Scabs Cause Olympic Cost Overruns

Yep the private sector construction companies and their pals in the Olympic Organizing Committee in their usual Anti-Union enthusiasim for contracting out screwed taxpayers out of millions and probably by the end of it billions since they refused to bargain with the Construction Unions in B.C. They would rather do it their way, cause guess whose gonna pay....you and me. See the bosses like team work only when its on their terms. And so far their non-union labour has NOT been cheaper.

Olympic overrun could have been avoided: unions

B.C.'s construction unions say part of the $110-million Olympic cost overrun could have been avoided if the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) had made them partners in the project. B.C. and Yukon Building and Construction Trades Council spokesperson Wayne Peppard says the 2000 Olympics in Sydney showed how Olympic organizers, labour and industry could work together.

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CIA Secret Flights in Canada

It is being reported that the CIA has been using Canada for a base for its secret rendering flights.

What is interesting in this news report is this:

Records indicate aircraft allegedly controlled by the CIA continue to use Canadian airports amid unanswered questions about their activities.

Last fall, the Bloc Quebecois pressed the federal government to reveal details of the flights, concerned U.S. intelligence may be ferrying terrorist suspects through Canada to countries where they could be tortured.

The Public Safety Department said last month a federal review of landings by alleged CIA planes at Canadian airports found no evidence of "illegal activities."

Nope its perfectly legal for them to fly here as private aircraft on business. Clever folks in the PSD eh, not denying the CIA is using Canada, just that they aren't doing anything illegal, oh like running drugs for guns for hostages......


Other Stories on the CIA: Irans Nuclear Program Is A CIA Oops


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Team Work

As I have said here before;Socialized Medicine Began In Alberta we need to put doctors on salary, reduce the restrictions of grade point averages and the guild like control that universities and the CMA has over who qualifies for medical education, and look at creating medical services that are community owned and operated.

It appears I am not alone in believing this is the real reform we need to apply to healthcare in Canada. Of course this report doesn't quite go that far but it's a beginning.

Joint health-care training applauded by watchdog
Thu, February 9, 2006
Michael Decter will give a public speech tomorrow at the University of Western Ontario.
By JOHN MINER, FREE PRESS REPORTER

Providing separate training for different health-care professions makes as much sense as providing separate training for members of a hockey team, the chairperson of the Health Council of Canada said yesterday.

Praising the University of Western Ontario for starting to train different professions together, Michael Decter said it is important to build teamwork from the start.

"If you are going to train a hockey team by having a school for defencemen in one city and a school for goalies in another and a school for forwards in another, you wouldn't expect them to play as a team when you put them together," he said.

"Similarly, if we train doctors and nurses and pharmacists and physiotherapists all separately and don't involve them in any kind of teamwork through their training, then it shouldn't be surprising that they find it hard when they get out into the real world to form up into teams to practice."


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Say It Ain't So

I am stunned, shocked, why how can this be..... Provinces break health promises: report That's what you get when you give the provinces money with No Strings Attached.

OTTAWA -- Provincial and territorial governments are not keeping their promise to account for billions in health funding allocated by the former Liberal government, says the Health Council of Canada.

The federal government gave provinces $36 billion over five years in the 2003 first ministers' accord, and another $41 billion over 10 years in 2004, on condition that the money be spent on specific areas.

But it's not clear where the money is going, says the council, created to monitor implementation of the first ministers' accords.

"Information about how federal transfers are spent by provinces and territories is not easily accessible and some cases is not available at all. Most jurisdictions are not living up to their commitment to provide annual public reports."

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Make Friends and Kill Yourself

Reuters is reporting that internet suicide rates are up in Japan. That is folks meeting on the net to plan collective sappuku. It's a unique Japanese phenomena.

While in the West folks hide away in their rooms, by themselves, alienated from the world around them only to die alone leaving their notes on the internet. Now some commentators thought I was being harsh in my comments on this particular case, of the AI genius who commited suicide, because I failed to understand him or read his work.

But the point I was making is that he was his project. He had stepped into the abyss. All that we do is a process of self realization, one side is enlightenment the other is madness. The same goes for the technogeeks in society. They already are maladjusted in mass society, alienated individuals, being nerds and geeks, their best friend is their program or their computer. Thus they already have the tendency towards the dark side.

It's the darkside of the web, and the dark side of our culture which denies public access to information on the epidemic of suicide. As the pressures of capitalism deforms our culture it also deforms our psyches. The pace of society, the demands of work and consumerism, the social conformity demanded of us are greater than any other time in human culture. Capitalism dehumanizes us and in its twisted version of individualism we are reduced to being alone, alienated.

We lack authentic relationships, love and solidarity, as Eric Fromm points out in this essay from 1959. Love in America

Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, and experiences his life forces as an investment that must bring him the maximum profit under existing market conditions.

Man bows down and submits to the demands of his own work, his machines, his organization of production and consumption, and loses the experience of himself as creator and subject of his truly human powers of love and thought. Thus human relations become more and more those of alienated automatons.

