Dion, Layton, No Harper

Liberal Leader Stephane Dion will be in Edmonton today.

NDP Leader Jack Layton will be in Edmonton next Friday

And still no sign of PM Stephen Harper.

The guy takes Redmonton and Alberta for granted.

Which is a mistake, and that might be a good thing.



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Ho Hum

Well I watched the much hyped new CBC 'comedy' Little Mosque on the Prairie, a pale imitation of CTV's very successful Corner Gas.

Little Mosque has been getting buzz for weeks, with everyone from the BBC to CNN running items on the comedy, the creation of Muslim filmmaker Zarqa Nawaz.The CBC, struggling terribly in the ratings, had a lot invested in the show and promoted it with uncharacteristic cash and vigour, including an event at downtown Toronto's Dundas Square last week that featured free chicken shawarma and a band of friendly camels.

Amatuer, banal, boring, snorefest, are terms that come to mind. That and it seriously needed a laugh track so we can follow the jokes. There were jokes?

And lots of references to Toronto proving it was produced in the very town that loves to hate itself, folks out west could care less about Toronto. Filmed in the backlot of a Toronto studio, which should be no surprize since the only thing CBC does out West is a Newsworld Broadcast from Calgary.

Will this show survive? Perhaps, since it will appeal to its Toronto audience. The rest of us are of course insensitive hicks as the show painfully tried to parody.

I don't see this playing on the screens at my favorite Spice Palace all you can eat buffet in Millwoods. Yep no Muslims out west. Except that the first Mosque in Canada was not in Toronto, or Montreal but in Edmonton.

And by the by last time I checked shawarma is a Lebanese dish. And last time I checked the Lebanese community in Canada has as many Druze and Christians as it does Muslims.

Now what they should have served if they were really on the prairies is Shai Butter Chicken.

See

TV

CBC


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Criminal Capitalism Redux

I guess they couldn't wait to get their bonuses. They thought it was just business as usual.

A total of six employees of the Siemens telecommunications unit Com have been arrested in connection with diverting the money to foreign bank accounts believed set up in order to pay bribes.

A former Siemens board member and three other employees were taken into custody last week, and two more suspects were detained on Wednesday, according to prosecutors in Munich.

The detentions followed a November 15 raid by 270 police and tax officials on the company's headquarters and other offices and private homes as part of an international investigation into bribery by company employees.

Altogether a total of 12 people are suspected of embezzling funds. A key focus of the investigation centres on contracts surrounding the security system for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, according to German media reports.

On Thursday, prosecutors announced they had charged a former DaimlerChrysler executive with embezzling 40 million euros between 2000 and 2005.

The man, who is in pre-trial detention, is alleged to have set up three dummy companies and submitted false invoices which were approved by the accounts department where he worked. Some 20 million euros was recovered when the fraud was exposed last year.

DaimlerChrysler earlier this year suspended several senior managers in its bus-making division and dismissed high-ranking employees over irregularities in its distribution network.

Criminal Capitalism remains the story of the year.

And like the recent CEO's pay scandals in the United States, or the back dating of stock options, captialism is a criminal activity until its made public.

Until then it is simply business as usual. No one though goes to jail, unlike the poor worker who is caught shoplifting or say engaging in robbery to keep body and soul together.

Nope White Collar crime ain't really a crime, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Once exposed then and only then does the captialist concede that maybe, just maybe they have done something wrong. But even then that isn't always the case. Take Steve Jobs and Apple for example.

An investigation into stock option irregularities by Apple has cleared its current executive team of any misconduct, although CEO Steve Jobs was found to be aware or recommended favorable grant dates, the company said in its regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Based on the findings of the independent investigation, Apple will take an additional non-cash charge of $84 million, after tax. This charge includes $4 million, $7 million and 10 million in fiscal years 2006, 2005 and 2004 respectively.

