R. Cobb

R.Cobb was a cartoonist for the LA Free Press in the sixties and seventies. He went on to do the design work on Alien. I always liked this cartoon. Ironic that it is as relevant today as it was back during the Viet Nam war era.



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Carnival of Anarchy Extended

The Carnival of Anarchy has been extended until July 1. We are blogging on the topic of ecology and environmentalism and the responses keep coming in.

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Gambling On Your Future

Here is another reason we need to democratize defined benefit pension plans, whether run by the government or through our employers. While these institutional funds talk about the need for shareholder democracy; they deny the same to us.

They are using their vast reserves of captial now to play the market place investing in risky enterprises like hedge funds and private equity funds.

Canada's three-largest pension fund managers, unable to meet the long-term needs of retirees with returns from stocks and bonds, plan to increase private-equity investments after spending about C$50 billion ($47 billion) buying companies, toll roads and gas pipelines.

The pension funds added C$31.7 billion to private equity holdings in their most recent fiscal year, almost double the amount of the previous 12 months. The retirement plans are buying riskier assets because they don't expect publicly traded securities to provide high enough returns to pay the more than C$1.56 trillion of benefits owed to retirees over the next 50 years, according to annual reports from the pension funds.

The ability of workers to control, or even to influence, the investment of their deferred wages in pension funds — which are now by far the nation’s largest source of capital — is an old but recurring debate. Unions played a leading role in the creation and expansion of private pension trusts, particularly the traditional defined-benefit plans that are funded almost entirely by employer contributions.4 Yet because control over how pension assets would be invested was
never made a bargaining priority, today at least 90 percent of private sector pension fund assets are controlled exclusively by management.

Since the Second World War a number of factors have led to increased investment by institutional investors in public corporations. There has been the use of superannuation and pension schemes. There has been an increase in insurance linked investment products and other forms of indirect investment. Trustee investment rules have been relaxed, enabling trustees to invest in equities

The result is that in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and the UK more than 50% of all equities are held by institutional investors and the tendency is to increase. Add to this the traditional domination by institutions of the bond market and we have the beginning of the growth of a significant counterveiling power if the economic strength is harnessed to a common cause. Listed corporations are becoming the servants of global financial activity rather than its masters.

Peter Drucker argued that this led to a quiet revolution – ‘The Unseen Revolution...The US is the first truly Socialist country."This was simply reflecting what Berle in his later workings had identified and his research student Paul Harbrecht had called ‘The Paraproprietal Society’ – the evolution of a new form of property.

Until the late 1980s the tendency of the institutions was to be a sleeping giant. There were instances of discrete intervention but by and large the institutions voted with their feet and followed the Wall Street Walk – if in doubt, sell.

Institutions themselves came under attack and we see two developments. First, the involvement by them in promotion of improved corporate governance and secondly the use of specialist funds managers. The latter makes it more unlikely for institutions to become activists in particular companies although there have been exceptional cases where a group of funds managers have taken action.

Institutions are primarily focussed on profit and liquidity and have been attacked for short termism in their approach to companies. There is also a problem of lack of coincidence between the interests of institutions and other smaller shareholders in takeover situations. Often institutions collectively have strategically significant holdings.

Institutions sometimes encounter legal problems in increased shareholder activism.

It is sometimes argued that public sector pension funds are more likely to take a long term strategic view and certainly the US and the UK public sector funds have had a tendency at least to mouth the appropriate rhetoric.

See:

Public Pensions Fund Private Partnerships

AIM High

Golden Parachutes

Your Pension Dollars At Work

P3= Public Pension Partnerships

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Prehistoric Happy Feet

What do you call a five foot penguin?
Whatever it wants to be called.

Peruvian prehistoric penguins were taller than Danny DeVito

Danny DeVito is 4'11" tall. These penguins topped out at 5 feet, and lived during a particularly sweltering time in Earth's history. 36 million years ago Icadyptes salasi plied the waters off the southern coast of Peru.

A prehistoric penguin has been uncovered that - at more than 5ft tall and with a spear-like 7in beak - is the mother of all penguins.

