The Limits of Freedom

When we go to hang the last Aristocrat it will be the capitalist who sells us the rope. V.I. Lenin

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." A. J. Liebling.

"Your abhorrent activities in China are a disgrace. I simply do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night," Rep. Tom Lantos, the ranking Democrat on a House International Relations subcommittee on human rights. Lantos' California district includes Silicon Valley.U.S. Congress Grills Internet Execs On China Policies

The computer search engine corporations are under attack for wanting to do business with China. Wal-Mart isn't of course, nor is Pepsi. Nor is Nike or Adidas put under scrutiny for the forced labour used to make their products in China or Vietnam. And China is now a member of the WTO, what's with that?

LABOUR-VIETNAM:
Wildcat Strikes Pay Off
Aaron Glantz and Ngoc Nguyen
HO CHI MINH CITY , Jan 17 (IPS) - More than a dozen strikes by more than 40,000 workers in Ho Chi Minh City's export processing zones have forced the Vietnamese government to raise the country's minimum wage by nearly 40 percent .

It appears that America expects to have corporations function by two different sets of rules when it comes to China and other state capitalist regimes in the region such as Vietnam. Human Rights when its convenient for some and not others. Its downright Orwellian.Big corporations making $32 billion a year from sweatshops

The Internet coporations are held to a different level of morality as businesses, because the Internet is seen as the ultimate function of the American First Amendment. It is the new press, the new means of communications, the new media. So to rephrase A.J.Liebling, the Freedom of the Internet belongs to those who own it.

And it is the U.S. and it's corporations over all that own it, despite efforts this past year to internationalize that ownership. And it is U.S. corporations that are trying to expand their ownership into countries like China that have sovereign Internets. Just as they have they have their own TV stations, Media and newspapers.


But the U.S. Congress is all upset that Google,Yahoo, Cisco Systems and Microsoft are censoring internet access at the demand of the Chinese state. Yet these American High Tech businesses give the same excuses as given by the Bush Administration and by the big corporations for doing business with China,they all see China as a huge consumer market; "by being there and doing business we will bring freedom."

Tear down China's `Great Firewall'

Published February 19, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Not a moment too soon, Congress is turning up the heat on the cozy relationship that Internet giants Google, Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems conduct with China's cyber-police. Top executives from the four firms testified last week before a House subcommittee. The most intriguing questions concerned morality. The spokesmen said that although their companies don't like China's censorship of the Web, censored information is better than none. Besides, they argued, companies have to comply with the laws of the countries in which they operate.

That's true companies have to abide by the laws of the countries they operate in. And the United States and European Union countries demand that these same companies give them access to confidential and private user information do so because they want to stop terrorism, or halt access to child porn, or some other hot button issue that is a red herring.

The State, any State, even the most democratic state still wants to punish free speech because it is an affront to the morality of the state; law and order. Ironically while human rights activists have complained about China and the U.S. Congress is investigating the Chinese censorship of the Internet, the Chinese throw these very reasons back in their faces.

To the Chinese State the Falun Gong cult are considered a terrorist anti-State organization, the Tibetan resistance equates with the Puerto Rican nationalists who spent thirty years in jail in the U.S. ( a country that like China claims it too has no political prisoners) and of course every state justifies censorship through the ultimate bugaboo; child porn on the net.

In a rare public statement this week about Internet filtering, Liu Zhengrong, who supervises Internet affairs for the information office of China's State Council, asserted that China blocks only a "tiny percentage" of Web sites that are available abroad. At a briefing reported by the New York Times, he said that regulating the Web is designed to protect children and that his government's efforts differ little from the controls of other nations, including the United States.

Before the doubting Thomases or in this case the doubting Lantos can sputter that American censorship is different, let's remember that only weeks ago the U.S. government used child porn as an excuse to attempt to gain unprecedented access to Googles internal records. Using the U.S. Patriot act will be next.

Only because the U.S. has the First Amendment was Google able to thwart the state. But the state still used 'child porn' as its excuse for its suspicious and nefarious attempt to look at all of Googles records. Crime is always the excuse the state uses to end freedom of speech, it is the criminalization of dissent. America does it so does China.

But the real reason that the Americans are concerned is not about Freedom of Speech for oppressed Chinese citizens, not with millions of them accessing the net everyday now. Nope it comes down to good old capitalist competition. China wants technology, and access to technology, and one of the best ways of doing that is hacking. Cyberwarfare. Underneath the U.S. concern for human rights is its concern for maintaining its technological and military secrets.

