Recycle Cycles is a volunteer-run bicycle repair shop, fixing donated bicycles for use by community members who normally couldn't afford a bike. It's a place you can learn by doing, and save the environment in the process. We also get involved in bicycle advocacy. To find out how to get involved, drop by the shop or contact Dean at 577-7753. RC is open to the public Saturday from 9 am to 12 noon, and is located at 19 Pearl St. North, in the Erskine Presbyterian Church (use the side door on Morden, ring the doorbell).

By now you've probably heard about genetically modified food. Advocates and opponents have been loud and proud about drawing their battle lines in the GM debate.

In the one corner weighing in at a hefty multi-billion in assets and resources are the federal government, Canada's universities and the biotech industry. In the opposite corner barely tipping the scales with a few thousand dollars, a couple of cool web sites, and some aging reusable coffee mugs is a ragtag coalition of 'special interest groups,' mainly environmental activists and other concerned citizens.

In case you missed the opening rounds, our opponents have been locked in a clinch for most of the fight. At issue is whether or not genetically modified foods should be labeled. GM opponents have come out swinging, pumped up by recent victories in Europe, and polls that suggest as many as 90% of Canadians are in favour of labeling. The biotech coalition has struck back by saying that labeling is unrealistic, confusing to the consumer, and logistically impossible. Many scientists have cheered on their employers saying that the public is ignorant on this issue and so skepticism is unfounded. Anti-GM has countered with the cry 'Consumers have the right to know!' and 'We should be using the precautionary principal.'

As the media referees and farmers sit at ringside judging, here we sit in the stands wondering if its safe to go to the snack-bar for a basket of genetically modified corn-chips. Well if you've ever had the misfortune of paying some of those outrageous concession stand prices, you know what all the hype is about. MONEY!

Let's be realistic. Companies like Monsanto are not the manifestation of evil incarnate, (although some arguments might be made to the contrary.) If biotech firms could make the perfect seed free of any negative environmental of health effects, they would. A better product is easier to sell. What Biotech companies are attempting to do is to seize ownership of something they could never own before: a seed, and life itself. Ownership means the industrialization of the last part of the agricultural food chain. Ownership means control of the world's food.

Statements like 'We need GM food to feed the starving poor of the world' smell worse than a badly managed compost pile. It is because ownership is being funneled into the hands of fewer and fewer people that the poor of developing nations are suffering. People don't own enough wealth to buy food. People don't own enough land to grow food. Countries don't own their debts and are forced to grow cash crops to pay them off. Now people are told they don't own the seeds they have used for generations because a multinational company has 'discovered' its genetic sequence and now owns the seed.

Will labeling solve any of these problems? Labeling will still allow GM food to be grown and shipped to and from developing nations. Labeling means GM crops can still cross breed with regular crops in an open environment. Labeling has the potential to create a new market of 'GE Free' products which would likely be sold to wealthier shoppers. And although the industry is against any mandatory labeling, they would rather argue 'labeling vs. no labeling' than 'food for all vs. food controlled by a few.'

When the biotech coalition entered the ring, they made the mistake of taunting the crowd. Now we are seeing biotech for what it really is and people are leaving the arena in droves. The supply of organic food cannot keep up with the demand, investors are wary and farmers are getting nervous. A giant NO GM GRAINS sign has been placed at the European border. A major blow has been struck by activists against the WTO, which has been economically punishing Europe for not accepting GM grain. What was thought to be inevitable has now turned into a massive backlash, not just against GM foods but against the industrial food system that has brought us to this point.

To whom it may concern:

Our names are Sue Markey and Andrew Loucks, and it is our pleasure to write to you in this New Year, the UNESCO Year for a Culture of Peace. I, Sue, am a teacher here in Hamilton; and I, Andrew, am a student at McMaster University. Over the past two years we have struggled along with others to bring to the attention of our fellow human beings the incredible suffering and devastation inflicted upon the people of Iraq. We make no secret of our attempt to touch your heart with this plea.

