Alberta KGB

I await the outrage of the Blogging Tories and their right wing ilk, that claim the mantle of the anti-Stalinist right wing.

Those folks who remind us of the horrors of Marxism by referring to the Stalinist USSR as an example of police state socialism.

The example they gave was always about how the State would spy on its citizens.

Suddenly they are sure quiet when the shoe is on the other foot when it applies to their bastion of conservatism in North America; the One Party State of Alberta.

Utility regulator breaches privacy with spies at public hearings

Utilities Board wrong to use private dicks: privacy commissioner

The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner has determined that the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) contravened the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIP) when it hired private investigators to monitor proceedings at Rimbey, Alberta.

The Alberta Energy and Utilities Board hired a private investigation company to monitor a public hearing about the North West Upgrader project in May, documents obtained by the CBC show.

This is the second time the board hired the firm of Shepp Johnman to attend one of its public hearings.

The board is already being investigated by the government for hiring Shepp Johnman to monitor landowners at a hearing in Rimbey who were opposed to a proposed powerline between Calgary and Edmonton.

Ironic that the virtuous right wing anti-statists never seem to protest such obvious statism when it is their government in power. Why should they now that they are in power they can abandon their principles as so much shaft in the wind,

EUB Offers No Apologies After Damning Privacy Report

This state sanctioned corporate monopoly applies its own jurisdictional law against the public interest and against small producers. It should be abolished.

Tiny Bearspaw Petroleum alleges persecution from Alta regulator

CALGARY (CP) _ Tiny Bearspaw Petroleum Ltd. says Alberta‘s energy regulator takes a “hypocritical approach‘‘ when it comes to enforcing safety rules. The company lined up against the Alberta Energy and Utilities board today in a third-party inquiry into allegations that the natural gas producer has been unfairly persecuted. Jirka Kaplan, an engineer with Bearspaw, told the inquiry that Leo Touchette, the board‘s Red Deer office team leader, had an “intense dislike‘‘ of the small Calgary-based company and did what it could to find things wrong with its operations. Bearspaw alleges that on one occasion, the regulator gave it a high-risk compliance citation and a potential explosion risk for one missing nut on the cover of a piece of well equipment. Kaplan says he hired an independent company to check out the regulator‘s safety concerns and no potential problems were found. Bearspaw has appealed some of the board‘s actions and challenged the legality of some of its processes. The inquiry, which was initiated by the regulator, is scheduled to run until Thursday, and chairman Bob Clark says he will try to expedite a ruling.

Still waiting to hear the outrage of the neo-con right....waiting....not even a peep out of those who would proclaim themselves libertarian....the silence is deafening.

Opposition politicians called Thursday for firings at Alberta‘s energy and utilities regulator after a report found serious privacy breaches by detectives hired to spy on people opposed to a new power corridor. But Premier Ed Stelmach said he wants to see more evidence about the decision of the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board to use private detectives at two hearings since last spring.

“It‘s to ensure that all Albertans have full confidence in the AEUB,‘‘ said Stelmach. “It is an important instrument for Albertans in terms of finding the balance between the production and the development of our resources.‘‘

Alberta's energy regulator says it will give opponents of a proposed new Edmonton-Calgary power line enough time to exhaust all appeals before granting any permits for the project.

Landowners who oppose the massive new transmission line were in Alberta Court of Appeal yesterday trying to get a stay on the Energy and Utility Board's decision on whether the project can proceed.

But board lawyer Rick McKee told the hearing that a stay was not needed as the regulator would give landowners enough time to appeal any decision before construction starts.

The board says a decision on the proposal by AltaLink, Alberta's largest transmission company, might not come until at least November.

Joe Anglin, a spokesman for one of the landowner groups, says he fully expects the board to rule in favour of the new power line but his group wants to make sure its voice is heard before some towers are built and their opposition becomes mute.

