It takes the American SEC to actually charge the folks behind Enron North. Investors got tired of waiting for the Ontario Securities Commission to do anything. Another reason for having a single national regulator.SEC files charges against former Nortel execs
The securities regulator alleges the execs at the Toronto-based telecom maker repeatedly engaged in accounting fraud "to bridge gaps between Nortel's true performance, its internal targets and Wall Street expectations." "Each of the defendants betrayed Nortel's investors and their misconduct gave rise to billions of dollars in shareholder losses," said Linda Thomsen, director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement.
In the go go world of a long bull market like we have seen, the only house rule for casino capitalism is that rules are meant to be broken. The wave of criminal fraud cases that have hit the market are a result of the politics of Greed that we saw in the eighties and before that in the seventies and early sixties.
Gekko: Greed - you mark my words - will save Teldar, and that other malfunctioning corporation, the U.S.A.
During bull markets the movers and shakers of real existing capitalism, not the Von Mises /Hayek fiction, find accomplices like Accounting firms to do their bidding, which is to hide money away from the government, and also to make as much money as quickly as possible. Both of these ends then require a means, which is fraud, pure and simple.
The use of back dated shares, accounting practices to pump up market prices, accounting practices to avoid taxes, hedged bets on mutual funds after closing, these are all business as usual until they are declared fraudulent by those who are supposed to be regulating the market.
It is the political dominance of finance in the marketplace.
Nortel is not Canada's only criminal capitalist on trial in the U.S.
Establishment-watchers eagerly await Black's trial
See
The Pentagon Thursday sought support for Defense Secretary William S. Cohen's choice to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff - a general officer who has admitted committing adultery - but the battle quickly widened into an effort to convince the public that the military was not applying a double-standard on sexual infractions. One day after the Pentagon's disclosure that Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston conducted an adulterous affair more than a decade ago, officials sought to explain how in different circumstances such relationships could put some service members in jail and others in retirement while not eliminating one - Ralston - from candidacy for the armed forces' most coveted post.
Los Angeles Times June 6, 1997.
ELIZABETH FOX-Genovese, a controversial figure in American feminism, passed away last week at 65. The career of this remarkable writer and scholar illustrates the complexities and challenges of 20th- and 21st-century feminism. She evolved from a left-wing Marxist feminist into a deeply conservative Catholic anti feminist, two positions that are equally alien to me. Yet she managed, along the way, to raise many important questions and offer many brilliant insights.Fox-Genovese's journey from Marxism to Catholic traditionalism -- shared by her husband, historian Eugene Genovese -- could be seen, from a classical liberal point of view, in starkly negative terms: as a full-circle transition from one anti-individualist, antiliberal philosophy to another. Yet when it comes to women's issues, her critique of individualism contains an important kernel of truth. Reconciling women's pursuit of their new roles, freedoms, and opportunities with the needs of families and children has often been a rocky road, as several generations of feminism's daughters have found out.
A new task force funded by the Canadian government and the province of Alberta will study ways to capture and store greenhouse gases emitted by the province's massive oil sands projects, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Thursday. The task force will be headed by Steven Snyder, chief executive of TransAlta Corp., a Calgary-based power company that operates coal-fired plants in Alberta and elsewhere.
Environmental issues today are greater than they've been in probably the history of the industry, and particularly in the Canadian context, with Kyoto at the forefront, but regardless of the CO2 issue, knocks, socks, water issues, in this industry are out there and bigger than ever. This is -- you know, the whole Kyoto argument has become a proxy for the environment, so it's raised environmental issues on everyone's mind. So whether, you know, the U.S., whether they sign Kyoto or not, I don't think it's the point. The point is, people are more conscious of the environment than they were, you know, asking for more action, and our industry's at the forefront of that. I mean, raising capital today, we all know that is more difficult than it was three years ago, so for a capital intensive business, that's pretty -- a pretty tough equation to be in. TransAlta Corporation Investors’ Days Presentation Seattle Seattle, Washington November 25, 2002So If Steve and the boys at TransAlta were 'at the forefront five years ago how come we are only seeing them act now on CO2 sequestration and other environmental solutions. Just waiting with their hands out. Ottawa spends $155.9M to make Alberta oil industry more green
The forerunner of TransAlta Utilities, Calgary Power Company, was founded by banker W. Max Aitken in 1903. Aitken, who later became Lord Beaverbrook, reorganized a number of utilities as a subsidiary of his Royal Securities Company. He was joined in this venture by his friend and mentor R. B. Bennett, who served as Canadian Prime Minister from 1930 until 1935. Some business leaders felt that Aitken and Bennett were an unlikely team, since Bennett was known as an upstanding young man, while Aitken had earned a reputation as something of a renegade. Nonetheless, the pair joined several other prominent Canadian businessmen on Calgary Power's initial board of directors. Among these board members were: A. E. Cross, one of the founders of the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede; Herbert S. Holt, a Montrealer who was later knighted; and C. B. Smith, president of Calgary Power's forerunner, Calgary Power and Transmission Company Limited. Aitken soon became Calgary Power's first president.
