Saturday, November 26, 2005

Catch 22

Ah ha! The old Catch 22, the CIA didn't inform the Canadian Government about its covert operation, so the Government has no evidence that there was a covert operation. Nor is the government going to ask for informantion about a covert operation cause like they know they will only get plausible deniablity.
Ottawa says it needs proof of CIA-plane allegations
If there is evidence CIA-controlled planes are involved in illegal activities in Canada, the matter will be raised with the United States, Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew said yesterday.The minister, under continuing pressure from the Bloc Québécois, told the Commons that Canada expects other countries to respect Canadian law. "If we were to learn that Canadian soil was being used against Canadian or international laws, then we would raise this with the United States," he said during Question Period.
Thus leaving it all up to the Europeans to expose the CIA. EU Wants Details On CIA Prisons On the other hand Pettigrew and the Anne Mcllean our Security Minister could read the paper and find out all about it and ask questions. But perhaps they don't want to know since they have availed themselves of this same CIA covert program against Canadian citizens like Mahar Arar.
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Stop the Extradition!

Joseph Pannell's wife vows to fight extradition
He's accused of shooting Chicago police officer

Have we learned no lessons from the illegal kidnapping and extradition of Leonard Peltier from Canada.

Now again on flimsy or non-existant evidence the US government is attempting to extradite another political refugee from Canada to stand trial in the U.S.

For what, defending himself against a racist cop and a campaign to destroy the Black Panthers which was organized at the highest levels of the state.

This is madness. He cannot be assured of a fair trial anymore than Leonard was, who rots in jail still, suffering retribution at the hands of the FBI.

The Minister of Justice must overturn this court decision. It is a travesty of Justice.

Alleged Black Panther to be extradited

TORONTO -- A man accused of being a militant Black Panther who shot and paralyzed a Chicago police officer more than 35 years ago was ordered extradited on Friday but won't be facing American justice anytime soon.

An Ontario judge ruled that Joseph Pannell, a married father of four who has lived in the Toronto area for more than two decades, must return to the United States to face charges of attempted murder for the 1969 shooting of police officer Terrence Knox.

"The ruling speaks to the inherent frailties in the system we have for extradition," Falconer said.

"The question is why a Canadian court is left in the position where our own system gives us almost no right or opportunity to assess the reliability of the information by which we're extraditing him."

Pannell, who was 19 at the time of the shooting, has never denied shooting Knox, who was then 21, but said it happened in self-defence after the police officer attacked him.

"African-American males in the city of Chicago were under siege by police," Falconer said of the political conditions at the time.

Pannell's lawyers argue there are major inconsistencies in Knox's version of what happened March 7, 1969. They also say much of the evidence has long been destroyed, and Pannell could not get a fair trial in the U.S.

The Murder of Fred Hampton

The activities of the Black Panthers in Chicago came to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Hoover described the Panthers as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and urged the Chicago police to launch an all-out assault on the organization. In 1969 the Panther party headquarters on West Monroe Street was raided three times and over 100 members were arrested.

In the early hours of the 4th December, 1969, the Panther headquarters was raided by the police for the fourth time. The police later claimed that the Panthers opened fire and a shoot-out took place. During the next ten minutes Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed. Witnesses claimed that Hampton was wounded in the shoulder and then executed by a shot to the head.

The panthers left alive, including Deborah Johnson, Hampton's girlfriend, who was eight months pregnant at the time, were arrested and charged with attempting to murder the police. Afterwards, ballistic evidence revealed that only one bullet had been fired by the Panthers whereas nearly a hundred came from police guns.

After the resignation of President Richard Nixon, the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a wide-ranging investigation of America's intelligence services. Frank Church of Idaho, the chairman of the committee, revealed in April, 1976 that William O'Neal, Hampton's bodyguard, was a FBI agent-provocateur who, days before the raid, had delivered an apartment floor-plan to the Bureau with an "X" marking Hampton's bed. Ballistic evidence showed that most bullets during the raid were aimed at Hampton's bedroom.


