Monday, August 20, 2007

NAFTA Poisioning

With the liberalization of trade regulations, and the neo-con agenda of de-regulation, reducing public services, the privatization and contracting out of inspection services leads to consumer poisoning.

And it ain't just China that's to blame.

NAFTA2 aka the SPP is also to blame.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is warning the public not to consume Los Angeles Salad Company Genuine Sweet Baby Carrots because the product may be contaminated with Shigella.

The item is labelled as product of Mexico and is sold in 672 gram plastic bags and sell by dates up to and including August 13th, this year.

The agency says the product was sold in Costco stores in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland.




This is not the news story the three amigos and their corporate buddies wanted to hear this morning.



The Canadian Press reported Sunday night that the leaders will issue a statement regarding procedures aimed at keeping borders open should another 9/11-type emergency occur, yet political activists say there's apparent secrecy on other issues up for discussion.

They say business leaders have been invited to meetings with the "Three Amigos" in Montebello, while protesters have been shut out. Their signs and shouts will only be available to leaders via video link.

"We want Canadians, Americans and Mexicans to know that this is a big-business driven process, for them and by them, to deregulate all sorts of regulations across the board -- environment, health, safety worker standards," said Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, the main group behind a protest in Ottawa on Sunday.



Last time it was organic American spinach, then organic carrots. And under the SPP agreement being discussed today America wants Canada to reduce its food safety regulations.

Regulatory harmonization, or regulatory co-operation as it is euphemistically called, is another top priority for business. Leaders have asked their officials to complete a "regulatory framework agreement" in time for the Montebello meeting. This will set the guidelines for many SPP initiatives. It is unlikely that we will see the full framework agreement, and even less so that we will see how it is applied in specific circumstances. Critics believe the government is preparing to weaken Canadian health, safety and environmental regulations and standards in the name of trade.

Let’s take the example of food safety. The SPP’s business council (the NACC) called for the harmonization of Canadian and U.S. lists of toxic substances, which are preventing some U.S. products from being sold in Canada. We also know that an SPP committee is working to resolve differences in pesticide maximum-residue limits. But will we ever know the outcome of these negotiations?

In this case, we do know now, thanks to an astute Ottawa Citizen reporter, who discovered that the Canadian government is in fact planning under the SPP to relax its requirements on pesticide residues on fruits and vegetables entering from the U.S. Some 40 per cent of the pesticides Canada regulates have stricter limits than U.S. regulations. The U.S. sees them as trade barriers and wants the list of priority pesticides to be relaxed. With the Bush administration aggressively dismantling its own regulatory systems, this harmonization concession amounts to Canada importing U.S. deregulation. Will this be the norm or the exception?

SEE:


The Truth About the Farm Crisis

Alberta State Capitalism


Fish Contamination


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Saturday, August 18, 2007

Another Croc


Another crocodile tale, except this monster turned out to be a bearded lizard. And proving once again that so called eye witness testimony is the flimsiest form of evidence, for science or justice.

Of course while relatively small the bearded lizard is commonly called a 'dragon'.

And as usual you can find out more about
dragons, sea monsters and die vurm.
on my blog.


Sometimes a crocodile is just a lizard

Vancouver -- A reported "15-foot crocodile" that drew a half-dozen police cars to a Vancouver backyard on Sunday night after panicked 911 calls from a resident turned out to fit easily into a shoe-box-sized enclosure when brought before the media yesterday.

Animal-shelter staff were looking after the bearded lizard thought to have wandered away from his owners' home.

"Sometimes they can be hard to handle, and will bite, but this guy's pretty gentle," said Paul Teichroeb, chief licence inspector for the City of Vancouver, holding up the sandy-coloured creature yesterday during a police news conference.

Police say they got a 911 call from a panicky homeowner who claimed there was a five-metre-long crocodile in his back yard.

Six officers were sent in, only to discover a 30-centimetre-long reptile called a bearded lizard.

Chief licence inspector Paul Teichroeb displays Bud a bearded dragon lizard found in a backyard on 14th Avenue.

