Goldbug

Now this is either a good reason (for investors) to invade Iran or a very bad reason to invade.....

United States Invasion of Iran Could Put Gold Over $1,000



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Iran, gold, invasion, US, Bush,

Heil Hillier, Maintiens le droit

Military chief called period of Liberal governments a 'decade of darkness'; Liberal says Gen. Rick Hillier a `prop' for Tories

Gee I said that: Joined At The Hip

The first two people Harper met with after the election were RCMP Commissioner Zaccardelli and General Hillier.

Scary that.

Consider the political role the RCMP had in the defeat of the Liberals. Releasing a press release during the campaign that said they were investigating the Liberals over alleged Income Trust leaks. Which was revealed this week, over a year later, with a inconsequential bust of a bureaucrat who profited from the Income Trust announcement but not a leak or any evidence of any kind of leak.RCMP income trust probe goes bust

Pure politics by Zaccardelli, which won him government support during the Arar affair, until he shot himself in the foot which he had already placed in his mouth.

Of course the RCMP has always been political.

They are Paramilitary Force created by the State to defend the State. That they would support a self declared Law and Order government is the essence of their slogan; Maintiens le droit.

Which my history Prof Jim Penton reminded his class meant Maintain the Right. As in the Kings Right, droit, or law, which the RCMP themselves translate as the harmless; Defending the Law. But as our Governor General Michelle Jean translated more accurately, and in the context of the Harpocrites a starkly insidious; “Upholding the Right,”

Another voice of men with guns and right wing political views was former General Lewis Mackenzie who is now an outspoken Conservative. But at least he waited till he retired to declare his allegiances to the right. Until Prime Minister Harper’s election and the brave new direction he set for Canada’s foreign and military policies, Gen. MacKenzie’s was almost a voice in the wilderness in this land.

General Hillier on the other hand is an outspoken supporter of War and of the Harper Government, because they do his bidding. Going to war in the South of Afghanistan was the first act of the New Harper Government, prior to that we had been doing peacekeeping in Kabul.

Hillier's Pro War ideology and Harpers correspond in wanting to recreate Canada's Armed Forces. By transforming them from their traditional Liberal role as Peace Keepers back into a traditional conservative Fighting Force. He began the change under the Liberals who appointed him but has mobilized his mouth in favour of Harper and War at any cost. Harpers War was originally posed to Canadians as an extension of Liberals Peace Keeping operations in Kabul. But all that changed when we joined the Americans in Kandahar.

Now we have a new Fighting Armed Forces. Complete with new recruitment ads. Gone was the tradesman/woman of the No Life Like It era, appealing to the Maritimers, the vast majority of our nations Armed Forces. Now it is a stark black and white world in the ads that show the viewer that we are fighting back.

Not only has Hillier been outspoken in public about the need to make war; the blunt-speaking Gen. Hillier has denigrated those fighting against Canadian troops in Afghanistan as "detestable murderers and scumbags." An over the top appeal to conservative law and order types. But our Armed Forces now find themselves in a situation where they face charges of attacking innocent villagers and abusing prisoners.

And Hillier has mobilized his troops to take to Canada's streets to support the war in Afghanistan.

The Red Friday Rallies began in Ottawa with Harper addressing the partisan crowd of spouses of our soldiers, Hillier was there, and the Conservatives allowed public servants time off to join the noon hour rally.

Since then Red Fridays across Canada have been small affairs notably made up of the RCMP and the Army and its conservative supporters. While ostensibly billed as supporting our troops it really is a rally to support Hillier and Harpers War.


And we remember the last time we had mass rallies of armed forces.

Men with guns being political. Scary.

SEE

Hillier

Afghanistan

RCMP

Autocrat


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Zaccredelli, RCMP, Harper, Conservatives, Canada, War, Afghanistan, fascism, Government, politics, right wing, Maintiens le droit,

Danger At Work

Not hundreds, not thousands but;
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians assaulted at work

Work not only kills it injures. And not a word about this crime wave in the workplace from the Law & Order government in Ottawa.

In a report released Friday, the agency said 17% of all self-reported incidents of violent victimization that year, including sexual assault, robbery and physical assault, occurred at the person’s place of work. That figure represents over 356,000 violent workplace incidents in Canada's 10 provinces. And those were only the incidents that were reported.

