A Peoples Program for Alberta

The Klein government has no new ideas of what to do with the growing surplus. Let alone any ideas about how to actually create an Alberta Advantage that benefit's the people of Alberta, and not just their Calgary Corporate Cronies, I thought I would offer my own Modest Proposal.

The government is asking for public input into changes in the Labour Relations Act, and the future of Post Secondary Education.

So here are mine. As well as proposals dealing with living wages, taxes, municipalities, cooperatives, investment funds, etc.

It's based on the simple principle:

Labour Produces all Wealth

All Wealth Belongs to those who Labour

Flat Tax of 10% on all incomes of $100,000 and over

No Income Tax on anyone earning less than $100,000

All resource Industries will pay 60% royalty fees and 60% tax on all after sales profit.

ATB and Credit Unions will loan up to $10,000 to all Albertans who may wish to start a business, a coop etc. interest free for five years.

Elimination of the Labour Relations Board, all contract disputes will be decided by between unions, employers and independent mediation agreed to by each party.

Anti-Scab legislation, no employer has the right to hire replacement workers in advent of a lock out or strike.

A Living Wage $14 per hour. All employers will be responsible for paying all benefits for workers they employ.

Elimination of all Health Care premiums, and user fees, and a pharmacare, dental and hearing eye care plan for all Albertans.

A provincial retirement benefit plan to compliment CPP and OAS.

A provincial insurance corporation for all insurance in the province, drivers, personal, housing, tenant, non profit org., pets and farm animals.

A guaranteed income for all Albertans of $20,000 a year. COLA to the national poverty standard. Elimination of AISH and Welfare Programs.

Tripartite Apprenticeship programs developed with unions/professional associations and employers and the government to train in trades and all professions, to be inclusive of all Albertans regardless of race, sex, sexual preference, etc. Applies to High School programs and post secondary education programs.

Encourage Labour Sponsored Investment Funds for Venture Capital. A fund created by unions and professional associations through ATB or Credit Union, with secure investment guarantee from province up to $60,000 per investment. Applicable as tax credit provincially and federally.

Low cost housing projects developed through Venture Capital Fund and ATB/Credit Unions with investment guarantee from provincial government.

Full funding of public daycare, pre school education programs, K-12 education and Post Secondary education.

No tuition fees for post secondary education.

Public access to all post secondary programs.

Student loans with no interest for five years after graduation.

Transferable credits between all post secondary institutions in the province.

Tax Credit to Businesses that provide daycare for their workers.

Expand the legislature to have enough MLA’s for every 10,000 people. Proportional Representation. No bills can be passed without a vote in the Legislature. Guaranteed sittings of the Legislature for a minimum of 120 days per year.

Full public funding for all political parties, with campaign limits for spending.

ATB and credit union funding for worker, producer and consumer cooperative businesses, with provincial guarantees for up to $100,000 in start up funding.

Full funding for Women’s shelters in the province with requirement of family counseling for all Men involved in abusive relationships.

Legalization of prostitution, no one under 18 may work in the sex industry in Alberta. Regulation of the industry in cooperation with Sex Trade Workers Union.

All medical abortions will be paid in full.

All public utilities will be under community control. This will reduce provincial funding to cities.

Fully funded public transportation for cities, and intercity travel.

Provincial and municipal land banking for low cost housing.

Put the Alberta Stock Exchange under National Governance.

Alternative Energy Investment and Tax Credits.

Arts and Culture production Investment and Tax Credits.

Low interest loans for Community Redevelopment Programs, revitalization of decrepit urban space.

No Child Labour.Anyone younger than 16 cannot work (excluding paper routes and neighbourhood chores).

All Public Boards, Health Boards, University, Technical Colleges, etc. will be made up of elected representatives. In the case of Post Secondary Institutions this will include representatives of students, faculty. In case of other boards, it will include representatives of employee groups and the public.

No Private Parking. All parking will be the responsibility of the municipality, and funds from parking will go to the municipality.

All municipalities will hold open budget hearings, and planning sessions, infrastructure plans and budget plans may be voted on by referendum.

36 hour work week. All hours after that are overtime.

All Albertans will have the right to join a union, regardless of their employment status, including contract workers, sales people, taxi drivers, farm workers and nannies.

Upon successful organizing of 51% of workers in any particular industry a first contract will automatically come into effect between the union and the employer.

First Tool Usage in Wild Gorillas Discovered

Our relatives are evolving. Like to hear how Creation Science, Intelligent Design, and all the other theistic deniers of evolution explain that.

