Shmoozing

A new right wing blog; the Shmoo Report got my attention.

Remember the Shmoo? No. It was an old Al Capp character.

No not Andy Capp the lazy Brit everyman, though the Shmoo Report would identify him as a union guy.

Al Capp the cartoonist. The right wing cartoonist from the sixties, who did the comic strip about the hillbillies. No, not the Beverly Hillbillies. Lil'Abner and Dogpatch.

Anyways Shmoo's were the ultimate socialist ideal, everyone could have anything they wanted because the Shmoo's would create it out of themselves. And they reproduced faster than rabbits.

Ironically, the lovable and selfless Shmoos ultimately brought misery to humankind because people with a limitless supply of self-sacrificing Shmoos stopped working and society began to break down.Seen at first as a boon to humankind, they were ultimately hunted down and exterminated by the U.S. government to preserve the status quo.

The Trouble with Tribbles on Star Trek, the loveable tribbles are modeled on Shmoo's. As is the edibled beast that wants to be eaten in Douglas Adams the Restaurant At the End of the Universe.

Sheesh this was just going to be a posting on Shmoo the schmuck and now I have to go into the history of comics. Schmuck of course is Yiddish, and a comical phrase for a well, schmuck.

Well ok here goes, the Shmoo Report says this, the proverbial Big Lie of the right that we all agree;

when it comes to being efficient and effective the private sector will always beat the public sector simply based on cost and time

Schmuck! The facts sir prove the opposite as I have documented here time after time. So no we don't all agree.

An actual study done by custodial workers in Edmonton public schools proves it. The study compared unionised in-house custodial workers with outside contractors. Same types of schools, the non-unionized outside contractors had to have their own equipment, supplies and staff. Which in itself is unusual because when the State privatizes as it has in Alberta with say its highways department or liquour stores it sells the equipment, supplies to the contractor.

This was a genuine level playing field, unlike most privatization attempts. It took two years and the result was that a joint union management committee, with two outside assessors found that the unionized workers were cheaper and more cost effective. Why the keyword used in the study was "ownership".

Contracted out workers while cheaper, that is paid less by their employer who profits by pocketing the difference in the contract and their pay, have no sense of loyalty to the company or to the place they are working in.

Public sector workers have a sense of ownership, the school, hospital, office building where they work as custodians is theirs. Hence the term custodians, NOT janitors. Janitors come in clean up and leave. A custodian maintains the building, for the safety of the people who work there.

Ironic that this is the very stakeholder ideology of the right. Maggie Thatcher used it when she wanted to sell public housing to those who rented it. If they owned it they would take care of it better Maggie and her right wing pals like to say. The whole stakeholder ideology is about 'ownership', well it turns out that it also applies to the public sector and public services. The public sector workers because of their employment conditions feel that they have ownership. Especially caregivers which includes custodians, foodservice workers and laundry workers in hospitals and schools. Even the support staff, school secretaries, teachers aids, nursing aides, etc. feel and know they are important for learning or maintaining a patients health. It takes Teamwork remember. And day by day contract workers will never have that feeling of ownership or stakeholding.


Today other studies show this to be the most important factor in retaining staff, having a sense of ownership. Ironic that as the right wing pushed for contracting out, management reform types were pushing the idea of teamwork and ownership at work.

So Shmoo the schmuck, believes that the private sector is better in delivering services than the public. His article, you knew I would get around to this eventually, is about health care. And he whines about how all the focus is on nurses and janitors and food workers, that are unionized. Tch Tch which of course he wants contracted out.

Well that has happened with laundry workers, and guess what again the myth that the private sector is cheaper and better falls apart again. Alberta and now B.C. has contracted out its laundery services. And no they haven't gotten cheaper. In fact in Alberta K-Bro who does all the laundry services now, could only operate by getting the hospital laundries sold to it at firesale prices. Now that it has a monopoly on laundry services it can charge what it likes, and it does. Laundry costs have increased. Workers wages of course have increased only minimally.

And again the use of contracted out services especially in custodial has been driven by cost considerations, that is the underfunding of the public sector. Hand in hand with the push to contract out has been the deliberate cost cutting to the public sector, be it schools or hospitals. Otherwise contracting out would not have been considered an option.Facing deficits school boards, hospitals, municipalities have been pushed to consider contracting out. So its not a solution at all, its an imposed economic condition that arises from cutbacks.
Which came first? Custbacks in public services of course, and which comes second contracting out as the saviour. Its got noting to do with being more economical or efficient. Its about saving money and the only way that savings is made is that contractors pay less to their workers. Thus with higher turnover in staff quality assurance cannot be made.

