Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Linda Does it Again

I am impressed while folks took time off during the holidays the campaigners and webfolks at Linda Duncan's NDP website for Edmonton Strathcona came up with this nifty little side bar for her campaign page. It's Linda's answer to Strategic Voting.


I like her comments on the Greens in particular, for their right of centre economics and political sheninagens after Harris and the Red Tory's took over. And as an Environmentalist her record for getting effective legislation passed is excellent.

Liberals, Liberals? Oh, are they running here? I thought they were only focusing on Edmonton Centre and Landslide Anne McLellan.


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CBC Hypocrisy

So CBC refused to run the bio on Tommy Douglas and Health Care during the election cause it might 'influence' how people vote.

Well perhaps they could explain running this tonight on CBC Newsworld, especially when the Chinese Head Tax is in the news again.


Tuesday, January 3, 2006, 10:00 p.m.

10:00 p.m. Rough Cuts
In the Shadow of Gold Mountain - Chinese-Canadian community campaigns to win government redress for relatives forced to pay the notorious Head Tax.

Maybe its cause its on late, or maybe its just cause its run already and this is repeat, or may be cause no one watches Newsworld. Yeah that's it.

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Chavez is NOT an Anti-Semite

John Murney is upset that Hugo Chavez apparently made an Anti-Semitic remark in his Christmas Speech to the homeless in Venezuela.

As hard as I could try, I could only find right wing Anti-Chavez references to the supposed Anti-Semitic remarks that Hugo Chavez, President Elect of Venezuela was said to have made in his Christmas Speech about Christ the Socialist/ Christ the Rebel.

The source referred to on Johns Blog was a biased or very least self interested Zionist Canadian web site called Judeoscope which made the assertion that Chavez said this (highlighted part). However the actual quote is;

"...that is why I say that today more than ever and in 2005 years we need Jesus the Christ, because the world, the world, the daily world is ending, each day, the wealth of the world, because God, nature is wise, the world has sufficient water for all of us to have water, the world has sufficient wealth, sufficient land to produce food for all of the world population, the world has enough rocks and minerals for all of the constructions, so that nobody would be without a home. The world is for all of us, then, but it so happens that a minority, the descendents of the same ones that crucified Christ, the descendents of the same ones that kicked Bolivar out of here and also crucified him in their own way over there in Santa Marta, in Colombia. A minority has taken possession all of the wealth of the world, a minority has taken ownership of all of the gold of the planet, of the silver, of the minerals, the waters, the good lands, oil, of the wealth then and have concentrated the wealth in a few hands: less than 10% of the population of the world owns more than half of the wealth of the world and ...more than the population of the planet is poor and each day there are more poor people in the whole world. We are decided, decided to change history and each day we are accompanied and will be accompanied by more Chiefs of state..."


Now the edited version of this speech was originally posted on John’s blog by one of the little rightwhingnutbars that attacks John regularly; goes by the pen name of Tommy Douglas, funny right. Anyways in a posted comment on an unrelated topic TD says Chavez made anti-Semitic remarks and links to Judeoscope.

Isn't it neat when the very rightwhingnutbars that have historically been linked to anti-Semitism use this as an attack on the left. Of course they are deliberately confusing Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism in most cases.

I respect John, I like his blog, and as a result of the attack on him by TD he has moderated his comments section. Good. But he also took this story at face value, and gave credence to the Judeoscope story by publishing this on his blog.

Now as a longtime boradcast journalist I would expect better of him in this regard. And I would have thought he would do some research on this quote and those who are supposedly the source of this news story.

What I have found is that it is a story circulating around on Anti-Chavez sites which should immediately give us all pause and question the sources and the context of what they are purporting what Chavez said or meant.

