Cherniak vs. Chomsky

In another slagging debate about Robert McClelland of My Blahg

Jason Cherniak says the following;

... I think (assume) he means the extreme left. People who follow the likes of Chomsky.

So I said:
"I think (assume) he means the extreme left. People who follow the likes of Chomsky." Once again Cherniak you are equating principled anti-Zionism/Anti-statism with antisemitism, as usual with you a cheap shot.

Then he said:

Jason Cherniak said...

Eugene, Chomsky is a Holocaust denier.

This is not factual it is an old slander from the right wing much like this one;Red Baiting Chomsky

"I have always supported a Jewish ethnic homeland in Palestine. That is different from a Jewish state. There's a strong case to be made for an ethnic homeland, but as to whether there should be a Jewish state, or a Muslim state, or a Christian state, or a white state — that's entirely another matter." Noam Chomsky

You have said you see a "hint of anti-Semitic implications" in the work of Robert Faurisson, the notorious French Holocaust denier. Is Jew-baiting merely a hobby of yours, or is it vocational? LAURENCE COLE, KENT

The facts and the principle have been spelled out dozens of times since 1980 (so it is a bit boring), but once again, briefly.

The last time I had anything to do with this affair, Faurisson was accused of raising questions about gas chambers. Several years later, he was tried and sentenced for "Falsification of History", but there was no charge of Holocaust denial or anti-Semitism (according to Le Monde). The only issue concerning my connection with this sordid affair is whether we should adopt the Goebbels-Zhdanov doctrine that the State has the right to determine Historical Truth and punish deviation from it. As I wrote then, and am happy to repeat, it is a gross insult to the memory of victims of the Holocaust to adopt the doctrines of their murderers. The remark you are misrepresenting is from a personal letter - an interesting source. It reviewed the facts and went on to point out that even denial of huge atrocities would not in itself be evidence for racism, giving a few of the many examples. Thus neither you, nor I, conclude that Americans are vicious racists because they estimate Vietnamese deaths at about 5 per cent of the official figure, or because for centuries even scholarship vastly understated the scale and character of the destruction of the indigenous population. The point generalises to England and others, of course. There can be many reasons for denying horrendous crimes, even in the cases that are the most serious on moral grounds: our own. One special case - purely hypothetical in this personal correspondence - was that denial of the Holocaust would not establish anti-Semitism, for exactly the same reasons.

Cherniak is a Zionist. As I have pointed out before Zionism is just another right wing nationalist ideology. Being Jewish is irrelevant to his defense of Zionism and Israel. Just as it is for his pal Warren Kinsella who is not Jewish but defends Zionism and the 'State' of Israel.

Cherniak is a politically a right wing statist and a nationalist. Being a Liberal he is also a statist when it comes to the Canadian State. And as I have pointed out before he is a right winger when it comes to progressive left issues in Canada.

He hates the left and he hates the anti-statist left especially. And he despises and disparages the Jewish Left, especially those who do not equate Israel and Zionism with being Jewish and do not equate Anti-Zionism with knee jerk painting of ones opponents as Anti-Semites.


With regard to anti-Semitism, the distinguished Israeli statesman Abba Eban pointed out the main task of Israeli propaganda (they would call it exclamation, what's called 'propaganda' when others do it) is to make it clear to the world there's no difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. By anti-Zionism he meant criticisms of the current policies of the State of Israel. So there's no difference between criticism of policies of the State of Israel and anti-Semitism, because if he can establish 'that' then he can undercut all criticism by invoking the Nazis and that will silence people. We should bear it in mind when there's talk in the US about anti-Semitism. Noam Chomsky

Being Jewish is all for Cherniak, yet like many Jews his roots like Chomsky's are in the Slavic community, Cherniak being a common Russian/Ukrainian last name.

Chomsky was born in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Hebrew scholar and IWW member William Chomsky, who was from a town in Ukraine. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (born Simonofsky), came from what is now Belarus, but unlike her husband she grew up in the United States and spoke "ordinary New York English".

But Cherniak never embraces this aspect of his cultural heritage. When I first read his Blog I considered Cherniak a fellow honky, as in Bohunk, that self depreciating racist epithet used for Ukrainians, Hungarians and Poles. The fact is that in the North American Diaspora one can be both, a honky and a Jew.

By emphasizing his Jewish roots and denying his Slavic ones he is selective in his cultural identity. In defining himself as a Jewish Nationalist a Zionist, hence a right winger he has made a political decision and a statement of his realpoliticks.

He has made his Jewishness a political fetish.One with which he uses to bash other Jews to his left. Depreciating them as crazy, nuts, etc.

His Zionism is anti-semitic, he hates Jews who disagree with him with a passion. Hence his specific attack on Chomsky. He posted his canard and link to a right wing anti-Chomsky blog because he wants to discredit Chomsky while avoiding arguing about Chomsky's politics; anarchism.

What makes Mr. Chomsky unique is that his criticism of the capitalist economic order takes its point of departure from the classical liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment. His heroes are not Lenin and Marx but Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt. He argues that the free market envisaged by these thinkers has never materialized in the world and that what we have gotten instead is a collusion of the state with private interests. Moreover he has repeatedly stressed that the attacks on democracy and the market by the big multinationals go hand-in-hand. The rich, he claims, echoing Adam Smith, are too keen to preach the benefits of market discipline to the poor while they reserve for themselves the right to be bailed out by the state whenever the going gets rough. As he puts it : “The free market is socialism for the rich. Markets for the poor and state protection for the rich.” He has spoken positively about the work of Peruvian liberal economist Hernando De Soto who sees the problem of poverty in the Third World as being related to the fact that the poor usually lack clearly defined property rights.

