Goof Off Day

Today is National Goof-Off Day And this guy wants to make it permanent; Work-hating bureaucrat will quit for $1 million.Which reminds us all that we do have the Right To Be Lazy.





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Bombardier Mobilizes Workers Power

Canada's ne plus ultra neo-liberal state capitalist corporatio; Bombardier is mobilizing its workers to demand it be given contracts to build subways cars for the TTC and for the Montreal subway system.

Bombardier employees told commuters on the Montreal metro system Monday that they want the government to choose them for a lucrative home-grown project.

Quebec Premier Jean Charest isn't ruling out the possibility that his government will award a major transport contract to Bombardier Inc. without a public tender.

Charest said Monday he is “receptive” to public demands that the Liberal government award the $1.2-billion contact to replace Montreal subway cars directly to Bombardier Transportation.

More than 3,000 residents of La Pocatiere, where the cars would be built, attended a rally on the weekend to pressure the province to do so.

Bombardier could not exist without government subsidies. It's competition is French state capitalist Alstom's and German State Capitalist Siemens. Alston actually has a plant operating in Quebec.

Being a state captialist business makes Bombardier the company of choice for the PRC. Bombardier wins $51.3M contract for rail link to Beijing Airport


And Seimens move to bid for building subway cars for the TTC could be seen as revenge;Bombardier wins $361 mln light-rail deal in Germany

But it does nothing for its share price, which continues to be boosted by Canadian taxpayers. Why don't we just own Bombardier outright, instead of continuing with the family business farce. That way the workers who are being used as pawns by the Bombardier family, could run the business themselves. And certainly the history of workers control in Quebec shows they can do it more profitably.

Bombardier "sell"

Monday, March 13, 2006 11:46:26 AM ET
Canaccord Adams

NEW YORK, March 13 (newratings.com) - Analysts at Canaccord Adams reiterate their "sell" rating on Bombardier Inc (BBD.B.TOR).

In a research note published this morning, the analysts mention that there are uncertainties surrounding the orders from US Airways on the company's backlogs and the timing of new orders, if any. These uncertainties, coupled with the lead time required with suppliers and Bombardier's current production rate, suggest that the company may have to cut the production of its larger jets in the near term, the analysts say. Canaccord Adams expresses its concern regarding the impact of the continuing appreciation of the Canadian dollar on the company’s margins in the near future.




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Plutocrats Rule

Plutonomies? Plutonomies?

Mr. Kapur has explained that among countries that function as “plutonomies” — a category that encompasses the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada — economic growth is powered by the increasingly wealthy, who dominate both income and consumption. In Japan and most of Europe, the rich have not been getting much richer and the economy is more egalitarian. A boom in assets, rising profits, favourable treatment by market-friendly governments, and improved productivity have allowed the wealthy to prosper. Mr. Kapur believes that corporate profits are set to climb, as “low inflation, high productivity, globalization, and low labour power” send profit margins even higher.

Why not call it what it is; Plutocracy and the rich are Plutocrats.

Prof. Neil Brooks says Canada at Risk of Becoming a Plutocracy

Forget Democracy welcome to the return of the Plutocracy one hundred years after it was spawned in America. This is what George Bush and Tony Blair mean by bringing Democracy to the world. They really mean rule of the wealthy; Plutocracy.

China issues report to criticize US for its democracy of money As former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said, "The United States is not a democracy, it is a plutocracy. The people don't rule in the United States. Wealth rules, the corporations rule."

Plutocrats ruled America at the end of the 19th Century, the robber barons, and expanded their power with the rise of the Trusts at the begining of the 20th Century. Today the global business giants that dominate the world market and its politics remind us that those who advocated for workers back over 100 years ago were not that far off the mark. And their rallying call against plutocracy is as relevant today as it was then.

Organized Labor and Social Justice Movements
Eugene Debs' revolutionary unionsim

by Charles Sullivan

Labor unions have always been under assault by the company bosses and their cohorts in government. This connection reveals that the government does not serve the people; it serves business interests, the elite. It is thus evidence not of democracy, but of Plutocracy.

Jack London: The Iron Heel

'I'll show you something that isn't a dream, then,' Ernest answered.

'And that something I shall call the Oligarchy. You call it the

Plutocracy. We both mean the same thing, the large capitalists or

the trusts. Let us see where the power lies today. And in order to

do so, let us apportion society into its class divisions.

