CIA Spies In Canada

The Central Intelligence Agency spied on Canadians critical of the Vietnam War during the late 1960s and '70s in an operation code-named "MH Chaos," CBC News has learned. The declassified CIA documents did not show whether the Canadian government was aware the CIA was spying on Canadian campuses.

Well duh. Of course they were. As it was reported in the Ubyssey in 1967;

The Canadian Union of Students is among 25 organizations
identified as receiving contributions from foundations connected
with the U .S . Central Intelligence Agency.

Since the RCMP, and now CSIS ,to this day have a joint information sharing agreement with U.S. intelligence and police forces.. And the RCMP was doing the same thing.

Spying 101: The RCMP’s Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917-1997. By Steve Hewitt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 295 pages.

If you were expecting a book about a course in basic espionage, look elsewhere. Spying 101 is predominantly a study of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s involvement on Canadian university campuses for eight decades monitoring radicals and subversive activities inspired by communists and Quebec separatists. Historian Steve Hewitt sees this period less as one of “monitoring,” than as one of infiltration, subversion, and spying. But, however one characterizes it, when the radical targets and their supporters found out that the government was watching and listening, they were furious and still are. Hewitt admits there was indeed plotting against the State, but suggests that it was, for the most part, nothing serious. He contends that the RCMP, with the concurrence of its political masters, intentionally exaggerated the threats to secure an inflated budget and arouse public antipathy.

The relationship between the CIA and the RCMP began back in WWII with its forerunner the SOE.

In the 1960's as the cold war raged, the CIA began to interfere in Canada's internal politics. Rumour has it that the CIA was only too happy to help defeat the Diefenbaker government.

CIA Fingerprints in Canada

  In 1962, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, Livingston Merchant, and his Second
Secretary Charles Kisselyak, fuelled a plot among the Canadian Air Forces,
Canadian journalists and others to dispose of Prime Minister Diefenbaker.
Kennedy hated Dief largely for his anti-nuclear stance.  Merchant and
other U.S. embassy officers with espionage backgrounds, met at
Kisselyak's home in Ottawa to feed journalists with spaghetti, beer and
anti-Diefenbaker/pronuclear propaganda.

Among the many participants in these off-the-record briefings was Charles Lynch
of Southam News. Diefenbaker later denounced these reporters as "traitors" and
"foreign  agents."  He lashed out against Lynch on a TV program saying,
"You were given briefings as to how the Canadian government could be
attacked on the  subject of nuclear weapons and the failure of the
Canadian government to do that which the U.S. dictated."

The Liberals used information provided by the RCMP to bring down the Diefenbaker government.

The Munsinger Affair was Canada's first national political sex scandal. It focused on Gerda Munsinger, an East German prostitute and Soviet spy living in Ottawa who had slept with a number of cabinet ministers in John Diefenbaker's government.

Most noted amongst these was the Associate Minister of National Defence, Pierre Sévigny, who had seen her since 1958 and had even signed Munsinger's application for Canadian citizenship. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) discovered her background, however, and informed Justice Minister E. Davie Fulton of her activities. She was deported to East Germany in 1961. The matter was dealt with behind closed doors and Sévigny resigned in 1963.

Traditionally in Canada, the personal lives of politicians are not discussed in parliament or in the media, but in 1966 the Liberal government was under attack for an unrelated security breach. On March 4, an angry Justice Minister Lucien Cardin rebutted the Tories by bringing up the Munsinger Affair in the House of Commons. The story dominated the media for weeks and was followed with rapt attention across the country. It became a massive distraction and all but shut down all other parliamentary activity for some weeks.

And thus the long political relationship with the RCMP as 'their' secret police began.

Conventional wisdom holds that police forces in democratic societies face a dilemma whenever the use of unlawful methods appears warranted to enforce the law. This dilemma is of greatest concern in consensus theories. In conflict theories, an "ideological dilemma" emerges: police must maintain legitimacy by appearing to uphold the law equally for all, while acting preferentially to serve the powerful. A small sample of secret RCMP Security Service communications is examined as: (a) an indication of awareness of the ideological dilemma; (b) evidence of "editing processes" to produce "bureaucratic propaganda"; (c) examples of "official deviance." The ability of the RCMP to resist labelling for official deviance, and maintain legitimacy, is considered in terms of organizational advantages not common in similar security services.

But when one deals with an autonomous paramilitary organization like the RCMP one has to be careful as they have their own political agenda, which may not be the same as their Masters.

Plummer a secret Agent man

Set almost entirely in an interrogation suite in a Montreal hotel in 1964, Agent of Influence stars Plummer, 72, as John Watkins, the former Canadian ambassador to Moscow who died in 1964 in RCMP custody.

A close friend of former prime minister Lester B. Pearson, Watkins was suspected of being a communist spy by the CIA.

Days after the interrogation, he was found dead.

"The reality of the story is, did Watkins die in police custody? Yes. Did the RCMP cover it up? Yes," says Ian Adams, who authored the novel upon which the movie is based and co-wrote the screenplay.