And cutting custodial staff in hospitals has led to dangerous conditions. Despite the Shmoo's view that Doctors are what keep hospitals running, and are obviously more important than 'janitors', lets remember the SARS crisis, which killed Doctors, Nurses and Patients. It and other viral diseases occuring in hospitals are doing so because custodial staff have been cut back and then contracted out.

Minimal cleaning safety standards are not being met. When that occurs in hospitals evidence shows the spread of opportunistic diseases such as SARS, the Norwalk virus and the Super Bugs increases. All have to do with the importance of cleaning for health. Which cannot be done under-budget, with cutbacks or through contracting out.








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Jurassic Park

South East Asia is fast becoming the Jurassic Park of our age. First it is the discovery of ancient humans who were dwarves, then it was the discovery of an ancient forest, new creatures are popping up on land and in the sea and now this.

Once again giving more credence to cryptozoology.

Just like the recent discoveries of; a new species of monkey , a Moose in New Zealand , the worlds largest catfish or the capture of a giant fresh water Sturgeon; which is catagorized as an ancient dinosaur fish.

Last year when this strange new rodent was discovered I blogged about it as the Giant Rat of Sumatra.

It all goes to remind us that; There are more things in heaven and hell Horatio that were dreamed of in your philosophy.

New rodent is 'living fossil'

By Helen Briggs BBC News science reporter

Laonastes is about the size of a red squirrel. (Image: Mark A Klingler).

A squirrel-like rodent discovered in Laos is the sole survivor of a group that otherwise died out 11 million years ago, according to fossil data.

The animal made headlines in 2005 when it was hailed as the only new family of living mammals to be found in 30 years.

But scientists now believe it is a "living fossil", the relic of a group of prehistoric rodents once widespread in South East Asia and Japan.

Back from the dead: Living fossil identified
The discovery is an example of what scientists call the "Lazarus effect," a situation when an animal known only through the fossil record is found living.

Perhaps the best known example of the Lazarus effect is the coelacanth, a lobe-finned fish discovered off the coast of South Africa that scientists thought died out at least 65 million years ago.

Most examples of the Lazarus effect in mammals, though, only go back 10,000 years or so.

"It is an amazing discovery and it's the coelacanth of rodents," said study coauthor Mary Dawson of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. "It's the first time in the study of mammals that scientists have found a living fossil of a group that's thought to be extinct for roughly 11 million years. That's quite a gap. Previous mammals had a gap of only a few thousand to just over a million years."

Laonastes is currently in the process of being officially reclassified in the Diatomyidae family.

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General Jackson Slaughters Luna

An American tug boat named the General Jackson has slaughtered Luna; the orphan Orca. Luna the orca killed by tugboat

Aboriginal peoples on the West Coast considered the Orca the reincarnation of their Chief who died days before the Orca was found.

A Killer Whale specialist considered Luna's death an inevitable result of inaction by the Department of Fisheries, and Marine Mammal scientists.

Once again the Fisheries bueracracy knows best.....they have something in common with Indian Affairs, both fail to consult with those in the know, aboriginals and fishers. Had they, Luna may have alive today.



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PeaceMaker Murdered In Iraq

Next week there will be mass demonstrations against the phony war on Terror.

Unfortunately the American occupation of Iraq has led to the death of the American PeaceMaker Tom Fox. One kidnapped peace activist found dead in Iraq

It is not just Fox who suffered and was tortured in Iraq. Under the continued occupation of Iraq, but so are the people of Iraq. They are being held hostage by the internecine battles of sectarian interests that have arisen from the occupation. Which is what the PeaceMakers were witnesses to and witnessing for in Iraq.

It is time to bring all the troops home, from Iraq and Afghanistan.

And to end the American bullying of Iran, which maybe the next front of Bush's phony War on Terror. Iran a 'grave' threat, says Bush

This would be the best tribute America could make for its fallen Peacemaker.

Annie Zirin
Leftwing Generals: the Dark Side of Liberal Imperialism

A Left that opposes the occupation of Iraq but accepts the overall war on terror will find itself inevitably on the side of supporting other wars and other occupations.