'There are three big classes in society. First comes the Plutocracy,

which is composed of wealthy bankers, railway magnates, corporation

directors, and trust magnates. Second, is the middle class, your

class, gentlemen, which is composed of farmers, merchants, small

manufacturers, and professional men. And third and last comes my

class, the proletariat, which is composed of the wage-workers.*

Triumphant Plutocracy ; the story of American public life from 1840-1910 Richard Franklin Pettigrew

It has been well said by the famous English writer and philanthropist, Mr. Stead, that the modern business world has adopted a new Golden Rule as follows :

“ Dollars and dimes, dollars and dimes ;
To be without money is the worst of crimes.
To keep all you get, and get all you can,
Is the first and the last and the whole duty of man.”

That this Golden Rule has been adopted by the so-called business men of the United States is evidenced by what has been accomplished in the distribution of the wealth produced by the great toiling masses of this country.

Recently it was announced that John D. Rockefeller had finally succeeded in accumulating one billion dollars, thus making him the richest man that ever lived.

The American people know how he succeeded in accumulating this vast sum. He produced none of it—he secured all of it by exploiting the American people who had produced it.

The most thrifty of the American people do well if they succeed in saving $300 a year above all their expenses, and they must be busy every day in the year in order to do that. To accumulate one billion dollars at the rate of $300 a year—a dollar a day for three hundred working days—a man would have to live and labor 3,333,333 years. He would have to be older than Methuselah—he would have to start when the world was hot no matter where he ended up.

But if he was cunning, unscrupulous and religious and followed Rockefeller’s method of robbing his fellow-men, he could get the billion-dollar prize in fifty years.

One billion dollars is equivalent to the earnings of one hundred thousand men for twenty years, provided they earned $500 apiece each year, and during all that time leaving nothing out for sickness, death or accident. The fact that Rockefeller could appropriate the earnings of his fellow-men and the fact that he did do it is what has caused the social and economic protest against the existing system and the cry for justice.

This great and powerful force—the accumulated wealth of the United States—has taken over all the functions of Government, Congress, the issue of money, and banking and the army and navy in order to have a band of mercenaries to do their bidding and protect their stolen property.

Immediately after the announcement that Rockefeller was worth a billion dollars, Armour & Swift announced a dividend upon their capital stock of thirty-three and one-third per cent and each of these concerns increased their capital stock from twenty millions to one hundred millions.

It is safe to say that neither of these concerns had any capital stock for which they had paid a dollar. Their capital stock represented what they had stolen from the people of this country. Their working capital is represented by bonds. The eighty millions of stock which they have since added is also nothing but water and is issued so as to make the annual dividends appear smaller. The exploited people will object less to paying six or seven per cent on a hundred millions than to paying thirty-three and one-third per cent on twenty millions. It looks better in print.

How do Armour and Swift make their money ? They are the great packers. They are in collusion. They fix the prices they pay the farmer for his hogs and cattle, and they fix the prices they will charge the consumer for their product. They are simply robbing the producer and the consumer, and their robbery is represented in their great wealth, which they did not produce but which they took from the people under the guise of law.

A Forgotten Fighter against Plutocracy

The best of these standard-bearers of the anti-monopolist crusade were known beyond the borders of this country. Even in the midst of the reconstruction of the Soviet Union, Lenin, for example, found time to follow their work. In October 1922, Oscar Cesare, the American artist, went to sketch Lenin in his Kremlin office. Cesare told Walter Duranty the next day that, he had murmured something about political opinion in America. “Yes,” Lenin replied, “I’ve just been reading this,” and he held up a red-bound copy of Pettigrew’s Plutocrat Democracy (sic). “It’s a very fine book,” he said— and his eyes sparkled as he looked down at it. “I got the impression,” Cesare commented, “that Lenin didn’t admire the American political system as much as he admired the book.”

Who was Pettigrew? What sort of man was this Republican senator that he could call forth Lenin’s admiration? Lenin was not in the habit of praising bourgeois politicians or their works.

You will not find the answer to these questions in the best-known liberal histories of Pettigrew’s period— in the Beards’ Rise of American Civilization; in Kendrick and Hacker’s History of the United States Since 1865; or in John Chamberlain’s Farewell to Reform. As though designed to emphasize his obscurity, Pettigrew’s name remains misspelled and the title of his book misquoted in Duranty’s Moscow dispatches published in book form twelve years after Cesare’s interview with Lenin. It is only when we turn to Pettigrew’s book that we begin to see why he has been obliterated from official historical memory. His book is a scathing indictment of monopoly rule beside which the writings of the muckrakers and speeches of the reformers seem pale and harmless.

