Ignatieff Cancelled

Ouch. There goes the my best friends are Jews sound bite...Ignatieff trip to Middle East cancelled OTTAWA - Michael Ignatieff's trip to the Middle East has been called off by the Jewish group that invited him The Canada-Israel Committee confirmed today that it decided to uninvite Ignatief. Hey isn't Warren Kinsella a member of the CIC. Double Ouch.




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Israel

Lebanon

Zionism

Kinsella

Liberal Leadership Race

Ignatieff

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The Working Class Hates Their Jobs

Remember this next time a neo-con ideologue of the professional self identified middle class denounces class war Lucien Bouchard questions work ethic in Quebec......this is the real face of class war in Canada;

The workplace blues

“Relatively high proportions of men and women who worked in sales or service, or processing or manufacturing or utilities were unhappy on the job. The same was true for men in administrative, financial or clerical jobs,” the report says. “By contract, comparatively low percentages of men and women in professional positions were dissatisfied. And among men in management, as well as those in farming, forestry, fishing or mining occupations, job dissatisfaction was particularly uncommon.

And speaking of class war in the US its called the War On The Middle Class and has created such unlikely allies as jinogist anit-migrant Lou Dobbs at CNN and the left wing Counterpunch.

That's because it about losing jobs, not the real oppression of capitalism which is jobs we hate because they demean and alienate us from our real creavtivity. Something the boss, the self employed and the middle class professional does NOT experience.

See:

Class War

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Tory Lies

The reason the Tories eliminated the Court Challenge Program was because they know their new Three Strikes/ Napoleonic Code is unconstitutional according to legal experts.

In Question Period Justice Minister Vic Toews lies saying that it is constitutional.Bill on repeat offenders introduced in House

Public Security Minister Stockwell Day in Question Period denies there is systematic discrimination in Canadian Prisons. Federal prisons discriminate against aboriginals, says ombudsman

Again in Question Period both the Prime Minister and his Minister of International Affairs avoided answering the question about the halt in CIDA funding in Afghanistan...Harper defends slow pace of reconstruction work

Finally they promised to announce the new clean air act this week .....still waiting. It is probably being revised again due to leaks and the need to acutally consult with climate scientists.




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The Return of King Coal

There is no existing clean coal environmental technology so why are new coal fired power plants being built? $$$$$$$$

U.S. Coal Plant Boom Poses Big Environmental and Economic Questions
Should power companies be permitted to build new plants that pollute more but are reliable and less expensive?
A building boom that would add scores of new coal-fired power plants to the nation's power grid is creating a new dilemma for politicians, environmentalists and utility companies across the United States. Should power companies be permitted to build new plants that pollute more but are reliable and less expensive? Or should regulators push utilities toward cleaner burning coal plants, even if it means they will cost more and are based on newer, yet still unproven, technology?

Clean coal technology: How it works
A range of approaches of CCS have been developed and have proved to be technically feasible. They have yet to be made available on a large-scale commercial basis because of the costs involved.

Coal is the major energy source in China which accounts for its high rate of greenhouse gases and China suffers severe acid rain contamination


Trojan Horses and the Big Lie of Clean Coal
According to American.edu’s study of China and coal, “Coal accounts for about 70% of China’s total energy consumption. The development and production of the coal industry provides stability in China’s economic growth. The coal resources in China have been exploited since 476 BC, and it is estimated that even with all the years of coal exploration, China has total coal deposits of 4, 490 billion tons, which are as deep as 2,000 vertical metres. Eventually China will exploit its coal resources until they are eliminated.”

See: Coal



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China Goes Republican

Its not called the Red State for nothing. The Chinese are building a New Great Wall between them and North Korea. It is already deploying considerable resources to rounding up and returning the many thousands of refugees flooding across their 1300km border, along part of which it is starting to build a Berlin Wall-type barrier.

Just like the Republican Congress and Senate approved of building on the US Mexico Border. And like Israeli's illegal wall in Palestine. Through the gate and over the wall


See:

Migration

Berlin Wall

China


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Damn Cat

Another example of mutual aid......though its a damn shame the dog died. So did the cat.....

After a disabled woman's cat started a house fire, her specially trained dog came to the rescue, then died trying to help the cat still in the house.

