Here’s an excerpt from the above linked-to article:
“Enter the foreign NGOs. The Haitian oligarchy has absolutely no interest in the poor once they leave the sweatshops. However, they don’t mind if a bunch of humanitarian suckers want to come to the island and immunize a few. Build a hospital, a school, feed them if you feel like it. Anyone with a few dollars in his pocket is welcome into Haiti to do whatever he likes as long as it doesn’t interfere with the wage or working conditions. You can’t get near that. No NGO that wants to remain in business is able to say this.”
And here’s an excerpt from my online response to the above linked-to article:
“When Canada, France and the U.S. attacked Haiti, I determined to not forget it, which I wasn’t going to do of course. But who can keep focussed on all of the corporatocracy’s atrocities from year to year? So, While you don’t uncaringly forget about things like the corporatocracy’s invasion of a small, defenceless nation like Haiti, you do find yourself distracted continuously [by] each new, successive atrocity and it all blurs. I just didn’t want that to happen with Haiti. And so I [focussed] on it as best I could.
“That hasn’t involved much more than paying attention to articles on alternative media websites like rabble, and giving myself the task of reading up on the subject, but I felt that that was better than nothing at all. I urge others out there to do that minimum as well. Then mention Haiti as an example of imperialism, with Canada right in the middle of it, when you’re talking to people you know. Because people should know about the ‘myth’ of Canada, that supposedly nicer, more civilized country north of America.”
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Coffee! I do not have a dedicated blog about coffee. I don’t yet blog frequently enough for that, I feel. As well, I don’t consider myself expert enough. I know that that doesn’t necessarily matter if the blog is done half decently. But that’s how I feel. In lieu of such a blog, I have my coffee posts scattered throughout this blog and easily available to you. To find them, click on the link at the bottom of the coffee post you read that says “Explore posts in the same categories.” That’s poorly expressed, but you get the idea. It ought to say “Explore other posts in this category.” But WP isn’t immune from the plague of illiteracy sweeping the planet.
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Disappeared! Going forward, I will more closely track interactive sites where I post commentary and the post doesn’t get accepted. I never submit commentary that is unacceptable to reasonable, decent people. The politics I espouse and talk about may offend many, but that’s different. Also, It’s one thing when a nasty organization disappears my posts. But it’s another thing altogether when an organization that I consider useful and on the side of ‘the people’ disappears my posts. Then again, Gatekeepers are everywhere (hint: Click on the word ‘gatekeeper’ in the tag cloud). Click on the word ‘censored’ in the tag cloud to see posts that I submit to various discussions but which never appeared or appeared and then disappeared. I won’t always know why my posts are disappeared. But so what? Let’s see what’s going on out there. Right?
An excerpt from the above linked-to article follows:
** Joseph Stalin didn’t care about taxpayers.
That’s the most benefit-of-the-doubt way to take a radio comment made by Mayor Rob Ford on Tuesday morning, which likened five political rivals to the murderous Russian dictator…
“These people are all two steps left of Joe Stalin. So I’m not discouraged by that and I don’t expect it. They don’t care about the taxpayers. But I know one person who does, and that’s me.” …
[Adam] Vaughan chalked it up to Ford being Ford.
“It’s one of those things that Mayor Ford says that no one understands. He’s just lashing out. I don’t think anyone should compare any member of council to Joseph Stalin,” Vaughan said. **
My typo-corrected online responses to the above linked-to post follows:
*************************** Fine As Long As…
“Mayor Rob Ford compares rival councillors to Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin.” Which is fine – and not behavior we can, or should, do anything to prevent – as long as people are beginning to understand it. Most north Americans, and, generally, citizens in developed democracies (who aren’t immigrants from south America, where they have learned things), have become cattle – by design. The majority of the 99% are stirring, a good, if rather late, development. That stirring must be accompanied by education (not propaganda, which we are already getting). Chomsky – who points out that propaganda is more important in developed states where people can’t so easily be physically mistreated by rulers – long ago pointed out the term ‘communist’, for example, is used in a technical sense and slung (hypocritically) by rightwingers at ‘any’ who simply have views that are not elite.
