The occupation of Wall Street is now in its third week. Thousands of people have worked and fought for it, have given it their time, their bodies, their ideas, their blood. People have used their bodies as shields, sent letters of solidarity, marched, slept out, donated, tweeted, and more. There are thousands more still who have not been with us, whether because of geographical reasons or because they are busy struggling elsewhere.

I have been involved, in some way, with the occupation on Wall Street since the first planning meeting a number of months ago, and I have been out there almost every day since the occupation actually began, though mostly keeping quiet and working on the sidelines – often critically. 

   The federal NDP is in deep trouble. They put all their eggs in one basket, and then Jack Layton was struck down by cancer. That is the problem with personality politics. Now they must choose a new leader, and there are no more Laytons around.
    In a recent piece in Prairie Dog/Planet S, John Conway argued that the NDP still has a chance to remain as the official opposition and perhaps build an alliance with the Liberals to defeat Stephen Harper in the next election. But to do so the party must allow the Quebec wing to play a leading role in this process. This will not be easy, given the historic hostility of the NDP to the Quebec sovereignty movement. http://www.planetsmag.com/story.php?id=575
    Murray Cooke has also concluded that the main impact that Layton had on the NDP was moving it more to the centre of Canadian politics, embracing the political agenda of neoliberalism. In this respect Layton followed the pattern set by the social democratic and labour parties in all of the advanced capitalist states. Layton’s political goal, of course, was to replace the Liberal Party as the formal opposition to Harper’s right wing government. As both Conway and Cooke point out, on the major issues of the day, the NDP platform in the May 2011 election was hardly different from that of the Liberal Party. http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/546.php#continue

In a national election on September 15, voters in Denmark chose to dump the conservative government and replace it with a left wing coalition government led by Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who will become Denmark’s first female prime minister. The Social Democratic Party led an electoral coalition which received 50.2% of the vote and won eight more seats than the conservative coalition. In a stark contrast to Canada, 87% of potential voters went to the polls.

But what is most astonishing is that the social democrats and their allies ran on a platform that made a strong pledge to implement a progressive income tax, with higher taxes on those in the upper income brackets. They also proposed a new tax on bank profits. Denmark has hit hard times, and the outgoing conservative government had implemented austerity programs. In contrast to all the other social democratic parties and governments across Europe, the new leftist coalition rejected these programs which fall hardest on the working class and the poor. Instead, they  promised to increase public spending. Ms. Thorning-Schmidt declared during the campaign that the contest was “between progressives and the bourgeoisie.”