While many folks believe cats are smarter than dogs, and I must confess our family includes both, in this case the dog was clearly smarter, and did something that has been more often been associated with humans. Self sacrifice .

"She got me outside and then she heard the cat upstairs and she went up there to get the cat and she wouldn't come back to me," Hanson, 49, said at a news conference Monday at Aurora Sheboygan Memorial Medical Center where she was being treated for her injuries.


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Madonna and Child

Does anyone else find this creepy. As in it is illegal in Malawi for non-citizens to adopt children, but donate some money for hospitals, an ofphanage and infrastructure, grease some palms, and you too can buy a child. It smacks of good old colonialism with a hint of slavery. Well after all she is a material girl ......Madonna and child

Judge approves Madonna's adopting child
Boniface Mandere of Eye of the Child emphasized that his organization was not against international adoption or Madonna helping a child in a country where many face lives of disease, hunger and premature death. Malawi is one of the world's poorest countries, devastated by Aids and periodic drought. But Eye of the Child is saying is: "You cannot buy a child as if you are buying a house," Mandere told The Associated Press. "This process is too short, applying on Tuesday, and yesterday the court gave the OK. I don't think that the High Court has any information about how Madonna is when it comes to child-rearing."


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Independent Unions In China

The restructuring of China from a State Captitalist economy to a mixed economy forces it to liberalize its labour laws. This does not yet mean that there will be independent worker controled unions, but it is a step forward.

And guess who opposes the idea of labour law liberalization and loves the old style Stalinist party controled apparatchik unions? Why American Capitalists!

What China needs, is a new workers movement and free unions not State unions.

China Drafts Law to Boost Unions and End Labor Abuse

China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers’ rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980’s.

The move, which underscores the government’s growing concern about the widening income gap and threats of social unrest, is setting off a battle with American and other foreign corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories here.

The proposed rules are being considered after the Chinese Communist Party endorsed a new doctrine that will put greater emphasis on tackling the severe side effects of the country’s remarkable growth.

Whether the foreign corporations will follow through on their warnings is unclear because of the many advantages of being in China — even with restrictions and higher costs that may stem from the new law.

Some of the world’s big companies have expressed concern that the new rules would revive some aspects of socialism and borrow too heavily from labor laws in union-friendly countries like France and Germany.

The Chinese government proposal, for example, would make it more difficult to lay off workers, a condition that some companies contend would be so onerous that they might slow their investments in China.

“This is really two steps backward after three steps forward,” said Kenneth Tung, Asia-Pacific director of legal affairs at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Hong Kong and a legal adviser to the American Chamber of Commerce here.

The proposed law is being debated after Wal-Mart Stores, the world’s biggest retailer, was forced to accept unions in its Chinese outlets.

State-controlled unions here have not wielded much power in the past, but after years of reports of worker abuse, the government seems determined to give its union new powers to negotiate worker contracts, safety protection and workplace ground rules.

Hoping to head off some of the rules, representatives of some American companies are waging an intense lobbying campaign to persuade the Chinese government to revise or abandon the proposed law.

The skirmish has pitted the American Chamber of Commerce — which represents corporations including Dell, Ford, General Electric, Microsoft and Nike — against labor activists and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist Party’s official union organization.

The workers’ advocates say that the proposed labor rules — and more important, enforcement powers — are long overdue, and they accuse the American businesses of favoring a system that has led to widespread labor abuse.

On Friday, Global Labor Strategies, a group that supports labor rights policies, is expected to release a report in New York and Boston denouncing American corporations for opposing legislation that would give Chinese workers stronger rights.

“You have big corporations opposing basically modest reforms,” said Tim Costello, an official of the group and a longtime labor union advocate. “This flies in the face of the idea that globalization and corporations will raise standards around the world.”

See:

China

State Capitalism

Unions


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Japan Proves Tories Wrong

Canada refuses to support the deep sea trawler ban not because of fisher interests, but because of processors who buy their stock from these bulldozers of the sea. As reported here both Hearn and his Newfoundland counterpart say that the deep sea trawlers have done limited damage to fish stocks. For them there is lots of sea left to hoover.

So explain this then...

