Basket Case

Inflation rate exceeds 1,000 percent in Zimbabwe

Gee that was the inflation rate in Weimar Germany prior to the rise of the fascists. Except in this case the fascists already rule in Zimbabwe. Mugabe is practicing what Schumpeter called creative destruction, "capitalism is revitalized by waves of creative destruction." Unfortunately for Zimbabweans the emphasis has been less on creation and more on destruction. The political policies of Mugabe are closer to those of Pinochet when he came to power in Chile. And while Mugabe is a statist and Pinochet was a free marketeer the results are the same.

Zimbabwe: Top Banks Face Crisis

As Zimbawe's economy collapses, a tiny few make huge profits
April 25: In the second of our dispatches from inside Robert Mugabe's tightly controlled country, the Guardian discovers one of the world's most surreal and successful stock exchanges.
24.04.06: Behind a facade of normality, Zimbabwe is falling apart

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Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism

I have blogged here often on how Anti-Zionism is NOT Anti-Semitic. For a critical view from a Jewish perspective check out this The Hermeneutics of Anti-Anti-Semitism where blogger Keith Kahn-Harris says;

It is also unclear as to how far many of those who criticise Israel and Zionism are motivated by a hatred of Jews. Even if there are many Jews who consider any opposition to Zionism as de facto anti-Semitism and even if there are many anti-Zionists who make little attempt to hide their dislike of Jews, an anti-Zionism of good faith is possible. After all, it was not so long ago that large sections of the UK mainstream Jewish community were dubious about Zionism.

A tip o the blog to BobFromBrockley for this


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When Should We Leave

When we're done, not a minute sooner

Says Blue Blogging Soapbox

Not So.We should leave in February. The Conservatives are of course preparing us for a long extended war, as they act as surrogates for the US forces in the region.

The NATO forces under the British have not yet even taken comand of their operations.

The Americans whose forces out number all the allied forces combined times two are still the dominant ideological force in Afghanistan. It is their hegemony, not the Afghani's which call the shots with their puppet regime in Kabul. Leave it to them . After all we are acting as their surrogates right now, not as part of the NATO forces contrary to the lies of both the Blogging Tories and Progressives for War.

And NO do not send the troops to Dafur.

While Jack wants that, so does David Kilgour and the Conservative Christian rightwing. They see it as a way in to promote their fundamentalist evangelism in Islam. It is another phony humanitarian war we don't need.

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Smoking Gun

Well the leaks from Stockwell Day's Public Security department are coming fast and furious over the gun registry . In anticipation ( said like Dr. Frankenfurter in the Rocky Horror Picture show) of Sheila Frasers Auditor General Report. I can proudly say I told you so. More Firearms Registry Scandal

Tories smell new scandal over gun registry costs

The former Liberal government "broke every rule in the book" when it signed a $273-million computer contract for the federal gun registry -- now the subject of a "stop-work" order -- and never reported the costs or terms of the deal to Parliament, a longtime Conservative gun-registry critic alleges.

A Tory source referred to the 383-page contract, which was obtained by Breitkreuz under the Access to Information Act and provided to CanWest News Service, as the "smoking gun" in the troubled saga of the Canadian Firearms Centre.

CanWest believes Auditor General Sheila Fraser will report Tuesday that the former Liberal government kept the true costs of the gun registry from Parliament and that the problems identified in her initial 2002 audit of the controversial program continued for at least three years despite fierce criticism and the scrutiny of opposition parties.

Unfortunately leaks being leaks, even if they come from the government are still illegal.

Auditor General Sheila Fraser is "very upset" by the leak of an audit report, due on Tuesday, dealing with the federal gun registry. She says she has strong suspicions about who gave it to the media,

Sure betcha spell it P-M-O. Cause the Harpocrite made it quite clear where the buck stops.

Tories launch probe to find who leaked audit info

Updated Fri. May. 12 2006 2:51 PM ET

CTV.ca News Staff

The federal government has launched an internal investigation to find the culprit who leaked details from Auditor General Sheila Fraser's report on the gun registry, which is due out on Tuesday.