The power line is also the subject of various provincial inquiries and legal actions over allegations that the Alberta regulator hired private investigators to spy on opponents of the project.

Waiting, waiting.


SEE:

Transparency Alberta Style

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Transparency Alberta Style

It has not been a good week for Alberta CEO Ed Stelmach, his regime has failed to be transparent as promised. Just another week of scandal for the tired old Tories.

NDP say Alberta Energy and Utilities Board aware of spying on power line opponents

EUB coverup shocking

Fire AEUB directors, Mason urges

And it just gets better. The party of rural Alberta screws rural Albertans. And the guy doing the screwing is non other than the California Born, Republican wannabe,and Herr professor of the Calgary School; Ted Morton. A guy who ran for the Premiers job appealing to the social conservative rural base of the Tory party.

Like Marie Lake, everything is for sale in this oil-rich province

NIMBY bites Premier Stelmach

Time to review industrial development, Tory MLA says

Alberta’s sustainable resources minister can’t guarantee seismic testing won’t hurt pristine Marie Lake and says he won’t release other seismic studies supporting the decision to allow the tests.

Still, he conceded, damage is possible. “Sure, it’s a question of risk management. But as I said this has been done on six other lakes with no evidence of adverse effects.”

Morton said the government has the legal right to reject seismic testing applications, but to shut off the exploratory process that early wouldn’t be fair to the company and wouldn’t make sense. His department noted that 34 other lakes have been tested in a similar manner in the last five years, and would not provide details of what took place in the other 28 cases.

The public has no reason to trust the government if it won’t even release the studies that support its decision, said Marie Lake resident Hal Bekolay.

“I can’t use the language I want to use to describe this,” he said. “But what it shows me is their complete lack of caring. It’s unbelievable that people we’ve elected choose to do this to us.” Now local residents want their MLA, Tory Denis Ducharme, to back up his earlier complaint about the testing by crossing the floor and sitting with another party or as an independent, said Bekolay.

Anywhere else in Canada and this would cry out for a comment from Democracy Watch. But in Alberta it's business as usual.

NDP condemns Suncor exec's gov't job

NDP question Suncor executive's appointment

Alberta defends decision to appoint Suncor executive as assistant deputy minister

EDMONTON (CP) _ The Alberta government is defending its decision to appoint a Suncor Energy executive as assistant deputy minister of its oilsands sustainable development secretariat.

Bart Johnson, a spokesman for the Treasury Board, says the government has set up safeguards against any conflict of interest.

Johnson says Heather Kennedy can‘t buy or sell any Suncor shares during her two-year appointment and must excuse herself from any decisions pertaining to Suncor.

He said Suncor will continue paying Kennedy during her two years with the government, but the province will reimburse the oilsands company.

NDP Leader Brian Mason has suggested Kennedy‘s appointment shows just how far the Progressive Conservatives have crawled into the pockets of big oil.

The oilsands secretariat reports to the Treasury Board.

And while we weep for the lack of democracy in the Banana Republic of Alberta, one of the last One Party States in the world, it just keeps getting worse....

Oil royalties going down?

Report Says Alberta Losing Oil Money

Alberta's oil royalties could drop: report

Not only do we sell off our resources at fire sale prices, Albertans could be taken to the cleaners by both Big Oil and the Federal Government while our tin pot Tory tyranny twiddles its thumbs.

In his study for Alberta Energy, Calgary-based consultant Pedro van Meurs said the proposal – which would allow companies to calculate royalty payments on a choice of either the finished synthetic crude product or the tar-sands bitumen from which it is extracted – could lead to two significantly different outcomes.

The companies being offered the new plans, Suncor and Syncrude, have until this year to decide which to opt into.

If the companies opt for royalties based on synthetic crude, Alberta’s royalty rates will be 8% higher than if it opts for a rate based on unprocessed bitumen, says Van Meurs.

If Alberta allows them to choose the latter, recent changes to federal tax laws mean the federal take will increase while Alberta’s take decreases, he indicates.