The big high tech companies want to know how China builds it's firewalls and internet security systems, and China wants to export that security abroad. Its good old capitalist competition in the realm of high tech.

At least three dozen governments around the world try hard to control the online environment. Many of the most extensive efforts are found in regimes in the Middle East, in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates, according to the OpenNet Initiative. Asian regimes, like Uzbekistan, Burma and Vietnam also filter the Internet. But no state approaches the censorship-and-surveillance apparatus of China. It's therefore not surprising that censorship has become a popular Chinese export. Techniques and software for Internet control, developed in China, are now being applied in countries like Vietnam and Iran.

China has also proved that censorship pays: it has developed a successful model for how government and business can collaborate to censor a nation's Internet activities. This model could be applied in any country. If we're not careful, we may wake up one day to discover that what a person can see and do on the Web will be radically different depending on which country he or she lives in: the Internet will become "The Internets." And U.S. tech firms won't have much of value left to sell if the Internet ceases to be the wonderful, world-connecting thing it is today. They must find a way to make their money in China without checking their values at the border. Morality aside, the long-term survival of their industry depends on it.

Rebecca MacKinnon is a fellow and John Palfrey is clinical professor of law and executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Opinion: Censorship Inc. Newsweek

And the U.S. government and its military industrial complex wants this information too. The better to spy on its own citizens. But what really concerns them is that if the Chinese can build such effective software applications that can monitor search engines and sweep the web. What is stopping them from using their hacks and hackers through these same search engines as backdoors to snoop on the U.S. and steal the technological and military secrets it needs. That is the real story here, not Human Rights. Its all a matter of cyberwarfare and intellectual property rights, not Human Rights.

China focus of Pentagon security study

The Daily Yomiuri, Japan - 4 Feb 2006

In connection with the third point, the QDR said the choices made by China, India and Russia "will be key factors in determining the international security environment of the 21st century."

Most of the 92-page review focused on China. The QDR expressed concerns about the rapidly developing nation, saying, "China continues to invest heavily in its military, particularly in its strategic arsenal and capabilities designed to improve its ability to project power beyond its borders."

The review went on to criticize the secrecy surrounding China's military buildup, stating, "The outside world has little knowledge of Chinese motivations and decision-making, or of key capabilities supporting its military modernization."

It also pointed out that China has been focusing on developing nonconventional military capabilities, such as those related to electronic and cyberwarfare. It expressed concerns about this, saying they were "disruptive military technologies that could, over time, offset traditional U.S. military advantages."

At a press briefing following the release of the QDR, Ryan Henry, U.S. principal deputy defense undersecretary for policy, expressed the Pentagon's strong concern over China's increasing influence in the East Asian and Pacific regions. "We think China should have a military capability sufficient to meet its genuine security needs," Henry told reporters.

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You and Climate Change

Download the experiment | Help/FAQ | My details | During the experiment | User map Climate change homepage Help/FAQ Report a problem

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Black Herstory Month: Lucy Parsons

Forgotten in the pages of Black History is the unique voice of the 19th Century Afro-American, Immigrant, Native, Womens, Workers Struggle in the United States. I am speaking of the Anarchist and Wobbly Lucy Parsons, wife of the Haymarket Martyr Albert Parsons. An excellent article on her importance to modern day struggles for social justice is; Lucy was her name and a lifetime struggle was her game Nice to see someone else remembers Lucy.

I posted this at my bloglines site last year:

February is Black History Month and March is Womens History Month. While March 8 is International Womens Day.

To celebrate I give you one of the greatest overlooked African American Women: Lucy Parsons.

Wife of Haymarket Anarchist, Albert Parsons, Lucy went on to be a founding member of the IWW.

"Lucy Parsons was an African, Native and Mexican-American revolutionary anarchist labor activist from the late nineteenth and 20th century America. Emerging out of the Chicago Haymarket affair of 1886, in which eight anarchists were imprisoned or hung for their beliefs, Lucy Parsons led tens of thousands of workers into the streets in mass protests across the country. Defying both racial and gender discrimination, she was at the forefront of movements for social justice her entire life. She sparked rebellion and discontent among poor and exploited workers wherever she spoke, and her fiery, powerful orations invoked fear in authority nationwide."

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More Hack Attacks on Windows

PC World is reporting that once again the wonderful world of Bill Gates is under attack, which hurts you and me...not his bottom line of course. If you build it the hackers will come....why can't you get a good set of blinds for windows?

Windows Flaw Makes Surfing Riskier Also: Hackers may use Outlook e-mail messages to take over your computer.

