Headline Says It All

Humiliating spectacle of a world leader caught without a policy

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Bush, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Hezzbollah, war, invasion, eiruit, hostage, USA, Middle-East, crisis

Liberals Military Heritage

Fleet plagued by problems

Crash of a Canadian Forces helicopter, which killed 3 and injured 4 off Nova Scotia, occurred while aircraft was under restrictions because of past mechanical troubles

EDITORIAL: Keep our Snowbirds airworthy

Under the Trudeau government the Canadian state focused less on external military operational capacity and more on the use of the military for domestic problems.

One was the Trudeau fear of insurrection in Quebec post the FLQ crisis, the other was the idea that the military should also be used for domestic emergencies, like clearling snow from Toronto streets or clean up after storms.

The Trudeau government also looked at the military as an opportunity to offer jobs to Maritimers whose local fishing industry was in decline. Along with the policy of promoting the depopulation of the Maritimes by promoting fishers to take up work elsewhere in Canada, the military offered trades training to the unemployed.

Combined with the Liberals ideology that the military was for peace keeping, and their disdane for NATO (though unlike the NDP they never admitted to wanting to leave NATO, they merely provided the absolute minimum required to maintain membership) military equipment purchased was for domestic use.

After WWII the dismantling of the merchant marine directly impacted on Canada's ability to maintain its ship building ability.

Under the Mulroney government the final destruction of Canada's indigenous ship and aircraft building industry was sealed with the Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA. What the Liberals had wrecked with indifference, the Conservatives now finally killed with its sucking up to the U.S.

Under the Chretien Liberals, a new policy was introduced, one that bespoke the Liberals frugality with taxpayers money, post-Mulroney's spending spree, the government would only buy used military equipment at bargain basement prices, and would continue to maintain old outdated equipment past their expiry date.

There are no such thing as accidents. The failure of the Submarine fleet, the aging helicopter fleets, the dangerous outdated fleet of Tudor aircraft for Canada's Snowbirds, all this is the direct result not only of the Canadian Governments failure to fund the military but the result of the death of Canada's own homegrown ship and aircraft industries. The Liberals had no use for an indigenous Military Industrial complex, satisfied being a branch plant supplier to the US for its war operations.

The Liberals focused their policies on domestic peace keeping, increasing the capabilities of the military and police to monitor the Left, Labour, the Anti-War movement and Quebec nationalists.

Under the Conservatives, both Mulroney and now the Harpocrites, the military industrial complex that did exist in Canada was further reduced to hewers of wood and drawers of water for the benefit of the Americans.

Today the military is being funded to buy new equipment, from the U.S. And that includes secondary manufacturing and maintance, something Canada once was famous for, is now being contracted out.

The failure to subsidizde the Canadian Military Industrial complex was a political choice of the Liberals, they had little use for the Military, except to quell another Quebec crisis. For the Conservatives its a political choice as well, to integrate the Canadian Military Industrial complex into the American one. Meaning that our military will be supplied by the American Military Industrial complex.

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.




Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
military, helicopters, commorants, Snowbirds, Tudor, aircraft, Military-Industrial-Complex, Liberals, Harper, Trudeau, Chretien, Mulroney, Conservatives, government, military-spending, submaries, SeaKing, helicopters, Armed-Corced, Canadian-military

The Alternative To CBC

Is private monopoly;
Bell/GlobeMedia/CTV.
Yep, be still my beating heart.
The right and private broadcasters like to attack CBC and claim that the private sector should provide news, sports etc. The usual blah blah blah about competition. Right-o like this; CTV buys out rival CHUM.

CHUM announces layoffs in morning, while a friendly take over by CTV halts share trading yesterday on the TSX in the afternoon. Can you spell monopoly? Yep I can its three little letters; CTV. And you gotta love this bit;

Bell Globemedia president and chief executive, Ivan Fecan, said in an interview that news operations at CTV and CHUM will remain independent. “We’ll have two separate news organizations, one at CTV and one in Citytv, and they won’t report to each other in any way,” Fecan said. “I don’t think there’s any upside in having them being the same. You actually want them to be different because they have different approaches.

Sure no sooner did this come out of his mouth than across the country CITY TV has laid off its front of house staff, including its news anchors. Layoffs come as deal is unveiled

Citytv has been downsized.