In 1947, two years after the war ended, Calgary Power moved its head office from Montreal--then the nation's largest city and prime business center--to Calgary, reorganized, and incorporated as Calgary Power Ltd. At that time, Calgary Power supplied the province of Alberta with 99 percent of its hydroelectric power. Also in 1947, Calgary Power built its Barrier Hydro Plant and used it to test the use of a newly developed remote-control operation system. The automation efforts worked well enough that Calgary Power soon converted all of its plants to the Barrier Plant system. A control center that could operate the company's entire system was built in Seebe in 1951. The company continued its string of innovations by testing 'mobile radio' communications in its line patrol trucks.
Although electricity had begun to spread to rural areas in the 1940s, only 5 percent of farmers in the province had electricity of any kind. The majority of farmers were hesitant to adapt until it became obvious that electric service could increase farm production as well as provide modern conveniences. The main problem for utilities in supplying farms was a financial one: at the time, it was estimated that it would cost $200 million--or twice the provincial debt--to expand service and supply all of the farms with electricity. This dilemma led to an unprecedented cooperative effort between Calgary Power, farmers, and the provincial government.
overlooked founder of the New Left and Marxist Feminism; Raya Dunayevskaya.This philosophical comprehension of Marx's mature work of political economy needs to be reckoned with by today's "anti-globalization" movement. That movement is largely motivated by the injustice of the huge disparity in wealth between the northern, advanced capitalist nations and the nations of the south. The rallying cry is for a more just distribution of the world's wealth. Marxism and Freedom moves beyond this politics of equity. It illuminates how deeply capital must be uprooted in order to transform labor into an activity for human development and the realization of individual potentialities.
Dunayevskaya highlights the question, "What are we for?" Typically it is more immediately clear what we are against-capital's globalized reach, or imperialism. The question of the kind of society we are working for is usually ducked as too remote or potentially divisive. Dunayevskaya nonetheless insists on the need for full-fledged discussion within the movement and a collective focus for working it out.
This orientation comes out of Dunayevskaya's embrace of Hegel's method of the negation of the negation. She likens it to Marx's concept of "revolution in permanence," which "made it clear that the revolution does not end with the overthrow of the old but must continue to the new, so you begin to feel this presence of the future in the present" (12). The revolutionary impulse thus seeks the creation of a new human being beyond the uprooting of the old society. Only this ceaseless negation, including the negation of the initial attempts at negation, can lead us beyond a reshuffling of the cards so as to achieve an equitable redistribution of the world's wealth.
For Dunayevskaya the dialectic of negativity is the notion that forward movement emerges from the negation of obstacles to freedom. Negation needs to go further than the refutation of the given, because the first negation is still imprinted with the old. Only when negativity goes on to become self-directed, self-related, or in Hegelian terms "absolute," does it create the positive and the truly new.
While the aim of a humanistic transformation of society has this dialectical philosophical basis, it emerges out of actual human struggles. Dunayevskaya anticipates the focus on fighting for "new human relations" that later became central to the women's, Black liberation and workers' struggles. She quotes a young worker from Los Angeles who asked: "What skill do you need in this day of Automation? What pride can you have in your work if everything is done electronically...? What about the human being?"
"Those who have dedicated their lives to the creation of more just societies stand back now and take stock of the disintegration of so many of the socialist experiments. Feminism was palpably missing from those plans drawn up by men. Raya Dunayevskaya knew the importance of a feminist vision and hers informed the Marxist-Humanism she explained so well. Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution is as relevant today as when it was written, perhaps more so. This is necessary reading for all who want to know what went wrong and how to do it better next time."— Margaret Randall
under capitalism machines exploit labor. “Capital is then a material thing which exploits labor” (p. 13). Instead of analyzing the capitalist labor process and thus discovering how a material thing becomes an exploiting force, ........that the thing, means of production, has become the social relation, capital, because of what Marx calls “the contradiction between the personification of objects and the representation of persons by things.”