Fraser said she is "very upset" by the leak, and has strong suspicions about who is behind the act, but wouldn't reveal who she suspected.

Opposition MPs pointed the finger straight at the Conservatives, saying the leak came from within.

Also See: Boondoggle


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The Labour Shortage Myth

Shell has completed its Scotford Upgrader project. That means construction tradesmen will be looking for work. As Neil Waugh reports in yesterdays Edmonton Sun.

Celebration Time
But completion of $400M Shell project ends thousands of jobs

Willms talked about the "millions of hours of human effort" it took to build the plant over the last two years. But when the job is done the work is over. International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers assistant business agent Wade Ashton informed me there are presently more than 2,600 guys on his list. The same thing is apparently happening at other hiring halls.

Truth be told the following comment is right on;

Oil sands projects by other companies have not been well budgeted, and costs escalated during construction, often largely because of poor organization by managers. CNQ drilling plans hit by rising costs

The Shell Upgrader at Scotford came in on time and on budget. And CNRL plans to do the same with its Horizon project. Since the begining of the Oil Sands companies like Bechtel and others constructing these large industrialized open pit mines, for thats what Tar Sands plants are, have deliberately run up operational costs. They have played fast and loose with construction costs because they know they can write it off as an expense paid for by the taxpayers of Alberta and Canada.

Canadian Natural has worked to avoid that fate. It has spent or committed $4-billion (Canadian) of the $6.8-billion it had budgeted for Horizon's first phase, and the project is on time and on budget.

Part of the company's strategy to keep labour costs down was to strike a deal with the Christian Labour Association of Canada, which has less stringent overtime rules, and is a rival to the traditional building trades unions that were protesting yesterday.

"We're not pleased at the course of action [Canadian Natural] has taken right from the start," Paul Walzack, executive director of the Alberta Building Trades Council, said in an interview before the protest. "We feel there's more than enough labour to take care of this project. And we feel they're jumping the gun drastically by sourcing labour from outside of Canada."

Canadian Natural has said as much as 30 per cent of 4,000 workers needed during peak construction next year could be foreigners, and recently signed a deal with an arm of Sinopec Shanghai Engineering Co. Ltd., which plans to bring in about 225 Chinese workers to help build Horizon. It was the first deal with a non-Canadian contractor. CNQ drilling plans hit by rising costs

Again the problem is "management" not labour. The labour shortage is a convenient fiction. As layoffs occur at Scotford and later next year at Joffery then labour becomes available for Horizon and other projects. As Waugh points out the problem is not labour shortages but lack of planning by the Klein Government. In other words the Klein Government has allowed and encouraged the conditions for cost over runs by shortchanging Albertans, cheating us of our royalties.

There's a serious break in the action in the Alberta's Tories deeply flawed oilsands strategy. They basically cut the bitumen royalty to pennies and said let 'er rip - without putting in place the necessary infrastructure or staging the projects to smooth out the boom-and-bust cycles.

Shell, of course, is the template the Alberta government should be following.

It's taking the resource from oilsands, to synthetic crude, to motor fuel to low-sulphur diesel with all the good-paying jobs staying right here in Alberta - rather than the U.S. Midwest or the Gulf Coast. Celebration Time

There is need for a long term planning for trades education. But like planning for Tar Sands development, the very idea is anathema to the Klein Tories, who take lazzie faire to mean hands off even necassary regulation for sustainable capitalist development.

The trades shortage can only be resolved by having a long term vision and plan. For instance increasing the amount of apprenticeships, which can be done directly through the union hiring halls instead of relying on employers. The AFL has already suggested this as well as tax breaks for hiring and training. The failure to provide for trades training in Alberta has been a problem for over twenty years, it is the failure of the Tory government in Alberta.