	A giant I salasi skull compared to Peru’s modern Humboldt penguin

The giant birds lived around the equator tens of millions of years earlier than expected and during a period when the earth was much warmer than it is now.

Researchers discovered their fossilised remains in Peru.

Evidence that the giant penguins once marched to South America was found by Dr Julia Clarke of North Carolina State University.

"We tend to think of penguins as being cold-adapted species, but the new fossils date back to one of the warmest periods in the last 65 million years," Dr Clarke said. "The evidence indicates that penguins reached low-latitude regions more than 30 million years prior to our previous estimates."

See:

March Of The Penquins to Extinction

it's natures way

Not So Cute Seals

Penquin Empiricism

Morality not from animals

Ted Morton To Outlaw Homosexuality

Brecht Meets Oscar

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Strange Bedfellows

You know the climate change deniers have officially joined the Flat Earth society when their major spokesperson publishes his work in Lyndon LaRouche's conspiratorial publication; Executive Intelligence (sic) Review.

Yep that puts them squarely in the camp of conspiracy nutbars and folks who believe that humans lived with dinosaurs.

Of course LaRouche and his followers are the original climate change deniers, who have spent the past thirty years promoting nuclear power.

Of course it is all about the company you keep. And it seems that when it comes to Climate Change there are those on the American left who also embrace the flat earth ideal.

Alex Cockburn for instance, who in keeping up with his fellow ex-Trotskyist, ex-Brit compatriot and former Nation fellow writer; Christopher Hitchens, has decided to be a contrarian.

“Peer Review” and Global Warming

There were yelps of alarm and the rustle of skirts being hoist knee-high after I published a note on sources in my column last week, Dissidents against Dogma. The panic was caused by one of the references to the work of Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski who, as I wrote, has written devastating onslaughts on the IPCC rallying cry that CO2 is higher now than it has ever been over the past 650,000 years. Jaworowski has pointed out the enormous inaccuracies in the ice-core data and the ease with which a CO2 reading from any given year is contaminated by the CO2 from entirely different eras. He also points out that from 1985 on there’s been some highly suspect editing of the CO2 data, presumably to reinforce the case for the “unprecedented levels” of modern CO2. I offered a couple of references to Jaworowski, one of them to an essay, "Ice Core Data Show No Carbon Dioxide Increase", published in 21st Century Science & Technology, Spring 1997.

It turns out that this is a publication put out by the LaRouche crowd. Next thing you know, poor Jaworowski was being accused oif being a neo-Nazi cultist, with kindred vitriol hurled at CounterPunch co-editor Cockburn.

Of course this makes sense since LaRouche is also an ex-Trotskyist. Heck isn't everybody who makes up the American neo-con right.

The problem with Hitchens and Cockburn is that they could have posed a libertarian alternative to the war in Iraq (which Hitchens supported) or to Kyoto and the capitalist crisis of the environment, which Cockburn denies. But they didn't. Instead they have like their former Trotskyist predecessors, embraced the neo-con right. Just as some of those in the so called Libertarian movement in the U.S. have over the issue of climate change.

Take Lew Rockwell, for instance. He is incredibly insightful when discussing the over bearing power of the state to make war, or the intrusion of the state into our lives. But he happily links to articles such as this one by Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch, regurgitates the most of the so-called scientific evidence against global warming, every single bit of which has been debunked and refuted before.

It is clear from the preponderance of evidence, from the vast majority of climate scientists (a number that is growing, not shrinking) that global warming is really happening and is caused by human activity. Why, then do libertarians and anarchists refuse to accept it?

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Edward Gibbon Wakefield

In searching for a pithy definition of Fete Accompli I came across this in Wikipedia.

Like Stephen Harper here is another Tory politician Quebecers liked; Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

But unlike Harper his motto was; if elected I will not serve. Which meant they liked him a lot.

