[OBSCURA] stillsinflux, "Humber"

Humber, a photo by stillsinflux on Flickr.

stillsinflux's photo of the Humber Bay Arch Bridge shows well how this bridge, spanning the mouth of western Toronto's Humber River on Lake Ontario, has much the same sort of post-modernist majesty and sweep as the Sydney Opera House.

[URBAN NOTE] "Tories prepare for siege on Liberals' GTA holdings"

it's not inaccurate to say that, federally, the Liberal Party of Canada is concentrated in the largest cities: Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver. That's why Brett Popplewell's article in the Toronto Star is so relevant: Toronto could win the Conservatives a majority. (robertprior was quite right.)

[The Conservatives] need to break the Liberal lines here if they are to hand Stephen Harper what he covets: a majority government. He is just 12 seats shy of the goal.

Harper’s strategy for a Conservative assault on the GTA is a classic one that has worked countless times in history.

“It’s like Mao Zedong’s strategy of war,” explains Tom Flanagan, a former top Harper adviser.

Encircle the city from the countryside. Then watch it fall.

With 40 per cent of the Liberals’ federal seats located within a 40 km radius of Toronto City Hall, their holdings are surrounded by territories ceded to the Conservative Party in the last three elections.

Pundits and polls agree that in this fight, the Liberals are weak and parts of their fortress might soon fall. Harper’s forces are already inside.

“I can smell a Conservative staffer six blocks away,” says Liberal MP Rob Oliphant, whose Don Valley West riding is in the heart of the Alamo.

“Everywhere I looked (in 2008) I saw Conservative young staffers in their little blue T-shirts and their Gap pants running around my riding.”

Oliphant expects more of the same in the coming weeks as the Conservatives pour resources into the region.

The Tories have already targeted five ridings along the periphery of the Liberal stronghold and have declared their intent to pinch the Grits from the North, East and West.

Popplewell concludes on a note with implications for my riding of Davenport.

The NDP has set up a dedicated war room at the foot of Yonge St. From there, the party plans to orchestrate an expansion that, if successful, will take three seats from the Liberals.

At the top of that list is Parkdale-High Park, which the NDP’s Peggy Nash lost to Gerard Kennedy in 2008.

Nash is back. She’s already attacking Kennedy for having one of the worst attendance records in the House of Commons.

The NDP are also targeting Mario Silva (Davenport) and Maria Minna (Beaches East-York).

[LINK] "South African Farmers Set Up in Congo"

Arsène Séverin's Inter Press Service story makes for interesting reading.

In the hope of strengthening its agricultural production, the Republic of Congo has handed over 80,000 hectares of arable land to a company owned and operated by 14 South African farmers.

"Our country is experiencing a food shortage and to resolve this problem, it is necessary to make land available to agricultural operators who are also investors. It’s the new policy and we’re going to continue with it," says Rigobert Maboundou, Congo’s Minister of Agriculture and Livestock.

An agreement signed on Mar. 10 in Pointe-Noire, the Congolese economic capital, the group of South African farmers and their jointly owned company, Congo Agriculture, handed over 63,000 hectares of land at Malalo II and an additional 17,000 hectares at Dihesse, in the south-west of the country. According to the agreement, the South Africans are going to set up a food processing industry in Malolo II, which should also create employment.

"Congo has been waiting for this kind of investment initiative, the creation of jobs and most importantly, an abundance of food, because these farmers are going to grow food-producing crops and farm livestock," says Pierre Mabiala, Minister of Land Reform, who handed over the title deeds.

The South Africans plan to grow rice, maize and soya. "They are also going to breed cattle, goats and pigs," says Genge Manelisi, South African ambassador in Brazzaville, the Congolese capital.

In December 2010, the government handed over 470,000 hectares of land in the Makoua and Mokeko districts in the north of the country to Atama Plantation, a Malaysian company. The Malaysians will invest 30 million dollars in rehabilitating and expanding old palm groves belonging to a state company to produce 900,000 tonnes of palm oil annually.