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Violence Against Women A Moral Outrage

Women do not speak of domestic violence - WHO
One in six women worldwide suffers domestic violence - some battered during pregnancy - yet many remain silent about the assaults, according to the World Health Organisation.
"Women are more at risk from violence involving people they know at home than from strangers in the street. There is a feeling that the home is a safe haven and that pregnancy is a very protected period, but that is not the case," WHO director-general Lee Jong-Wook said.

Slain woman 'brought smiles to everyone' family remembers
CBC News
A pregnant teenager found in a Mill Woods townhouse Wednesday night died from multiple gunshot wounds, the medical examiner's office said Friday. A 19-year-old man, who police say had known Olivia Talbot since childhood, has been charged with first-degree murder in connection with her death.

The right wing will now decry this and call for more law and order, but it is their religious morality that is the cause of this violence against women.

Violence against women is the result of patriarchy, of the religious ideology that says women are the chattel property of their husbands, fathers, brothers.

It matters not which religious sect of monothiesm espouses the belief in the Sacredness of Marriage, those that speak of such sacredness are merely excusing their right to 'own' their wives. To do with them as they will, which includes beating and even killing them.

Recently, Mr. Oppal characterized the gang violence afflicting his community in Greater Vancouver as a "cancer." More provocatively, he said the difference in the way many Indo-Canadian families raise sons and daughters is a contributing factor. "There are still a lot of families who celebrate the birth of a boy but don't celebrate the birth of a girl," Mr. Oppal said in an interview. "And you see this reflected in the way they bring up their children. The boys get carte blanche treatment and the result is they grow up to be gangsters in many cases."

It is a moral depravity of these religions of patriarchy, and should be seen as such. While the religionists around the world are quick to denounce the moral turpitude of secular society, we must remember that this so called secular society is the result of humanities revlusion to the moral decadence, political power and its abuse by the theocracies that have ruled our lives.

Every time the religious establishment denounces sex education, womens rights, and humanism in general they are creating the continued conditions of oppression of women.

To say the unborn child takes precedence over the mother and her rights as a woman to choose, is to say she is chattel property.

To fail to have a comprehensive human relations education, sex ed if you like, in our public schools will continue to haunt us with examples like that above.

While denouncing sex education, what the religionist does is throw the baby out with the bathwater. For in having human sexuality education one learns tolerance, one learns about the problems of relationships including jealousy.

We cannot pray away these very real human emotions, nor can one hope they will not occur, they do in all relationships, and in order to mature into a relationship one needs education, including moral education. But that moral education needs to be humanist, to recognize the problems that exist in our relationships with each other and to also honour each other as inviduals not for our social roles.

The moral bankruptcy of leaving sex ed/human relations education to the Church/Temple/Synagouge etc. and to the parents continues to result in the abuse and death of women and children.

Until we recognize womens individuality, to their right to ownership especially over their own persons, and to own property, then violence against women will continue, it is the disease of patriarchy.

 The Failure of Christianity

by Emma Goldman

Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it.
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State Capitalism By Any Other Name

In the mercantilist period of Canadian History the State was crucial to the expansion of British Colonial monopolies in Canada, like the Hudsons Bay Company. The State cleared the way for the Private Railway company the CPR to expand westerward, and in order to make sure the CPR did not have a sole monopoly of the rail lines paid for by Canadians, the State created its own railway, CN.

Today the largest institutional investors in Canada are public pensions plans. The three largest are the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund and the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement Fund and finally our national Canadian Pension Plan, CPP. All three of late have been bemoaning the fact that they have had to invest overseas because the Canadian economy does not allow for Public Private Partnerships (P3's).

The irony in this is that the OTP and OMER are jointly funded by unions and the employers, in this case the State. And the CPP is funded directly by Canadian Taxpayers. Today CPP is one of the largest investors in commercial real estate in Canada.

CPP to pay $1B for malls
Quebec City, Sherbrooke: Pension giant's third billion-dollar deal this year

The CPP Board, which invests cash not needed for current pension-fund obligations, stunned the real-estate world this year with two major deals in a span of three weeks. The first deal was a 50% equity stake in the $2-billion takeover of O&Y Properties Inc. that was led by BPO Properties Ltd. Then it spent $1-billion to acquire a 50% interest in 11 properties owned by Oxford Properties Ltd., a subsidiary of the Ontario Municipal Employment Retirement System.
The pension fund's new dominance is symbolized by the fact it now owns half interests in two of the country's largest bank towers, the Royal Bank Plaza and First Canadian Place, both in the heart of Toronto's financial district. The expected price for the shopping-mall portfolio is reported to be in the $800-million-to-$1-billion range and based on a capitalization rate or rate of return of about 6.25%, will offer an extremely low rate of return, which is indicative of the strong demand for retail property. That demand has left pension funds increasingly as dominant players in the field because they can accept a lower rate of return than publicly traded entities.