Chief licence inspector Paul Teichroeb displays Bud a bearded dragon lizard found in a backyard on 14th Avenue.
Photograph by : Stuart Davis, Vancouver Sun

Transparency Alberta Style

It has not been a good week for Alberta CEO Ed Stelmach, his regime has failed to be transparent as promised. Just another week of scandal for the tired old Tories.

NDP say Alberta Energy and Utilities Board aware of spying on power line opponents

EUB coverup shocking

Fire AEUB directors, Mason urges

And it just gets better. The party of rural Alberta screws rural Albertans. And the guy doing the screwing is non other than the California Born, Republican wannabe,and Herr professor of the Calgary School; Ted Morton. A guy who ran for the Premiers job appealing to the social conservative rural base of the Tory party.
Like Marie Lake, everything is for sale in this oil-rich province

NIMBY bites Premier Stelmach
Time to review industrial development, Tory MLA says

Alberta’s sustainable resources minister can’t guarantee seismic testing won’t hurt pristine Marie Lake and says he won’t release other seismic studies supporting the decision to allow the tests.

Still, he conceded, damage is possible. “Sure, it’s a question of risk management. But as I said this has been done on six other lakes with no evidence of adverse effects.”


Morton said the government has the legal right to reject seismic testing applications, but to shut off the exploratory process that early wouldn’t be fair to the company and wouldn’t make sense. His department noted that 34 other lakes have been tested in a similar manner in the last five years, and would not provide details of what took place in the other 28 cases.

The public has no reason to trust the government if it won’t even release the studies that support its decision, said Marie Lake resident Hal Bekolay.

“I can’t use the language I want to use to describe this,” he said. “But what it shows me is their complete lack of caring. It’s unbelievable that people we’ve elected choose to do this to us.” Now local residents want their MLA, Tory Denis Ducharme, to back up his earlier complaint about the testing by crossing the floor and sitting with another party or as an independent, said Bekolay.



Anywhere else in Canada and this would cry out for a comment from Democracy Watch. But in Alberta it's business as usual.

NDP condemns Suncor exec's gov't job

NDP question Suncor executive's appointment
Alberta defends decision to appoint Suncor executive as assistant deputy minister
EDMONTON (CP) _ The Alberta government is defending its decision to appoint a Suncor Energy executive as assistant deputy minister of its oilsands sustainable development secretariat.

Bart Johnson, a spokesman for the Treasury Board, says the government has set up safeguards against any conflict of interest.

Johnson says Heather Kennedy can‘t buy or sell any Suncor shares during her two-year appointment and must excuse herself from any decisions pertaining to Suncor.

He said Suncor will continue paying Kennedy during her two years with the government, but the province will reimburse the oilsands company.

NDP Leader Brian Mason has suggested Kennedy‘s appointment shows just how far the Progressive Conservatives have crawled into the pockets of big oil.

The oilsands secretariat reports to the Treasury Board.
And while we weep for the lack of democracy in the Banana Republic of Alberta, one of the last One Party States in the world, it just keeps getting worse....

Oil royalties going down?

Report Says Alberta Losing Oil Money

Alberta's oil royalties could drop: report

Not only do we sell off our resources at fire sale prices, Albertans could be taken to the cleaners by both Big Oil and the Federal Government while our tin pot Tory tyranny twiddles its thumbs.

In his study for Alberta Energy, Calgary-based consultant Pedro van Meurs said the proposal – which would allow companies to calculate royalty payments on a choice of either the finished synthetic crude product or the tar-sands bitumen from which it is extracted – could lead to two significantly different outcomes.

The companies being offered the new plans, Suncor and Syncrude, have until this year to decide which to opt into.

If the companies opt for royalties based on synthetic crude, Alberta’s royalty rates will be 8% higher than if it opts for a rate based on unprocessed bitumen, says Van Meurs.

If Alberta allows them to choose the latter, recent changes to federal tax laws mean the federal take will increase while Alberta’s take decreases, he indicates.

“It is very obvious that Alberta is faced with a very high level of royalty reduction, when under the Suncor and Syncrude terms companies opt for a switch to bitumen values from SCO values,” he notes.