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State Terror
Let’s not let Ford’s ilk hide, even if it’s hard to stand up to their kind. Adam Vaughan thinks no one should compare any council member to Joseph Stalin. Does he mean that free speech is only okay sometimes? Or does he mean that there is no basis for the comparison? If the comparison is education, I’m all for it. To suggest that any council member has ‘actually’ murdered citizens is folly, to be clear. Beyond that… Look at the way western corporations (you name it!) worked with China to create a surveillance/security network that our leaders here would love to employ but can’t, fully – yet (“China’s All Seeing Eye,” by Naomi Klein). We barely rolled back SOPA & PIPA (for now). Will we sorely regret it when ‘democracy’ and ‘advanced’ means that 99% of us are afraid of our neighbors and authorities and, therefore, of our own freedom[?]
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An excerpt from the above linked-to article follows:
** …The murders since 2010 of four nuclear scientists — most certainly masterminded by agents of Israel’s Mossad — are deeply humiliating. With parliamentary elections in March regarded by many as the most important in the history of the Islamic republic, the pressure within Iran to hit back at Israel in some damaging way is inevitable — and this will happen soon.
In Israel, the calculation is also overwhelmingly political. The fractious government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is obsessed with the prospect of a nuclear Iran even if the evidence is still unclear how imminent that threat is. Netanyahu is also driven by his bitter rivalry with President Barack Obama. There is growing speculation the prime minister will trigger early Israeli elections in June to shore up his political position before Obama, as Netanyahu believes, is re-elected in November. He knows his best opportunity to attack Iran will be shortly before the U.S. election when he figures Obama would be politically cornered. **
Tony Burman, a tool, is spouting fantasy and it can’t be a good thing. If the U.S. stopped arming and supporting Israel, Israel would be in big trouble. That substantial support, on top of simply succeeding in having Israeli leaders betray their own people for power and glory, is how uncle Sam keeps it’s most important mid east asset in line. Israel won’t attack Iran without the go-ahead from uncle Sam. Not a bloody chance! With the U.S. so invested in the region, it’s main asset would never, never chance displeasing the Americans by miscalculating, as Saddam Hussein probably did when he invaded Kuwait, and striking Iran against uncle Sam’s wishes.
Yes, Tony Burman is a former Al Jazeera chief and before that a CBC editor in chief. There’s nothing special about having a connection to the spinny, compromised CBC. It’s a fake friend of ‘the people’, like the Toronto Star. (See my recent post titled “The 1% Is Pissed! Their Fake Leftwing Assets Are Active!”) Which isn’t to say that the people don’t need something like the CBC.
While Al Jazeera has endeared itself to the Left, or at least the mainstream Left (I don’t know exactly how the ‘real’ Left feels about Al Jazeera), I have always found it to be not right. That was before I came across information about how it was willing to do nasty things to whistle blowers simply because Julian Assange and Wikileaks made whistleblowing a heroic and widely popular thing and (like the Wall Street Journal) saw a way to capitalize on that. The intention wasn’t to support and encourage whistleblowers. See my post titled “Giving The Dogs A Reason To Party.”
My online responses to the top of post linked-to article follows:
****************** Perverted Provocative Predictable
“Serious people are doing serious work to prevent this from happening.” Mr. Burman should not parrot establishment, pro war language that ignores, in the most provocative manner, Iran’s right to make nuclear weapons, as it’s citizens want (point of pride) and as, we see, would be rational in a world where the US (supported by other criminal states – like Israel – that take their orders from the godfather, uncle Sam) steals countries whose people (often because of traitorous leaders) are too weak to defend themselves. Seriously!
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Criminal? No!
Can a criminal state perform ‘near’ criminal acts? Hmm.
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If these organizations and individuals who would certainly have us believe that they see themselves as public servants and champions, not destroyers, of civilization allow me to publicly disagree with them the way I do, Can I be right? You bet! For one thing, Where organizations are concerned, Especially when they present themselves as being ‘progressive’, it isn’t so easy for them to completely silence progressive voices. If they go to the trouble of looking progressive, then it wouldn’t make sense for them to start openly attacking and/or hindering progressives whose bona fides are beyond questioning. (Are my bona fides beyond questioning? They would be if anyone knew me. Never mind.) As well, Such orgs are often large and have many working for them, with views that might be more or less the same, but with some exceptions.
