Rich Man's War

Steve Earles rockin country anti-war album The Revolution Starts Now is not only a political challenge to the powers that be in the US and their Warfare State, but its as I said rockin, C&W. Not a single song that ain't a toe tapper and left wing. I give it five cowboy boots out of five. Kick ass album.

I was impressed with the album but even more so now that it takes on a more international flavour with his song Rich Mans War. It mentions of course Kandahar, where Canadian Forces are now covering for the American Empire's exit. US forces in Bhagdad need us in Kandahar.

Which is why WE MUST oppose our excursion in Afghanistan. That and it is still a rich man's war. Our armed forces like the Americans are a working class volunteer army. People joined to get jobs and skills, not to go and fight and die for the capitalists and their state. Something the Progressives For War keep forgetting.

Afghan mission is proving ground for Canada's future military leaders

Their performance will influence, accelerate or kill their future careers and the Afghan veterans who rise up the ranks will help shape Canada's armed forces.

But a spokeswoman at National Defence headquarters says there's no crush of volunteers looking to burnish their personnel files with a stint in Kandahar.

"There hasn't really been a bunch of people saying 'I want to go to Afghanistan so I can further my promotion possibilities.,' " says Cmdr. Denise Laviolette, chief of public affairs at military personnel, the office that handles promotion and selection boards.

The military wants well-rounded leaders, she says, which means along with overseas deployment, holding staff appointments, serving as training instructors and undertaking academic and language studies.

Only about 400 soldiers in Canada's Kandahar contingent belong to the "sharp end" - the units conducting actual combat patrols. The rest are in crucial logistical and planning positions.

Artist/Band: Earle Steve
Lyrics for Song: Rich Man's War
Lyrics for Album: Revolution Starts Now

Jimmy joined the army ‘cause he had no place to go
There ain’t nobody hirin’
‘round here since all the jobs went
down to Mexico
Reckoned that he’d learn himself a trade maybe see the world
Move to the city someday and marry a black haired girl
Somebody somewhere had another plan
Now he’s got a rifle in his hand
Rollin’ into Baghdad wonderin’ how he got this far
Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war

Bobby had an eagle and a flag tattooed on his arm
Red white and blue to the bone when he landed in Kandahar
Left behind a pretty young wife and a baby girl
A stack of overdue bills and went off to save the world
Been a year now and he’s still there
Chasin’ ghosts in the thin dry air
Meanwhile back at home the finance company took his car
Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war

When will we ever learn
When will we ever see
We stand up and take our turn
And keep tellin’ ourselves we’re free

Ali was the second son of a second son
Grew up in Gaza throwing bottles and rocks when the tanks would come
Ain’t nothin’ else to do around here just a game children play
Somethin’ ‘bout livin’ in fear all your life makes you hard that way

He answered when he got the call
Wrapped himself in death and praised Allah
A fat man in a new Mercedes drove him to the door
Just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war

Sarangel Music (ASCAP)

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NARUS Is Big Brother

It's called NARUS and it is the evolution of tracking software, it allows thousands of emails and phonecalls to be monitored for terms like terrorist, bomb, etc. But it goes further it puts them into context, reads between the lines and can determine if the terminology being used is actually a threat or not. An Engineer Blows The Whistle On AT&T

It is being used by the NSA in the US and it is currently reading and monitoring this as you read it. It recognizes no soverignty as it sweeps the net, phone lines and email. It is being used by President Bush to read your blog, emails and monitor your phone calls whether you live in the United States, Canada or Mexico.

It is now being used by repressive regimes to monitor blogs and email in their countries.

It is an invasion of privacy and a violation of Canada's privacy laws according to Technology commentator, and founding member of the TAO collective, Jesse Hirsch in an interview on CBC Live today. Because tghe backbone of the internet is in the US and all our websites and services are routed on that backbone. We have no Internet soveriegnty says Hirsch. And he advocates that Canadian's using email, the web, VOIP, etc. complain to your MP. Here, Here.

The secret Narus spy software at Folsom Street

The venture capital-backed Silicon Valley company Narus has found itself at the center of a legal fight over domestic spying. We're now wondering how its software is being used abroad in places like China and the Middle East.

Narus is based in Mountain View, and makes a network management software.

This week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed documents contending Narus' software was plugged into AT&T's network as part of a massive surveillance program conducted by the National Security Agency -- to eavesdrop on Americans' international phone calls and e-mails. President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the NSA project.