“It is very obvious that Alberta is faced with a very high level of royalty reduction, when under the Suncor and Syncrude terms companies opt for a switch to bitumen values from SCO values,” he notes.

He said the switch “will result in a drop of about 8% in the overall government take. However, that drop is only experienced by Alberta, the federal share actually goes up, since royalties are now deductible for tax purposes.

While Stelmach's blustered and fumed over the forces of Kyoto at the Premiers meeting last week, the reality is that under Klein, and now Stelmach, Alberta's oil resources are being sold off on a future promise. In reality the royalty regime in the province benefits big oil and everyone but Albertans.

There is no nasty Federal NEP that can be blamed for this, just tired old AlbertaTories, in the pockets of big oil.

It not been a good week for Stelmach who should have been basking in the glory of his victory over the discombobulated gaggle of Premiers who could not save the planet due to their limited provincial narcissism.

Stelmach is rumored to be considering a fall election, while realistically it probably won't be held in the winter but next spring.

Of course considering how badly he has botched his first six months in office an election sooner rather than later might be the only thing that will save his regime. For a short time. But like the former One Party that was in Power for 35 years, this one is bound to go. It's the law of entropy as well as history.



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Native America and the Evolution of Democracy

An interesting online text on Native Democracy and its impact on colonial America and thus the basis of the libertarian chants democratic that echo through out American history.

Exemplar of Liberty:
Native America and the Evolution of Democracy

By
Donald A. Grinde, Jr.
Rupert Costo Professor of American Indian History
University of California at Riverside
and
Bruce E. Johansen
Associate Professor of Communication
University of Nebraska at Omaha

Every king hath his council, and that consists of all the
old and wise men of his nation. . . . [N]othing is under-
taken, be it war, peace, the selling of land or traffick,
without advising with them; and which is more, with the
young men also. . . . The kings . . . move by the breath
of their people. It is the Indian custom to deliberate. . . .
I have never seen more natural sagacity.
	--William Penn to the Society of Free Traders, 16 August 1683

Coming from societies based on hierarchy, early European explorers and settlers came to America seeking kings and queens and princes. What they sought they believed they had found, for a time. Quickly, they began to sense a difference: the people they were calling "kings" had few trappings that distinguished them from the people they "ruled," in most native societies. They only rarely sat at the top of a class hierarchy with the pomp of European rulers. More importantly, Indian "kings" usually did not rule. Rather, they led, by mechanisms of consensus and public opinion that Europeans often found admirable.

During the 170 years between the first enduring English settlement in North America and the American Revolution, the colonists' perceptions of their native neighbors evolved from the Puritans' devil-man, through the autonomous Noble Savage, to a belief that the native peoples lived in confederations governed by natural law so subtle, so nearly invisible, that it was widely believed to be an attractive alternative to monarchy's overbearing hand. The Europeans' perceptions of Indian societies evolved as they became more dissatisfied with the European status quo. Increasingly, the native societies came to serve the transplanted Europeans, including some of the United States' most influential founders, as a counterpoint to the European order. They found in existing native polities the values that the seminal European documents of the time celebrated in theoretical abstraction -- life, liberty, happiness, a model of government by consensus, under natural rights, with relative equality of property. The fact that native peoples in America were able to govern themselves in this was provided advocates of alternatives to monarchy with practical ammunition for a philosophy of government based on the rights of the individual, which they believed had worked, did work, and would work for them, in America.

By 1776, Iroquois imagery was used not only in treatymaking but also as a pervasive idiom in American society. A few weeks after Paine's use of Iroquois imagery, John Adams (Paine's fellow delegate from Massachusetts) would have dinner with several Caughnawaga Mohawk chiefs and their wives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. George Washington and his staff also were present. Washington introduced Adams to the Mohawks chiefs as one of the members "of the Grand Council Fire at Philadelphia" and Adams noted in a letter to his wife that the Mohawks were impressed with Washington's introduction. Although it can be argued that George Washington and the Continental Congress used American Indian rhetoric and imagery to explain to Native American people the nature of the new American government, such an argument does not explain how such rhetoric begins to occur in Robert Treat Paine's private correspondence to Non-Indians. Actually, the ideas and symbols of Native America became important facets in the formation of a new American identity.

