Thanks Stephen

Thank Prime Minister Stephen Harper for the huge turnout at the International Women’s Day march in Toronto yesterday.His plans to scrap a national daycare plan pledged by the former Liberal government galvanized support for the 28th annual rally and march that filled sunny downtown streets with 3,500 people chanting and carrying signs and banners. About 750 marched last year. 3,500 march for women’s day


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Contracting Out Faux Pas

Opps. It turns out that Citibank and Wells Fargo outsource, contract out, to a third party their Visa and Bank card security. And guess what happens ?

Breach Of Security Among Debit Card Companies that then screws American visitors when they are out of the country. Suddenly, not their fault, they can't access their bank accounts.

If You Can't Trust Your Bank, Who Can You Trust?

Shortly after I wrote yesterday's story about Citibank's confirmation that a third-party company it does business with had been breached, causing the bank to block PIN-based transactions for customers in Canada, Russia, and the U.K., I started to hear from the people directly affected by the mess this latest data faux pas caused.

I guess this is another example of the Shmoo's theory of contracting out, outsourcing and privatization "being efficient and effective " Tell that to the poor shmook who is trying to pay his cabfare in London and can't get out any cash from the ATM in English pounds.


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Union Busting Monopoly

Garda one of Canada's largest private security firms has acquired the British owned Initial Security, making it Canada's largest private Rent-A-Cop company. Coming soon to a picket line near you.

The acquired operation, better known as Initial Security, was a unit of Britain's Rentokil Initial, whose diverse interests include office cleaning, courier services and pest control as well as security. Based in Edmonton, Initial offers such services as "uniformed protection, labour unrest protection and mobile patrol," Garda said.


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Double Dipping Emerson

Oh this is rich. In fact very rich. And a good reason for an ethics investigation into David Emerson. As if another reason was needed. But this one takes the cake, as in having your cake and eating it too. Ok that's it for the cliches.

New salvos in bitter ethics battle

Trade Minister David Emerson is in an apparent conflict as Canada's lead negotiator in the Canada-U.S. softwood lumber trade dispute because he still has a financial stake in forestry giant Canfor Corp., according to a complaint sent yesterday to Ethics Commissioner Bernard Shapiro. The formal complaint, filed by Liberal trade critic Dominic LeBlanc and provided to CanWest News Service, is based on Mr. Emerson's $167,000 annual pension he receives from a company that could benefit enormously if the ongoing dispute is resolved. As a cabinet minister, Mr. Emerson will earn $213,000 a year.

Emerson earns a paltry $380,000 a year in Salary and Pension. As the commercial says Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun.



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White Whing Wacist

There are those on the rightwing of the blogosphere in Canada that think they can blissfully go on and on in a racist fashion and think it's funny. Worse they think it's defensible.

I am refering the collective of mental midgets over at Cannuckistan Chronicles. The latest White Whing Wacist outburst in this case was posted by Richard, the Cannucklehead.

Breaking News: Sand Monkeys and MoonBats Really Are That Dumb!

Sand Monkeys. Whats next Rag Heads? Is it any less racist or offensive? No. But hey Richard the White Whing Wascist already has his excuse's ready for those of us offended by his racism.

Note to whiners complaining about the use of the term Sand Monkey: Sand Monkeys are not a race. They are a group. Specifically, they're a group comprised of Islamofascists otherwise known as terrorists. You politely refer to them as insurgents or freedom fighters. Now, if any of you folks who wish to complain about the phrase would like to point me in the direction of one of these islamofascist/terrorists, I'd be more than happy to question them on how they feel about it's use.

Sure he would from the safety of his Canadian blogosphere. This mental midget thinks this clever comment clears him from being a hatemonger and racist. Far from it, it merely confirms he is unapologetic about his hatemongering and racism.

But worse yet Richard literally palpitates with joy over the death of Tom Fox the Christian PeaceMaker. Richard says he deserved to die and his fellow Canadian and Brit comrades deserve to die too. The vitrol drools vindictively in his post.

As a matter of fact, I am pleased things turned out this way. And, yes, I'm hoping the same fate befalls the others. I don't think these treasonous SOB's should live the same way I don't think serial killers should live. These individuals, in my mind anyway, are far from innocent. They're reaping the seeds they've sown and we're devoting far too many resources to try to save their lame asses. Maybe you idiots will finally wake up and join the war on terror instead of fighting your war against western civilisation.

These are far from rational well meaning folks whose politics differ from mine. They are rabid racist dogs of war. There is no reasoning with them. Nor should one try. Merely exposing them to the light of day may help them retreat back under the rock from whence they crawled with their cousins in the White Supremacist movement.


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Tout va Bien

It may not be quite a re-enactment of the student revolt of May' 68 but once again the proletarian students have seized the Sorbonne! Be Realistic Demand The Impossible!

Police and students clashed Saturday at Sorbonne University.



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The Other Afghanistan

A tip o the blog to Vive le Canada which posted a link to this excellent leftwing blog.

