Your New IPad

Today Canada and the rest of the world gets to buy Apples IPad...

iPad launches in Canada, around the world

‎Just remember who made it and why it is so cheap.

Globalization of labour demands a global labour movement.....for those who say unions are out dated......China is a developing capitalist country in case anyone still thinks it is communist......

Suicides at Apple maker spotlight China's migrant workers

They work up to 12 hours a day, six days a week, assembling products that most cannot afford to buy themselves: Apple iPhones, Dell computers and Nokia mobiles.

Experts said deep-rooted problems lie behind the deaths of so many young workers.

Guo Yuhua, a sociology professor at Beijing-based Tsinghua University, said Foxconn represents the status quo of China's profit-driven manufacturing industry, in which companies are trying to offer low salaries to workers to control production costs.

Workers are usually kept in closed industrial parks with no access to social activities and no way to develop social relations, she said.

"This problem is not limited to Foxconn, and it's not only a psychological problem but also a social one," she said.

Guo also said labor-intensive manufacturing companies like Foxconn should make more efforts to enable their employees to have normal social lives.

"There should be communities and the workers should have time to have contact with others," she said.

The monthly salary for a typical Foxconn employee is about 900 yuan ($131), so many workers volunteer to work extra hours to earn more money.

Lu Huilin, an associate professor of sociology at Peking University, said the string of jumps also reflects the poor situation of the second-generation migrant workers.

All the confirmed dead Foxconn workers are between 18 and 24 years old, and most come from the rural and less-developed regions.

Bre-X Redux

The Alberta Government is challenging the Federal government, their fellow Tories, over the proposed National Securities Commission. Like their failed gun registry challenge this is a waste of taxpayers money. The Alberta Sock Market along with its counter part in B.C. were a wild west show of rip offs during the eighties and nineties. While Alberta and Quebec protest a single national securities commission I would remind readers of the success of Alberta's Securities commission in protecting investors from rip offs, one little word; Bre-X.

Cold War Chickens Come Home To Roost

During the cold war the CIA engaged in black ops to destabilize the Caribbean and other areas of Central and Latin America that they determined were their domain under the Monroe Doctrine. Ironically it was exactly these operations that led to the increase in the drug trade, since they were black ops the money used to pay for them was drug money. As it was in their operations in Viet Nam/Laos and Cambodia and later in Afghanistan and Contra Iran affair. And during this same time the American government began its war on drugs, a war that was bound to fail since it was American policy to encourage drug lords to fight the left, a policy begun after WWII in the port of Marseilles.

Here the consequences of the CIA cold war black ops are still being felt in Jamaica and downtown Toronto......

In a move that mirrored similar operations in Panama and other Latin American countries, U.S. intelligence agencies lent support to emerging right-winger Edward Seaga, then-leader of the Jamaican Labour Party. In a 1977 investigative report, Penthouse magazine, citing U.S. intelligence sources, described how the State Department sought to capitalize on the spreading violence between Mr. Coke’s Shower Posse and the garrisoned neighbourhoods that supported Mr. Manley: “Shipments of guns and sophisticated communication equipment begun to be smuggled into the island. In one shipment alone, which was grabbed by Manley’s security forces, there were 500 submachine guns.”

But after Mr. Seaga’s nine-year stint as prime minister in the 1980s, the U.S. justice system decided that their ally’s enforcer in Tivoli Gardens had become too powerful, as Mr. Coke’s violent network of drug dealers and gun runners boiled over onto U.S. soil. After the elder Mr. Coke’s capture and mysterious death in 1992, the funeral procession numbered in the tens of thousands. Marching next to his casket was Mr. Seaga, who told reporters that the dead man had been “a protector” of the people.

It was U.S. foreign policy that gave rise to the system that propped up the late Mr. Coke and his now fugitive son, said Mr. Crawford, the political analyst. “It is one of the supreme ironies of life, as far as Jamaica is concerned,” he said.

A Monument to Capitalism

As I wrote on face book after the throne speech:"So the Conservative government is going to build a monument to "the victims of communism" gee just to be fair and balanced they should build one to the "victims of Capitalism" too."

