1812 Remembered

As I said in my blog on Amb-ass-asdor Wilkins, without Canada the US wouldn't have the Star Spangled banner. Little did I know that my remarks would be aired on Fox TV.

Hey buddy before you go declaring Canada a Terrorist State or part of the Axis of Evil remember we got yer oil. And we whupped yer ass the last time ya invaded us. And we have been eating Laura Secord choclates ever since.

A tip o the blog to Scott Tribe for this.

1+1=2

Robert Novak the disgruntled Democrat turned Republican mouthpiece says that George Bush knows who Deep Throat is in the Plame affair. Novak and Karl Rove are old cronies, and their little trysts of dishing dirt go all the way back to leaks during George W campaign for Governor. Rove used Novak then for his dirty tricks campaigns too. So despite the red herring of 'another White House source' (which is like the guys on the grassy knoll) its a simple case of 1+1=2 .If Bush knows, and Novak knows it must be Karl Rove. Nes pas.

No One Believes You

Tory TV Ads Backfire

While the Liberal TV Ads were exposed by the NDP to be full of Liberals posing as ordinary Canadians.In the case of the Conservative Party TV ads to make Harper look, soft, human and reasonable, no one had to tell Canadians that the folks in the ads were Conservatives. And despite all his best efforts to look human, approachable, and of the people, no one was fooled by Harpers performance. He didn't win an Academy or a Gemini Award. The Canadian people have given him a Raspberry.


A survey of 1,350 undecided voters who saw the Tory television ads were asked last week to pass judgment. Fifty-nine per cent said the ads would have no impact on their vote. But 19 per cent said the spots made them more likely to vote Liberal, and nine per cent said the ads pushed them toward the NDP. In other words, more than a quarter said they were inclined to do the opposite of what the ads intended. Only 12 per cent said the ads made them more likely to vote for the party that actually paid for them, raising questions about whether the Tory campaign has backfired.

Singing We Won't Get Fooled Again, Canadians held their noses turned off the TV ads for Trust Me Tory and told the guy on the phone that well Harpers TV ads worked, they are definetly not voting for him now.

The same survey found that six per cent of 1,046 undecided voters who saw a Liberal television ad said it made them more likely to vote Tory, and eight per cent said it pushed them toward the NDP. Decima's chief pollster says it's unusual that a political party would get so much advertising bang from its rival's buck. "It's an unusual circumstance and obviously it's something the Conservatives would need to take a look at,'' said Bruce Anderson."There's more than anecdotal evidence . . . that the Conservative advertising doesn't seem to be all that effective. The numbers say it's not.''

Which begs the question, if the Party War Rooms believe this; Television the main medium for strategists How come the Liberals and Conservatives blew it? The winner in the TV Ad war, the NDP. They had a message, they had humour, and they didn't use party members as actors. Cause Canadians now have higher standards for our actors. And we have higher standards for TV production. The country that brings you CSI, NCSI, etc. should not have to put up with ads that look like the Friendly Giant or Mr. Dress up.

Mea Culpa 100,000 Deaths later

Well he finally admited it, he lied, and he led America into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's and thousands of Americans. He forced them to fight, with out supplies, without a break, with no national draft, with no kids of the rich in the War. He Lied! They Died!

But hey this is no Mea Culpa, this is No apology from the War President he is still defending the indefesible. But now we know, He Lied.




War Criminal

Bush: Iraq Invasion My Responsibility

President Bush said Wednesday the responsibility for invading Iraq based in part on faulty weapons intelligence rested solely with him, taking on the issue in his most direct and personal terms in the 1,000-plus days since the war's first shots."It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Bush said. "As president, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq."

War and the Market State

A tip o' the blog to bradspangler.com for drawing my attention to these articles.

Which led to inadvertent connections between two articles. Because again in the syncronistic universe that is the WWW, I was looking for his link to this, Counter-Economics: review of excellent book on smuggling and came across another article, which describes the actual nature of what folks mistakenly call globalization.