While active with the New Zealand Company, Edward Gibbon had maintained his interest in Canadian affairs. He was involved with the North American Colonial Association of Ireland, NACAI. At his instigation, the NACAI were trying to purchase a large estate just outside Montreal where they wanted to establish another Colonial settlement. Edward Gibbon pushed the scheme with his usual energy; apparently, the government did not object in principle but they strenuously objected to Edward Gibbon having any part of it.

But trusted or not by the politicians, Edward Gibbon was involved in the scheme. The NACAI sent him back to Canada as their representative; he arrived in Montreal in January of 1842 and stayed in Canada for about a year. At this stage , Canada was still coming to terms with the union of Upper and Lower Canada. There were serious differences between the French and English Canadians with the English Canadians holding the political clout. Edward Gibbon skillfully manipulated these differences; it was fairly easy for him to get the support of the French Canadians. By the end of that year he had got himself elected to the Canadian Parliament. It is perhaps typical of Edward Gibbon that, having been elected, he immediately returned to Britain and never took up his seat.

He went back to Canada in 1843 and spent some months there. However when he heard of his brother Arthur's death at the Wairau Affray, he immediately quit Canada and never returned. This appears to be the end of his involvement with Canadian affairs except that he was paid about twenty thousand pounds by the NACAI for his work in Canada. As always with Edward Gibbon, principles and profit seemed to go neatly together.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield was a scoundrel and a cad, a free land advocate, a realitor , opposed to the British Mercantile State Monopoly, and thus he was not trusted by them. Despite being in business with them in forming colonies as their real estate agent.

Competing schemes of colonial emigration with different implications for equality were promoted to create more consumers of British manufactured goods and producers of food. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s plans were designed to recreate in British North America the inequalities associated with labour’s divorce from capital as necessary for social and economic development, but others sought the same end by means of the greater social equality that came from reuniting labour with capital. The poor and dispossessed in Britain who produced and consumed little could be transformed into agrarian property-holders in colonial societies dominated by such petty producers. A degree of inequality would persist, but the resulting colonial societies were far more egalitarian and therefore socially and politically democratic than Britain itself. In such a social context, nineteenth-century liberalism—its celebration of independence and equation of individual economic success with virtue—seemed especially plausible to contemporaries.

Herr Doctor Professor Karl Marx outlines the origin of American Libertarianism, that shocked Wakefield; its exceptionalism as a free soil political economy, not a capitalist one. America was a truly free market economy as long as land was held as a public trust for private use.

As a commercial colonizer Wakefield was shocked his experiment had failed. It had not created a capitalist colony bound to the Mother Country, rather it had given free men, free land. But then again he was an idle speculator, a salesman of colonies for his masters.

And so in desperation as Marx points out Wakefield offers his masters a solution to end the free labour republic, taxation, expropriation of the land by the State and then selling it back to free men at such a high cost they have to become wage slaves instead of independent landowning producers.

This then is the secret of the political economy of Capitalism. That it must destroy the real free market by imposition of Statist taxation for capital accumulation. America as a colonial experiment had evolved into a Republic of Free Labour and Free Soil, something that most American Libertarians acknowledge as their exceptionalism. But this was too much for Old World capitalism and it needed a State that would tax property and then sell it off to the highest bidder. That as Marx says and they would concur;

that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.

While vulgar liberaltarians leave out the capitalist and simply decry the State and Taxation as the villains genuine American descendants of the libertarian independent producers would embrace instead the ideal of the cooperative commonwealth as a way of challenging the State and its taxation of their 'public property'.

It is ironic that Marx who is assaulted as a statist by the right would embrace the libertarian ideal that the truly independent producer is also the owner of his own property, that is land. But as Marx says the secret to this form of private property is its communal ownership as public property of the producers.

• A View of the Art of Colonization by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, 1849.

• The Modern Theory of Colonisation last chapter in Karl Marx's Capital, Vol I focused on Wakefield's theory.

It is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies, but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country. As the system of protection at its origin attempted to manufacture capitalists artificially in the mother-country, so Wakefield’s colonization theory, which England tried for a time to enforce by Acts of Parliament, attempted to effect the manufacture of wage-workers in the Colonies. This he calls “systematic colonization.” First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.

