Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Free Trade: Primitive Accumulation of Capital

I have said it before and will say it again, capitalism is merchants with private armies. The modern market state that is evolving under globalization is no different.


Seventeenth Century Origins of Free Trade

During the early modern period (1500-1700), there was intense conflict among European states. Chartered trade companies acted as warrior merchants, especially the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company. Armed trade was refined into a ruthless art by the Republic of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. At the same time, some kingdoms — for example, France and Spain — attempted to control their economies (Mercantilism) for strategic reasons. Moral philosophers, meanwhile, were critical of trade itself. Unlike Islam which was largely hospitable toward trade and merchants, Christian theology and Church edicts were hostile; they condemned commerce as abetting fraud, promoting avarice, and encouraging worldly gains. Theologians became more liberal as the centuries passed, but the status of merchants who merely traded goods and produced nothing was not high. At best there was theological ambivalence about commerce. Free trade did not have an easy birth in these circumstances.

Ironic ain't it that the very historical forces opposed to Free Trade are now it's greatest proponents. Of course that is because of the development of the ultimate Protestant State; the American Empire. While Europe remains dominated by Catholicism, even in its Anglican and Lutheran forms.

See my; LOOKING BACKWARDS
The Fraternal Origins of Working Class Organizations In the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism

As for Islam and Free Trade see my article Ibn Khaldun 14th Century Arab Libertarian

Instead of sabre rattling the Americans might want to use Free Trade, any trade in fact, with economically isolated Iran to get them to quit their sabre rattling.



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Dodge Ball


some economists believe the Bank of Canada may be habitually overestimating inflation because the central bank is focusing too much attention on traditional factors that cause prices to rise -- like a tight labour market and booming domestic demand -- and not enough on globalization and international competition.

Yep I have said it before the Bank of Canada is stuck in the Mulroney era. Leave well enough alone, David Dodge. But of course being a monetarist like he is he won't.Bank of Canada expected to raise interest rates which will result in;

Markets could be in for more losses in coming week
"That calls into question the Bank of Canada's own assertion that core inflation was going to be back at the two per cent threshold by the third quarter," said TD Securities chief strategist Marc Levesque. "It looks like the bank may have a bit more wiggle room on the inflation front, so I think this just adds to the likelihood that it could, in fact, choose to take a pass and do nothing." "Tame core inflation, a tight-as-a-drum labour market, healthy retail sales, a firm Canadian dollar, a red-hot economy in the west... what's a central bank to do?" asked Avery Shenfeld, senior economist with CIBC World Markets.

Leave well enough alone. Geez does it take an anarchist to tell the capitalists how the market works? Guess so.


More on Dodge

Also See

Loonie

Petro Dollar

Monopoly

Monopolies


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Silly Headlines

Human Remains Found in Quebec

I would hope so since humans have lived there for thousands of years.



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Harper Has Already Abandoned Kyoto

Which is why Rona Ambrose is on CTV Question Period,on Sunday and sitting on her duff in the House and not in Bonn.

And when asked why she isn't in Bonn, she replies like the trained parrot she is; "We want a made in the USA....errr...Canada policy."

Yeah more like a Made In Alberta policy.



Kyoto backslide sparks furor

Canada sabotaging Kyoto accord, environmentalists say

Canada wants Kyoto deal scrapped - reports


More On Kyoto


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Ping!

I use Pingomatic to hit multiple blog-readers. Lately it has been a bit funky but over all it when it works it saves you lots of time. And don't forget to Tag!
And if you have breaking news, its good to also post it to Indymedia.


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Monday, May 22, 2006

Just The Facts Ma'am

This is a follow up on my previous article;UN Report Says We Need A Living Wage

Just the facts ma'am.

The facts show that for the majority of women in Canada Day Care is NOT a matter of Choice it's a matter of NEED.

And this is true for single mothers who have no choice in whether to work or not. The myth of the two income family which allows for so called 'choices' of staying home, is a return to the era of Leave It To Beaver, and even then women worked outside the home.

Those who claim to speak for choice in staying home can only afford too because they live on two family incomes, both are professionals earning above average wages who can afford to have one parent stay home by defering their salary.

The attack on Day Care in Canada by the Harpocrite government is based on their base in Alberta's patriarchical religious right, who wanna keep the little woman at home barefoot and pregnant. And if she dares to not be married well she is after all a fallen woman and should get no support from society. She should be shunned.

Such is the real message in the Harpocrites Non Day Care policy.