The creation of the new market states is the result of NAFTA, the EU, and other new evolving models of contractual corporate and state cooperation. They are the WTO, APEC , etcagreements and meetings that are occuring that have set in motion the evolution of the market state that Bobbitt speaks of below.

The War in the Balkans followed by the war in Afghanistan followed by the war in Iraq is not just the war of Empire and Imperialism but of private armies and private contractors, becoming in effect a state, since they provide privatized functions of the state as I have blogged about.See; War! What's it Good For? Profit

The attack on the Balkans was an attempt to end the last vestiges of State Capitalism and pound the Serbians into submissive acceptance of the privatization of the State through strategic bombing of industries.

It is the same with Iraq. It too was the last state capitalist country in the Middle East that had to be privatized. The other countries were less vulnerable since they are hierarchical societies that had opened their markets to capitalism, while remaining fuedalistic social constructs.

An interesting analysis of this concept of the War of the Market State can be found at Global Guerrillas which reviews this book;

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History

by Philip Bobbitt

" A new form of the State — the market state – is emerging from this relationship in much the same way that earlier forms since the 15th century have emerged, as a consequence of the sixth great epochal war in modern history.

The “market-state” is the latest constitutional order, one that is just emerging in a struggle for primacy with the dominant constitutional order of the 20th century, the nation-state. Whereas the nation-state based its legitimacy on a promise to better the material well-being of the nation, the market-state promises to maximize the opportunity of each individual citizen. The current conflict is one of several possible wars of the market-states as they seek to open up societies to trade in commerce, ideas, and immigration which excite hostility in those groups that want to use law to enforce religious or ethnic orthodoxy.

A state that privatizes most of its functions will inevitably defend itself by employing its own people as mercenaries-with equally profound strategic consequences. "

So if the exisiting nation states are using private armies, and further privatization due to the transformation of these new models of transnational corporate/state agreements creates the historic conditions for the development of market states then the current conflict called the War on Terror is a conflict between the black market states, such as Bin Laden Inc. against 'legitimate' transnational corporate states like Halliburton USA Inc.

In fact all of the current 'Stan states (Afghanistan, Kyhrigistan, etc.) which were once colonial outposts of the Soviet Union and were not fully developed state capitalist economies are now home to much of the black market. And while they are dictatorships still, they are ones that capitalism finds friendly, and able to do business with. But within these states exists another state, that is international in scope and is linked with organized crime, international intelligence agencies, terrorist networks, drug smugglers. etc. etc.

The way these black market states are funded is through what Libertarians call counter economics. Piracy by any other name. The very origins of the primitive accumulation of capital under fuedalism that gave rise to banking, trade and eventually full blown capitalism.

The Necessity of Gangster Capitalism: Primitive Accumulation in Russia and China

It is useful at this point to quote from the book review of Illicit from Global Guerrillas

Moises Naim, the editor of Foreign Policy Magazine, has an excellent new book called Illicit on the rise of global smuggling networks. It's a must read.

Globalization Melts the Map

Moises copiously documents how globalization and rampant interconnectivity has led to the rise of vast global smuggling networks. These networks live in the space between states. They are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere at the same time. He shows how these networks make money through an arbitrage of the differences between the legal systems (and a desire to prosecute) of our isolated islands of sovereignty. He also shows how their flagrant use of corruption can enable them to completely take over sections of otherwise functional states.

By all accounts the amount of money involved is immense. In aggregate, the networks that form this parallel "black" global supply chain, have a "GDP" of $1-3 trillion (some estimates are as high as 10% of the world's economy) and are growing seven times faster than legal trade. These networks supply the huge demand for:

• Drugs (both recreational and pharmaceutical).
• Undocumented workers (for corporations, home services, and the sex trade).
• Weapons (from small arms to RPGs, many come from cold war arsenals).
• Rip-offs of intellectual property (from digital content to brand named consumer goods).
• Laundered and unregulated financial flows.