And the comment is open to interpretation. Their spurious attempts to link Chavez with Iran, rather than with the recent election of Evo Morales in Bolivia in his Christmas remarks makes this all the more suspect as a propaganda campaign from the right. As Bill Weinberg writes;

Ironically, an account of his speech in FrontPageMag, FreeRepublic and the conservative Hispanic Center for Economic Research (HACER) ("A Perilous Hanukkah with Hugo—Venezuela's socialist strongman demonizes the Jews," Dec. 28) indicates that he likely meant the spiritual descendants of the christ-killers, i.e. the capitalists, not the Jews:

Celebrating on December 24, Chavez said ‘Christmas is a rebellious, revolutionary, socialist Christ [sic] …the descendants of those who crucified Christ have taken ownership of the riches of the world, and they have concentrated it in a small number of hands.” Chavez said he was “decided” to change history, and he said that every day, he is joined by a “greater quantity of Chiefs of State and leaders in that struggle.” Among those are Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with whom Chavez recently met. On December 14, Ahmadinejad described the Holocaust as "a myth," months after he suggested that Israel should be "wiped off the map."

It is also likely that the other chief of state Chavez had foremost in mind was Bolivia's newly-elected Evo Morales, not the buffoonish Ahmadinejad (who HACER, of course, prominently features in a photo with the Venezuelan leader). We also question the accuracy of both JTA's and FrontPageMag's translations, as they don't quite match and the latter seems awkward at best.



I also found this article on Chavez and his supposed Anti-Semitism, equating the Chavez revolution in Venezuela with National Socialism in Germany (its that old canard of the right; Hitler wasn't one of us he was a 'socialist'). It was published in the Weekly Standard, the voice of all that is Right in the Republican Party in the USA, last summer.


Under Chavez, more than one million Venezuelans have voted with their feet in the largest political exodus in Latin America since the Cuban migrations of the 1960s. Venezuela's Jewish community has been halved over the past six years. Many of the children and grandchildren of those who arrived on the Koenigstein and Caribia have now left the country. Fortunately, there are no exit restrictions--yet.


It has been combined in the news stories above with the supposed Christmas remarks to inflame readers to believe there is a pogrom against Venezuelan Jews. As Tim Bartholomew at Salon Blogs notes:

This comes several weeks after a raid on the Colegio Hebraica, a private Jewish school in Caracas. The reason given for this was purported Mossad involvement in the assassination of State Prosecutor Danilo Anderson.

Gee the Weekly Standard Story ran August 8th while Chavez made his remarks on December 24 that is longer than a ‘couple of weeks’. But when there is little real evidence of a pogrom or an Anti-Semitic campaign in Venezuela fabrication of evidence by spurious linking is all these guys have.

It is clearly a propaganda campaign, one that began with the Weekly Standard story this summer and continued into the fall.

The Grand Rabbi of Sao Paulo, the American Henri Sobel, told President George W. Bush on Sunday in Brasilia about the ”precarious” situation of the Jews in Venezuela, accusing Hugo Chávez of being an ”anti-Semite”.

Speaking over the phone with AFP, the president of the rabbinate of the Congregation of Jews in the Brasilian metropole said that ”even though there is no discrimination in Venezuela officially, Hugo Chávez does everything he can to spread hatred against the minorities”.

"Chávez is a demagogue, a radical, an anti-Semite in a country where there is a lot of social injustice”, said Mr. Sobel, reporting what he had said to the American President George W. Bush, during a private meeting, in which the president of the Jewish Congress, Israel Singer, also participated.

”Under these circumstances it is tempting to look for a scapegoat”, emphasized Rabbi Sobel, adding that ”the masses have a tendency to listen to false messiahs”.

”This mixture of political unrest and social turbulence creates an environment conducive to anti-Semitism and that is why the situation is precarious”, not only for the Jews, but for all the minorities in Venezuela.

While the Rabbi of Brazil was speaking on behalf of the Jews of Venezuela this is what they had to say for themselves.

Jews Dismiss Charges of Anti-Semitism in Venezuela
El Universal
November 9, 2005

In Venezuela there is no anti-Semitism, and nor have there been any attacks on the Jewish community by the State, said David Bachenheimer, Secretary General of the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela (CAIV).

