Resistance builds to the “epidemic of billionaires”

by Jim Hodgson

Back in the 1980s, a spike in global interest rates sparked a “third-world debt crisis” (yes, at the time, that is what we called it). The crisis became a shock-doctrine opportunity to strengthen a harsher form of capitalism, one that came to be called “neo-liberal economic globalization” or simply neoliberalism or globalization. Governments weakened themselves, cut taxes on wealth and on corporate profits, eased health and environmental protections, and capital became ever more transnational.

We are now more than four decades into neoliberalism. The economic crisis of 2008-09, when banks were rescued instead of people, further widened the gap between the ultra-rich one-per-cent and everyone else.

A decade of Trump and his cronies in power has produced what British writer Craig Murray calls “an epidemic of billionaires.” It is they who are now trying to force a form of transnational corporatist fascism on the rest of us.

In France, high school students lead protests

In North America, it takes some effort to get past mainstream narratives about recent student protests in France, Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Riots! Violence! Palestinian flags!! U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance blamed immigrants for France’s troubles.

But let’s dig deeper to find out what is really going on.

“Young people are asking for one simple thing: resources to get an education and access to quality studies,” writes French economist Thomas Piketty. He argues that the government of President Emmanuel Macron has presided over a “catastrophic and unprecedented 20% drop in the budget per student since 2017.”

Think here of what you might have seen in the 2019 film, Les Misérables. Not the musical, but the drama about suburban Paris riots in 2005 that was France’s nominee for best international film at the Oscars. Recommended viewing!

While the government’s budget for education increased from €13.3 billion to €15.5 billion between 2017 and 2026 (up by 17%), inflation over the same period was 22%. And the number of students rose from 2.6 million to over 3 million, an increase of 15%. The result, according to Piketty, is that the budget per student dropped by about 20%:

“Reinvesting in these sectors [education and health] today is not simply a matter of equality between regions or social classes. It is also a key issue in moving further toward the gradual de-commodification and dematerialization of the economy, and, beyond that, to building a different model of development. Let us hope the current movement helps put these issues at the heart of the upcoming elections.”

What do cuts to education budgets mean to students? Matthew Fox of Catholics for the Common Good writes:

“The French student protests began on a small scale in mid-September, in high schools in the poorer suburbs of Paris. Their complaints ran from timetables and class sizes to a shortage of teachers and classrooms that had overheated during the summer’s heat waves, and by early October some protesters were attacking police and school staff. On Oct. 17, a national day of protest against the cost of living drew 550,000 people by the Interior Ministry’s count and 800,000 by the CGT unions.”

Fox goes on to describe responses from church leaders and organizations in France and also Italy, where similar protests grew. On Oct. 5, 12 days before the riots, France’s Young Christian Workers, the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, a Catholic Action movement founded in France in 1927, issued a statement supporting the high school protests. The JOC objected to media coverage showing “une jeunesse qui casse et qui brûle,” a youth that smashes and burns, and it quoted a student in Nantes who criticized protesters who come only to break things. Relying on police intervention alone, the movement argued, signals decision-makers unwilling to negotiate.

(The JOC organizes about 6,000 young people between 13 and 30 from working-class families and neighbourhoods. It belongs to the Catholic Action movement of the Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn and his method of See, Judge, Act – and influential in the development of liberation theology since the 1960s.)

On Oct. 19, the presidency of the French bishops’ conference condemned the violence, expressed solidarity with injured officers and looted shopkeepers, and prayed that the students’ “just demands be heard and taken into account.”

Similar protests also took place in Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and Albania. And in Serbia, what began as a student movement became a representative political movement and won the recent election.

Ana María Aragonés, a French-born specialist in migration law who teaches at Mexico’s national university UNAM, wrote in La Jornada Oct. 19 that protest by growing social movements in Europe is a sign of growing recognition that the existing economic and political order no longer serves most people, be they students, seniors, immigrants, renters and workers. “Discontent touches ever wider sectors of European societies,” she writes.

“Could these social movements represent the beginning of a rupture with the nationalist and xenophobic discourse that for so long has served to divide workers and to preserve the privileges of capital? Could they open the possibility of a convergence between social movements in the Global North and South, not because their conditions are identical, but because they face the same root causes?”

In the United States and Canada, and indeed throughout the Americas, the moment feels a bit different. The urgent feeling now is to defeat Trump and his allies across the hemisphere, as Brazilians did in elections last week and as U.S. voters did Tuesday.

But at some point, we have to see that Democrats in the U.S. and Liberals and Conservatives in Canada have facilitated the same transfer of wealth to the top one-per-cent. Can we learn to see past the daily political headlines to discern the signs of the times that might propel us toward more profound change?

The movement that defeated Trump’s agenda in Brazil has deep roots

by Jim Hodgson

Lula’s victory Sunday has global significance. Lula – Luiz Inácio da Silva – faced threats from U.S. President Donald Trump. His campaign withstood interference by the U.S. government and by giant tech companies, notably Meta.

