Only 9% Support for Harper

The Blogging Tories and other syncophants of the Harpocrite government will be doing cartwheels over the latest poll headlines: PM's agenda resonating with voters, new poll finds

But wait lets dig a little deeper and we find;

In all regions of the country, about 9 per cent of respondents said Mr. Harper's priorities were identical to their own,

So we have a government that represents the interests of less than 10% of Canadians. There should be no joy in Mudville over that number.

It has remained static. This is the real base of the right wing in Canada.

Meanwhile the great unwashed middle, 54-58% of those polled, is found to be 'supportive' of the governments priorities but, and it's a BIG BUT;

“When you poke further and say, ‘Do you have any other priorities?' a solid majority say yes,” Mr. Gregg said.

Those other priorities cover a broad range of issues, topped by education, the environment and other aspects of health beyond the reduction of waiting times.

“When you put those three together, you've got a good solid chunk of the population and that should be a little warning sign to him,” Mr. Gregg said. “There's stuff that he's doing right now in terms of cutting back on the greenhouse-gas emissions that just plays to his weakness.”

And this poll will bouy the Stalinist regime of the Harpocrite. He will use the poll to justify his autarchic authoritarian control over his party and the cabinet in Ottawa,Alberta. And let's remember it's only a honeymoon poll.

The government has had only one week in the house with a question period dominated by the Harpocrite anwsering for all his ministers. Wait till the budget and the bills come into the house. What we have here is Stephen Bush, remaking the PMO into the White House.

It's not obvious that Canadians will be comfortable with this new Canada. What is certain is that this much change can only happen if a prime minister applies his extraordinary powers in ways usually associated with presidents.And that's what Harper is doing. In commanding centre stage, he is accelerating a trend that reduces ministers to bit players whose principal role is filling policy blanks. At the same time, he's reading from the George W. Bush script by staying relentlessly on-message and playing to public perceptions of the media as negative, unruly children in desperate need of adult discipline. PM's control strategy is working — for now

For an excellent slice and dice commentary on this poll see:A BCer in Toronto


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Words of Wisdom From Captain Watson

Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, "I have no respect for Newfoundland or Newfoundlanders. They debased Canada when they joined the nation in 1949 and they continue to embarrass us in the eyes of the world as they inflict bloody carnage on innocent creatures, peddling seal penises and their silly seal flipper pie to the ecological perverts who actually pay for these obscenities."

Captain Paul Watson is a vegan who has no other mission in life than to stop all hunting. Period.

He is an idiot and an embarassment.

And while I support animal conservation endeavours around the industrial fishing of Whales, he goes too far there too when he attacks single whale hunts by West Coast and Northern aboriginal peoples. Which he would ban.



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A Word From Our Sealers

Jack Troake, a fisherman and sealer from Twillingate in central Newfoundland. Last Sunday, Mr. Troake left for the Labrador seal hunt, as he has nearly every spring for four decades. Sealing is a dangerous, gruelling pursuit, Mr. Troake said, conducted solely to put food on the tables of families in struggling, rural communities. "It's not pretty," said Mr. Troake, who is in his early 70s. "You kill any of God's creatures and it's not pretty."It's 'not pretty,' but seal business thrives

Amen to that.

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June Pointer RIP

Here is a short and sweet tribute to June Pointer who passed away this week from cancer. She was of course one of the Pointer Sisters.

JUNE POINTER

1953-2006

While the kind of cancer was not made public I find it interesting that finally we are seeing reports on the increasing amount of lung cancer among non-smokers. Especially women.

It is an under-reported fact. On the the moral majority that is imposing its non-smoking agenda on us overlook. And I say it is a moral issue because it blames the victims of this addiction, and it blames the victims of lung cancer who may never have smoked. The non-smokers lobby wants cancer to be caused by one thing and one thing only, smoking. But of course it is easy to blame smokers, the whole anti-smoking movement has been based upon this mythology that it is ONLY smoking that causes cancer When in fact cancer is the result of industrial capitalism, and its resulting toxic environment; chemicals, pollution, etc.