“If,” says Wakefield, “all members of the society are supposed to possess equal portions of capital... no man would have a motive for accumulating more capital than he could use with his own hands. This is to some extent the case in new American settlements, where a passion for owning land prevents the existence of a class of laborers for hire.” So long, therefore, as the laborer can accumulate for himself — and this he can do so long as he remains possessor of his means of production — capitalist accumulation and the capitalistic mode of production are impossible. The class of wage-laborers, essential to these, is wanting.

We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony, on the contrary, consists in this — that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation. This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice — opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labor very dear, as respects the laborer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labor at any price.”

As in the colonies the separation of the laborer from the conditions of labor and their root, the soil, does not exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale, so neither does the separation of agriculture from industry exist, not the destruction of the household industry of the peasantry. Whence then is to come the internal market for capital? “No part of the population of America is exclusively agricultural, excepting slaves and their employers who combine capital and labor in particular works. Free Americans, who cultivate the soil, follow many other occupations. Some portion of the furniture and tools which they use is commonly made by themselves. They frequently build their own houses, and carry to market, at whatever distance, the produce of their own industry. They are spinners and weavers; they make soap and candles, as well as, in many cases, shoes and clothes for their own use. In America the cultivation of land is often the secondary pursuit of a blacksmith, a miller or a shopkeeper.” With such queer people as these, where is the “field of abstinence” for the capitalists?

But in the colonies, this pretty fancy is torn asunder. The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mother-country, because many laborers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the labor-market is always understocked. The law of supply and demand of labor falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence”; on the other, the regular reproduction of the wage-laborer as wage-laborer comes into collision with impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the production of wage-laborers into independent producers, who work for themselves instead of for capital, and enrich themselves instead of the capitalist gentry, reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions of the labor-market. Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage-laborer remain indecently low. The wage-laborer loses into the bargain, along with the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious capitalist. Hence all the inconveniences that our E. G. Wakefield pictures so doughtily, so eloquently, so pathetically. The supply of wage-labor, he complains, is neither constant, nor regular, nor sufficient. “The supply of labor is always not only small but uncertain.” “Though the produce divided between the capitalist and the laborer be large, the laborer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist.... Few, even those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.” The laborers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part of their labor. It avails him nothing, is he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease... to be laborers for hire; they... become independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labor-market.” Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come! No wonder Wakefield laments the absence of all dependence and of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage-workers in the colonies. On account of the high wages, says his disciple, Merivale, there is in the colonies “the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient laborers — for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them.... In ancient civilized countries the laborer, though free, is by a law of Nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means.”

What is now, according to Wakefield, the consequence of this unfortunate state of things in the colonies? A “barbarising tendency of dispersion” of producers and national wealth. The parcelling-out of the means of production among innumerable owners, working on their own account, annihilates, along with the centralization of capital, all the foundation of combined labor. Every long-winded undertaking, extending over several years and demanding outlay of fixed capital, is prevented from being carried out. In Europe, capital invests without hesitating a moment, for the working-class constitutes its living appurtennce, always in excess, always at disposal. But in the colonies! Wakefield tells and extremely doleful anecdote. He was talking with some capitalists of Canada and the state of New York, where the immigrant wave often becomes stagnant and deposits a sediment of “supernumerary” laborers. “Our capital,” says one of the characters in the melodrama, "was ready for many operations which require a considerable period of time for their completion; but we could not begin such operations with labor which, we knew, would soon leave us. If we had been sure of retraining the labor of such emigrants, we should have been glad to have engaged it at once, and for a high price: and we should have engaged it, even though we had been sure it would leave us, provided we had been sure of a fresh supply whenever we might need it.”

After Wakefield has constructed the English capitalist agriculture and its “combined” labor with the scattered cultivation of American peasants, he unwittingly gives us a glimpse at the reverse of the medal. He depicts the mass of the American people as well-to-do, independent, enterprising, and comparatively cultured, whilst “the English agricultural laborer is miserable wretch, a pauper.... In what country, except North America and some new colonies, do the wages of free labor employed in agriculture much exceed a bare subsistence for the laborer? ... Undoubtedly , farm-horses in England, being a valuable property, are better fed than English peasants.” But, never mind, national wealth is, once again, by its very nature, identical with misery of the people.

