Having Faith

One of the evangelical advisors to George W. in his first term coined the phrase compassionate conservatism. Five years later it could be called an inconvenient Christianity. And following in the footsteps of the Foley follies this could be the blockbuster expose for fundamentalist Christians that Woodwords book was for Iraq.

More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, [David Kuo] the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider’s tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points....Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly “nonpartisan” events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races. ... Nineteen out of the 20 targeted races were won by Republicans, Kuo reports.

ThinkProgress has obtained an excerpt from the book, set shortly after Bush’s 2001 inauguration:

Every other White House office was up and running. The faith-based initiative still operated out of the nearly vacant transition offices.

Three days later, a Tuesday, Karl Rove summoned [Don] Willett [a former Bush aide from Texas who initially shepharded the program] to his office to announce that the entire faith-based initiative would be rolled out the following Monday. Willett asked just how — without a director, staff, office, or plan — the president could do that. Rove looked at him, took a deep breath, and said, “I don’t know. Just get me a f—ing faith-based thing. Got it?” Willett was shown the door.

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Conservatives Attack Prairie Farmers

Driven by the Southern Alberta farming lobby that is deeply influenced by its American roots, the area is rampant with Mormons, Dutch Reformed Church and other proto-American exiles, the old Reform party took the position that the Canadian Wheat Board was a communist state monopoly. That's because it was originally formed in the dirty thirties during the Great Depression as a producers cooperative.

The New Conservative Government of Canada having its roots in this backwater minority lobby has taken on the Canadian Wheat Board and has decidied that one of its election promises, though not one of its five priorities, was to carry on the Reform party tradition and attempt to open up the western Canadian wheat and barley market by eliminating the Wheat Board. The problem is that of course while a free market in wheat and barley may appeal to large producers with their own trucks living close to the U.S. border, for the majority of wheat and barley farmers trade is international, and the single desk has served them well.

Orginally intended to be a producers cooperative board, the state created a bueracracy alienated from the farmers. In the last decade that has changed in response to pressure from the farm base and in response to criticism from the right and the right wing lobbying for a dual market in wheat and barley. The Board is now elected by farmers. And the much lauded dual market lobby even has elected its own members to the board. However they garner far less grassroots support than they do media attention, and of course their voice is not really of farmers but of the neo-liberal Calgary lobby around the Reform/Alliance/Conservative party.

Now the government intends on forcing the stupidity of a dual marketing scheme on farmers without asking them their opinion. Worse it is gagging them, refusing to allow the Wheat Board to defend itself. Talk about a paranoid authoritarian action by the state. So much for democratic consultation with stakeholders.

Wheat Board ordered not to sow discontent Globe and Mail, Canada - 11 hours ago WINNIPEG -- The Conservative government has banned the Canadian Wheat Board from advocating its continued existence as the monopoly seller of Western Canadian ...
Canadian Wheat Board asks Ottawa to withdraw partial gag order Canada.com
Farmers fretting over Wheat Board's future Globe and Mail
Farmers Support Wheat Board Despite Conservative Claims
Wheat Board supporters accuse Ottawa of imposing gag order
Canadian Wheat Board won't sit on committee designed to end its existence
Prairie coalition fights for Canadian Wheat Board
Keep the tradition of the Wheat Board
Farm groups demand voice in talks about Wheat Board

Why it makes one wonder where the libertarians in the Conservatives disappeared too. Nary a one left to speak out against state interference in a producers cooperative, which is democratic. What ever happened to minila state intereference, the compalint that was raised agaisnt the Liberal government from its domination over the farmers on the Wheat Board. The Wheat Board exists not to limit the market, but to get the best deal for the most farmer from a market that is dominated and manipulated by large American Agribusiness monopolies. And their market manipulation works against the producers in favour of the market gamblers and the big agribusinesses who control transportation, storage, frefining, distribution and marketing. Volatile CBOT Wheat Futures Hit Market-Makers Hard


I guess it is time for another praririe farmer rebellion against a government in Ottawa that doesn't listen to them. Ironic ain't it.



See:

Wheat Board

Mormonism Cult of the Political Right

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Ding Dong Monopoly

Bell Canada known as BCE owner of the Globe and Mail, CTV, Bell mobility, etc. has moved into the income trust business, in order to avoid taxes. The Toronto Star has an interesting take on this Curtain falls on flawed business strategy

Bell had a monopoly in Eastern Canada, built as it was on a contiental basis in the Eastern seaboard of the US and Canada. It never made it out west, due to expense and risk. So instead provincial governments and the City of Edmonton created competing phone systems.

In the case of Emonton Telephones it was a private company which was sold to the city in the early 20th Century. Alex Taylor took advantage of the fact that neither Bell nor Alberta Government Telephones saw fit to build a telephone line to the city. It later was sold to AGT in the ninties, wtoghether they became the privatized Telus, Bells largest competitor.

In order to have competition between monopolies they have to be large enough corporate behemoths to take each other on. Sort of like Gozilla versus Mothra, or the silent dinosaur movies of the twenties. The liberaltarians believe that a mythical state-free market would eliminate monopoly, it is a myth. The inherent drive of capital is to centralize itself and thus to create a state capable of allowing for monopoly and oligopoly. It does not want competition but centralization and collusion.

Telus has gone into creating an income trust fund so flush with capital that it needs to hide it under the bushel of this ponzi tax avoidance mechanism.