Even though it is the leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States, lung cancer attracts much less research money than other major cancers, Dr. Siegfried said, largely because it is so strongly linked to smoking that people often blame the victims for giving the disease to themselves. The Thinkers: Celebrity deaths shine light on lung cancer

Lung cancer continues to be the leading cause of cancer death
for both men and women in Canada according to annual
statistics released this week by the Canadian Cancer Society.
Despite alarming trends, including an increasing
incidence of lung cancer in women and life-long non-smokers, 
Lung cancer tops list as biggest cancer killer

"A significant body of scientific evidence links exposure to radiation and synthetic chemicals to an increased risk of breast cancer," said Susan Roll, Associate Executive Director of the Massachusetts Breast Cancer Coalition and one of the event's primary organizers. "We hope that legislators and their constituents will begin to think about reducing toxic chemicals as one way of preventing some diseases and disorders."Exploring chemical links to disease

Also See:

Smoking At Home Will Be Banned

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ASH

Edmontons Liberal Leadership Candidate

And the most Trudeau of the Liberal Leadership candidates is, according to Calgary Grit, former Edmontonian Gerard Kennedy. Kennedy started the Edmonton Food Bank one of the first in Canada.

The NDP need to be worried about Kennedy.

Brian Bechtel, who was in charge of the Edmonton Social Planning Council, proves this point as a spoiler in Edmonton Norwood when he ran for the provincial Liberals.

Kennedy can claim, as he did last Sunday at the Forum in Edmonton, to be able to speak to the West as much as he can issues in Toronto and Ontario.

Kennedy can give Layton a run for his money as a liberal social democrat.

And where the NDP have only won once in Edmonton in a federal riding, Kennedy could give a centre left leadership that would see more Liberal seats at least in Redmonton.

In the progressive politics of the centre left, Kennedy would bring back Liberal voters who supported the NDP. It would be a rare riding where the NDP would not be hurt by his leadership. Unlike the hardcore of each party, the vast majority of supporters, volunteers, etc. still support the idea of electing the best candidate or leader. As do the mass of voters.

I have seen that enthusiasm undermine many a provincial NDP campaign, as the Liberals drop in a socially progressive politico who has community links,into a provincial campaign here in Redmonton.

Bechtel did it, and so can Kennedy.

And as Pacific Tribune says; "What's stopping the NDP from getting swallowed entirely by the Federal Liberals, I'm becoming less and less sure of daily."

Kennedy is Layton sans moustache.



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Not Your Usual Left Wing Rant

No Taxes for the working class. That should be the watchword of the Left.

Left blogger a Class Act bemoans the state of the Canadian left on his blog. He says; "When is the left going to quit trying to be like its opponents,and begin to define itself by it's own actions and ideology?Give the people a real choice,a choice that stands for something,but above all principaled."

Exactomundo. When the Reform party was created it based itself not on the neo-conservatism of the Reaganites but on Western Canadian populism, a populism based on the Left. Recall, referendum, the attack on taxation, were all antebellum left wing causes at the begining of the 20th Century.

Socialism as Class Act calls it. It included the ideology of the producer republic, Georgism in the United States, the Cooperative Commonweal in Canada and the UK. It included syndicalism for the working class, and producer cooperatives for farmers and small producers. It was anti-monopoly and anti-rentier, pro land ownership. See Rothbard’s Reds Redux


Socialism at the begining of last century was not yet tainted with Bolshevism. And I use that term deliberately to distinguish it from communism. For within the anarchist and statist socialist movements were movements of communism, which went farther and further in their critique of capitalism than the anti-state socialists did.

Unfortunately the socialist dream, or vision, was lost in the coming forth of the social democratic movement and its statist ideal of the welfare state. Far from dying at the end of WWI in Canada the CCF called for social revolution, as did many of the socialists of the day. They still had only had a small taste of government, in this case the Socialist Party of Canada had been crucial to maintaince of power for the provincial Liberals in B.C, in the last days of fin de sicle 19th century.

The Socialist movement in Canada coalesced around the CCF, the Communist party and the OBU. With the destruction of the later and the success of the former in gaining political power provincially and representation federally came the end of the extra parlimentary left in Canada.

By the 1960's the CCF and the labour movement had purged the radicals and were now liberal social democratics just like their German predecesors of the century before.

The extra-parliamentary left was centred around the anti-Nuclear Bomb movement, Our Generation magazine, and what could be loosely called an anarchist left. One that was sceptical that state power could change anything.

Today the NDP and its social democratic ilk are really liberals in a hurry. And thus the plight that Class Act finds us in. We go back to the orginal debate between State Socialists and Anti-State Socialists. Is socialism a set of principles and and ideal to strive towards or is it the pragmatic logic of gaining state power.
It is of course the former since the latter has been a historic failure.