Chomsky has repeatedly stressed that the attacks on democracy and the market by the big multinationals go hand-in-hand

Another aspect of his political work that has been overlooked by foes and critics alike is Mr. Chomsky’s fight against the forces of irrationality that tend to dominate the humanities in the universities. His dismissal of Marxism as a religious “pseudoscience” devoid of all scientific pretensions is one such case. Another is his insistence that the social “sciences” and economics do not meet the methodological criteria that would qualify them as sciences and should thus give up any pretence to being so.

Cherniak hates the left, whether it is the Jewish left or Canadian left, he hates socialism and socialists as his attacks on the NDP in his blog show. But he dresses up his conservative religious and political/social values as progressive because he is a Liberal.

But the only difference between him and the social conservatives on the right is well, actually not much. He is in good company with Stockwell Day, a 'good friend' of Zionism and Israel. Birds of a feather.

Accusations of anti-semitism

Partially because of these criticisms, Chomsky has been accused of being anti-semitic on many occasions. The most outspoken of his critics include writer David Horowitz, who has toured college campuses distributing anti-Chomsky pamphlets, attorney/professor Alan Dershowitz, with whom Chomsky has engaged in many verbal battles through the media, and sociology professor emeritus Werner Cohn, who has written an entire book; Partners in Hate about Chomsky's relationship to Faurisson One of the most common charges is that the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is theoretical, and in practice anti-Zionism is a manifestation of anti-Semitism.

Chomsky's support for Israel Shahak, author of Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, a book that claims that Judaism is a fundamentally chauvinistic religion, has led to more accusations of anti-semitism.

Chomsky rejects charges of anti-Semitism, citing that the definition presented by Israeli apologists is itself racist and ethnocentric. Claiming to speak out against bigotry of all forms, including anti-Semitism, Chomsky is nevertheless often accused of anti-Semitism, which he dismisses as "ad-hominem attacks" and "typical propaganda."

QUESTION: I ask you this question because I know that you have been plagued and hounded around the United States specifically on this issue of the Holocaust. It's been said that Noam Chomsky is somehow agnostic on the issue of whether the Holocaust occurred or not.

CHOMSKY: My "agnosticism" is in print. I described the Holocaust years ago as the most fantastic outburst of insanity in human history, so much so that if we even agree to discuss the matter we demean ourselves. Those statements and numerous others like them are in print, but they're basically irrelevant because you have to understand that this is part of a Stalinist-style technique to silence critics of the holy state and therefore the truth is entirely irrelevant, you just tell as many lies as you can and hope that some of the mud will stick. It's a standard technique used by the Stalinist parties, by the Nazis and by these guys.

QUESTION: There's tremendous support for Israel in the United States at least in elite groups. There's also on another level a very steady, virulent anti-Semitism that goes on. Can you talk about that?

CHOMSKY: Anti-Semitism has changed, during my lifetime at least. Where I grew up we were virtually the only Jewish family, I think there was one other. Of course being the only Jewish family in a largely Irish-Catholic and German-Catholic community--

QUESTION: In Philadelphia?

CHOMSKY: In Philadelphia. And the anti-Semitism was very real. There were certain paths I could take to walk to the store without getting beaten up. It was the late 1930s and the area was openly pro-Nazi. I remember beer parties when Paris fell and things like that. It's not like living under Hitler, but it's a very unpleasant thing. There was a really rabid anti-Semitism in that neighborhood where I grew up as a kid and it continued. By the time I got to Harvard in the early 1950s there was still very detectable anti-Semitism. It wasn't that they beat you up on the way to school or something, but other ways, kind of WASP-ish anti-Semitism. There were very few Jewish professors on the faculty at that time. There was beginning to be a scattering of them, but still very few. This was the tail end of a long time of WASP-ish anti-Semitism at the elite institutions. Over the last thirty years that's changed very radically. Anti-Semitism undoubtedly exists, but it's now on a par, in my view, with other kinds of prejudice of all sorts. I don't think it's more than anti-Italianism or anti-Irishism, and that's been a very significant change in the last generation, one that I've experienced myself in my own life, and it's very visible throughout the society.

QUESTION: How would you account for that?

CHOMSKY: How would I account for it? I think partly that the Holocaust did have an effect. It brought out the horrifying consequences of anti-Semitism in a way that certainly is striking. I presume, I can't prove this, but there must be, at least I hope there is, a kind of guilt feeling involved, because the role of the United States during the Holocaust was awful, before and during. They didn't act to save Jews, and they could have in many respects. The role of the Zionist organization is not very pretty either. In the late 1940s there were plenty of displaced persons in the Jewish DP camps. Some survived. It remained awful, they stayed in the DP camps, in fact, for a while they were dying at almost the same rate they were under the Nazis. Many of those people, if they had been given a chance, surely would have wanted to come to the United States. There are debates about how many, but it's just unimaginable that if they'd been given a chance they wouldn't have wanted to come here. They didn't. A tiny scattering came. There was an immigration bill, the Stratton bill, which I think admitted about 400,000 people, if I remember, to the United States, very few Jews among them. Plenty of Nazis, incidentally, straight out of their SS uniforms. The reason that bill passed, I think it was 1947, was that it was the beginning of the Cold War and priority was being given to basically the Nazis, because we were resurrecting them all over the world, a lot of them were brought in, a lot of Nazi war criminals, and others, but very few Jews. That's not a very pretty sight. You say, during the war you could have given some argument, not an acceptable argument, but you could have given at least a not ridiculous argument that you had to fight the war and not worry about the people being sent to the gas chambers, but after the war you couldn't give any argu- ment. It was a matter of saving the survivors, and we didn't do it. I should say the Zionist organization didn't support it either, they didn't even lobby for the bill. The only Jewish organizations that lobbied for the admission of Jewish refugees to the United States were the non-Zionist or the anti-Zionist organizations. The reason was that they wanted to send them off to Palestine. Whether they wanted to go there or not is another story, the same matter being relived today, incidentally, with the Russian emigres. The Zionist organization wants to force them to go to Israel. Most of them, especially from the European parts of Russia, want to come to the United States, and all sorts of pressures are being brought to bear to prevent that. It's kind of a reenactment at a less hideous level of the same story. I suppose there's some element of guilt, certainly over the Holocaust and maybe over the post-war matter.