"Has there been any evidence produced of Watkins' guilt? No."

'BLOODLESS COUP'

Instead, what Adams uncovered was evidence of an attempted "bloodless coup" by the CIA to depose Pearson in part by accusing the former ambassador of spying.

The Americans theorized the KGB had blackmailed Watkins over his homosexuality.

But Adams believes it was the RCMP buckling under the pressure of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA head of counter espionage, that doomed Watkins, along with his homosexuality -- which was illegal in Canada until 1968.
Two decades after Watkins' death, and only after an inquest and autopsy, did the RCMP admit the diplomat had never succumbed to Soviet blackmail, says Adams.

"There is not one shred of evidence he was guilty."

The author sees Agent of Influence as a cautionary tale following the events of Sept. 11.

"(Intelligence agencies) are now operating with enormous freedom which they have historically abused."

The CIA also attempted to destabilize the NDP Government in B.C. under David Barrett after its success in doing the same in Chile.

At the same time the CIA was using Cuban Mafia connections in Canada to attack the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa, a series of bombings. Which conveniently never resulted in any arrests by the RCMP. In a bombing in Cuba a Canadian was killed. The bombing was orchestrated by Luis Posada Carriles, who is wanted by Venezuela as a terrorist and is being protected by the U.S. government.

As we mentioned earlier, Canada was not spared from the decades-long campaign of violence against Fidel Castro's Cuba.

In the 1960s and 70s anti-Castro groups targeted the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa and the Cuban Trade Commission office in Montreal. Sergio Perez Castillo, a Cuban security guard was killed in the second attack.

And years later -- on September 4th, 1997 -- Fabio Di Celmo, a Montreal resident vacationing in Cuba, died in a bombing at the Copacabana Hotel in Havana. Luis Posada Carriles confessed to that attack, but later recanted.

And of course there was the Canadian governments complicity with CIA brainwashing experiments in Canada known as MKULTRA.

Early in 1957, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, Director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, formally applied for funding from the "Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology," a CIA front at Corn-ell University Medical School, New York City.

In the 1980s, the CIA and State Department launched a public counterattack on the Canadian government for questioning the propriety of CIA activities. The CIA effectively converted the Canadian government into an active and hostile opponent.

In press briefings, interviews and Court pleadings, the CIA hammered away at one theme - Canada funded Cameron too. Legally, this was irrelevant, but politically, it was devastating. As one U.S. Attorney said, "We're going to wrap the Canadian Government financing of Cameron right around their necks."

CIA brainwashing victims seek Canada court action

In a case that sounds like science fiction, a Montreal court is deciding whether a class action lawsuit can be brought against the Canadian government on behalf of more than 250 psychiatric patients who were unwittingly subjected to radical experiments in the 1950s.

The so-called MK-ULTRA tests were part of a secret mind-control programme funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Canadian government in the 1950s.

The Cold-War-era experiments, carried out by a Scottish doctor in Montreal, included forced isolation, induced-comas, electro-shock therapy and the use of hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD and paralysis-inducing narcotics.

Lawyers for Janine Huard, a 78-year-old great-grandmother, told a Montreal court last week that their client suffered for years as a result of Dr. Ewan Cameron's experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital based at Montreal's McGill University.

As to all those Fox News claims that Canada is harboring 'terrorists', they happen to be CIA trained, FBI informants and protected by the U.S. while using Canada as a safe haven.

In the al-Qaida camps, he was known as Abu Mohamed al Amriki -- "Father Mohamed the American." And, until he was finally arrested and convicted in 2000 -- after two decades of high profile terrorism, including helping to plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa -- Ali Mohamed roamed free and even protected.

He was so untouchable, he was taken from quick-thinking Canadian officials, who suspected he may have been a threat.

Mohamed was a U.S. Army sergeant, FBI operative and possible CIA asset, who, on the side, was a friend to Osama bin Laden, trained the leader's bodyguards, was instrumental in killing Americans and was the middle-man in an historic and vile union between bin Laden's forces and the Lebanese Hezbollah. His fingerprints can be traced to those who assassinated Jewish militant Meir Kahane and blew up the first truck bomb to hit the World Trade Centre.

Mohamed himself had come to the FBI's attention in 1989, when the agency's Special Operations Group photographed a cell of his trainees firing AK-47s at a Long Island shooting range. The bureau would drop that investigation -- as it would in many other cases involving the terror spy.

It would also keep him safe. Even in Canada. Lance connects all the dots, including how Mohamed came, in 1993, to be questioned by suspicious RCMP officers in Vancouver. Lance says he was set free after handing the RCMP a phone number that connected them with his FBI handler.

"The Canadians placed the call," Lance writes. "Whatever (the special FBI agent) said, caused the Mounties to let Mohamed go... . Al-Qaida's master spy was free."

Canada has been used by the CIA to dump off its undercover operatives, to keep them out of harms way.

