City to foot Whyte policing bill Why? The bars on Whyte Avenue profited handsomely from the NHL playoffs. They charged more for their booze, they overcrowded their bars, they provided negligable security, and they don't have to pay for policing. The bill should go to the Old Strathcona Hospitality Association, which represents these profiteers and also to the Old Strathcona Business Association. The riots on Whyte were a direct result of their profiteering and they should foot the bill, not taxpayers. How come none of our self-righteous right wingers ,like the folks at the Edmonton Sun, have come to this libertarian conclusion. Instead the right wing business types on city council deny the obvious; “To blame the bar owners for the stuff on Whyte Avenue is a mistake,” said Coun. Mike Nickel. Nope it's not a mistake it is their fault and they should pay.
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Whyte Avenue
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Friday, November 10, 2006
Murder City
So explain this. Alberta has an overwhelming majority of Conservatives federally and provincially, the party of Law and Order.Alberta also has the highest murder rate in Canada. So much for their ability to actually get tough on crime.
Despite the high number of murders in Toronto, Ontario’s rate was still below the national average. Among Canada’s larger cities, Edmonton had the highest homicide rate. Murder rate rises, says Stats Can
See:
A Murder of Crows in Canada's Murder Capital
MurderCrime
Edmonton
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Consultation
What do the Income Trusts and the Wheat Board have in common? The New Conservative Government failed to consult the stakeholders involved before deciding to take arbitrary action; taxing the Income Trusts and dismantling the Wheat Board. Repeat after me; open, transparent, accountable.
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Bozo Boner
Boy what will we do without King Ralph. First he and his syncophants get all verklempt over Jeffery Simpsons article based on his speech in Alberta to the Congress Board; The bozo years are over for Alberta. What now?
Klein calls writer's bozo story TO 'crap'
Calgary Sun, Canada -8 Nov 2006
EDMONTON -- Premier Ralph Klein says he's offended by remarks that suggest he ran a "bozo" government, but dismissed the insult as envy at his province's ...
Klein offended by columnist's 'bozo' crackCTV.ca
Klein reacts to 'bozo' commentsEdmonton Sun
'Bozo' description based on envyVancouver Province (subscription) all 8 news articles »
Then he shows up as the class clown on the Rick Mercer show.
And just to really make things even better, after denouncing the Bozo comments the Bozo makes one of his own. Klein won't apologize for Stronach 'bone' joke
Lets see the Federal Conservatives have called Belinda a Dog and now Klein has made a boner at her expense. Nastiness puts women off politics: Stronach
And folks get upset because some environmentalists challenge Rona Ambrose for being more concerned with her hair than the environment.
But Ralph does em one better attacking Belinda.
Yep its still the Bozo years in Alberta, and even with Ralph leaving the Bozo's will still be in charge. Unfortuanetly for Mercer and the MSM none of them is as quotable as Ralph.
The progressive blogosphere has more on the Klein boner.
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Klein
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Kristallnacht In Gaza
Grief turns to rage as Beit Hanoun buries its dead
The Israeli Imperialist State has waged war on the civilian population of Gaza for the past week, bombing, straffing, bulldozing, using tanks, aircraft and rockets. The world's silence over these war crimes is again deafening.
This must be another example of what the New Government of Canada calls a 'measured response'. Response to what one must ask. A response to the Palestinians voting for the wrong party.
While jack booted brown shirts are not marching in the streets of Beit Hanoun smashing windows and burning out Palestinians, the effect is the same. The brown shirts are the IDF and they are using their overwheming military might to terrorize the Palestinian population whom they have imprisoned in the occupied territories. Israel is a not only a terrorist state but a Fascist state. No matter what excuses they make over this particular assault in Gaza. For a Gaza family, the strife hits home
Israel's rabid nationalism is actually a form of virulent anti-semitism, since the Palestinians are also Semites. The irony is of course obvious. The Israeli state defends only some semitic peoples at the expense of the other semitic peoples in the region whom they continue to oppress. And like their fascist forebearers the Israeli state blames the victims.
This past week was a Gaza's Kristallnacht.
Also See:
Israel
Lebanon
Zionism
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The Israeli Imperialist State has waged war on the civilian population of Gaza for the past week, bombing, straffing, bulldozing, using tanks, aircraft and rockets. The world's silence over these war crimes is again deafening.
This must be another example of what the New Government of Canada calls a 'measured response'. Response to what one must ask. A response to the Palestinians voting for the wrong party.