They dumbed down the trades, by creating a general high school diploma program, aimed at university qualification and for the rest of the student population there was no encouragement to take trades training or go into work related post secondary education. Which is why a university education is now equated with employability. Another reason that so called higher learning is now being proletarinized, that is students at university are attending in order to get employable skills. Something that was once the domain of NAIT and SAIT and post-secondary trades and college education. Trades enjoy renaissance among job seekers

Increasing the attractiveness of the trades to women will also solve the labour shortage problem, and it is encouraging to read headlines that this is so. But they remain part of the proletarianization of academic training, being nurses, teachers, business management, some in engineering and sciences. As in the trades where they are a minority in the traditional male trades, they remain in the pink collar ghetto, whether as teachers or as hairdressers, or as service workers; houskeeping, store clerks. Even when having post-secondary education they remain a cheap labour force, as the wages paid to day-care workers shows.

Record number of women at work [Globe and Mail]

Growth works well for women [Ottawa Sun]

So why is Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL) saying it needs to import temporary construction workers from China and other countries. Because it has nothing to do with lack of labour and everything to do with union busting.

Shareholders Meeting Attracts Hundreds Of Union Protestors

CNRL is using this chimeric labour shortage to justifiy the outsourcing of labour to reduce its costs. Whether there is a labour shortage or not the company would still try and reduce its labour costs by using temporary workers, in this case foreign workers. Its all about profit not costs.

What the building trades unions have finally realized is their mis-placed campaign last year which was a xenophobic nationalist attack on temporary workers was misdirected. CNRL is the problem, not the workers they employ or not.

The Building Trades and the AFL now calls for giving these workers green cards, union rights and the potential to move here as immigrants. Something the IWW had already called for.Foreign Workers are Fellow Workers.

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More Firearms Registry Scandal

As I have shown the Firearms Registry, now being called the 'Long-gun Registry' a Conservative monicker to differentiate it from its earlier manifestation as the Canadian handgun and automatic weapons registry, was a Private Public Partnership boondoogle. Canada’s Billion Dollar P3 Boondoggle

Contracting out was the reason that costs at the registry sky rocketed. Contracting out computer operations including software creation and hardware purchases, and the use of contracted out call centre staff. Now it turns out that in the spirit of Liberal generosity and incompetence they also contracted out research. Well sort of.....

Groupaction went off half-cocked, court told

Was monitoring reaction to gun laws. Firm didn't understand 'firearms experience,' witness testifies at Guite corruption trial

SUE MONTGOMERY, The Gazette

Published: Wednesday, May 10, 2006

It was as if someone had gone downstairs to the local magazine shop, picked up all the firearms magazines, and photocopied the pages, especially the ones about the right to bear arms under the U.S. constitution.

That's how a witness testifying at the fraud trial of Charles Guite described how Groupaction Marketing Inc. monitored the Canadian pulse on the federal gun legislation, and got paid $150,000 in return.

"These people didn't have an appreciation of the Canadian firearms experience, not having the information we had and not having done the work we had," said Henry Vanwyk, communications director for the Canadian Firearms Centre, the organization formed to implement the 1995 Canadian Firearms Act.

The recent revelations of the ADSCAM scandal also involving the Canada Firearms Registry thus should come as no surprise. Considering that the Justice Department had no cost controls on anything else going on with regards to the registry. Which the Auditor General reported in the past and will further expand on next week.

At 2 p.m. next Tuesday, Fraser is scheduled to release her latest report to Parliament, another guaranteed compendium of squander and stupidity in high places, including the federal firearms program. While the AG does not have the authority to send the agency to its grave, her revelations will likely provide ample ammunition for the Conservatives to put the registry on life support. If a recent press teaser from Fraser's shop is any indication, her report will not be flattering.Among other things: "In carrying out our audit of the Canada Firearms Centre, we noted a matter with significant implications for Parliament's control of public spending." Stay tuned. Registry's not dead yet