Don't expect the Law and Order Conservatives to do anything about violence in the workplace because that would interfere in the market place.

As Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day reminded us when he was Labour Minister in Alberta and unions called for Working Alone legislation after workers were assaulted on the job. He said there was nothing he would do about bringing in Working Alone legislation. Instead he cut jobs in his department.

It took the murder of a young woman working alone in Calgary to actually get the ruling PC's in Alberta to take the issue seriously. But by then Stock was leading the New Canadian Alliance Party.

Of course Public Safety in Canada means keeping us safe from foreign terrorists not terror on the job. Especially when most of these assaults were on public sector workers, that is government workers.

The majority -- about 70% -- of the violent workplace incidents were classified as physical assaults. That's more than the 57% of non-workplace incidents that were classified as physical assaults. The three offences were much more common in the social assistance and health care services sectors, the study found. One-third of all workplace violent incidents involved a victim who was working in those types of jobs. A high proportion also occurred in accommodation or food services, retail or wholesale trade and educational services sectors.

As the ILO reported as far back as 1998 the reason for the increasing assaults in the work place is the decrease in workers on the job the privatization of public services and the consequences of the reduction in the size of government. Because the bureaucracy has not declined only front line services.

In situations of structural change and transition, when the main objective is to retain employment and income, safety and health issues are often relegated to second place. However, it is these very situations which generate anxieties, frustration and organizational difficulties, which in turn can lead to violence. In practice, violence at the workplace may include a wide range of behaviour, often of an ongoing and overlapping nature. While attention has traditionally been focused on physical violence, in more recent years evidence has been emerging of the impact and harm caused by non-physical violence which, although often referred to as psychological, can also have physical repercussions for the victim.

A survey by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) revealed that almost 70 per cent of respondents considered verbal aggression to be the leading form of violence, citing physical violence as the next most frequent form. Growing attention is also being paid to perpetuated violence involving repeated behaviour. In itself this type of violence may appear to be relatively minor, but cumulatively it can become very serious, taking the form of sexual harassment, bullying or mobbing. It is this type of behaviour which can have the most negative impact on human resource development at the workplace.

The impact of the 1995 Neo-Con revolution in Canada, the so called "Reinventing Government", when Stockwell Day was Labour Minister in Alberta and Paul Martin was Finance Minister, and both the provinces and Federal Government cut funding and outsourced public sector jobs, is still with us.

And thus the public sector and service workplace is just as unsafe as it was when miners needed canaries to go into the mines. Which is why we mourn the loss of life and the injuries of class on April 28 each year.




See

In Canada Work Kills

Work Sucks

Laundry Workers Fight Privatization

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
workers, injuries, assault, crime, work, labour, labor, government, public sector workers, service workers, Canada, job, dangers on the job, assault, crime, Stockwell Day, unions, Alberta, working alone

Carnival of Anarchy February 07

Carnival of Anarchy

It's almost time for the next carnival, this one on the topic Anarchism in your area.

The carnival will be next weekend, from Friday 23rd through til Sunday 25th, so get cracking on your posts, and when the time comes throw them up here (and on your own blogs, if you wish).





A few questions to consider while posting:

• How common are anarchist ideas in your area?
• Are there many people who actively identify as some sort of anarchist?
• Is there one stream of anarchism that is dominant (eg anarcho-syndicalism, ultra-leftism, anarcho-primitivism, insurrectionary anarchism etc)? If so, why?
• What anarchist groups/organisations/institutions exist in your town, if any? Are they old or relatively new?
• What is the makeup of anarchists in your area as compared to the general population (ethnicity, gender, sexuality etc)
• Does your area have a history of lots of anarchist activity? If so, how does that affect modern anarchist activity and how it is percieved?
• What do anarchists do in your area?

Feel free to be as broad or narrow a s you want - discuss your street, suburb, city or country, whatever takes your fancy.

If you want to post on this carnival but aren't currently a member, post your email in the comments and hopefully someone will add you.

In the meantime, use the comments on this thread to suggest and hopefully decide on a topic for the next carnival. For previously suggested topics, check out here and here.