How, then, to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? If men were willing, at a blow, to turn all the soil from public into private property, they would destroy certainly the root of the evil, but also — the colonies. The trick is how to kill two birds with one stone. Let the Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into an independent peasant. The fund resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the wage-workers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of labor by violation of the sacred law of supply and demand, the Government is to employ, on the other hand, in proportion as it grows; to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies, and thus keep the wage-labor market full for the capitalists. Under these circumstances, tout sera pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles. This is the great secret of “systematic colonization.” By this plan, Wakefield cries in triumph, “the supply of labor must be constant and regular, because, first, as no laborer would be able to procure land until he had worked for money, all immigrant laborers, working for a time for wages and in combination, would produce capital for the employment of more laborers; secondly, because every laborer who left off working for wages and became a landowner would, by purchasing land, provide a fund for bringing fresh labor to the colony.” The price of the soil imposed by the State must, of course, be a “sufficient price” — i.e., so high “as to prevent the laborers from becoming independent landowners until others had followed to take their place.” This “sufficient price for the land” is nothing but a euphemistic circumlocution for the ransom which the laborer pays to the capitalist for leave to retire from the wage-labor market to the land. First, he must create for the capitalist “capital,” with which the latter may be able to exploit more laborers; then he must place, at his own expense, a locum tenens [placeholder] on the labor-market, whom the Government forwards across the sea for the benefit of his old master, the capitalist.

However, we are not concerned here with the conditions of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the housetops: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer.

See:

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Many Headed Hydra

Libertarian Anti-Imperialism

William Appleman Williams

Libertarian Dialectics

War and the Market State




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How Times Change

Huge papier mache statues of the great builders of Quebec were among the flags and marching bands in a boisterous parade Sunday that marked Quebec's Fete nationale provincial holiday. Former premier Rene Levesque was featured along with explorer Samuel de Champlain in the march,

Samuel de Champlain father of New France, founder of Quebec City, would be considered a pederast by today's Harpocrite government.

And while Conservatives and conservatives hearken back to the good old days of traditional values, this is not a 'traditional value' they support since they have lobbied for twenty years to change of age of consent from 14 to 16.

Champlain achieved at the beginning of the winter an important gesture: on December 27, 1610, aged at least 30 years, he signed a marriage contract with a 12-year-old girl, Helene Boullé. Because of her youth, it is specified that the marriage was to be carried out only after two years had elapsed. The engagement took place two days later and, on December 30, the bridal blessing was given in the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, in Paris. Promised a dowry (6 000ª), Champlain received 4.500ª the day before, which is an invaluable supplement for his company.

Of course this wasn't a sexual/love marriage but one for financial purposes. Merely a marriage of convenience. Altogether now let's repeat; Marriage is a sacred institution.

Luckily for Champlain his marriage would not be annulled under Bill C-22.

Bill C-22 was passed by the Justice Committee on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 with one amendment. The government’s original Bill, which raises the age of sexual consent from 14 to16, would have allowed an exemption to the new law if the couple involved in the existing relationship were married, or in a common-law relationship or were in a relationship which had produced or where they were expecting a child. The Bill, as amended by the Committee, proposes to allow relationships between 15 year olds and adults who are more than five years older, to continue to be legal, as long as the people involved are married.

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Quebec Fete Nationale is Pagan

How pagan rites are revised to fit political purposes.

The reporter assumes that the Roman Catholic establishment in Quebec was not being political when it changed this ancient rite of Summer Solstice to a celebration of John the Baptist. Ironically a major festival for Freemasons, the political opposition to the RC establishment in Quebec.

Fete nationale began as a religious holiday back in 1615 to mark the summer solstice and the birth of John the Baptist.