In his victory speech, Lula proclaimed: “This country does not accept being anyone’s back yard.” The United States has always treated Latin America and the Caribbean as a back yard. Even when then-President Joe Biden said in 2022 that it wasn’t the back yard, but the front yard, he still implied U.S. possession.

Trump’s revival of the early-nineteenth century Monroe Doctrine, continuing airstrikes against fishing boats while arguing without evidence they were used for drug-trafficking, the fuel blockade against Cuba, the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, and overt interference in elections in Honduras, Colombia and Argentina (among others) all show renewed U.S. determination to force the region’s submission – together, evidently, with that of Canada.

This election was the fourth that he has won (2002, 2006, 2022 and 2026), but there were three others before 2002 which he lost.

Images from the 1989 campaign: “Without fear of being happy”

The deep roots of Lula’s movement

In December 1989, a night or two before the run-off vote in that year’s election (Lula’s first campaign), I was one of about 300,000 people who gathered in the wide avenue leading to the old cathedral in Rio de Janeiro for Lula’s final rally of that campaign. The famous “Olé” soccer chant, altered here to end “LU-LA, LU-LA,” reverberated in the steel and concrete canyon.

After long decades of military dictatorship, Brazilians were making history: this was their first direct presidential election since 1960. In 1980 with the military still in power, Lula and others formed the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) – the workers’ party – from his base in the industrial suburbs of São Paulo. It built links with social movements across Brazil: farmers, landless farm-workers, women, Indigenous people, ecological defenders and others.

What I learned in my 1989 visit was that many of those movements had roots in the development of Christian base communities in the Catholic Church and in the processes of popular education and cultural action developed decades earlier in Brazil by people like Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. Those methods had spread rapidly across Latin America, and shaped the work I did in the Dominican Republic from late 1986 through 1988. I was a “communications technician,” working in an organization dedicated to popular education and cultural action. My role was to train people in basic skills: how to write a news release, how to publish a newsletter. (This was long before the internet!) My colleagues did the prior work: adult literacy, building awareness. The people worked on issues of land, water, and threats of expulsion from their homes. I helped them make more noise about their concerns.

I learned far more from my Dominican colleagues about long-term struggles than they did from me about communication!

I returned to Toronto from the Dominican Republic at the end of 1988 and began working with the Canadian Council of Churches (CCC) in early 1989. That work brought me to Rio de Janeiro for a global ecumenical “Cultural Action Workshop.”

The World Council of Churches and the Brazilian Ecumenical Youth Union (UBRAJE) organized the event for young adult leaders from around the world to share experiences of action for social change, and to learn from each other. The theme was “The Senses of Creation,” and participants (about 20 of us from various parts of the world) were encouraged to use our senses to increase our awareness of our surroundings as a sort of first step in a longer process of personal and social change.

We spent a day, for example, visiting parts of Rio de Janeiro: a traditional neighbourhood market, a middle-class beach area (Ipanema), and a Pentecostal church. We broke into small groups, each group corresponding to one of the senses. Later, we returned to our conference centre and talked about our experiences. This wide-ranging discussion succeeded in heightening our awareness of various components of Brazilian society.

Drama exercises took us into our own minds and bodies, and then back out into the world, moving us to think about our place in the world. It seemed quite simple to open a huge trunk, remove costumes from the trunk and don the garb of some other personality. Here we entered the world of Boal’s “popular theatre,” used in Brazil to help people understand issues which surround them and begin to see what can be done to make change happen.

The Brazilians with whom we worked showed us how these activities helped participants to discover their roots, notice the ground on which they stood, and match their ideals to proposals for political and social action, lessons that we would later apply in our own contexts.

One of the organizers was Mauricio Lissovsky, who worked then with Brazil’s Institute for the Study of Religion (ISER) and later as a communications professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Despite the disappointment of Lula’s loss, Brazilians, he said, would continue to strive for transformation of Brazil “with full awareness of the ground beneath our feet.” Action for change could not be rooted in ideologies that were abstracted from people’s daily realities, but rooted instead in the ways that people live, work and express themselves.

In the years that followed, I thought often of Mauricio’s words as Brazil’s Landless Peoples Movement (MST) emerged alongside other social movements across the country. These movements played lead roles in the new international social movement spaces like the World Social Forum and the Hemispheric Social Alliance. Meanwhile, Lula’s political movement gathered strength and the PT won power in various cities and states.

Finally, in 2002, Lula won the presidency. He and his successor, Dilma Rousseff, led the country until 2016, when Rousseff was removed from office through a series of legal and parliamentary manoeuvres that eventually led to the presidency of the right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro. Lula won the 2022 vote and returned to power – and won again in 2026 as the whole region seemed to be shifting to the right.

Some people from the social movements took positions within various PT-led local, state and national governments, and played positive roles within the structures of power. But the movements themselves retained their autonomy from the party and governments. When necessary, they criticized various government policies, such as the glacial pace of land reform, the charity model implicit in the government’s anti-hunger program, persisting corruption, the government’s embrace of food fuels like ethanol despite their impact on food prices and supply, and more recently the government’s move to allow oil and gas exploitation in the Atlantic Ocean near the mouth of the Amazon River.

