CBC on Bolivia

Once again the CBC shows why it is more like the BBC than CNN. In this 'fair and balanced' report by long time international reporter; Joe Schlesinger; EVO-LUTION!

The Bolivian revolution is explained and not spared coverage of its blemishes. The reality is that there is a social revolution occuring here, one that is part of a larger transformation in Latin America that offers all of us hope that the Struggle Continues. Real revolution, by real people, combating American Hegemony and global capitalism.


More on Bolivia


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
CBC, Bolivia, Morales

It's My Party

It's my party and I'll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to, cry if I want to
You would cry too if it happened to you

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he'll no longer give news conferences for the national media, after a dispute led a number of journalists to walk away from an event when he refused to take their questions. Harper says he's finished with Ottawa press corps

Welcome to Ottawa, Alberta. As I predicted here the Harpocrite is using the tried and true tactics of the Alberta PC's in making the media feel small.

Also see:Ottawa, Alberta

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Harper, PM, PMO, Canada, media, news, reporters, press-gallery, Parliament,

Da Vinci Vatican

The Vatican reviews the movie version of the Da Vinci Code and concludes it is long and boring.

Gee just like the Bible.










Also see:

Judas the Obscure

My Favorite Muslim

Antinominalist Anarchism

New Age Libertarian Manifesto

The Morning Star

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Vatican, DaVinciCode, Movies, Hanks

The Job Creation Myth

Precarious labour describes those whose work is part time, home work or based on outsourcing. Often described as "self employed", it produces an illusion of the private consultant, home based worker, self employed trades-man, etc.

The reality is much different. With the move by the Neo-Liberal State in Canada to Reinvent Government, large numbers of public sector jobs were contracted out. In some cases this meant those whose expertise was vital to a partiuclar department were allowed to contract back to the Government, or under legislation now sell their services in place of a government department.

In most cases though it meant contracting out and outsourcing, creating a vast army of temporary or replaceable contract workers, who have no beneftis and suffer under low pay regimes. It saved the government millions in benefits and wages. It save corporations and small employers the same. They are not obliged to pay benefits to contract workers, nor do these workers have the right to unionize.

As self employed consultant, and Career Activist Mark Swartz points out;

"The illusion of growth is most evident in the private sector, which
misleadingly counts self-employment as full-time, private sector jobs," says
Swartz. This grossly distorts the employment picture. Of this year's 80.7M new
private sector positions, fully 51.2M, nearly 2/3rds, are self-employment, not
real jobs. He notes "Historically self-employment has hovered around 15% of
total employment. Recent statistics suggest a growing deficit in genuine jobs
masked by inflated rates of self-employment."

Which means that with the increase in precarious employment, those jobs are here today and gone tommorow. And of course give us another reason to quote; "lies, damned lies and statistics"


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Canada, Stats-Canada, Swartz, Precarious, labour, employment, self-employment, contracting-out, outsourcing

The Joys of Telemarketing

Telemarketing is big business in Canada. We are second behind India in outsourced telemarketing services for U.S. corporations. But of course with the growth in this precarious labour market of outsourcing comes another Canadian specialty; White Collar Crime.


Massive fraud sting leads to 400 Canadian charges

Canada is notorious as a source of boiler room rip off operations. It has expanded from being a small room with phones to the Internet. And it is a natural for telemarketing.

Of course we should not be surprized since captialism is by its nature a criminal enterprize and we do celebrate entrepreneurial spirit.


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
telemarketing, boiler-room, fraud, crime, white-collar-crime, Canada, US, outsourcing, capitalism

Lucky Number 7

A drop in the Canadian dollar in the past two weeks gave the Bank of Canada just enough breathing room to deliver its seventh consecutive - and likely final - interest rate increase Wednesday morning.

Seven rate hikes and of course David Dodge and the Bank of Canada do it again.

Bank of Canada raises overnight rate target by 1/4 percentage point to 4 1/4 per cent

And of course they just can't help themselves. Since the Bank no longer controls money production in Canada nor the Banking establishment, it has to do something to justify its existence.

Such as practicing the ancient art of prestidigitation.

" Recent Canadian data confirm that domestic demand remains solid, and that both CPI and core inflation are evolving largely in line with the Bank's expectations."

Oh how prescient of them, reading entrails again I suppose. As the dismal science this is right up there with weather reporting and astrology.

Except that their expectation is to keep inflation at 2%, while in April it was was reported at 1.6% . Below the Banks expectation, perhaps they are upset it was lower than expected so the rate increase is to get it UP to 2%. Yep that makes a lot of sense.

The result is that the Banks have increased their prime lending rate to 6%.