Yesterday's takeover of its parent company CHUM Ltd. by CTV parent company, Bell Globemedia, for $1.7 billion wipes most local Citytv content off the air.

Breakfast Television survives -- and may be expanded -- but the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts are gone.

But at least Frank and Gordon kept their jobs. But they only do commercials. And they aren't part of the union, like real folks who are getting laid off. Stop the CHUM deal and the layoffs says CEP

This comes after CHUM recently bought out its competitor Craig Broadcasting.

Thus in becoming a bigger fish in the media marketplace, CHUM got swallowed by an even Bigger Fish.

Bay Street calls it mergers and acquisitions, I call it monopoly. And it will impact the non-pay/non-cable portion of your TV. Which includes of course local news.

The reason for the merger, was that CHUM dominates the specialty/cable channels. Which make money.

TV sector growth slows: Statscan

A day after one of the biggest mergers in Canadian television history was announced, Statistics Canada reported growth in that sector slowed significantly last year. While the overall television industry slowed because of sluggish results from conventional television, the pay-television and specialty channel segment showed strong increases in revenue and profit.

Also See:

Monopoly

Media

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Canada, media, CHUM, Bell, Globe&Mail, TV, mergers, layoffs, news, CITY-TV, CTV, monopoly, MUCH, CEP, cable

Eyeless In Gaza

The outrage against the illegal Israeli invasion of Gaza and its armed assault on the Palestinian Authority and its terror attacks on the Palestinian population is growing. Albeit amongst the leftwing blogs.

My Blahg On Gaza

It's Time to End the "Last Taboo" and Hold Israel Accountable for Its Actions - by Stephen Lendman



The left folks.

Not liberals like Mindelle Jacobs of the Sun who on the issue of Israel and Gaza sounds more like that other bitch queen at the the Sun; Michael Coren.
And like the proverbial Israeli Apologist and Suck Up Warren Kinsella liberals in Canada defend the aparthied state. In fact that is how they define themselves as liberals. For liberals Israel is the very model of a modern major democratic state.

For the Left the State of Israel is Imperialist and an occupying power, that is barely legitimate, the liberals paen that Israel is somehow democratic forgets the disenfranchised Arab population.

"The extermination of the Native Americans can be admitted, the morality of Hiroshima attacked, the national flag (of the US) publicly committed to flames. But the systematic continuity of Israel's 52-year oppression and maltreatment of the Palestinians is virtually unmentionable, a narrative that has no permission to appear."

--Edward Said, Palestinian writer, scholar and activist

And then as I googled Eyeless in Gaza, which is a novel by Aldous Huxely ( and an avante garde band) , I found these complimentary articles;

A critique of the media coverage from Australia Eyeless in Gaza

And from the US Arms and influence: Eyeless in Gaza

And in an article from last year after the Israeli withdrawl from Gaza we are reminded of the economic differences between the Palestinians and the Israelis. An economic relationship of indentured servitude by one group to the other.

According to the Palestinian Economic Council for Reconstruction and Development (PECDAR), annual per capita income in Gaza continues to average roughly $700, compared to the $16,000 per capita income enjoyed by Israelis. In the absence of relatively well-paying jobs, what will happen to the lines of unemployed Gazans? The potential flight of employment seekers -- a formidable phenomenon worldwide -- is only one problem. More immediately, if Gazans cannot feed their families, the recurrence of cross-border violence, if not a third intifada, will only be a matter of time. Eyeless in Gaza - Salon

Also See:

Gaza

Israel

Zionism/Anti-Zionism


Israel, deaths, Gaza, children, artillery, Paestine, Palestinians, US, slaughter, missles, Zionist, Zionism,
Hamas, Fateh, IDF, Abbas, Palestinian-Authority,hostage, Hamas, war, Gaza, invasion,

Free Market Economics=Cooperatives

Found this interesting article at GNN on the nature of the Free Market, one that exists without capitalism. Of course in order to have a free market it has to be cooperative. Something my pals in the Mutualist movement have been at pains to point out.

Frances Moore Lappe finds a cooperative approach to living that actually enhances human dignity

A market economy and capitalism are synonymous—- or at least joined at the hip. That’s what most Americans grow up assuming. But it is not necessarily so. Capitalism—control by those supplying the capital in order to return wealth to shareholders—is only one way to drive a market.

