what being "white" really means. Is this about heritage, or is this about racial purity?

A lot about this campaign has made me uncomfortable. The insinuation that "Barack Husseien Obama" is a Muslim, despite all evidence to the contrary, has bothered me. It's as if being Muslim is somehow inappropriate for an American president, and that's a scary concept. The Sarah Palin stuff hit a nerve with me as well. It seems like every time a (younger) woman runs for high political office the level of debate drops to that of my old middle school playground. Sure, the woman's dumb as a post and just a bit terrifying, and if she ever became my Vice President I'd probably move to Mongolia...but I just can't seem to shake the idea that many of the nasty things which have been said about her would never have come up if it'd been Sam Palin who was running. Did she spend lots of money on clothes, shoes and purses at fancy New York shops? You probably would too, and do we have any evidence to suggest that Obama, Biden or McCain hasn't spent at least that much on tailored suits, shoes and wallets? Was she a beauty queen? Yes, but it isn't like another prominent state governor wasn't "Mr Universe" at one point in his past, and that never seemed to carry the same kind of connotations. It all just seems too much like all of the "Magna Spice" comments made when Belinda Stronach wanted to run for Prime Minister.

One way or another, American politics just took on a another unfortunate dimension of personality contest which cannot help but obscure the issues which are actually being discussed, though arguably in a little less dramatic a fashion than running movie stars (Reagan or the Guvernator) or former presidents' kids. Where were the actual issues in this campaign?

Do I think this will really change much? I'm not that optimistic. He may not have been born into money like most in Washington, but he sure has it now. As inspiring as it is to see that a poor coloured kid can rise his way through Harvard Law School into the top ranks of the American Elite, it might be a little more inspiring if, like nearly everyone in America, he wasn't a member of that elite now. Whatever colour people are, and whatever their background, a power elite is a power elite, and for every one back person in the oval office, how many millions are still in slums and jails? Where are the real policy alternatives here? Where's the will to take on a banking system which has run amok with the homes, jobs and wealth of the American people? Where's the commitment to admit that the "war on terror" was a mistake and that America is no longer (and never really was) the "world's policeman". Unfortunately, he wants to increase the size of the military, and speaks often about "America's historic purpose in the world". Worse yet, John Biden (who I honestly can't tell apart from McCain) is one of the most hawkish Democrats in Washington. How is he going to break the ever-expanding cycles of resource use and abuse which ar promising to strangle America (and the world)? Ending foreign oil imports is a nice idea (though many of his promised cuts will almost certainly run up against the hard realities of peak oil), but I'm still not comfortable with coal ("clean" or otherwise) and nuclear power, which he supports. Truth be told, a lot of his policies are very progressive, at least in the context of American politics, but I don't see a lot of real radical potential here.

The next four years are going to be a very difficult time for Obama and all of America. Does he have the vision and foresight, once in office and confronted with a crumbling economy, failing war and dissappearing natural resources, to lead America from a position at the front of the pack of lemmings to one at the back? I don't know, I've certainly never had those kind of expectations for a president before. I just hope that the promise showed by a liberal black president doesn't overshadow the work that ordinary people know they *should* be doing to accomplish the same goals, and turn, once more, to a "leader" to solve all of their problems.

Cops are above the law

24 counts of sexual harassment and yet again, they can't prosecute him. The statue of limitations - amount of time after a crime is committed that you can't be charged for it - is six months for cops, instead of the better part of decade for the rest of us. Even if that crime has nothing to do with "enforcing the law" (in fact, causes problems for other people trying to enforce it), police are still, effectively, above the law.

Sure, he was investigated, and slapped with a brutal punishment - "suspension with pay". $92 000 a year (and this goes back a few years) to go on vacation. That's the kind of "punishment" most of us play the lottery for. And it's the same thing they gave the cop who shot Dudley George. These people are very nearly above the law.

Does anyone see the irony here?

Think about this garbage the next time a cop tells you that they can't "let you off" for riding a bike without a bell or having a half-gram of weed on you - because
"the law" is so bloody important. This isn't about "the law" or "justice" this is about power. Their power over us.