Age of Secrets - The Conspiracy that Toppled Richard Nixon and the Hidden Death of Howard Hughes by Gerald Bellett

John Herbert Meier

• was responsible for Richard Nixon's downfall, which is always missing from books on the subject.
• was Howard Hughes' most trusted courtier from 1966 to 1970.
• was forced to flee the U.S.
• His many businesses & companies were stripped from him.
• Since 1972 was chased out of England, Japan, Australia, and Tonga by the CIA. Was helped by the British and Cuban intelligence sevices.
• has been falsely charged with tax evasion, fraud, obstruction of justice, forgery and murder. Life threatened, and family stalked for kidnapping.

Meier was still under CIA surveillance. The RCMP Security Service gave Meier a cover: they pretended Meier was working with CLEU (British Columbia's Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit).

From a CIA contact, Meier obtained documents that he gave to Canada's Security and Intelligence Branch, and later to Canada's Liberal politicians. Contained info on:

• Canadian politicians, including Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and members of his cabinet.
• the Canadian military, and defense systems and defense industries.
• leading CIA agents in Canada, Cleveland Cram and Stacey Husle

Of course once exposed for using Canada as a fly over/stop over location for its illegal rendition operations, the CIA gets an endorsement from our own PM.

"Twenty different planes for the CIA have arrived in Canada over the last four years," said Serge Ménard, a member of Parliament from Quebec. "Italy is prosecuting people from the CIA" allegedly involved in renditions. "Why doesn't the prime minister do likewise?"

Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded in the House of Commons on Wednesday, saying that an investigation into the CIA plane landings revealed "no indication there were any illegal activities."

Good old Stevie boy, he took the word of the CIA that they were not doing anything illegal. LOL.

In the panic after 9/11, Canada enacted anti-terrorism legislation that curtailed civil liberties in favour of national security. Faced with American pressure, is the Harper government poised to go even further?

h/t to buckdog.

See

CIA

Torture

RCMP

CSIS



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Lefty Blog Awards

Engaged Spectator has launched the First Annual Canadian Lefty Awards.

The Lefty’s 2007

Nominations in progress.Go to sidebar click on “Nominations 2007″ then submit your nominations.

Accepting nominations ;June 11 - July 14

All participating _Cnd Blogger’s_ in the first annual Canadian Lefty Blog Awards get a chance at a draw for $100.

Whether the $100 bucks will be in Canadian Tire money has yet to be revealed.


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Fraser Institute Racists

Whats the difference between the Fraser Institutes anti immigration conference and these guys?

One is overtly racist, while the other hides their racism behind 'national security'.

The other irony is that mainstream media commentators like right whingnut Michael Coren defend restricting access to Canada to White Christian Europeans, which is what media pirriah like right whingnut Paul Fromm also says. But unlike Fromm, Coren is an immigrant.

And being from Britain Coren has dual citizenship, another bugaboo of the right.

While right whingnuts like Coren can freely move here, or like their Canadian counterparts like Mark Steyn or David Frum who freely move to England and the U.S. to work, they would deny these rights to others.


SEE:

Procreation To Save The White Race

Conservatives Orwellian Language Politics

White Multiculturalism

Because They Ain't White

Racist ADQ

The Language Of Racism

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CIA Conspiracies Are Real

After decades of denial the CIA finally is forced to out itself. Of course we knew of many of these things thanks to the work of those who were often labeled 'conspiracy theorists' like Jack Anderson and later Mae Brussel.As this editorial points out there is no difference between the CIA of the past transgressions and the CIA of today.

Editorial: CIA abuses aren't history

The CIA calls them "the family jewels," which make the documents sound like something precious. On the contrary, they are a shameful record of decades of embarrassing missteps and outrageous abuses of power by America's spies.

The documents, released this week, provide new details on CIA activities in the 1960s and 1970s, many of them previously uncovered. They tell of assassination plots, both successful and not, of domestic wiretapping operations, the infiltration of antiwar groups and mind control experiments.

From this distance documents can seem comical, but nonetheless disturbing. The CIA partnered with the mafia in repeated attempts to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro, and the mafia expected favors in return. Thus, we had CIA agents bugging the hotel room of comedian Dan Rowan to determine if the "Laugh-in" star was sleeping with a mob boss's girlfriend. As John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy - who approved the attempts on Castro's life - and the nation soon learned, assassination is no laughing matter.

The CIA released the documents - which remain heavily censored, indicating there are still some sins officials don't want to confess - in an attempt to score points for candor. "I firmly believe that the improved system of intelligence oversight that came out of the 1970s gives the CIA a far stronger place in our democratic system," CIA director Michael Hayden said in releasing the documents.

He should tell that to a judge in Italy, where 25 CIA agents are being tried in absentia, charged with kidnapping an Egyptian cleric. The trial, now recessed until October pending the appeal of a ruling, is a test of the agency's "extraordinary rendition program." He should ask the more than 100 terror suspects held since 2002 in the CIA's secret prisons overseas, subjected to interrogation techniques often described as torture.