You may know that since August 6, 1990 Iraq has been subjected to some of the most comprehensive, economically restrictive sanctions ever imposed upon a nation state. You probably know that the US, Britain and other countries have bombarded Iraq repeatedly over the last decade, beginning with "Operation Desert Storm", the 9th anniversary of which occurred this January 17th. What we ask you to consider today is a painful reality, the reality that the storm has never let up. I, Sue travelled to Iraq in the summer of 1991. We ask you to take an imaginary journey to Iraq today...

Tears stream down the face of a young child outside a market, for he has dropped the sole egg his mother has sent him to purchase, the only egg the family can afford. A shopkeeper hurries out with a replacement, but this ease of pain is momentary in an economic siege that lasts over 9 years.*
You walk into the children's ward of a hospital just outside Baghdad and see a woman trying to feed her little girl sugar and water. She can't afford to buy infant formula at 35 dinars a can. It was 3 dinars before the war. Her face is gaunt and tired. As your eyes meet, her sadness and desperation becomes overwhelming.*
In a Baghdad hospital Ali poses proudly for a photo, holding high a picture of a plane dropping medicines rather than bombs. The picture was drawn by a child from Hamilton. Ali's father has sold his house and almost everything he has to pay for one year's worth of treatment for Ali's leukemia. The full treatment program is two years. Early on in his battle with cancer, Ali energetically follows you around the hospital, beaming all the way.*

What would it be like to have your child die in your arms of diarrhoea because a simple antibiotic was not available? What would you say to the woman who lives in a trailer next the Amiriya bomb shelter, now a shrine to the nine family members she lost and the more than 1000 killed there on February 13, 1991? What if instead of your unit of currency being worth 69 American cents it were worth 1 twentieth of an American cent? Could you live on inadequate rations for over 9 years? How would it feel when you had to water down your baby's formula, not knowing how clean the water was? How would our health system deal with a 90% budget cut? How would your community deal with a drastic increase in cancer? What would it be like to pull your children out of school in the afternoons to sell family heirlooms on the street? What would it be like to have your nation crumble under these conditions?

Unfortunately, the Government of Canada is totally committed to policies that maintain mass death and deprivation in Iraq. I, Sue, and I, Andrew feel this pursuit of genocidal policies cannot be allowed to continue, and so we call on you today - now - to take the necessary personal measures to address this issue.

Hear the cry of the Iraqi children, allow it to seep inside of you, then issue a cry of your own. May peace be upon you, and us all.

Sue Markey, Andrew Loucks

The profile of sports and athletics at McMaster has been heightened in the past few years through the efforts of a new marketing team in the Department of Recreation and Athletics. In the summer of 1998, three new marketing positions were created under the direction of Mary Keyes, vice-president of Student Affairs and chair of the President's Advisory Council on Athletics and Recreation, which oversees the athletics department at McMaster. Marketing and Advancement, Media and Promotions, and External Relations positions were created with the purpose of engaging larger numbers of students in the department's programming.

The goals of this team included increased participation in the Pulse and intramural sports, as well as increased attendance at varsity athletics events. According to Robert Hilson, head of Marketing and Advancement,

"McMaster is now on the cutting edge in Canada. It has the newest programming - we offer dance classes, powerpacing, tai chi... The Pulse, with 5500-6500 members, is open more hours than the library… It is the best facility with the best weight training equipment hands down in Canada… and our intramurals are one of the best if not THE best in Canada."

McMaster is on the cutting edge not only of athletics service provision, but also of athletics corporatization on Canadian campuses. Students groomed as a captive audience for corporate marketing campaigns have the potential to bring in big dollars for the Athletics Department and for the school as a whole. In an era of ever-increasing tuition fees, in which universities are reeling from the effects of massive budget cuts in post-secondary education, universities are looking more and more to the corporate sector as the logical solution to its budgetary concerns. According to Hilson, the goal is to become self-funding by following the 'NIKE model' of athletics departments at universities in the United States.

This NIKE model refers to 'huge football and basketball contracts which foster a kind of mob mentality… developing a cult for the image itself as opposed to just numbers exposure…." Athletics have been actively targeted by corporations on campuses in the States because of the powers they seem capable of wielding over the public imagination. Indeed, the religious dimension of sports is being explored in sports sociology textbooks with entire chapters devoted to such questions as "Sports and Religion: Is It a Promising Combination?"