In the news today: Franco's Crimes Under Scrutiny Again

Spanish courts are battling over an investigation into the roughly 114 000 people who went "missing" during and after Spain's Civil War which broke out in 1936. At issue is an amnesty on crimes committed by Generalissimo Francisco Franco's Falange (fascist) party which ruled the country into the '70s. For those who aren't framilliar with Franco, he siezed power via a military coup in the unstable political climate which purvaded great-depression-era Europe. With the help of Hitler and Mussolini he fought a brutal civil war against the Republicans, a motley crew of democrats, communists (backed by Russia), anarchists and a host of international volunteers from the allied nations such as George Orwell and Ernest Hemmingway. As the coup was happening civil society (largely Spain's radical unions) reacted - not by protesting or holding a vigil, but by raiding the armories and taking on the army directly. At their height anarchist and syndicalist trade unions such as the CNT had established anarchist collectives encompasing several million people and great territories. The allied nations themselves, hoping to appease Hitler and avoid a revolution in Western Europe signed a non-intervention treaty which essentially handed the country to the Fascists and made it illegal to join the Republicans. Resistance fell apart slightly before the dawn of WW2 when the Russian-backed communists turned on the others (hoping to establish a social democracy so as not to offend the west) and a battered Spain managed to mostly stay out of the war (sending only a few volunteers) then enjoyed decades of American support for their anti-communist stance during the cold war.

The story did, though, have a happy ending. Franco reigned till the end of his life and attempted to re-establish the Spanish Monarchy, which fit with his traditionalist conservative views. He picked Juan Carlos as a successor and arranged to hand over dictatorial power to him upon his death. Upon gaining power, Juan Carlos managed to re-establish the Spanish democracy in two weeks flat, thus ending 40 years of fascist power.

If martial law was declared tomorrow, and threats have been made lately, would you be ready? Or will we be waiting for a judge's decision as to whether the "disappearances" were really crimes against humanity 70 years later?

I'm generally a fan of graffiti. Nothing tells you a city, neighbourhood or space is lived in quite like a mosaic of tags, etchings, murals, stencils and pasties. Much of it takes amazing skill (try it sometime, spray cans aren't the most forgiving medium), and some of the most impressive artwork I've ever seen was done under cover of night under highways and train bridges. Since the first cave paintings, graffiti has remained a crucial form of cultural expression, coming even from the most marginalized sectors of society. It conveys messages, from the political to the pure and simple DM+CG 4EVR.

It is art.

It's not locked up in some pay-to-enter sterilized, carefully planned art gallery. It's not a sign of "high society" that one can show off to their friends at bourgeois cocktail parties or hang in their office to demonstrate their fat wallet and "high taste". It's not censored (except by other graffiti), it's not always liked and it certainly not always beautiful or polite, but a big black marker is about as free as expression gets when it comes to the written word.

Yes, some graffiti is used by gangs to mark their territory. But most isn't. And frankly, if your area's got a gang problem, you have bigger things to worry about (poverty, racism, hopelessness etc) than a few naughty lines. And yes, sometimes it's racist, but this, too, is rare, and nearly always is dealt with by other graffiti artists.

Does it make a neighbourhood look bad? It's funny how that argument doesn't hold for the Starbucks on Locke, or that hundred story Freudiansim that Harry Stinson wanted to build in the Howard Johnson parking lot. The fact is, the more you crack down, the worse graffiti you get. Graffiti never goes away. I've traveled tens of thousands of kilometres and seen city after city. Not one had managed to eliminate graffiti. What many had, though, unlike our endless procession of tags which look like something from a third-grade lesson in cursive writing, was unbelievably beautiful and intricate murals. Taking a train out of any major station in Europe will give you at least a mile of pieces. Those never could have been done under crackdowns like the one we are experiencing at the moment, and wouldn't have been worth it if they could - they'd have been painted over. Tolerating some degree of public art, especially when it's in spaces like train yards which aren't trying to be beautiful anyways (in away, I'd agree, they are, but I'd say graffiti adds to that), why not let it be and focus on protecting spaces where it shouldn't be? I'll agree, nobody wants some joker to come by and bomb their garage, but big drab concrete pillars, postboxes (esp. those gray ones), train cars and are nobody's personal property. If somebody wants to go out and make the city more beautiful, then let's encourage them - if it's beautiful, let it stay - the best guarantee of not getting tagged is a big, nice mural (commissioned or not). We should explicitly decriminalize artwork on a certain class of public space (not a handfull of "public walls") - bare, boring walls, sidewalk tiles, highway overpasses and the like. Set people free to express themselves.