While Jobs was aware of the grants, the probe concluded that he did not financially benefit from any of the grants. The special committee set up to investigate the irregularities raised concerns regarding the actions of two former officers in connection with the accounting, recording and reporting of stock option grants.

While the probe did not name the officers, Fred Anderson, former chief financial officer resigned from the board in October as the company announced the internal investigation’s end. He said then he believed it was in Apple’s best interest for him to resign. Nancy Heinen, former senior vice president and general counsel left the company, quietly and without comment, in May. At the time, a company spokesman confirmed she had left, but couldn’t say why.

In Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs is admired for many things: His storybook resuscitation of Apple Computer Inc., his billion-dollar-plus fortune, his rock star status as the driving force behind iconic products such as the iPod. Near the top of the list is Jobs's famed ability to spin what admiring techies refer to as a "reality distortion field" to win consumers over to the Apple view of the world.

But will it work with government regulators? As Jobs prepares to wow the masses once again with his keynote at the annual Macworld trade show on Jan. 9, skepticism abounds among options experts, as well as techies, that the Apple chief executive is totally in the clear over his role in resetting start dates for company stock options. A report issued on Dec. 29 by a two-member special committee, composed of no less than former Vice-President Al Gore and tough-minded finance veteran Jerome B. York, "found no misconduct" by Jobs or other managers. Yet it acknowledged that he knew about some of the 6,428 option grants handed out between late 1996 and early 2003--roughly 15% of the total in that time--that were improperly dated to give employees an artificially low price. On some occasions, Jobs even recommended the dates.

See

CEO

Stock Options

Corporate Crime

White Collar Crime

Criminal Capitalism

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Lily Munster RIP

Death of A Scream Queen.

The Goth Queen of the Sixties Yvonne De Carlo. Back when Goth was fun, a parody of early horror films.

Yvonne De Carlo in full makeup as Lily Munster in 1966's "Munster Go Home."

De Carlo chats with James Stewart, who was working nearby, in 1948.

Yvonne De Carlo, the beautiful star who played Moses' wife in "The Ten Commandments" but achieved her greatest popularity on TV's "The Munsters," has died. She was 84.

De Carlo, whose shapely figure helped launch her career in B-movie desert adventures and Westerns, rose to more important roles in the 1950s. Later, she had a key role in a landmark Broadway musical, Stephen Sondheim's "Follies."

But for TV viewers, she will always be known as Lily Munster in the 1964-1966 slapstick horror-movie spoof "The Munsters." The series (the name allegedly derived from "fun-monsters") offered a gallery of Universal Pictures grotesques, including Dracula and Frankenstein's monster, in a cobwebbed gothic setting.

Yvonne De Carlo, the beautiful star who played Moses' wife in "The Ten Commandments" but achieved her greatest popularity on TV's "The Munsters," has died. She was 84.

De Carlo was born Peggy Yvonne Middleton in Vancouver, British Columbia, on September 1, 1922 (some sources say 1924). Abandoned by her father, she was raised by her mother in poor circumstances. The girl took dancing lessons and dropped out of high school to work in night clubs and local theaters. She continued dancing in clubs when she and her mother moved to Los Angeles.

Paramount Pictures signed her to a contract in 1942, and she adopted her middle name and her mother's middle name. Dropped by Paramount after 20 minor roles, she landed at Universal, which cast her as the B-picture version of the studio's sultry star Maria Montez.

Lily Munster was modeled on the earlier Scream Queen; Vampira.

Maila Nurmi (born Maila Syrjäniemi, December 21, 1921 in Petsamo, Finland — now Pechenga, Russia) created the well-remembered 1950s character of Vampira. Her portrayal of this character as a television horror host and in films was influential over decades that
followed.

Apparently, there remains some rare footage of the Vampira show in the KABC archives, as it remains extremely difficult to view her in the media that made her so popular. A Finnish documentary about Maila was shot in 1995, entitled Death, Sex and Taxes. In 1998, she returned to movies for I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, from an old Ed Wood script and starring Billy Zane. She can still be seen on the star conventions circuit.

