Sunday, 31 January 2010
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Olbermann: Freedom of speech has been destroyed
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Wednesday, 20 January 2010
Friday, 15 January 2010
Monday, 11 January 2010
Get back to work - noprorogue.ca
"Following Stephen Harper's cynical decision to suspend democracy for the second time in a year, an unprecedented backlash is building across Canada. On 23 January 2010, at demonstrations in over 30 communities from coast to coast to coast, Canadians will send an unmistakable message in defence of Parliament, pluralism, and our nation's proud democratic tradition."
Friday, 8 January 2010
Harper, "Naked self interest" - The Economist
Read the editorial: Harper goes prorogue - The Economist
.
And while your at it read this one too: Halted in mid-debate - The Economist
"Parliamentary scrutiny may be tedious, but democracies cannot afford to dispense with it."
Thursday, 7 January 2010
Tuesday, 5 January 2010
The idiot empire: by Murray Dobbin
Reproduced below, and linked here is a brand new column from Murray Dobbin's blog. One of the best I've read in a long time. It needs no explanation. The idiot empire
Posted on January 4, 2010 by murraydobbin
What happens when an empire is run by people who have a visceral contempt for government and all it stands for? You have an empire that will ultimately fail and collapse because whatever else you might leave to “market forces” administering a global empire and protecting the motherland from attack is not something you want to leave beholden to the profit motive.
We have become so accustomed to the US being a clumsy and inept giant that it’s frighteningly stupid responses to crises (most of its own making) don’t even warrant comment any more. Only if the catastrophe is on the scale of Katrina do people notice. Take the response to the Nigerian who nearly blew a plane out of the sky – an operation effective in its planning but fortunately not in its execution.
The system should have worked and the US had extraordinary luck in being informed by the man’s father that he was becoming increasingly – perhaps dangerously – radical in his Islamic beliefs. Other intelligence told the CIA and the National Security Agency that a Nigerian was being trained in Yemen to attack an airplane.
Yet the most powerful, well resourced, empire in the history of the world still could not prevent the attempted attack. What on earth has to happen for the system to work? The source of the failure was apparently territorial jealousy at the agencies which declined to share the information with other critical players in the anti-terror security network. This lack of co-operation is taken as normal but from any reasonable assessment it is as if the whole intelligence community consists of miscreant teenage boys too addled by testosterone to take even minimally mature decisions to save their own country.
But even that idiocy pales in comparison to the response to the attempted bombing. A massive “security” effort after the fact which caused, and continues to cause, chaos in air travel without any evidence that flying is safer. The terrorists didn’t manage to kill anyone but they must be delighted at the hundreds of millions in damage to the economies of the West they have caused.
The defensive reaction – pat downs of mothers and their children from Peoria to Podunk – would be humiliating to any self-respecting nation. But the US is not a self-respecting nation – it is free market loony-bin – a private capital free-for-all encouraged and facilitated by a terminally corrupt government made dysfunctional by corporate money.
The edict that no one can now go to the bathroom in the last hour of a flight was breathtaking in its stupidity – as it was apparently based on the fact that the terrorist tried to detonate his device in the last hour of his flight. Can this be happening? Will they ban bathroom trips in the first hour of flights if the next terrorist tries in the first hour? Do they think that blowing up a plane in the last hour is a tenet of Islam?
Did the US government and its seventeen (!) intelligence agencies not have somewhere in its hundreds of possible attack scenarios that someone would try exactly what Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried? Did they decide it was, what? Unlikely? Too expensive to guard against? The mind boggles.
Except that this is exactly what we should expect from a country whose elites consist of people becoming obscenely wealthy while 25% of their country’s children survive on food stamps, or the pols and their hangers-on who see being elected to government as nothing more than an opportunity to receive bribes from corporations.
It’s just one small part of the failed security apparatus (price: $75 billion a year) but it is telling: the last line of defence against a terror attack on planes in the US is carried out by airport security people being paid minimum wage working for private firms ever-obsessed with the bottom line. They are untrained, unmotivated, unorganized and the turnover is what you would expect of such unrewarding jobs. That is how serious the US is about fighting terrorism.
Hendrik Hertzberg writing in the New Yorker a few years back put it best: “when the ameliorative functions of government are held in contempt, then a single thread ties together upper-income tax cuts, the dismantling of environmental and safety protections, the shredding of the social safety net, the peopling of regulatory agencies with cronies hostile to their purposes, and, finally, outright corruption. If government is seen as a whore, why not treat her like one? All that remains is to fleece the johns and divide the take.”
When the US Empire finally enters its death throes this quote would be a suitable inscription to place on its grave stone.
Monday, 4 January 2010
Top CEOs still raking it in: CCPA
The national office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released it's new analysis of CEO compensation in Canada today:"National Office Update
Projects & Initiatives: Growing Gap
January 4, 2010
Canadians may have been hit hard by a worldwide economic recession, but it appears Canada’s 100 highest paid CEOs are enjoying a soft landing.