The focal point of Marx’s analysis of capitalist society is his critique of capitalist production. The ideology which flows from this historic mode of production is enveloped in the perverted relation of dead to living labor. Marx pointed out that the very simple relation—capital uses labor—expresses “the personification of things and the reification of people.” That is to say, the means of production become capital and are personified as capitalists at the same time that the workers become reified, that is, their labor becomes objectified into the property of others.
Marx’s critique of capitalist society, based primarily on this inverted relation of dead to living labor at the point of production, extends also to the surface of society (the market), where the social relation between people assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”This is the fetishism of commodities.Marx proceeds to analyze the capitalist mode of production. Now that the worker is in the factory, the “social relation” becomes a production relation.
By virtue of that fact his relationship to the boss is very clear; it in no sense assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things. On the contrary, there the worker overestimates the capitalist’s might. He thinks that the capitalist alone is responsible for his plight instead of seeing the cause in the mode of production which the capitalist represents. There the worker personifies things: the means of production used as capital become the capitalists. We are here confronted with what Marx called “the personification of things and the reification of people.” Marx was most emphatic in laying bare this “reification of people” because that is the very heart of his critique of political economy. He grasped this very early. “When one speaks of private property,” wrote the young Marx in 1844, “one thinks of something outside of man. When one speaks of labor, one has to do immediately with man himself. The new formulation of the question already involves its solution.”
Dunayevskaya Outline of Marx's Capital--volume one
In evolving through the Communist party to Trotskyism, Dunayevskaya and James became the Forrest Johnson Tendency after Trotsky's death as a political crisis shook the Fourth International. They articulated the earliest State Capitalist critique , within Trotskyism, of the Soviet Union and subsequently of historical capitalism as it evolved through WWII and the Cold War.
She became Leon Trotsky’s Russian-language secretary in 1937 during his exile in Mexico, but broke with him in 1939 at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Her simultaneous study of the Russian economy and of Marx’s early writings (later known as the 1844 Humanist Essays) led to her 1941-42 analysis that not only was Russia a state-capitalist society, but that state-capitalism was a new world stage.
It was this articulation plus their emphasis on women, blacks and youth as part of the class struggle, culturally as well as politically and economically that set them apart from the rest of the Left. They were part of a movement known as the third way, but different from its other proponents because even though they were steeped in Leninism, they confronted the failure of the Vanguard of professional revolutionaries and their parties, to really speak for the whole of the class.
News and Letters, Dunayevskaya's organization evolved out of the post war Cold War as the Left faced the crisis of Imperialism and Stalinism. Those who came out of the Trotskyist movement created a new force on the Left called the Third Way, neither supporting Stalinism or American Imperialism. In Europe they moved beyond Trotskyism into Libertarian Marxism and Socialism.When we reach state-capitalism, one-party state, cold war, hydrogen bomb, it is obvious that we have reached ultimates. We are now at the stage where all universal questions are matters of concrete specific urgency for society in general as well as for every individual. As we wrote in The Invading Socialist Society:
“It is precisely the character of our age and the maturity of humanity that obliterates the opposition between theory and practice, between the intellectual occupations of the ‘educated’ and the masses.” (p. 14.)
All previous distinctions, politics and economics, war and peace, agitation and propaganda, party and mass, the individual and society, national, civil and imperialist war, single country and one world, immediate needs and ultimate solutions – all these it is impossible to keep separate any longer. Total planning is inseparable from permanent crisis, the world struggle for the minds of men from the world tendency to the complete mechanization of men.
State-capitalism is in itself the total contradiction, absolute antagonism. In it are concentrated all the contradictions of revolution and counter-revolution. The proletariat, never so revolutionary as it is today, is over half the world in the stranglehold of Stalinism, the form of the counter-revolution in our day, the absolute opposite of the proletarian revolution.
