The Cost of Fitness

The Tories tax credit for fitness is a joke. First it will be based on fitness programs that can prove they improve kids "cardio-respiratory fitness" Next it ain't $500 its only $78.50. For every $500 you spend on Hockey Equipment or joining a sports fitness centre you will get a tax credit for $78.50.

The federal government let parents claim up to $500, but give them an annual maximum of $78.50 per child.During the campaign before the Jan. 23 parliamentary election, Stephen Harper proposed that parents with children under 16 be able to claim $500 in registration fees per child participating in organized sports.

Dr. Kellie Leitch suggests that means activities such as archery and lawn bowling wouldn't qualify. Eligible programs would have to include at least 30 minutes of physical activity for kids under 10, and an hour for those 10 and over, for parents to qualify for the maximum tax credit of $78.50 per child.

Of course if your kids join a dance group like Shumka or go to a Drama Music Dance School like Fame you get nada. Despite these programs being just as effective at improving cardio-respiratory fitness in your kids as sports programs. Call it another tax credit for the suburban class, call it the Harpers Kids benefit, cause his son plays hockey and would qualify.

Call it another false promise, $500 suddenly becomes $78.50. And there are restrictions on who qualifies. Just like their Family Allowance payments aren't a Universal Daycare program.


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Patriarchy Hates Women

Two blogs at opposite political polls make the point that patriarchy hates women. April Reign reports on the right wing Catholic attacks on womens right to choose in Nicaragua and Poland, and the sexist comments of a Mulsim Cleric in Australia admonishing women to avoid dressing provocatively or they invite rape.

At the other end of the political spectrum Big Blue Wave complains that people, men, are sexist in believing that social conservative women are dumb. Well they aren't dumb, but they are agents of patriarchy. Which is worse. Because they are women they think they can speak for all women, while denouncing feminists for doing the same thing.

In reality they are the womens voice FOR patriarchy, which is anti-women always has been always will be.


Unfortunately the pews, temples, and synagogues are filled with women. Without women the patriarchical religions would collapse. Like Hegels 'slaves'; whose existence is justfied through their bondage, conservative women act against their own best interests for the interests of their masters. Thus the right wing can justify their attack on individual rights by saying not all women support feminism.

The war on women is the inherent misogyny of patriarchy, the battle for womens rights which is the battle for individual rights means that patriarchy needs to be abolished. Since all monotheist religions are patriarchical and conduct their moral war against human rights and individual rights means that we must abolish religious institutions and their political power.

This has always been the core of anarchist anti-theism.

See:

Radical Feminism

Whose Family Values?

The Sanctity of Marriage Debate

Feminism



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Rona Wrong On Kyoto

Conservative Environment Minister Rona Ambrose likes to denounce the Kyoto accord because it would mean Canada would pay foreign countries to reduce their greenhouse gases. Of course she has made it sound like that would be a bad thing. Too bad the World Bank disagrees with her. As do the investment bankers Morgan Stanely. So even the scions of capitalism say the Tories have it wrong. Time for her to resign.

Rich should pay for forests: World Bank

Global warming caused by rapid deforestation could be curbed if developing countries were paid the proper rewards for maintaining their forests, according to a World Bank report.

The report released this week noted that the world's forests are disappearing at a rate of five percent a decade as woodland is cleared for timber and production of in-demand commodities like beef, coffee and soybeans.

But the land would have far more value if developing countries were paid to preserve their forests on global carbon markets, the report said. Such markets are an offshoot of the Kyoto agreement, and allow countries that struggle to meet targets for industrial emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) to pay other countries that keep their emissions down.

Global push to cut greenhouse emissions

The drive to tackle climate change gathered pace on Thursday as Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, announced a $3bn plan to invest in the carbon trading market amid mounting evidence that some US states are growing more sympathetic to international action.

The moves come just days before a UK government report is expected to propose a huge expansion of the global market in trading permits for carbon dioxide emissions. It will also propose extending existing mechanisms for western companies to benefit from promoting cleaner energy in poor countries.

