Free Trade=Cheap Wages

The truth is in reading the fine print. Free Trade is not about trade, or sustainable markets, it is about off-shoring production and contracting out services.

India also offers Canadian companies another cheaper-wage locale besides China where they can shift production to save money and remain competitive.

This little fact will get lost in the hoopla that will be generated around a bilateral free trade agreement between Canada and India.



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Brief Cases vs Batons

Lawyers fight riot police in protest against Musharraf

The brief cases were a flying, as the batons crashed down on their powdered wigs. Barricades were built with case files as suits were stuffed to act as decoys. The real power of the State is not its laws or lawyers but who carries the baton of office.

See

Lawyers

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Nortels Chickens Roost

It takes the American SEC to actually charge the folks behind Enron North. Investors got tired of waiting for the Ontario Securities Commission to do anything. Another reason for having a single national regulator.

And Nortel has been a bigger loss for more seniors and retiree investors than the Income Trusts.

SEC files charges against former Nortel execs

The securities regulator alleges the execs at the Toronto-based telecom maker repeatedly engaged in accounting fraud "to bridge gaps between Nortel's true performance, its internal targets and Wall Street expectations." "Each of the defendants betrayed Nortel's investors and their misconduct gave rise to billions of dollars in shareholder losses," said Linda Thomsen, director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement.

In the go go world of a long bull market like we have seen, the only house rule for casino capitalism is that rules are meant to be broken. The wave of criminal fraud cases that have hit the market are a result of the politics of Greed that we saw in the eighties and before that in the seventies and early sixties.

Gekko: Greed - you mark my words - will save Teldar, and that other malfunctioning corporation, the U.S.A.

During bull markets the movers and shakers of real existing capitalism, not the Von Mises /Hayek fiction, find accomplices like Accounting firms to do their bidding, which is to hide money away from the government, and also to make as much money as quickly as possible. Both of these ends then require a means, which is fraud, pure and simple.

The use of back dated shares, accounting practices to pump up market prices, accounting practices to avoid taxes, hedged bets on mutual funds after closing, these are all business as usual until they are declared fraudulent by those who are supposed to be regulating the market.

It is the political dominance of finance in the marketplace.

Nortel is not Canada's only criminal capitalist on trial in the U.S.

Establishment-watchers eagerly await Black's trial

See

Nortel Slash & Burn

NORTEL: REDUX

NORTEL: Canada's Enron

Dalai Canuck

Criminal Capitalism

We Need a Living Wage

The Phoney Debate On Net Neutrality

CEO


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Kettle Pot Pace

Onward Christian Soldiers.

Gen. Pace Calls Homosexuality Immoral

And killing people is moral?

And it gets better;

Marine Gen. Peter Pace likened homosexuality to adultery, which he said was also immoral,

So I guess that leaves Newt out of the army. And Karl Rove.

"I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way," Pace told the newspaper in a wide-ranging interview. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday he considers homosexuality to be immoral and the military should not condone it by allowing gay soldiers to serve openly, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Heck I guess that means the U.S. military won't accept any divorced folks in their ranks. Nope that ain't true.

The Pentagon Thursday sought support for Defense Secretary William S. Cohen's choice to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff - a general officer who has admitted committing adultery - but the battle quickly widened into an effort to convince the public that the military was not applying a double-standard on sexual infractions. One day after the Pentagon's disclosure that Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston conducted an adulterous affair more than a decade ago, officials sought to explain how in different circumstances such relationships could put some service members in jail and others in retirement while not eliminating one - Ralston - from candidacy for the armed forces' most coveted post.
Los Angeles Times June 6, 1997.

Or folks who have stolen post it notes from the office supplies.

I thought the U.S. Military swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States not the Ten Commandments. Wait a minute there is no condemnation of homosexuality in the Ten Commandments.....


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