While jack booted brown shirts are not marching in the streets of Beit Hanoun smashing windows and burning out Palestinians, the effect is the same. The brown shirts are the IDF and they are using their overwheming military might to terrorize the Palestinian population whom they have imprisoned in the occupied territories. Israel is a not only a terrorist state but a Fascist state. No matter what excuses they make over this particular assault in Gaza. For a Gaza family, the strife hits home
Israel's rabid nationalism is actually a form of virulent anti-semitism, since the Palestinians are also Semites. The irony is of course obvious. The Israeli state defends only some semitic peoples at the expense of the other semitic peoples in the region whom they continue to oppress. And like their fascist forebearers the Israeli state blames the victims.
This past week was a Gaza's Kristallnacht.
On the nights of November 9 and 10, gangs of Nazi youth roamed through Jewish neighborhoods breaking windows of Jewish businesses and homes, burning synagogues and looting. In all 101 synagogues were destroyed and almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed. 26,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, Jews were physically attacked and beaten and 91 died (Snyder, Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Paragon House, 1989:201).
Three days later, on November 12, Goering called a meeting of the top Nazi leadership to assess the damage done during the night and place responsibility for it.
It was decided at the meeting that, since Jews were to blame for these events, they be held legally and financially responsible for the damages incurred by the pogrom. Accordingly, a "fine of 1 billion marks was levied for the slaying of Vom Rath, and 6 million marks paid by insurance companies for broken windows was to be given to the state coffers. (Snyder, Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Paragon House, 1989:201).
KRISTALLNACHT
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Israel
Lebanon
Zionism
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Too Rich
Boy its been a long time since anyone called the CP a 'far left group'. And the Luxembourg in this story ain't no Rosa.
Communist Party chair nets £20m in painting sale
It couldn't have been a greater contrast: the comrades of the Communist Party of Britain were meeting on a wet Wednesday night in one of the grottier enclaves of east London, while in an auction room in Manhattan the world's leading art dealers were on a spending spree which broke world records. Few would have guessed the unlikely link between them. But Anita Halpin, the 62-year-old stalwart and chair of the far left group, was about to become a multimillionaire.
In the last few months, unbeknown to friends and colleagues, Ms Halpin has inherited one of the most important expressionist German paintings. Yesterday, it was sold for £20.5m.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Berlin Street Scene, a vivid vision of the claustrophobic, anxiety-inducing ebb and flow of urban life in 1913, was bought from Ms Halpin by art consultant Daniella Luxembourg on behalf of the Neue Galerie, New York.
Ms Luxembourg told the Guardian: "It's one of Kirchner's best ever works. Without the restitution claim, the probability of such a work arriving on the market is absolutely zero. There is no other painting like this in the work of Kirchner - it's so rare. The quality and rarity of it are what justify the price. When you buy a work like this, you are buying a museum piece, part of the cultural heritage of a country."
For a communist, it may seem a galling sum for 200cm by 150cm of canvas. Worse still, perhaps, for a woman with Stalinist credentials. Her inheritance was sold in a frenzied session at Christie's in New York during which Russian tycoons and American millionaires bid well through the roof of estimated sale tags. At the end of the night, the total sale had achieved $491.4m (£258m), nearly doubling the previous record of $269m at Christie's in May 1990.
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Thursday, November 09, 2006
Hobsbawm Historical Revisionist
Firstly let me say that I enjoy Eric Hobsbawms historical writings. The depth and the historical materialist perspective, the breadth of the his writings whether on social rebels or jazz, working class history or on world history, his works are invaluable. He is a marxist historian, and an unrepentant one at that. So far so good. Unfortunately Hobsbawm spent most his years defending the Soviet Union and the Communist Party after Stalins fall.
While other marxist historians like E. P. Thompson moved towards the New Left abandoning Stalinism, Hobsbawm remained a true believer. Even after the pivotal event which led most of the old left to abandon the CP and create the New Left, that event was the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
Now that Soviet Union has collapsed Hobsbawm has finally admitted that the CP was bankrupt. Ironcially it is this event the one that Hobsbawm did not allow to influence his party loyalty that he writes about since this is the sixtieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution.
Could it have been different? :: Eric Hobsbawm: Budapest 1956
A revolution that opposed Stalinism, and was the very model of revolts that would follow it, Czechslovakia in 1968 and Poland with the Solidarity Revolts through the seventies and eighties. And inevitably the actions in Hungary would be replayed in Russia when communism there collapsed, the tearing down of statues of Stalin, the military refusing to fire on the Duma, etc.