Also See: Boondoggle

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Kyoto Shimoto

The Hammerblog reports: We're Number One! (May. 11, 2006) - Today, a Google search for the words climate change returns the Government of Canada's Climate Change website as the first result.The Government of Canada's Climate Change website is the first result of a Google search. (Source: Google) How drolly ironic, considering that the federal government has just abandoned its commitment to reducing Canada's greenhouse gas emiss

The Montreal Gazette Headline is priceless;Kyoto protocol mostly hot air, minister says

The importance of Kyoto is much overblown, it is an attempt to make capitalism sustainable, which it ain't. Kyoto allows for exchange of carbon credits, and for increased dependance on clean energy; read nuclear power versus dirty energy read coal. Ottawa wants Kyoto softened


That being said the Government of Canada signed on to Kyoto. The Government of Canada not the Liberal Party. Which the Harpocrites cannot stomach. Which is why they are attempting to abandon anything the Liberals did. So they will overturn Kyoto and the Firearms Registry and accept BMD through the back door of NORAD.

Basically they have an anti-Liberal fetish. They believe the Government for the past six years was not 'the Government' but the Liberal Party. Unfortunately it is a selective fetish. A selective choice of which Government of Canada agreements and policies the Conservatives will abide by and which they will abandon. Or we would not be in Afghanistan. But what's that saying about consistency and hobgoblins?

Of course then again there is the simple fact that the Harpocrites are just Bush League, shamelessly parroting everything the White House does.



More on Kyoto

Also see: A Critique of Kyoto Capitalism Is NOT Sustainable



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I Spy

Canada needs to do more spying: Day

No we don't we do enough already thank you very much. Since we are involved in the supersecret Echelon Project of global spying.

As this 1999 story shows; Canada a key snooper in huge spy network
which was by the same reporter who did the story above; Jim Bronskill.

The Echelon project is run in Canada by the super secret: Communications Security Establishment Canada's National Cryptologic Agency

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is Canada's national cryptologic agency. We provide the Government of Canada with two key services: foreign signals intelligence in support of defence and foreign policy, and the protection of electronic information and communication.

But since it is so secret (complete with its own web page) no wonder Public Security Minister Stockwell Day doesn't know about it. He probably doesn't have the neccasary security clearance. Since it is operated by the Department of Defense and he is only the Security Minister. They probably didn't tell him we are already spying hand in glove with the American NSA.

Except that it is public knowledge. It is known to Parliament. And it to the rest of the world thanks to CBS Sixty Minutes. But I guess it isn't known to the Stockwell Day.

Paper 1: Echelon and its role in COMINT
In a May 1995 report, the Canadian Parliamentary Security and Intelligence committee stated "Canada collaborates with some of its closest and long-standing allies in the exchange of foreign intelligence... These countries and the responsible agencies in each are the U.S. (National Security Agency), the U.K. (Government Communications Headquarters), Australia (Defence Signals Directorate), and New Zealand (Government Communications Security Branch (sic – Communications Security Establishent))" Canada has also published a number of official statements confirming basic aspects of the five power relationship. According to the Auditor-General, "CSE [the Communications Security Establishment] has access to allied SIGINT through reciprocal sharing agreements … Intelligence products, including analyses and assessments are exchanged, and technical assistance is provided by each to the others. These, and other relationships, provide Canada with information and technological resources that would otherwise be unobtainable with current resources".

CBS News | Ex-Snoop Confirms Echelon Network | February 12, 2001
Everywhere in the world, every day, people's phone calls, emails and faxes are monitored by Echelon, a secret government surveillance network. No, it's not fiction straight out of George Orwell's 1984. It's reality, says former spy Mike Frost in an interview broadcast on 60 Minutes on Sunday, Feb. 27, 2001 It's not the world of fiction. That's the way it works. I've been there," Frost tells CBS News 60 Minutes Correspondent Steve Kroft. "I was trained by you guys," says the former Canadian intelligence agent, referring to the United States' National Security Agency. The NSA runs Echelon with Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand as a series of listening posts around the world that eavesdrop on terrorists, drug lords and hostile foreign governments. But to find out what the bad guys are up to, all electronic communications, including those of the good guys, must be captured and analyzed for key words by super computers.