Henri Sobel, leader of a Jewish congregation in Sao Paulo, declared that the Venezuelan Jewish community was living in a precarious situation due to anti-Semitic positions taken by the government of president Hugo Chavez during a meeting last week with U.S. president George W. Bush.

Bachenheimer explained that the CAIV was surprised by Rabbi Sobel’s statement as he had never asked the Venezuelan Jewish community whether or not it had been victimized or persecuted.

Bachenheimer went on to say that in Venezuela there have been no problems of anti-Semitic or racist attacks and the government has always acted quickly when isolated incidents of racial or religious intolerance occur. He added that the Jewish community has never been the target of policies or campaigns against it.


Now did Chavez really mean Jews when he spoke out at Christmas? What did the Jews have to do with the killing of Bolivar asks Normblog.

Good question. Could Chavez not only be referring to the rich and the capitalists (the 10% who own all the wealth) but also be referring to the Romans, who actually crucified the historical Jesus, and the later Roman Catholic Church which having resumed power in Spain under the Carlists continued to fight against the National Liberation struggle of Bolivar?

Hmmm its pretty open ended that. And I know its a semantic argument at best but before launching into a tirade accusing of Chavez of Anti-Semitism, that is largely a deliberate and calculated smear of the rightwhingnutbars who equate him with National Socialism, this has as much validity as saying he was speaking of Jews.

And hey after all Venezuela is a Catholic country and the Church under the last pope was virulently anti-liberation theology and pro-right wing. And after Pat Robertson called for Chavez's assisnation, the Venezuelan government can be forgiven for being cautious about the intentions of Born Again Evangelical Protestants too.

..Florida-based New Tribes Mission today is appealing its ordered expulsion from Venezuelan tribal areas to that nation's Supreme Court. New Tribes spokeswoman Nita Zelenak is asking people to pray that Venezuela's high court will take the case and suspend the order, or at least let the missionaries continue their Bible translation and evangelism while the case is considered. President Hugo Chavez announced the expulsion nearly two months ago, accusing New Tribes missionaries of spying for the CIA, a charge they vigorously deny. Zelenak says New Tribes missionaries are rushing to complete as much work as possible in the few weeks left before their mandatory departure. [AP]


But these attacks on Chavez and his apparent Anti-Semitism, that is equating his Bolivarian revolution, a peaceful nationalist democratic electoral process, with National Socialism have been around since he was first elected and the CIA attempted to oust him with a coup.

They are spurious at best, even the Jewish Human Rights monitoring organization the Stephen Roth Institute says that Venezuela has been a rather benign country when it comes to overt Anti-Semitism, even more so than Canada! However let us be clear that what the Institute and other Zionist organizations call Anti-Semitism is not only overt attacks on Jews but ANY criticism of Israel and Zionism;

In the pro-government newspaper Vea, Guillermo Garcia Ponce, an ideologue of the Chavez Bolivarian Revolution, wrote several pro-Palestinian articles which included classical antisemitic statements

Back in 2001 this excellent article, from a Libertarian Perspective, said this about Chavez and his revolution.

The Republican policy wonks who believe that Chavez is a Fidelista retread, a mad leftist who would spread socialist subversion throughout the region and revive the Third International ignore the essentially rightist thrust of his politics. The New York Times, in its "new" reporting, has all but accused Chavez of being a fascist sympathetic to anti-Semitism, a latinized version of Austria's Haider.

Steve Ellner, author of three books on Venezuelan politics and history, and a professor of economic history at the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela since 1977, puts it this way:

"Chávez embraces a homegrown style of nationalism underpinned by Venezuelan heroes. His discourse resembles Sandinismo which also developed a national doctrine while breaking with imported models of Marxism-Leninism. Chávez berates historians for practically writing off the nation´s history between the death of Simón Bolívar in 1830 and the modern era, dismissing a whole century of political leaders as ¨caudillos," or strong-men. In a book of interviews with Chávez entitled The Commander Speaks, he states: ¨Caudillos may have been necessary for the incorporation of our people in historical struggles. I believe we have been sold an imported bourgeois democratic model – that of the elimination of our leaders."