Tangled up in spying controversy
NARUS SAYS IT WAS UNAWARE ITS TRACKING SOFTWARE AIDED THE NSA

Last week, the EFF filed a declaration from former AT&T technician Mark Klein alleging that AT&T assisted the NSA in spying. Klein said he learned that a computer containing Narus' software had been installed in a secret room in the company's Folsom Street office in San Francisco sometime after October 2003 to monitor ``people's e-mail, Web surfing or any other data.''

Narus CEO Greg Oslan said the company's software is designed to allow carriers to monitor all Internet traffic, including Web searches, e-mail content and attachments, and Internet phone calls.
Narus was founded in 1997 and has more than 100 employees around the globe. Some of the world's largest phone and Internet carriers have signed up as Narus customers, including T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, Brasil Telecom, Korea Telecom, Telecom Egypt, Saudi Telecom and Shanghai Telecom, according to the company. Narus Helps Countries to Block VoIP







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Canadian Community Found at TTLB

Whew I thought the Canadian blogging community was gone forever due to a page malfunction at TTLB ecosystem, but no its not. Its here. You just can't use their Search for Weblog feature to find it. You have to click oncommunities in the header bar. With all that cash rolling in from the ads in their sidebar you'd think they could afford to fix their f**k up.

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Agribusiness Bad Boys

Tyson Foods Inc., Cargill Inc. and Greeley-based Swift & Co. may have to pay $9.25 million in fines after a federal jury found them guilty of ignoring incorrect government beef-price reports, which producers say depressed cattle prices.

Aw shucks say it ain't so. And to think Tysons and Cargill benefited from Alberta's BSE payout which was supposed to go to farmers. But didn't. Instead it benefited Tyson's and Cargills bottom lines which were hurting without the taxpayers of Alberta generous donation.

And it was the Harper Conservatives that killed the parilamentary committee that was investigating these crooks.

And they still succumbed to price fixing the beef market.

Ain't capitalism grand.

Cargill Net Up; Grain and Poultry Credited

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Peter McKay Has A Crush...

on Condoleeza Rice.

Well they are both single after all.

She is of course a cougar.

And he is such a twink.

And we have less of an image problem with inter-racial romances than the Americans.

Of course it would be nice if besides wooing Ms. Rice the eligable bachelor did something for Canada.

Besides taking it up the.....

Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay was so appreciative after his first visit Thursday with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that he nearly ran out of superlatives.



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The Truth About the Farm Crisis

Finally the Liberal Ag Critic says what the Liberals would never say when they were the Government. That the WTO ruling on agribusiness benefits Cargill and the big agribusiness interests, not the producers or producing countries. Wayne Easter was talking with Craig Oliver today on CTV's Question Period. Strahl pledges Canada's farmers won't be forgotten

Easter finally admited the fact that the whole debate around subsidies to farmers is not about farmers at all but about global agribusiness as I have documented in my research on Cargill.

The industrialization of farming is the ongoing creation of capitalism, it has been since the industrial revolution and the origin of capitalism in England. And in terms of the world captialist agriculture, single crop production for export is leading to desertification.The destruction of the family farm is the agenda of agibusiness, it does not want food sovereignty nor sustainable agriculture the real basis of market agriculture. It wants to create large scale farms, run by managers using GPS technology for export crop production. WTO Who Cares?

Thus the destruction across the prairies of the community grain elevator and its replacement with the one stop shopping agribusiness like Cargill. They offer fertilizers, seed, seed cleaning and processing, shipping and selling of grains. In fact the largest port operation on the B.C. coast is Cargills.

This destruction of the family farm in the prairies began over thirty years ago, before Cargill, Kraft created the conditions of buying up dairy farms and prairie dairy operations in order to drive milk prices down by controlling the market. Thus the National Farmers Union in the early seventies called for the first ever national agribusiness boycott of Kraft.

In Canada the Kraft boycott in the seventies was the equivalent of, and cooresponded too, the grape boycott in the U.S. It was all about saving the family farm.

After Kraftco. came the American giant Cargill in the late seventies and early eighties buying up the grain elevator business. Green Cargill elevators dominated the prairies. Slowly at first and then becoming ever dominant. As the farm economy collapsed during the eighties more and more family farms in Canada and the U.S. were sold off to the agribusiness giants like Cargill and then ADM.