Some wags have reported that the Bank is signaling a pause in its Long March of increasing interest rates, though again one has to peer into a glass darkly to read that out of their press release. I guess the experienced prestidigitator could see this in their reading of the entrails.

The fact is that our advantage is our Flexible Exchange Rate meant that there was no real need to up the interest rates. But the Bank already made up its mind that's what it was gong to do and by gawd they did it. And the reason all this concern for inflation?

Well you can blame the last Conservative government which introduced the GST.

The key objectives of Canada’s inflation targets,
when they were originally announced in 1991, were
to prevent inflation from accelerating in the short
run in the face of the introduction of the new Goods
and Services Tax (GST) and a sharp rise in oil prices
and, in the longer run, to bring inflation down to a
level consistent with price stability.

Over time, the importance of other favourable
characteristics of inflation
targets as a permanent operating framework for
monetary policy has become increasingly apparent to
us at the Bank of Canada. The most notable of these
characteristics are increased transparency, better accountability,
improved internal decision making, and
a mechanism for responding to demand and supply
shocks that reduces potential fluctuations in output.

I would not argue that explicit inflation targets are
the only way to achieve good macroeconomic results.
Indeed, the worldwide reduction of inflation in the
1990s across countries with different frameworks for
monetary policy clearly indicates that there are a
number of ways to achieve low inflation.

GORDON G. THIESSEN
Governor of the Bank of Canada

Say wouldn't a deline in the GST by 1% have been good news for the Loonie and avoided this rate increase? Guess not.

And you know who else rolled a Lucky Number & why the Banks, well the BMO anyways.

Bank of Montreal Q2 profit up 7.1% at $644M; dividend boosted

And while shareholders will celebrate, us peons, the folks that use the banks, well we sure do get the shaft, low interest on our savings, and service charges out the wazoo. See; Bank Charges

Not all the banks made big bucks with the rise in the Loonie. The financial sector was the biggest sectoral decliner as Royal Bank (TSX:RY) lost 47 cents to $46.58 and Scotiabank (TSX:BNS) fell 72 cents to $44.70.

Which will be excuse the Royal Bank will use to justify their proposed increase in service rates to be introduced on, wait for it....July 1. Canada Day. Gives ya something to celebrate.




Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Bank-of-Canada, David-Dodge, Interest-rates, Canada, economy, Banks, service-charges, prime-rate

Revolt of the Fifth Estate

His Majesty King Stephen the First has ticked off the fifth estate. Journalists boycott Harper news conference as media battle heats up Now if only the other four Estates would follow suit, we good bring back public executions of the autarch. After all the King is in favour of Law and Order, something the French Revolution executed quite well. And why pray tell is the Fifth Estate ticked off, well because King Stephen is using King George the Second's play book, again.

The Prime Minister's Office insists on choosing who gets to ask questions based on a list it compiles.


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Harper, Conservatives, Government, media, journalists, boycott, PM, PMO
Canada, Politics

A Critique of P3's From The Right

As regular readers will know I have been critical of P3's, public private partnerships, from the Left. Now here is an interesting critique of them from the Liberaltarians around the Von Mises (pronounced by Sylvester as von meeses) Institute.

Unfortunately the author misses the point that it was the neo-cons who promoted the Reinvention of Government the liberaltarian ideal of getting the State out of business and business to take up the slack of the state, in other words his arguement is upside down. In fact it is the folks at Von Mises and others like the CATO and Fraser Institutes that promote the so called free market ideology that promote P3's.

His critique of sustainable development suffers from a similar misunderstanding of the political economy of the neo-liberal state. The State has been run by the neo-cons for more than twenty years and sustainable development is their way of creating a Greener capitalism without actually investing in industrial ecology or social ecology.

Once again the Liberaltarians fail to understand the simple fact that the State is a manifestation of Capitalism. In their efforts to create a mythology of a pure and simple capitalism, they view the State as somehow apart and separate from its birthmother, modern capitalism. It is not the State that hinders capitalism, on the contrary it is the State which abets and promotes capitalism. Their argument is based upon a percieved American exceptionalism and thus remains a-historical and a flight of fantasy.

While their key argument that big business and its state hinder markets, competition, free association remain cogent, it not a question of either or but rather the elimination of both. See: Libertarian Dialectics

Public-Private Partnerships, The Undermining of Free Enterprise, and the Emergence of “Soft Fascism”

There are now thousands of public-private partnerships in place throughout the country, engaging in activities ranging from building roads and neighborhoods to providing waterand wastewater services to renovating government schools to overseeing the management
of real estate to providing health care. This number seems destined to grow in theimmediate future.

