COURT ORDERED EXPLUSION A TWISTED ASSET GRAB

[proudtobeadp]

One of the most strange asset grabs in history was carried out in Winnipeg by Manitoba judiciary (court judges) in the middle of March against a disabled couple, their daughter a single parent and their son a Masters of Social Work student throwing them into the street during one of the weeks of cold weather seen of the past winter.

In the court decision carried out purposely with the exclusion of the disabled couple from proceedings in court in mind the court gave the couple one week to vacate their home valued at $221,000. The court sold the property for $170,000 or some $50,000 below market level. Ordered the couples mortgage payable to Cambrian credit union for $60,000 be paid off. Ordered their business loan of $47,000 from TD-Canada Trust paid off and then ordered the lawyers firm of Thompson Dorfman Sweatman who are not the couple's legal firm to do all this and absorb the proceeds for themselves which in effect the court gave TDS over $100,000 in equity to do with what ever they wanted with some residuals if any to be given to the couple representing the extended family that was put into the street.

One un-named Winnipeg lawyer examining the situation said he in his 33 years of practice had never seen anything as "dirty" as this in all this practicing life as a lawyer and former prosecuting crown attourney! What possibly could a disabled couple have done that would cause such a dirty asset grab and toss into the street by a court bent on such destruction? At the start of that answer lies an irrefutable connection to the workings and machinations of Manitoba's odious, Workers Compensation Board of Manitoba wanting to turn these this couple of which only one was a former claimant into "vulnerable people" under Manitoba's "Vulnerable Persons Act of Manitoba". Clearly it was seen though within the week alloted by the court for the couple to vacate the house and turn over the keys that as so-called vulnerable people they successfully organized their move, took their remaining assets with them vowing to expose the vicious process that did this to them.

More on this unfolding story upcoming! Just where was the local media and main stream press in all this?

[proudtobeadp]

Manitoba is a hotbed of "Structural Oppression. Manitoba sociologists are seeing this emerging Manitoba case this way.

The Facebook group has grown to some 700 participants looking at this very case that are now all wondering out loud as to "how can this be happening in Manitoba" in a supposedly civilized and democratic society?

"Just What is "Structural Oppression"? Why is it happening in Manitoba and to whom? Some thoughts that come from both sides of the border.

Structural Oppression is the experience of repeated, widespread, systemic injustice. It need not be extreme and involve the legal system (as in slavery, apartheid, or the lack of right to vote) nor violent (as in tyrannical societies). Harvey has used the term "civilized oppression" to characterize the everyday processes of oppression in normal life. Civilized oppression "is embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutions and rules, and the collective consequences of following those rules. It refers to the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions which are supported by the media and cultural stereotypes as well as by the structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms."

We cannot eliminate this structural oppression by getting rid of the rulers or by making some new laws, because oppressions are systematically reproduced in the major economic, political and cultural institutions. While specific privileged groups are the beneficiaries of the oppression of other groups, and thus have an interest in the continuation of the status quo, they do not typically understand themselves to be agents of oppression.

Add this view to the workings of society in Manitoba.

“Normal” racisms, in our day and age, have various dimensions. According to most observers they can be separated into two species: personal prejudice and structural oppression.

Personal prejudice is easy enough for everyone to pick up on, as it’s the most open and explicit form the cancer takes. From jokes and stereotypes which degrade, pigeonhole or simply make ludicrous this ethnic group or the other, to angry klansmen vowing to “kill the mud people,” you figure you’ll know it when you see it.

Structural oppression is a more sophisticated thing, and in the age of Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice it’s granted a degree of camouflage. Not enough to make it invisible, but enough so that if you really don’t want to see it you can pretend you don’t. Plausible deniability. But you really have to have some gall to pretend – i mean, just look at Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans: that was not (for the most part) “personal prejudice,” that was structural racism. That is why lobotomized commentators on CNN had so much trouble with the deal about “Is it because they’re Black or is it because they’re poor?”