Farmers who survived did so because they bought up their neighbours farms, added mechanization, and cooresponding bank debt, and increased crop yeilds with fertilizers and seed from Cargill and then Monsanto. Crop production such as GMO Canola from Monsanto became a major export product. Farm production of grains was now part of the global agribusiness market, no longer did we have local food production for local use.

This was the changing and is the changing nature of food production in Canada. First the Loaf: And it has been subsidized and supported by the government. Regardless of political stripe. Mulroney Conservatives opened up the market to ADM, they allowed the last independent mill to be sold to them, Robin Hood Mills, and for a reward Mulroney was give a post as a director of ADM.The Ethanol Scam: ADM and Brian Mulroney


The Liberals before them had allowed Cargill in with a wink and a nod. Trudeau's disdain for the west and farmers was well known. And its cost was the death of the family farm. The farm crisis and corporate power

The new Liberal regime, under Chretien and Martin added the stake to the heart of farmers by allowing Monsanto's expansion of GMO production of canola, they opened up the possibility of radioactive food sterlization, and the Supreme Court allowed for Monsanto's patent and control of it's GMO seeds at the expense of the soveriegnty of the family farm.

No one is innocent in the death of the Family Farm in Canada, no government federally or provincially. The Farm Crisis & Corporate Profits A Report by Canada’s National Farmers Union November 30, 2005 View the report

It is inevitable the mechanization of farming, but it does not need to lead to agribusiness corporatization. Certainly in the 1930's we saw the greatest achievement of farm mechnization when thousands of combines cleared farmers crops across the North American prairies in just a few weeks. It was a colossal collective endeavour never achieved again, it was in response to the depression on North American prairie farmers.

Varty, John F. "On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread: Rationalizing Technologies and the Canadian State, 1912-1935"
The Canadian Historical Review - Volume 85, Number 4, December 2004, pp. 721-753

Dependent Harvests Grain Production on the American and Canadian Plains and the Double Dependency with Mexico, 1880–1950

The Social Bases of Technical Change: Mechanization of the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890 to 1914

From Farm to Factory: Structuring and Location of the US Farm Machinery Industry

Changing Machinery Technology and Agricultural Adjustment

Mechanization is not the enemy of the family farm, technology is not either. Nor is collectivism and cooperation. Marketing boards are the life blood of the family farm, but not the corporate farm which can market itself directly.

The Cooperative Commonwealth ideology of prairie populism reflected the needs of farmers/producers and of workers. Today that ideal is gone, as agribusiness truimphs with its capitalist market of food production. Gone is the real market of farm/producer cooperatives, which are essential for individual family farms.

The modern Canadian farmer instead of sharing or creating equipment cooperatives, has sold their soul to the banks to keep up on the latest in seed or mechanical technology. That along with single crop production has left them vulnerable to corporatization.

Instead of moving to organic farming, mixed crops, truck farming, herb farming, organic animal husbandry, hemp farming, or with creation of bioenergy fuels, etc. along with cooperative farming of large areas in order to maintain soil conservation, cooperative/community equipment buying, the family farm today must grow or die. It must become a mini-corporation, which means it becomes vulnerable to corporate take over, mergers and aquistions by Agribusiness.

The alternative is cooperative farming and the creation of indigenous markets, like farmers markets in cities, supplying Halal and Kosher butchering and dairy needs, the vegatarian market, whole foods, etc. creating producer controled marketing boards and of course producer controled banks/credit unions for low interest loans, gaining control of transportation and grainaries, feedlots and slaughterhouses under producer worker control.

Those on the right who attack the Wheat Board for instance are those whose farms have succeeded in becoming a single crop corporation, having taken over their neighbours farms when they were driven to bankruptcy in the economic crisis of the eighties. The marketing boards in Quebec and Ontario are also reflections of this corporatist model of farming. And that is why agribusiness wants them destroyed, to allow the remaining corporate farms to taken over by them.

Also See:

Migration

A History of Canadian Wealth, 1914.