It is the totality of these contradictions that today compels philosophy, a total conception. Hence the propaganda ministry of Hitler, the omnipresent orthodoxy of Stalinism, the Voice of America. The war over productivity is fought in terms of philosophy, a way of life. When men question not the fruits of toil but the toil itself, then philosophy in Marx’s sense of human activity has become actual.
World War I plunged the world into complete chaos. Lenin between 1914 and 1917 established in theory: (a) the economic basis of the counter-revolutionary Social Democracy (The economic basis of imperialist war had been established before him.); (b) the Soviet democracy in contradistinction to bourgeois democracy. But before he did this, he had to break with the philosophical method of the Second International. He worked at this privately in a profound study of the Hegelian dialectic applied to Marx’s Capital, the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Thirty years have now passed. Lenin’s method of economic analysis is ours to use, not to repeat his findings. His political conception of complete abolition of bureaucracy and all ordering from above is today to be driven to its ultimate as the revolutionary weapon against the one-party state. But today the problems of production which Lenin had to tackle in Russia in 1920 are universal. No longer to be ignored is the philosophical method he used in holding fast to the creation of a new and higher social organization of labor as "the essence” of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is not the Marxists who have compelled society to face this issue. Today in every layer of society, the great philosophical battles that matter are precisely those over production, the role of the proletariat, the one-party state, and many of the combatants are professed dialecticians.
The crisis of production today is the crisis of the antagonism between manual and intellectual labor. The problem of modern philosophy from Descartes in the sixteenth century to Stalinism in 1950 is the problem of the division of labor between the intellectuals and the workers.
Source: State Capitalism and World Revolution, by C.L.R. James in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya & Grace Lee; with a new introduction by Paul Buhle. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986. Chapter XI, pp. 113-135. Original publication: 1950. Note: Asterisks were changed to numbered footnotes for greater clarity.
In 1953, Dunayevskaya split with Lee and James, leading to the formation of Marxist-Humanism by Dunayevskaya (later solidified into the group News and Letters), while James and Lee would go on to form a new group, Facing Reality, which would eventually see the split between James and now Grace Lee-Boggs. James' work would continue to influence other people through the journal started by longtime co-revolutionary Martin Glaberman called "Radical America", whose writers are a virtual "Who's Who of the Marxist critique of racism and white supremacy, including George Rawick and David Roediger. The group Sojourner Truth was influenced by James' work and took up the name of autonomist Marxism, but independent of James' practical organisational efforts. The work of Noel Ignatiev and Race Traitor would form the other well known tendency within the Marxist critique of white supremacy through the theory of 'white skin privilege.'
Dunayevskaya and News and Letters have been influenced by the early Hegelians and the Frankfurt School and themselves represent one of the more vocal defenders of a Hegelian Marxism which they refer to as Marxist-Humanism, having made theoretical contributions to the study of Marx and Hegel and the post-Marx Marxist world, as well as innovative readings of Lenin and issues of race, gender and sexuality. The group is also influenced by Rosa Luxemburg and did much to resurrect her in the English-speaking world as a major theorist.
Rank and file organizing against the union bosses and bureaucracy, self organization, the need for revolutionaries to recognize all struggles of the oppressed in America as part of the class struggle took News and Letters and Glaberman and Dunayevskaya, into a different non-Leninist non-vanguard form of revolutionary organization and praxis. As their detractors have pointed out; There is also a close internal relationship between Dunayevskaya and the morality of anarchism.
CUPE Staff Strike Update: Staffers hit the bricks
At a time when the federal finance minister is asking Canada's big banks to justify a raft of ATM banking fees, Canada's second-largest bank is reporting its first quarterly profit of more than $1 billion.
Bank of Nova Scotia reported Tuesday morning a first quarter profit that smashed all expectations at $1.01 billion, or $1.01 a share, up almost 20 per cent from $844 million, or 84 cents a share, a year ago.
Last week Canada's largest bank, Royal Bank of Canada, posted first-quarter net earnings of $1.5 billion or $1.14 per diluted share, a 27.6-per-cent increase from the same quarter last year
Let us review the facts; ATM fees are set by a cartel of Canada's six banks. Not credit unions or foreign banks. The Banking Cartel owns Interac, it implemented ATM's as a way of closing branches and reducing front line staff.
So when they claim that they need to charge you ATM fees for withdrawing money from their branch and not your own, well thats a little white lie. Since the cartel owns Interac, the fact is they have colluded in a monopolistic fashion to set fees.