Marc W. Herold of the Departments of Economics and Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire is currently publishing a series of articles on Afghanistan.

It poses questions about Afghanistan from the view of those forgotten by the politicians, the Progressives For War (PFW) and the rest of the MSM, main stream military, apologists.

The people in the empty State of Afghanistan, a land that is filled with nomadic peoples, whose civilization is outside of Kabul. Where our troops are now invading.
In classic capitalist fashion, those outside will be brought into civilization, that is the urban centres, to become proletarianized. This same policy was used in Indonesia for thirty years to move a mass of humanity from their villages towards the metropols to create a vast army of the unemployed.

Here are links to his three most recent articles. For those who think this war is about Timmies setting up a coffeshop in Kandahar, or who are deluded into believing we are actually doing something noble, well read on.

Pulling the rug out: Pseudo-development in Karzai's Afghanistan

The perfect Neo-Colonial state of the 21st century. Part two.

Welcome to the "new" Afghanistan, and please, ladies and gentlemen proceed up these golden stairways. The forms taken by pseudo-development in Kabul are many and grotesque: construction of luxury hotels (photo above of elevator in the new Kabul City Center), shopping malls and ostentatious "corrupto-mansions," grinding poverty amidst opulence, pervasive insecurity, lock-down and deserted streets at night, an opium and foreign monies-financed consumption boom, pervasive corruption, alcohol and prostitutes for the foreign clientele, and the long list of "Kabul's finest" - foreign ex-pats, a bloated NGO-community, carpetbaggers and hangers-on of all stripes, money disbursers, neo-colonial administrators, opportunists, imported Chinese and Soviet Republic prostitutes, imported Thai masseuses in the Mustafa Hotel, bribed politicians and local power brokers, facilitators, beauticians (of the city planner or aesthetician types), members of the development establishment, do-gooders, mercenaries, fortune-hunters, enforcers, etc.

In this section, I shall address six inter-related aspects of Kabul's pseudo-development: (1). Opulence amidst destitution; (2). The absence of genuine governance in a culture of impunity; (3). Corruption; (4). Life in the ex-pat community; (5). Evidence of decadence -- alcohol and prostitution in Karzai's Kabul; and (6) The climate of generalized insecurity. Naturally, no aggregate data exists on these matters and so I shall rely upon scattered first-hand reports that form a coherent whole.

Afghanistan as an empty space

The perfect Neo-Colonial state of the 21st century. Part one.

Argument: Four years after the U.S.-led attack on Afghanistan, the true meaning of the U.S occupation is revealing itself. Afghanistan represents merely a space that is to be kept empty. Western powers have no interest in either buying from or selling to the blighted nation. The impoverished Afghan civilian population is as irrelevant as is the nation's economic development. But the space represented by Afghanistan in a volatile region of geo-political import, is to be kept vacant from all hostile forces. The country is situated at the center of a resurgent Islamic world, close to a rising China (and India) and the restive ex-Soviet Asian republics, and adjacent to oil-rich states.

The only populated centers of any real concern are a few islands of grotesque capitalist imaginary reality -- foremost Kabul -- needed to project the image of an existing central government, an image further promoted by Karzai's frequent international junkets. In such islands of affluence amidst a sea of poverty, a sufficient density of foreign ex-pats, a bloated NGO-community, carpetbaggers and hangers-on of all stripes, money disbursers, neo-colonial administrators, opportunists, bribed local power brokers, facilitators, beauticians (of the city planner or aesthetician types), members of the development establishment, do-gooders, enforcers, etc., warrants the presence of Western businesses. These include foreign bank branches, luxury hotels (Serena Kabul, Hyatt Regency of Kabul), shopping malls (the Roshan Plaza, the Kabul City Centre mall), import houses (Toyota selling its popular Land Cruiser), image makers (J. Walter Thompson), and the ubiquitous Coca-Cola¹.

---

An Island Named Kabul

Trickle-Up Economics and Westernization in Karzai's Afghanistan

The evidence of class exclusion and westernization abound in the island called Kabul, the mayoralty of U.S.-anointed and DynCorp-protected Hamid Karzai.¹ Liberation and civilization arrive through acts of westernized consumption and also participation in U.S.-modeled, organized and protected "elections," a topic explored elsewhere by others. The distinctive element of the Karzai reconstruction project – to use the memorable phrase of Ross Perot – involves a "giant sucking sound" meaning here transferring income upward in the social structure, e.g., trickle-up, well-lubricated by drug and foreign monies. The obscene, sickening spectacle of an import-dependent consumption boom in Kabul coexists with deep impoverishment and destitution, the whole sordid mess "protected" by close to 20,000 foreign troops.

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Shmoozing

A new right wing blog; the Shmoo Report got my attention.

Remember the Shmoo? No. It was an old Al Capp character.

No not Andy Capp the lazy Brit everyman, though the Shmoo Report would identify him as a union guy.