Between 1953 and 1956 workers across Eastern Europe revolted against Post War Stalinist Russian Imperialism. As Chris Harman of the International Socialists wrote in his invaluable work about this period;Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe.
The Hungarian Revolution splintered the Trotskyist movement as much as it splintered the Communist Parties in the West. A new analysis was developed contending that the Soviet Union was not socialist nor an alternative to capitalism but was actually a different form of capitalism, state capitalism.
These events gave succour to those in the Forth International who contested Trotsky's undying faith that the Soviet Union was a deformed workers state. It gave rise to a variety of views of state captialism in the Soviet Union, including theJohnson Forest Tendency, being CLR James and Raya Dunsevkaya, the International Socialists, and the Bureacratic Collectivist theory of Max Schactman.
During the cold war this tendency was broadly called the Third Way Tendency one that declared that both the Soviet Union and American Imperialism were a danger to the world and to class struggle. It would be the revolts in Eastern Europe like the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 that would inspire this tendency.
And it was the old guard like Hobsbawm for whom the Hungarian Revolution would be an anathema to their soft stalinism. Hobsbawm says in his review;
"Contemporary history is useless unless it allows emotion to be recollected in tranquillity. Probably no episode in 20th-century history generated a more intense burst of feeling in the Western world than the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Although it lasted less than two weeks, it was both a classic instance of the narrative of justified popular insurrection against oppressive government, familiar since the fall of the Bastille, and of David’s in this case doomed victory against Goliath."
He then proceeds to look back at the history of the period with his inside insight devoid of emotion to define why and how the revolution occured, which he blames on a deformed Communist Party and the negative influence of Stalin.
It is an amazing read, certainly one that he would not have nor could have written at the time or for years after. But fifty years later he too as a marxist historian can finally give this pivotal event in Communist Party history its due, devoid of emotion.
The Hungarian Revolution led to contradictory trajectories in Western Politics, it furthered the Cold War and the rise of the neo-fascist right, with its exiles coming west full of venom for Stalinism and full of venomous anti-semitism.
Perhaps the best way to begin the history of the uprising is with the miserable state of the Hungarian Communist Party during World War Two. Since briefly establishing the only Soviet republic outside Russia in 1919 (with the enthusiastic support of the young Hungarian movie industry under Alexander Korda, Michael Korda’s uncle), the Party had been scattered and reduced by domestic repression, Stalin’s terror and its own internal quarrels, and several times had actually dissolved. Gati claims that by 1940 there were barely more than two hundred activists in Hungary and fewer than fifty reliable survivors in Moscow, with the result that one of Stalin’s four Magyar postwar proconsuls (Rákosi, Gerö, Révai and Farkas), all incidentally Jewish, had to be transferred from the Czechoslovak to the Hungarian Party.
And amongst disenchanted Trotskyists like Shactman and Burnham it led them to the right and they became the ideological forefathers of the neo-cons. It subesequently led to the collapse of the CP in Europe and North America and the rise of the New Left.
These political tendencies are still very much with us today even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and fifty years after the Hungarian Revolution. And even if it is late in the day it is nice to see Hobsbawm belatedly reflect on this pivotal event in the history of the Cold War.
See:
An Honest Politician
50th Anniversary Hungarian Workers Revolt
Book Review:BEHIND THE TIMES The Decline and...
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Polyamory Is Good For The Genes
But bad for the males. But with multiple partners it is likely more male babies would survive to replace them. While it is not truly polyamory it is the earliest form of polgamy, that of polyandry where a female has many mates. It is also the form of human sexual relations in what Engels called primitive communist societies.
Free loving mums have healthier babies
Promiscuous females are more likely to give birth to fitter offspring than their monogamous sisters, an Australian study shows.
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Free Love
Whose Family Values?
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Free loving mums have healthier babies
Promiscuous females are more likely to give birth to fitter offspring than their monogamous sisters, an Australian study shows.
Paternity tests showed that the sperm of some males was far more successful than others, and most importantly, that babies fathered by these males were twice as likely to survive, said Fisher.
Despite the advantages to the species from free love, males usually died due to exhaustion and aggressive encounters with other males after a single, torrid mating season.
Also see:
Free Love
Marx on Bigamy
Whose Family Values?
The Sexual Revolution Continues
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