He said the switch “will result in a drop of about 8% in the overall government take. However, that drop is only experienced by Alberta, the federal share actually goes up, since royalties are now deductible for tax purposes.


While Stelmach's blustered and fumed over the forces of Kyoto at the Premiers meeting last week, the reality is that under Klein, and now Stelmach, Alberta's oil resources are being sold off on a future promise. In reality the royalty regime in the province benefits big oil and everyone but Albertans.

There is no nasty Federal NEP that can be blamed for this, just tired old AlbertaTories, in the pockets of big oil.

It not been a good week for Stelmach who should have been basking in the glory of his victory over the discombobulated gaggle of Premiers who could not save the planet due to their limited provincial narcissism.

Stelmach is rumored to be considering a fall election, while realistically it probably won't be held in the winter but next spring.

Of course considering how badly he has botched his first six months in office an election sooner rather than later might be the only thing that will save his regime. For a short time. But like the former One Party that was in Power for 35 years, this one is bound to go. It's the law of entropy as well as history.



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Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Godzilla Croc


You know that urban myth about gators in the New York City sewer system....well it ain't New York and it ain't in a sewer and it's a croc not a gator.

A small crocodile called Godzik, or Little Godzilla, which escaped from its cage in southern Ukraine at the end of May, is still at large and apparently enjoying itself, an official said Friday.

The 70-centimetre (two-foot, four-inch) long Nile crocodile, which swam away during a publicity show on a beach on the Sea of Azov, is defying attempts to recapture it.

Dariel Adjiba, of the local office of the emergencies ministry, said the reptile had apparently made its home on an abandoned barge which ran aground in the shallow sea, where it could often be seen sunning itself.

              Close up of a nile crocodile in captivity. A small Nile crocodile called Godzik, or Little Godzilla, which escaped from its cage in southern Ukraine at the end of May, is still at large and apparently enjoying itself               Photo:Mustafa Ozer/AFP

AFP Photo: Close up of a nile crocodile in captivity. A small Nile crocodile called Godzik, or...

Godzik had been with a travelling circus for about a year when it escaped at Maryupol on the northern shore of the inland sea.

In the old days this kind of thing would give rise to the myth of dragons, sea monsters and die vurm.


SEE:


Strange Sea Creatures


I Thought I Saw A Putty Cat


Congo's Ghosts


The Fountain Of Youth


Turning Off The Nile


I Don't Do Mornings


Nessie was an Elephant?


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Native America and the Evolution of Democracy

An interesting online text on Native Democracy and its impact on colonial America and thus the basis of the libertarian chants democratic that echo through out American history.

Exemplar of Liberty:
Native America
and the Evolution of Democracy

By
Donald A. Grinde, Jr.
Rupert Costo Professor of American Indian History
University of California at Riverside
and
Bruce E. Johansen
Associate Professor of Communication
University of Nebraska at Omaha















Every king hath his council, and that consists of all the
old and wise men of his nation. . . . [N]othing is under-
taken, be it war, peace, the selling of land or traffick,
without advising with them; and which is more, with the
young men also. . . . The kings . . . move by the breath
of their people. It is the Indian custom to deliberate. . . .
I have never seen more natural sagacity.


--William Penn to the
Society of Free Traders,
16 August 1683

Coming from societies based on hierarchy, early European explorers and settlers came to America seeking kings and queens and princes. What they sought they believed they had found, for a time. Quickly, they began to sense a difference: the people they were calling "kings" had few trappings that distinguished them from the people they "ruled," in most native societies. They only rarely sat at the top of a class hierarchy with the pomp of European rulers. More importantly, Indian "kings" usually did not rule. Rather, they led, by mechanisms of consensus and public opinion that Europeans often found admirable.

During the 170 years between the first enduring English settlement in North America and the American Revolution, the colonists' perceptions of their native neighbors evolved from the Puritans' devil-man, through the autonomous Noble Savage, to a belief that the native peoples lived in confederations governed by natural law so subtle, so nearly invisible, that it was widely believed to be an attractive alternative to monarchy's overbearing hand. The Europeans' perceptions of Indian societies evolved as they became more dissatisfied with the European status quo. Increasingly, the native societies came to serve the transplanted Europeans, including some of the United States' most influential founders, as a counterpoint to the European order. They found in existing native polities the values that the seminal European documents of the time celebrated in theoretical abstraction -- life, liberty, happiness, a model of government by consensus, under natural rights, with relative equality of property. The fact that native peoples in America were able to govern themselves in this was provided advocates of alternatives to monarchy with practical ammunition for a philosophy of government based on the rights of the individual, which they believed had worked, did work, and would work for them, in America.