Al Capp the cartoonist. The right wing cartoonist from the sixties, who did the comic strip about the hillbillies. No, not the Beverly Hillbillies. Lil'Abner and Dogpatch.

Anyways Shmoo's were the ultimate socialist ideal, everyone could have anything they wanted because the Shmoo's would create it out of themselves. And they reproduced faster than rabbits.

Ironically, the lovable and selfless Shmoos ultimately brought misery to humankind because people with a limitless supply of self-sacrificing Shmoos stopped working and society began to break down.Seen at first as a boon to humankind, they were ultimately hunted down and exterminated by the U.S. government to preserve the status quo.

The Trouble with Tribbles on Star Trek, the loveable tribbles are modeled on Shmoo's. As is the edibled beast that wants to be eaten in Douglas Adams the Restaurant At the End of the Universe.

Sheesh this was just going to be a posting on Shmoo the schmuck and now I have to go into the history of comics. Schmuck of course is Yiddish, and a comical phrase for a well, schmuck.

Well ok here goes, the Shmoo Report says this, the proverbial Big Lie of the right that we all agree;

when it comes to being efficient and effective the private sector will always beat the public sector simply based on cost and time

Schmuck! The facts sir prove the opposite as I have documented here time after time. So no we don't all agree.

An actual study done by custodial workers in Edmonton public schools proves it. The study compared unionised in-house custodial workers with outside contractors. Same types of schools, the non-unionized outside contractors had to have their own equipment, supplies and staff. Which in itself is unusual because when the State privatizes as it has in Alberta with say its highways department or liquour stores it sells the equipment, supplies to the contractor.

This was a genuine level playing field, unlike most privatization attempts. It took two years and the result was that a joint union management committee, with two outside assessors found that the unionized workers were cheaper and more cost effective. Why the keyword used in the study was "ownership".

Contracted out workers while cheaper, that is paid less by their employer who profits by pocketing the difference in the contract and their pay, have no sense of loyalty to the company or to the place they are working in.

Public sector workers have a sense of ownership, the school, hospital, office building where they work as custodians is theirs. Hence the term custodians, NOT janitors. Janitors come in clean up and leave. A custodian maintains the building, for the safety of the people who work there.

Ironic that this is the very stakeholder ideology of the right. Maggie Thatcher used it when she wanted to sell public housing to those who rented it. If they owned it they would take care of it better Maggie and her right wing pals like to say. The whole stakeholder ideology is about 'ownership', well it turns out that it also applies to the public sector and public services. The public sector workers because of their employment conditions feel that they have ownership. Especially caregivers which includes custodians, foodservice workers and laundry workers in hospitals and schools. Even the support staff, school secretaries, teachers aids, nursing aides, etc. feel and know they are important for learning or maintaining a patients health. It takes Teamwork remember. And day by day contract workers will never have that feeling of ownership or stakeholding.


Today other studies show this to be the most important factor in retaining staff, having a sense of ownership. Ironic that as the right wing pushed for contracting out, management reform types were pushing the idea of teamwork and ownership at work.

So Shmoo the schmuck, believes that the private sector is better in delivering services than the public. His article, you knew I would get around to this eventually, is about health care. And he whines about how all the focus is on nurses and janitors and food workers, that are unionized. Tch Tch which of course he wants contracted out.

Well that has happened with laundry workers, and guess what again the myth that the private sector is cheaper and better falls apart again. Alberta and now B.C. has contracted out its laundery services. And no they haven't gotten cheaper. In fact in Alberta K-Bro who does all the laundry services now, could only operate by getting the hospital laundries sold to it at firesale prices. Now that it has a monopoly on laundry services it can charge what it likes, and it does. Laundry costs have increased. Workers wages of course have increased only minimally.

And again the use of contracted out services especially in custodial has been driven by cost considerations, that is the underfunding of the public sector. Hand in hand with the push to contract out has been the deliberate cost cutting to the public sector, be it schools or hospitals. Otherwise contracting out would not have been considered an option.Facing deficits school boards, hospitals, municipalities have been pushed to consider contracting out. So its not a solution at all, its an imposed economic condition that arises from cutbacks.
Which came first? Custbacks in public services of course, and which comes second contracting out as the saviour. Its got noting to do with being more economical or efficient. Its about saving money and the only way that savings is made is that contractors pay less to their workers. Thus with higher turnover in staff quality assurance cannot be made.

And cutting custodial staff in hospitals has led to dangerous conditions. Despite the Shmoo's view that Doctors are what keep hospitals running, and are obviously more important than 'janitors', lets remember the SARS crisis, which killed Doctors, Nurses and Patients. It and other viral diseases occuring in hospitals are doing so because custodial staff have been cut back and then contracted out.

Minimal cleaning safety standards are not being met. When that occurs in hospitals evidence shows the spread of opportunistic diseases such as SARS, the Norwalk virus and the Super Bugs increases. All have to do with the importance of cleaning for health. Which cannot be done under-budget, with cutbacks or through contracting out.








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