A bigger market could offer substantial business opportunities. One recent calculation suggests that global expenditure on curbing the effects of climate change could be worth about $1,000bn (£529bn) within five years of action being agreed.

See:

Ambrose

Environment

Kyoto

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Open Skies

Gee I made this point the other day Make Robert Milton Happy and no sooner do I point it out then the Tories oblige in bringing it up......Ottawa hints it's ready to open Canadian skies to competition


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Public Pension Parnerships

David Dodge , Governor of the Bank of Canada has a new definition for P3's, Public Private Partnerships, well actually he has said this many times before. His definition of P3's for investment purposes is Public Pension Partnerships. That is he wants to see government access workers pension funds to pay for infrastructure.

On the long-term structural issues facing Ontario, Dodge said it was critical the province improve efficiency and productivity by investing in infrastructure and human capital.

He threw his support behind public-private partnerships as way for Ontario to dig its way out of an infrastructure crunch.

''There is evidence from other countries that public-private partnerships can both increase the efficiency of investments and support their financing,'' Dodge said.

''Now is the right time to encourage partnerships between the government of Ontario and private providers, given the climate of low nominal interest rates and the presence of large pension funds that searching for these kinds of investment opportunities.''

As I have said here before the liquidity of institutional pension funds, such as the Canada Pension Plan, Ontario Teachers Fund, the largest such source of capital in Canada, and OMERS, as well as the building trades pension funds are not private but actually another form of public funding. In otherwords Public Private is a misnomer, it should be called Public Pension Partnerships. The working class again funds itself, through low wages, taxes and then finally with our pensions.

Private capital on the other hand wants to make its profits faster so it will not invest in infrastructure. Instead it turns to creating tax shelters such as Income Trusts. So the State turns to social capital for its financing instead, as do businesses that are in need of restructuring but want to avoid a hedge fund takeover, which inevitabley ends when they are cannibalized and sold off.

CPP to assume active role with $5-billion fund

The relationship portfolio will eventually consist of about a half-dozen companies and be part of the $57-billion in stocks run by Donald Raymond, CPP's senior vice-president for public market investments. Mr. Raymond is a former Canadian air force pilot who joined the money manager in 2001 from Goldman Sachs & Co. The new head of relationship investing is expected to receive a pay package similar to the $864,000 that Mr. Raymond was awarded last year.

The move to activism — CPP executives prefer to call it “pro-active engagement” — takes the CPP fund down a path blazed by many U.S. public sector funds and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan. The $96-billion Teachers fund has been making such investments for the past 15 years, using in-house expertise to earn superior long-term returns.

Teachers now has between $3-billion and $4-billion of its money committed to this area, said Brian Gibson, a senior vice-president at the pension fund.

Value investors typically target companies they feel are undervalued, and wait for the price to appreciate. Activist investors target much the same companies, but once they understand what they believe to be reason for the underperformance, they work on a plan to correct it.

Pension funds that currently are complaining that they have no shareholder say in companies they invest in turn deny their own investors, you and me, any say in their internal affairs and investment policies. Pot, kettle, black.

The powerful Ontario Teachers Pension Plan is asking Goldcorp Inc. to give shareholders a vote on its $6.7-billion (U.S.) takeover of Glamis Gold Ltd., giving credence to a court challenge by the company's founder and largest shareholder.

As Robert McEwen's request for a court order imposing a Goldcorp shareholder vote was being heard in Ontario Superior Court, Teachers executives were meeting with the company's chief executive officer, Ian Telfer, just a few blocks away.

The pension plan, which owned about 2.3 million Goldcorp shares or about half a per cent of the company's outstanding float at year end, said the transaction's significant share dilution is well beyond the level where shareholder input should be sought. “It's hard to imagine how you can issue 67 per cent of your shares and say nothing has changed,” said Teachers senior vice-president, Brian Gibson, in an interview. “That's pretty significant and we believe shareholders should be consulted,” he added.

What we need is a socail policy on public pensions that allows those of us who are the investors and owners of these funds to have a say in how and where they invest.