Japan Admits Exceeding Bluefin Tuna Quota; 'An Horrendous Overcatch'

The Japanese overcatch was uncovered by Australian industry figures who scrutinised publicly available market documents. On a 6000 tonne national annual quota, Japan had been taking between 12,000 and 20,000 tonnes - severely damaging the fishery.

A report by the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin found Japan illegally caught up to $6 billion worth of fish.

If Japan had stuck to its quota, the fish stock would now be five times larger. Japan's quota has been halved to 3000 tonnes a year.

Or this.....Tiny, innumerable, threatened

Now, a new generation of technologically sophisticated factory trawlers has arrived, using vacuuming pumps to suck huge quantities of krill continuously out of the water.One such vessel is expected to take in 100,000 metric tons of krill during the 2005-2006 southern summer fishing season, and may be capable of "hoovering up" as much as 120,000 metric tons each season. Other ships of similar capacity are bound to appear, ultimately threatening the health of the entire ecosystem, unless careful safeguards are quickly put in place.

If we had a deep sea trawler ban then nonee of this would not have happened.

In 2004, the General Assembly passed a nonbinding resolution urging nations to consider temporary bans on bottom trawling. Japan, Iceland, Spain and other nations whose fishing fleets do much of the world's bottom trawling opposed a larger moratorium.

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Bottom Feeders

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Job Loss It's The Environmentalists Fault

Two Quebec Ministers in the Harper Government, the Minister of Labour and the Minister of Industry, state that its the environmental movement that have caused the job losses around softwood. Why because the Quebec provincial government imposed environmental laws on the private sector without consulting them and bringing them in gradually. You know like having the private sector use voluntary compliance. Oh gosh I can't wait for the Tories Clean Air Act.

Blackburn said Ottawa's environmental legislation, to be tabled Tuesday, "is a step in the right direction" because it still allows businesses to flourish.

Of course the job loss in the softwood industry has nothing to do with the Tories failure to bail out that sector, while waiting for their Softwood lumber deal to pass the house. Nope, not a thing to do with that. Of course industry can continue to function on the promise of future funding from the softwood deal, yep they can take that to the bank.

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Softwood



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CMHC to be Privatized

Which priority was this?

The Harpocrties will sell anything not nailed down regardless of it's financial success...it's called devolution of federal power.

Ottawa eyes privatization of CMHC
Private companies — mainly U.S.-based multinationals — are ready to rush in to the lucrative mortgage-insurance market that CMHC dominates. And the federal government has signalled it wants out of the housing business altogether, arguing that it's a provincial responsibility. “Trial balloons are being floated around” and can be traced back to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's office, one Bay Street source said. “This has been in the wind for a couple of months now,” said another private sector source.

The success of such endeavours can be seen in the Liberals selling off the student loan progam to the banks. Hows your debt doing?!

And it's a sure fire way of creating a Housing Bubble like they are experiencing south of the border.

And of course privatization of the CMHC will benefit the Tories pals in business but do nothing for ordinary Canadians.


A tip o' the blog to Politique Vert

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Privatization

P3




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Tories Face Farmer Backlash

As I said here before the Conservatives are listening to the smallest minority of the social conservatives in the their party base when it comes to the Wheat Board. Of course it fits with their neo-liberal idoeology, which is why they do it. However when it comes to the broader base of the farming community across the Prairies, the folks who are the real voter base for the Conservatives, well they are about to lose them over this issue. Cause its not just about the Wheat Board, its about democracy. Which of course scares the bejesus out of the Harper autocracy.

Farmers fretting over Wheat Board's future

Doug Chorney's devotion to the Conservative Party runs deep enough that he spent last winter hammering campaign signs into the frozen prairie on behalf of the local Tory candidate.

But Mr. Chorney, a 41-year-old grain farmer, believes the federal government is about to make an enormous mistake by dismantling the monopoly power of the Canadian Wheat Board.

"They've never properly explained how you can have a strong and viable Canadian Wheat Board in a dual market," Mr. Chorney says. "In fact, every credible voice on the subject says it's not possible."

"They're really floundering on this issue," he says.

"If we just get a vote, we'll have no trouble showing that farmers want the CWB to stay," Mr. Chorney says. "We're not scared of a vote, and the other side is. That speaks volumes."

Mr. Strahl wouldn't commit to a plebiscite, he says in an interview.