The government estimates that this agricultural initiative could create 20,000 jobs and contribute as much as one billion dollars to the Congo’s GDP.

The land handed over to the South Africans in Malolo II and Dihesse was occupied by smallholder farmers relying on traditional agricultural methods.

"I was shocked when the people from the government told me that I had to move off my cassava and groundnut field," says Jean Mbenze, a peasant farmer from Dihesse.

"It’s about access to information," says Christian Mounzéo, president of the Pointe-Noire-based NGO, Conference for Peace and Human Rights. "Why is this issue of dividing up the land not made public, leading to national debates that would allow people to engage with each other, rather than just deciding without consulting the affected communities?"

The displaced farmers are to be resettled in more productive districts, apparently.

[LINK] "Jason Kenney Announces Fund For Gay Refugees"

Slap Upside the Head notes the pleasant news that the Conservative Party of Canada is trying to capture the GLBTQ vote.

Less than a day before the Canadian government was (expectedly) defeated in a vote of non-confidence, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced that $100,000 would be available to the Rainbow Refugee Committee, an organisation dedicated to assisting gay refugees.

Canada’s record is not good when it comes to accommodating refugees persecuted in their home countries simply for their sexual orientation. Many of these refugees are fleeing nations that imprison gay people—or worse, leaving very few avenues for escape other than through the refugee system.

Thursday’s announcement was a welcome surprise, but also a suspicious one. Jason Kenney has an atrocious record when it comes to recognizing the equal rights of GLBT citizens. Just last month, for example, he voted against a bill that would forbid discrimination in housing and employment for trans Canadians. He also repeatedly ignored pleas regarding individual gay refugee cases despite numerous concerns about the procedures that these refugee seekers have had to endure. It’s not unusual, for example, for adjudicators to require impossible proof that a refugee is gay, even though claimants had to hide such evidence at all costs in their home countries. It’s doubly unfortunate that claiming they’re gay as part of the refugee process also leaves them vulnerable to severe punishment should they be deported back home instead of accepted as a refugee.

The Rainbow Refugee Committee deserves the funding that was announced, and I hope they get it—no matter which party forms our next government. That said, a single token announcement doesn’t make up for Kenney’s past actions.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network

The cable channel of the subject line, launched in 1999 after nearly two decades' worth of discussion and planning to serve a core demographic of First Nations, got a big scoop when it broke the story of an apparently corrupt former senior advisor to Stephen Harper.

While other media have been digging into the story of Bruce Carson, the former senior advisor to Stephen Harper whose conduct regarding the promotion of water filtration systems to First Nations reserves has been referred to the RCMP for possible investigation, it was APTN that first broke the story.

They recently ran a one-hour special (h/t Red Tory) going in-depth recapping their investigation into Carson, which includes the revelation Carson's 22-year-old fiancée Michele McPherson, a former Ottawa-area escort known as Leanna VIP whom he bought an expensive home outside Ottawa with, had a contract with a company selling water filtration units earning her a percentage of gross sales of water units to First Nations reserves across Canada that would have potentially been worth as much as $80 million to McPherson. In question is whether Carson tried to open doors for his girlfriend's business with his connections to the Harper government, as the company was hoping to see Indian and Northern Affairs put up millions to fund the program.

You can see where the wheels come off in Carson's interview with APTN, when they begin to ask about his fiancée and begin to hint at knowledge of her past profession.

It further deteriorates when they hit him with an e-mail that shows he claimed to have spoken with the Prime Minister and gotten advance notice of Vancouver Island North MP John Duncan's appointment as Indian Affairs minister, promising Duncan's appointment to cabinet wouldn't impact their hopes of funding for the program and that him and Duncan are good friends.

As Marsha Lederman noted in the Globe and Mail this weekend past, APTN is fairly ambitious--a national network in the broadest sense.

Launched in 1999, APTN offers programming about first nations, Inuit and Métis, ranging from cartoons (Little Bear) to drama series (Blackstone) to news programming in English, French and several aboriginal languages. Most of the programming originates in Canada, but you’ll also find Hollywood films and Northern Exposure reruns – and a lot of infomercials.