According to one author, both sports and religion create strong collective emotions and celebrate selected group values through rituals and public events. This is precisely the kind of power which interests the marketing departments of huge corporations, who will always find the potential for emotional manipulation and the cultivation of religious feelings useful in their quest to develop new markets.

The introduction of corporate funding models at Canadian universities like McMaster is being facilitated through the cleavage between service and academic sectors. In The University Means Business (a book available through the OPIRG library in HH 210), Janet Newson and Howard Buchbinder describe the way in which labour market needs for bio-technology, micro-technology and computer-related developments were prioritized across the board by universities in the early 1980s, thus relegating athletics and other fields of study to the sidelines of the post-secondary educational agenda. The Bovey Report in 1983 further entrenched this market orientation, recommending a restructuring of the university system in Ontario based on university-market relationships. Elements of the academic 'core' were thus gradually redefined and reconstituted as 'services' to be offered for sale to student/customers.

Once the educational system is split into 'academic' and 'service' sectors, autonomy is generally understood to pertain to the academic realm, being considered less of a critical issue in relation to the optional and peripheral services which might be offered within the university institution. Corporate logos in the cafeterias, in the washrooms or on posters at the Pulse are accepted much more readily even by critical observers than the introduction of corporate funding into academic departments.

The potential benefits and the potential drawbacks of corporate money as a subsidy to student services can not be posed as starkly as the implications of corporate money within the academic sphere, precisely because the issues of academic integrity and autonomy are not as immediately apparent. This is especially true in the absence of an understanding of the historical context, within which it is possible to see how elements of the 'academic' realm have been carefully shifted into the 'service' realm in order to legitimize their corporatization in the first place, and our subsequent redefinition as customers rather than as students.

By splitting the athletics department from its academic cousin, the Kinesiology Department, in 1992, the administration at McMaster drew a clear line between what would be considered a service and what would be considered an academic department. This, in turn, laid the groundwork for corporatization of the athletics department on an unprecedented scale, inaugurating a model that will prove useful for the corporatization of athletics departments and other university departments across Canada. The need for corporatization in the Athletics Department at McMaster was ensured when Mary Keyes froze the student fees levied by the MSU to fund the athletics department, despite the fact that the MSU had been paying one of the lowest supplementary fees for athletics in the province.

The 'service sector' at McMaster now includes the bookstore, the cafeterias, and the athletics department, all of which are rapidly consolidating under the direction of the Athletics Department. For instance, while Titles Bookstore and Athletics used to have shirts made separately, according to Robert Hilton, they are now planning to get together to make purchases. The Maroons' mission to increase school pride at McMaster also works out well for the Athletics Department since school pride is exactly what is needed in order to boost attendance at varsity athletics events, creating the 'captive audience' needed to attract big corporate money onto campus. And with public relations representatives from NIKE making the rounds at Canadian universities in recent weeks, McMaster appears poised for the introduction of corporate contracts onto campus on an unprecedented scale.

For the anti-sweatshop movement, the question is what can we do about it? The drive to impose conditions on the corporatization process through the implementation of codes of conducts at universities is problematic, since we may, to some degree, be deflecting attention from the fact that our schools shouldn't be corporatized in the first place. There is, after all, a big difference between serving students and serving their money. It is possible, by asserting our power as 'consumers', that we might be further entrenching our identity as customers rather than as students, which might serve the corporate agenda to dismantle publicly funded post-secondary education very well.

Although the codes of conduct which have been passed at many schools in the U.S. in recent years and more recently at U of T may not be a final solution to the objectives of protecting publicly funded post secondary education and eradicating sweatshop conditions around the world, they do represent a decisive first step. To help us initiate a corporate code of conduct at McMaster, and to integrate this strategy with the fight to save publicly funded post-secondary education in Canada, we will draw on the experiences of our allies at U of T, whose code of conduct represents the first on any university campus in Canada. As a consumer AND as a student, have your voice heard!