- Romanian lawmakers have pulled out of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) to protest against a Swiss investigator's report that said Bucharest hosted CIA secret prisons.

CIA Remains Secretive About Current Acts

While the CIA is lauded for releasing 700 pages documenting some of its most egregious 1950-1970 abuses, critics say the US spy agency remains secretive about its current controversial activities. "We don't know everything that's going on today. But it seems to me there's already enough evidence to conclude that things are not so different today," said David Barrett, political scientist at Villanova University, author of a 2005 book on the CIA and Congress in the 1940s and 1950s, speaking to the New York Times. -Capital Hill Blue

Documents show 30-year-old skeletons in CIA closet

Little-known documents made public Thursday detail illegal and scandalous activities by the CIA more than 30 years ago - wiretappings of journalists, kidnappings, warrantless searches and more.

Much of the decades-old activities have been known for years. But Tom Blanton, head of the National Security Archive, said the 1975 summary memo prepared by Justice Department lawyers had never been publicly released. It sheds light on meetings in the top echelon of government that were little known by the public, he said.

Blanton pointed to more recent concerns, such as post-Sept. 11, 2001 programs that included warrantless wiretapping.

"The resonance with today's controversies is just uncanny," he said.

On the Net:

The documents can be found at: http://www.nsarchive.org

CIA Document Dump Just Confirms Kissinger's Dark Rep

The recent release by the CIA of documents concerning the agency's illegal surveillance of Americans and involvement in the assassinations of Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Salvador Allende of Chile, and Patrice Lumumba of Congo, as well as assassinations plots against Fidel Castro, prove what authors and scholars have already concluded about the agency. Most noteworthy is the involvement of Henry Kissinger in giving the green light to Turkey's invasion of Cyprus.

The links between Kissinger and Turkey formed a long lasting relationship between Kissinger and the Israeli Lobby in the United States, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Turks, particularly the links between AIPAC and the American Turkish Council and individuals like Richard Perle, Marc Grossman, and Douglas Feith. That relationship was exposed with revelations stemming from information divulged as a result of the FBI's firing of Turkish translator Sibel Edmonds and the concentration of the Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA front company on weapons of mass destruction and the Turkish nexus to nuclear materials trafficking from the former Soviet Central Asian states.

ACLU Sues for Patriot Act Documents from CIA and Pentagon

Of course the CIA has still not revealed what it knows about the JFK Assassination.

More than 40 years after he was fatally shot in Dallas, researchers have added fresh fuel to the speculation over who was involved in the assassination of President John F Kennedy by claiming the original bullet analysis was flawed and cannot rule out that a second gunman was involved.

Using new scientific techniques not available to previous researchers and analysing bullets from the same batch purportedly used by Lee Harvey Oswald, the team has argued that it cannot be assumed that Oswald was the only assassin involved. While they do not claim evidence to prove a second gunman participated, they say the original fragments of the bullets recovered from the scene of the shooting should be re-examined.

And they also didn't reveal what they know about UFO's.

Because that would lead to disturbing questions about the Weaponization of Space.


SEE:

The Misuse of Acid

Psychedelic Saskatchewan

Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out

Irans Nuclear Program Is A CIA Oops

CIA Secret Flights in Canada

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Procreation To Save The White Race

Behind the attacks on immigration, abortion and birth control, from the Christian right lays the underlying belief that this is the result of the permissive sixties, which introduced no fault divorce, the birth control pill, common law relationships, and a materialist culture that through public education, in particular educational access by women, decreased the birth rate.

Now right wing pundits are claiming that the declining birth rate which results from capitalist production and social liberalism is not just a threat to Western Civilization but to White Civilization.

Fight illegal immigration with procreation

If politicians won't find a way to deport illegals, then it is time for Americans who care to take matters into their own hands. By having lots of babies.

America will have to shoulder the responsibility of being the only Western democracy left; at least the only one big enough to give the remaining "whites" a geographical location to call "home," and – here is the important part – a place relatively free from hostile cultures.

While this is addressed to an American audience in an American publication its author is an influential Canadian Evangelical; Tristan Emmanuel.

Behind the attacks by the Christian right on womens rights, reproduction freedom; which attacks birth control as well as a womans right to abortion and promotes abstinence instead of sex education, their attacks on gay marriage, which is simply an extension of their attacks on our right to no fault divorce, common law relationships, open marriage and free love.

Its all about a return to the not so distant past when America was white, middle class and happy. The mythical 1950's.

As a local Christian (Baptist) church pamphlet I came across says;

A Christian Home. So many precious children are growing up in a home filled with hatred, strife, poverty, and neglect. It is no accident that the devil fights hardest in his attack on the home, using tools such as homosexuality, abortion and divorce. The nuclear family of the 1950's with its working dad, stay at home mom, and 2.3 kids is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. A Christian home, with a loving atmosphere, a happy marriage, a providing father, a teaching mother, and obedient children is even more rare.