See:

Chomsky

Cherniak

Israel

Zionism

Anarchism


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Angus Reid On Line Poll

Does Canada need a federal election in spring? Give us your opinion nowAngusReidForum.com Do you want a federal spring election?
YES	36%
NO	64%

Please note that these survey results are of website visitors who voluntarily take the survey. These results are not necessarily representative of the larger population.


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Poster Girl for Anorexia

Anne Coulter "I'm a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative" and the poster girl for Anorexia.

One can only pity those who suffer from such psychological disorders.




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History of Slavery

A blog after me own heart, matey's.

Slavery is the origin of the primitive accumulation of capital.

British and American Slavery 1500 -2000

The Story of Britain's rise to Glory through Slavery and pillaging its Empires and Colonies. The Rise of Capitalism on the bodies of Slaves, and the separation of its profit taking investors, from any reponsibility for their actions through Company activity.

See:

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Era Of The Common Man

The Many Headed Hydra

Slavery

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Jack Was Right, Again

NATO should talk to Taliban because military victory impossible: report

Gee Jack Layton said that back in September.

Nyah, Nyah. Whose Taliban Now

See

Jack Layton

Taliban Jack

NDP

Afghanistan






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State Security Is A Secure State

A secure state is not a secure people, it is in fact a secure state against the people. At all costs the state must be kept secure,or anarchy will be unleashed on the world. Often the state claims that its own self interest is the same as the peoples, that a secure state is the publics security the security of its citizens. Such is NOT the case.

One of the most fundamental responsibilities of a government is to ensure the security of its citizens. This may require it to act on information that it cannot disclose and to detain people who threaten national security.Yet in a constitutional democracy, governments must act accountably and in conformity with the Constitution and the rights and liberties it guarantees. These two propositions describe a tension that lies at the heart of modern democratic governance. It is a tension that must be resolved in a way that respects the imperatives both of security and of accountable constitutional governance. Supreme Court Decision To Strike Down Security Certificates

Canada’s Long History of Criminalizing Dissent

Deportation from Canada for political radicals who threaten the State is not new. It was done in 1918 against members of the Industrial Workers of the World, IWW, the Wobblies, and anarchists. It was used against the Ukrainian and other Eastern Europeans strikers who were involved in the 1919 General Strike in Winnipeg. It was used between 1921 and 1937 against immigrants who were members of the Communist Party.

We did not have a Canadian Constitution during this period. The U.S. did but it too passed similar security acts to detain and deport foreign radicals. Such was the plight of the anarchist; Emma Goldman.

Contrary to the assertion of the Supreme Court Chief Justice and the various hacks in parliament, State Security laws are not required to protect the citizens, they are required by the State to protect it from its enemies. And as the executive class of capitalism to protect capitalism from its enemies. Whether the State calls its enemies; aliens, anarchists, or terrorists.

Washington Post Calls for the Execution of All Anarchists

The wave of anarchist bombings in the United States and Europe in the 19th Century led to the origin of the first international police organization still with us today; Interpol.

The governments of the time feeling threatened again called for extraordinary laws that would protect them from attack. Not their citizens but the state.

In the United States, despite its self created mythology, the FBI was more interested in countering anarchism and communism, then dealing with organized crime, through out most of its history.

Several journalists made a link between the history of the anarchist bombers and modern terrorism after 9/11. All of it was spurious because it did not look at what the differences were between the anarchists and the later Jihadists. It would be like equating the Black Handand Black September with the Black Bloc because they all had black in their names.

Common tactics were compared rather than ideologies. It would be like saying that since the Nazi's had an Army and the US had an army they were the same. Opps.. maybe that is the case... As Major General Smedley Butler warned at the time.

The anti-terrorism act is still in effect in Canada as are the Security Certificates, as is CSIS as is Echelon the secret information gathering efforts of the defense establishment.

The defeat of the Sunset clauses in the ATA last week was NOT a defeat of the Act itself, which the Conservatives deliberately obfusticated last week.

The ruling — and the broader issue of anti-terrorism legislation — has created considerable attention in Canada, as well as the United States.

A Globe and Mail editorial noted that the court still maintains it is legitimate to detain, indefinitely, non-citizens suspected of being terrorists “as long as they have a meaningful review process.”

Meanwhile, an editorial in the New York Times praised the ruling.

“Lawmakers have only to look to the Canadian court for easy-to-follow directions back to the high ground on basic human rights and civil liberties,” it states.

The issue goes beyond “legal niceties or technicalities,” said Evans.

“What is at stake are the basic human rights that we all depend on and take for granted: the right to be presumed innocent, to have legal counsel and to challenge the legitimacy of your detention before a judge, the right not to be tortured, the right to let your family know that you are alive,” he said.

In fact it is the courts, contrary to the Harper government claims, that have struck down the governments security acts.

In October, Rutherford struck down a portion of Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act defining terrorism as a criminal act committed for religious political or ideological reasons. He found it violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but said Khawaja's trial could go ahead.
Greenspon said he began a process of obtaining new disclosure in November. He said he was given 23 volumes of disclosure that the government had "redacted."Portions of evidence were blacked out and labelled with a code identifying the justification for censoring the evidence.