Of course Elvira is also modeled on the Vampira character for her camp take off for another LA TV station

SEE:

Grandpa Munster RIP

RIP


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Vietnamization of Iraq

Tonight the President of the United States declared his dream of Empire defeated.

Bush Says He Takes Responsibility for Mistakes in Iraq

He has declared, that like the Viet Nam war, he will rely upon the Iraqization of the war, and rotate in more troops.

Bush Stresses Iraqi Role, More Troops in New War Plan

Many are not new troops but extensions of existing troops in the field and rotation of troops only recently removed from Iraq. There are no more troops to be had.

So the U.S. will rely upon its puppet government in Iraq to provide for some front line troops to be backed up by the U.S. just as it had in Viet Nam. All the talk over the last month has been about how this 'surge' will be led by the Iraqi's. And the result will be the same as the fall of Saigon.

By the end of 2007 the Americans will be rushing out of the Green Zone in Baghdad as they did in Viet-Nam.

The greatest irony is that Gerald Ford who passed away earlier this month was
the President when Saigon fell.

No wonder he thought Bush's war ill advised, he remembered too well the Viet Nam debacle when his Secretary of Defense was Donald Rumsfeld.

We have gone from Mission Accomplished, to a plan for Victory to a plan for success to a 'surge' plan. This was the wrong war at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. And now the chickens come home to roost.


'Surge' Debate a Classic Test of Power of the Purse

It was 32 years ago this winter when a heavily Democratic Congress, elected in the Watergate year of 1974, ended a decade of acquiescence and said no to the Vietnam War.

By then, the bulk of U.S. forces had been withdrawn and the war was almost entirely in the hands of the Vietnamese.

But there were still many diplomats and other Americans in the city that was still known as Saigon as well as elsewhere in the country that was still known as South Vietnam. And there were still tens of thousands of Vietnamese who had risked their standing and their well-being to serve alongside the Americans.

Beyond all these lives, the fate of that country still bore enormous implications for the prestige of the United States. The human investment that had been made there in the 1960s and 1970s, along with the inestimable consequences back in the U.S., would make Vietnam the most compelling issue of the era for tens of millions of Americans — if not for the nation as a whole.

At no time in the three decades of ensuing history has an American president been in quite so similar a predicament. But that has changed in the past year. President Bush began 2006 with a plausible case to make about the emergent, plucky democracy in Iraq. Millions had defied violence to vote and a government was taking shape. But with the bombing of the Al Askari mosque in Samarra in February, the insurgency in Iraq took a more viciously sectarian turn. For the remainder ofn 2006, the situation "on the ground" continued to deteriorate, with sharp growth in the rate of casualties among U.S. troops and Iraqis alike.

A U.S. military Apache attack helicopter flies over Baghdad. Smoke rises over central Baghdad as U.S. and Iraqi troops battle insurgents.

Claiming the Prize: Bush Surge Aimed at Securing Iraqi Oil
The American "surge" will be blended into the new draconian effort announced over the weekend by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki: an all-out war by the government's Shiite militia-riddled "security forces" on Sunni enclaves in Baghdad, as the Washington Post reports. American troops will "support" the "pacification effort" with what Maliki says calls "house-to-house" sweeps of Sunni areas. There is of course another phrase for this kind of operation: "ethnic cleansing."

So Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If the effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse – as it almost certainly will – Bush will simply back another horse. What he seeks in Iraq is not freedom or democracy but "stability" – a government of any shape or form that will deliver the goods. As the Independent wryly noted in its Sunday story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of the war back in 1999, in a speech he gave when he was still CEO of Halliburton. "Where is the oil going to come from" to slake the world's ever-growing thirst, asked Cheney, then answered his own question. "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."

