Joined At The Hip

Scary picture at the Canadian Club in Ottawa yesterday.

PM Stephen Harper presents his new election platform, another Five Point Platform.

Beside him, not a Minister, not a Senator, but none other than General Rick Hillier.

These two are like peas in a pod.

Joined at the hip.

Like Roy Rogers and Trigger. Trigger...happy.

Despite the talk about the environment, the fiscal imbalance or even tax cuts we know which priority is number one for our Macho PM; Afghanistan. After all it was his first photo op mission abroad, and war making is not a tough decision for either of these warmongers.

And Harper is calling for an "assertive" foreign policy, by boosting the strength of the military, as well as continuing reconstruction and the fight against terror in Afghanistan. Harper says his government will table a comprehensive report in Parliament summarizing Canada's role in Afghanistan and announcing the next steps in its participation there.

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Hillier

Afghanistan






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Free Labour = Free Of Unions

Critic howls over trade agreement Note the headline.....It's from the Edmonton Sun of course......And you know there is trouble when the Fraser Institute says its a good deal....This is the latest ne0-liberal/neo-con attack on workers and their unions.

Alberta's highly touted free trade agreement with B.C. is "a wolf in sheep's clothing," says the head of the Alberta Federation of Labour. Gil McGowan is warning other provinces that the Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement, dubbed TILMA, "is not all sweetness and light."

But McGowan says union lawyers fear the deal will give companies the right to sue municipal and provincial governments and school boards that try to bring privatized services under the public umbrella.

He's also concerned the deal will result in a "dumbing down" of Alberta rules for trades training.

Liberal critic Bill Bonko says the deal should have been debated in the legislature if it was so good, rather than being negotiated behind closed doors.

But Jason Clemens of the Fraser Institute raves about the deal, saying the Yukon, Saskatchewan, Ontario and the Atlantic provinces are keen on it.

"This really could be a domino effect across the country to remove or dramatically reduce trade barriers," he said.

Also see: Legal advice on TILMA

For more on the TILMA go here and here

This is a provincial agreement that was drafted to meet the open corridor polices of NAFTA and the new North American Union proposed under the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) which will be discussed by the Three Amigos this summer in Kananaskis.

And it fits in with the agenda of the Harpocrites in Ottawa and their business cronies who are promoting this policy as well as the increased use of temporary workers.

The $10-billion plan to help manufacturing compete globally
Expand the temporary foreign worker program to make it easier to hire non-Canadians when there are no domestic citizens available.

Although governments can only influence manufacturers' success to a certain degree, the industry believes Ottawa could be doing much more to help.

The sector's wish list includes lower corporate income taxes, the elimination of provincial trade barriers, more investment in skills, and broader tax credits for industrial training and corporate research.

And let's not forget who Harper put in charge as Minister of Human Resources.

And there is a Conservative former MLA and anti-union candidate running in former Conservative MP John Williamson's federal riding here. After all Alberta has the worst labour laws in Canada. And is home to the Right To Work Movement which was once headed by Conservative MP Rob Anders.

As Jean Charest once said, back when he was leader of the Federal PC's, "Alberta sets the agenda for Canada."


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Labour

Unions

Temporary Workers

NAFTA

AFL





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Capitalism Caps Tarsands Expansion

No need for the Blogging Tories, Harpocrites or Fast Eddie Stelmach to get all in huff over the need to cap or reduce the rapid expansion of the tar sands.

Capitalism will take care of that.....for a while... until oil prices go up again....

Low bids stymie Petrocan oil sands auction

But with the price of oil down more than 20 per cent from a peak in 2006, passion for the oil sands has lessened, in part because of the high cost of developing projects in northeastern Alberta.

Interest in the oil sands can vary from week to week. On Jan. 10, the Alberta government said exploration rights for about 200,000 hectares of oil sands territory generated $134-million. Two weeks later, oil sands rights raised only $500,000 for less than 6,000 hectares. Another sale will be announced Wednesday, which is expected to attract more interest, as are more sales in March.

Another Fire Sale of Alberta's resources, with a 25 year exemption on Royalties!!!

Lougheed was right we need a plan for expansion of the oil sands, but that is not likely to happen as this is the same government that sold off its assets like liquor stores, highway construction, etc. at fire sale prices.

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Stelmach

NEP

TarSands

Alberta

Environment



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Where's That Damn Calculator

Lyle Oberg the man who would be Premier but ended up as Treasurer can't find his calculator so the Spring sitting of the Alberta legislature will be delayed.

The session, Ed Stelmach's first as premier, was originally slated to begin in the last week of February. But the date is now being pushed back to March 7 to give the government more time to prepare. The delay comes less than three weeks after finance minister Lyle Oberg admitted the 2007 budget would not be ready until April, rather than March, as is the norm.

Apparently the session will be delayed because he is counting all the billions on his fingers and toes.

No big deal they do all the real business in Cabinet. After all the only deficit in Alberta is a democratic deficit.