It is fair to say that public-private partnerships have been accepted
without question by the ‘mainstream’ of both government and business. This is because a new ‘paradigm’ for the relationship between the two has emerged, verygradually, over the past few decades. This ‘paradigm,’ of course, is that of sustainable development, which combines the power of the purse, one might call it, with the power of
the sword. The resources of business (the power of the purse) are utilized to do the work of “governance” (the power of the sword)—with the former’s full cooperation and support.

The reports we cited noted several examples of what appear to all intents and purposes to be successful public-private partnerships—successful, that is, in achieving the ends wanted within government.

Expansionist or interventionist government—the idea that government should undertake responsibility for managing huge portions of a country’s economy and infrastructure—is taken for granted, but limits on the capacity of government to effect change by itself are acknowledged. The solution to the problem of the limits on the capacity of government, in the new paradigm, is to employ the resources of business, in a way that brings business fully on board and enlists it as collaborator—or partner.

Of course, the larger the business the better, because bigger businesses tend to have deeper pocketbooks than smaller businesses. The critics of public-private partnerships usually cited in the favorable literature are not those who do not trust government but those who do not trust business.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
P3's, public-private-partnerships
left-libertarian, libertarian-left, agorist, free-market, Von-Mises, Hyaek, Austrian-School

Bilderburger

Over 200 Billion controlled. That would be the motto of the Bilderberg Conference if this secret society of the ruling class was branded like MacDonalds, the other burger baron.

Apparently one of our favorite 'secret' ruling class conclaves will be meeting in Canada, north of Ottawa, in June.

The secretive group known as Bilderberg will hold its annual secret meeting at the posh Brook Street Resort a few miles from Ottawa, Canada, June 8-11.

The location and part of the agenda was disclosed to American Free Press by a source inside Bilderberg’s inner circle.

High on the Bilderberg’s secret agenda this year are oil prices and the political upheaval in Latin America. When meeting last year in Rottach-Egern, Germany, Bilderberg called for dramatic increases in the price of oil. Oil prices started climbing immediately from $40 a barrel to $70.

Whether Bilderberg will call for still higher prices is unclear, but Henry Kissinger and others had gleefully anticipated ultimate prices at $150 a barrel a year ago. Bilderberg is certainly concerned about supply, which is related to the “Latin American problem,” as one insider said.

Approximately 120 international leaders in politics and finance will also discuss the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has caused a rare breach between American Bilderbergers and their European counterparts since the United States Iraq invasion in 2003. Whether the United States should invade Iran is also high on the agenda.

Media coverage of the Bilderberg conference is extermely limited as many of the ruling class media barons and their syncophants attend. See Aaron Bratens Open Letter to the Bilderberg Steering Committee

For more on ruling class conspiracies see: Conspiracy Theory or Ruling Class Studies

For more on the Bildgerberg Conferences

We all know of the Davos meeting of the Ruling Classes but before that there was the Bilderberg Conference. Davos too was a secret meeting till after it was exposed during the Seattle Protests, and the creation of the mass democratic alternative World Social Forum.

When the ruling class gathers to hold its secret meetings to plan our futures we should all be worried. It proves that the Executive branch of capitalism, view democracy as only convinient if it is representative of their interests, which is why they dominate all of the political parties that vie for parlimentary power.

the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

Now those that see conspiracies everywhere might be forgiven for thinking that this meeting is coincidental with Canada's economic dominace with the petro-dollar and the election of the Conservatives, since Harper has attended previous Bilderberg Conferences.

Steven Harper and the Bilderbergers Secret Meeting : Thunderbay IMC


Your Exeutive Committee of the Canadian Ruling Class:

The ruling class has many coordinating committees, and like most corporations they share interlocking boards of directors.

Ralph Klein attended the 1995 Bilderberg meeting while floods ravished the south of the province and forest fires decimated the North. It was a good time for a trip abroad. He was invited by long standing Bilderberg Steering Committee member and international corporate criminal; Conrad Black.

Alberta is also home to members of the Trilateral Commission, another executive committee of the ruling class; Ron Southern of ATCO-Frontenac. Meetings are held at Southern's Spruce Meadows equistrian ranch in Calgary. Bill Graham is also a member as is Allan Gotlieb The international importance of Ron Southern cannot be underestimated last year the Summit of the Americas held a closed confernce at Spruce Meadows.

The Head of the Carlyle Group is a member of the Trilateral Commission. It is well known that ex-Premier Frank Mcekenna is a member of the Carlyle Group, but so is another Ex Premier. Peter Lougheed is a member of the Carlyle Group along with the political king maker Paul Desmarais of Power Corporation.