And since it is the courts that have challenged the laws, the Conservatives have pushed to have their right wing allies including the police now on the committee to appoint judges. That's a way to make sure we have no more liberal decisions like these that restrict draconian measures to protect the state and its police. Because in reality that is exactly what these security laws are, they allow the State and it's police to engage in illegal activities and then to hide them under a bushel from public view. They are not laws for the protection of the citizens of Canada, nor for public safety. They are laws to protect the State and its Police from transparency and investigation when they act illegally.

I w^d. say emphatically that in recent years the Police have succeeded only by straining the law, or, in plain English, by doing utterly unlawful things, at intervals, to check this conspiracy; & my serious fear is that if new legislation affecting it is passed, Police powers may be thus defined, & our practical powers seriously impaired.

—Robert Anderson, Home Office minute, 12 December 1898
Which is the irony of the Harpocrites using the Air India families as their hand puppets last week. Because the same security laws are being used to cover up the alleged malfeasance of the RCMP and CSIS and their possible role in acting as agent provocateurs in the Air India bombing.

Of course political sub-text of what the Conservatives were saying was that the Liberals are supporting terrorists in the Indo-Canadian community, that is Sikh's, while the Conservatives support non-Sikh Indo-Canadians, the Air Canada families. Just as they have linked the Liberals to the Tamil Tigers because of Tamil community support for the Liberals.

The Conservative Party now that it has state power has abandoned all its so called libertarian philosophy. It is beholding to its social conservative base, so it gave a contract to a far right think tank opposed to greater citizen participation in politics, to study parliamentary and election reform.

It has appointed right to life advocates on the board examining reproductive technologies including stem cell research. It has shut down the Status of Women long a bugaboo of its supporters in REAL Women. Now it is appointing right wing judges.

But its real face has been shown for the past year, that this is not the old Reform party of Western populism, nor a neo-liberal or libertarian party, rather it is a good old fashioned conservative, right wing party of Law and Order. As such Harper has declared the next election will be fought on two issues, Law and Order and Terrorism.

These are of course the traditional values of the right wing, despite its toying with capitalist libertarianism, from the old Tory days in England to modern Fascism.
All right wing governments regardless of their labels are parties of Law and Order. And Law and Order means power to the police and the creation of a secure state, a police state.

It means going to war for war's sake. In this case supposedly to protect Canadians from terrorism. And thus we see our Law and Order government promoting the rearmament of the Armed Forces and transforming them from liberal peace keepers back to conservative fighting forces.

Through out the debate on the Tories allowing police to appoint judges, and the debate around the sunset clauses in the ATA, the Tories in QP and through statements in the media declared that they supported the police and their opponents were opposed to the police.

The opposition was either silent or in the case of the Liberals quick to deny they were anti-police. No one said, yes sir I am opposed to the police, since they exist as agents of the state ABOVE the citizens they are supposed to protect. The police sir are empowered to defend the State AGAINST it's citizens.

Ask any cop they are the thin blue line of the state, of law and order, against anarchy and chaos. They are not citizens nor a citizens milita, they are agents of the State and thus above the laws they supposedly enforce. That is why they ignore paying for parking meters or donuts, and are always right and you and I are always wrong.

That is why they are allowed to use force including deadly force like Tasers, and the courts will uphold their rights to do so. While the higher courts may rule in favour of civil liberties they still support law and order as they are part of the State themselves. Thus their rulings will always be in favour of the police and even draconian legislation for security and secrecy as the recent rulings on Security Certificates and the Anti-Terrorism Act show.

They are only as liberal as the laws passed by parliament. They do not rule by the doctrine of natural justice, that would be libertarian. The are an arm of the state and if the state has not passed laws to defend the individuals rights or human rights then woe betide you and I.


To the police we are 'them', some of us are good guys but mostly we are bad guys, and even good guys can be bad guys. Thus all laws to give the police more powers, are laws allowing for a police state.

The Conservatives have created a not so new political paradigm in Canada, a militarized police state. And the last time I checked that paradigm was spelled F A S C I S M.

And the only voices that will oppose that are truly libertarian ones.





See:

Anti-Terrorism Act

Spying

Statist Anti-Terrorism Act

Paranoia and the Security State

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The Only Poll That Counts

The latest poll shows that the Harper attack ads and attacks on Dion and the Liberals has had an impact in the ROC. But the real poll is what their impact has been in Quebec, because Quebec is the key to any Liberal or Conservative victory. And their impact has been a big fat Zero.


Decima's poll, provided to the Canadian Press, showed the separatist Bloc Quebecois, which runs candidates only in Quebec, stood at 35 percent in the province, with the Liberals at 23 percent and the Conservatives at 15 percent.

And for those who think we are going to have a spring election sprung on us, think again...not with these numbers we ain't.

In an average of the last three weekly polls, the Conservatives have 33 per cent, the Liberals 30 per cent, the NDP 14 per cent, the Bloc nine per cent and the Greens 11 per cent.


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The Ape Will Lie Down With The Tiger

NO MORE PALM OIL!

Both these species are endangered thanks to Palm Oil plantations. And as cute as they are together they are endangered by man and imprisoned by man, to protect them from man.

See my Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

Feb. 28: Dema, a Sumatran tiger licks Nia a baby orangutan in a nursery room at the Taman Safari Zoo in Bogor, Indonesia.

Global warming hits world's largest tiger reserve

See:

Cargill

Borneo

Orangutan

Apes

Primates

Monkeys

Great Apes


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Liberals Scab

Liberals are not the party of workers in Canada.

When in power provincially Liberals oppose a living wage.

Now the Federal Liberals under Dion have flip flopped on anti-scab legislation Bill C-257.

A private members bill from the BQ supported by the NDP and until today, supported by the Liberals.