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
carnival of anarchy, anarchy, anarchists, blogs, blogging, weblogs, bloggers, libertarian, libertarians ocialism, left libertarians, mutualists, individualism, individualists,

Top 47

A diverse field of Canada’s most well known and respected personalities from journalists to politicians offering their comments on the issues of the day, everyday.

This is a misleading article; first because there are only 47 folks listed.

Second because many of these folks don't "comment on the issues of the day, every day".

Third; because there is not a single labour activist amongst them. Nor anybody from the left. Notably missing are Judy Rebick , James Laxer and Jim Stanford.

Fourth; no environmentalists; Elizabeth May isn't even on the list nor David Suzuki. And no NDP bloggers.

Which is why they probably couldn't find fifty to fill the list.

It's a who's who of Macleans favorite Conservatives and Liberals. After all Maude Barlow is a Liberal.

And they have one token Dipper; Jamey Heath.

At least Kinsella ain't on the list. Boy he's going to be pissed.

h/t to Scott Tribe



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Macleans, Kinsella, blogs, bloggers, Canada, Laxer, Rebick, Heath, Liberals, Conservatives, journalists, media, politics

Gnostic Anarchists

Light and Life

The Online Journal of Rev. Thomas Langley

Rise, Prophet!

"Musings, meditations and poems of a mystic anarchist (with some gnostic Christian, Zen Buddhist and Advaita Vedantic thought thrown in for good measure)"

See

Anarchism

Gnostic

liberation theology


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
anarchy, anarchism, gnostic, gnosis, blogs, bloggers, blogging, liberation theology, spiritual

enMasse

Came across the alternative to Babble at Rabble.....still going strong with a blog and discussion forum.

Q:

How did enMasse come to be?

A:

Well... you'd better take a seat... Where to begin? EnMasse came into being after Audra Williams, the moderator of the babble discussion forums at rabble.ca was fired by the Management Committee by e-mail during a series of life crises. Audra was an extremely well-liked moderator and was largely responsible for the creation of babble at the time of the Quebec City protests in 2001 and for its success until April of 2006, when she was summarily fired. After firing Audra, the Management Committee proceded to adopt an extremely hardnosed attitude towards her and towards outraged members of the community, of which there were many. The Management Committee refused to negotiate and some members of the community began actively spamming the discussion forum in an effort to secure Audra's re-instatement. At the same time as the spamming of the discussion forums, a movement for a "strike" against babble developed, largely led by the babbler with the handle Kevin Laddle. The strikers refused to post to babble until Audra was re-instated. The "Babble Strike" movement grew and on April 10, 2006, a new discussion forum was created on a server paid for by The JF. This forum was initially known as the Babble Strike Forum (BSF). In the first two days over 150 babblers left to join the BSF. At first the BSF was used as a forum to debate the response to the actions of the rabble.ca Management Committee and to debate the possible future of the BSF as an independent progressive discussion forum. As it became increasingly clear that the rabble.ca Management Committee would never agree to the re-instatement of Audra or any of the accountability and democracy reforms demanded by the babble strikers, a consensus developed to forge ahead with the creation of a new progressive space on the internet. At that time, the site was re-named "Temporary Left Wing Board" while a decision was made regarding the naming of the site. On April 28th of 2006, only eighteen days after the site's founding, the name "enMasse," often shortened to EM, was chosen by a significant margin in a vote of the membership. EM has suffered through growing pains and several unfortunate and painful divisions among the membership leading to the departure of a significant number of members. However, as of September 2006 seems to be on a steady footing and is a thriving and vital community.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Audra Williams, Rabble.ca, Babble, blogs, leftwing blogs, Canada, feminism, socialism, GLBT

New Math

This has to be some form of new math, right.

Terrorism suspect Mohamed Mahjoub will soon be living again in Toronto with his wife and two young sons after spending almost seven years behind bars without charges.

Because if he has been in jail for seven years on terrorism charges, counting backward on my fingers that means;he was arrested in 2000 a year before 9/11 and two years before the Security Act was passed and several years before they built Gitmo North in Kingston.

And if he was not allowed to know the charges against him or see the evidence in denial of habeas corpus, then we already had a paranoid security state in place in Canada before 9/11!!!

My gawd that means we have been living in a police state for seven years and it had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or 9/11.