Since I of course do not believe it is the latter, I hardly consider the NDP or even the Trade Unions on the left. That is they cannot concieve of a program of workers and community control that is a radical challenge to the corporate/financial and state monopoly. They in effect are , as the left communists call them, the left hand of capitalism. They merely wish to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism while maintaining the status quo.

Expect no real answers from them on how to change or challenge the system.

But thank goodness the long march to Ottawa by the neo-conservative right in Canada has finally ended in a minority government. Because they too called for a revolution in politics as usual. And they too have ended up being no such thing, just business as usual.

Where the left failed during the past two decades was to see that what Reform had harnassed was a real grass roots disgruntlement of the working class towards politics as usual. Not always reactionary, it was based on feeling powerless and wanting to feel in power over our own lives.

The Left never got it. Whenever the NDP called for taxing the rich, the guys in the Alberta Gas Plants, unionized, and paid overtime saw it as an attack on their wages. It didn't matter that the NDP meant the Rich, as in the 1% of Canadians that own all the wealth, or the corporations, their message was lost on the working class. And for good reason.

We hate taxes. We love services. And we will pay for services, but we hate taxes. And why shouldn't we, over the past fifty years the federal and provincial tax base has moved from the corporations to picking the pockets of you and me.

The NDP finally realised this simple fact during the 2004 election and during the last sitting of the house. They called for more tax breaks for the working class. But because this runs counter to their state socialism, they were faint hearted in their calls, faint hearted in their attack on the Liberals and Conservatives as parties of the rich and entrenched power. The so called special interests.

The fact is that the Conservative government in Ottawa is about to launch a massive assault on the working class through taxation.

They will fund their 1% GST cut by eliminating tax breaks the Liberals brought in. They will give out a baby bonus that will be taxed. They will fail to transfer funds to day care programs clawing them back.

The Left should be calling for no taxation for anyone who earns $100,000 a year or less. Period. That is the mass of the working class in this country.

No party currently will call for this and for the elimination of user fees and the GST. For these are the little taxes that hurt, the death by a thousand cuts that so irritate each and every wage slave in Canada.

Tax the Corporations NOT the People, should be the watchword of the Left. Want Daycare and Medicare, the corporations should pay, out of pre tax profits. It is social capital that they directly benefit from in their bottom line, its what makes them competitive against the American capitalist model.

Eliminate all corporate tax loopholes. Eliminate offshore investment havens for the Rich. And in the process this will eliminate the Tax Department.

The Left should attack the failure of the Reformers, who are still out there as the recent Fireweed Forum on Democracy showed, and the parliamentary reformers,
to address the real issue of political reform in Canada.

The need for real democracy, directly elected revocable delgates to constiuent assemblies. To the right to referndum, to a renewal of Canada as constitutional confederation of the people not a con job. See my Abolish The Senate

On economic renewal we should be calling for the creation of peoples banks, the deregulation of banking from the hands of the State into the hands of the people as pools of capital for usage with institutional pension funds and workers investments to build small and medium sized worker/producer cooperatives.
See Michael Alberts Economic Participatory Democracy project; Parecon.

This deregulation would also eliminate large banks as holders of capital in the national interest. That role should be continued by the Bank of Canada, which delegated it to the national banks twenty years ago under the Mulroney Conservatives.

We don't need a state in Canada we need a confederation of peoples and communities in a federal system not of Trudeau's making or Harpers but in the Proudhonist model of self government.


And this cannot be done through electoral means, it takes a social revolution. The Reform party tried to do this from the Right and the NPI and other attempts to reform the NDP did it on the left and the result is Jack Layton and Stephen Harper. Nothing changed.

So Class Act I agree with you that the Left needs renewal. And the Left needs first to divorce itself from the existing liberal social democratic parliamentary mileu.
Then and only then will it become an authentic voice for Canadians who are frustrated and pissed off with the system as it is. We have been told to embrace change for twenty years by the neo-cons as they privatized public services. That change for change sake ideology is deeply embedded in all of capitalism corporate and managerial structures now. It gives us a window to challenge the very system of capitalism with a real Left agenda of People Power.




Also see:

Unite the Left

A Peoples Program for Alberta

Left, Right and Liberty

State-less Socialism

A NEW AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

Rebel Yell

Plutocrats Rule


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Service Charges

So I went to the Alberta Government Treasury Branch the other day to get some cash out of the instant teller. Now I belong to a credit union and so as usual this would mean an Interact service charge anywhere from $1.50-$2.5o. So I ask for $40 and get $40 and on the receipt I find there is NO SERVICE CHARGE. Damn right.