The May 2006 report Fiscal Surplus, Democratic Deficit by the University of Alberta's Parkland Institute, not only correctly predicts this year's actual surplus, it also points out that the Alberta government has been wrong in its revenue projections for at least the last thirteen years.

More specifically, the report calculates that in each of the last six years, the government has underestimated revenues by an average of $4.3 billion per year.

This attitude was confirmed by Mr. Klein last fall when he told the media that the unbudgeted surplus was none of the legislature's business. Given Alberta's track record in budgeting, what the premier was saying was that the legislature should have no say in how to spend 20 to 25 per cent of the province's revenue.

For more on Alberta's democratic deficit see Daveberta's review of Kevin Tafts new book democracy derailed.

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Democratic Deficit

Ed Stelmach

Lyle Oberg



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Poll Predicts War On Iran

It's a good thing that the Bush White House doesn't develop its policies and strategies based on polling. American Majority Predicts War with Iran


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Iran


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PC=Liberals

I was always a Progressive Conservative, I am a Progressive Conservative and the Liberals are Progressive Conservative, said Garth Turner in his press conference with Liberal Leader Stephane Dion. And Dion didn't blink.

Well that settles that. We now know what 'progressive' means when Liberals and Liberalbloggers use it. Small p for progressive, small c for conservative.

The Big Red Tent is home for Red Tory's; Turner, Stronach, Brison.

I look forward to Garth blogging at Liberalbloggers and Progressive Bloggers since he was unceremoniously kicked off the Blogging Tories several months ago.

Of course it won't be the same old principled independent Garth of the past year because he has agreed to abide by caucus and party solidarity, Dion said so. Well maybe, I couldn't see Garths hands he may have had his fingers crossed when he said Yes, when asked by reporters.

And while there are few tears being shed over at the Blogging Tories, well lets just say they are the hardline right.

And while Garth may be a maverick, his sharp knife jabs at Harper and the Conservative party, at the press conference, claiming they abandoned their PC and Reform roots for the politics of fear, well that says a lot.

The centrist politics of the Dion Liberals bodes ill for the Harpocrites. After all as Garth said his choice was Liberals or Green. NDP never crossed his lips.

So folks if ya want to really be progressive and not just PC well then ya gotta move left.

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Garth Turner



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Groupthink

We sometimes overlook the most obvious connection between deniers, those who deny global warming, those who deny evolution and those who deny the holocaust.

They suffer from the same kind of groupthink and conspiracy theories.

Its not denial they say, it's debate they want, the facts are not irrefutable, there is evidence to the contrary.

For a long time Bradley Smith has tried to present himself as an honest chap, a champion of intellectual freedom simply seeking an "open debate"about the "holocaust controversy [sic]." But this debate is a sham. The so-called holocaust controversy does not exist. It is the invention of a collection of long-time anti-Semites and apologists for Hitler.

On the surface, Holocaust deniers portray themselves as individuals and groups engaged in a legitimate, dispassionate quest for historical knowledge and "truth."

Dressing themselves in pseudo-academic garb, they have adopted the term "revisionism" in order to mask and legitimate their enterprise. After all, the ongoing challenge to and revision of previously accepted historical interpretation is one of the hallmarks of the professional historian's craft.

Of course most holocaust deniers are right wing kooks that even other right wingers disavow or do they? Not so. Once upon a time they had powerful business backers, and in many cases still do today.

Like Robert Welch Jr. who founded the John Birch Society. Today the Birchites focus their criticism on immigration, legal or illegal and the UN. There are many in a variety of right wing movements, like the Minutemen, whose roots go back to the sixties and the World Anti-Bolshevik Movement which gave succour to post WWII fascists.

The right wing is inundated with conspiracy theorists, holocaust deniers and neo-fascists. And ideological differences aside they are part of the 'mainstream' right, they are backed by private business interests and the tactics they have developed over fifty years of lobbying in the United States remain the same.

Because they are effective. Deny that your opponents have evidence, claim something is a theory, not a fact and viola, their views are challenged for there creditability.

Thus the same argumentative tactic used to deny the holocaust is used to deny evolution and used to deny climate change. It is groupthink on the right. And the argumentative style does not change, the subject of the attack does.

And it is always tinged with conspiracy theory, that the scientific or historical facts are being foisted on us because it is consensus reality, consensus of those in power it is not the 'real thing'.

So all the historians that accept the holocaust are establishment historians not 'real' historians. Scientists that accept evolution or global warming are not 'real' scientists.

The only place that a climate change science consensus exists is in what Essex and McKitrick call 'Official Science', the collective voice of governments and other so-called 'science authorities'. But this is not real science.

The Climate Change Deniers have money and powerful connections they have used to discredit their opponents, in this case other scientists and academics. And sometimes do so to end careers, literally terrifying their opponents into silence. Certainly a form of fascism.

"There is a strategy to single out individuals, tarnish them and try to bring the whole of the science into disrepute," he says. "And Kevin [Trenberth] is a likely target." Mann agrees that the scientists behind the upcoming IPCC report are in for a rough ride. "There is already an orchestrated campaign against the IPCC by climate change contrarians," he says.