Origins of the Captialist State In Canada

The Real Story of Alberta's BSE Crisis

Lost and Found

Kids Are Commodities

Development Versus Population Growth

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National ID Card

Yep coming to a government office near you the new Canadian Bio-Metric National ID card. Why cause George Bush says so. U.S. says border passport a must

But our PM and his Peter of course toughed it out with the Americans and now;Border ID cards coming, PM says

Yep tough negotiators those Tories, can't wait till Stockwell Day meets with the Republican Homeland Security folks in the U.S. MacKay makes no headway in slowing controversial border ID plan

Of course no-one will admit that their whole border issue is not about security but good old fashioned Yankee anti-Mexican immigration jingoism. THE PREDATORY ESCALATION OF ‘IMMIGRATION POLICIES’

And while these ID cards will be embraced by those who live on both sides of the Canada US border the likelyhood of them being embraced by folks in North Carolina or Georgia is well zip, nada, zero.

But don't worry the majority of Americans don't travel farther than a few hunderd miles from home. To them thats a big deal. We are dealing with an insular nation of navel gazers, here folks.

America is a nation who in order to keep Mexican and Central American migrants out will impose a National ID card on us. And of course the Security Statist Tories will push it through for their own authoritarian purposes. And they will be supported by the Liberals who already planned for the National ID cards.

So where is the outrage from the right wing Liberaltarians and their ilk at the Blogging Tories?


See:
Migration

Development Versus Population Growth

Free Labour


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Canadians Not Social Conservatives

The right wing in Canada is a minority because most Canadians are not evangelical Christians, which has been the sole source of the rights power in the U.S.

Social Conservatives that attempted to dominate Harpers Conservatives had to rely on their American counterparts in the election to lobby for their christian values coalition. Their power is far less than the power of their bankbooks.

So says a recent poll.

So when folks tell us about how their 'values' are Canadian values, well no they aren't.

One of the key libertarian findings of the survey was that Canadians distrust institutions. And the church in all its forms is an institution we have a healthy scepticism about. Which is why Quebecois are Catholics as a community and individuals but disdain the church and its values.

Belief strong in Canada, but the pews are empty

The survey shows a widening gulf between Canadians and Americans.

In the U.S., regular church attendance is more the norm and has remained virtually unchanged since the Second World War.

Thirty-nine per cent of Americans said they went to church at least once a week, more than double Canada's regulars.

The difference can be attributed to Canadians' mistrust of institutions and the fact that there are fewer smaller evangelical churches in this country that there are in the U.S, said Richard Ascough, a religious studies professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.

"The church in a way is perceived as just another institution and people are shying away more and more from things institutional," he said.

And the greatest growth in religion in Canada was in paganism and alternative spiritualities according to the last census done by Stats Canada. Alternative religions such as Wicca and Paganism were placed under the rubric "no religion".

Those who identified as pagans or had increased over 200%.

And the greatest growth was in Alberta. And contrary to Alberta's evangelical/social conservative image over a quarter of Albertans reported that they had no religion.

Which is why this makes sense; Da Vinci Code gospel to 22% in Alberta



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CLC at 50

The Canadian Labour Congress is fifty years old this year and Canada Post has issued a stamp commorating it's birthday. Now will they do the same for the labour movement's party; the NDP when it turns 50?

And prices for stamps were a heck of a lot less fifty years ago.

Ironically Canada Post provides a bit more labour history about the CLC than the CLC does on its own website. Tch, tch.

Formed in 1872 as the Canadian Labour Union from groups that had promoted the Nine Hours Movement, it evolved over the years as mergers and reorganizations took place. Between 1883 and 1956, it operated under the name the Trades and Labour Congress (TLU). In 1939, the TLU expelled members affiliated with the US-based Committee for Industrial Organizing (CIO); the expelled members set up the Canadian Labour Council. In 1956, the Trades and Labour Congress merged with the Canadian Labour Council to become the Canadian Labour Congress.



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Do As I Say

Vision TV is showing a biography of the founder of the Toronto Star, Joseph E. Atkinson, and of course the Star has a lengthy article on Atkinson and the biopic. It shows that the paper has long been the voice of the red liberal establishment in Canada. And in someways Atkinson's editorialship reminds me of Judy Rebick and Rabble.ca a case of progressives saying do as I say not as I do.

Much is made of Atkinson supporting striking unionworkers in the General Motors' strikes in the late 1930s. Former publisher Beland Honderich, filmed just before his death, allows a smile in saying Atkinson's determination to keep the Newspaper Guild out of his newsroom was at odds with his philosophy. The Guild only received full recognition in 1949, the year after Atkinson's death.

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