One small step for Leah is a giant leap for wild gorillas
Now, for the first time, scientists have observed and photographed wild gorillas using tools, including the moment Leah - the nickname used by scientists - used a stick to test the depth of a pool before wading into it. Until she wielded her wading stick in a swamp, all other species of great apes, including chimpanzees, bonobos and orang-utans, have been observed using tools in the wild, but never gorillas. "This is a truly astounding discovery," said Dr Thomas Breuer of the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig."Tool usage in wild apes provides us with valuable insights into the evolution of our own species and the abilities of other species. Seeing it for the first time in gorillas is important on many different levels," Thomas Breuer, lead researcher of the Wildlife Conservation Society, said in a statement. On two separate occasions in the northern rain forests of the Republic of Congo, researchers observed and photographed individual western gorillas using sticks as tools, according to the study.

No need to postulate the existence of Intelligent Design or some disembodied God in the evolution of the species. The cognition of our nearest relatives, is being influenced over the centuries as they 'discover' and 'adapt' tool making.

The outrage is that they are still being poached and killed for their land, as meat, for their pelts, and in war zones like Rawanda. They are still treated as 'dumb' animals as native peoples were treated as 'savages'. 'brutes' by European colonialism.

Like the impact of Imperialism on indigienous peoples, the Gorrilas are subject to the effects of Speciesism in their mountain regions.

And speciesism is a result of the monotheistic dictum that Man is Created in the image of God (singular, male) and has dominion/domination of all the fish, fowl and beasts of the planet.

Let's note here as well that it is a FEMALE gorilla that has made this discovery. Tool making is not neccasarily a MALE occupation or discovery, This is also astounding in its obviousness and in the obvious obliviousness that male scientists have to this fact. Like our ancient ancestors being discovered around the world, most fossils are of women, not men. From 'Lucy' to Our Lady of Flores

Which should tell you something about evolution, that it develops along matrilinear lines, in other words it is matriarchical rather than patriarchical. And last time I checked ALL monotheistic religions in the modern world are Patriarchical, and deny that they had any social predecessors, especially a matriarchical/matrelinar one

Let us remember too that tool making is the most significant factors in human evolution of cognition. It reflects the role that labour had in moving from ape to hominid to homo sapiens..

The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
Frederick Engels 1876
Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, during an epoch, not yet definitely determinable, of that period of the earth's history known to geologists as the Tertiary period, most likely towards the end of it, a particularly highly-developed race of anthropoid apes lived somewhere in the tropical zone -- probably on a great continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. [1] Darwin has given us an approximate description of these ancestors of ours. They were completely covered with hair, they had beards and pointed ears, and they lived in bands in the trees.

First, owing to their way of living which meant that the hands had different functions than the feet when climbing, these apes began to lose the habit of using their hands to walk and adopted a more and more erect posture. This was the decisive step in the transition from ape to man.

All extant anthropoid apes can stand erect and move about on their feet alone, but only in case of urgent need and in a very clumsy way. Their natural gait is in a half-erect posture and includes the use of the hands. The majority rest the knuckles of the fist on the ground and, with legs drawn up, swing the body through their long arms, much as a cripple moves on crutches. In general, all the transition stages from walking on all fours to walking on two legs are still to be observed among the apes today. The latter gait, however, has never become more than a makeshift for any of them.

It stands to reason that if erect gait among our hairy ancestors became first the rule and then, in time, a necessity, other diverse functions must, in the meantime, have devolved upon the hands. Already among the apes there is some difference in the way the hands and the feet are employed. In climbing, as mentioned above, the hands and feet have different uses. The hands are used mainly for gathering and holding food in the same way as the fore paws of the lower mammals are used. Many apes use their hands to build themselves nests in the trees or even to construct roofs between the branches to protect themselves against the weather, as the chimpanzee, for example, does. With their hands they grasp sticks to defend themselves against enemies, or bombard their enemies with fruits and stones. In captivity they use their hands for a number of simple operations copied from human beings. It is in this that one sees the great gulf between the undeveloped hand of even the most man-like apes and the human hand that has been highly perfected by hundreds of thousands of years of labour. The number and general arrangement of the bones and muscles are the same in both hands, but the hand of the lowest savage can perform hundreds of operations that no simian hand can imitate-no simian hand has ever fashioned even the crudest stone knife.

The first operations for which our ancestors gradually learned to adapt their hands during the many thousands of years of transition from ape to man could have been only very simple ones. The lowest savages, even those in whom regression to a more animal-like condition with a simultaneous physical degeneration can be assumed, are nevertheless far superior to these transitional beings. Before the first flint could be fashioned into a knife by human hands, a period of time probably elapsed in comparison with which the historical period known to us appears insignificant. But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation.

Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini.