Thursday, January 05, 2006

Labour Abandons the NDP

It's not just Buzz or his economist in residence Jim Stanford that have abandoned the NDP now the House of Labour, the founding members of the New Democratic Party have abandoned endorsement of the party in favour of third party lobbying.


CLC puts issues at forefront:: calls for support of policies, not parties, in federal election [Globe & Mail] 05-Jan-2006


This is not new, they did this during the 2004 election, basing their propaganda campaign around 'issues'. But having seen the negatigve impact Buzz embracing Martin has had we have all been waiting for the CLC to come to the defense of the party they created.

The late launching of their campaign this week and their failure to endorse the NDP and attack strategic voting is shameful. Why have they even bothered. Brother Georgetti and the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) should hang their heads in shame.

Labour Launches Its Own Federal Election Campaign [CLC] 05-Jan-2006


What was needed now was a strong push in the labour movement for the NDP not some weak tea vote on policies campaign that one would expect from a Liberal front group like the Council of Canadians. Now a strong attack from Labour on the Liberals and Conservatives was needed. And it ain't happening. This makes the CLC irrelevant as well as ineffecutal as a political force in this election.

They sound exactly like Buzz and the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) who support the Liberals. An low and behold behind their 'issues' campaign is the truth. Brother Georgetti has abandoned the NDP for the Liberals.

Labour's minority report on the election [24 Hours Vancouver] 05-Jan-2006

A major Canadian labour leader is crossing his fingers for another minority government in the next election.

"We think minority governments work better than majority governments," said Canadian Labour Congress president Ken Georgetti yesterday. "We've seen the results and we're quite happy with them."

Georgetti said the last minority government was better for labour, passing legislation that protected workers' pay if their employers went bankrupt. There was also more money for training and education.

While Georgetti claims to still support the NDP so does Buzz and they sound like Tweedledee and Tweedledum when it comes to the Liberals.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) an affiliate in the CLC at least has taken the bull by the horns and done the right thing. The best “strategic vote” is for the NDP [CUPE] 05-Jan-2006

What had always made Canada different from the U.S. was our labour movement was the source of Canada's Labour and Socialist parties.Through out the thirties till the red scare of the fifties radical unions, were aligned with the Communist Party and the One Big Union formed by the Socialist Party of Canada. In the fifties the divided labour movement in Canada came together as one federated body the CLC and went on to merge with the CCF to create the NDP.

In the U.S. the AFL/CIO historically followed Samuel Gompers dictum of rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies. And would not be until the 1960's that they aligned with the Democrats. An independent labour party never existed under the auspices of the AFL/CIO though the Socialist Party of the USA was a power house under Eugene Debs at the begining of last century.

Today the CLC has reverted, as has Buzz and the CAW to Gomperism. And its all over jobs in the Southern Ontario Rust belt. Auto and Steel jobs. Screw the rest of Canada, screw the NDP, screw Quebec, its all about Ontario. The CLC should give up any pretence to being a national federation, and change its name to the Ontario Labour Congress. And the CAW should change their name to the Ontario Autoworkers Union.

Hot: Endorsements. NDP candidate Peggy Nash, whose boss, Buzz Hargrove, keeps trying to hug Paul Martin when labour union bosses traditionally hug NDP leaders, is doing just fine without him. Ms. Nash, who is running against Liberal incumbent Sarmite Bulte in the Toronto riding of Parkdale-High Park, recently received an endorsement from Stephen Lewis, the former Ontario NDP leader and former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, who is now involved in fighting HIV/AIDS in Africa. Meanwhile, CAW chief economist Jim Stanford is endorsing Greig Mordue, the Liberal candidate in Oxford, a Southwestern Ontario riding. Mr. Mordue is the government affairs official for Toyota, which the last time we checked, was a Japanese car manufacturer. Mr. Mordue is running against Conservative incumbent Dave MacKenzie. Of course, Toyota just broke ground on its new plant in Woodstock, which is part of the Oxford riding.
And Toytoa is one of the companies NOT unionized by CAW, along with Honda. So go figure why such a high profile labour fakir like Stanford would support this particular Liberal. A foot in the door for the CAW to unionize the number one car maker in the world as the number one car maker in the U.S., GM sheds jobs as it tanks in the world market. Opportunism as usual in the world of bread and butter business unionism. Once upon a time the CAW and other large industrial unions claimed to be the Left in Canada, and the Left in the union movement.

Today they show themselves for what they are, shameless business unions out for the good of their own members.Willing to sacrifice class struggle for a bowl of pottage.


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Conservatives Hidden Agenda Exposed

That smiling face of the Harper, looking like a Prime Minister, looking acceptable to Joe and Janey Canuck, sounding well reasonable, is a slick groomed media image. The real Harper and the real right wing Conservatives will re-appear after the election. Unlike last election, no right wing Randy Whites will be allowed to upset the Conservative election apple cart. Nope. A pax silensius has been reached with the party's extreme right wing. They will shut up for now, biding their time till the Conservatives win the election, they hope, and then the cat will be out of the bag.

Elect Conservatives, then talk about issues: social conservatives

A traditional definition of marriage and abortion weren't mentioned, but social conservative groups that consider those to be important issues say they're satisfied with the direction the party is taking in its effort to form the next government. "They have to talk this way to get elected," Link Byfield, chairman of the Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy, said. "I think a lot of conservatives honestly agree with that."Hermina Dykxhoorn, president of the Alberta Federation of Women United for Families, says no main stream party is talking about the issues she considers most important, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. But she says she's willing to not talk about those issues during the election if it means electing a Conservative government.


These are the same folks from Alberta that support Firewall Alberta, in the case of Link Byfield and his ilk and a refederation of Canada based on Harpers decentralized Canada from Sea to Sea. See Alberta Seperatism Not Quite Stamped Out

AFWUF ( pronounced Aff woof) opposes unions, opposes equal pay for equal work, and opposes a womans right to choose publicly funded daycare or abortion.See Right to Life = Right To Work

They are aligned with Real Women of Canada and Life Canada, and have been part of the Byfield right wing front groups. See It's A Family Thing

This CBC item had the Blogging Tory's all a flutter crying foul.

But then good old Elsie Wayne, the mouth that roared from New Brunswick, let the cat out of the bag in CTV interview with Mike Duffy. She has teamed up with Pat O'Brian former Liberal and his anti-gay lobby which is quietly lobbying Conservative MP's and mobilizing the right wing vote in Ontario against the Liberals and NDP.

Elsie Wayne, Former Conservative MP

CTV Wed. Jan. 4 2006 9:39 PM ET

Without the party's approval, former Conservative MP Elsie Wayne wants to bring the same-sex marriage debate back to the forefront of the election campaign.

And the same cretinous right wingers populate this front group too, including Real Women Canada, Campaign Life, its the Byfield gang and their pals.

Yep the Tory's have a hidden agenda always have always will, if they allow free votes for Same Sex Marriage they will allow free votes on abortion and the death penalty, regardless of what Harper says now. If they become the government it will be open season on human rights as private members bills originate from the Whipless backbenches of the Torys.

My Columns on Harper


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A Simple Question Baffles Harper, Again



Ask the Harper a straight question or a simple question, he sputters, stammers, skates around it in his answer. Like Do You Love Canada, or Will you swear on the bible to keep your promises. He sputters, asks for the question to be repeated, hums, haws and then doesn't answer it.

He reminds me of Marvin the manic depressive Robot with a brain the size of a planet from Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe.

The other day in Quebec he was asked if he got his prop money from a local cash machine by a clever and witty Quebecois reporter. Obviously too clever by a mile, Harper asked him to repeat the question then blathered on about a supporter loaned them the money, and he had to return it.....Not sure what that meant.

Today after announcing the return of the lash, full term imprisonment and throwing away the key for gun crimes....ok sorry, the lash comment was by some Tory nutbar on the Rutherford show.......

A reporter asked him if he would still register handguns since Harper declared he was going to eliminate the gun registry....And Harper replied he was going to have longer sentences for gun crimes. A simple yes or no just does not come easily off his lips.

And then there was this item from the Globe and Mail.

Stephen Harper meets Daniel Cook

Daniel Cook is eight years old and a television star with his own show, This is Daniel Cook, broadcast on Treehouse TV and the Disney Channel in the United States. On his show, he takes on an adult job or task and interprets it through his young eyes.

He's an inquisitive little guy. Well, creative minds at CTV Newsnet thought Daniel might be able to help them with the election campaign, and so they hired him to be a regular correspondent on Newsnet's Countdown with Mike Duffy.

Yesterday, the red-headed newsman was on the tour with Stephen Harper (Daniel brought his Dad, Murray, along as his chaperone). And Daniel landed his first exclusive with the Tory Leader, conducted on the Harper campaign bus. The diminutive journalist was able to stump Mr. Harper when he asked him who he would vote for if he weren't running.

Mr. Harper told him he'd rather "jump off a tall building."

Huh? See what I mean he just can't answer a simple question.

"Oh dear I have a brain the size of a planet and I am so depressed......"
Marvin the Robot.


My Columns:

Harper

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Anonalogue is a Racist Dweeb

Showing once again that a little bit of education is a dangerous thing for a regressive mind. Anonmyass blogger Anonologue denounces the Liberals post secondary education plan using the Bell Curve as his defense of a Malthusian survival of the fittest.

Liberals Want To Waste Billions On Shitty Students
Hey f**kchop: ever hear of The Bell Curve?


The Bell Curve for those of you who don't remember is a discredited racist attempt to justify why White Folks like Mr. Anonologue are smarter than Black Folks. It tried to cover up its racist ideology by claiming of course that Asians are smarter than White Folks cause they score higher on math and science exams.

As noted biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his review of the Bell Curve:

Herrnstein and Murray's second claim, the lightning rod for most commentary extends the argument for innate cognitive stratification to a claim that racial differences in IQ are mostly determined by genetic causes—small difference for Asian superiority over Caucasian, but large for Caucasians over people of African descent. This argument is as old as the study of race, and is most surely fallacious. The last generation's discussion centered on Arthur Jensen's 1980 book Bias in Mental Testing (far more elaborate and varied than anything presented in The Bell Curve, and therefore still a better source for grasping the argument and its problems), and on the cranky advocacy of William Shockley, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist. The central fallacy in using the substantial heritability of within–group IQ (among whites, for example) as an explanation of average differences between groups (whites versus blacks, for example) is now well known and acknowledged by all, including Herrnstein and Murray, but deserves a restatement by example. Take a trait that is far more heritable than anyone has ever claimed IQ to be but is politically uncontroversial—body height. Suppose that I measured the heights of adult males in a poor Indian village beset with nutritional deprivation, and suppose the average height of adult males is five feet six inches. Heritability within the village is high, which is to say that tall fathers (they may average five feet eight inches) tend to have tall sons, while short fathers (five feet four inches on average) tend to have short sons. But this high heritability within the village does not mean that better nutrition might not raise average height to five feet ten inches in a few generations. Similarly, the well–documented fifteen–point average difference in IQ between blacks and whites in America, with substantial heritability of IQ in family lines within each group, permits no automatic conclusion that truly equal opportunity might not raise the black average enough to equal or surpass the white mean.

Disturbing as I find the anachronism of The Bell Curve, I am even more distressed by its pervasive disingenuousness. The authors omit facts, misuse statistical methods, and seem unwilling to admit the consequence of their own words.



The virulent foul mouthings of this racist dweeb only prove that he is a sore loser, having obviously left school so long ago that he will not be able to benefit from the Liberal post secondary education plan. Jealousy is an ugly thing, so is racism. Bell Curve indeed. This guy is the ding dong.

Like many Blogging Tory's he thinks he lives in the United States. "Precisely when did it become a bad idea in Canada for prospective college/university student to compete for scarce resources by writing entrance exams and SATs?"

Ummm Mr. Racist Dweeb we don't write SAT's in Canada.

And precisely when students had to compete for scarce resources was in the early 1980's as provincial governments reduced funding to Universities and Colleges and increased tuition fees and foreign student fees.

As funding decreased University Departments increased enterance grade requirements to limit access to public education, to restrict access and to keep their guild like monopolies over their professions like Medicine, Law, teaching etc.
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Green Opportunism

The Green party in it's opportunism to get as much taxpayer funding as it can has parachuted candidates into Newfoundland Labrador. Despite the fact that they held a quicky delegates meeting in the first weeks of the election to push an anti-sealing motion through to put into their platform which lost them support of their members in Newfoundland.

Forced to run a full slate to get their share of public funds, they have no hope of making even a reasonable dent on the Rock but they will run front men and women to get their bucks out of us. Principled Party -Not.

By taking an anti sealing position, they are off the map in a riding like Avalon
which is wide open with the resignation of Jim Elford. But that's not their concern anyways. The Green Party Inc.theme song is Frank Zappa's We're only in it for the money.

The Green party has managed to field a full slate of candidates in Newfoundland and Labrador, but has had draw on out-of-province members to do it. Shannon Hillier, who is carrying the Green banner in Avalon riding, admits the party's stand against the seal hunt is an obstacle – at least in Newfoundland and Labrador. "Basically, it's an Ottawa decision," she said. Lori-Ann Martino, who ran for the Greens in 2004, said she could not endorse the party's stand on sealing."I think any Newfoundlander would look straight at [that] and be able to see that this party does not represent them," Martino said. "That's when I realized that this was strategic, and I was just a tool in a bigger political machine that was mostly aimed at Upper Canadians." every vote for the party brings $1.79 in federal funding that can be used to promote the Greens' environmental agenda.


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The Stamp Story Won't Go Away

Larry Johnsonrude at the Edmonton Journal blogs about Gordon Stamps fall from grace due to blogging. Larry sez:

As part of their election strategy, politicians and their handlers started the campaign viewing blogs as a magic bullet for getting their unfiltered message directly to voters. Instead, they have become a source of embarrassment.
Obviously, blogs are being read. Problem is, they aren’t necessarily being read by the voters for whom they are intended. Rather, they are being closely scrutinized by the writers’ political enemies looking for dirt And they're not finding any shortage. That’s the trouble with something as democratic as the Internet. It doesn’t impose the discipline needed for fighting an election. There is a maxim in journalism that we writers need editors to protect us from ourselves. The same can be said about political operatives.


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How about a Memorial for Workers

The Alberta government is going to build a memorial for fallen Police Officers. But they don't build a memorial for the workers killed or injured on the job who built this province.

Heck they can't even get it together to fix Highway 63 which has killed more Fort McMurray workers than any accidents in the Tar Sands plants. If they did it would keep more workers alive and then we wouldn't need a memorial, or little roadside crosses to indicate the governments abdication of responsibility. Every one of these deaths are Ralph Kleins fault.

Klein closer to twinning highway to Fort McMurray

At one time the government said Highway 63 would likely be twinned in the next 20 years. But last July, Oberg said he would like to see a plan in place to widen the highway within seven years.

On Tuesday, the medical examiner in Fort McMurray renewed his call for twinning the highway following the crash that killed the oilsands workers from Calgary.

"This is just another preventable accident, and more preventable deaths -- the fifth in the last month on this highway,'' said Dr. John O'Connor.

"The numbers are getting bigger, the population is getting bigger, the road is getting busier and yet (the politicians) do nothing.''

In the last five years, 22 people have died and more than 250 have been injured on the northern roadway.

Earlier this year, the province announced $530 million worth of improvements to highways leading into Fort McMurray, including Highway 63.

But that doesn't involve twinning the section of highway where Tuesday's fatal crash occurred.

Johnson said it's just a matter of time before the highway is fully twinned.

O'Connor said the medical community has repeatedly asked the province to do something.

"We have unanimously voiced our opinion in the strongest possible terms,'' he said. ``We are frustrated and angry at the lack of action and commitment to twinning the highway.

"We are beyond waiting. We are going to do whatever it takes to get some action.''

Since 2000, the number of cars travelling to Fort McMurray has increased by roughly one-third as oilsands projects have expanded


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Comrade Kate of SDA

Will wonders never cease, the entire Conservative movement in Canada appears to be moving to the Left. First Comrade Harper keeps talking about 'Canadian workers' and 'working families', which is only a hop skip and a jump to him saying 'working class'.

Then Edmonton Centre candidate Laurie Hawn joins Federal Prison Guard Union members in Solidarity Forever.

Now Kate McMillan from Small Dead Animals in her latest blog on CBC quotes Vladimir Illich Lenin. No really. She quotes Comrade Lenin.

Now of course if I quote Comrade Lenin then I get accused of being a Lefty. But if Kate quotes him well..... ok lets put it in context. She really is NOT supporting a return of Red Toryism in the Conservatives she is attacking her favorite bug a boo, socialised day care. Ok and she is attacking socialized health care.

Lets deal with the former first. In her blog she says;

But that anyone would propose that government "knows best" when it comes to early learning and child care is nothing short of frightening.

"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." - Vladimir Lenin

Oh that clever Lenin, he surely is responsible for the Liberals and NDP day care policies. I bet they hired him as a disembodied advisor. But wait this quote sounds familar. Hmmm let us google around for a minute and see what we find.....
Oh dear Lenin was paraphrasing that famous Jesuit quote:

"Give me a child for the first seven years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards."


And since this has been the core philosophy of Catholic Education, I wonder if Kate is as frightened of the Church knowing best. Specially since Canada is a Catholic country. Perhaps not by government edict but certainly by census, if not concensus. Of course she doesn't mind Church indoctrination. Like most Blogging Tory's she is all in favour of private delivery of services by the Church. Moral values and all that. But the government funding secular non profit daycares, oh heaven forbid such interference in our individual and family lives.

Instead she makes a straw man out of Lenin, raises the bugaboo of daycare as a communist plot, not unlike the old red scares around flouride back in the early sixties. Except she says nothing at all about education having always been the delivery of ideology by the Church or State.

The only free school movement that has historically existed is not what Kate has in mind. No siree it has been Anarchist, starting with Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School Movement in Spain in opposition to the Catholic Education system in that country.

Early in the summer of 1908, after his release from jail, he wrote the story of the Modern School. The work was entitled The Origins and Ideals of the Modern School and was translated into English by Joseph McCabe and published by the Knickerbocker Press in 1913.

Following the declaration of martial law in 1909 during the Tragic Week, he was arrested and executed without any proof by firing squad at Montjuich Fortress in Barcelona on October 12.

Shortly after his execution, numerous supporters of Ferrer's ideas in the United States formed what were called Modern Schools, or Ferrer Schools, modeled after la Escuela Moderna. The first and most notable Modern School was formed in New York City in 1911.



Coincidental with the anarchist Modern School Movement was the Summerhill Free School movement in Germany which moved to England and influenced the homeschooling movement of the early sixties.

Summerhill: the early days

Summerhill was founded in 1921 in Hellerau, a suburb of Dresden. It was part of an International school called the Neue Schule. There were wonderful facilities there and a lot of enthusiasm, but over the following months Neill became progressively less happy with the school. He felt it was run by idealists – they disapproved of tobacco, foxtrots and cinemas – while he wanted the children to live their own lives. He said:

Summerhill School I am only just realising the absolute freedom of my scheme of Education. I see that all outside compulsion is wrong, that inner compulsion is the only value. And if Mary or David wants to laze about, lazing about is the one thing necessary for their personalities at the moment. Every moment of a healthy child's life is a working moment. A child has no time to sit down and laze. Lazing is abnormal, it is a recovery, and therefore it is necessary when it exists. Summerhill School

Together with Frau Neustatter (later his first wife), Neill moved his school to Sonntagsberg in Austria. The setting was idyllic – a castle on top of a mountain – but the local people, a Catholic community, were hostile.

By 1923 Neill had moved to the town of Lyme Regis in the south of England, to a house called Summerhill where he began with 5 pupils. The school continued there until 1927, when it moved to the present site at Leiston in the county of Suffolk, taking the name of Summerhill with it.


Yep social engineering is what Kate opposes, of course unless its delivered by the private sector as a commodity. Or perhaps by the church through access to public school funds or through religious based home schooling (an extension of Sunday School).

That is what she wants for day care, education and health care. She calls these commodities, at least she is honest about her capitalist apologetics. She wants all this delivered by the private sector. Or in an unregulated fashion, such as Baba babysitting, which is all the Conservative plan pays for.

Where she is not honest is of course her revisionist history of Canada and our social programs. She rely's upon her reading of American right wing propaganda and applying it uncritically to Canada. Lets look at Medicare for instance.

In her same blog item she says this about Medicare.

With the generation who remember life without socialized medicine slowly passing into history, the nation fully indoctrinated with the belief that the words "commodity" and "right" are interchangable, the Liberals have decided to welcome a future voting demographic to the concept that "babysitting" is a government responsiblity.


Oh what generation is that Kate? You obviously missed my blog about how Socialized Medicine Began in Alberta, even before it began in Saskatchewan.

And it was demanded by the ruling classes, the political powers that be, in the medical establishment as well as the government, and it was introduced by a right wing government; Social Credit. It began in the 1940's.

So there has not been a modern generation without Medicare in Canada except your grandparents, when they were children. After WWII every Canadian that came home from the fight for freedom was prepared to fight for social programs, cause when they left home there had been a depression and no social programs and when they returned they were not prepared to settle for less than the current social programs we enjoy. If they hadn't gotten them there would have been a revolution. Which is why Keynsian economics was used to createthe welfare state.

But Kate the historical revisionist denies all this.

Mind you Medicare as it existed in Alberta and Saskatchewan were different then Medicare is today. And different from the private insurance policies that folks in other provinces lived under. And I don't imagine that generation wants to return to that.

Nope they are seniors now and they ain't much in mood to listen to wet behind the ears whippersnappers like Kate tell them that what they consider a right should now be sold back to them as a commodity. Nope. Thats why they vote. And they vote in large numbers. And they vote to keep pensions, medicare, etc. They are the most vocal defenders of the status quo, cause they and their parents fought for it and built this country around those rights that Kate would sell off.

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Conservatives Turn Left

In a stunning move to the left Edmonton Centre Conservative Candidate Laurie Hawn called a media scrum to exploit, err expose the plight of Federal Jail Guards and their union which have been without a contract for five years. But before Laurie could start singing Solidarity Forever, he was turfed from the jail.

Now these guards of course are under the jurisdiction of the last Liberal left standing in Alberta; Anne McLellan, whom he is running against.

Blogging Tory Civitatensis blogged about this to which I left this reply;

Gee is this the same Conservative party that has Rob Anders as an MP the same Rob Anders who opposes Forced Unionization....and wants Right to Work laws....do I smell opportunism here...yep smells pretty strong too.

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CTV scoops CBC

Yesterday morning as CBC ran Don Newmans Politics show, 10 AM EST and CPAC ran their Talk Radio show CTV NEWSNET scooped them both and ran Jack Laytons Pharmacare announcement from Windsor live. Don only quoted from the press release in his discussion with the Media wonks from the Three Party War Rooms.

And Jacks announcement was original not a retread or 'me too' like the Liberals and Conservatives who announced identical Immigration Head Tax and Health Care plans. Tweedledee and Tweedledum indeed.

Yep I am more and more impressed with CTV on the election than I am CBC, and even more so now that Angry in the Great White North is praising CBC for its coverage of the Harper.

When Blogging Torys like CBC, cause they publish racist Kate of SDA, and say nice things about Harper, are right wing phone pledges for public broadcasting far behind?..."its the end of the world as we know it."


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Irans Nuclear Program Is A CIA Oops

Read it and weep. The US intelligence community bungles again. This is another case of SPY VS. SPY. Bad enough that Iran got its nuclear material and bomb making information from America's new found friend Pakistan. Now it turns out the CIA in a dirty tricks operation screwed up and actually gave them bomb blueprints.


US blunder aided Iran's atomic aims, book claims

Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday January 5, 2006
The Guardian

The CIA may have helped Iran to design a nuclear bomb through a botched attempt to channel flawed blueprints to Tehran's weapon designers, according to a new book on the US "war on terror".

In an excerpt from State of War, printed today in G2, the author and New York Times intelligence correspondent, James Risen, writes that the abortive operation misfired when a Russian defector on the CIA payroll, chosen to deliver the deliberately flawed nuclear warhead blueprints to Iranian officials in February 2000, tipped them off about the defects.

The operation, codenamed Merlin and approved by the Clinton administration, was intended to send Iranian scientists down a technological dead end, according to this account. They would spend years building a warhead which would fail to detonate. Instead, Risen writes, the operation may have helped Iran to "accelerate its weapons development" by extracting important information from the blueprints and ignoring the flaws.
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Coal Mine Disaster No Accident



(CNN) -- As family members waited for word on the fate of the 13 West Virginia miners trapped in the Sago Mine, they looked up to God and north to Pennsylvania's Quecreek Mine. Both gave them hope.