Capital and Social Europe
Robin Blackburn, NLR 34, July-August 2005, pp. 87-112
The social funds would also be as much about producing wealth as distributing it. In a continent where stock exchanges are already of greatly increased importance, the social funds could help to protect productive enterprises from ‘financialization’, promote socially responsible business objectives and assert a degree of popular control over the accumulation process. The network of pension funds would have significant power in corporate affairs, both because of its shares and its investment policies. The fund network could develop its own cadre of financial specialists and would have reason to assist the tax authorities in monitoring and enforcing fiscal regulations.

See:

Social Insecurity The Phony Pension Crisis

Pension Plunder

Is Delphi the Oracle of things to come?

Labour Is Capital

Pension Free China

Kids Are Commodities

Workers vs Worker

Air Canada Profits From Bankruptcy

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Star Wars

Forget BMD, move over George Lucas, here comes the real Star Wars; The United States of Space.

A Dangerous Step toward Space Warfare

The release of the U.S. National Space Policy (NSP) on October 6 has worried many experts, who say the policy marks a strategic shift toward a more military-oriented, unilateral approach to space for the United States. They fear that the policy, if followed, could begin an arms race leading to catastrophic space warfare.

The NSP reads, in part, "The United States considers space capabilities… vital to its national interests. Consistent with this policy, the United States will: preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space; dissuade or deter others from either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do so; take those actions necessary to protect its space capabilities; respond to interference; and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests;

See:

Space



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Lumpenproletariat

In Marx's time they were called the Lumpenproletariat......

How Globalization Is Creating a New European Underclass

Rather, what stand out are the symptoms of intellectual neglect. The poor of today watch television for half the day. These days, television producers even refer to what they call "Underclass TV." The new proletariat eats a lot of fatty foods and he enjoys smoking and drinking -- a lot. About 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of all the alcohol sold in the country. While he may be a family man, his families are often broken. And on Election Day, he casts a protest vote for the extreme left or right wing party, sometimes switching quickly from one to the other.

But the main thing that sets the modern poor apart from the industrial age pauper is a sheer lack of interest in education. Today's proletariat has little education and no interest in obtaining more. Back in the early days of industrialization, the poor joined worker associations that often doubled as educational associations. The modern member of the underclass, by contrast, has completely shunned personal betterment.

He likewise makes little effort to open the door to the future for his own children. Their language skills are as bad as their ability to concentrate. The rising rate of illiteracy is matched by the shrinking opportunities to integrate the under class. The Americans, not ones to mince words, call them "white trash."

And the old debate on whether they are revolutionary or reactionary returns.
The Philosophical Roots of the Marx-Bakunin Conflict

The Revolutionary Agent

Another strategical disagreement dividing Marx and Bakunin centered around the question of who would lead the revolution. Both agreed that the proletariat would play a key role, but for Marx the proletariat was the exclusive, leading revolutionary agent while Bakunin entertained the possibility that the peasants and even the lumpenproletariat (the unemployed, common criminals, etc.) could rise to the occasion. Bakunin argued, for example, that the peasants were a revolutionary class for three reasons: (1) They have retained “the simple, robust temperament and the energy germane to the folk nature.” (2) They work with their hands and despise privilege. And (3) as toilers they have common interests with workers

In other words, being close to nature, the peasants are less alienated from their true, natural essence since they have suffered less corruption by the evils of society. Bakunin adopted a similar argument in relation to the lumpenproletariat:

“By flower of the proletariat, I mean precisely that eternal ‘meat’, ... that great rabble of the people (underdogs, ‘dregs of society’) ordinarily designated by Marx and Engels in the picturesque and contemptuous phrase lumpenproletariat. I have in mind the ‘riffraff’, that ‘rabble’ almost unpolluted by bourgeois civilization, which carries in its inner being and in its aspirations ... all the seeds of the socialism of the future....”

In both cases, Bakunin’s conclusions flow directly from his conviction that inherent in humanity is a natural essence which can be suppressed but never entirely extinguished. Those in society who are more distant from the State apparatus (the peasants are scattered throughout the countryside, the lumpenproletariat simply refuses to obey the laws) are accordingly natural leaders.