Granted, it is hard to imagine another possibility for how an economy could work in the abstract. It helps to have a real-life example.

And now I do.

In May I spent five days in Emilia Romagna, a region of four million people in northern central Italy. There, over the last 150 years, a network of consumer, farmer and worker-driven cooperatives has come to generate 30 percent to 40 percent of the region’s GDP. Two of every three people in Emilia Romagna are members of co-ops.

The region, whose hub city is Bologna, is home to 8,000 co-ops, producing everything from ceramics to fashion to specialty cheese. Their industriousness is woven into networks based on what cooperative leaders like to call “reciprocity.” All co-ops return 3 percent of profits to a national fund for cooperative development, and the movement supports centers providing help in finance, marketing, research and technical expertise.

The fact is that these counter economic experiments in Italy began in the Hot Autumn of the early seventies. They also gave rise to the autonomist movement of the working class in the cities who took part in rent strikes and food strikes, where they decided the price of the products they would buy. A different kind of wage and price control regime than that of the State which was also embracing this during the economic crisis of the time.


Also See: Free Market

Toni Negri

Anarchist Mayor of Milan

Workers Control Versus Trade Unions

A Libertarian defense of Communism

State-less Socialism

The New Multitdue

Free Trade; Hong Kong & Somalia

The War For Chocolate

Development Versus Population Growth

WTO

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
market, cooperation, free-mmarket, agora, agorist, left-libertarian, Gramsci, libertarian, anarchy, anarchism, coops, cooperatives, Italy, Bologna, counter-economics, capitalism, anti-capitalism

Tags
anarchism
socialism
unions
labour
Zanon
World Social Forum
workers councils
Libertarian
syndicalism

War Resister Killed In Afghanistan

Is what the headline should read.

Instead of the apologistics of the Minister of Defense. This is Canada after-all and yes we can decide which missions we want to go on. Thank you very much. Especially when our troops were lied to. Those who signed up under the impression our National Policy was Peacekeeping, now are working under the Harpocrites private agenda of War Making. They were mislead.

Soldier not misled: Minister
OTTAWA—Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor has responded to a young soldier's concerns that he was "misled" about Canada's Afghan mission with a tough rebuttal of his own: "This is the military. "You don't vote in and vote out of operations. Family and friends have painted Boneca as a disillusioned soldier deeply unhappy about this mission. Their comments have highlighted the mounting stresses on Canadian troops caught up in fighting a shadowy enemy in scorching temperatures."He hated it over there. He was misled as to what was going to be there when he got there, and what he would be doing. He was very mad about it," Larry DeCorte, his girlfriend Megan's father, told the Toronto Star on Sunday. Indeed, Boneca was so unhappy with his mission, he had asked an army priest if talk of suicide would get him discharged, DeCorte said.

If not you will find soldiers committing suicide or fragging their officers. It is now time for the Left to call for general resistance by our troops in their own self interest; that is to get out of Kandahar alive. Calling for troop resistance now will save lives in the future.

The reality is that the war in Afghanistan is not a humanitarian mission but a continuation of the American War on Drugs. Afghan drug policy costs Canadian lives: study

Canada's Afghanistan mission under fire

The Canadian government is in denial over the true perception of its troop deployment to Afghanistan's troubled Kandahar province, says the head of a European drug policy think-tank.Emmanuel Reinert, executive director of the Brussels-based Senlis Council, said he was taken aback by the virulent reaction to the group's report, which said Canadian soldiers and Afghan civilians are paying with their lives because of failing U.S. policies that focus on eradication of the poppy crop



Canada in Kandahar: No Peace to Keep - A Case Study of the Military Coalitions in Southern Afghanistan

New Field Report
June 2006

Canadian troops and Afghan civilians are paying with their lives for Canada's adherence to the US government's failing military and counter-narcotics policies in Kandahar. The US-led counter-terrorist operations and militaristic poppy eradication strategies have triggered a new war with the Taliban and other insurgent groups, and are causing countless civilian deaths.

To a large extent, it can be said that Operation Enduring Freedom and the related militaristic counter-narcotics policies are significant contributors to the current state of war in Kandahar and the other southern provinces.