Leaving aside for the moment debates over successive PT administrations, what had been underway among social movements in Brazil and many other countries in Latin America since long before the PT’s electoral success was a process of stepping back from reliance on political parties as vehicles (much less vanguards) for social change.

Instead, the social movements themselves become protagonists themselves in the political arena – as had Lula in his labour-organizing days. Widespread use of the techniques of popular education accomplished what they were intended to do: create new social subjects – people who were passive no longer and who understood themselves as agents of change.

Elections this weekend in British Columbia and Brazil: Who gets thrown under the bus for the sake of development?

by Jim Hodgson

I write today from northwest Chiapas, part of the traditional territory of the Zoque Indigenous people in southeastern Mexico. But I am thinking of friends and family in the Canadian province of British Columbia, who will elect a new provincial government today, and of the people of Brazil who will choose a president Sunday.

In all of these places, politics have become sharply polarized. The right attacks even the concept of Indigenous rights as an impediment to private property and to their notions of development – usually tied to ecologically-destructive resource extraction. They also attack 2SLGBTQIA+ people, especially trans people. And the left, rather tepidly in my opinion, defends the rights of Indigenous people, ecological protection and the rights of queer and trans people.

Today, let’s look at my home province, so-called British Columba, a land where virtually no treaties were signed during colonization.

Orange Shirt Day, Penticton, Oct. 30

In the B.C. provincial election, two acronyms have been bandied about. DRIPA and SOGI. Conservative politicians say they’re bad: threats to your property on the one hand and to your family on the other. And the relatively progressive government has not shown much courage in defending these policies.

What are they?

In this piece by Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), DRIPA is explained.

In times like these, First Nations and our rights are often the first to be thrown under the bus. In the territory known as British Columbia (B.C.), this has resulted in politicians placing a target squarely on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA). Lost in all the related bluster and rhetoric is what UNDRIP and DRIPA actually are and are meant to do, and what those who seek to weaken or do away with them are asking British Columbians to give up.

Understanding UNDRIP and DRIPA

UNDRIP is an international human rights instrument. Developed through a series of forums beginning in 1982 and ending with the UN General Assembly voting to adopt UNDRIP in 2007, it is the product of more than 20 years of international deliberations, diplomacy, and compromise between UN member States and Indigenous Peoples’ representatives.

UNDRIP does not create new rights, nor does it extend any unique privileges or entitlements to Indigenous Peoples. Rather, it expresses long-standing international human rights norms in the specific context of the world’s Indigenous Peoples. Grounded fundamentally in the inherent right to self-determination enjoyed by all peoples, it is intended to protect the collective human rights of the more than 470 million Indigenous People worldwide that may not be adequately addressed in other human rights instruments that emphasize individual rights, and it also further elaborates on specific individual human rights with particular emphasis on the rights of Indigenous women and children.

Stated simply: UNDRIP recognizes and is meant to protect broadly accepted, basic human rights. Indigenous rights are human rights.

DRIPA, on the other hand, is a provincial statute which the B.C. legislature passed unanimously in 2019. The purpose of DRIPA is to advance the domestic implementation of these rights in B.C. DRIPA made B.C. the first jurisdiction in Canada to formally adopt UNDRIP as its framework for reconciliation, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada explicitly called for. Since then, DRIPA has played a key role in enabling First Nations to take our rightful place at the decision-making table while facilitating economic growth and prosperity. …

There are legitimate questions about how DRIPA should operate, how its obligations should interact with existing law, and what role courts should play when conflicts arise. But those questions should not be allowed to obscure the fundamental question at the heart of this debate: whether the rights of First Nations will be treated as enduring human rights or as political concessions that can be suspended whenever they become politically inconvenient.

Summerland’s first Pride March, June 18.

And SOGI – sexual orientation and gender identity – is explained here by Wilbur Turner, president and executive director of Advocacy Canada (a Kelowna-based 2SLGBTQIA+ advocacy organization).

SOGI 123 was introduced in BC schools in 2016, ten years ago. It is a set of resources to help schools be safe for every student, and it was never a stand-alone curriculum. Researchers at UBC’s Stigma and Resilience Among Vulnerable Youth Centre, led by Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc, evaluated it using BC Adolescent Health Survey data from more than 98,000 students in grades 7 to 12 across 482 schools. They found that SOGI 123 reduced bullying and sexual orientation discrimination for students in the rainbow community and for their heterosexual classmates too. “We’ve now got 10-year evidence that it works,” Saewyc said.

Thousands of students have now graduated after spending most of their school years with these resources in their classrooms. The sky hasn’t fallen. What has happened is that more kids feel safe at school.

British Columbians face real problems this fall, from housing and health care to the cost of groceries. Let’s get serious about those, and leave the kids out of this culture war.

I’ll write about Brazil’s election in days to come. In the meantime, for excellent updates check out posts from Panamerican Dispatch.