2.3 children? The teaching mother exists, women are cast into the pink ghetto of working as an extension of their housework; nursing, teaching, day care, elder care, etc.

The reality is that this idyllic family is as much a the myth as the rest of the Christian belief system.

The Christian right wing wants to social engineer society backwards. As such they deny the liberal progressive nature of the very capitalist system that they defend.

Demand for children is affected by four principal classes of factors: "direct economic costs and benefits of children" [(1) P: 766] costs with regard to time, income and wealth, preferences and norms. Modernization has implications for all the factors mentioned above. With modernization, the costs (economic and time) of children increase, the benefits decrease and preferences and norms change. Money tends to be used for the purchase of consumer goods rather than for having and raising more children.

Other important factors that determine fertility are the material and non-material costs of regulation. Monetary costs, according to the researchers cited above, do not appear to be a significant barrier to contraceptive use, rather, access to information about contraception and the psychological costs associated with access are more important. Moreover, there is also the fear of incurring health costs (especially in case of abortion).

Besides these, Bulatao and Lee [(1) P: 775] mention the importance of communication between husband and wife regarding contraception. They see this as a determinant of fertility and view it as a psychological cost. Among the various sociocultural factors that affect demand, supply and costs of regulation are the nature of marriage and more generally the "patterns of sexual unions . . . their stability; their composition, including whether they are polygynous or monogamous and whether families are extended or nuclear; and their formation and dissolution" [(1) P: 777].

Education (in particular that of women) and residence (rural or urban) are two additional socioeconomic factors that affect fertility. However, these two factors operate through several channels, making the exact determination of their influence very difficult and allowing many possible explanations. In addition, the mode of production (familial or industrial) is critical in determining the value of children's labour, which in turn affects the demand for children. Moreover, government policies and efforts made by governments to mobilize the mass media, to make access to information regarding contraception easier, to make contraceptive measures available, and to reduce the costs of regulation are also important [(1) P: 784].

Simmons [(2) P: 96] summarizes the effects of the individual variables considered in various research studies. He has found a strong relationship between women's education and fertility. Women's labour-force participation, sex preference, availability of family-planning services, general environment and population programmes and policies were found to have a medium effect on fertility, while infant mortality, per capita income, income distribution and preferred number of children had only a weak effect on fertility.

See:

A Tale Of Two Canada's

Abortion, Adoption, or Abandonment

Thank God for SSM

Back Door Abortion Ban

December 6 Will Live In Infamy

Marx on Bigamy

Secular Democracy


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R. Cobb

R.Cobb was a cartoonist for the LA Free Press in the sixties and seventies. He went on to do the design work on Alien. I always liked this cartoon. Ironic that it is as relevant today as it was back during the Viet Nam war era.



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Carnival of Anarchy Extended

The Carnival of Anarchy has been extended until July 1. We are blogging on the topic of ecology and environmentalism and the responses keep coming in.

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Gambling On Your Future

Here is another reason we need to democratize defined benefit pension plans, whether run by the government or through our employers. While these institutional funds talk about the need for shareholder democracy; they deny the same to us.

They are using their vast reserves of captial now to play the market place investing in risky enterprises like hedge funds and private equity funds.

Canada's three-largest pension fund managers, unable to meet the long-term needs of retirees with returns from stocks and bonds, plan to increase private-equity investments after spending about C$50 billion ($47 billion) buying companies, toll roads and gas pipelines.

The pension funds added C$31.7 billion to private equity holdings in their most recent fiscal year, almost double the amount of the previous 12 months. The retirement plans are buying riskier assets because they don't expect publicly traded securities to provide high enough returns to pay the more than C$1.56 trillion of benefits owed to retirees over the next 50 years, according to annual reports from the pension funds.

The ability of workers to control, or even to influence, the investment of their deferred wages in pension funds — which are now by far the nation’s largest source of capital — is an old but recurring debate. Unions played a leading role in the creation and expansion of private pension trusts, particularly the traditional defined-benefit plans that are funded almost entirely by employer contributions.4 Yet because control over how pension assets would be invested was
never made a bargaining priority, today at least 90 percent of private sector pension fund assets are controlled exclusively by management.

Since the Second World War a number of factors have led to increased investment by institutional investors in public corporations. There has been the use of superannuation and pension schemes. There has been an increase in insurance linked investment products and other forms of indirect investment. Trustee investment rules have been relaxed, enabling trustees to invest in equities

The result is that in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and the UK more than 50% of all equities are held by institutional investors and the tendency is to increase. Add to this the traditional domination by institutions of the bond market and we have the beginning of the growth of a significant counterveiling power if the economic strength is harnessed to a common cause. Listed corporations are becoming the servants of global financial activity rather than its masters.

Peter Drucker argued that this led to a quiet revolution – ‘The Unseen Revolution...The US is the first truly Socialist country."This was simply reflecting what Berle in his later workings had identified and his research student Paul Harbrecht had called ‘The Paraproprietal Society’ – the evolution of a new form of property.