Fighting "terrorism"-imperialism's cover story

Noam Chomsky recently argued,

The fact of the matter is that there is no War on Terror. It's a minor consideration. So invading Iraq and taking control of the world's energy resources was way more important than the threat of terror. The U.S. invaded Iraq because it has enormous oil resources, mostly untapped, and it's right in the heart of the world's energy system. Which means that if the U.S. manages to control Iraq, it extends enormously its strategic power, what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls its critical leverage over Europe and Asia.3 In 2004, John Kerry ran a campaign based on the slogan that the war in Iraq was "distracting" the U.S. from its ability to fight the "global war on terror." This became a slogan that a section of the liberal-left was more than happy to adopt as its own. Because the unspoken aim of liberals and many leaders of antiwar organizations in 2006 is to elect a Democratic Congress in November, we have seen the consolidation of liberal critics of the Bush administration behind Democratic talking points. Unfortunately, in 2006, history appears to be repeating itself.

Liberal imperialism

We can hardly be surprised that a section of liberals continues to take their marching orders from the Democratic Party. There has always been a wing of American liberalism that has fully supported the project of U.S. imperialism, and their class interests find expression in the Democratic Party. These were the Cold War liberals that backed and helped prosecute the McCarthyite witch-hunts on communists and who were the architects of the Vietnam War. These were the liberals who supported Bill Clinton's "humanitarian" wars in the 1990s, and who saw economic sanctions on Iraq as an alternative to war. "The task of liberal realists," notes John Pilger, "is to ensure that western imperialism is interpreted as crisis management, rather than the cause of crisis and its escalation. By never recognizing western state terrorism, their complicity is assured."11

The Left in the U.S. needs to put forward an antiwar opposition on an entirely different basis. We must reject the idea that the U.S. has the moral authority to fight terrorism, when it is the leading cause of terror in the world. We must stand for the self-determination the people of Iraq, Iran, Palestine, and people around the world. We must reject Islamophobia and defend the Arab and Muslim communities in the U.S. who have been the victims of political persecution since September 11. We have to consistently and clearly expose the real imperialist interests behind the war on terror, as well as the history of U.S. imperialism, in order to build a stronger and wider foundation for our movement, and show how working-class people in the United States pay the price of the war on terror. The antiwar movement needs to remain independent, both in its political views and its organizing, from the Democratic Party that wants to strengthen U.S. imperialism, not to end it. The antiwar movement cannot oppose the occupation in Iraq while giving the U.S. a pass to wreak havoc elsewhere in the name of fighting the war on terror.

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The Butcher Of Serbia Dies

Slobodan Milosevic dies Good riddance to this Nationalist Socialist. He died in his cell not unlike another National Socialist; Rudolf Hess

Milosevic put Serbia on the map in the worst way, giving his people the reputation of a ruthless bunch addicted to violent nationalism. Mastery of the political scene gave him a supreme grip on power for years under a veneer of democracy.Milosevic carried his defiance to the end

Exactly which is why I titled this article as I did, for in his rabid Nationalism he as much destroyed Serbia as the UN/NATO forces did in the war over Kosovo. Which led to his downfall.



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Free Trade; Hong Kong & Somalia

I came across this well written essay at Dissident Voices, an anarchist-left compiliation blog. Its about Hong Kong, by Chohong Choi;Hong Kong’s “Free Market”: Someone Pays

Very lengthy, like some of the stuff I write here. But despite its length it's very informative. Well worth your time. I thought I would give you a flavour of it by presenting his conclusion.

And because Somalia is back in the news of late, and is the only 'real free market economy' with no government. I thought it was interesting that he concluded on that point as well. More on this at the end of Chohong Choi's missive.

Be Careful What You Wish for

Business always speculates on how much better it would be if government would just get out of the way and let free enterprise do its thing. It longs for some mythical time in the past when the businessman was on his own and things worked out fine. It sure hopes not. For it is the biggest user and beneficiary of public facilities like the courts, education, fire services, hospitals, infrastructure, the military, and the police. Not only does business rely on these resources, its employees and customers do too. Also, business utters nary a word when the government goes to bat for it by enacting favorable legislation and signing trade deals with foreign countries. It knows who hold the keys to power, and spares no effort to ingratiate itself with these movers and shakers, as well as to find as many backers as it can to represent its interests in the government.