Single mothers

550,000 – The estimated number of single-parent families headed by women in Canada in 2004.

$27,700 — The after tax income of lone-parent families headed by women in 2004.

Source: The Daily, Thursday, March 30, 2006, “Income of Canadians”.

38% — The proportion of families headed by lone-parent mothers that had incomes which fell below the after-tax low income cut-off (LICO) in 2003. In comparison, this was the case for 13% of male lone-parent families and just 7% of non-elderly two-parent families with children. The incidence of low income among lone-parent families headed by women has declined somewhat since the early 1980s, when the figure hovered around 50%.

68% — The percentage of female lone parents who were employed in 2004.

Source: The Daily, Tuesday, March 7, 2006, “Women in Canada”.


Working Mothers

65% — The percentage of all women with children under the age of three who were employed in 2004.

70% — The percentage of women whose youngest child was aged three to five who worked for pay in 2004.

Source: The Daily, Tuesday, March 7, 2006, “Women in Canada”.

54% — The proportion of children in Canada aged six months to five years who were in some form of child care in 2002-2003, up from 42% in 1994-1995. (From the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth.)

Source: The Daily, Wednesday, April 5, 2006, “Child care: An eight-year profile”.

Boy babies less likely for single mothers


Women living with a male partner are more likely to give birth to boys than women who live alone, suggests a study of 86,000 US births. The finding hints that higher numbers of single mothers could explain a recent drop in the birth rate of boys in some developed countries.

Evolutionary theory suggests female animals can boost the chances of propagating their genes if they can control the gender of their offspring, depending on environmental conditions and the fitness of their mate.

Males are generally considered more costly to feed and raise than females. But, if fit, they can produce many offspring with many different females. But whereas an unfit female is still very likely to reproduce, an unfit male may never mate.

In humans, about 51% of babies are boys. But previous research has shown that women tend to have girls when food is scarce and boys when they are optimistic about their own futures. The effect of a committed partner on a child's sex has been unclear, however, with various theories making contradicting predictions.

Gender Inequality in Poverty in Affluent Nations: The Role of Single Motherhood and the State.

Poverty, as measured in this study, refers to whether the household one lives in has a total cash income below half of the median income of households in the individual's nation. Nations with high poverty for women also tend to have high poverty for men. The U.S. and Canada lead the way with the highest poverty rates for both men and women. The lowest poverty rates for both occur in Sweden and the Netherlands.


Single Mother Crisis in Canada

posted by: Ladan Affi (Friday, February 10, 2006)

The Somali Crisis in Canada:
The Single Mother Phenomenon

"The growing Somali community is considered to be one of the most disadvantaged among the visible and ethnic minorities In many cases, women fled Somalia with false passports and could only bring the number of children stated on these passports. The financial issue of the cost to bring the children to Canada was also used as a factor to decide which children to bring. The decision of who would depart and who would stay is a most difficult one since there are mother who leave young children behind in the hopes of sponsoring them, once they become permanent residents. This process however, on average, takes over one year and sometimes longer.

Third, the rate of divorce among Somali couples is incredibly high. The confilicts which arise are mainly due to the redefinition of traditional cultural roles between women and men and the stress of trying to cope in a foreign country. For example, women raise a family without the help of their husbands, yet it is the men who expect to be treated with respect and exert authority as heads of households as they once had in Somalia. These men are expecting to be obeyed without contributing very much to the well-being of the family.

In Somalia, men did not help their wives with household chores and caring for their children because there are many relatives helping them instead. In Canada, however, this kind of support from relatives does not exist, yet Somali men fail to understand that.



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UN Report Says We Need A Living Wage


Canada failing to care for poor, disadvantaged: UN report

Yep ever since 1995, when Paul Martin became Finance Minister and Ralph Klein kicked off his phoney war on the debt and deficit on the backs of the poor, unions and public sector workers.

The UN committee's findings are particularly harsh in regards to cuts made under the previous Liberal government to federal transfer payments earmarked for social services. The report suggests the cuts have had a serious impact on the standard of living of many of the country's minority groups. UN committee delivers harsh appraisal of Canada's social services


But it saved its harshest critique for how the Liberals, and now the Harpocrites, use EI to fund their surplus while denying Canadians basic economic rights. UN report criticizes Canada's EI program

While those who are optimists will focus on the fact that the committee reports;
Despite Canada's economic prosperity, the report says, roughly 11.2 per cent of the population lived in poverty in 2004. That is a drop from 13.7 per cent in 1998.