And like the flip flop on the Anti-Terrorism Act, Mr. Dion does it again. But will he whip the vote? Probably not. Without the Liberals support the bill will die on third reading. When they were the government the Liberal majority voted against previous private member anti-scab bills.

My what a friend business has in Mr. Dion. I guess two controversial votes in a week would be a bit much for Mr. Dion's fragile leadership. The infighting in caucus would be even more virulent than it was over the Anti-Terrorism Act. After all the Liberals are the party of Bay Street as much as the Conservatives are.

By flip flopping on this bill, which has been placed before parliament five times now, the Liberals prove they are not just pro-business but pro-scab. Which means anti-union. I hope they don't plan on trying to solicit funds from their old friends in the General Workers Union in Toronto.

Progressives? In name only.

Green? Sure thats the colour of money.

Friends of Buzz Hargrove? Only during elections.

Labour has a political party and it is the NDP. All others are pretenders and fair weather friends.

See

Dion

Buzz

Gomperism

Liberals

Unions


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China Burps Greenspan Farts Dow Hiccups

File this under; loose lips sink ships.

On Monday, Greenspan said a recession was possible, though it's difficult to predict the timing, a comment blamed in part for the global market decline this week.

Greenspaned the works. He actually speculated that America may be facing a recession. But now noticing the stink in the room he is waving his hand behind his butt to clear the air.US slump possible, not probable-Greenspan quoted

Then the Chinese government which is still unfamiliar with the operations of capitalism speculated on capital gains taxes, and the Chinese stock market listened, and crashed.

One does not speculate out loud about such things when you have a stock market. The market responds as it did to Greenspan's comments. Sighs for the good old days were heard through out the Chinese hierarchy.

But why the panicked selling in China? It certainly wasn't because of anything Greenspan said. Most news reports are declaring that it was the result of rumors about potential policy initiatives that the Chinese leadership might soon enact to cool off an economy that is growing too fast. Whether Premier Wen Jiabao is about to announce interest rate hikes or a capital gains tax is impossible to say, but what we do know is that the leadership is very concerned with attempting to rein in China's reckless growth. And that's probably a good thing for everyone.

So when Shanghai sneezes, the world's markets catch the bird flu? True or not, the fact that this story is even being told is testament to how far and how fast China has come. It's instructive to think back 10 years, to the Asian financial crisis of 1997. China managed to keep itself relatively immune from the devastation that ransacked its neighbors, in part because of its iron grip on its own currency, and possibly because it was less well integrated into the global economy than the rest of the region. Ten years later, it's China that's shaking up the status quo, with a little help from the United States. From that vantage point, the fact that on Wednesday the Shanghai stock exchange, so far, is keeping its cool could well be the single most significant data point in all the market madness racing around the globe over the past 24 hours.

The reality is that in 1997 China had NO international stock market and did not yet own the ultimate capitalist safe haven; Hong Kong. So the Yaun was protected by the Chinese and their stock market, being internal, did not suffer the meltdown the rest of the world did.

In this case China came of age, and created a global meltdown on what was a local event.

Pick a stock market, any market in our globalised, homogenised, sterilised, aneasthetised, dumbed down, interconnected ever shrinking globe... and it tanked.
But the original epicentre was somewhere new...that emerging sleeping giant that even Napoleon worried fleetingly about...China. Shanghai’s A share index – ie for Chinese investors only - slumped 9%.

Today it is a different world and China owns the majority of America's debt. And its stock market is now a world market place despite being a creature of the Chinese State.

China’s stock market had three unique features that made its rapid
development unique and interesting.

First, the government used it largely as a fund raising vehicle for
funding state-owned enterprises
Second, China’s stock market developed under a repressed financial
regime. Financial repression was created through a combination
of capital controls on international capital flows and administrative
measures imposed by the central government to dampen potential
competition among different financial assets (e.g., bank deposits, enterprise
stocks, enterprise bonds, and various kinds of government
bonds) within the domestic financial sector.5 While the capital controls
helped to prevent capital from flowing out of the country, the
competition-mitigating administrative controls sought to avoid the
driving up of returns on various financial assets and thus to allow the
government to maintain a source of cheap capital for financing SOEs’
investments.
Third, China’s stock market was developed under a weak legal
framework that offered shareholders little protection. On the widely
used indicators for shareholder rights protection developed by La
Porta et al. (1998), China scored 3, compared with the average score
of 3.61 for all other transitional economies.
The actual protection for shareholders in China, however, is lower
than what the index suggests because of the weak legal enforcement
in China. The development of China’s stock market therefore
presents a puzzling case for economists and financial analysts who
hold that legal shareholder protection is a prerequisite for the development
of a functioning capital market

So the result was a crash heard around the world. The reason is three fold, China burped, Greenspan farted and America had lower than expected trade income (from durable goods) thus they owed the Chinese even more money.

What happened Tuesday was a confluence of events, something of a "perfect storm," each of which precipitated pent-up doubts. There was the decline overnight of 9.2 percent in the Chinese stock market, in which U.S. investors purchased $5.2 billion in equities in 2006. Then there was a decline in orders for durable goods and Mr. Greenspan's comments.

Correction or Crash is the question on everyones lips this morning on day three of the crumbling of stock markets world wide. It's a crash. Just not a 1929 crash. Heck it isn't even a 1987 crash. Nor a 1997 meltdown. It's a hiccup the stock markets world wide are a thousand times higher than 1929, and in 1987 the stock market was only at 5000. Today it is over 12,000 in North America and around the world. But a crash none the less.