Until the late 1980s the tendency of the institutions was to be a sleeping giant. There were instances of discrete intervention but by and large the institutions voted with their feet and followed the Wall Street Walk – if in doubt, sell.

Institutions themselves came under attack and we see two developments. First, the involvement by them in promotion of improved corporate governance and secondly the use of specialist funds managers. The latter makes it more unlikely for institutions to become activists in particular companies although there have been exceptional cases where a group of funds managers have taken action.

Institutions are primarily focussed on profit and liquidity and have been attacked for short termism in their approach to companies. There is also a problem of lack of coincidence between the interests of institutions and other smaller shareholders in takeover situations. Often institutions collectively have strategically significant holdings.

Institutions sometimes encounter legal problems in increased shareholder activism.

It is sometimes argued that public sector pension funds are more likely to take a long term strategic view and certainly the US and the UK public sector funds have had a tendency at least to mouth the appropriate rhetoric.

See:

Public Pensions Fund Private Partnerships

AIM High

Golden Parachutes

Your Pension Dollars At Work

P3= Public Pension Partnerships

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Prehistoric Happy Feet

What do you call a five foot penguin?
Whatever it wants to be called.

Peruvian prehistoric penguins were taller than Danny DeVito

Danny DeVito is 4'11" tall. These penguins topped out at 5 feet, and lived during a particularly sweltering time in Earth's history. 36 million years ago Icadyptes salasi plied the waters off the southern coast of Peru.

A prehistoric penguin has been uncovered that - at more than 5ft tall and with a spear-like 7in beak - is the mother of all penguins.

	A giant I salasi skull compared to Peru’s modern Humboldt penguin

The giant birds lived around the equator tens of millions of years earlier than expected and during a period when the earth was much warmer than it is now.

Researchers discovered their fossilised remains in Peru.

Evidence that the giant penguins once marched to South America was found by Dr Julia Clarke of North Carolina State University.

"We tend to think of penguins as being cold-adapted species, but the new fossils date back to one of the warmest periods in the last 65 million years," Dr Clarke said. "The evidence indicates that penguins reached low-latitude regions more than 30 million years prior to our previous estimates."

See:

March Of The Penquins to Extinction

it's natures way

Not So Cute Seals

Penquin Empiricism

Morality not from animals

Ted Morton To Outlaw Homosexuality

Brecht Meets Oscar

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Strange Bedfellows

You know the climate change deniers have officially joined the Flat Earth society when their major spokesperson publishes his work in Lyndon LaRouche's conspiratorial publication; Executive Intelligence (sic) Review.

Yep that puts them squarely in the camp of conspiracy nutbars and folks who believe that humans lived with dinosaurs.

Of course LaRouche and his followers are the original climate change deniers, who have spent the past thirty years promoting nuclear power.

Of course it is all about the company you keep. And it seems that when it comes to Climate Change there are those on the American left who also embrace the flat earth ideal.

Alex Cockburn for instance, who in keeping up with his fellow ex-Trotskyist, ex-Brit compatriot and former Nation fellow writer; Christopher Hitchens, has decided to be a contrarian.

“Peer Review” and Global Warming

There were yelps of alarm and the rustle of skirts being hoist knee-high after I published a note on sources in my column last week, Dissidents against Dogma. The panic was caused by one of the references to the work of Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski who, as I wrote, has written devastating onslaughts on the IPCC rallying cry that CO2 is higher now than it has ever been over the past 650,000 years. Jaworowski has pointed out the enormous inaccuracies in the ice-core data and the ease with which a CO2 reading from any given year is contaminated by the CO2 from entirely different eras. He also points out that from 1985 on there’s been some highly suspect editing of the CO2 data, presumably to reinforce the case for the “unprecedented levels” of modern CO2. I offered a couple of references to Jaworowski, one of them to an essay, "Ice Core Data Show No Carbon Dioxide Increase", published in 21st Century Science & Technology, Spring 1997.

It turns out that this is a publication put out by the LaRouche crowd. Next thing you know, poor Jaworowski was being accused oif being a neo-Nazi cultist, with kindred vitriol hurled at CounterPunch co-editor Cockburn.

Of course this makes sense since LaRouche is also an ex-Trotskyist. Heck isn't everybody who makes up the American neo-con right.

The problem with Hitchens and Cockburn is that they could have posed a libertarian alternative to the war in Iraq (which Hitchens supported) or to Kyoto and the capitalist crisis of the environment, which Cockburn denies. But they didn't. Instead they have like their former Trotskyist predecessors, embraced the neo-con right. Just as some of those in the so called Libertarian movement in the U.S. have over the issue of climate change.

Take Lew Rockwell, for instance. He is incredibly insightful when discussing the over bearing power of the state to make war, or the intrusion of the state into our lives. But he happily links to articles such as this one by Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch, regurgitates the most of the so-called scientific evidence against global warming, every single bit of which has been debunked and refuted before.