This supply chain isn't run by the vertically integrated cartels and mafias of the last century (those hierarchies are too vulnerable, slow, and unresponsive to be competitive in the current environment). The new undifferentiated structures are highly decentralized, horizontal, and fluid. They specialize in cross border movement and therefore can handle all types of smuggling simultaneously. They are also very reliant on modern technologies to rapidly transport and coordinate their global operations.

I would also reccomend Robert Naylors Hot Money, though dated, from the 1970's, it was one of the first to talk about International Finance and the black market and its impact on the bank meltdowns like BCIC and the connection of the banking industry to the black markets and their involvement in the debt crisis in the developing world. It was published by Black Rose books. A new edition is out as well he has written another work along similar lines, critiquing international relations, crime and hot money, entitled the Wages of Crime.

Thus the War on Terror is a war on two fronts. One to smash and transform the last outposts of state capitalism in Europe and the Middle East, and a war on the unregulated market.

Global Guerrillas says; The similarity between these commercial networks and those of modern terrorism (my global guerrillas) is not incidental.

Nor is it incidental that the American Empire is sowing the seeds of its own self destruction, not only in expensive military operations that rack up thousands of corpses and trillions in deficits, but in the fact that like the British Empire before it in order to finance these wars, it too relies on the black market. The British Empire set itself up for decline as it persued its Opium Wars against China. The US set itself up in the 1980's providing stinger missles to the Mujahadin in Afghanistan who paid for them in opium money. Who transported them through smuggling routes, still with us today used by Bin Laden Inc.

And quoting Bobitt again;
The current conflict is one of several possible wars of the market-states as they seek to open up societies to trade in commerce, ideas, and immigration which excite hostility in those groups that want to use law to enforce religious or ethnic orthodoxy. States make war, not brigands; and the Al Qaeda network is a sort of virtual state, with a consistent source of finance, a recognized hierarchy of officials, foreign alliances, an army, published laws, even a rudimentary welfare system. It has declared war on the U.S. for much the same reason that Japan did in 1941: because we appear to frustrate its ambitions to regional hegemony.

Capitalism has outgrown the Nation State. It reguired it for its period of ascendency. Now that it is the real domination of everything , of all social relations it needs a new state, a market state. One that can continually destroy its overproductive capacities. As capitalism evolves better technonological production, increases productivity and reduces the need for real labour, it amasses capital, which becomes unproductive. It is here that the new market state can use this capital to create permanent war, small scale localized war, that does not threaten its global expansion, but allows it areas for wide scale destruction of productive capabilities to offset its cancerous growth.

If war is privatized and all state functions are privatized, then the individual is no longer identified as a citizen, or as a wage labourer, but as 'free' individual, a contractor in a market state. Capitalism will have evolved to its logical conlusion; that we remain wage slaves but no longer to a particular boss or business but to the market. Our alientation will be complete. And it will be a society of barbarism, of all against all.

Labour 'is and remains the presupposition' of capital (Marx, 1973, p. 399). Capital cannot liberate itself from labour; it depends on the imposition of necessary labour, the constituent side of surplus labour, upon the world's working classes. It has to posit necessary labour at the same time as which it has to reduce necessary labour to the utmost in order to increase surplus value. This reduction develops labour's productive power and, at the same time, the real possibility of the realm of freedom.

The circumstance that less and less socially necessary labour time is required to produce, for want of a better expression, the necessities of life, limits the realm of necessity and so allows the blossoming of what Marx characterised as the realm of freedom. Within capitalist society, this contradiction can be contained only through force (Gewalt), including not only the destruction of productive capacities, unemployment, worsening conditions, and widespread poverty, but also the destruction of human life through war, ecological disaster, famine, the burning of land, poisoning of water, devastation of communities, the production of babies for profit, the usage of the human body as a commodity to be exchange or operated on, the industrialisation of human production through cloning etc.