By 1776, Iroquois imagery was used not only in treatymaking but also as a pervasive idiom in American society. A few weeks after Paine's use of Iroquois imagery, John Adams (Paine's fellow delegate from Massachusetts) would have dinner with several Caughnawaga Mohawk chiefs and their wives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. George Washington and his staff also were present. Washington introduced Adams to the Mohawks chiefs as one of the members "of the Grand Council Fire at Philadelphia" and Adams noted in a letter to his wife that the Mohawks were impressed with Washington's introduction. Although it can be argued that George Washington and the Continental Congress used American Indian rhetoric and imagery to explain to Native American people the nature of the new American government, such an argument does not explain how such rhetoric begins to occur in Robert Treat Paine's private correspondence to Non-Indians. Actually, the ideas and symbols of Native America became important facets in the formation of a new American identity.


And the Six Nations, Iroquois confederacy that so influenced the founding fathers of America also influenced Marx and Engels.

Two contemporaries of Buffalo Bill, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, about the time of the Custer Battle were drawing on the Indian models to support their theories of social evolution. As had Franklin and Jefferson a century before, Marx and Engels paid particular attention to the lack of state-induced coercion and the communal role of property that operated in the Iroquois Confederacy.

Marx read Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society, which had been published in 1877, between December 1880 and March 1881, taking at least ninety-eight pages of handwritten notes. Ancient Society was Morgan's last major work; his first book-length study had been The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851). Morgan was a close friend of the Seneca Ely Parker, a high-ranking Civil War officer. Like Johnson, Weiser, Colden, and others, Morgan was an adopted Iroquois. When Marx read Morgan's Ancient Society, he and Engels were studying the important anthropologists of their time. Morgan was one of them.

Marx's notes on Ancient Society adhere closely to the text, with little extraneous comment. What particularly intrigued Marx about the Iroquois was their democratic political organization, and how it was meshed with a communal economic system -- how, in short, economic leveling was achieved without coercion.

During the late 1870s and early 1880s, Marx remained an insatiable reader, but a life of poverty and attendant health problems had eroded his ability to organize and synthesize what he had read. After Marx died, Engels inherited his notes and, in 1884, published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, subtitled In Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. The book sold well; it had gone through four editions in German by 1891. Engels called the book a "bequest to Marx." He wrote that Morgan's account of the Iroquois Confederacy "substantiated the view that classless communist societies had existed among primitive peoples," and that these societies had been free of some of the evils, such as class stratification, that he associated with industrial capitalism. Jefferson had been driven by similar evils to depict Europe in metaphors of wolves and sheep, hammer and anvil.

To Engels, Morgan's description of the Iroquois was important because "it gives us the opportunity of studying the organization of a society which, as yet, knows no state." Jefferson had also been interested in the Iroquois' ability to maintain social consensus without a large state apparatus, as had Franklin. Engels described the Iroquoian state in much the same way that American revolutionaries had a century earlier:

Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households -- still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal -- including the women.

Concern for the depredations of human rights by state power is no less evident in our time than in the eighteenth century. American Indians, some of the earliest exemplars of those rights, today often petition the United Nations for redress of abuses committed by the United States government, whose founding declarations often ring hollow in ears so long calloused by the thundering horsehooves of Manifest Destiny and its modern equivalents. One may ask what the United Nations' declarations of human rights owe to the Iroquois and other Indian nations. Take the following excerpts from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted December 10, 1948), and place them next to the Great Law of Peace, and the statements Franklin and other American national fathers adapted from experience with American Indian nations:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1)

Every person has a right to life, liberty and security of person. (Article 3)

Everyone has a right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. (Article 18)

Everyone has the right of freedom of opinion and religion. (Article 19)

. . . The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of governments . . . (Article 21)

Looking across the frontier, as well as across the Atlantic, looking at Indian peace as well as Indian wars, history poses many tantalizing questions. The thesis that American Indian thought played an important role in shaping the mind of European America, and of Europe itself, is bound to incite controversy, a healthy state of intellectual affairs at any time in history, our own included. The argument around which this book is centered is only one part of a broader effort not to rewrite history, but to expand it, to broaden our knowledge beyond the intellectual strait jacket of ethnocentricism that tells us that we teach, but we do not learn from, peoples and cultures markedly different from our own.