See:

Iraq


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Feminizing the Proletariat

Here is an excellent post on why women are the proletariat, not a special interest group, nor a minority . Nor is womens work in the social factory valued anymore than it is in the home.

Women's work is real work
My recent starting of a job in childcare has got me thinking just how underappreciated and unappreciated childcare work really is. What it all comes down to though, is that childcare has always been the primary responsibility of women. And, as belonging to women, has so been made to be inadequate. Unimportant. Less skilled. Lower. Certainly paid lower on the pay scale of things. But most importantly, deemed of a lower status because it is women’s work - it is not “real” work.

What is mistakenly called the feminization of poverty is in reality the proletarianization of womens work and of women as workers.

The social factory is the extension of womens work in the home and the extension of homework. The fact is as I have posted here before, but it is important to reiteriate, womens work, women workers are seen as and extension of being homeworkers. Home work includes child and elder care. It is not the natural function of women as individuals in society prior to capitalism.

In pre capitalist societies it takes a village to raise a child or care for its elders. It is a social function of the whole community. With the advent of capitalism and the creation of modern urban society a new family unit of the bourgoise was created; the nuclear family. What was once the family unit of the upper classes is now the generalized family unit in modern capitalist society. It is perfect for the needs of capitalism, which is producers no longer working from their homes as artisans, but working as wage slaves and unwaged slaves capable of consuming the goods of fordist production.

Housework and Care of Young Children

Throughout the world women continue to bear primary responsibility for childcare and house-work. This unpaid work remains economically invisible, but creates a foundation for all other economic, political and social life.

At the same time, pregnancy and care for young children impede women’s opportunities for employment. Women today increasingly lack the traditional support of the extended family, in which other family members participated in childcare and children helped with agricultural and domestic chores. Childcare is often a heavy burden on women who work outside the home to support the family. Poverty greatly exacerbates the problem.

The World’s Largest Workplace: Social Reproduction and Wages for Housework

Done-Paid
or
Women's house work - How it should be rewarded?

For a year and a half we have been running in foundation "Taking care of the world" a campaign "DONE-PAID or women's housework - how to reward it". We can see the results of ignoring women's rights: violence against them, poverty, too small participation in public life. We point out the structural cause of these problems: no payment for housework done by women for ages.

Women's economic rights are ignored all over the world. This problem is so difficult that it seems almost impossible to solve it in existing system. But Poland has good tradition in starting changes in what seemed impossible (for instance social movement Solidarność and its leader Lech Wałęsa). Now it is time to take the next step.

In our opinion the key to the problem called "equality" is women's money. A fight for equality hasn't ended yet. First we fought out a right to education, then to work outside home, next electoral rights. Now it's time to fight for our economic rights. It's time to work on new way of thinking and new solutions.

Only when women become financially independent, not by taking on additional responsibilities but by achieving recognition for their housework, such shameful acts as violence against women can be eliminated. Only then social and political activation of women, so desired by international institutions, will be possible. Because without dealing with causes we can't deal with effects.

Sweden

EXTRA PAY FOR HOMEMAKING
It is given to families with children and childless persons between the age of 18 and 29. It consists of two parts: one - for running the home, and another - for children who live in that house. Its amount depends on the size of a household, costs of its keeping and family income.

The extension of womens work into the workplace in jobs such as daycare workers, teachers and nurses leads to it being undervalued and underpaid. And today in Canada the vast majority of women are working.

Not as professionals, eg. lawyers, politicians, doctors, CEO's, etc. but a low paid workers in the service and retail sectors a sector that is not unionized and pays minimum wages or just above. Again the role of women workers in the service industry is an extension of their role at home as the hostess.

When the Conservatives attacked the Liberal daycare funding for the provinces often they focused on the fact that monies were being used to boost the pay for daycare workers, as if this was some sort of waste of money. In fact you can't talk about having daycare spaces for children without the workers to maintain the relationship with those children. Which is exactly the problem with private daycares and the baba as babysitter situations, they often do not have enough workers per child.