That was the ultimate Perfect Storm, as the 1987 crash proved. In 1987 the crash was as severe as it was in '29 but the impact was the clearing out of junk bonds, as it had been in '29 a clearing out of Mutual Funds, and other get rich quick schemes, and companies that collapsed were quickly bought up by those cash rich, which did not occur in '29.

The 1987 market crash, which greeted Greenspan just two months into his term and drained the stock markets of nearly one-quarter of their value in a single day, was widely thought at the time to be a precursor of recession. But the Fed chairman, beginning to establish his reputation for working miracles, avoided the inevitable by guaranteeing to pump enough money into the economy to keep anyone from going broke for lack of cash.

What folks forget in bull markets and boom economies, such as we have seen for the past twenty years is that crashes become cycles, called corrections by optimists, but the business cycle of the early 20th century are no longer as damaging to capitalist society as they were in 1929. Thanks to Keynes. Notice that even an Ayn Randist like Greenspan is not adverse to priming the pump to protect the Stock Market.

There was no priming the pump for the 1929 Wall Street Crash, as Keynes noted at the time. As Galbraith writes in his history of the Great Depression.

Galbraith writes with great wit and erudition about the perilous actions of investors and the curious inaction of the government. He notes that the problem wasn't a scarcity of securities to buy and sell: "The ingenuity and zeal with which companies were devised in which securities might be sold was as remarkable as anything." Those words become strikingly relevant in light of revenue-negative start-up companies coming into the market each week in the 1990s, along with fragmented pieces of established companies, like real estate and bottling plants. Of course, the 1920s were different from the 1990s. There was no safety net below citizens, no unemployment insurance or Social Security. And today we don't have the creepy investment trusts--in which shares of companies that held some stocks and bonds were sold for several times the assets' market value.

In 1929 Joe and Jane America were invested in the stock market for the first time through Mutual Funds, which were the junk bonds of their day. Workers , small businessmen, seniors, all could afford to invest in stocks. Gone were the days of the Robber Barons dominating the sanctuary of Wall Street.

Like insurance companies of the time, Mutual Funds and other stock market options were being peddled to the working class. For the first time ever in the boom economy of the Post War 1920's workers were secure in their jobs and could afford homes, cars, and yest putting a little aside for retirement either through insurance, bank savings, saving and loans mortgages or through stocks and mutual funds.

The perfect storm was the complete collapse of market capitalism, one that had no social safety net. Workers lost homes, business collapsed and the state called for chickens in every pot but provided no jobs. The chickens came home to roost for the free marketeers,their ideology was laughed at as irrelevant in light of historical facts of the crash and empirical fact's behind it. The U.S. market never recovered until the space age.

Over the long run, a European investing on Wall Street might do fairly well. But what if he had invested in the late ’20s, when America’s promise and success seemed most inevitable? Just ask the Ghost of ‘29. If he had invested his money just before the crash, he would have had to wait until ‘56 to break even! That is, he would have had to hold on through a Great Depression…another major world war…and practically until the end of the Eisenhower administration - a period of 27 years! After that, he would have enjoyed a good 10 years of capital growth - and then another setback.

Like today many folks are invested in the Stock Market, but mainly through their retirement savings, thus the impact on real cash, real value is softened. State capitalism saves the day, meaning crashes are reduced to corrections, the business cycle levels off instead of being a desperate spiral to Depression, and all is well with the world. Thus this weeks downward spiral is a hiccup instead of a stroke.

And while Rothbard would deny Keynes or Galbraiths solutions were valid, which history proved they were, his work on the Great Depression also shows that the much vaunted Free Market failed because it was dominated by criminal capitalists trying to make a fast buck. Something the right wing liberaltarians never consider in their free market mythology. But which is the reason for all such meltdowns in the marketplace as Enron showed.

The ability to now regain from a crash is part of the checks and balances of the stock markets, whether through state regulations, investor funding or computerization. And thus the need to continually keep armed, to have little wars world wide, are now part of the business cycle as well. Gone are the days when rearmament could save the market, today it is key to the well being of the market place.

The bull market effectively came to an end on September 3, 1929, immediately the shrewder operators returned from vacation and looked hard at the underlying figures. Later rises were merely hiccups in a steady downward trend. On Monday October 9, for the first time, the ticker tape could not keep pace with the news of falls and never caught up. Margin calls had begun to go out by telegram the Saturday before, and by the beginning of the week speculators began to realize they might lose their savings and even their homes. On Thursday, October 12, shares dropped vertically with no one buying, and speculators were sold out as they failed to respond to margin calls. Then came Black Tuesday, October 19, and the first selling of sound stocks to raise desperately needed liquidity.

So far all was explicable and might easily have been predicted. This particular stock market corrective was bound to be severe because of the unprecedented amount of speculation which Wall Street rules then permitted. In 1929 1,548,707 customers had accounts with America's 29 stock exchanges. In a population of 120 million, nearly 30 million families had an active association with the market, and a million investors could be called speculators. Moreover, of these nearly two-thirds, or 600,000, were trading on margin; that is, on funds they either did not possess or could not easily produce.

The danger of this growth in margin trading was compounded by the mushrooming of investment trusts which marked the last phase of the bull market. Traditionally, stocks were valued at about ten times earnings. With high margin trading, earnings on shares, only one or two percent, were far less than the eight to ten percent interest on loans used to buy them. This meant that any profits were in capital gains alone. Thus, Radio Corporation of America, which had never paid a dividend at all, went from 85 to 410 points in 1928. By 1929, some stocks were selling at 50 times earnings. A market boom based entirely on capital gains is merely a form of pyramid selling. By the end of 1928 the new investment trusts were coming onto the market at the rate of one a day, and virtually all were archetype inverted pyramids. They had "high leverage"—a new term in 1929—through their own supposedly shrewd investments, and secured phenomenal stock exchange growth on the basis of a very small plinth of real growth. United Founders Corporation, for instance, had been created by a bankruptcy with an investment of $500, and by 1929 its nominal resources, which determined its share price, were listed as $686,165,000. Another investment trust had a market value of over a billion dollars, but its chief asset was an electric company which in 1921 had been worth only $6 million. These crazy trusts, whose assets were almost entirely dubious paper, gave the boom an additional superstructure of pure speculation, and once the market broke, the "high leverage" worked in reverse.