And I note that Rick Salutin in yesterdays Globe and Mail said the same thing.
"One size fits all: My favourite moment in Wednesday's Throne Speech was the promise to erect a monument to the victims of communism. As a monument-liker, that would be fine with me – if it were twinned with a monument to the victims of capitalism, which makes as much sense. Or maybe they could both be united by the need to cut spending, resulting in a single National Victims Monument, come one, come all."

Now I could point out that what the Harpocrites are talking about is Stalinism and its children; Mao and Pol Pot, but for the conservative right wing they go back to the Bolshevik revolution. In fact Jason Kenney the Minister of Immigration has gone as far as defending fascism in Spain because the republicans were socialists, anarchists and communists.

But of course as my regular readers know, the state capitalist regimes in the USSR, China, Cuba etc are not communist nor are they even socialist, they are public ownership under a one party state.

Sort of like Alberta.

And in WWI Alberta was home to concentration camps, called interment camps, for Ukrainians who built Banff and Jasper as forced labourers. During the great Depression internment camps were used for unemployed single men, since there was no welfare or unemployment insurance.

The right wing loves to talk about Stalinism as if it is equivalent to Hitler and the Nazi's. And in fact if push comes to shove, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel and Pol Pot are equated as one in the same, and worse than Hitler or Mussolini or even Franco.

Since fascism is a right wing movement that grows out of calls for law and order, along with appeals to a corporatist state, a form sometimes mistakenly called National Socialism, coined originally by Oswald Spengler, if you look in the conservative closet you will find a shiny pair of jack boots.

The conservative ruling classes during WWII in both England and the US found much admirable in Mussolini and Hitler, especially their self proclaimed war on Bolshevism. Conservative and right wing politicians lobbied for Hitler, promoted isolationism in the US and appeasement in England.

Our own former PM King favoured Hitler, when he wasn't talking to his deceased mother through his dog. He declared that the volunteers who fought in Spain against Franco were acting illegally. He refused entry into Canada to German Jews. And heck he was a Liberal.




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Guergis Going Going Gone?

An interesting group of media pundits like Lorne Gunter, right wing bon vivant for Canwest, the Hill Times, the Globe and Mail and the editorial board of her home town paper are urging the PM to Fire Helena Guergis for her recent temper tantrum.

The Toronto Star also points out she was a failure at the UN meeting on Women despite being the Minister for the Status of Women. She was in fact an apologist for the anti-feminist REAL WOMAN agenda of the Harpocrite government.

Methinks that some folks are worried not only about her flipping out in public and ranting at airport workers, but that perhaps this also has something to do with hubby, the former Edmonton Strathcona MP Rahim Jaffer who was busted for drunk driving and possession of cocaine.

It's not just her recent actions that are an embarrassment to the government but also hubby who has yet to stand trial. When he does, she will be gone.....

Globe and Mail

Rahim Jaffer case heads for plea bargain

Globe and Mail - ‎Feb 23, 2010‎

A dejected Rahim Jaffer gives the thumbs up after falling behind in the Edmonton-Strathcona riding at Tory headquarters on Oct. 14, 2008. ...

Criminal Conservatives

They are tough on crime except when they are guilty of it, then they claim its either no big deal, or a dispute between bureaucrats, or they are redeeming and rehabilitating a former criminal. But if we look at the current crop of criminal Conservatives a pattern emerges; those in power are not just the law they are above the law when it suits them. In the Orwellian world of Stephen Harper up is down, down is up and three strikes does not apply to white collar crime.

Bruce Carson was convicted on five counts of fraud -- three more than previously known -- and received court-ordered psychiatric treatment before becoming one of Stephen Harper's closest advisers.
And his lawyer tells The Canadian Press that Carson disclosed his entire criminal record during a security check that was required to become a senior staffer in the Prime Minister's Office.
The latest revelations raise new questions about Harper's judgment in hiring Carson as his chief policy analyst and troubleshooter.