With an annual budget of about $37-million (based on 2008 figures) APTN derives the bulk of its revenue from subscriber fees. That year, the federal Canadian Heritage department gave the network $2.1-million; advertising brought in about $2.5-million. APTN’s hiring policy favours aboriginal candidates, and more than three-quarters of the staff are native. [. . .]

On the news side of the operation, APTN airs APTN National News on weekdays; and on alternating Friday nights, the current-affairs programs APTN In Focus and APTN Investigates. Their mandate: focus on aboriginal issues, and also provide an aboriginal take on other news.

“Please don’t take offence,” [Paul Barnsley, executive producer of investigative news] said during an interview this week, “but the mainstream media doesn’t really spend a lot of time on aboriginal issues in-depth and doesn’t necessarily understand them that well.”

Since launching in 2000, APTN’s news operations have grown substantially, with 11 bureaus now across the country, each staffed, when at full complement, by a cameraperson, a video journalist and a reporter. They cover stories of interest to aboriginal viewers. Among them: funding issues, court proceedings, Assembly of First Nations activities, and protests.

APTN's problem is apparently that few people outside of the First Nations took it seriously.

Karyn Pugliese, 41, was with APTN for six years beginning with its news programming launch, and now hosts the current-affairs show @issue on iChannel. “One of the reasons that I had to leave APTN was that I was getting too emotional. There are certain stories that I have a hard time talking about without starting to cry because you go into communities and you see who are nice people. They have loving families and they’re living in conditions that are just intolerable.”

Pugliese knew people in those communities often spoke with her – sometimes about a taboo subject, against the wishes of others – in order to effect change. But she also knew her stories wouldn’t necessarily accomplish that.

“You sometimes see W5 or CBC break the story and then at the end of the day when they go for their Canadian Association of Journalists awards they can talk about how that made a big difference. You sit there and you watch over the years the amount of stories that APTN has broken, and the really quality work and quality journalism and facts, and follow the money. They put all this research and all this effort into it, but it doesn’t have the same impact.”

Whether or not the Carson affair will change this is another subject, although the growing size of Canada's First Nations population--especially but not only in western Canada--means that it will be increasingly difficult to ignore First Nations issues.

[LINK] "Somewhere east of Aachen"

A fascinating Language Log post by Mark Liberman linked to the article "Civil Warfare in the Streets" by Adam Goodheart in American Scholar. There, Goodheart describes how politically mobilized German immigrants in St. Louis, Missouri, often veterans of the 1848 revolutions in Germany, took up arms against the slaveholding elite of Missouri and won.

Throughout the winter and early spring of 1861, the Union revolutionaries who would soon fight the battle for Missouri were preparing for the war in hidden corners of the city. They drilled by night in beer halls, factories, and gymnasiums, barricading windows and spreading sawdust on floors to muffle the sound of their stomping boots. Young brewery workers and trolley drivers, middle-aged tavern keepers and wholesale merchants, were learning to bear arms. Most of the younger men handled the weapons awkwardly, but quite a few of the older ones swung them with ease, having been soldiers in another country long before. Sometimes, when their movements hit a perfect synchrony, when their muffled tread beat a single cadence, they threw caution aside and sang out. Just a few of the older men would begin, then more and more men joined in until dozens swelled the chorus, half singing, half shouting verses they had carried with them from across the sea:

Die wilde Jagd, und die Deutsche Jagd,
Auf Henkersblut und Tyrannen!
Drum, die ihr uns liebt, nicht geweint und geklagt;
Das Land ist ja frei, und der Morgen tagt,
Wenn wir’s auch nur sterbend gewannen!

(The wild hunt, the German hunt,
For hangmen’s blood and for tyrants!
O dearest ones, weep not for us:
The land is free, the morning dawns,
Even though we won it in dying!)

