LNG

Is it just me or do these two stories have something in common?

Canada Kitimat LNG plant gets provincial OK

PetroChina seeking LNG suppliers - report

Coincidence? I think not.



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Between Coal and a Hard Place

So is it going to be coal or nuclear that Ontario moves towards for its energy needs? Well not coal despite Our King Ralph trying to woo Ontario folks to give his mythical clean coal a second look. Of course there ain't no such a creature yet, however coal prices are still lower than other energy costs And of course the coal lobby in Ontario is linked to the right wing and Klein.

Energy minister dismisses clean coal idea

Of course I guess Natural gas is out of the question. Wait a minute why is that? Natural gas prices predicted to plummet. And LNG plants are planned for both coasts.

Shell CEO says natural gas prices must be kept competitive

Van der Veer pointed out that gas doesn't have a monopoly over power generation. "Power generation can come from alternative energies," he said, adding that once coal power stations are built, it's not that easy to switch back to gas generation, he said.

"We have to make sure that people make long-term choices which are favorable to gas," he said.

The industry needs knowledge and relationships because of the difficulties faced in creating a secure future for gas production and consumption, "it needs complete value chains," he said.

"There's a very good future for gas, oil companies can help with their knowledge, governments set the framework...you can't do it on your own, it's all about confidence and trust," Van der Veer concluded.

And how about hydro? Why not buy into the Quebec Hydro grid, and look at joint dam construction with Manitoba in the northern border region.

Well because The Nuclear lobby has the McGuinty government ear, thats why.





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Bubble Burst

The current housing bubble in the US is being used to pay off credit cards, as folks take out second mortgages, the elderly take out loans through reverse mortgages (those despicable CHIP ads on TV) and as folks buy and flip homes in heated up real estate market. But has the bubble burst? Forbes thinks so.

Special Offer: What happens as the middle and working classes get priced out of home ownership? They stay in apartments, which is good news for multifamily REITs, which pay fat yields and have returned an average of nearly 20% year-to-date. Click here for the best buys in apartment REITs from the Forbes/Slatin Real Estate Report.

And so does the new Fed Chairman. Bernanke batters stocks

As I posted here yesterday the US is about to enter a period of Stagflation.

See: Greenspans Legacy


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Outsourcing IT

After selling off its computer manufacturing arm to China, IBM was cash rich, and what does it do with the cash, why invest in India. The number two growth economy behind China. This will set off Lou Dobbs for sure. Yet why he does not get the neo-liberal agenda is beyond me.

IBM plans to invest $6 billion in India
Global companies are competing here to harness talent and to garner market share in the second fastest- growing economy in the world, after China. Other technology multinationals like Microsoft, Intel, Cisco Systems and Advanced Micro Devices have recently announced investments in India that each exceed $1 billion.Among IBM's operations in Bangalore is a command center, the largest of three such IBM centers worldwide, which monitors 16,000 computer servers and 10,000 applications globally, according to Mats Agervi, vice president for global delivery services. The center has some of the most sophisticated high-technology equipment, huge bandwidth connectivity and workers who back up operations of the firm's customers worldwide, Agervi said.

America is dying as a manufacturing society as it embraces the service economy of Multi-level marketing and internet business. Manufacturing and computer servicing are going offshore, as America merely becomes a nation of sellers and buyers. Which is why its economy currently is boyed up by the housing bubble.

However it is the nature of globalization, capital goes where it can make money, and it makes money through cheap labour and technological advancement. Which produces a new proletariat where one did not exist before. IBM and other American IT companies are doing what the British Empire did in India 100 years ago during their period of Free Trade expansion. Something Marx pointed out about India over 150 years ago.

The British Rule in India by Karl Marx

These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe:

“Sollte these Qual uns quälen
Da sie unsre Lust vermehrt,
Hat nicht myriaden Seelen
Timur’s Herrschaft aufgezehrt?”

[“Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?”]
[From Goethe’s “An Suleika”, Westöstlicher Diwan]

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Stephen Nixon, Richard Harper

Gee this reminds me of when Richard Nixon decided to comment on the Charlie Manson Case.

Before the trial began, the Manson case became a political issue. President Richard M. Nixon condemned Manson on public television, calling him a dangerous cult leader.

Especially when the PM makes it personal.

Terror suspect Chand accused of wanting to behead prime minister ...