The Star carries articles by a few who do not support the direction that it’s top officials are taking it in. Just compare Carol Goar’s sorry reportage dealing with free trade and deficits with Linda McQuaig’s reportage on those same subjects. Thomas Walkom no doubt sees things quite a bit differently than anyone on the Star’s editorial board. Rick Salutin, who was unceremoniously dumped from the pro free trade, anti civil society Globe And Mail (where it’s easier to turn on progressives, since it doesn’t pretend to the same extent as the Star to be progressive) doesn’t see eye to eye with the Toronto Star’s big shots. Who knows about others within the organization? There are gatekeepers everywhere, for sure. But not everyone is a gatekeeper.
And here’s Rick Salutin’s thoughts on the CBC: “Should leftists defend the CBC? Hell, no, they should attack it — for being so far to the right. Look at CBC’s prestige political panel: two of three members are Andrew Coyne, of hard-right Maclean’s, and Allan Gregg, who polls for Preston Manning to show how right-wing Canada now is. Its chief pundit is Rex Murphy, now also at the National Post. Take former journalists in the Harper government, like minister Peter Kent and senators Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin — they all had serious CBC careers. Is CBC training right-wing media agents?” – Rick Salutin (“CBC drifts further right, passing a conservative along the way”)
Kai Nagata worked, very hard and successfully apparently, for CTV. He quit because, like most mainstream media, it isn’t a place where those who take life seriously, in a positive sense (caring about the big issues of the day because one cares about people and the environment and the way those with power don’t care), can thrive and do much good. After his departure from CTV, he explained why, online in his blog. And he had a few words to say about media in general, including the CBC:
“Aside from feeling sexually attracted to the people on screen, the target viewer, according to consultants, is also supposed to like easy stories that reinforce beliefs they already hold. This is where the public broadcaster is caught in a tough spot. CBC Television, post-Stursberg [see bottom of post], is failing in two ways. Despite modest gains in certain markets, (and bigger gains for reality shows like Dragon’s Den and Battle of the Blades) it’s still largely failing to broadcast to the public. More damnably, the resulting strategy is now to compete with for-profit networks for the lowest hanging fruit. In this race to the bottom, the less time and money the CBC devotes to enterprise journalism, the less motivation there is for the private networks to maintain credibility by funding their own investigative teams. Even then, “consumer protection” content has largely replaced political accountability.
“It’s a vicious cycle, and it creates things like the Kate and Will show. Wall-to-wall, breaking-news coverage of a stage-managed, spoon-fed celebrity visit, justified by the couple’s symbolic relationship to a former colony, codified in a document most Canadians have never read (and one province has never signed). On a weekend where there was real news happening in Bangkok, Misrata, Athens, Washington, and around the world, what we saw instead was a breathless gaggle of normally credible journalists, gushing in live hit after live hit about how the prince is young and his wife is pretty. And the public broadcaster led the charge.
“Aside from being overrun by “Action News” prophets from Iowa, the CBC has another problem: the perception that it’s somehow a haven for left-wing subversives. True or not, the CBC was worried enough about its pinko problem to commission an independent audit of its coverage, in which more consultants tried to quantify “left-wing bias” and, presumably using stopwatches, demonstrate that the CBC gives the Conservative government airtime commensurate with the proportion of seats it holds in the House of Commons. Or something like that.
“Jon Stewart talks about a “right-wing narrative of victimization,” and what it has accomplished in Canada is the near-paralysis of progressive voices in broadcasting. In the States, even Fox News anchor Chris Wallace admitted there is an adversarial struggle afoot — that, in his view, networks like NBC have a “liberal” bias and Fox is there to tell “the other side of the story.” Well, Canada now has its Fox News. Krista Erickson, Brian Lilley, and Ezra Levant each do a wonderful send-up of the TV anchor character. The stodgy, neutral, unbiased broadcaster trope is played for jokes before the Sun News team gleefully rips into its targets. But Canada has no Jon Stewart to unravel their ideology and act as a counterweight. Our satirists are toothless and boring, with the notable exception of Jean-René Dufort. And on the more serious side, we have no Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow. So I don’t see any true debate within the media world itself, in the sense of a national, public clash of ideas. The Canadian right wing, if you want to call it that, has had five years to get the gloves off. With a majority Conservative government in power, they’re putting on brass knuckles. Meanwhile the left is grasping about in a pair of potholders.”