SOMEONE IS LISTENING
The computers in stations around the globe are known, within the network, as the ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can automatically search through traffic for keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system was designed by NSA to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole. The NSA and GCSB are bound together under the five-nation UKUSA signals intelligence agreement. The other three partners all with equally obscure names are the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in Canada, and the Defense Signals Directorate (DSD) in Australia.


ECHELON - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

However all this is moot. The real facts are simple, CSIS wants more moola for its failed operations of domestic spying. They have botched every attempt made to do domestic anti-terrorist spying begining with Air India and more recently with the Arar case. And so in order to expand its bueruacratic power base CSIS is using well placed news stories on the threat of Osama bin Laden to get more money and more power. Al Qaida assault on Canada 'probable,' warns CSIS

Most international spying is controled by the NSA in the USA which is now in the hands of private companies. And for good reason because most international spying has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden perse but more to do with bin Laden INC.

It's all about other corporate spying. The new warfare is about expanding global capitalism, cyberwarfare is about corportate secrets, knowledge has become a commodity under the WTO agreements on intellectual property. Commercial spying is about profit , and spying has become the ultimate Public Private Partnership (P3) which is why NARUS was hired to update the electronic survelliance capabilities of the NSA under Bush.Potential Evidence Surfaces of Bush's Illegal Spying

There is money to be made in the private business of spying. As government spies contract out to private companies. What the CIA once offered to corporate America during the Cold War has now become the business of warfare in the new market state.

Under Groundbreaker, the NSA will outsource much of its nonmission-related information technology support in four areas: networks, telephony, enterprise management and distributed computing.

ECHELON: America's Secret Global Surveillance Network
Commercial espionage: Since the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe, the intelligence agencies have searched for a new justification for their surveillance capability in order to protect their prominence and their bloated budgets. Their solution was to redefine the notion of national security to include economic, commercial and corporate concerns. An office was created within the Department of Commerce, the Office of Intelligence Liaison, to forward intercepted materials to major US corporations. In many cases, the beneficiaries of this commercial espionage effort are the very companies that helped the NSA develop the systems that power the ECHELON network. This incestuous relationship is so strong that sometimes this intelligence information is used to push other American manufacturers out of deals in favor of these mammoth US defense and intelligence contractors, who frequently are the source of major cash contributions to both political parties.

CorpWatch : Science Applications International Corporation

US: In The Company Of Spies

Also See:

CIA Front Companies Exposed

The Privatization of Torture

Big Brother Bush

Russia's Army of Slaves

Globalization=Contracting Out

The End of State Monopoly Internet

RCMchumPs

Fascists were CSIS Front

CSIS vs. CUPW

Not Your Daddies Conservative Party, well...

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Comatose Citizenship and Immigration Canada

"She goes into a coma [and] she loses her work permit, she loses her medical coverage," Sloan said Tuesday. "That's treating somebody like a bag of garbage, basically." Montreal nanny who fell into coma faces deportation

No its like treating someone like an indentured servant, a slave by any other name. Which is what Nannies are in Canada under employment standards laws and Federal immigration legislation.

While all the attention is focused on the US and its xenophobic nationalism, over Latino migration and so called open borders, the Bush Like Harpocrites have also pushed Citizenship and Immigration Canada to start more deportations. And this is what happens when the Law and Order types control the State. Bad laws, bad enforcement, and stupid deportations.

Also see:

Whose Family Values?

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Rare Bear

Strange bear was grizzly-polar hybrid, tests show And we know this how? Oh because it was killed. By a sports hunter. From the US. Who was kind enough to give the skin to Federal scientists for them to test. Dead rare bear. Rare. As in unkown. As in probably the only one of it's kind. As in dead.

Hunting Trip: $50,000

Shooting a Grizzly without a license: 12 months in Jail

Dead Rare Bear; Priceless.

Also See:

Bears

Hunting

Save our Polar Bears

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