They will say we are doing better, when we still have over ten percent of the population living in poverty, many of those are women; as single mothers and seniors. Which is why we need a Social Wage.



Also see:

Living Wage articles




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Harpers Billion Dollar Blunder


The Liberals blundered over the helicopter purchase by the Mulroney government, which the Chretien Liberals made an election promise to renege on. They did. Costing us billions in the lost contract and then billions more in replacing the helicopters.

Now the Harpocrite government has done the same thing with the canceling the Liberal Governments Environmental programs. One of their five priorities.

Ironic ain't it.

Tech firms see red in Tory pullout

Canada is paying a huge price in lost investment and business development because of Ottawa's dithering over climate change, industry people say. In particular, we're missing opportunities in the burgeoning global trade in pollution credits — a system that played a big role in reducing acid rain and is now widely viewed as the best way to induce businesses to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.The plan devised by the previous Liberal government, they say, was flawed and developing at a frustrating turtle speed. The new Conservative government has caused further delay by killing that plan without anything to put in its place."The do-nothing option is not free," says Len Eddy, president of AgCert Canada, the Edmonton-based Canadian branch of an international company that invests in emissions-cutting projects. "It's an extremely expensive option. "Analysts estimate the lost investment this year totals as much as $1 billion. It's gone forever, Eddy says.

Also See:

Kyoto

Harper

Rona Ambrose

Climate Change

Global Warming

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Harpers Ideal

Here is the result of law and order platforms embraced by the right, and what we can expect with the Harpocrite Government's new crime laws.

The US Prison Industrial Complex is growing by 1000 people a week thanks to, wait for it....the War on Drugs.

Something the Harpocrite has declared as part of his law and order policy for Canada. So this is what we have to look forward to.

The United States continues to have the highest prison population in the world, withe 1,000 inmates added to the nation's prisons each week from June 2004 to June 2005.

At mid-year 2005, jail facilities were operating at 95% capacity;

The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group, reports that the U.S. incarceration rate in 2004 was the highest in the world, at 724 per 100,000 population. Second was Russia, at 532 per 100,000.

'The data is clear: Drug use is driving up prison numbers throughout the region,' the state's corrections secretary Tim Reisch said in the news release. 'In South Dakota, we are directing our resources to address the issue head on.'

One American in 136 is in prison.



Imagine that more prisoners in the 'land of the Free' than in Russia. And both countries share something else in common, the disreputible use of Capital Punishment.



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Maxim Jail Time

No this is not a case of free speech it's a case of idenity theft and a violation of that most sacred of all American property; intellectual property. It is also just unintelligent, period.

Khushboo case: SC refuses to grant bail to Maxim editor

New Delhi, May 22: The Supreme Court today refused to grant anticipatory bail to Sunil Mehra, editor of the magazine Maxim, against whom a case has been registered for publishing indecent morphed photographs of Khushboo.

The actress had sued the Indian edition of men’s magazine Maxim for a picture published in its inaugural January issue. She filed a defamation case along with criminal and obscenity charges against the British publishers as well as the editors of the Indian edition.

The magazine morphed Khushboo’s face onto a woman clad in black lingerie, with the caption, ‘‘Of course I am a virgin if you don’t count from the behind’’ under it.

Despite the fact that the fine print under the picture reads, ‘‘Women you will never see in Maxim’’ as well as ‘‘100% fake’’, the actor doesn’t see the humour. ‘‘I’m not an object. This incident has damaged me and the publishers must pay for the damage,’’ she said.

And she is not the only star complaining about Maxim ripping off their 'images' to use in their magazine.


Model Complains About Corbis Photo On Maxim Cover


May 18, 2006

By Daryl Lang

Model Veronica Varekova is publicly accusing Maxim magazine of using her image on its cover without her permission, though the magazine says it licensed the photo legitimately from Corbis. "They put me on the cover without my permission," Varekova told the Associated Press this week. "They have no right to do it." The photo of Varekova, topless and seen from the back, was shot by photographer Michael Williams for the British edition of GQ last year and licensed to the American edition of Maxim through Corbis Outline. Varekova's complaint draws light to the common practice of reusing photos shot for one magazine in another market. (It is also convenient publicity for Maxim's June issue, which hit newsstands today.)

As they say on Hawaii Five-O; Book 'Em Danno.

Clearly Maxim fails to follow the Playboy principle of paying its models, photographers, and authors, etc. Imagine that a principled Mens Magazine; Playboy NOT Maxim.


And no you will not find Sidney Crosby in Maxim.



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