Many of the IPCC's authors, some of whom asked not to be named, say this is a smokescreen. They claim there is an extensive network of lobby groups and scientists involved in making the case against the IPCC and its reports. Automobile, coal and oil companies have coordinated and funded past attacks on them, the scientists say. Sometimes this has been done through Washington lobby groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), whose officers include Myron Ebell, a former climate negotiator for George W. Bush's administration. Recently, the CEI made television advertisements arguing against climate change, one of which ended with the words: "Carbon dioxide, they call it pollution, we call it life." CEI's past funders include ExxonMobil, General Motors and the Ford Motor Company.

The money trail

Some sceptical scientists are funded directly by industry. In July, The Washington Post published a leaked letter from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA), an energy company based in Colorado, that exhorted power companies to support the work of the prominent sceptic Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Worried about the potential cost of cleaning up coal-fired power plants to reduce their CO₂ emissions, IREA's general manager, Stanley Lewandowski, wrote: "We believe that it is necessary to support the scientific community that is willing to stand up against the alarmists... In February this year, IREA alone contributed $100,000 to Dr Michaels."

The Fraser Institutes response to the IPCC report was a long time in the making, and a coordinated effort between them and the anti-climate change lobby, the flat earthers, in the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. And the organizations, front groups really, are all interconnected.

It was planned years ago, as new front organizations sprung up over the past three years in preparation for the IPCC report. While the Fraser Institute like its American counter-part the Cato Institute have existed since the seventies, groups like Canada's Natural Resources Stewardship Project, and the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition are all relatively new lobbying groups. Even the older Friends of Science. was only created in 2002.

The push was on by the right and their big business backers when they saw the writing on the wall after Kyoto was signed. One faction of capitalism endorsed Kyoto, another was ambivalent, and a handful, but a powerful handful, vehmently opposed Kyoto.

Having lost the war they now engage in a protracted series of battles to attempt to inundate doubt in the public mind, using fronts like Junk Science.com and Fox News, various assorted right wing media mouthpieces in Canada, Europe and America. They know they have lost, but if in anyway they can hold back radical changes required to deal with the heat death of the planet, to save their industries they will. Victory to them is to delay change.

And they will never go away, another issue will come to the fore that they can delay, attack, undermine, and deny. And the consipiratorial politics of denial will once again be used.

The Right Wing exposes the Janus nature of the ruling class. One face appeals to the public as liberal, seeking to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism, the other jingoist, nativist, reactionary seeks to dominate through demagoguery and populism. One is enlightened capitalism the other is fascism. Both are false choices.

The alternative is, as it has always been for the past one hundred years, Barbarism or Socialism.



See:

Fraser Institute

Environment

Conspiracy Theory

Fascism

Anti-Semitism


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Echo Chamber

Here we have more of the same echo chamber of the Flat Earth society of climate change deniers quoting each other without referencing they belong to the same old boys club.

For instance we get this right wing column in the London Free Press, a Quebecor/Sun newspaper,

Kyoto penalizes those trying to do good
The not-so-green cynics at the Small Dead Animals blogsite have dubbed Suzuki's tour, Flakes on a Plane, and worry about the amount of emissions-spewing fossil fuels Suzuki himself will burn up by the time his tour wraps up in Victoria.

Cynics? Cynics? Rightwhingnutbars is more like it. But of course this columnist is a member of the SDA fan club so he puts them in a charitable light.

And we have this report published in the Canadian Free (sic) Press

Asking the right questions about climate change

And the folks asking those right questins are

The Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP), a Canadian non-profit group, including a number of leading climate change sceptics, was launched October 12, 2006.

And they quote their pals in the Fraser Institute. As I pointed out here when they quote each other they fail to say they all belong to the same small circle of friends. Which is journalistically and intellectually dishonest, to say the least.

See:

Fraser Institute

Environment


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God Created Global Warming

Yep when you break down the arguments from the right that's what it comes down to.

Global Warming, like AIDS, is all part of Gods plan.

Global warming is a given. The cause of global warming is questioned. Some scientists blame man, just as many other scientists contend we are undergoing one of Earth's natural warming cycles.

Our planet has been cooling and warming since God created it.


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Creationism

Environment

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Al Gore A Tory?

File this under all is fair in love and war and politics...

In answer to a question in Palrliament today, Environment Minister, and Mouth that Roared, John Baird, he who is never without a newspaper to quote from, quoted Al Gore saying that Canada punched above its weight when it comes to championing the environment.

(source unkown and you will have to wait till tommorow for the exact quote to appear in Hansard)

My, my will wonders never cease. It's the Jolly Green Make Over of the Tories.

Of course we know this is all this recent conversion on the road to Paris, they still deny Kyoto, is superficial.

After all remember the last time a Tory Minister quoted Al Gore.

I hope they all plan to attend this event, if not to embrace Gore at least to get his autograph,

Former US vice-president Al Gore will give a public lecture at the University of Toronto Feb. 21, addressing the threat of global climate change. ...

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Baird

Environment



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