See:

Jamestown; The Birth of Capitalism

The Era Of The Common Man

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Many Headed Hydra






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Polyamory is not Polygamy



More on the polygamy slippery slope


A surprisingly good debate between two Blogging Tories and a gay libertarian on the issue of polygamy, plural marriage/polyamory, and gay marriage.


See my posts:

Polygamy is NOT Polyamoury

Marx on Bigamy

The Sexual Revolution Continues

The Sanctity of Marriage Debate

Polyamory Is Good For The Genes


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The Cost of War

That's Trillions of dollars.


U.S. NATIONAL
DEBT
CLOCK


The Outstanding Public Debt as of 14 Aug 2007 at 09:16:31 AM GMT is:





$ 8 , 9 7 3 , 6 9 2 , 9 6 9 , 8 4 7 . 8 3


The estimated population of the United States is 302,702,356

so each citizen's share of this debt is
$29,645.27.


The National Debt has continued to increase an average of

$1.47 billion per day since September 29, 2006!



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U.S. Supplies Iraqi Insurgents With Weapons

As I reported here in March; Look In Your Own Backyard

We now have a count of the weapons lost by the U.S. to insurgent forces in Iraq, far more than could ever be supplied by Iran, or Syria, or Saudi Arabia, or all of them combined.

190,000 US weapons feared missing in Iraq


But it gets better, now the Iraqi puppet regime in Baghdad is buying weapons from the Mafia!

US loss of control over the flood of weapons into Iraq was highlighted again yesterday when it emerged that Italian anti-Mafia investigators had uncovered an alleged shipment of 105,000 rifles of which the American high command was unaware.


But they are just following in their masters footsteps.

It was classic bureaucratic bungling, the Government Accountability Office concluded last month in a report criticizing the Pentagon's failure to keep proper records and track weapons flows. But there may have been another factor -- the government's dangerous and bumbling use of bad guys.

Consider the case of one particular bad guy, Viktor Bout -- a stout, canny Russian air transporter who also happens to be the world's most notorious arms dealer.
Perhaps Joseph Heller's Catch 22 should be mandatory reading for Congress and the Pentagon.


Colonel Cargill was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war, he had been an alert, hard-hitting, aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel Cargill was so bad a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work himself down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.
Since this kind of screw up is an American Military tradition. Just business as usual.

I explained about the 17- and 18-year-old medics in Vietnam carrying M&Ms to give to soldiers too severely wounded even for morphine, whispering that the candies were for the pain while they waited for the choppers.


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Big Tobacco


While I defend a persons choice to smoke, I recognize it is a health problem and an addiction, and that the corporate cartels behind it are of course making a killing off of killing.

But so are the corporations that make weapons and weapons systems.And funny thing like Big Tobacco they use bribery, illegal trading practices, smuggling etc.



"Diamond (reference services, Louisiana State U.) describes the world (literally) of US Big Tobacco and Nicotiana tobacum from 1990 to 2004 as it expanded into new world markets in Asia, Eastern Europe and Russia, often with the assistance of the US government, and kept the more mature US market puffing along. The topics for his annotated bibliography include economic aspects such as advertising and marketing (including philanthropy and sponsorship of arts and sporting events), distribution channels (including duty-free, illegal trade, and the market of prisons and jails), and political aspects (such as the various relationships of the industry with politicians, lobbyists, litigators and the State of California). Topics of the statistical tables include cash receipts, exports and advertising expenditures (page numbers would be recommended in this section) and other appendices include company profiles, court cases and tobacco websites."



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