These men were part of a wave of German and other Central European immigrants that had poured into St. Louis over the previous couple of decades. By 1861, a visitor to many parts of the city might indeed have thought he was somewhere east of Aachen. “Here we hear the German tongue, or rather the German dialect, everywhere,” one Landsmann enthused. Certainly you would hear it in places like Tony Niederwiesser’s Tivoli beer garden on Third Street, where Sunday-afternoon regulars quaffed lager while Sauter’s or Vogel’s orchestra played waltzes and sentimental tunes from the old country. You would hear it in the St. Louis Opera House on Market Street, where the house company celebrated Friedrich Schiller’s centennial in 1859 by performing the master’s theatrical works for a solid week. You would hear it in the newspaper offices of the competing dailies Anzeiger des Westens and Westliche Post. You would even hear it in public-school classrooms, where the children of immigrants received instruction in the mother tongue.

Politically, too, the newcomers were a class apart. Many had fled the aftermath of the failed liberal revolutions that had swept across Europe in 1848. Among those whose exile brought them to Missouri was Franz Sigel, the daring military commander of insurgent forces in the Baden uprising—who, in his new homeland, became a teacher of German and a school superintendent. There was Isidor Bush, a Prague-born Jew and publisher of revolutionary tracts in Vienna, who settled down in St. Louis as a respected wine merchant, railroad executive, and city councilman—as well as, somewhat more discreetly, a leader of the local abolitionists. Most prominent among all the Achtundvierziger—the “Forty-Eighters,” as they styled themselves—was a colorful Austrian émigré named Heinrich Börnstein, who had been a soldier in the Imperial army, an actor, a director, and most notably, an editor. During a sojourn in Paris, he launched a weekly journal called Vorwärts!, which published antireligious screeds, poetry by Heinrich Heine, and some of the first “scientific socialist” writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In America he became Henry Boernstein, publisher of the influential Anzeiger des Westens. Though he may have cut a somewhat eccentric figure around town—with a pair of Mitteleuropean side-whiskers that would have put Emperor Franz Josef to shame—he was a political force to be reckoned with.

For such men, and even for their less radical compatriots, Missouri’s slaveholding class represented exactly what they had detested in the old country, exactly what they had wanted to escape: a swaggering clique of landed oligarchs. By contrast, the Germans prided themselves on being, as an Anzeiger editorial rather smugly put it, “filled with more intensive concepts of freedom, with more expansive notions of humanity, than most peoples of the earth”—more imbued with true democratic spirit, indeed more American than the Americans themselves. Such presumption did not endear them to longtime St. Louisans. The city’s leading Democratic newspaper excoriated the Forty-Eighters as infidels, anarchists, fanatics, socialists—“all Robespierres, Dantons, and Saint-Justs, red down to their very kidneys.” Clearly these Germans were godless, too: one need only walk downtown on a Sunday afternoon to see them drinking beer, dancing, and flocking to immoral plays in their theaters—flagrantly violating not just the commandments of God, but the city ordinances of St. Louis.

Liberman went on, in his annotations, to note that this speaks to the extent to which the German language in the United States has been marginalized.

I suppose that the burial of this fascinating and important piece of U.S. history is due to some combination of uneasiness about popular rebellion (even if this was an anti-rebellion rebellion, so to speak) and the waves of anti-German cultural erasure associated with the two world wars.

Against this background, it's relevant to review some of our past posts about German cultural and linguistic assimilation in America. Thus in 1751, Benjamin Franklin asked "Why should Pennsylvania … become a Colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion?" (More on this here and here.) A Nebraska state law making it a crime to teach German to children was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923. And in 2004, the NYT noted the passing of a woman whose ancestors had immigrated from East Friesland to rural Illinois in 1841, and who at the age of 100 spoke English only with a thick German accent, although she was born more than 60 years after her great-grandparents arrived the U.S.

The comments are filled with interesting discussions about the German heritage, revolutionary and cultural and more, in the United States. Go, read both.

[DM] "Post-colonialism and migration in Italy"

I've a post up where I point out that many of the immigrants coming to Italy are coming from Italy's old colonial periphery. What role does empire play in modern Italian policies and attitudes and the directions of migrants, I wonder.

Go, read.