The existence of Man as a degraded, exploited, debased, forsaken and enslaved being, indicates that capitalist production is not production for humans - it is production through humans. In other words, the value form represents not just an abstraction from the real social individual. It is an abstraction that is 'true in practice' (cf. Marx, 1973, p. 105). The universal reduction of all specific human social practice to the one, some abstract form of labour, from the battlefield to the cloning laboratory, indicates that the separation which began with primitive accumulation appears now in the biotechnical determination to expropriate human beings. Capitalism has gone a long way. Indifferent to life, it 'was satisfied with nothing more than appropriating an excessive number of working hours' (Dalla Costa, 1995a, p. 21). It is now engaged in the production of human-workers.

The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Notes on Social Constitution

We Don't Blog Cause We Are Honest

A tip o the blog to Accidental Deliberation for this item

While some NDP candidates have blogs, the party opted against a general election blog, because it didn't want something that didn't look sincere, said party spokesman Brad Lavigne."The Web world is a particularly savvy one and I think visitors can smell bogus blogs a mile away," Mr. Lavigne said.

So what are you saying Brad that if you had someone blog it would be like the Conservatives Flog, that all political campaign blogs are flogs? Or that blogging is inherently dishonest. Just admit you screwed up and will get a blog soon. Better sooner than later. This is an even lamer excuse than your earlier comment.

"In the NDP camp, insider Brad Lavigne says blogs have had a minimal impact so far on leader Jack Layton's campaign. The top priority is to track the other leaders' daily campaigns and mainstream news coverage.'' Why Jack Doesn't Blog

Admit it you just didn't think of it, and now that everyone has one your brain trust in the War Room figures it's clever not to have one. Just admit it you screwed up.

Other NDP Stories

Bullies Who Us?

So both Don Newman and Mike Duffy had talking heads from American Think Tanks on their shows this afternoon, commenting on the lamentable breakdown in Canada US relations and U.S. Amb-ass-ador Wilkins comments. Both were right wing apologists, you can tell by how they dressed and by the insititutes they spoke for.

Newmans guest stated that he was surprised at Harpers sudden about face on the US after he had been handed a "creem puff on a silver platter by the Cato Insititute' editorial in the Washington Times. Yep Harper did a St. Peter and denied his lord.U.S. ambassador should stay out of election: Harper

Wilkins was directed to criticize Martin and Canada from no less than the Darth Vader of the Empire; Dick Cheney.

But the stupidest comment came from the commentator on Mike Duffy's show who claimed, and this is not the first time I have heard this, we were 'bullying' the U.S. Yep little old us, the polite Canadians, those mousy folks up north,with the less population than California, and No Guns. Bullies! Kicking the shins of Uncle Sam to get his attention obviously got his attention, and we are bullies. Yep guess we aren't going to be invited to the lighting of the White House Holiday Tree.

Michael Ignatieff the Gentle Imperialist

It's the syncronicity of cyberspace research. While researching on the internet for material for an article I come across something interesting, a quote, an article, a reference that pops out and while not directly related to what I may be writing I clip to use later. This is one of those.......

In the face of this attempt to extend what can only be called the American Empire, intellectuals and political figures are not only returning to the idea of imperialism, but also to the view of it propounded by its earlier nineteenth century proponents as constituting a grand civilizing mission. Comparisons of the United States to Imperial Rome and Imperial Britain are now common within the mainstream press. All that is needed to make it completely serviceable is to rid the concept of its old Marxist associations of economic hierarchy and exploitation—not to mention racism.

According to Michael Ignatieff, Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, writing in the New York Times Magazine (July 28, 2002), “[I]mperialism used to be the white man’s burden. This gave it a bad reputation. But imperialism doesn’t stop being necessary because it is politically incorrect.” In referring to U.S. war operations in Afghanistan he writes: “Yet the Special Forces aren’t social workers. They are an imperial detachment, advancing American power and interests in Central Asia. Call it peacekeeping or nation-building, call it what you like, imperial policing is what is going on in Mazar. In fact, Americaentire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism. This may come as a shock to Americans, who don’t like to think of their country as an empire. But what else can you call America’s legions of soldiers, spooks and Special Forces straddling the globe?” The Rediscovery of Imperialism by John Bellamy Foster

Also See Ignatieff

WTO Who Cares?