But thats nothing new; Canada's First Internment Camps




h/t to verbena-19

SEE

Why The Tories Want Tory Judges

CIA

Torture

RCMP

CSIS

Arar

Crime

Terrorism



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Canada, anti-terrorism act, Government, Liberals, NDP, Conservatives, War Measures Act, 1970, Arar, terrorism, crime, Mohamed Mahjoub /a>, state, statism, libertarian, civil liberties

Who Said This?

But the democratic part of democratic conservatism reflects our insistence on democratic accountability and reform in government.

We believe that Parliament must be reformed so that individual MPs can have a meaningful voice; that an appointed, patronage-ridden Senate is a disgrace; and that citizens must be able to have a direct say over governing their country through such means as initiative and referenda.

This is the Reform part of our heritage, and this conviction that government must be more open, more free, and more democratic is a central part of our political creed.


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Canada, conservatives, politics, government,

Free Book Online: Rosa Luxemburg and South Africa

Newly released online as a PDF



Capitalist accumulation as a whole, as an actual historical process,
has two different aspects. One concerns the commodity market
and the place where surplus value is produced – the factory,
the mine, the agricultural estate… The other aspect of the
accumulation of capital concerns the relations between capitalism
and the non-capitalist modes of production which start making
their appearance on the international stage. Its predominant
methods are colonial policy, an international loan system – a policy
of spheres of interest – and war. Force, fraud, oppression, looting
are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment…
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, p. 432.

Capital now devours human beings: it becomes a cannibal. Every
human activity must now become capital and bear interest, so
that investment-seeking capital can live: schools, kindergartens,
universities, health systems, energy utilities, roads, railways, the
post office, telecommunications and other means of communication,
etc. The anarcho-capitalist dreams go even further. Even the police
and legislation are to be transformed into capital investments. One
receives a licence to live and to participate in any of the spheres
of society only if one pays to capital the fees required in the form
of interest. Capital becomes a ‘superworld’ to which sacrificial
victims must be brought.
Ulrich Duchrow and Franz Hinkelammert,
Property for people, not for profit, p.148.

These two citations present in a nutshell the basic traits of capitalist
accumulation from its origins to its current forms – the dominance of the
capitalist forms in the arena of material production, the continuous use
of coercion, violence and theft in order to increase the rate of profit, as
well as the intrinsic tendency of capitalism to subjugate all aspects of
social life to the reign of profit.

The 3rd Rosa Luxemburg Political Education Seminar, jointly
organised by the Centre of Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-
Natal in Durban and the Southern African Regional Office of the Rosa
Luxemburg Foundation in Johannesburg, was held on March 2nd – 4th
2006 in Durban. The Seminar examined these general characteristics of
capitalist accumulation within the global, regional and local context.
That context is shaped, on the one hand, by the growing impact of
a corporate driven globalisation, but also the expansion of South African
capital into neighbouring countries, the emergence of new forms of
‘primitive accumulation’ under the label of Black Economic Empowerment,
and the ongoing commodification and privatisation of public services.
On the other hand, there is a growing movement which not only
resists the commercialisation of all sphere of human life but strives to
build alternatives – to create ‘another world’ which is not only possible
but necessary.

The success of the Seminar is due to many contributors. Very
valuable inputs were made by overseas guests including Elmar Altvater,
Nicola Bullard, Massimo De Angelis, Ulrich Duchrow and Gill Hart.
Other crucial interventions came from scholar-activists from the region
including Jeff Guy, Ntwala Mwilima, Prishani Naidoo and Greg Ruiters.
But this alone would not have been enough to make the seminar the
thrilling event it was. The other factor was vibrant interaction from the
floor. Contributions by activists from townships and social movements
– and the often forgotten inconspicuous work of the staff members of the
organising institutions – created an atmosphere of rigorous debate and
mutual encouragement.

This book contains some of the contributions to the 3rd Rosa
Luxemburg Political Education Seminar. The materials gathered here
will hopefully provide a valuable source of inspiration for activists and
will encourage them to extend their studies on other important writings
which form part of our huge theoretical heritage. However, these texts
can never fully reflect the lively spirit of interaction and solidarity that
prevailed throughout the event. To experience this unique feeling it was
essential to be there.

See:

Marxism

Imperialism

Africa

State Capitalism in the USSR

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
South Africa, Rosa Luxemburg, Marxism, capitalism, Imperialism, PDF, free book online