But automatons cannot love. They can exchange their „personality
packages“ and hope for a fair bargain. Love becomes the refuge for a
„team“ from an otherwise unbearable sense of aloneness. One forms an alliance
against the world as this „egoisme a deux“ is mistaken for love and intimacy.

Industrialization has provided leisure for entertainment, mass communications
media have made it continuously available, and our consumption-oriented
economy urges us to imbibe as much of it as possible. Turn where we will our
senses are assailed by hundreds of competing forms of amusement.
The tendency of mass entertainment, especially the movies, to exalt romantic
love at the expense of other kinds has already been noted. Its other effects on
love include the following:

(a) As financial considerations require that most
entertainment programs attract the largest possible numbers, they demand very little
of their audiences. This means that they contribute to human passivity; little more
is required than to sit and absorb. But if love is an activity, as we have insisted, it
is poorly served by inducements to become, as persons, more passive.

(b) The continuous entertainment which mass media offer us has turned what is inherently the most intimate of all human relationships into the most public and ubiquitous. Never before have so many people been wooed in such public fashion.
Sentiments which were formerly regarded as deep, personal exchanges between
two loving human beings are now common promises in the wind. „I love you“ is a
pledge by a disembodied voice to an anonymous mass. It is difficult to see how
this process can continue without undercutting some of the power of love’s language.

(c) When people spend their time together, not in coming to know one
another better as individuals, but in attending to something unrelated to anyone
in the group, neither friendship nor love is advanced. In this sense, it is one of the
ironies of our culture that the entertainment designed to bring people together
actually keeps them apart.

The phrase „mass culture“ has come to suggest a number of features of
modern society which work against the individual’s uniqueness,
depth of personal feeling, and self-identity.

Cities are crowded, work is specialized, and people are mobile, all of which
means that we encounter more persons but know and are known less
thoroughly by each. We are part of the busman’s „load,“ a proprietor’s
„customers,“ a manager’s „personnel.“ Vast, centralized enterprises with
radical divisions of labor inhibit workers’ individuality and reduce them
to the status ofr eplaceable cogs.

Government, business, and labor unions are all so big as to
make us feel impotent. Alienated from ourselves, from our fellow-men and from
nature, we try to escape from our loneliness, insignificance and insecurity by
identifying ourselves with others through conformity. We dress like them, behave
like them, and hold the same opinions, only to discover that
uniformity is noguarantor of true unity.

Huddled in togetherness we remain alone. Significant human relationships are a function of lives that are confidently rooted in the individuality that mass culture renders difficult.

Mind & Body, Alfred Adler, 1931

Character and the Social Process, Eric Fromm, 1942

One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse, 1964

The Politics of Experience, R. D. Laing, 1967

Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967


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Stats

Of the several stat counters I use on this blog this is best one I have found to date for tracking data. And it's free. If you are concerned about others seeing your stats,some bloggers are now promoting the idea of privacy that is your visit to their site is not publicly available, then you can make it private. This is one damn fine piece of tracking software.

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Da Death of De Hip Hoppy

Found these two interesting articles deconstructing Hip Hop music culture. Once again those who beleive that culture or the counter culture is revolutionary miss the point. Culture is political, and it is the dialectical creator of capitalism and its creature, it always reflects the values of capitalism. P. Diddy is a good example of this. Even the counter culture can only exist within the confines of commodity production. Its the war of the brands; Che versus Coca Cola.

David Drake's The Death of Hip-Hop

Krisna Best - A Reply to David Drake's Opinion on the Topic of the Death of Hip-Hop

Drake attempts to show from the outset that capitalism and hip-hop are and have always been joined at the hip. Hip-hop is a cultural superstructure that exists in motion with the ideas and institutions of capital. A case could be made for each, and often individuals fall on one side of the spectrum that either hip-hop is "capitalist" (which is not even grammatically correct, let alone theoretically) or it exists in opposition to capitalism. Any responsible and dialectical approach would show that hip-hop is indeed an offspring of people of color and poor folks living under capitalism, but that within hip-hop a mass of contradictory ideas exist which are pushing it forward.

See:

Hip Hop Gun Culture

Gangsta Hip Hop

Blame 50 Cents


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Free Labour

One of the criticism's of globalization has been that it restricts economic liberty of workers, their ability to move freely across borders for work, while allowing capital free access to all markets.

The EU has finally recognized this problem.

"A free movement of workers is economically rational. It is one of the values that is defined by the European treaties," Spidla said.

However their solution will only apply to legal migration while the multitude is sans papier, those who are illegal. The core of capitalisms underground economy in Europe and North America for that matter. The source of racism in Europe and the rebirth of fascism, as religious fundamentalism and as white power. Dual aspects of the problem of undocumented workers migrating into the capitals of capitalism.

Black market risk
On the other hand, labour restrictions in some countries may have encouraged an "exceptionally high influx of posted workers or workers claiming to be self-employed" from the east, the document indicates.

It also stressed "restrictions on labour market access may exacerbate resort to undeclared work," which could be undesirable for both undeclared and regulated workers.

Migrants from central and eastern Europe did not "crowd out national workers," according to the report, and filled up vacancies in hotels, restarurants, transport and mainly in the construction sector where their number is double that of EU15 employees.