Even without Katrina, the economic symptoms of structural racism in the USA are obvious – a Black unemployment rate twice that of whites, a Black poverty rate three times as high, and a median Black family income $17,000 less per year than for the vaunted whites – never mind the fact that this 12% of the U.S. population accounts for 48% of the prison population and 42% of those living on death row.

The mechanisms of structural oppression can exist in the complete absence of personal prejudice, that’s what it means to say that this setup is structural. It is a system of social stratification which reproduces itself from one day to the next, and will continue to do so as long as nobody figures out how to short-circuit it. In fact, for many middle and upper class people, the absence of personal prejudice merely serves of obfuscate structural oppression, to confuse the issue and allow con-artists to look you in the eye and swear they’re not racist, so you have nothing to complain about.

Structural racism and personal prejudice are both serious problems. While the former may have a higher body count, and may in some ways be responsible for the latter, they are both worth struggling against. I say this in disagreement with those of my comrades who feel all energies must be used against structural racism, and in equal disagreement with those right-wing anti-racists who feel the problem begins and ends with personal attitudes.

Finally, I would like to suggest that there is also a third, often-overlooked, strain of racism. Potentially separate from personal feelings, and independent from actual social structure, i refer to this third strain as “ideological racism.”

Unlike structural racism and personal prejudice, ideological racism is not very visible today, though it has deep roots within mainstream science and history, and is often fueled by personal animus.

Ideological racism is most significant in terms of the revolutionary right, for it is their banner. Clearly, the role of racism in groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Church of the Creator and their ilk, goes far beyond personal prejudice, regardless of what may motivate their freshest recruits. A look at their literature shows that racism serves a similar purpose for these groups as patriarchy does for the women’s movement and class does for classical Marxism. It may, amongst other things, motivate personal prejudice and (to the degree that their political activities bear fruit) it may lead to heightened structural oppression, but its true value for these movements is that it serves as a guide to all of human history, a philosophical blueprint for how people should treat each other, for sexual relations and musical tastes and religious beliefs. It is their principle contradiction, the mental glue that holds their movement together, the theoretical underpinning of their worldview. Thus, debates within these circles as to whether to worship Jesus Christ the Christian or Odin and Thor of Norse mythology, whether to tolerate or eradicate homosexuals, to support global U.S. hegemony or oppose it, and so on ad nauseum, refer to the mythologies of race as the basis for each position.

This is not to say that racial “facts” determine the course of the radical right; the advantage to letting a pseudoscience guide one’s movement is that even more so that the Bible, Talmud or Koran, everything can be interpreted any way you want. I would argue that class interests, a patriarchal agenda and personal prejudice determine the political trajectory of the revolutionary right, but to try and understand this without appreciating the role of racist ideology is to willfully ignore the matrix within which these factors are played out; it would be much like trying to explain the Iraqi Resistance or the Vatican without any reference to Islam or Roman Catholicism.

Ideological racism is almost a litmus test to see who would surpass the limits of what Canadian sociologist Stanley Barrett termed the fringe right, passing into what he called the “radical right.” (i prefer the term “revolutionary right”: these people definitely want a revolution, but i don’t feel they are very radical at all.) Even when it is not essential to a group, it often serves as a reliable marker of how “radical” a revolutionary right-wing organization is.

I point this out because a few years back i was involved in a very acrimonious dispute with some folks, a dispute that led me (slowly) to think this out. At the time, i was told that if a form of racism did not exist as structural racism, then it did not really exist. Structural racism – i.e. the embedding of racist dynamics within the economy or State – was to be the defining characteristic of all racism, and (logically) the limit to our anti-racism.

I would argue that ideological racism carries the seeds of structural racism and personal prejudice. To the degree that the revolutionary right fails, then these seeds won’t grow, and as unrealized potential will amount to nothing. But to the degree that the revolutionary right succeeds, these seeds will grow into new mechanisms of racist oppression. So ideological racism is a threat. Not simply because some ****-up who has just finished reading propaganda from the National Socialist Movement may be dangerous if you bump into them in a dark alley, but more importantly because it has the potential to create new mechanisms of racist oppression.

To sum up, i would argue that ideological racism also constitutes an aspect of contemporary racism, and as such it underlines the need for an anti-racism without limits.