It is not always a bad thing that Hong Kong’s economy is not as free as advertised. Its public facilities and regulations help ensure stability in the city and make it a livable and investable place. That is how a strong community is built. Hong Kong still suffers from crowdedness, pollution, stress, and a widening rich-poor gap, but its public sector, while not without fault, has succeeded more than it has failed. Even as Hong Kong’s business sector continues to preach the advantages of the “free market,” it is silently thankful for (just to name a few) its affordable public healthcare, which releases it from straining its resources to provide its employees with basic health coverage like employers in the U.S., and for its public safety measures, which spare it the expense of having to hire high-priced private security contractors to protect its assets à la post-Katrina New Orleans.

If Hong Kong was chosen as the site of the last WTO conference because it appeared to practice free trade and free market economics better than anyone else, then that makes sense. Free trade talks and deals are mostly razzle-dazzle anyway, as those players who can afford to flout the terms of any agreement do so with near impunity. Insiders and those at the short end of these pacts know better. Markets and trade are never free. Someone reaps the rewards, someone pays for the rewards, and someone certainly pays for its consequences.

If the closest thing to a truly free market is what you seek, then Hong Kong is not it. That place, according to one journalist, would more likely be Somalia. But there is no invisible hand at work in Somalia. If anything is invisible, it would be a functional national government, which has not been seen since 1991 (hence, no government regulations), as well as foreign aid (thus, no strings attached). Private enterprise exists in Somalia, and some of it works quite well given the circumstances. But even those in the private sector await the return of a working central government, which can help ensure stability and provide the framework for a smoother operation of society. Until then, rules are made by word of mouth and usually enforced at the point of a gun (the visible fist).

Any chance that the next WTO conference will be held in Mogadishu?

Heh, heh not likely eh. Recently some liberaltarians have been singing, or ringing, the praises of the free market in Somalia. Seriously, they have the largest cell/mobile phone system in the world. All set up amongst freely competing capitalists and their private armies, it make's the free (booty) marketers over at the Von Mises Institute drool. Unfortunately such anarchic capitalism is based on the primitive accumulation of capital, in otherwords brigandism and piracy. Gee just like the foundation of Hong Kong as the distribution centre of Opium into China, in the 19th Century.

Unfortunately the current minarchist capitalist free for all in Somalia while successful in producing a mobile phone business has not solved the problem of the current drought affecting the Horn of Africa. In fact the free market brigands and pirates have been detrimental to the attempts by the UN to get food to the starving masses.

Conflict and lawlessness in the Horn of Africa are making it far harder to get aid to those who need it. In particular, Somalia's pirates and warlords are disrupting shipping routes and delaying food deliveries.

The biggest security problems are in Somalia, which has had no central government for 15 years.

Even in the best of times in Somalia, when there's plenty of rain, warlords often wage battles. But in a time of drought, specialists warn that the stresses of survival will further unravel local power structures, creating new opportunities for havoc from freelance bandits, militias, and perhaps Islamic extremists aligned with Al Qaeda.

''Somalia has been an extraordinarily difficult country for the last 15 years," Christian Balslev Olesen, UNICEF's Somalia representative, said in an interview in Nairobi. ''We've had flooding, drought, conflict, war, and general insecurity. But we haven't seen anything like this drought for the past 25 years. . . . The worst scenario is that we might be going into huge drought with some kind of high-scale conflict. And bringing food into a security situation like Somalia for 2 million people is going to be a nightmare."

Last year, pirates hijacked two World Food Program ships carrying donated food. US Navy ships now patrol off the coast, but most shipping companies have refused to deliver to ports in Somalia. That means it takes up to a week longer for each shipment of food to come from the port in Mombasa, Kenya, and then be trucked to south and central Somalia

A woman and a girl stood in a field outside Wajid, Somalia, that has not produced a crop of sorghum, a grassy grain that is one of the foundations of the Somali diet, in two years. (John Donnelly/ Globe Staff)

Somalia is an excellent example of Anarcho-Capitalism in action. That is the theory that all state services could be privatized, including having private armies and police forces. Well that's Somalia. Look there for the future of this flawed ideology.

You see capitalism needs a State to function properly, as does business. Without the State, capitalism returns to its original state; fuedalism in decay. As Yemen has shown as well as Somalia.