It is clear from the preponderance of evidence, from the vast majority of climate scientists (a number that is growing, not shrinking) that global warming is really happening and is caused by human activity. Why, then do libertarians and anarchists refuse to accept it?

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Edward Gibbon Wakefield

In searching for a pithy definition of Fete Accompli I came across this in Wikipedia.

Like Stephen Harper here is another Tory politician Quebecers liked; Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

But unlike Harper his motto was; if elected I will not serve. Which meant they liked him a lot.

While active with the New Zealand Company, Edward Gibbon had maintained his interest in Canadian affairs. He was involved with the North American Colonial Association of Ireland, NACAI. At his instigation, the NACAI were trying to purchase a large estate just outside Montreal where they wanted to establish another Colonial settlement. Edward Gibbon pushed the scheme with his usual energy; apparently, the government did not object in principle but they strenuously objected to Edward Gibbon having any part of it.

But trusted or not by the politicians, Edward Gibbon was involved in the scheme. The NACAI sent him back to Canada as their representative; he arrived in Montreal in January of 1842 and stayed in Canada for about a year. At this stage , Canada was still coming to terms with the union of Upper and Lower Canada. There were serious differences between the French and English Canadians with the English Canadians holding the political clout. Edward Gibbon skillfully manipulated these differences; it was fairly easy for him to get the support of the French Canadians. By the end of that year he had got himself elected to the Canadian Parliament. It is perhaps typical of Edward Gibbon that, having been elected, he immediately returned to Britain and never took up his seat.

He went back to Canada in 1843 and spent some months there. However when he heard of his brother Arthur's death at the Wairau Affray, he immediately quit Canada and never returned. This appears to be the end of his involvement with Canadian affairs except that he was paid about twenty thousand pounds by the NACAI for his work in Canada. As always with Edward Gibbon, principles and profit seemed to go neatly together.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield was a scoundrel and a cad, a free land advocate, a realitor , opposed to the British Mercantile State Monopoly, and thus he was not trusted by them. Despite being in business with them in forming colonies as their real estate agent.

Competing schemes of colonial emigration with different implications for equality were promoted to create more consumers of British manufactured goods and producers of food. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s plans were designed to recreate in British North America the inequalities associated with labour’s divorce from capital as necessary for social and economic development, but others sought the same end by means of the greater social equality that came from reuniting labour with capital. The poor and dispossessed in Britain who produced and consumed little could be transformed into agrarian property-holders in colonial societies dominated by such petty producers. A degree of inequality would persist, but the resulting colonial societies were far more egalitarian and therefore socially and politically democratic than Britain itself. In such a social context, nineteenth-century liberalism—its celebration of independence and equation of individual economic success with virtue—seemed especially plausible to contemporaries.

Herr Doctor Professor Karl Marx outlines the origin of American Libertarianism, that shocked Wakefield; its exceptionalism as a free soil political economy, not a capitalist one. America was a truly free market economy as long as land was held as a public trust for private use.

As a commercial colonizer Wakefield was shocked his experiment had failed. It had not created a capitalist colony bound to the Mother Country, rather it had given free men, free land. But then again he was an idle speculator, a salesman of colonies for his masters.

And so in desperation as Marx points out Wakefield offers his masters a solution to end the free labour republic, taxation, expropriation of the land by the State and then selling it back to free men at such a high cost they have to become wage slaves instead of independent landowning producers.

This then is the secret of the political economy of Capitalism. That it must destroy the real free market by imposition of Statist taxation for capital accumulation. America as a colonial experiment had evolved into a Republic of Free Labour and Free Soil, something that most American Libertarians acknowledge as their exceptionalism. But this was too much for Old World capitalism and it needed a State that would tax property and then sell it off to the highest bidder. That as Marx says and they would concur;

that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.

While vulgar liberaltarians leave out the capitalist and simply decry the State and Taxation as the villains genuine American descendants of the libertarian independent producers would embrace instead the ideal of the cooperative commonwealth as a way of challenging the State and its taxation of their 'public property'.

It is ironic that Marx who is assaulted as a statist by the right would embrace the libertarian ideal that the truly independent producer is also the owner of his own property, that is land. But as Marx says the secret to this form of private property is its communal ownership as public property of the producers.

• A View of the Art of Colonization by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, 1849.

• The Modern Theory of Colonisation last chapter in Karl Marx's Capital, Vol I focused on Wakefield's theory.

It is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies, but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country. As the system of protection at its origin attempted to manufacture capitalists artificially in the mother-country, so Wakefield’s colonization theory, which England tried for a time to enforce by Acts of Parliament, attempted to effect the manufacture of wage-workers in the Colonies. This he calls “systematic colonization.” First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.

“If,” says Wakefield, “all members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of laborers for hire.” So long, therefore, as the laborer can accumulate for himself — and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production — capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible. The class of wage-laborers, essential to these, is wanting.

We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this — that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation. This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice — opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labor very dear, as respects the laborer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labor at any price.”