Canada and the international community continue to unquestioningly accept America's fundamentally flawed policy approach in southern Afghanistan, thereby jeopardising the success of military operations in the region and the stabilisation, reconstruction and development mission objectives.




Full report (2MB, PDF)

---

• The United Nations Drug Conventions Regime and Policy Reform
• International Drug Policy Status Quaestionis
• Global Drug Policy: A Historical Perspective
• Illicit drugs convention reform & the United Nations agencies
• The United Nations Drug Control Treaties
• A Fourth International Convention for Drug Policy
• Global Drug Policy: Building a New Framework
• Feasibility Study on Opium Licensing in Afghanistan for the Production of Morphine and Other Essential Medicines
• Impact Assessment of Crop Eradication in Afghanistan and
• Helmand at War
• Afghanistan Insurgency Assessment Field Report
• Integrated Social Control in Afghanistan

Afghanistan & the Ghost of Kim

The drug trade is indeed a problem, but in large part because of the war. The Taliban initially suppressed opium production, but war, coupled with a failure to adequately fund a program aimed at weaning farmers off poppy growing, means Afghanistan is now once again the world’s largest producer of opium.

Opium profits not only fuel the insurgency, they fill the coffers of the U.S.-supported warlords who are once again in power. It was the corruption and violence of the warlords that originally laid the ground for the Taliban takeover. The only thing keeping the warlords in power today is the U.S. and NATO armed forces.

Actually rather than Kim, the Harpocrites war efforts in Afghanistan reminds me of another of Rudyard Kiplings stories; The Man Who Would Be King.


















Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Afghanistan, Kandahar, Bocera, Harper, The-Man-Would-Be-King, narcotics, opium, marijuana, Taliban, Kandahar, Canadian-Armed-Forces, O'Commor, Canada, Government, war, politics, Kipling, Kim, narco-politics, Taliban, war-resistance

Good Riddance

Chechen behind Beslan massacre killed
It is ironic that prior to the Beslan assault the U.S. intelligence community heard noise about a potential terrorist threat. Their interpretation of that 'noise' was that Al Qaeda was preparing to disrupt the Republican convention. Such navel gazing resulted in this horrific massacre of school children. The noise was real, it just had nothing to do with the US. And everything to do with the old USSR.

Some key facts about Basayev

* Basayev was born in 1965 and brought up by the generation of Chechens who had just returned to their homeland after being exiled by dictator Josef Stalin to Kazakhstan and Siberia. He was a talented footballer who studied at an engineering institute in Moscow and at an Islamic institute in Istanbul.

* Basayev was a fierce fighter motivated by militant Islam. He listed South American revolutionary Che Guevara as his hero, but believed Russian civilians, including children, were legitimate targets in the fight for independence from Moscow. He once described himself as "a bad guy, a bandit, a terrorist."

He was less influenced by Che as he was the very model of Nechayev's amoral revolutionary; the nihlist. Which by the by is also the model for Al Qaeda. Regardless of their claims to Islam, as Basayev shows, they are amoral nihilists. Nechayev who?

Perhaps Nechayev's most controversial theorem was his amoral statement that "the ends justify the means." In his mind, the revolutionary cause was to succeed by whatever means necessary. Given the very real threat of extinction that western man faces, this once extreme idea might not be so extreme any longer:

For him, everything is moral which assists the triumph of revolution. Immoral and criminal is everything which stands in its way.

Racialism, Revolution, and the Radicalism of Sergei Nechayev ...

Sergey Genadievich Nechayev was a man so feared by the Czar and the aristocrat, ruling classes, he became the Czar’s special prisoner. The Czar received weekly special reports on Nechayev’s prison activities.

Nechayev was born September 20, 1847. He died at age 35 in prison, on December 3, 1882 – from dropsy complicated by scurvy.

He was convicted for the murder of a fellow student, but his real crimes were political. He frightened the state because he claimed to head a secret society four million strong. In truth, it was a small group, maybe a few hundred, mainly of St. Petersburg students. The trial sentenced him to 20 years in Siberia. The Czar intervened and ordered him to be retained for the rest of his life. He was kept in Cell #1 of the notorious Alexis Ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress.