Hence, awakening from the pipe dream was bound to be painful, and it is not surprising that by the end of the day on October 24, eleven men well-known on Wall Street had committed suicide. The immediate panic subsided on November 13, at which point the index had fallen from 452 to 224. That was indeed a severe correction but it has to be remembered that in December 1928 the index had been 245, only 21 points higher. Business and stock exchange downturns serve essential economic purposes. They have to be sharp, but they need not be long because they are self-adjusting. All they require on the part of the government, the business community, and the public is patience. The 1920 recession had adjusted itself within a year. There was no reason why the 1929 recession should have taken longer, for the American economy was fundamentally sound. If the recession had been allowed to adjust itself, as it would have done by the end of 1930 on any earlier analogy, confidence would have returned and the world slump need never have occurred.

Instead, the stock market became an engine of doom, carrying to destruction the entire nation and, in its wake, the world. By July 8, 1932, New York Times industrials had fallen from 224 at the end of the initial panic to 58. U.S. Steel, the world's biggest and most efficient steel-maker, which had been 262 points before the market broke in 1929, was now only 22. General Motors, already one of the best-run and most successful manufacturing groups in the world, had fallen from 73 to 8. These calamitous falls were gradually reflected in the real economy. Industrial production, which had been 114 in August 1929, was 54 by March 1933, a fall of more than half, while manufactured durables fell by 77 percent, nearly four-fifths. Business construction fell from $8.7 billion in 1929 to only $1.4 billion in 1933.

Unemployment rose over the same period from a mere 3.2 percent to 24.9 percent in 1933, and 26.7 percent the following year. At one point, 34 million men, women, and children were without any income at all, and this figure excluded farm families who were also desperately hit. City revenues collapsed, schools and universities shut or went bankrupt, and malnutrition leapt to 20 percent, something that had never happened before in United States history—even in the harsh early days of settlement.

This pattern was repeated all over the industrial world. It was the worst slump in history, and the most protracted. Indeed there was no natural recovery. France, for instance, did not get back to its 1929 level of industrial production until the mid-1950s. The world economy, insofar as it was saved at all, was saved by war, or its preparations. The first major economy to revitalize itself was Germany's, which with the advent of Hitler's Nazi regime in January, 1933, embarked on an immediate rearmament program. Within a year, Germany had full employment. None of the others fared so well. Britain began to rearm in 1937, and thereafter unemployment fell gradually, though it was still at historically high levels when war broke out on September 3, 1939. That was the date on which Wall Street, anticipating lucrative arms sales and eventually U.S. participation in the war, at last returned to 1929 prices.

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Labour Shortage = Union Busting

The only labour shortage in Alberta is finding unskilled folks to work at Timmies, and even there they are now paying $14 an hour plus benefits. But as for skilled labour, well they are working there too because they can't find jobs through the Merit Contractors and their business pals like CNRL and the Padrone's of CLAC.

These guys being anti-union would rather hire temporary workers for $14 dollars an hour no benefits. To do union jobs that pay over $22 an hour with benefits.

Worker shortage a 'myth' - union
'Lots of skilled people in province'
Alberta's labour shortage is a myth, says the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Tim Brower, IBEW Local 424 business manager, says non-union contractors are using the "myth" of a labour shortage to bring in temporary foreign workers who are taking away jobs from Albertans. "There is a shortage of unskilled people in this province. I won't deny that," he told reporters at the legislature yesterday. "Tim Hortons is looking for people. 7-Eleven is looking for people ... but when it comes to skilled people in this province, there is no shortage. I am the expert. I have them available."Brower said 1,000 electricians in his union are unemployed or working other jobs because they can't find work in their trade. "I have run into my members working at Home Depot handing out electrical components," he said. "Some of them are driving trucks.

And since our new Minister of Human Resources; Monte Solberg loves his Timmies it's no wonder he is joining his pals in the non-union construction sector in Alberta calling for more Temporary Workers. Thats so more unionized workers can get jobs at Timmies. There are lots of unemployed skilled workers in Alberta, but of course they belong to the building trades unions.

Companies like CNRL and others that are using Merit Shops to build oilsands projects are taking advantage of this to undercut the unions. Heck even right wing Edmonton Sun Columnist Neil Waugh noted this 'fact' last summer. And he notes it again today in a scathing attack on lack of planning by the new Stelmach regime.

That's because the Merit Shops are not independent contractors at all but spin offs of unionized companies! Merit Shops are about as independent as CLAC is an independent union. Neither of them are and both are spin offs of Alberta's Big Construction Companies trying to bust the Building Trades Unions.

Kushner is the president of the Merit Contractors Association and the person most responsible for getting a review of the Code rolling. Call them merit contractors, or open shops, it all means non-union (or at the very most, an "alternative" labour group such as the Christian Labour Association of Canada).

Alberta's non-union construction industry began 20 years ago, as the oil price slump of the early 1980s shut down jobs and pushed companies into bankruptcy. Driven by the earlier, decades-long boom and labour shortage, construction labour relations had become a perpetual upward spiral of wage increases. Faced with the crunch, companies had to cut costs or go under.

The end result was the famous "spin-off" company, a term industry people are reluctant to use to this day. After locking out their employees for 25 hours, the firm would hire them back in a subsidiary company, or through a labour broker, at lower wages. After the dust settled, the complexion of Alberta�s construction industry had changed forever.