But let’s leave the last word to Larry Derfner ,columnist in the Jerusalem Post, who as the comments to his column show, was roundly berated for his critical comments on Jews and his positive comments of Chavez and the revolution of the poor now occurring in Latin America.

As an American-born Jew who grew up in an East European immigrant, Left-liberal household, I'm very happy to say that democratic socialism has become the rising tide in South America.

It's basically a peasants' revolt, only peaceful, electoral. The poor people want to take back the ownership of their countries' natural resources from the foreign corporations. They also want New Deal-type economic policies, not the tight-fisted, bank-capitalist approach demanded by their creditors at the International Monetary Fund, which only made them poorer.

This week Bolivians voted Evo Morales into power, joining the leftward trend that's spread through Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay and Peru. The movement's leader is Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who is loathed by the Bush administration and even wishfully marked for death by evangelist Pat Robertson, but who keeps winning elections because he spends his country's oil profits to help the poor.

There was a time, up to about 30 years ago, when I would have been part of a worldwide Jewish rooting section for the South American socialist upheaval. What's more, the assumption would have been that South American Jews were heavily involved in the movement, and Jews all over would have been worried for their safety at the hands of the continent's old, wealthy, fascistic elite.

But world Jewry has changed, in Israel and everywhere else. Today its voice is the voice of wealth and power. The strongest Jewish reaction to what's happening in South America - to the extent that influential Jews know what's happening there - is alarm. Fear. Fear that this poor people's movement could spread to other parts of the world, and endanger the wealth and power of all the Jews whose attitude toward the poor is more or less the same as the Bush administration's.

I know - 70% of American Jews vote Democrat. But they don't offer much dissent anymore on the subject of poverty. When Jews were struggling immigrants in America, their economics was socialism. For their children and grandchildren, it was liberalism. Today, for the immigrants' great-grandchildren, it's conservative, businessman's capitalism.

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Tax Breaks Hurt the Bond Market

Ok fianciers, Tory tax cutters, speculative investors, would be capitalists, here is what happens when you cut and cut and cut taxes for corporations. And no there is no trickle down effect. But there is an effect on the Bond Market and the price of the dollar.

Why are yields so low?


One puzzle that perplexed Wall Street through 2005 was the question of why long-term bond yields remained low even as the U.S. Federal Reserve Board kept raising short-term interest rates.

U.S. corporations tend to be awash in cash. With companies generating so much free cash flow, they don't need to borrow as much as usual. What will happen in 2006 if that free cash flow begins to deteriorate because companies have been spending less in recent years on expanding their businesses.

But with corporations hoarding capital (cash) and not investing it, opps I thought tax breaks meant they would invest back into their companies, and not borrowing, if the consumer financed U.S. growth bubble bursts that could spell
R E C E S S I O N.




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Telus Strike Redux

So after not having a collective agreement for five years, forcing workers into striking for months and then giving them no guarntee of not contracting out their jobs, what does the President of Telus say for himself? Oh yeah and how much did he pay himself last year?

Darren Entwistle President and CEO Telus Corp. Age: 43
''We are focused on being one team, united behind one strategy and defined by one brand.'' Compensation in 2004: $6.54-million
Punk.

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Mr. Dithers Returns

No Comment, this says it all.
Bank merger issue joins the federal election fray
Prime Minister Paul Martin says the next federal government will have to deal with the thorny question of bank mergers, although he wouldn't clarify his own position on the issue.

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The Glass is Half Full

The Globe and Mail, which is closely aligned with the Liberal Election Machine, is 'gleefully' reporting that a new poll shows that NDP supporters will shift votes to the Liberals to avoid a Conservative election victory.