The WTO is meeting in its long anticipated Hong Kong round to talk about agribusiness subsidies. But despite the long anticipated meeting it is going nowhere. Nor can it. Despite the anti-WTO protests, despite last summers G8 meeting pledging Trade Not Aid, despite Bono and Geldoff, the very fabric of capitalism is the industrialization of agriculture, and this is the contradiction that belies this round of trade talks. Capitalism developed out of large scale farming production with the end of the commons in England.

Today the modern form of agribusiness destroys the family farm here in the industrialized world as much as it has declared war on subsistence farming in the developing world. The subsidies given out to Agribusiness are being equated with cooperatives and producer marketing boards. Hence the attack on the Canadian Wheat Board and the Quebec Dairy boards by Americans and by our own comprador farmers from the Reform/Alliance/Conservative party. And they are no more equivalent than the subsidies given to Agribusinesses that market bananas from Ecuador, like Dole, and the farm cooperatives that grow the bananas and are paid below market price by Dole.

Ever since the GATT Uruguay talks ended, more and more subsistence farming in the Third world and the newly Industrialized nations has been replaced by large scale export farming controlled by Agribusiness Giants like ADM,Cargill, Nestles, etc..

And where export products such as sugar, rice, soya, and dairy products, are in competition with the G8 they have no fair trade market. Even in their particular unique export markets such as bananas and cocoa and coffee, the internecine trade zones between the EU and the USA punitively punish these producing countries, and do not pay a fair price for their products.

Nor are the farmers encouraged to develop subsistence farming, some for export with varied crops for their own survival. When agribusiness gets involved, farmers in the developing world become wage slaves on large scale corporate plantations.

The village farming cooperatives are a real market alternative to rapacious capitalism and its agribusiness operations, but these folks are forgotten at the WTO. They have neither local representatives nor state representatives. Nor has the Libertarian movement taken up their cause with few exceptions such as those of us on the Libertarian Left; Kevin Carson, Larry Gambone, and the Knappster, voices in the wilderness on this issue.

Think of the power that these small villages would have if rich American Libertarians who have oodles of cash were to champion their cause. But it won't happen because they aren't really Libertarians, just Republican hanger ons, more interested in privatizing public services than supporting real free markets in the real world. Because these markets are run by cooperatives and collectives, which runs counter to their individualist consumerist ideology.

The WTO talks stalled again today, and will not get anywhere because the issue to agribusiness is not the issue of sustainable farming, but of transforming the world into its supermarket as ADM brags.

And until we have fair trade that promotes open markets to farmer cooperatives in the developing world, Africa in particular, we will continue to have to feed them, and fund them, as they suffer the famines of Imperialism.

The Free Market In Children

Forget the beer and popcorn, here is a real example the right of parents to choose whats best for their children. Here is the reality of having a free market where parents can choose and the nanny state doesn't exist. Here is an example of having no state regulations, no state enforcement, and real freedom of choice. I can hear the conservatives cheering until they choke on this.....

UN highlights children's plight

One in 13 children in the developing world have lost a parent, it said

Hundreds of millions of children suffer discrimination and exploitation but are invisible to the world, the UN agency for children says in its annual report.

It said new laws are required to ensure that births are officially registered, and it also urged governments to do more to stop "abuse and exploitation".

Trafficking risk

The report said nearly two million children had entered the sex trade, 5.7 million were sold into slavery and 1.2 million were trafficked each year

The report said over half of the births in the developing world - apart from China - are not registered, meaning they are not recognised as citizens.

Without registered identity, they are unable to receive education, decent health care and other services. If they do not officially exist, it also means traffickers can make them "disappear" without fear of retribution.

The State of the World's Children 2006: Excluded and Invisible said exploited children were often overlooked in public debate or news stories.

Yep you can say that again.