But in years since, particularly with the waning of the influence of the Roman Catholic church in Quebec, it became more political. In recent years, efforts have been made to make it more inclusive and less political.

Quebecers celebrate Fete nationale more enthusiastically than Canada Day but one of the main reasons for that is because July 1 is the province's annual moving day and people are busy hauling boxes and furniture to new homes.

How to make Canada irrelevant, millions of dollars spent by Sheila Copps to supply Quebecers with Canadian flags, they can wave as they move with all their belongings festooned with Canadian decals, stamps, bumberstickers, etc.

While Quebec and its Roman Catholic Aristocracy adopted St. Jean de Baptiste as their patron saint for their Nation State the Freemasons did the same but for the promotion of the brotherhood of man.

On June 24th, we observe the festival of summer sun and on December 27th, we observe the festival of the winter sun. The June festival commemorates John the Baptist and the December festival honors John the Evangelist.

These two festivals bear the names of Christian Saints, but ages ago, before the Christian era they bore other names. Masonry adopted these festivals and the Christian names, but has taken away Christian dogma, and made their observance universal for all men of all beliefs.

The Baptist is patron of tailors (because he made his own garments in the desert), of shepherds (because he spoke of the "Lamb of God"), and of masons. This patronage over masons is traced to his words:

Make ready the way of the Lord, make straight all his paths. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, And the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways smooth. (Luke 3, 4-6.)

All over Europe, from Scandinavia to Spain, and from Ireland to Russia, Saint John's Day festivities are closely associated with the ancient nature lore of the great summer festival of pre-Christian times. Fires are lighted on mountains and hilltops on the eve of his feast. These "Saint John's fires" burn brightly and quietly along the fiords of Norway, on the peaks of the Alps, on the slopes of the Pyrenees, and on the mountains of Spain (where they are called Hogueras). They were an ancient symbol of the warmth and light of the sun which the forefathers greeted at the beginning of summer. In many places, great celebrations are held with dances, games, and outdoor meals.

Many of these same fire festivals are also practiced on Walpurgisnacht and Beltane; May Day. Another pagan festival of great social importance.


See:

Fete Accompli


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Fete Accompli

Once again the PM missed attending the party of the year;

Hundreds of thousands flock to TO Pride Parade

Instead he was feted in Quebec, as he feted Quebec Nationalism.

Huge parade, concerts and fun mark Quebec's Fete nationale holiday

Huge papier mâché statues of the great builders of Quebec were among the flags and marching bands in a boisterous parade yesterday that marked Quebec's Fête Nationale provincial holiday. An image of former premier René Lévesque was featured along with that of explorer Samuel de Champlain in the march.

The links between Levesque, a sovereigntist icon, and the celebration of the Fete nationale were obvious to Yvon Trudel, who marched in the parade with the nationalist Mouvement Quebec Francais.

"It represents the future - the future country that we want," he said when asked what the day meant to him.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper visited Roberval, Que., where he praised the contribution of Quebecers to building Canada.

"The first people in this country to call themselves Canadians were the French-speaking settlers who built their first community on the banks of the St. Lawrence then followed our rivers to places like Lac St-Jean and then across our land envisioning a country from sea to sea," he said.

And my how times have changed .

It was a far cry from the days when riots plagued Fete nationale. in 1968, Pierre Trudeau won a majority government the day after he stared down rioters at a St-Jean Baptiste Day parade in Montreal.

For Harper Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Transgendered Canada is more of a threat than Quebec Separatism.

Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal have been named Canada's five top gay-friendly tourist destinations by an American magazine.

One challenges his machismo the other embraces it.


SEE:

Harpers Legacy

Avoiding The Issue

Some Same Sex Marriage Ok Say Tories

Harper Gaffe #2: SSM

Intolerant Blogging Tories

Mortons Homophobia Rebuked

Harper

SSM

Same Sex Marriage


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War Is Peace

Quebec Premier Charest addressing the Van Doos on Friday who are about to go to Afghanistan.

"You are the acting arm of Quebec pacifism," Charest said.

I think he mistook pacifism for pacification .









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