As a human being, he left much to be desired – he lied, cheated, blackmailed, murdered. Of course, he would defend his actions based on the principles laid out in the following document. Regardless his personal attributes, he rejected the authority of the state to his dismal end and, for that, gained legendary status in Russia.

The Narodnaya Volya (People’s Freedom) considered using its resources to free him rather than kill the Czar – an offer he rejected, saying the death of the Czar was more important. (And, indeed, on March 13, 1881, Czar Alexander II was assassinated whilst riding through the snowy streets of St. Petersburg.)

The Revolutionary Catechism by Sergey Nechayev 1869

1. The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.

2. The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the social order and the civilized world with all its laws, moralities, and customs, and with all its generally accepted conventions. He is their implacable enemy, and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily.

6. Tyrannical toward himself, he must be tyrannical toward others. All the gentle and enervating sentiments of kinship, love, friendship, gratitude, and even honor, must be suppressed in him and give place to the cold and single-minded passion for revolution. For him, there exists only one pleasure, on consolation, one reward, one satisfaction – the success of the revolution. Night and day he must have but one thought, one aim – merciless destruction. Striving cold-bloodedly and indefatigably toward this end, he must be prepared to destroy himself and to destroy with his own hands everything that stands in the path of the revolution.

9. It is superfluous to speak of solidarity among revolutionaries. The whole strength of revolutionary work lies in this. Comrades who possess the same revolutionary passion and understanding should, as much as possible, deliberate all important matters together and come to unanimous conclusions. When the plan is finally decided upon, then the revolutionary must rely solely on himself. In carrying out acts of destruction, each one should act alone, never running to another for advice and assistance, except when these are necessary for the furtherance of the plan.

10. All revolutionaries should have under them second- or third-degree revolutionaries – i.e., comrades who are not completely initiated. these should be regarded as part of the common revolutionary capital placed at his disposal. This capital should, of course, be spent as economically as possible in order to derive from it the greatest possible profit. The real revolutionary should regard himself as capital consecrated to the triumph of the revolution; however, he may not personally and alone dispose of that capital without the unanimous consent of the fully initiated comrades.

13. The revolutionary enters the world of the State, of the privileged classes, of the so-called civilization, and he lives in this world only for the purpose of bringing about its speedy and total destruction. He is not a revolutionary if he has any sympathy for this world. He should not hesitate to destroy any position, any place, or any man in this world. He must hate everyone and everything in it with an equal hatred. All the worse for him if he has any relations with parents, friends, or lovers; he is no longer a revolutionary if he is swayed by these relationships.

26. To weld the people into one single unconquerable and all-destructive force – this is our aim, our conspiracy, and our task.

And with a certain irony it is Putin who is now the neo-Lenin in Russia that has to put up with the revived heritage of Nechayev as does the Military Industrial Dictarorship in the USA. If Basayev was a product of post Stalinist Russian liberalism, he became the Stalin of Chechnya, while Putin becomes the new Stalin of Russia.

The Chechens' long war

July 11, 2006

THE DEATH OF Shamil Basayev, a Chechen rebel commander responsible for horrific terrorist acts, is being trumpeted by Russian President Vladimir Putin not merely as reprisal for Basayev's atrocities, but as a fatal blow to the Chechen independence movement.

All is the historical inheritence of the Bolsheviks. Those who would use State power to win a revolution are doomed to fail and to create their own dopplegangers like Stalin and Basayev. While they are amoral nihilists they are NOT revolutionaries.

Boris Souvarine

Stalin: A Critical Survery of Bolshevism

Translated by C.L.R. James

Chapter VI. The Civil war

The whole of the non-Bolshevik press abused and vilified the usurpers." Only the journals of the Right had been suspended, but the others felt their interests assailed by the attack on the freedom of the press. Articles Of Gorky, a former Left Bolshevik, give an idea of the general point of view, and sum up the average opinion held by the socialist revolutionary intelligentsia: "Lenin, Trotsky and their disciples are already intoxicated with the poison of power as is proved by their shameful attitude towards liberty of speech, personal freedom, and all the rights for which Democracy has fought." In the same Novaya Zhizn, in the pages of which he had defended the fugitive Lenin after the days of July, Gorky described the Bolsheviks as "blind fanatics, conscienceless adventurers," and Bolshevism as a "national disaster."