And the Six Nations, Iroquois confederacy that so influenced the founding fathers of America also influenced Marx and Engels.

Two contemporaries of Buffalo Bill, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, about the time of the Custer Battle were drawing on the Indian models to support their theories of social evolution. As had Franklin and Jefferson a century before, Marx and Engels paid particular attention to the lack of state-induced coercion and the communal role of property that operated in the Iroquois Confederacy.

Marx read Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society, which had been published in 1877, between December 1880 and March 1881, taking at least ninety-eight pages of handwritten notes. Ancient Society was Morgan's last major work; his first book-length study had been The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851). Morgan was a close friend of the Seneca Ely Parker, a high-ranking Civil War officer. Like Johnson, Weiser, Colden, and others, Morgan was an adopted Iroquois. When Marx read Morgan's Ancient Society, he and Engels were studying the important anthropologists of their time. Morgan was one of them.

Marx's notes on Ancient Society adhere closely to the text, with little extraneous comment. What particularly intrigued Marx about the Iroquois was their democratic political organization, and how it was meshed with a communal economic system -- how, in short, economic leveling was achieved without coercion.

During the late 1870s and early 1880s, Marx remained an insatiable reader, but a life of poverty and attendant health problems had eroded his ability to organize and synthesize what he had read. After Marx died, Engels inherited his notes and, in 1884, published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, subtitled In Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. The book sold well; it had gone through four editions in German by 1891. Engels called the book a "bequest to Marx." He wrote that Morgan's account of the Iroquois Confederacy "substantiated the view that classless communist societies had existed among primitive peoples," and that these societies had been free of some of the evils, such as class stratification, that he associated with industrial capitalism. Jefferson had been driven by similar evils to depict Europe in metaphors of wolves and sheep, hammer and anvil.

To Engels, Morgan's description of the Iroquois was important because "it gives us the opportunity of studying the organization of a society which, as yet, knows no state." Jefferson had also been interested in the Iroquois' ability to maintain social consensus without a large state apparatus, as had Franklin. Engels described the Iroquoian state in much the same way that American revolutionaries had a century earlier:

Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households -- still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal -- including the women.

Concern for the depredations of human rights by state power is no less evident in our time than in the eighteenth century. American Indians, some of the earliest exemplars of those rights, today often petition the United Nations for redress of abuses committed by the United States government, whose founding declarations often ring hollow in ears so long calloused by the thundering horsehooves of Manifest Destiny and its modern equivalents. One may ask what the United Nations' declarations of human rights owe to the Iroquois and other Indian nations. Take the following excerpts from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted December 10, 1948), and place them next to the Great Law of Peace, and the statements Franklin and other American national fathers adapted from experience with American Indian nations:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1)

Every person has a right to life, liberty and security of person. (Article 3)

Everyone has a right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. (Article 18)

Everyone has the right of freedom of opinion and religion. (Article 19)

. . . The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of governments . . . (Article 21)

Looking across the frontier, as well as across the Atlantic, looking at Indian peace as well as Indian wars, history poses many tantalizing questions. The thesis that American Indian thought played an important role in shaping the mind of European America, and of Europe itself, is bound to incite controversy, a healthy state of intellectual affairs at any time in history, our own included. The argument around which this book is centered is only one part of a broader effort not to rewrite history, but to expand it, to broaden our knowledge beyond the intellectual strait jacket of ethnocentricism that tells us that we teach, but we do not learn from, peoples and cultures markedly different from our own.

See:

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Many Headed Hydra

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