Also, the commission points out that fears expressed in the UK about possible expoitation of social benefits by Poles or Lithuanians have also not materialised, as there have been only about 45 cases of benefit claims in Britain, out of 200,000 registered workers.

East Europeans are traditionally less mobile and generally unwilling to travel too far in search of a job, a legacy of 40 years of state planning that discouraged free movement of labor in the former Soviet satellite countries. The exception is Poland, where private entrepreneurship, although often illegal, existed even under communism and where workers are used to resettling to find a job.

This is the real fear in the EU of not only now being swamped with migrant workers from the South but cheap labour from Poland. Currently underwaged non union construction workers are being imported to work in France, Germany etc. competing with unionized construction workers. This is one of the reasons that there was both right and left unity last year in opposing the EU constitution which saw a liberalization of the economy to allow for greater privatization and contracting out pitting worker against worker.

It is not the Eastern European workers that is the real concern in Europe. It is the African and Turkish guest workers, and migrant labour that Europe has relied upon for years that has created the conditions for racist exploitation that goes unheeded until it erupts into riots as we saw last year in France.

Germany, Austria and France, where fears of migrant workers taking over jobs run high, are likely to use the entire transitional period until 2011, despite objections by the commission.

And yet these are the very countries that relied on Turkish, Albanian and Yugoslavian Guestwokers in the seventies to grow their economies. In the latter case the Yugoslavian economy relied on exporting workers rather than commodities for its economic stability.

After thirty years it ended with the crisis of unification of Germany and the influx into the German economy of unemployed, underemployed East Germans. In effect creating an economic crisis in the Yugoslavian republics, that eventually led to the devastating internecine warfare. The political recognition of Slovenia and Croatia by the powerful German state, flexing its geopolitical muscles also contributed to the Balkan crisis of the ninties.

In the case of Turkish guest workers, they were never integrated into the German economy as citizens. As with France and its large mass of unemployed Muslims from Africa, Turkey and other Islamic countries that came to work in the underground economy and the legitimate low paid economy of hotel and service work.

And as with Mexican workers in the United States, those 'illegal aliens' which Lou Dobbs rants about, the economy of Empire cannot exist without them. Global capitalism requires low waged work and masses of unemployed to offset the wage demands of better paid workers, to challenge workers rights to their profit in order to maintain their profits. This then leads to the jingoistic nationalism and racism in the working class, pitting worker against worker.

The new EU regulations will not change this dynamic but exasperate it, creating the conditions for more outbursts like the riots in France.

Europe-wide day of action for freedom of movement and universal rights

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Da' Bears Have It

Bear with me here as I pun around some great news for Ursus Major. A sancturary for bears and the ancient forest has been declared in B.C.; Great Bear Rainforest.

Years of tension end with 'unique' BC rain forest deal
Globe and Mail - 20 hours ago
VANCOUVER -- After 10 years of logging-road blockades, marketplace boycotts and meetings that were so fractious people couldn't even agree on lunch breaks, the antagonists in British Columbia's great land-use debate finally made peace. ...
Canada creates massive `working` park Monsters and Critics.com
Canada signs deal with loggers to save ancient rainforest Independent
CTV.ca - The Moscow Times - Vancouver Sun (subscription) - Environment News Service - all 178 related »

And the US is looking at the crisis of the Polar Bear in the Arctic due to Climate Change. Someone hasn't told Bush about this cause you know what he thinks of Global Warming.

White House to Study Protecting Polar Bears
Washington Post, United States - 4 hours ago
The Bush administration has agreed to study whether polar bears should be added to the nation's endangered species list because global warming is shrinking ...
US considers endangered status for polar bears CBC News
US mulls protecting polar bears as Arctic melts Reuters Canada
Polar Bears May Join Endangered Species ListiThe NewStandard


This must mean the Right To Arm Bears campaign has been making headway.

See A Hunting We Will Go

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The Curse of Bruce McNall

It must be the curse of LA Kings owner Bruce McNall who bought Gretzky from the Oilers with his coin collection and then got busted for fraud.

Cause now the Gretzky's wife and other NHL players are rumoured to be involved in a gambling ring. Gretzky's Wife, Tocchet, NHL Players Cited in Gambling Ring
And it's really bad timing as Gretzky prepares to go to Turin with Team Canada for the Winter Olympics. Gretzky remains top pitchman He hasn't played for seven years, but the Great One still king of marketing

No shock here, it's business as usual in professional sports which has a historical link to gambling and the underworld of crime in England and North America.

Sports and gambling -- the American way?
Office pools, point spreads, off-track/off-shore betting, illegal bookies
you name it, we bet on it.

The Economics of Gaming: Risk and Reward in American History

BETTING ON THE FUTURE OF SPORTS: WHY GAMBLING SHOULD BE LEFT OFF THE FIELD OF PLAY

PlanetPapers - Gambling

I found this interesting blog while researching this
<>The Sports Economist Economic Commentary on Sports & Society

Also See: Pro Sports and Criminal Capitalism




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