And its not just that women earn less than men but that their jobs are undervalued. This is clear in the report issued this morning on the SARS epidemic in Ontario. That workers, mainly women, were injured on the job because their work is not considered as hazardous as mens.

The commissioner lambasted Ontario for its failure to adequately protect the doctors, nurses and other hospital employees in their place of work, noting of all the people who contracted SARS in the province, 72 per cent were infected in a health-care setting, including 169 health-care workers. Two nurses and one doctor died.

''Hospitals are dangerous workplaces, like mines and factories, yet they lack the basic safety culture and workplacesafety systems that have become expected and accepted for many years in Ontario mines and factories and in British Columbia's hospitals,'' Campbell wrote.

''This was a system failure,'' Campbell wrote. ''The lack of preparation against infectious disease, the decline of public health, the failure of systems that should protect nurses and paramedics and others from infection at work - all these declines and failures went on through three successive governments of different political stripes.

The fact this report shows that several years after the SARS outbreak Ontario still has not protected its healthcare workers.

In the same way other working women have experienced the failure of succesive governments and their policemen to protect them from being terrorized and murdered on the streets of our cities by lust murderers. Their work being an extension of the womens role in the bedroom.

Along with sexism racism is the undercurrent in the failure of the State and its cops to do anything about the mass murder in Canada of sex trade workers. Because many sex trade workers are aboriginal women and girls they suffer a modernized form of colonial occupation and domination, that it is ok to rape and abuse them, as has happened in their own communities by the very policemen supposedly there to protect them.

It all comes back to the home. The oppression of women in the home is written on the face of our very uncivil civil society. Only when the proletariat refuses to continue to do housework at home or its extension in capitalist society, the General(ized) Strike, will the exploitation and oppression of women cease.


See

Childcare

Feminism

Proletariat

Women Workers


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Loonies and Scorpions

This whole War On Terror Security State business is getting just downright silly.

Its an arachnid not a terrorist Scorpion delays Canada-bound flight

Now whose loonie? Canadian coins bugged, U.S. security agency says


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Marxist Dictionary

And speaking of dictionaries and definitions I found this useful definition at Paulitics Marx English Dictionary;

Use Value:

-the power of something to satisfy a human need/desire (eg.: food satisfies hunger)

-use value …exchange value (which is how much $$ you can get for something)

-an umbrella’s exchange value may equal a dinner’s, but their use values are never equal (unless of course you have, for instance, a very large steak that you can also use to protect yourself form the rain)

See Use Value

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Minoritory

A new word to add to my Devils Dictionary, courtesy of the National Post;

Minoritory: n.

The small number of Canadians who vote Conservative. "Can Harper grow the minoritory?"

Only if he waters them with tinkle-down economics.



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Labour WebSite Of The Year-A Blog?

Its that time of the year again for the annual Labour Web Site of the Year Awards.

Vote for the Labour Website of the Year 2007!
Voting ends in 21 days ...

When it was begun in 1997 I had my first website up and got the nomination for website of the week. Then Eric Lee expanded it into Labour Web Site of the Year. There were few union websites up then. Today there are thousands.

Now the question is will the Labour Website expand to include labour blogs. There are now labour blogs publishing, whether directly from unions or from union based commentators.

I would suggest that Eric Lee consider doing a Labour Blog of the Year award to differentiate them from Labour Websites.

Amongst the Progressive Bloggers these folks have blogged on labour issues lately which is always good to see, its just a smattering and apologies if I missed anyone. You can always let me know in the comments. Don't forget to add a link to your story.

SGEU strike escalates

We haven't discussed the SGEU strike yet. Please share your feedback on this matter.

Toronto Taxi Drivers Picket Sheraton Hotel


They're goin' back to work...


US Army might break Goodyear strike - Financial Times - MSNBC.com

A Short History of the Labour Movement in Canada and Quebec: Part One

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