As we delve deeper into the events of Pettigrew’s career, we understand still more clearly why he has been cast into obscurity. Richard Franklin Pettigrew was the first United States senator from South Dakota. He was not only a picturesque personality but an influential figure in national politics at the turn of the century.

Pettigrew’s elimination from the political arena coincided with the defeat of the middle-class radicalism he represented. He was crushed by the political steamroller of the plutocracy as an obstacle to its concentration of power. In the process his reputation was so blackened and his deeds so distorted that he has never been accorded his rightful place as one of the staunchest opponents of monopoly domination in American public life.

William Graham Sumner:

Against Democracy, Plutocracy, and Imperialism

Sumner was too astute to believe that there was any danger that
democracy could degenerate into mass rule. The mass was unorganized,
unintelligent, and without leisure or a taste for study. How could
they possibly rule? The fate of modern democracy is to fall into subjection
to plutocracy. The term plutocracy is integral to Sumner's
thought.

By it, he did not mean the rule of wealth, for he thought that
wealth should have more political power than the mass. Rather, he
meant a type of government in which effective control rested with
men of wealth who sought to use political means to increase their
wealth. Sumner believed that there is no form of government better
suited to their control than democracy.

The methods and machinery of democratic, republican self government
caucuses, primaries, committees, and conventions
lend themselves perhaps more easily than other
political methods and machinery to the uses of selfish cliques
which seek political influence for interested purposes.

William Morris - Art Under Plutocracy Completing the American Revolution Norman D. Livergood

Forgotten Victims of America's Plutocracy | BaltimoreChronicle.com

Plutocracy and Politics






Demise of the Middleclass as we once knew it! The Internal Revenue Service figures and the results of corporate deregulation in the decade of the 1980s. Ironically, this has resulted in a 2,184% increase in the salaaries of the overclass, the largest increase of the richest incomes in recorded history. However, the middleclass has had only a 44% increase in the same period of time. If a family earning $13,000 a year at poverty level, had the same increase in their income as the rich, they would have had an unbelievable $283,920 annual income! Poverty would no longer exist! This is the beginning of the end of our middleclass culture. Is a class war inevitable???

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Child Care

Here is a damn good reason we need to have a national day care/ child care program. To avoid this in the future.Adult children living at home longer And no you won't get the Tory baby bonus. Grow up already. Wait a minute, this must be source of the blogger boom!




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Quit Yer Whining

Ok enough whining and calls for more tax breaks out of the Business Lobby; the Canadian Taxpayers (sic) Federation, the NCC and the Fraser Institute. Here are the facts ma'am; Canada still cheapest in G7 for business

Canada is still the cheapest place to do business among G7 countries, even though the rising dollar has eroded some of its advantage over the United States, a KPMG study has found. In 2006, the cost of setting up and running a business in Canada for 10 years is 5.5-per-cent lower than in the U.S., the report says, thanks to lower wages, electricity and facility costs. In 2004, Canada's business costs were estimated to be 9 per cent below the U.S. while in 2002, Canada enjoyed a 14.5 per cent advantage.

And the secret is lower wages and social benefits paid for by taxpayers, that is workers who are the real taxpayers not like the phony taxpayers of the CTF business lobby.

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Wolves and Regulations

Here is another example of self regulation at work, and business as usual for capitalism, which led to the death of a young man attacked by a wolf. Of course the hew and cry goes up about the wolves until it is revealed that the real reason is the working conditions where the man was at. They had an illegal dump which attracted the wolves. Garbage, wolves and death

If wolves killed Ontario university student Kenton Carnegie, lax environmental regulations may have played a role in the tragedy, a CBC investigation indicates. Carnegie was the 22-year-old engineering student who died Nov. 8 while on a work term at Points North Landing, Sask., about 750 kilometres northeast of Saskatoon. The province hasn't released the cause of death, although the RCMP said in November it's likely he was killed by wolves. Documents obtained by the CBC show that Saskatchewan Environment Department officials have been concerned about an illegal garbage dump near the Points North Landing mining supply camp – a dump that wolves have been regularly visiting. The department confirms it has been trying to do something about the dump for years.

My comments on Wolves.