The lawyer chastised Harper for expressing "happiness" that the suspects had been arrested over the weekend.

"I expect my client to get a fair trial; as fair as every other trial that occurs in Canada," said Batasar.

"In fact the comments made by the prime minister himself with respect to his happiness that these persons had been arrested certainly is surprising and shocking."

"I believe the prime minister should keep out of the process and let justice take its course."

And like the Manson case with the hysteria around terrorism innocents are bound to be locked up and have the key thrown away with our new law and order security state under Harper. Especially when he has already declared them all guilty.

Bobby Beausoleil, the intended beneficiary of the copycat Tate-LaBianca murders, remains in prison despite his having been convicted of a single murder that was not aggravated by factors like torture or rape. It is probable that the specter of a headline reading "Manson follower paroled" is behind his continuing imprisonment. The Manson Myth

Police put on a `good spectacle'

Snipers, leg irons, selected evidence, police brass — all calculated to sway the public, lawyers and security experts say

However after the inital media hysteria dies down and the real facts are placed before the courts the chances are very good that this was all a tempest in a tea pot. Used to assuage the US Public, bolster the Harper Government and of course put more bucks in RCMP, CSIS and local cops budgets. This high profile bust comes after CSIS claimed it needed more money to detect immigrant terrorists entering the country, and while the current security state anti-terrorism law is being reviewed. Coincidence, I think not.

As for the innocent they will have to wait for their day in court to overcome the social pariah status they currently face. Most so called security cases in Canada have ended up with NO convictions according to the panelists on Mike Duffy's show today. And they too recommended that Harper should have kept his trap shut.

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Double Jeopardy

This is a case of double jeopardy where in the victim is subjected to both the sexist regime of Sharia law in Iran and the ruling classes discrimination against ethnic minorities in Iran.

Today on Parliament Hill MP's from all parties gathered to denounce the pending death sentence for Nazanin Fatehi who killed a rapist attacking her. She is Kurdish in a largely Farsi country. Double Jeopardy.

Congratulations to all the Women MP's who united to make this case their cause and held an all party joint press conference withNazanin Afhin-Jam on Parliament Hill today to celebrate the news that a new trial for Nazanin Fatehi maybe pending.

Update: Nazanin's death sentence has been overturned by the Iranian head of Judiciary Ayatollah Shahroudi. The case will now be sent back to a lower court Read more

And congratulations to Nazanin Afhin-Jam who has used her celebrity for a just cause.Ex-beauty queen spearheads fight

Sign and spread this petition, started by the Canadian model and singer Nazanin Afshin-Jam.

The MP's should offer Canada as an asylum for Nazanin since we know she will not get a fair trial under the Ayatollahs.



18-year old Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi (f) was sentenced to death after she reportedly admitted stabbing to death one of three men who attempted to rape her and her niece in a park in Karaj in March 2005. She was 17 at the time. During her trial, she reportedly told the court “I wanted to defend myself and my niece. I did not want to kill that boy. At the heat of the moment I did not know what to do because no one came to our help”.

2 women unite in desperate cause

NAZANIN FATEHI: The Kurdish woman awaits execution in an Iranian prison for killing the man who tried to rape her NAZANIN AFSHIN-JAM: The Canadian model is leading a growing international campaign to spare the jailed woman's life

Bodog Music Recording Artist Nazanin Afshin-Jam Pleas to World Media, Kofi Annan and the UN to Save the Life of Another Nazanin in Iran

Save Nazanin

This website was created to spread information about the 18-year old Iranian girl Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi, who has been sentenced to death by hanging. Nazanin`s "crime" was killing a man who ambushed and tried to rape her. Please take a few moments to read about her case and what you can do to stop the execution and save Nazanin`s life.

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Blame the Workers

In a sleazy move that is typical of B.C. Ferries management they are now blaming the mariners, the Ferry Workers for not being trained on new equipment installed on the Ferry, Queen of the North, that sunk earlier this year. The equipment an automatic pilot and navigation computer were installed only weeks before the sinking, and none of the ships crew were trained in their operation.

The Transportation Safety Board considered this failure of management so serious that they wrote the B.C. Ferries Corporation with their preliminary findings. B.C. Ferries response, provide training for the workers heck no. Blame the workers, issue a new form letter demanding the workers sign that they are trained, failure to complie and you are fired.