Bell on the other hand is bleeding capital, and as the Tor Star article points out going the income trust route is counter intuitive. Instead of investing capital for profit they are divesting themselves of profit in a trust which pays out high income to investors and managers.

Once again the capitalism shows it is not capable of operating an efficient system of production and distribution. Captial and the capitalist is always distracted by the next get rich quick scheme to maximizes it's profit from credit and interest.


See:

Unproductive Capital


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There Is No Free Market

The softwood lumber industry proves that the so called market economy, is not.
We live in a historic period of state capitalism. The political economy in Canada depending on the state to bail out resource industries and the towns they have created. Quebec vows to help forestry workers The decline being the result of the state capitalist protectionist policies of the U.S. and the recent quizzling softwood lumber deal of the Harper State.Behind the Eight Ball


See

State Capitalism Quebec Style

Softwood

Free Trade



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Too Greedy

Call this the dot.com bubble 2 the wave of resignations occuring in the wake of the SEC investigation into dot.com businesses that back dated stock options for their executives. Options scandal claims CNET, McAfee chiefs It all began with this guy; Ex-Comverse boss arrested in Namibia

Jacob "Kobi" Alexander, is one of three former Comverse execs who are accused of securities fraud. He also alleged to have illegally siphoned of $57m out of the US to Israel, in a money laundering scheme. Investigators seized $45m left in US accounts. In 2005, Alexander ranked 75th in the Forbes list of CEO compensation at America's 500 biggest companies. His pay that year? A lousy $13,882,700, of which stock gains accounted for $9.6m. Still, this wasn't so bad, considering that the median pay in 2005 for CEOs at big firms in the US telecoms sector was an even lousier $1.7m. ®

Imagine if he had been illegally shipping the money to Palestine, why the outrage would be palable. While the US denounces China for stealing high tech it is silent on Israel. Ain't money laundering illegal. That makes Israel a Criminal State as well as a practioner of State Terrorism.


See:

Bring Out Your Dead

Criminal Capitalism

Primitive Accumulation of Capital



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Common Sense

Here is an interesting case of common sense being more sensible than science. Of course science can be used for all kinds of justifications, including for the unjustifiable. Science is being used for the racial purity argument this time in relation to Moose.

Mysterious Moose Sighting: Albino Moose Turns Up in Norway
Residents in Norway have sighted what is believed to be an albino moose. With the hunting season just around the corner, local residents are campaigning for it to be spared. But scientists argue that the white moose is a genetic mistake and should be shot.


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NAFTA To The Rescue

For those on the left who denounce NAFTA it is always interesting to see that they use the side agreements for progressive aims. Labour has used the labour side agreement, now the environmental lobby is using the environmental side agreement. Maybe NAFTA is useful, hmmm. Thats its contradiction. It can be used by both activists and capitalists to their own ends. In this case the New Government of Canada stands to be embarassed on the global stage, and rightly so.

Canada isn't living up to its own laws meant to protect endangered species from extinction, Canadian and American environmental groups charge.

Sierra Club of Canada and Friends of the Earth, have filed a formal complain against Canada with the Commission for Environmental Cooperation for North America, an inter-governmental body with senior representatives from Mexico, Canada and the United States set up under the North American Free Trade Agreement. The commission's web site says it is investigating the complaint against Canada.

See:

Endangered Species

NAFTA



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Buy American

Propping up the American dollar economy is its Gulf Allies....not any economic policy coming from the Fed or the White House......

Consider this protection money paid to the American Empire.

Gulf oil states ‘keep faith in dollar assets’

Gulf oil producers will continue buying dollar-based assets with their windfall revenues, but not all the money will flow into the US, according to Mohsin Khan, director of the IMF’s Middle East and Central Asia department.

Gulf oil producers including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates will record current account surpluses of $239bn (€190bn, £128bn) this year, rising to $259bn in 2007, a new IMF report says.

And we thought $13 billion was a record surplus!

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Fair Share

The OECD reports that corporations are paying more in taxes now than in the 1960's. Corporate share of tax bill driven up in line with profits

However what is not reported in this news story is the relationship between corporate and personal income taxes paid to the OECD member states.

That is in Canada in the 1960's corporations paid a bigger portion of the taxes collected by the Canadian State than the portion from personal income taxes.

At the end of this story the truth is revealed while corporations pay 10 percent now personal income taxes are still 25 percent of the states income. That is down from 30% thanks to tax cuts to the rich.


SEE:

Corporate Tax




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Behind the Eight Ball

Canada, US to Implement Softwood Lumber Accord on Oct. 12

To little, too late. Thanks to the bursting of the American housing bubble.


Slumping lumber prices could see sawmills close

Abitibi shutdowns chop 680 jobs Indefinite closings at 4 sawmills. Firms says demand for products has dived because of the US housing slowdown.
Domtar Announces Closure of 4 Sawmills MSN Money

Abitibi-Consolidated cutting 700 jobs in Quebec and closing four mills
Other forestry companies including Cascades (TSX:CAS), Weyerhaeuser (TSX:WEF) and privately held Kruger have announced similar closures in Quebec and in other parts of Canada this year as the industry restructures to meet rising energy costs and lower demand for lumber and other wood products.


See

American Exceptionalism

Softwood

Free Trade



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