pic by Patrick Corrigan
Here’s a letter I wrote to Carol Goar, which her pro free trade propaganda prompted me to write but which I did not enjoy writing since I had, just a short time earlier, written her to thank her for her articles dealing with poverty. She acknowledged receipt of the letter:
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Carol Goar: August 10, 2007
I can’t tell you how disappointed I am with your boosting of NAFTA. You must know that free trade, a misnomer, hasn’t been good for most people. (Congress’s own research arm predicted that NAFTA would hurt all three national signatories to the pact, which it did. But the study and it’s findings were not released to the public.) People here have signalled to politicians that they (the people) are so stupid that their leaders can push this sort of legalized exploitation on them just by referring to it as ‘free trade’. I agree that people are dumb. Most of it is voluntary. Some of it isn’t. It makes me angry. But it’s no excuse for people who choose to exploit. If your front door is open, that does not mean it’s okay for me to walk across your yard and into your home. In regard to free trade, the capitalist exploiters know that most folks will not ask, “What? There was no trade before now? It wasn’t free? You’re right, There’s no time to waste. We need free trade!” When exactly the opposite is the case.
Your colleague, Linda McQuaig, has some interesting thoughts about free trade, as you well know. Consider:
“A poll conducted for Business Week similarly found that 80 per cent of Americans believed that the environment should be a top priority in trade deals; 74 percent also wanted to make labour rights a priority, and a solid majority disapproved of signing trade deals that offered no protection for environmental and labour concerns. What this suggests is that a lot of Canadians and Americans don’t fully understand that the new trade deals compromise environmental and labour rights. This is no surprise, since government and business leaders keep implying that the deals are exclusively about trade. But when asked about their priorities, citizens in both countries are unequivocal: unbridled profit-making, at the expense of everything else, is unacceptable.” -pg 223 of ALL YOU CAN EAT – GREED, LUST AND THE NEW CAPITALISM (2001)
It’s not just government and business leaders who imply trade deals are only about trade, Is it Carol? Linda also notes how pundits who are widely known and respected, such as the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, can greatly help to convince people that a certain position is right by himself endorsing it in his columns. Like you with your columns, Carol. Linda notes that by being regarded as neutral and not ideological – which is not exactly what I would have thought about Friedman – he adds force to his arguments. Frankly, I would have thought ‘neutral and not ideological’ applies ‘more’ to you than Friedman. Therefore, In my view and from all I’ve read about free trade deals, Your betrayal, as one who regularly speaks out about the plight of the poor, is great.
And it seems that everyone, except you, is aware that the Washington Consensus, also known as neoliberal capitalism, has been devastating for Latin America. Of course, you ‘are’ aware. While we’re on the subject of what you are and are not aware of, it took some clever navigation on your part to avoid mentioning the Security and Prosperity Partnership in your article on NAFTA and it’s benefits. But it’s hardly surprising. While you might want to boost free trade – which I’ll NEVER understand – NAFTA is already done, whereas the SPP isn’t, de jure, a done deal yet. And we mustn’t invite the readers to enquire as to what this SPP is about, Must we?
“As the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research has shown, economic growth has slowed dramatically in virtually every corner of the developing world in the past two decades – which also happens to be the period when the World Bank and the IMF started aggressively pushing their unfetterred-market agenda. If we compare the twenty-year period before 1980 – when Keynesian-style government interventionism was in vogue – to the twenty years of pro-market policies that have followed, we find that growth was higher almost everywhere in the earlier Keynesian period. (This pattern holds true, although to a less dramatic extent, throughout the industrialized world as well.) In Latin America, for instance, GDP per capita – the standard measure of economic growth used by mainstream economists – grew by 75 per cent in the earlier period and by only 6 per cent in the more recent period.” -pg 77 of ALL YOU CAN EAT
So what does George W. Bush do? He goes down there (with an unstated agenda to morally support tottering rightwing leaders) in the early spring of this year and tells South Americans that neoliberal capitalism hasn’t worked for them and so they should let American capitalists give them more of it, as Justin Akers Chacón recently noted in ISR. In fact, Justin provides us with the sobering fact that “These policies, known collectively as neoliberal capitalism, have been responsible for one of history’s greatest transfers of wealth from poor to rich nations (and from the working classes to the ruling classes) ever witnessed in human history. Since 1980, for instance, it has been calculated that over $4.6 trillion have flowed from poor to wealthy nations through these polices.” (International Socialist Review, “Casualties of neoliberalism,” July/ August 2007)
A final point Linda mentioned in her book has to do with people thinking, with a little help from the establishment, that before the recent free trade deals there wasn’t any free trade. There was, and it was ‘actual’ free trade, as she discusses in the chapter of ALL YOU CAN EAT titled Tearing Down The Fence. She also makes that point, on page 47, in an earlier chapter titled Remaking The World.