Today, Yemen itself is on a dagger's edge, precariously balanced between forces of modernization and the pull of powerful traditionalists. In the West, Yemen may be best known for its recent history of tribal kidnappings of tourists, the 2000 al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole, and the ubiquitous chewing of khat, a mildly narcotic leaf. But the government has helped roll up several al Qaeda cells and, at least until a recent prison break, generally allayed western fears that terrorists would find sanctuary in the large tracts of lawless, tribal lands.
In deep denial. These days, though, Yemen is facing its own crisis, the result of deepening poverty and a government in denial about the depth of reforms needed to survive. In the past year, the United States and the World Bank have slashed their modest aid programs to Yemen, increasingly fed up with a bureaucracy that is one of the most corrupt in the world. "Yemen is teetering on the edge of failed statehood," warns one U.S. official. "It will either become a Somalia or get serious about transforming." For a nation awash in guns and crisscrossed by well-worn smuggling routes, the threat is grave.

And the capitalist state is not just any kind of government, it is a specific kind of government that regulates the market in favour of stability for the creation of monopolies. As the history of Hong Kong and of course British and American capitalism shows. This is the history that the right wing of course has always revised, whether it is the Heritage Foudation or the Von Mises Institute.

For as Herr Dr. Marx said the history of the world is the history of class struggle which the right has interpreted as the history of the world is the history of people clashing with the state. Which is only partially true, for in this assessment of the world, they forget people have developed self-government and that the masses revolutionary struggles have not been just over what kind of government should exist, but how the social relations of society should function.

In other words its not enough to just Smash the State in a fuedalistic society or a capitalist one. It is essential to change the means of production and distribution. The apologists for capitalism, see Somalia as a free market. It maybe, but it is not a self governing market, it is far from a society of Liberty, Equality and Solidarity.

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No See Um's

David Emerson is managing to be like the proverbial no-see-um's that plague Northern Manitoba and Ontario. Or perhaps he is hiding behind his hands, peeking out of his fingers hoping that the justly irate citizens of this constituency would go away. Because he has done all he can to avoid them.

But wait he has time to meet with the business folks in Vancouver when he is there, of course it had to be a super secret meeting, no publicity. This is the new openess in government we can expect from the Harpocrite autocracy.

Emerson heckled, protesters demand meeting
Emerson did find time however to speak to more than 400 people at a Vancouver Board of Trade dinner Wednesday evening, which went unpublicized either by the business group or Emerson's office.


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Halliburton's Depleted Uranium Cover Up

File this story under the headline;

The Joys Of Privatization

Tony Blair is really Maggie Thatcher in drag, doing that Victor Victoria thing. As this story about the contracting out of a major British military establishment to Halliburton shows.

And meanwhile back in the USSA folks are all verklempt that a private British Company, good old P&O , currently contracted to run American ports is being sold to the UAE.

My guess is they would be happier if it was sold to Halliburton. I know Dick Cheney would be. And then Halliburtons cover ups of dangers to humanity could be excused as National Security.

Privatizing State functions means the state is no longer answerable to the public, to its citizens. The Privatized State is responsible to its stakeholders, that is the companies it contracts out to and their shareholders. This reveals the real meaning of 'stakeholder democracy' that Tony Blair and George Bush talk about.

Depleted uranium measured in British atmosphere from battlefields in the Middle East

by Leuren Moret

"Did the use of uranium weapons in Gulf War II result in contamination of Europe? Evidence from the measurements of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, Aldermaston, Berkshire, U.K.," shows such contamination, reported the Sunday Times Online, in a shocking scientific study authored by British scientists Dr. Chris Busby and Saoirse Morgan.

The highest levels of depleted uranium ever measured in the atmosphere in Britain were transported on air currents from the Middle East and Central Asia. Of special significance were those from the Tora Bora bombing in Afghanistan in 2001 and the "shock and awe" bombing during Gulf War II in Iraq in 2003.

Out of concern for the public, the official British government air monitoring facility, known as the Atomic Weapons Establishment, at Aldermaston, was established years ago to measure radioactive emissions from British nuclear power plants and atomic weapons facilities.

The British government facility was taken over three years ago by Halliburton, which refused at first to release air monitoring data to Dr. Busby, as required by law.

The fact that the air monitoring data was circulated by Halliburton AWE to the Defense Procurement Agency implies that it was considered to be relevant and that Dr. Busby was stonewalled because Halliburton AWE clearly recognized that it was a serious enough matter to justify a government interpretation of the results and official decisions had to be made about what the data would show and its political implications for the military.