But is it really true? Chuck the editorializing from this article and here is what you get. Just the facts m'am as Joe Friday would say.

The latest Decima Research online survey of 6,380 voters, released Sunday, suggests that half of those surveyed would like to see more New Democrats in the House of Commons. But when asked if they'd like to see more New Democrats elected, even if it means the Conservatives ultimately win power, support fell to 35 per cent.

Ok so half these folks will vote for the NDP and if the Liberals appear to be losing, then only then 15% of them 'may' abandon the NDP for the Liberals. That sounds like a gain for the NDP to me. They retain more than they lose. And if they begin to kick butt as Jack did today attacking strategic voting and the Liberals, well thats 15% to gain back. Seems to me like the glass is still half full not half empty.

What the Globe and Mail didn't say about the poll was this:

Nationwide, the poll found 52 per cent of respondents considered the prospect of a Liberal majority undesirable, while 25 per cent found it desirable and 23 per cent found it acceptable.

The results were almost identical for a Tory majority: 56 per cent found that prospect undesirable, 25 per cent desirable and 19 per cent acceptable.

A minority government, led by either party, was acceptable to more people.

Interestingly, the New Democratic Party scored very similar results to the two main contenders, even though the NDP is running a distant third in most opinion polls.

An NDP majority was considered undesirable to 56 per cent, acceptable to 26 per cent and desirable to 18 per cent.
An NDP minority was deemed acceptable to 44 per cent, undesirable to 44 per cent and desirable to 12 per cent.


The poll also asked respondents whether a Conservative government would make matters better or worse in 15 different public policy areas. In every case a healthy majority _ ranging from 62 per cent to 85 per cent -- said
the Tories would be better or no different than the Liberals.

Gee do I detect a Liberal bias at the Globe and Mail. Awww say it ain't so......

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Liberal Pension Blues

A tip o the blog to I (AM)Canadian Too for this item on how PM screwed his workers out of their pensions and what Federal workers have to look forward to.

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Why Is Buzz Clapping


So Mr. Labour, Buzz Hargrove who says he called for strategic voting cause he is well Left Wing, more Left Wing than the NDP, has ended up as a poster boy for Canada's CEO Paul Martin and his Liberal Election Team.

By endorsing a Liberal minority with an NDP balance of power, the CAW is not “drifting” toward Liberal views. Indeed, my opinions (on everything from free trade to public ownership to gun control) clearly place me to the left of the NDP hierarchy. Buzz Hargrove


Nope you are not drifting as the picture shows, you are embracing the Liberals.

Ah Buzz can you explain why you are supporting the Liberals who did this?


Liberals and Conservatives defeat anti-scab legislation

"NDP will continue to fight for working Canadians,": Layton


OTTAWA - NDP Leader Jack Layton expressed deep frustration when a vote on a private member's bill (C-263), to amend the Canada Labour Code to prevent the use of replacement workers, was defeated by Liberals and Conservatives.

"It is shameful that 72 Liberals joined forces with the Conservatives to block this legislation which would have made a real difference in the lives of working Canadians," said Layton. "Striking workers under federal jurisdiction deserve to know that their jobs are protected when they exercise their legal right to strike. They deserve to be protected from the destructive and hostile practice of strike-breaking."

Gee Buzz any of those Liberals get your vote? Or the vote of your CAW members? By the way Buzz counting on your fingers that's over half of the Liberal Government MP's that voted against CLC sponsored labour legislation. Legislation you supported.

Trade Union Principles be damned eh Buzz as long as you save a few Auto jobs in the Southern Ontario Rust Belt.

"Voting Liberal isn't being smart - it's being played," Mr. Layton said in an Ottawa address that kicked off the final three weeks of campaigning before the Jan. 23 ballot

Yep, you tell him Jack.

Buzz thinks of himself as a 'player', but he is being played by the Liberals.

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