As in the colonies the separation of the laborer from the conditions of labor and their root, the soil, does not exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale, so neither does the separation of agriculture from industry exist, not the destruction of the household industry of the peasantry. Whence then is to come the internal market for capital? “No part of the population of America is exclusively agricultural, excepting slaves and their employers who combine capital and labor in particular works. Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They frequently build their own houses, and carry to market, at whatever distance, the produce of their own industry. They are spinners and weavers; they make soap and candles, as well as, in many cases, shoes and clothes for their own use. In America the cultivation of land is often the secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper.” With such queer people as these, where is the “field of abstinence” for the capitalists?

But in the colonies, this pretty fancy is torn asunder. The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mother-country, because many laborers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the labor-market is always understocked. The law of supply and demand of labor falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence”; on the other, the regular reproduction of the wage-laborer as wage-laborer comes into collision with impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the production of wage-laborers into independent producers, who work for themselves instead of for capital, and enrich themselves instead of the capitalist gentry, reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions of the labor-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage-laborer remain indecently low. The wage-laborer loses into the bargain, along with the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious capitalist. Hence all the inconveniences that our E. G. Wakefield pictures so doughtily, so eloquently, so pathetically. The supply of wage-labor, he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. “The supply of labor is always not only small but uncertain.” “Though the produce divided between the capitalist and the laborer be large, the laborer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist.... Few, even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.” The laborers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part of their labor. It avails him nothing, is he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease... to be laborers for hire; they... become independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labor-market.” Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come! No wonder Wakefield laments the absence of all dependence and of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage-workers in the colonies. On account of the high wages, says his disciple, Merivale, there is in the colonies “the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient laborers — for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them.... In ancient civilized countries the laborer, though free, is by a law of Nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means.”

What is now, according to Wakefield, the consequence of this unfortunate state of things in the colonies? A “barbarising tendency of dispersion” of producers and national wealth. The parcelling-out of the means of production among innumerable owners, working on their own account, annihilates, along with the centralization of capital, all the foundation of combined labor. Every long-winded undertaking, extending over several years and demanding outlay of fixed capital, is prevented from being carried out. In Europe, capital invests without hesitating a moment, for the working-class constitutes its living appurtennce, always in excess, always at disposal. But in the colonies! Wakefield tells and extremely doleful anecdote. He was talking with some capitalists of Canada and the state of New York, where the immigrant wave often becomes stagnant and deposits a sediment of “supernumerary” laborers. “Our capital,” says one of the characters in the melodrama, "was ready for many operations which require a considerable period of time for their completion; but we could not begin such operations with labor which, we knew, would soon leave us. If we had been sure of retraining the labor of such emigrants, we should have been glad to have engaged it at once, and for a high price: and we should have engaged it, even though we had been sure it would leave us, provided we had been sure of a fresh supply whenever we might need it.”

After Wakefield has constructed the English capitalist agriculture and its “combined” labor with the scattered cultivation of American peasants, he unwittingly gives us a glimpse at the reverse of the medal. He depicts the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising, and comparatively cultured, whilst “the English agricultural laborer is miserable wretch, a pauper.... In what country, except North America and some new colonies, do the wages of free labor employed in agriculture much exceed a bare subsistence for the laborer? ... Undoubtedly , farm-horses in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants.” But, never mind, national wealth is, once again, by its very nature, identical with misery of the people.

How, then, to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? If men were willing, at a blow, to turn all the soil from public into private property, they would destroy certainly the root of the evil, but also — the colonies. The trick is how to kill two birds with one stone. Let the Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into an independent peasant. The fund resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the wage-workers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of labor by violation of the sacred law of supply and demand, the Government is to employ, on the other hand, in proportion as it grows; to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies, and thus keep the wage-labor market full for the capitalists. Under these circumstances, tout sera pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles. This is the great secret of “systematic colonization.” By this plan, Wakefield cries in triumph, “the supply of labor must be constant and regular, because, first, as no laborer would be able to procure land until he had worked for money, all immigrant laborers, working for a time for wages and in combination, would produce capital for the employment of more laborers; secondly, because every laborer who left off working for wages and became a landowner would, by purchasing land, provide a fund for bringing fresh labor to the colony.” The price of the soil imposed by the State must, of course, be a “sufficient price” — i.e., so high “as to prevent the laborers from becoming independent landowners until others had followed to take their place.” This “sufficient price for the land” is nothing but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the laborer pays to the capitalist for leave to retire from the wage-labor market to the land. First, he must create for the capitalist “capital,” with which the latter may be able to exploit more laborers; then he must place, at his own expense, a locum tenens [placeholder] on the labor-market, whom the Government forwards across the sea for the benefit of his old master, the capitalist.

However, we are not concerned here with the conditions of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the housetops: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.

See:

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Many Headed Hydra

Libertarian Anti-Imperialism

William Appleman Williams

Libertarian Dialectics

War and the Market State




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