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Crony Capitalism and Hamm

Here is a case of crony capitalism, State capitalism by any other name. Neo-liberal state capitalism Conservative style.

Senior bureaucrats say the final decision about a controversial $350,000 loan to a struggling amusement park was made at the cabinet table. Andy Hare, director of lending and special projects for the Office of Economic Development, sent briefing notes about the precarious business situation at Magic Valley to then premier John Hamm, then tourism minister Rodney MacDonald, and then economic development minister Ernie Fage. "Magic Valley was struggling. I wanted some kind of direction," Hare told an all-party committee investigating the loan Monday. The 30-year-old amusement park outside New Glasglow is owned by Bill MacNeil, who worked on Hamm's 1998 and 1999 campaigns. It has been losing visitors since Highway 104 was twinned and newer theme parks opened in Moncton and Upper Clements.


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Offshoring

Offshoring, outsourcing, these are terms used for sending production abroad, leaving a country the hewers of wood and drawers of water, while secondary and tertiary production is done elsewhere and then the finished product is shipped back to the resource based country. Like Canada, and like the current crisis Newfoundland fishers find themselves in with the State Capitalist FPI a fish processing company now shipping Canadian Fish and jobs to China.

Unlike most private companies, FPI is governed – to some extent – by the Newfoundland and Labrador legislature. The FPI Act sets limits on individual ownership and, among other things, stipulates that the company be headquartered in St. John's. FPI was formed in 1984 as a Crown corporation, from the ashes of a number of private fish companies. It was launched as a publicly traded company in 1987. In 1990, declining fish stocks forced it to close three plants and develop a business plan that emphasized marketing over harvesting. FPI said it and other seafood producers are being hammered by fierce competition from low-cost processing plants in China, as well as other factors, including the high Canadian dollar.

So FPI in order to compete with China ships production there. Makes sense. NOT.

The Newfoundland and Labrador government plans to charge Fishery Products International for sending yellowtail flounder to China for processing, the fisheries minister said Tuesday. The company didn't obtain the required exemption under the Fish Inspection Act before shipping unprocessed fish out of the province, said Tom Rideout. "They shipped, and they shipped and they broke the law, and today they are under investigation and they'll be charged," Rideout told about 250 fish-plant workers protesting company plans to cut jobs and close plants in the Burin Peninsula.

But here is the reality that Canada's fishing production industry faces. Globalization. Capitalism has industrialized Fishing and Fishing production on a global basis. Local based secondary canning production etc. now faces Fordist production models.

But in reality, there is no Canadian seafood industry -- just a world industry. The typical fillet cooking on a North American grill has been harvested by a Russian trawler or raised in a Chilean fish farm, sent to China for gutting and filleting, and transported to Lunenburg, N.S., or Burin, Nfld., for slicing into portions, and neatly rolled, stuffed or slathered with sauce. The challenge is finding a profitable niche in this transnational supply chain. Sea change in the fisheries


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Why we need regulations

Here is another example of why people like government, and need government to regulate the market. It's the nature of the state under capitalism. The State is the regulator, since self regulation leads to this;

Death sparks calls for piercing guidelines The death of a St. John's girl from an infection caused by a breast piercing is sparking national calls for tougher industry regulation.

Mike Grant, who runs a tattoo and piercing studio in Victoria, BC, said strict national rules would do more to guarantee the industry is safe.Now, some people who work in the industry say they would like to see Canada-wide guidelines. "We understand that surgical steels release nickel salt into the body, creates infections in piercings, or open wounds, or in surgeries or implants," said Grant. "Only titanium should be used. That's a regulation that I follow, which I don't have to, but I do because I know it's the right thing to do." Grant said he would like the entire country to impose rules similar to the ones already in place in Winnipeg – that city made changes to its tattoo bylaw earlier this year to include all body modifications. Tattoo and piercing studios in Winnipeg need to be licensed and employees need to pass a certification exam.




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The New Inquisition

Here is the Orwellian logic of the Inquisition in action. In Afghanistan.Where we are supposedly defending "democratic values".

"We will invite him again [to renounce Christianity] because the religion of Islam is one of tolerance," trial judge Ansarullah Mawlazezadah told the BBC on Sunday. "We will ask him if he has changed his mind. If so, we will forgive him." Canada concerned over Afghan facing death for being a Christian

Yep No One Expects The Spanish Inquistion in the 21st Century. Especially an Inquisition protected by Canadian Armed Forces.

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