The push for P3's by the government and the public pension funds are the modern form of State Capitalism in the age of neo-liberalism. Rather than having the State directly own enterprizes or businesses, as is the traditional definition of State Capitalism, the State is the investor in private enterprize. In this case the use of public pension funds is State Capitalism through the back door. Without this investment capitalism cannot function. So whats changed since the days of the CPR? Not much.

Pension fund capitalism

Peter Drucker, one of the foremost business theorists of the 20th century, who died earlier this month, understood all this. He predicted, 30 years ago, that western capitalism was moving towards what he called "pension fund socialism", a kind of economy owned by the workers through the pension funds being reinvested in the economy on their behalf. Back in the 1970s, Drucker thought the money pensions could raise for investment might reignite a golden age of economic growth. As America was ahead of the game in pushing its pensions on to the money markets, he argued, it could claim to be the first truly socialist country in the world.Since then, our economies have become much more reliant on pensions to keep them moving. But there is something strange about how institutional investors are investing those pensions on our behalf. In his book Pension Fund Capitalism, Professor Gordon Clark of Oxford found them guilty of loss aversion: being more worried about losing money than excited about making it.

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Liberal's Real Crime of the Week

Lost in the whole fracas of the last couple of days, is the fact that the market leaped at the news that the government was lowering the dividend tax for corporations and reversed its public announcement that it was going to tax Income Trusts.

While the MSM and blogosphere are full of stories on the Harper comments on the Liberals being in cohouts with 'organized crime', this little bit of scandal was relegated to the back pages.

Barry Critchley writes in his Financial Post column yesterday;

"I was talking to some prominent lawyers and bankers and they were up there in Ottawa earlier this week and they were basically told this was going to happen," added the banker, who over the years has won his share of the deals that are up for grabs. "It's all over the street. All the people are talking about who had a heads up and who didn't." The events left the banker wondering whether Ottawa was interested in consultation or more interested in passing on inside information. "The government then tells a bunch of Bay Street insiders what it is going to do so they can profit." Clearly some people had better information than others about what has happening and there is only one place that information could have come from: the nation's capital.How else are we to explain the sharp jump in the price of income trusts over the past few days, a rise that climaxed on Wednesday, the day of the federal government's announcement that there would be no new taxes on income trusts. On Wednesday, the S&P/TSX capped trust index rose by 1.49%, with the bigger business trusts posting even larger gains. For the week ending Wednesday, the index was up by 3.61% .And how else to explain the action in the high dividend-paying stocks, such as BCE, on Wednesday. The stock, which hit a six-month low the previous day --jumped by 4.9% on Wednesday, on twice the normal volume.

CBC is finally reporting on this today on their website.

But trading in many trusts and dividend-paying stocks became much heavier than usual in the hour or two before the market's close on Wednesday, and share prices rose sharply.Forensic accountant Al Rosen said it looks to him that Bay Street knew the details of Goodale's announcement well before he made it. "Clearly, there was a leak between 2 [p.m. ET] and 4 [p.m. ET]," he told CBC News.

This is a very real organized crime, and the Tories said nary a word about.

Oh sorry the Harper did mention the words 'Income Trusts' in his non confidence speech, but with no reference to the fact that the market leaped on information provided in advance by the Liberals to their Bay Street Cronies.

That is the real scandal of this week.

But since it benefited Bay Street neither the Harper nor Monte Solberg were about to challenge the Liberals over this very real crime of insider trading especially since it was a Tax Break, something they have been ranting about for the last six months.

And clever Paul Martin created a smoke screen, with his faux outrage over the Harpers organized crime comments, with his threats to sue. Lost in the smoke was the Liberal insider trading leak.
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