In a similar circumstance, in 1992, Major Doug Rokke, the director of the U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Cleanup Project after Gulf War I, was ordered by a U.S. Army general officer to write a no-bid contract, "Depleted Uranium, Contaminated Equipment and Facilities Recovery Plan Outline," describing the procedures for cleaning up Kuwait, including depleted uranium, for Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton.

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Canada Out Of NATO

Another Progressive For War (PFW) the Galloping Beaver blogs on the background to the Canadian Forces operations in Afghanistan. He is cheered on by Cerberus, and cross posted it to the Torch. So now all the bases are covered.

Galloping Beaver compares the differences between Iraq and Afghanistan. Quite right too. Both operations are different. And as a progressive he is opposed to the war in Iraq but then he continues to try and justify the war in Afghanistan as different, more noble. Because it is sanctioned by the UN and NATO.

But then again when he says it is sanctioned by the UN and NATO let us not forget that so was the war on Serbia over Kosovo. And that mess is still going on. With no resoloution. So far neither the UN nor NATO sanctioned wars have had much success.

See my Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Thesis on The Kosovo Crisis and the Crisis of Global Capitalism
originally written May 1999, Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. to invade Afganistan and Iraq for humanitarian purposes.

And the comparison could be made that initially we were involved in peace keeping in the Balkans and then we were part of the War in the Balkans declared by that other Progressive For War, Bill Clinton.

At that time those who opposed imperialism and war, and the two go togther like peanutbutter and jam, also objected to that war. And that war was fought on so called humanitarian grounds, which many on the left even, mistakenly, supported. Christopher Hitchens opposed the war but now he supports the War in Iraq. Consistency is the hobgobllen of opportunists.

The Galloping Beaver says; If Canada were to suddenly withdraw because Canadians at home are getting squeamish, those who would have us do that should be aware that Canada would be forever viewed as an unreliable ally; not by the US, but by NATO. Canada relies on collective defence treaties to keep defence affordable. Withdrawl would result in no treaties, no collective defence and a huge price to pay in going it alone.

Exactly why we should withdraw from NATO. Something the NDP called for over many decades until Jack Layton decided to arbitrarily change the party platform. Thus leaving him in the Hobbesian dilemma he is in now over whether our Troops should stay or go. NATO is a cold war relic, whose purpose was to prepare for a European theatre of war with the USSR. Without the USSR, NATO has no purpose.That was until it was utilized to end the Balkan war it's member states had encouraged in the first place (with their recognition of Slovenia and Croatia).

Then the Beaver concludes; "No matter how comfortable people are inside our borders at the moment, they should realize that the world has become a much more dangerous place, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union."

Yep thats when the world changed. No longer did we fear the nuclear meltdown due to the Cold War. Nor could the Soviet Union do its job as an Imperialist power in moderating its client states and holding them accountable. Thus a vacuum was created. One into which marched the USA as it declared under the Elder Bush the coming of the New World Order. And the new mask of Imperialism was adopted, that of humanitarian wars.

Military interventions on supposedly humanitarian grounds have become an established feature of the post–Cold War global order. Since September 11, this form of militarism has taken on new and unpredictable proportions. Diana Johnstone’s well-documented study demonstrates that a crucial moment in establishing in the public mind—and above all, within the political context of liberalism and the left—the legitimacy of such interventions was the “humanitarian” bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999.

For those of us on the Left we are opposed to Capitalism, Imperialism and War we are not pacifists, we recgonize that all wars are the bosses war which is why we say No War But Class War.

This adventure in Afghanistan clearly exposes those who are the liberals and so called progressives, the new age social democrats who will go to war for humanitarian reasons; which is the new excuse for Capitalism and Imperialism. Like they once used nationalism and honor.



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Contempt for Parliament

Opposition questions Harper's ethics Opposition MPs blasted Stephen Harper on Thursday for his refusal to co-operate with the federal ethics commissioner, with one MP threatening to hold the prime minister in contempt.

Only one?

The whole house should condemn Harper for being in contempt of Parliament.

Wait a minute wasn't that the reason we had an election?

The PM and the government had lost the moral right to govern? Yeah but that was after twelve years in power.

Harper has earned the contempt of parliament and the Canadian people after less than twelve weeks in power.

Harpers ethics? Simple. Run as a populist reformer. Once in power show your true colours as an autocrat.

“Government exists to serve Canadians; government must serve the public interest, not personal interests.”

Harper Makes Commitment to Clean Up Government 04 November 2005

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