Two examples of computer code that exploit a flaw in Windows Media Player have become available only days after Microsoft released a patch to fix the bug.

Windows Media Player Worm Set To Strike

An exploit against the Windows Media Player vulnerability disclosed by Microsoft two days ago may be only hours away from hitting unpatched users, a security company said Thursday.

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Stephen Mulroney Brian Harper

So who is our new PM? Stephen Mulroney it appears, or is it Brian Harper? Mulroneyites are calling the shots in the backrooms of the new government as I have pointed out here much to the chagrin of all the young neo-cons who are Blogging Tories.

Insiders say the two men appreciate that each offers a quality lacking in the other. Harper is the studious policy wonk, Mulroney the crafty old-school politician.

And it makes perfect sense, despite the Reform/Alliance origins of the Conservatives, the old boys that sought to regain power, those not Progressives/Red Tories of the Clark variety, rallied around the McKay merger.

The could smell the blood in the water after Adscam. It was they who ran both McKay and Stronach against Harper, sending him a message that this was no longer Presto's party.

The message was hammered home after the Harperites failed to get elected in 2004, their new Conservative alliance held their first Consvention in 2005 and the writing was on the wall. The social conservatives were not as powerful as they thought. Abortion was off the table. The only sop they got was over Same Sex Marriage. Most other Convention issues, including bi-lingualism, long time bugaboo of the Reform/Alliance unilingual English first types, were also accepted despite the right wing Reformers. The party moved to the centre, thanks to the pull of the backroom boys. The Mulronites.

Then their crowning moment came last summer when Harper failed to bring down the government. His authoritarian leadership challenged by Stronach crossing the floor, left the Harperites with egg on their face and with no plan to appeal to the centre, which spelled sure defeat in any upcoming election.

The night of the long knives happened and over the summer Harper purged his inner circle and embraced Mulroney and his back room boys for advice.

Having been out of power so long and knowning full well that the Manning style of Reform/Alliance politics may sell in the West they didn't in the rest of Canada, especially Quebec, Harper needed the Mulronite machine to win. As a result he made a deal with devil. And the rest is history. We have gone back to the future, forward to the past.

Until there is another election expect that Mulroney will be the eminence de gris in the Harper Government. His Cardinal Richelau. For without him Harper cannot govern. For the Reformers/Alliance have always been a populist opposition party not fit to govern, nor prepared to.

Nor should we expect the Mulroneyites to give up power, now that they have achieved it again. Harper may be his own man for now, but Mulroney is the ultimate political animal, and he will make sure that his puppet government dances as he wants it too. He will do it with a smile and a kinfe behind his back, as Joe Clark can testify to. Harper will be given leeway to think he is doing things his way, but in the backrooms where the real power lies, it is now in the hands of BM.

Harper has made a deal with the devil and sold his soul for power. Principles, well those went out the door January 24.


Also see:

Not Your Daddies Conservative Party, well maybe...

Derek Burney Voice of America

The Tories First Scandal

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Will Klein Share Chretiens Fate?

I have been saying this for the past year since Klein announced his pending retirement, see here and here, but its nice to see someone on the right finally adimit it, but only after Martin and Chretien are no longer in office.

Deja vu? asks BBSIs it just me or does this sound strangely like the Chretien/Martin debacle? The forces pushing for Ralph's ouster might want to go back and study a little recent history. Do they want to risk a repeat of the Liberal's internal war in their own party?

And of course the real reason for the sexist and racial slur uttered and reported on faithfully by Ric Dolphin for the Western Slander was to show that the old boys network in the Tories are tired of Ralph. They are acting just like the Martinites and their quiet quizzling backstabbers did in pushing Chretien to quit. And look where it got them. Hey there might be a silver lining to all this yet. In other words the upcoming convention and leadership vote may not be going Ralph's way. The rattling of knives you hear are out for the Kings head.

Rick Bell covers the internecine intrique in his latest column in the Calgary Sun.

In this real life story, the king is Ralph and he has said he will leave in 20 months. He made his intentions quite clear last fall when he spoke about people lining up to replace him.

"These guys can kick tires. They can kick tires until their toes are blue but I ain't goin' until 2007 unless the party tells me they don't want me or I'm dead. Alright? Period."

Well, Ralph is very much alive but Tories at next month's party convention will get a chance by secret ballot to tell Ralph whether they want him.

And there are those in the party, and not a small number, who are pushing for the premier to lose the vote on his leadership, or secure a win so narrow he will be embarrassed into exile.

After all, in this place, the person who succeeds Ralph becomes premier, not just leader.

