“Thousands of migrant workers come to Canada from the Caribbean and [Latin] America each year to perform seasonal labour, mainly in Ontario and British Columbia’s agriculture sector. Most have come under the federal government’s Season Agriculture Worker Program, and rarely have much contact with the communities where they spend as much as seven or eight months as labourers, often to earn money to send back home”

The families of the deceased labourers have no rights to pursue financial compensation for their loss.

See also: No Jamaican among Ontario crash victims, says foreign ministry | Jamaica Observer

“According to the Toronto Star, Health Minister Deb Matthews, while describing the crash was “a horrific tragedy”, said she was unsure whether the survivors’ health costs are covered. She promised to look into the issue.”

US radicals came up a century ago with sound proposals for a maximum income, enforced through progressive taxation, to ensure that the rich couldn’t so easily buy political influence, as well as to adjust inequality | by Sam Pizzigati | Le Monde diplomatique

If the state can expropriate wealth, why not rather expropriate the means of wealth production and place them under public ownership with workers’ control? The distribution of wealth is ultimately the result of the distribution of the ownership of social production. The wealthy are rich due to their ownership of capital; therefore abolish private property in the commanding heights of the economy.

By John Riddell interviews Felipe Stuart Cournoyer | Axis of Logic

A reply from Lenin’s Tomb to Slavoj Žižek’s recent article.

By Duncan Cameron | Rabble.ca | When Harper was in Davos, Switzerland, last week to address the World Economic Forum, he did not talk about the subject of the conference. Instead he presented his austerity plan for Canada.

with David Harvey

By Ewan Robertson – Venezuelanalysis.com

–It is also an attack on the next generation of workers.

On February 28th 2012 over 100,000,000 Indian workers will come out on strike. Workers from many unions and sectors are trying to gain improvements in areas such as, pay, pensions, and employment rights.

Christoph Hermann | Socialist Project | While in previous crises shorter work hours were discussed as a measure to combat growing unemployment, an astonishing feature of the current economic downturn from 2007 on was that work time reductions were nowhere on the political agenda.

The dreadful debt saga will only come to a close when Greece takes charge of its predicament | Costas Lapavitsas | guardian.co.uk

An Interview with Doug Henwood | by Sasha Lilley | MR Zine

Slavoj Žižek | London Review of Books |”The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is at the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect – based on collective knowledge and social co-operation – has increased in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge.”

Doug Nesbitt | Socialist Project

David Harvey: Chinese urbanization, construction and real estate speculation is saving global capitalism – will it burst as in the US? | The Real News

By Devinder Kumar | Znet

Job sharing and increased leisure are the answer to rising unemployment, claims thinktank | The Guardian

Richard Peet | Monthly Review | “Over the last thirty years, capital has abstracted upwards, from production to finance; its sphere of operations has expanded outwards, to every nook and cranny of the globe; the speed of its movement has increased, to milliseconds; and its control has extended to include “everything.” We now live in the era of global finance capitalism.”

“For some of the Canadian banks, loan growth has averaged nearly 10% over the past five years. We think the slower macroeconomic environment along with historically high consumer debt levels will slow loan growth. … we have watched the Canadian banks make various acquisitions in order to increase revenue, especially in their fee-based businesses. With all of this acquisition activity, particularly in asset management, we think there is an increased risk that banks will destroy shareholder value by overpaying for assets.”

–A rather long article on copyright and the academy and how we need to keep fighting for fair implementations of copyright and the “copyleft” alternatives to allow sharing of data and analysis in an increasingly commercialised academy and monopoly publishing world.
Oh, and I wrote it.

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20111231/news/news2.html

–The Peoples’ National Party has beaten Labour in Jamaica. A move to the left, but the PNP better put education first and build ties with the ALBA nations if it is going to be able to implement its manifesto.

by Mike Whitney | Counterpunch | “For the second time in three years, the banking system has collapsed, which means that the banks are no longer able to fund themselves through the normal means, the wholesale markets.”