ATB was created as a People Bank by the Social Credit Government in 1938 to counter the Eastern Banking Monopoly and for the creation of Funny Money in order to offset the massive debt and depression affecting the province.

There is great irony that the Alberta Treasury Branches still operate in Republican Lite Alberta. They are unionized, the only unionized banking system in Canda!

The credit union movement in Quebec Cassie du Populaire is close to the ATB model of the peoples bank though it is more of a federated peoples bank as adovacted by mutualists and Proudhon.

The provincial ATB's have low interest rates for citizens banking with them. And they have minimal service charges, like none on Interact banking through the ATM. This is unique since both banks and credit unions charge service charges.

And that fact is amazing because that is where we as consumers get ripped off. We pay exorpident services charges above the actual cost of maintaining the local ATM and the Interact/Plus network that is owned and operated by the Banks! The bank workers get ripped off because ATM's have seen a reduction in teller services.

With electronic transfers of social welfare benefits to banks the poor face a dispraportionate disadvantage of being taxed with user fees/service charges on their accounts.

Like the perennial debates in the House of Commons on gas prices, banking charges are another of those debates that parliament can never resolve. Even as they discuss allowing for bank mergers. Which as documentation shows have increased across North America over the past two decades, with no reductions in service charges or savings to depositors or borrowers.

So why are we being ripped off, paying for service charges for use of ATM's then paying for using the ATM when it is not our bank, while Interac, ATMs etc are all controled by the banks.

In Europe last week the EU announced that it was looking into regulating Master Card and Visa, both controled by the banks as well, due to excessive and profit gouging by the banks and the credit card companies they own.

The report found:

* Credit card charges to retailers add an average of 2.5% to the cost of goods.

* Small and medium businesses pay up to 70% more than large companies for offering credit card payments.

* Consumers pay 100% more for MasterCard and Visa in some countries than in others

While this was report on Europe the same can be said for the North American marketplace.

The banks use the excuse that their costs are the techonology and start up costs. However those costs began over twenty years ago, and are no longer real costs of doing business.

Since these fees hurt customers as well as business, which is charged a service charge for bank cards as well as credit cards, when will we hear from the CFIB and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, along with consumer advocates and unions about how we are being ripped off by the banks?

If you want to put real money in your pocket, as the on line no service charge bank ING says, then its time we ended service charges for Interac banking and on Credit Cards. Service charges that are tacked on over and above interest payments by Visa and Mastercard.

So if the ATB can not charge me for Interac banking why can't the rest of them?
Again a failure of the ideology of competition, obviously in this case the taxpayers citizens of Alberta underwrite this competitive advantage while the rest of the financial industry goes on its merry way gouging us.

Private ATM deployers take root in Canada�s wide-open market - August 1, 1998

Canada's Office of Consumer Affairs says ATM fees on the rise ...

Overview of the ATM and Debit Card Industry

"Rip-Off" ATM Surcharges
Nadia Massoud, Dan Bernhardt
RAND Journal of Economics, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring, 2002) , pp. 96-115

Fees and surcharging in automatic teller machine networks:
Non-bank ATM providers versus large banks

ATM networks were initially developed as a means by which banks could save costs by shifting
customers from costly “teller” transactions using personnel at a branch to the use of machines. In the early 1980s in North America, these initially proprietary systems evolved into shared networks, which enhanced customer convenience in accessing their account, without having to go to their branch. A main fee set by the (shared) network is an “interchange fee” that banks must pay to other member firms for each “foreign” transaction made by one of their customers at another member’s ATM. In order to recover at least part of the cost, banks typically charge their own customers a “foreign fee” for these transactions. In addition to the foreign fee, customers making foreign ATM transactions may pay a “surcharge” directly to the owner of the ATM. This fee structure has the interesting and unusual feature that all three fees apply to the same transaction.

Harming Depositors and Helping Borrowers: The Disparate Impact of Bank Consolidation

Recently, banking has experienced rapid consolidation in many countries. For banks in the United States, corporate restructurings have been driven by advances in information technology and by a loosening of geographic restrictions on branching and acquisitions. The number of U.S. commercial banks declined from 14,469 in 1984 to 7,888 in 2002, while the average asset size of banks has more than tripled over this period, from $268 million to $897
million.