Today, there are few union contractors working in the commercial/institutional sector, while the large industrial projects are built almost exclusively by organized labour. The Merit Contractors Association represents 670 companies in Alberta, employing over 20,000 persons who complete 32 million hours of construction work annually. The Association has been growing at a rate of 36% a year, for the past four years. During those four years, it�s been lobbying ceaselessly, in its own right and through its members, for changes to workplace legislation, making annual presentations at Standing Policy Committee and appearances at Conservative Party functions.

See

Labour Shortage

History of the WRF

Alberta's Free Market In Labour

The Labour Shortage Myth

AFL Agrees With Me

Lack of Planning Created Skills Shortage in Alberta

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Dion Sucked

Celine Dion not Stephane Dion.

At the Academy Awards.

Doing a pathetic souless song dedicated to the great composer Ennio Morricone.

10:52: I'm not the biggest fan of movie scores, but I have to say, Ennio Morricone elevates the genre. Take notes, please, John Williams. Celine Dion opens her mouth, my cue to get up and stretch my legs.

In fact it was so bad that while she looked like she was lip-syncing the words were actually coming out of her mouth. With lip-syncing there is at least some power, some force, some emotion because it is pre recorded. This was live.

You had to lean forward to hear her sing, and as the camera focused on her mouth I was given to think of a Kissing Gourami as she painfully formed each word with her lips as she sang. High notes ferget it. Deep contralto ferget it. It was white toast, nah make that Melba toast.

Luckily it was the Academy Awards and not American Idol, or she would never have made the cut. But then again Best Supporting Actress awards are given to those who don't make it on Idol.


Dion's performance was a flat as the other Dion's has been in Question period.

That's what happens when unilingual Francophone's try to express themselves in English by reading from a script or a teleprompter.





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Tough Guys Cry

So I went out for smokes in the wee hours of this morning and what should greet me from the covers of the Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Sun? Why nothing less than front pages showing Oiler Captain Ryan Smith crying cause he got traded.

Not because he lost his teeth on the ice, or his team sucks, or because he was touched by some cancer kids in the hospital, or because he was outraged after visiting a womens shelter. Nope he is crying because he got traded.

Shades of Oilers past it is being played like the Gretzky trade. Which was the end of the Oilers reign as NHL Champs. They became chumps until last years great play-off season.

One look at the face of the former face of the franchise and you knew.

He's the broken-hearted former heart and soul of the Edmonton Oilers.

A dozen cameramen walking backward led a sobbing Ryan Smyth through the airport yesterday, his contorted face framed by the famed mullet. It said so much before a word was spoken.


Yesterdays papers were filled with Mark the Moose Messier crying because the Oilers hung his number up. Boy these tough guys show they really are sensitive new age guys. Nice to see. But in the cheering and partying over Mess the news coverage in the local papers seem to be a day behind on the Smith trade news.

Of course it was after two days of partying remembering the Oilers Championship which coincided with Alberta's last Oil boom. Talk about flashbacks here we are 25 years later and another boom and the Moose is retiring. There goes the last of the cocaine cowboys that were the Oilers past. At least they won the Stanley Cup, the Oilers are now officially out of it.

Today the crying is over Smyth and his trade, a trade made over a measly $100,000 difference.

Unless Smytty re-signs with the Oilers in the summer (he can join any NHL club), the Oilers are relegated to second-tier status in the NHL, at least in the coming "rebuilding" years.

Impeccable sources suggest the dispute wasn't so much about money, but conditions - such as Ryan's insistence on a no-cut/no-trade clause.

And, in the end, trading Smyth was a "hockey" decision. The money was there, but GM Kevin Lowe and his boss Cal Nichols felt $5.5 to $5.8 million a year could be better used on up-and-coming talent than a five-year commitment to a player who'll get slower and less productive as he ages.

Clearly these two guys quoted above from the Edmonton Sun don't talk to each other. Whats going on here is another brilliant Ken Lowe play. He has upped the value of Ryan Smith by trading him to the Islanders, helping them make the playoffs. He waited till the absolute eleventh hour to trade him. He traded Edmonton's best player, heck their only real player this season, sans Rollie the Goalie, to a team with a chance at the Stanley Cup or at least a play off contender.

He has all but admitted the Oilers are toast this season. So in what capitalism calls value added, he has made Smith more valuable for when he becomes a free agent in less than five months.

And yep the Oilers have the money to buy out Smyth this summer. In fact Smyth has not even packed up his family or home here. He doesn't have to, his trade to the Islanders is temporary. And the Oilers got a good deal, cash and two young players to help build up the team.

Why it's a win win as business likes to call it. And pro-sports is a business after all, and the players are commodities, the league is the market.

Its a smart move for a team that has nothing else good to say about it this season. Except that we won't be seeing the City pay for play off riots fueled by the greed of Whyte Avenue bars.

And all the tears, well these too shall pass. Besides they are only crocodile tears of very big egos either hurt or humbled, but big egos none the less. Hey it's not like these guys are Albert Schweitzer. They are after all just big dumb jocks.


See:

Hockey

Oilers

Pro-Sports


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Shaft

This is too funny I just heard it on CKUA Overnight...

John Shaft Listen

I thought it was Billy Crystal imitating Sammy Davis Jr. doing Issac Hayes; Shaft Theme.

Nope I was wrong.

It was the real Sammy Davis Jr. doing the Shaft Theme. Talk about high camp.

He isn't even singing he is reading the words, sort of like William Shatner does.

And it is on not just one album, nor two, but three!

The only way it could have been campier is if he had a Klezmer band in the background. Nope sorry then it would sound like Sammy imitating Billy.




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