And every time I read about how these pacts arrived or are arriving, I find the same reference to how they’ve been kept from the public as much as possible. I remember experiencing this personally when the Multilateral Agreement On Investment was being cooked up. I was online for that and I immediately began passing on info about it as I discovered it. But, What does the public have to add to pacts and so forth that depend for their success on social deficits? The people must fail for the few, who reside in Richistan, to succeed.
“Neoliberalism in Mexico (with the passage of NAFTA) was designed to induce a painful shock treatment into the economy, with the rapid transition to open markets, the abolition of tariffs and subsidies, and the reduction of social spending. Nowhere in the 700-plus pages of NAFTA text was there a plan to address the land loss, deindustrialization, and impoverishment that would immediately result in those sectors of the economy made vulnerable by exposure to the world market,” writes Justin Akers Chacón.
Murray Dobbin adds this:
“Common to all of these deals and potential deals is the complete absence of any reference to social, environmental, or labour standards or human rights. In the developed countries, governments have responded to this criticism with what are now commonly referred to as “side deals.” These usually concern labour and the environment, the two areas where the protest has been the most effective, and a social charter. So far, under the FTA and NAFTA, the side deals have proven ineffective though supporters suggest the jury is still out.
“There is a fatal flaw in the notion of social charters being attached to liberalizing multinational agreements. Pressing for improved labour, social and environmental standards fundamentally contradicts the whole point of these deals, which is to lower cost and investment barriers to transnational corporations. Free trade and investment demand deregulatory requirements that make social protection ideologically and politically unacceptable. It would be difficult to make them effective precisely because, to the extent that they are effective, they undermine the purpose of the agreement and its corporate libertarian philosophy.” -pg 118 of THE MYTH OF THE GOOD CORPORATE CITIZEN, by Murray Dobbin
Murray isn’t drawing his own conclusion there. He then recounts how the U.S. Council for International Business, speaking for U.S. TNCs, wrote to senior U.S. officials and told them they would oppose “any and all measures to create or even imply binding obligations for goverments related to environment or labour.”
Has something changed here, Carol, that we don’t know about?
From Chomsky:
“The UD [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] became the focus of great attention in June 1993 at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna…
“The high-minded rhetoric at and about the Vienna conference was not besmirched by inquiry into the observance of the UD by its leading defenders. These matters were, however, raised in Vienna in a Public Hearing organized by NGOs. The contributions by activists, scholars, lawyers, and others from many countries reviewed “alarming evidence of massive human rights violations in every part of the world as a result of the policies of the international financial institutions,” the “Washington Consensus” among the leaders of the free world. This “neoliberal” consensus disguises what might be called “really existing free market doctrine”: market discipline is of great benefit to the weak and defenseless, though the rich and powerful must shelter under the wings of the nanny state. They must also be allowed to persist in “the sustained assault on [free trade] principle” that is deplored in a scholarly review of the post-1970 (“neoliberal”) period by GATT secretariat economist Patrick Low (now director of economic research for the World Trade Organization), who estimates the restrictive effects of Reaganite measures at about three times those of other leading industrial countries, as they “presided over the greatest swing toward protectionism since the 1930s,” shifting the US from “being the world’s champion of multilateral free trade to one of its leading challengers,” the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations commented in a review of the decade.” -pg 130 of ROGUE STATES – THE RULE OF FORCE IN WORLD AFFAIRS (2000), by Noam Chomsky
We need besmirching, Carol. But I guess we’ll only get that from rabble rousers like your colleague Linda McQuaig and, perhaps, from the odd “special to the Star” writer, like the one who wrote a different view from you the same day you tapped out “Americans rethinking free trade.” Dick Smyth, a former broadcaster, wrote “Our crass business ethos cannot survive,” in which he notes that:
“Free trade had the potential of improving the human condition. But instead of bettering wages and working conditions in Mexico and the U.S. south, it has exerted downward pressure on them in Canada.