He denounced the "vanity of Lenin's promises ... the extent of his madness ... his anarchism on the Nechayev and Bakunin model," and his government as an "autocracy of savages." He expressed passionate indignation over their first steps in dictatorship. "Lenin and his acolytes," he said, "think they have licence to commit every crime." "How," he asked, "does Lenin's conduct with regard to freedom of speech differ from that of Stolypin, Plehve and other caricatures of humanity? Does not Lenin send to jail all those who do not think as he does, just as the Romanovs did?"

Friend of Lenin as he was, he wrote of him in these terms: "Lenin is not an all-powerful healer, but a cynical conjurer caring nothing for the honour or the life of the proletariat." Lenin, he adds, has all the dualities of a leader, "especially the amorality essential to the part, and the country gentleman's scorn for the life of the masses." The Leninists are no better, for the "working classes are for them what minerals are for the mineralogist." He clings to the comparison with Nechavev. "Vladimir Lenin," he says, "is introducing the socialist regime into Russia by Nechayev's methods—at full steam through mud. Lenin, Trotsky and all the others who accompany them to destruction in the slough of realism are evidently, like Nechayev, convinced that dishonour is the best way of persuading a Russian. .. ." He takes pleasure in likening Bolshevism to Tsarism: "by threats of starvation and massacre for all those who do not approve of the Lenin-Trotsky despotism, these leaders justify the despotic power against which the best elements is the country have so long been struggling."

In reply to the reproaches of certain partisans of the new regime Gorky said: "Novaya Zhizn has asserted and will continue to assert that the requisite conditions for the introduction of socialism are non-existent in our country, and that the Government at the Smolny Institute treats the Russian workman as if he were a log; it sets light to the logs to see if the flame of European revolution can be kindled on the Russian hearth." He fearlessly warns the workers on repeated occasions and in varying terms: "The Russian proletariat is being subjected to an experiment which it must pay for in blood, life, and, what is worse, in lasting disillusion with regard to the socialist ideal."

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Russia, Chechnya, Chechins, Basayev, Terrorists, Terrorism, Nechavey, Stalin, Lenin, Bolsheviks, Republican-Convention-2004, noise, Al-Qaeda, Bin-Laden, CIA

A Little Gallic Foot In Mouth

Something happens to Quebec politicians when they get to the old colonial homeland. They open their mouths and promptly stick their foot in it.

Charest said in a television interview in Paris on Friday that the province had the means to separate, but that it wasn't in Quebec's interests to do so.

Of course the shoe has been on the other foot when the Leader of Free France visited Quebec. It's the Gallic charm.

it is almost four decades since the late French president Charles de Gaulle gave courage to the separatists by uttering these four words at the (1967) St. Jean-Baptiste Day festival: "Vive le Quebec libre."


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Quebec, Charest, indpendence, soviergnty, seperation, Vive-Quebec-Libre, PQ, Liberals, ADQ, BQ, DeGaulle, France

The Phoney Debate On Net Neutrality

It never was about Net neutrality boys and girls. It was about gaining more money, cash to be able to buy up the competition, and overcharging for broad band is the way to get that cash. In the meantime how much will Nortel go for, and will Canadians even care. Doubtful after having lost money in the greatest fiscal crash since Enron.

This continues to be a simple question of market integration, the move towards monopoly capitalism or at least a price regulating cabal, and oligopoly, in telecos.

We have seen the return of ATT and now we see the wireless cable phone companies in merger mania. Only because capitalism knows no other way to capitalize technology or use technology to benefit production. Aimed soley at making profits it is only incidental that progressive technological change is made at all.

Nortel proves that. As does Motorola, two basket cases in the industry. And the industry is dominated by the Northern EU countries Finland and Sweden. Nortel fits into this as another example of a high tech company destroyed by the short term goal of the quarterly bottom line.


A Mania in Telecom to Merge

As Nokia and Siemens announced plans to merge their telecommunications equipment businesses — the third major industry deal in less than a year — the big unanswered question was not if, but when, the remaining giants would team up.