The Welfare Consequences of ATM Surcharges: Evidence from a Structural Entry Model

The goal of this paper is to estimate a structural model of the market for automatic teller
machines (ATMs) in order to understand the implications of regulating ATM surcharges on
ATM entry and consumer welfare.
Since the establishment of the first ATM networks in the early 1970s, ATMs have
become a ubiquitous and growing component of consumer banking technology. By 2001, there
were over 324,000 ATMs in the United States, processing an average of 117 transactions per
day, suggesting that each person in the United States uses an ATM an average of 45 times per
year.
In spite of the vast and growing presence of ATMs, product differentiation may imply
that the market for ATMs does not reflect perfect competition or yield optimal outcomes. In
particular, the surcharge—the price charged by an ATM on top of the set interchange fee—has
increased significantly over the last several years. The increase can be linked to an April 1996
decision by the major ATM networks to allow surcharges among their member ATMs.2 Between 1996 and 2001, the number of ATMs tripled, but the number of transactions per ATM fell by about 45 percent. The technology of ATMs is characterized by high fixed costs—primarily the cost of leasing the machine, keeping it stocked with cash, and servicing it—and very low marginal costs. Thus, the increased price of ATM services has been accompanied by an increased average cost per ATM transaction.


See:

A History of Canadian Wealth, 1914.

Historical Memory on the Eve of the Election

Calgary Herald Remembers RB Bennet

Canada's First Internment Camps

Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

Rebel Yell

The Peoples Bank of Alberta


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Capitalist Environmentalism

The fetish of the market and private ownership that the liberaltarians in the U.S. cite as their solution to the environmental crisis takes a new twist. Environmental terrorism for profit.

Mr. Reumayr, 55, is accused of plotting to blow up the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in a scheme designed to drive up the value of energy futures. His alleged plan was to buy oil, gas and electricity futures that would likely rise in value when oil supplies were disrupted, and then to stage a series of attacks on the pipeline in Alaska and on another pipeline in Canada.
Man loses final bid to stop extradition to US


See: Climate Change

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The Cone of Silence Over Kyoto

Do not say the word Kyoto to Conservative Environment Minister; that sensitive policy wonk Rona Ambrose, or she will refuse to be interviewed by you. Even though she is in charge of the next round of Kyoto talks. As the Calgary Herald columnist Don Martin discovers.

Don't publish a fictional novel about Climate Change if you work as a scientist for the Department of the Environment. Or ever sensitive Rona will call you and tell you NOT to attend your own book launch if you want to continue working for the department. Minister stops book talk by Environment Canada scientist

The PMO says he knows nothing of it......but hey its a good idea if the Minister clamps down on the beuracrats so they all sing from the same songsheet.....the Conservatives; Just say NO Kyoto......Ottawa plans cuts to green programs: documents

Ottawa plan hacks green programs


BLACK DAY FOR GREENS AS TORY BLUE TAKES OVER

Welcome to Ottawa, Alberta.

The Kyoto accord is the most worrying. Because if it was ever implemented as Paul Martin's discredited Liberals planned, it would have imposed impossibly steep reduction targets and severe economic pressures on what's become known as the Alberta Advantage - the most powerful and important provincial economy in Canada today.But while the Conservatives aren't about to tear up the United Nations agreement - and give the other three parties in the House of Commons their political hill to die on - at least Environment Minister Rona Ambrose is doing the next best thing. EDITORIAL: Rona is a realist


Now what was that about more open transparent government? No that's not a platform of the Harpocrites that was a reccomendation from Gomery It's still business as usual in Ottawa.....sadly lacking in the governments practice or its new accounatability bill.

Harper Keeps Ministers From Ottawa Reporters

Press Gallery, PMO not talking, relations continue to deteriorate




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Protesting the Protestors

Turn about is fair play so quit yer whining. Seal-hunt supporters confront protesters

Rebecca Aldworth, the humane society's Montreal-based Canadian issues director, criticized Blanc-Sablon residents for interfering with the observers' work. "What has happened out here has crossed a line," Aldworth said. "Of course they have a right to protest, and I respect that, but when you put human lives at risk and prevent people from engaging in lawful activities, you've crossed the line into assault and reckless endangerment. Fishermen keep anti-sealing activists grounded

Gee sounds like the pot calling the kettle black.

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