And of course we would be remiss if we did not mention the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, the ultimate executive committee of the ruling class in Canada of which David Emerson is a prominant member as is Derek Burney.

The fact that Burney was Harpers advisor and a corporate colleague of Emerson's may have helped when Harper got Emerson tocross the floor.

Ladies and Gentlemen these are your Board of Directors of the Canadian Ruling Class.

Also See:

Bilderberg

Conspiracy Theory or Ruling Class Studies

Conspiracy Theories



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
secret-societies, ruling-class, executives, Lougheed, Southern, Davos, Trilateral, Bilderberg, Klein, Black, CCCE, Media, conspiracy, conspiracies, Seattle, WTO, protests, WSF, World, Social, Forum

Quebec Hydro Created Kyoto

Charest to go it alone on Kyoto climate accord is the headline in the Globe and Mail.

Nothing surprizing with this, since it was the Chairman of Quebec Hydro, political scion of the Power Corporation, Maurice Strong who chaired the Rio round of talks on the environment, when petit Jean Charest was Environment Minister in the Mulroney government. Kyoto was Canada's creation. Before Jean Chretien ( another Quebecois aligned to Power Corp) signed it, Kyoto was the creation of Strong and Hydro Quebec.

It is the reason Mulroney was given the Greenist PM award by the environmental movement. Kyoto was his legacy. Ironic it was a Conservative government that created Kyoto and now it is a Conservative government that wants to destroy it.

The difference between the Conservative Party of the Past and today is that the Mulroney government was dominated by Quebec and its capitalist ruling class, todays Conservative party is dominated by the interests of Calgary and its petro-industry ruling class.


See: Harper Has Already Abandoned Kyoto

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Charest, Kyoto, Strong, Mulroney, Harper, Ambrose, Canada, Quebec, environment, Rio, UN, HydroQuebec, PowerCorp

Credit Card Fraud

The wonderful thing abut the stock market is that it is amoral, capitalism itself is amoral. Clearly with such little concern about the criminal behaviour of the big Credit Card companies, the stock market should be willing to put IPO's out for Bolivian Coca or Afghanistan Opium cooperatives. Then those two economic basket cases would at least be able to gain enough capital to reconstruct their economies.

Visa and MasterCard are part of the Banking cartels, they are in fact agents of the banks, much like the ATM service programs, Cirrus and Interac.

Interesting that banking/credit card fraud is considered a less henious crime than say oh I don't know, shoplifting, or robbery, or selling drugs on the street for the third time.

And the reason that Visa and Mastercard are facing legal suits? Why it's a simple thing called MONOPOLY.

As Americans go into Debt, and Canadians as well, Mastercard and Visa have reaped record profits off the go-go casino economy that is America.

Nothing productive here, just Money chasing Capital chasing Money; M-C-M. Housing Bubble, Debt Boom

Which is why America is now the worlds largest debtor.Storm Clouds Over The US Economy

Merchants Hit MasterCard IPO on Anticompetitive Grounds

A law firm co-leading the merchant class-action interchange lawsuit against Visa USA, MasterCard Inc. and a number of their large members yesterday filed a supplemental complaint in federal court asserting that MasterCard’s imminent initial public offering of stock is an attempt to shield itself from antitrust liability for past interchange practices. But if or how the revised complaint will affect the planned IPO that could come as soon as Thursday and raise up to $2.8 billion is unclear.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - MasterCard is expected to hit the market with a bang when it makes its debut on the New York Stock Exchange as early as next week.

But there may be reason for long-term investors to whimper.

Investors big and small are expected to gobble up shares of the credit card association, which has a long history of stable performance. But the company's future appears less certain.

MasterCard faces mounting lawsuits, and long-term investors could end up footing the company's legal bills, analysts said.

Investors in the IPO market like to see growth, and while MasterCard is a well established company, its business has benefited as consumers move from paper to electronic payments. The total value of transactions on MasterCard-branded cards - including purchases and cash advances - rose 13 percent last year to $1.7 trillion, according to company estimates.

MasterCard has booked about $860 million in expenses related to legal settlements over the last three fiscal years. It settled a lawsuit brought on behalf of merchants in 2003 but a number of cases remain outstanding, including separate suits filed by Morgan Stanley's (Research) Discover and American Express alleging the credit card association competes unfairly.

Also See:

Bank Charges

Contracting Out Faux Pas

Money Money Money

BANKS



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Mastercard, Visa, IPO, monopoly, crime, Banks, debt, credit, creditcards, CIRRUS, Interac, US, Canada, Stockmarket, M-C-M