"All this task force is doing is answering technical questions on what would be necessary to move from a monopoly position to a marketing-choice position," Mr. Strahl says. "You don't need a plebiscite on that."

Tories' plan to end Canadian Wheat Board monopoly has political risks

Alan Skardal has voted for the federal Conservatives for more than 30 years, but insists the ballot he cast for them last Jan. 23 was his last.

The grain and cattle farmer from Baldur, Man., says his commitment never wavered despite Tory-supported agriculture policies that cost him and his neighbours thousands of dollars through the years - from elimination of a grain transportation subsidy to support for meat packers during the mad cow crisis.

But the party's decision to look at ending the Canadian Wheat Board's monopoly on western wheat and barley exports before letting farmers vote on it is the last straw.

"I don't know who I will vote for in the next federal election, but I do know who it won't be. I will never vote Conservative again," Skardal, 50, wrote this month in a letter to the editor of the Farmers Independent Weekly.

And for more on the Wheat Board check out fellow Albertan and Progressive Blogger Buckdog.

See:

Wheat Board

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Global Warming Off's The Vine

Great Headline....but the facts are scary if you enjoy a Nouvelle Beaujolais.

French wine about global warming
Warming climate conditions between 1945 and 1999 have already brought the grape harvest forward by three weeks to a month in many parts of France - to its earliest point for the past 500 years, according to the ONERC.Though for the past 20 years, a general rise in temperatures has spelled good news for the French wine trade, a confirmed trend towards global warming could bring other unwelcome challenges.The summer of 2003 - when a heat wave gripped much of Europe - was an early warning sign: the grape harvest was down 17 per cent on average, almost entirely because of the climate, according to the ONERC.


See: Global Warming


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Micro Finance Pro and Con

With the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize going to Bangladesh Banker Mohammed Yunnus and his micro-credit bank Grameen, one has to ask why he did not get the Nobel for Economics, considering the neo-liberal American dweeb that did.

I have blogged here on micro-credit before, and it is, despite its faults and limitations, an alternative to NGO's, development Aid from the OECD States and IMF World Bank loans to the State.

Banker to the poor who changed lives of millions
By Justin Huggler. Mohammed Yunus is not a statesman or world leader. He is not feted everywhere he goes. He is an economics professor who lives in a small apartment in Bangladesh.

Banking for the poor Pakistan Dawn

"A person doesn't have to be rich to become creditworthy. Credit, he says, should be accepted as a human right," Younus told Gulf News in an earlier interview. "Credit is the last hope left to those faced with absolute poverty. That is why I believe that the right to credit should be recognised as a fundamental human right," he said. Righting a wrong with alternative credit

However there is a down side as I mentioned. High interest rates, overblown bueracracy, anxieties about paying back the loans, etc.

The Grameen Bank Founder Muhammed Yunus Gets the Nobel Prize.

Are micro-finance institutions exploiting the poor?

Microcredit, Macro Problems


In the Summer issue of the CATO Journal, the American adovcates of Free Trade find that Banking regulations are a problem in the developing world because of the inherent corruption of monopoly. The author of this particular article finds that both Private and State oversight of these banks are equally corrupt.

Conventional government regulation of banks is likely to backfire because the regulators are frequently incompetent or corrupt. Instead of serving the public interest, regulators often end up serving the banking industry and its political supporters.
The most compelling evidence for this point of view is the many banking crises around the world in which large numbers of banks have failed, leaving governments with the cost of compensating depositors. By one count, there were 168 such crises from 1976 to 2002. The usual cause
is that both governments and private owners have turned banks into pyramid or Ponzi schemes in spite of government regulation. The banks are insolvent (bankrupt) because a high proportion of their loans are bad and will never be repaid. Yet the banks can remain liquid and continue to operate for years because new deposits keep coming in. Such schemes are possible because of explicit or implicit government guarantees and insurance of bank deposits that reduce the incentive for the private sector to monitor the financial health of banks.
Rethinking Bank Regulation: Till Angels Govern
by James R. Barth, Gerard Caprio Jr., and Ross Levine
Reviewed by Robert E. Anderson
Cato Journal
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Policy Analysis
Volume 26 Number 2, Spring/Summer 2006

While allowing removing deposit insurance from the banks might appear as a good idea on the surface the experience in Alberta shows that it is not. The Dial Mortgage scandal and the Principal Trust scandal of the early eighties shows that those that use uninsured banks can be ripped off just as easily. And I need not remind readers of the ultimate Ponzi scheme in the U.S. the Savings and Loans debacle of the ninties.