Lack of training cited in fatal BC ferry sinking

The TSB said some crew members on the bridge of the ship felt they did not have enough training to work with the new equipment — specifically the newly installed auto-pilot system. "These are master mariners, so again I'm having a little trouble that they would want to be in control of a ship and not be familiar with their equipment," said David Hahn, president and CEO of BC Ferries. Hahn said the company is taking the preliminary findings seriously and have already taken steps to address the training issue. "We've introduced a new form that we're asking all the officers to sign, stating that they're familiar with the equipment, they're comfortable with it," he said. "We have to remove that doubt."

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Labour Produces All Wealth

As the wobblies say; Labour produces all wealth, all wealth belongs to labour.

It's the labour theory of value, nice to see it in the headlines.

Workers look to cash in on mining industry riches

It pays to hire an apprentice - Landmark study reveals that employers accrue $1.38 for every dollar they invest in training an apprentice

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Take A Valium

Ok everybody who is mounting their Outrage Over CUPE campaign here are two articles that put the CUPE Ontario motion to boycott Israel in context.

One from the left; Union drawing attention to Israeli injustice, argues Linda McQuaig

and surprise surprise one from the right;

Toronto Sun EDITORIAL: We choose Israel — and Palestine
We agree with CUPE that what it calls the apartheid wall and we call the security barrier, is an affront to the dignity and lives of the Palestinians. But we see it as a necessary evil, precisely because it has dramatically lowered the number of terrorist attacks on Israel. We agree with CUPE that the Palestinians have suffered under occupation. Unlike them, we accept the reason for the occupation — Israel’s need for security.

Unlike the other right wing ranters like Coren and Levant, and the syncophantic Kinsella, the Sun editorial is a ray of reason in a stupid reactionary attempt to discredit CUPE for DARING to criticize Israel.

Of course not to be left out of a controversy and free press coverage, the self appointed voice of Labour and the Left in Canada also takes cheap shots at CUPE.

CUPE boycott of Israel won't help cause of peace
The labour movement and the left should try to counteract despair in the Middle East with calls for genuine dialogue and exchange, not by finger-pointing and boycotts, writes Buzz Hargrove

But then Buzz wants to raid them so his motives are not exactly pure. And he is still ticked off that the CUPE dominated Ontario NDP kicked him out.


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Warren Kinsella

Duh Oh

Equalization report favours Quebec Well slap me up the head and call me stupid, I would never have expected that.

Despite the privatization putsch of the Charest government, and the call for a more market state by the right wing of the BQ/PQ, the fact remains that Quebec is a State Capitalist nation.

It relies upon federal handouts to function, including massive job creation subsidies, subsidies to Bombardier and other SME's, which is exactly what undermines its claims to independence. It is actually capable of generating a surplus but it refuses too. Its economy is bourgoise like its nationalism, both are protectionist.

Which gives succour to the Western Alien-Nation whiners and Alberta Separatists.

Some on the right argue that of course Quebec is a have not nation because it is State Capitalist. The reality is that it is a basket case economy because it relied on years of Liberal cronyism both provincially and federally to remain a protectionist economy, despite promoting and embracing the FTA and NAFTA.

Liberalization of the economy will be fought by both the left and the crony capitalist ruling class as it is not in their mutual interests to change. It is the last basition of classical captialist industrialism in Canada.

Showing that without a truly Pan-Canadian industrial policy Quebec will remain a basket case economy, asking for handouts while producing massive surplus value.

RBC forecasts slower economic growth for Quebec

RBC notes that for Quebec, as the most reliant province on the manufacturing sector, the stronger Canadian dollar brings some challenges to many of these industries, specifically high-tech and electrical products, machinery manufacturing, primary and finished textiles and clothing, transportation equipment, paper, furniture and wood products. Combined, these industries make up over two-thirds of Quebec's GDP and about 400,000 workers. In addition, export sensitivities exist particularly in industries exposed to the coming slowdown in North American housing and auto markets. Another area for concern is the impact of aggressive competition in the U.S. from low-wage countries like China and India, in industries such as textiles and clothing, furniture and fixtures and machinery, in which Quebec has traditionally been strong.

Canada Economic Development -- The Economy of Quebec

See: Quebec

The Neo Liberal Canadian State

Origins of the Captialist State In Canada

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