Cracking down does nothing but scare away the real artists. Good graffiti, like good oil painting or sculpting, takes time. Nobody wants to be busted, and nobody wants 30 hours of their work painted over, or to be tied to a truly remarkable set of tags. Since nature abhors a vacuum, others will step in to fill it, and that's where you get some of the crap which adorns our city. Someone will always step in. The answer to this crackdown? Chillen. Big, bold blasts of paint tagging his name in 20-30 foot letters, as well as his ubiquitous tags on every bus shelter in sight. One colour, no finesse, just a great big fuck you to everyone in charge.

Graffiti artists have a responsibility here too. The public is not going to support graffiti until it sees something it likes, and in general, it doesn't. As much of a fuck-you as the 10-billion Keenur tags around town were, they don't add much to public space. Paint something beautiful, informative or thoughtful, or at least something that encourages other people to get involved.

Ultimately, to me, it's the romance that does it. A dark night with a black hoodie and a bag full of cans, so quiet you can hear your heart pounding and just waiting to see the cherry lights of a cruiser swing around the corner at any time. The graffiti artist is a person who puts his own freedom on the line to give art to the world...can you claim as noble a purpose?

So this post goes out to Keenur, with the best of hopes for your trial, and for all the others caught up in the city's latest "cleanup". This goes out to Chillen, for being big, bold and loud. It goes out to everyone who's ever stayed up late cutting stencils out of old cereal boxes and everyone who knows just how loud that little ball bearing can be when you're shaking a can on a cold, dark and deathly quiet night. And, with all the love and thanks I can muster, it goes out to everyone who ever helped me keep from getting bored in an otherwise unremarkable toilet stall.

Once again, Stephen Harper is the Prime Minister of Canada, leading a now-strenghtened minority government. Fuckin' awesome.

One more triumphant victory of Canadian "democracy". $300 million dollars down the drain halfway through a term, with the lowest federal voter turnout ever (59.1%, a number which has been dropping for decades), to tell us what we already know about Canadian Parliament - the "left", though favoured by the Canadian public, is divided, while the Conservative Alliance is not. Less than 40% of voters (which ignores the over 40% which did not vote, and those who are not eligible to vote) support him, but thanks to our archaic electoral system, he is still the boss. Thank Allah, Jesus and the Buddhas that he does not have a majority.

I guess this is what we get for not all giving up on the Bloc, NDP and Greens in favour of the Liberals. That's what they told us to do, right? That our own beliefs about policy came second to the need to keep Harper out of power (and, concequently, return them to their traditional majority position). But when it's their turn to sacrifice on their policy matters, that's simply not an option - just like last time, they've completely dismissed the idea of forming a coalition with the NDP and Bloc, something which, in all honesty, Canadians voted for. The liberal party is out of touch, corrupt, complacent, and has become much more right wing than Canadians are comfortable with, and no amount of blaming the NDP or Greens for "splitting the vote" will change that. Parliament was supposed to be about discussion and compromise - passing only the bills which were supported by the majority of members, not simply whichever party got the most votes. Or so I thought. As Harper's proved with this whole joke of an election, these parties are only interested in one thing - majority government - the ability to pass bills without consulting anybody elected by the rest of Canadians. Majority governments, though almost never actually representing a majority of votes (and why, prey-tell, is 51% the magic number, anyways, rather than 67% or 76%?) are essentially one-party rule, with everyone else showing up only to fill seats and give whiny soundbites. I suppose we can expect another farce such as this in 2 years or less.