In recent days, an article in the Western Standard takes the rebellion in the ranks to a new depth, quoting unnamed Tories who believe Ralph's wife Colleen is keeping Ralph from leaving. One source maintains once Colleen is no longer the premier's wife she be- comes "just another Indian."

No party people are pointing fingers at the off-the-record racist. In fact, every single Conservative you speak to insists their outrage against this verbal swill be put on the record. But all kinds of back-stabbing bravado continues behind the scenes with no names attached.

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Your Papers Please

Minister of Public Safety Oberfuerher Stockwell Day has decided that he should close down the Firerarms Registry cause its been a billion dollar boondoogle. Instead he wants to replace it with a National ID card and registry. Which will cost billions and be a greater infringement on our personal freedom by impacting all Canadians. Now whose the Statist?! So much for the Conservatives and their paper thin veneer of being Libertarians.

Tony Blair tried this in England to hue and cry and lost the vote. It is a major concern around the world as more and more statists attempt to impose ID cards using the hysteria around the phony war on terror as an excuse to increase monitoring of citizens. In fact statists have attempted to introduce National ID cards well before the 9/11 disaster.

Maybe Oberfuerher Day is being clever and thinks this issue will get the Liberals on side. Liberals will not prop up Conservative government: Bill Graham

The Conservatives are out of step with their rank and file on this issue, while having the support of the same Canadians who support the Firearms Registry, which is the majority of Canadians. And ironcially being the government in Ottawa if they push this National ID card, they will be alienating the West as a 2003 SES poll shows.


Or perhaps Stockwell Day is just hastening the day of Rapture and the coming of the Apocalypse since he is a born again evangelical Christian who believes in that bunkum.




A tip o the blog to My Bhlag and Progressive Right for this.



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How Many Audits Does It Take?

The new Minister of State Security Stockwell Day has announced that he wants yet another audit of the Firearms Registry.

Not satisfied with the previous audits; the first were internal audits done in 2000-2001, followed by the damning Auditor General audit in 2002 then followed by another damning independent audit in 2003 by Raymond V. Hession and KPMG

So how many audits do ya need Stockwell to tell you that the cost overruns were caused by Privatization and Contracting Out of services. Stockwell like Vic Toews, Minister of Justice,cannot believe the facts that are as clear as the noses on their faces. Contracting Out and Privatization created the cost over-runs:

Canada’s Billion Dollar P3 Boondoggle

What the Liberals and Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know

The real story behind the cost overruns at the Canadian Firearms Centre

"Just read your piece on the firearms P3 – quite a revelation. I am amazed we have never heard this before – congratulations for bringing it to light."
Murray Dobbin, author of Paul Martin Canada's CEO

Once again the Tory ideology that privatization, contracting out and Public Private Partnerships P3's are the solution to reducing government spending and costs falls flat on its face in the light of the facts of the Firearms Registry cost over runs. They just can't beleive it to be true. All the new audit will show is what the Auditor General and Hessions KPMG audit did and I reported in the article above.


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Idiot Provacatuer Redux

I posted a teaser, a portion of my article Idiot Provacatuer about Ezra LeRant and his Western Slander running the Mohammed cartoons on Vive le Canada, and what a firestorm of comments it generated you can read them here.




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Russia's Army of Slaves

I blogged here a year ago about the new trend in privatization, that of the use of mercenaries, so called contractors, in the War in Iraq.

It's a new phase of war and the advent of the Market State that Phillip Bobbit writes about which is why his quote runs in my side bar;

A state that privatizes most of its functions will inevitably defend itself by employing its own people as mercenaries.

This is occuring in Russian today as well. It is one of the side effects of the introduction of capitalism, sans democracy, into an authoritarian state.

Russian officer hired out troops for slave labour

Kontonistov was deputy commander of a division of the Strategic Rocket Forces in Siberia's Novosibirsk region, a unit that services Russia's nuclear missiles. He hired out his troops to local businesses, according to Interfax news agency, a practice believed to be commonplace in an army in which poorly paid officers say they have to find ways to supplement meagre incomes.

In the West we call this a Private-Public-Partnership, P3's.

The rest of the article goes on to discuss the fact that the Russian 'conscript' army is a horror show of abuse. Something Russian Mothers have been saying for almost twenty years now.

The cases have drawn attention once again to the wretched conditions suffered by military conscripts. All Russian men are supposed to serve two years in the military between the ages of 18 and 28. Reports of brutal initiation ceremonies and bullying are common.


