Union Busters Update

Currently workers at the Northern Canadian Ekati Diamond Mine in Diavik, owned by BHP are on Strike.

It is a misnomer to call this a mine, it is an enormous large scale operation that is less a mine than a huge deep open pit processing operation like the Tar Sands.

A blog has been set up BHP Labour Watch, by the striking workers that details their issues and day to day struggles.

The union busting goon squad from AFI is currently on the picket line protecting scabs crossing the lines, AFI will be speaking at a Human Resource Managers conference in Victoria this week promoting their corporate protection services.

Bottomline is that AFI are professional union busters, their purpose on the picket line is to intimidate strikers, harrass them, attack them, document them for court cases by the employer, in other words to be the front line in the bosses attack on workers rights. Just like their predecesors the Pinkertons.

BHP Labour Watch says;

BHP CLAIM THEY "WON'T USE REPLACEMENT WORKERS" HAS NO MERIT.

BHP, has hired a southern secturity force to intimidate and harass picketers and citizens of Yellowknife. But that isn't all this company does. Here is an excerpt from one of their pomotional docmuments. You decide: is BHP telling the truth?

AFI strives to recruit the best personnel for clients requiring replacement workers to continue operations. Our complete replacement workers service includes performance monitoring and the administration of payroll and benefits, which removes clients from all direct responsibility for the temporary workforce.
Accredited through the Professional Recruiting Association of Canada, our recruiting teams use a comprehensive, three-phase selection process to identify the best possible employees.
Note that the skill or trade of replacement workers required will affect the recruiting time and rates of pay.

Neither BHP or AFI have any respect for Northern values that is obvious.

BHP USING GOONS

Ekati “Goons” Harassing Yellowknifers

(Yellowknife) Ekati’s professional strike breakers have been attempting to intimidate Yellowknife citizens showing sympathy for the Ekati diamond workers currently on strike.

The President of the Union of Northern Workers, Todd Parsons has been receiving reports of people being followed around Yellowknife and even to their personal residences late at night.

“I think it goes beyond simple harassment when women are being followed home. I think this is very close to stalking which is a criminal offence.”

When consulted, a BC Federation of Labour spokesperson said they were not surprised by the use of intimidating tactics. The southern security force hired by BHP Billiton is well known for its use of provocative and intimidating tactics.

“I am disgusted by BHP’s recent statement that they would not tolerate harassment by our members while they turn around and employ people to specifically harass not only our members but innocent citizens of Yellowknife,” said UNW President Todd Parsons.


A tip o' the blog to my pal Bill Tieleman for this.

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Diavik, Diamond, mine, BHP, Ekati, union, PSAC, Northern, workers, labour, unions, AFI, union-busting, goons, scabs

Creating Scientologists

"In an effort to inform family and those close to Katie Holmes on how to handle a Scientologist birth, Tom Cruise has been conducting seminars. "

They are going to give birth to a little scientologist.....wonder if the baby is going to look like this.

Internet websites are reporting that Holmes was inseminated with L. Ron Hubbard's frozen sperm.


Scientology Founder L Ron Hubbard researching if tomatoes feel his pain


Mission Impossible star Cruise vows to eat placenta after birth

No wonder the Chef quit South Park he is needed at the Cruise Home




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Scientology, L, Ron, Hubbard, Crusie,

The One Party State

Ya gotta love a blog from Alberta that tells it like it is and calls itself; Renewing the One Party State Which is covering the current leadership race for who will be Alberta's next CEO. It's the joy of living in an out and out plutocracy.

Cause as I have said here repeatedly ad nauseum that Alberta is unique in the Western Hemisphere as one of the few democratically elected one party states.

Yep Stalin and Castro would be jealous. And it goes to prove that representative democracy is not democracy at all just majoritarian rule that can provide for a tyranny and a dictatorship. Nothing new in that, both the old Soviet Union had and Cuba has 'free' elections too, and they had purges. So do we. Ralph Stalin Purges Alberta Cabinet

Also See:

Medicare Calgary Style

Eleven Days of Scandal Alberta Style

Go West Liberals,Thar's A Boom Out Thar

The Real Story of Alberta's BSE Crisis

Alberta Provincial Election 2004

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Alberta, PC, Conservatives, Klein, Dinning, Oberg, Stelmach, Manning, politics, leadership, premier

Whither the NDP

Aiden the Marijauna Party Candidate in Peterborough has a blog. Guess you could call it a Green blog....he he....anyways in a well written insightful article he challenges the right over the label socialist being applied to the NDP.

And he links to my humble blog article on the capitalist nature of the major Parliamentary Parties. So in return, I thought I would link to his article, and here is a taste of his commentary;

The debate now is whether the NDP is a liberal party or a social democratic one. The NDP has not necessarily embraced neoliberalism yet like many of their social democratic European sister parties or like the Green parties. But we can be sure that Jack Layton would love to be a Canadian Tony Blair if it meant he could capture government.

Like I said can't disagree with his assessment of Smilin Jack as I have blogged here.


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NDP, Jack, Layton, socialism, Marijauna, Party, Canada, politics, left-wing, blogs, blogger,

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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Bush, Harper, Afghanistan, Steve, Earle, Iraq, Canada, military, forces,

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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TTLB, blogs, blogging, bloggers,

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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BSE, Alberta, Canada, Cargill, Tysons, Swift, crime, price-fixing,

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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Canada, family-farm, farming, agriculture, WTO, subsidies, farm-crisis, producers, marketing-boards