Using these useless, archaic and altogether obnoxious parties as proxies for the actual will of the Canadian public is proving, once again, to be a failure. We can't actually introduce bills or veto them, we can't strike down existing laws (some notable examples with around 90% public opposition would be marijuna prohibition or municipal amalgamation), we can't recall "representatives" no matter how badly they misrepresent us, we can't veto a war or stop one while it's happening, and we have no legal means of succeeding from confederation should we desire to (as Quebec shows). The Candian people have no right to actual participation in the process, short of taking an issue to a judge - someone who is neither elected nor answerable to the will of the people. This is not democracy. And this is why people don't vote. Ask them, it's not because they don't care - they do - most of them are mad as hell about all of these assholes, they just don't feel that marking an X in a circle once every couple of years is going to change any of it.

There is one bright, shining silver lining, though. Larry DiIanni, former Mayor of Hamilton, lost once again. His supporters (like Spec columnist Andrew Dreschel) downplayed the fact that his last election win was the result of cheating - something he was convicted of and slapped firmly on the wrist for. Unfortunately one doesn't get disqualified from elections for cheating like one does in school or sports, but fortunately, voters have a long memory, and are really fucking tired of being cheated.

The world can breathe a great sigh of relief today as oil prices have just dipped below $90 per barrel in today's orgy of falling markets. There's no telling how far this may go, as prices approach half of their peak just a few months ago. This will, of course, lead to decreases in everything from bus fares to food prices, and hopefully help restore some stability to our battered financial system.

Candidates like Jack Layton would like to see gas prices regulated. That could have worked. Many others would have liked Saudi Arabia to ramp up production to drop prices to this point (if possible). But, ultimately, oil prices found their own way to come down on their own accord...they triggered the biggest economic meltdown in nearly a century.

The American dream of low-density suburban housing connected by freeways of gas-guzzling life-sized Tonka trucks, all built quickly and cheaply and mortgaged/leased/rented to consumers with a host of money-sucking financing plans relies heavily on cheap oil. Without it we can't import cheap, chemically grown tomatoes from Mexico, and without those we'd have to keep growing FOOD south of Rymal to feed ourselves, and that land would not be sold off by failing family farmers (thanks to the amount of financing they need for all those nifty pesticides, chemicals, copywrited seeds and mega-tractors). Without it we couldn't keep millions empolyed in industries like automobiles (some estimates put it at one quarter of America's jobs), airlines or trucking, and that means people can't keep paying those absurd financing plans off.

Our economy, for better or worse (usually worse) runs upon a seemingly magical game of numbers, which may generate tons of wealth, but usually only involves a few percentage points of grown on the whole each year. When on of the fundamental commodities (oil) goes up in price from 4-7 times what it was at the dawn of the decade, it isn't hard to wipe out those few points. Keep in mind that oil production hasn't really dropped, it's only plateaued for a few short years while demand increased, and this is the havok it hath wrought. In another decade or two, once pumping has really begun to decline and production has shifted from cheap and easy desert wellheads to multi-billion dollar tar sands megaprojects and deep sea arctic drilling, we'll begin to see the true cost of a lifestyle based on cheap fuel.

With any luck, this drop in commodity prices and fall in stock prices will encourage people to get back on their feet, buy a few bargain-priced stocks and maybe fill up their Ford. But that won't solve the problem. Our economy is based around the fantasy world of Wall Street ballance sheets and not the realities of a finite, living planet, and until we walk away from that, we'll still be in danager of this kind of collapse.

Maybe, though, it's for the best. Had the dinosaurs never died out, we would never have evolved. And now, in the midst of the biggest mass extinction since then, maybe a different kind of dinosaur has to move on to make room for the new guys. Right below BBC's pile of stories on today's financial mayhem there was something from the science section which stood out - at least 25% of the world's mammal species are now facing extinction, and that's a conservative estimate. This represents a bigger loss than every company on Wal-Street, a massacre of this world's living genetic heritige, and a crime for which future generations will likely never be able to forgive us. If that's going to be the legacy of all the "progress" and "development" from Wal-Street, then maybe all of this is for the best.