Hugh Mackenzie's latest report on executive compensation shows the total average compensation for Canada's 100 highest paid CEOs was $7,352,895 in 2008—a stark contrast from the total average Canadian income of $42,305. They pocketed what takes Canadians earning an average income an entire year to make by 1:01 pm January 4—the first working day of the year.
Click here to read more and download the full report. Click here to use our CEO pay calculator to find out how quickly a top CEO will earn your salary."
Saturday, 2 January 2010
Tommy Douglas on Fascism
Tommy Douglas on Fascism: “Once more let me remind you what fascism is. It need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt -- it may even wear a dress shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."
Tuesday, 29 December 2009
Olbermann destroys Limbaugh once and for all - game over!
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Monday, 28 December 2009
Could Canadian officials be charged with war crimes?
Check out the article over on the Embassy Newspaper/Hill Times website entitled: Could Canadians be charged with war crimes? It's from the December 16, 2009 print edition of Canada's influential foreign policy newspaper.The article, written by Jeff Davis, raises some very serious questions about the role of Canadian officials in potential violations of the Geneva Convention related to Afghan detainee torture. The article is excerpted below:
"With the government refusing to start a public inquiry and the International Criminal Court having launched a "preliminary" investigation into the Afghan detainee issue, law experts say there is a very real chance Canadian officials could be charged with war crimes.
Until last week, the government and senior officials had been saying they had no credible reports that people detained by the Canadian Forces and transferred to Afghan authorities were being tortured.
While Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Walter Natynczyk revealed on Dec. 9 that such torture had, in fact, occurred in the past, government ministers say they were not aware of the reports. Further, they have not acknowledged they heard the widespread reports that Afghan authorities were abusing detainees." Continue reading full article .....
Wednesday, 23 December 2009
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Monday, 14 December 2009
CLAC promotes slashing minimum wage for young workers; Wall gov’t hiding Bill 80 information from public
The best investigative writer/journalist in the province, citizen blogger Joe Kuchta, has just posted a new article over on the Owls and Roosters blog entitled: Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC) promotes slashing minimum wage for young adults; Wall gov’t hiding Bill 80 information from public.In signature comprehensive Kuchta style, the posting exposes the love affair between the Sask. Party government, a number of ultra extreme anti-union business groups, Wall's/Norris's anti-worker legislative agenda, government secrecy, growing Saskatchewan poverty and CLAC.
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Saturday, 5 December 2009
Olbermann: Companies betting on employees' lives
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
The Story of Cap and Trade
"The Story of Cap & Trade is a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution being discussed at Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill. Host Annie Leonard introduces the energy traders and Wall Street financiers at the heart of this scheme and reveals the "devils in the details" in current cap and trade proposals: free permits to big polluters, fake offsets and distraction from whats really required to tackle the climate crisis. If youve heard about Cap & Trade, but arent sure how it works (or who benefits), this is the film is for you."
Friday, 4 December 2009
SFL Marks 20th Anniversary of the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women
News Release
For immediate release December 4th, 2009
SFL Marks 20th Anniversary of the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women
Saskatchewan's labour central will commemorate the victims of the 1989 Ēcole Polytechnique massacre this December 6th, alongside workers and citizens across the country.
"Saskatchewan’s labour movement stands in solidarity with the “20 Days, 20 Ways” campaign of the Canadian Labour Congress. It begins with honouring the memories of the 14 women who were murdered that day, for the expressed reason that they were women. Violence continues to affect shocking numbers of women. Far too many of our daughters, wives, mothers, sisters, and partners live in fear and pain because collectively we have not solved the problem of the hatred of women,” says Mary-Beth Hollis, chair of the SFL Women’s Committee.
“The trade union movement believes that one key way to solve the problem of violence against women is to push our governments to promote and support women and their struggle for equality. This December 6th we are pressing the Harper government to promote and advance women’s equality, rather than continuing their agenda of diminishing it,” says Larry Hubich, SFL President.
The campaign highlights the need for a comprehensive social and economic program that includes:
- maintaining the long gun registry, which has reduced gun-related spousal homicides by 50% since it was started;
- access to affordable, safe housing;
- a living minimum wage;
- effective pay equity laws;
- a national publicly-funded child care programme;
- equal access to Employment Insurance;
- access to justice, including the resources to challenge discriminatory government action and legal aid;
- increased governmental support for women’s centres, rape crisis centres and women’s shelters;
- legal protection and support for women who report sexual assault.
Workers are mailing postcards on these issues every day, for 20 days, directly to the Prime Minister.
The SFL also invites Saskatchewan citizens to attend a vigil outside Member of Parliament Ray Boughen’s office, at #210 – 2631, 28th Ave. Regina, on Sunday December 6th at 4:00 p.m. (see attached poster)
“We will be sending a message to stop Federal Bill C-391 which proposes to end the registry of long guns. Let’s send a message to our government that the gun registry helps save women’s lives and should not be dismantled,” says Hollis.
The SFL represents 95,000 unionized workers from 37 affiliated unions in Saskatchewan.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)