Many financial analysts expect Motorola and Huawei of China to pursue Nortel Networks, which is widely viewed as the most valuable but also the most financially troubled of the remaining companies that make the building blocks of the world's phone and data networks. A smaller group of analysts see Motorola and Huawei joining hands, leaving Nortel alone.

Whatever combination emerges, the logic behind the deals is not unlike the thinking that drove Ericsson to buy Marconi or the pending merger of Alcatel and Lucent Technologies, which was announced in March: As carriers like AT&T and Sprint-Nextel turn into one-stop communications providers, equipment vendors must expand if they hope to continue serving them.

They must be able to integrate wireless and traditional networks so customers can, say, check their e-mail on their cellphones and have single voice mail accounts serving a variety of phones. They also need more financial firepower to cut prices and keep up with low-cost competitors overseas.

With their broader product lineup and deeper pockets, Ericsson-Marconi, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia-Siemens would be in a stronger position to win contracts to provide those services. For Nortel, the weakest of the remaining equipment makers, merging may be the only way to keep up, analysts said. "If you look at financials, Nortel is the No. 1 target" for a takeover, said Edward Snyder, an industry analyst with Charter Equity Research in San Francisco.

Any deal for Nortel, though, must overcome hurdles. Nortel has been plagued by accounting troubles, operating losses and management shake-ups. As the company was busy sorting out these problems, its potential suitors were merging.

If the merger of their equipment units is approved, Nokia and Siemens would become the third-largest equipment vendor in terms of 2005 sales, with 18.3 percent of the global market, according to the Dell'Oro Group. Ericsson-Marconi is the leader with a 21 percent share of the market, followed by a combined Alcatel-Lucent, with 19.6 percent.

Nortel, on the other hand, has just 10 percent of the market, while Motorola has only 5 percent. Huawei has about 4 percent of the market.

These companies would not only lag behind in total sales, but would also lack the full complement of products that their three larger rivals will have.

They would also face more pressure from Cisco, which in February bought Scientific-Atlanta, a leading maker of television set-top boxes. The deal gave Cisco, which makes the digital switches used to route traffic around the Internet, access to cable companies, which are building networks that compete head-to-head with those of big telecommunications companies like Verizon.

It also could give Cisco a foot in the door at Sprint-Nextel, which is working with Comcast, Time Warner and other cable companies to introduce wireless services that dovetail with their landline and video businesses.

Also See: Monopoly

Telecos want to Monopolize the Net

NARUS Is Big Brother

The End of State Monopoly Internet

Big Brother Bush

Google Censorship China

Inclusive Internet

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
NARUS, NSA, Bush, spying, internet, web, email, telephone, ATT, software,Internet, China, America, WWW, ICANN, networks,
Telcos, AOL, Verizon, Yahoo, Google, email, spam, bandwidth, broadband, internet

Tags
USA
WWW
internet
spying

Google

A Tale Of Two Whyte Avenues

It's a tale of two cities.

It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.

Really only one city, but two versions of it from its two newspapers.

The two newspapers in Edmonton, the Journal and the Sun put a different spin on the police stories arising from the Stanley Cup riots on Whyte Ave. What is so glaring is that they are two solitudes, one showing the best of times and one the worst.

The Sun ever the cheerleader for law and order published photos of Edmontonians taken by the police. The Journal citing press freedom and privacy refused to.

The Sun praised the police no end even while the police violated peoples rights as they used indiscriminate mass arrest as a way of quelling disturbances.

The Edmonton Journal reported on police burtality, as well as at least one case of false arrest and brutality. A story that never appeared in the Sun.

In fact no stories on police brutality appeared in the Sun, despite the previous run ins that Sun Columnists have had with the EPS.


Also See:

Whyte Ave.

Death by Taser

The Crime of Privatization

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Edmonton, Whyte, Avenue, Alberta, trashing, drunks, bars, Whyte-Riot
OSBA, Old, Strathcona, NHL, hockey, Oilers, bluemile, riot, copperkilometre,
its, dicks, drunks, rowdies, Oilers, Ducks, NHL, Hockey, Stanely-Cup, playoffs,
Edmonton, police, photo-radar, privatization, crime, kickbacks, bribes, Alberta, Canada,
Edmonton-Jounral, Edmonton-Sun, media, newspapers, reporting, coverage, police-brutality, arrest, beating,
Tags
Taser / police