"Whatever did God do for us?"

Anger over false news of US miners' survival It was a mistake, families told, after hailing news of miners' survival


A Disaster in the Making


There are no such things as accidents in coal mining. Never have been never will be. Accidents, acts of god, do not occur in coal mines. What happens is that the company fails to provide for the safety of its workers, by cutting corners. Lack of safety precautions or inspections, lack of follow up, poor mining practices, these are the causes of miners deaths.


This is what happened in Canada's worst coal mine explosions such as Hillcrest in Alberta, Springhill in Nova Scotia and the recent disaster at Westray in Nova Scotia.


As we move towards increasing reliance on coal due to energy shortages, and the need for coal for power plants such as those in Ontario will mean the opening of more mines reviving old mines, and in some cases strip mining. Underground mining of coal is by far the most dangerous. It is why we associate the canary with coal mining because of the methane gases given off by coal.


Increased production of coal will mean more speed ups in the mines, ignoring safety regulations and inspections, more fast buck risks taken by the investors for quick profits and thus higher risks for the workers who mine King Coal.


This is what occured this week in West Virginia. Sago mine was plagued with problems that inspectors found and the company failed to resolve. Which of these was the cause of this weeks explosion and disaster will be discovered soon enough but the companies record of violations and roof falls, only show that this was no'accident' but a disaster that was waiting to happen sooner or later.



The International Coal Group was formed in 2004, when business entrepreneur Wilbur Ross Jr. led a group that bought many of the assets of Horizon Natural Resources in a bankruptcy auction.

Last year, ICG bought Anker, which previously owned Sago. The company has mining operations in West Virginia, Kentucky and Maryland and owned or controlled approximately 707 million tons of coal as of Jan. 1, 2005.

The Sago Mine was cited 208 times over alleged safety violations in 2005, up from just 68 citations the year before, The Associated Press reported. Federal regulators' allegations against the Sago Mine included failure to dilute coal dust, which can lead to explosions, and failure to properly operate and maintain machinery, according to the AP report.

Sago Has A History of Safety Violations

In 2005, the government proposed fines for Anker, the company that operates the Sago Mine, that total almost $25,000 for violations; the company has paid a little more than $14,000 (so far).

Only a few weeks ago, the feds cited the company for a number of violations, but inspectors did not propose any fines. According to the MSHA chart, the most recent Sago Mine violations have not yet been assessed. (Click on the "Standard" column to see the specific violation for each item listed.)

Among the December 2005 inspector findings were fire-extinguisher violations and violations for surface (above-ground) travelways such as railways. There were three violations issued just since Dec. 18, 2005 regarding a "roof control plan."

The mine was also cited less than a month ago for allowing coal dust to accumulate. Last month, the mine was cited (not fined) for not having proper atmospheric monitoring systems.

In November, inspectors did propose fines for inadequate mine ventilation and inadequate roof bolts.

MSHA has been updating information on the West Virginia mine on its Web site.



History of Accidents

Many of the accidents include unintentional roof falls. The Charleston Gazette explored the roof-fall angle under the notion that the series of recent minor roof falls may have been an indication that the mine needed to fix roofing problems. The paper said: Three of the roof falls occurred after International Coal Group finalized its purchase of the Anker operation in mid-November.



Mining Accident Raises Broader Safety Questions

The mining disaster at West Virginia's Sago Mine has raised new questions about safety in an industry that has long been among the most dangerous in America.

Tougher government regulation and technology improvements have helped reduce mining accidents over the past two decades. But at a time of increased mining demand and a shortage of skilled workers, safety problems have continued to dog the industry, contributing to more than 300 fatalities since the year 2000.





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Dead Men Tell No Tales

Nor do dead women. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists , 47 journalists were murdered doing their jobs last year. At least half in Iraq. Which may be the reason the Pentagon saw fit to publish their own good news stories and plant them in the Iraqi press. Just covering for all those journalists murdered by friendly fire.....

Iraq still remains the most dangerous place for journalists: 22 journalists lost their lives there in 2005. A total of 60 journalists have been killed on duty in Iraq from the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 through the end of 2005. That number surpasses the 58 journalists killed in the Algerian conflict from 1993 to 1996.






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