In contrast, Marx consistently argued that the proletariat alone was the revolutionary agent: “Of all classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.”Here again their different philosophical frameworks led these revolutionaries in opposed directions. Because Marx believed human nature was shaped by the economy, he analyzed the possible revolutionary agents by analyzing how the economy would influence their development. And economic considerations led him to conclude that the peasants could not play a leading revolutionary role. For example, they do not constitute a cohesive class. Some are large landowners and hire other peasants to work for them while the latter are often landless and destitute. Moreover, the desire for land by a majority of the peasants could serve as an anchor, holding them back from a truly revolutionary perspective. Rather than rallying for a thoroughgoing, socialist revolution where private ownership of land is abolished, they often veer in the direction of seeking to augment their own modest, private property land holdings at the expense of the large landowners. But aside from these economic considerations, Marx also believed that the situation of the peasants, not only prohibited them from attaining class consciousness, but from becoming a truly revolutionary class:

“The small holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse.... Their field of production, the small holding, admits of no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science and, therefore, no diversity of development, no variety of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient; it itself directly produces the major part of its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, a peasant and his family; alongside them another small holding, another peasant and another family.... In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is a merely local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class.”

Marx was even less enthusiastic about the lumpenproletariat because it was not directly related to the production process at all, being comprised of the permanently unemployed, criminals, etc.

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Ralph on Rae

King Ralph entered the Liberal Leadership race by saying Bob Rae was Dumb in a quote worthy of the high school drop out and academic palagarist....

"education bears no relationship to intelligence" said Ralph. And he should know since he lacks both.

Also See:

Ralph Klein

Alberta

Bob Rae

Liberal Leadership Race

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Drug Addict Attacks Fox

Drug addled, drug addict; Rush Limbaugh on Michael J. Fox: ‘I Take Back None of What I Said’





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Money For Nothing

Is a song by Dire Straits. And it is the way oil companies and their partners in Africa do business. It's called Free Trade. And in Russia it's called Mafia Capitalism. Corruption by any other name....

African minister took cut of oil contracts

In an unusually frank admission about the mechanics of business in oil-rich West Africa, a top Equatorial ­Guinean official has said that companies owned by ministers often bid for ­government contracts with foreign groups and, if successful, receive “a percentage of the total contract the company gets”.

Teodorin Nguema Obiang, the 37-year-old son and likely successor of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, made the statement in a sworn affidavit to Cape Town’s High Court, where his lawyers will today oppose the seizure of two luxury houses he owns in the city. Equatorial Guinea is sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest oil producer.

However, in an extraordinary admission in his affidavit, the president’s son ­testified that ministers and public servants in Equatorial Guinea were allowed to own companies bidding for ­government contracts with foreign groups which, if ­successful, would receive “a percentage of the total contract the company gets”.

This, he told the court, “means that a cabinet minister ends up with a sizeable part of the contract price in his bank account”.

Non-governmental groups campaigning against corruption in the oil industry have long contended that officials in Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, and other oil-rich West African states have made untold sums by profiting from foreign business contracts, often in contravention of local laws.

However, statements to that effect by African officials themselves are rare.

And of course its not limited to just Guinea...

Nigeria’s Faltering Federal Experiment

Nigeria’s federal system and politics are deeply flawed, contributing to rising violence that threatens to destabilise one of Africa’s leading countries. Failing to encourage genuine power sharing, they have sparked dangerous rivalries between the centre and the 36 states over revenue from the country’s oil and other natural resources; promoted no-holds-barred struggles between interests groups to capture the state and its attendant wealth; and facilitated the emergence of violent ethnic militias, while politicians play on and exacerbate inter-communal tensions to cover up their corruption. The government has been quick to brand many of the symptoms, especially the rise of militancy, as simple criminality to be dealt with by more police and more troops. But unless it engages with the underlying issues of resource control, equal rights, power sharing and accountability, Nigeria will face an internal crisis of increasing proportions.

See:

Africa

Oil





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