Conscription in Russia has existed since the days of the Tzar, with only a few breaks.It did not begin with Stalin as some on the right like to assert using him as their boogyman. It began under the Tzar.

The Bolsheviks did not allow a conscript army, rather they formed the volunteer Red Army. Conscription did not come even with the invasion by the Western Expeditionary Forces, which included Canada, at the end of WWI.

The Soviet Military Experience : A History of the Soviet Army, 1917 - 1991

Roger Reese's book covers the entire period of the Soviet Army's existence, from it's revolutionary birth in 1917, until it's counter revolutionary demise in 1991. Reese analyses how the Soviet Army was intended to be unlike no other army ever previously conceived, made up of volunteers and loyal party supporters with the aim of being a tool of political expression for the party as much as a military force. He also shows how idealistic considerations for the running of the Army had to give way to practical issues for the effective running of the Army, and how this moved the Army closer to that of the Tsarist Army which many revolutionaries passionately sought to avoid. He also examines the performance of the Army during the Second World War, and the impact this had on dynamics and the moral state of the organisation, as well as refuting the argument that the Great Purges of 1937 - 1938 had an impact on the fighting ability of the Soviet Army. He then goes on to outline the stagnation of the Army which resulted in it reflecting many of the values of the Tsarist regime it replaced. Reese's focus for the book is a look at the Red Army merely in quantitative terms, but in terms of it's interaction with society and the health of the organisation internally. A interesting and well written read.

Conscription was introduced after Hitler invaded the USSR. It continued after the war as Russia faced off against the US in the Cold War, and it was used to reinforce Russias control over its authoritarian state regimes in Eastern Europe. It allowed for employment of the vast army of otherwise unemployed in Russia. Still even after WWI the Russian Army was modeled on the authoritarian armies of the past, both Russian and German.

It was not Afgahistan that was Russias Vietnam it has been Chechnya. Which coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It left the old Soviet military regime in a powerful position, thanks to the Cold War which placed both the US and USSR under the control of their respective 'Military Industrial Complexes'.

Since the war in Chechnya Russian Mothers have organized, like their Argentinian counterparts the Mothers of the Disappeared, to denounce the treatment of their sons in Russias conscript army.

While few are now sent to serve in the violent North Caucasus, near Chechnya, it is estimated that hundreds die each year through accidents or through the ritualistic bullying inflicted by superior officers. Forty-six soldiers died of non-combat injuries in one week alone last year.

The story goes on to talk about the most recent case of torture by officers of a rank and file conscript. Giving more credence to the case of civilians who suffered atrocities at the hands of Russian troops during the Chenchin war.

The case came amid growing public disgust over the fate of Andrei Sychev, a 19-year-old conscript at a tank academy in the eastern town of Chelyabinsk. He was reportedly beaten and tortured by his superior officers during a drunken rage on New Year's Eve, during which he was tied to a chair and repeatedly hit. He did not receive medical treatment for several days, by which time gangrene had set in, forcing doctors to amputate his legs, genitals and fingers. He was taken off a ventilator only on Monday.

If the bastards can do this to their own, what will they do to the enemy. Well this is what happens in Authoritarian regimes with hierarchical regimentation and a 19th century military hierarchy.

A volunteer army, a free standing militia is always the sign of a free peoples, because it can only exist because people volunteer to support their state. A volunteer Red Army, opps sorry its now Red, White and Blue, the old Tzarist colours, a volunteer Army in Russia is a much need reform.

Unfortunately given that the army is where the surplus unemployed are shipped too, Russia is unlikely to embrace even this modest reform. Instread it will contnue to brutalize conscripts, they are after all expendable, and use them for slave labour. All the atrocities of the bad old days of the Tzar have once again been revealed in 'Modern Russia'.

Unfortunately as we have seen as long as the military funtions based on its 19th century model, even in the United States, then a volunteer army does not assure you of ending abuse, there have been many cases of hazing in the US forces as well, though not nearly as bad as this. Nor does a volunteer army mean that it won't be an army of the otherwise unemployed, as the U.S. has also shown. Finally once in conflict its desertion rates will be high, but no more so than Russias which is high as well. Nor does a volunteer army mean there won't be mercenaries, private contractors, as we have seen in Iraq.

The only real volunteer armies that have existed are those during Revolutions, the Paris Commune in France, the October and February revolutions in Russia, and during the Spanish Civil War. The later was an all volunteer army including International Brigades, volunteers from around the world including Canada, and they were truly a volunteer army, electing their officers, debating strategy, and treating each other as comrades not conscripts.





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