A real alternative would be to create peoples banks, credit unions, with low interest rates and micro-loan economics. This would allow the working poor to develop savings thus capital.

An End to Poverty: The Will and the Means

Having survived the depredations of war, sickness and a natural disaster in rural Bangladesh, Pramila was sure her life would unravel completely when a fire destroyed her grocery store, her entire stock, her two cows and her stored-up crops.

Help was at hand, however, thanks to a revolutionary finance system known as microcredit, pioneered in the 1970s by Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank. “The Grameen Bank visited her the next morning,” Yunus records in his autobiographical book, Banker to the Poor. “Part of the loan she used to start up a small grocery store and the rest she invested in fertilizer for her irrigated land. With the help of her three grown sons, she was able to start paying off the loan. Three months later Grameen gave her a housing loan, and she constructed herself a new house.

“She is currently in her twelfth loan. She owns and leases enough land to sell about 10 mounds of rice paddy [unmilled rice] a year, after feeding her whole family” (see our interview with Professor Yunus: “Banking on Trust”).

The fact is that the Grameen Bank is one model, and just that, one that needs to be refined to overcome its weaknesses. Namely that it remains a monopoly bank rather than a peoples bank.

Micro-financing is a model that could be and should be applied in the advanced industrial countries as well as in the newly industrialized and developing countries. It is the missing element in Welfare Reform in North America which does not provide credit opportunities for the poor. Welfare itself is anti savings and credit which leaves the poor with an all or nothing alternative.
A living wage would be the alternative to welfare in advanced capitalist countries.

The other missing element is median financing to worker/producer owned cooperatives. Allowing workers to both create new businesses on a cooperative model as well as to bail out failing capitalist enterprizes that communities rely upon, but which are shut down as inefficient or unproductive. These need to be placed under worker control, and refinanced by a credit system ideally through credit unions, union pension funds and all three levels of government.

New initiatives for micro-credit individual businesses and worker/producer cooperatives could be financed by venture capital such as Labour Funds, which failed because they were directed at long term risky ventures like Bio-Tech. Instead a tax credit system, as well as government banking gurantees could allow for a pool of capital to be used for these purposes.



See:

Free Trade


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Cherniak Unwitting Tory

The Conservatives messaging that you hear on Mike Duffy and Don Newman over Iggys commments about War Crimes is; "this summer the Liberal Leadership Candidates and MPs attacked Israel." It is their defense of Harpers comment that the Liberals are Anti-Semitic errr.... Anti-Israel/Anti-Israeli.(the two terms seem interchangable in the heat of debate on these political shows)

I scratch my head and ask myself, self where have I heard this before. The Liberal Party did not attack Israel but had an internal kerfuffle over comments made by a volunteer for one of the Leadership Candidates, and comments from one MP.

A tempest in a teapot that got blown out of proportion by Cherniak 's vociferous blogging outrage. So now the Tories are using Cherniak against the party. Delicious. This is what happens when you smear people. Chickens, home, roost.

And it seems that Cherniak just doesn't know when to quit....Cherniak in the Globe

Also See:

Israel

Lebanon

Zionism

Kinsella

Liberal Leadership Race

Ignatieff

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Does Bilingualism Matter?

Nope not in the ROC, only in Quebec. You can barely be understood in English and you can be PM just look at Jean Chretien, but heavens forbid you can't be understood in Quebecois. As I said before Dion's liability, which will be overlooked, is that he is not fluently bilingual.

Dion's English, like Kennedy's French in Quebec, became hard to comprehend when subjects got complicated.

As for the candidates, they came to rumble. Stéphane Dion picked a fight with Rae over fiscal responsibility. Rae pushed back — switching into French to demonstrate that he's more comfortable in his second language than Dion is in his —

So can we drop this crap about bilingualism when what we are really talking about is whether political candidates are fluent in Quebecois patois.


See:

Liberal Leadership Race



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