“Unions are loathed. The first indication of their demise was when politicians dispensed with the once mandatory union “bug” on their campaign material. Unions today negotiate concessions rather than benefits.
“Pension and medical plans are increasingly rare. The five-day week and eight-hour day, wrested into existence by unions, are vanishing under the twin chimeras of “competitiveness” and “productivity.” Employers evade the spirit of the law while observing its letter by hiring people “on contract” or as part timers. Others are given meaningless “management” titles to thwart laws on overtime.” And he doesn’t mellow out for the rest of his article. I remember the man, sort of. I remember his voice. It’s distinctive. But I remember him, I think, from a time when I wasn’t politicized. Now I’ll remember his words, which I’ve enjoyed. (“Americans rethinking free trade,” Toronto Star, August 6, 2007 & “Our crass business ethos cannot survive,” Toronto Star, August 6, 2007)
Maude Barlow writes about two trips that she took to Mexico that stood out for her. After one visit, she cried all the way home from seeing conditions that she describes in her book and that would make any normal person extremely sad. I liked the one about dipping a pencil into the river in the maquiladora and finding it stripped of paint when removed. She also mentions the factory owners who expected to be shown a good time when they came to visit and would therefore be given Mexican women to rape. (I recall in the news learning about all the women in the maquiladora area simply disappearing and turning up raped and murdered. Maude here mentions photo journalist Charles Bowden’s work, presenting the horrific story of those disappearances, with over 500 women, most of them young, disappearing in 1997 alone. Bowden worked for Harper’s magazine. However, She mentions that in the middle of recalling her 1990 and 1991 trips to Mexico.)
I don’t recall hearing that we are in Mexico in part to free the women, but maybe that line works better for Afghanistan. Maude’s 1990 trip, made for the purpose of finding out what free trade had done for Mexicans, prior to NAFTA’s implementation, saw her make contact with an economist named Carlos Herédia, who she later brought to Canada “when CBC’s The National put the deal “on trial” and I was defence for the prosecution.”
“For the whole week, I kept my emotions in check. I did say in my closing remarks to the gathering back in Mexico City that I was leaving a piece of my heart behind and this was true. But it wasn’t until I got on the plane to return home that the full impact of what I had seen hit me. I was sitting with Tony [Clarke] who could see that I was devastated and was helping me to comprehend what it all meant. I had seen poverty before; what so upset me about this trip was that I had glimpsed a future the world was pro-actively and consciously creating. We were weaving a future out of extreme inequality and violence in order to service the growing consumer demands of the world’s elite, many of whom lived in my country. The children I saw on the streets of Mexico would never be counted in the measurements I knew our government officials and business economists would use to “prove” that free trade was working for Canada. The twisted, deformed infant victims of the toxic maquiladora factories I visited would never show up as a negative factor in Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product. I wept most of the way back to Canada.” -pages 126 & 127 of THE FIGHT OF MY LIFE (1998), by Maude Barlow
Carol, I don’t think your boosting of free trade is educational. At least not in a positive sense. Just from the quick review of free trade in this email, it’s clear that you are very deliberately protecting free trade’s image, at least in the eyes of those who haven’t had a good look at it and who believe it’s ‘free’ and it’s ‘trade’ and that it’s good, just as people like you indicate. You have a louder voice than most others and what you say has an impact on (helping to determine) the issues Canadians will want to talk about. So, If you can lambast David Miller for not being forthcoming with the public about his dilemma vis a vis Toronto’s finances and the options before Toronto’s councillors (“Mayor’s credibility gap on taxes,” Toronto Star, August 1, 2007), then perhaps you can re-think your failure to talk about the SPP when you’re talking about it. Somehow, I doubt you will.
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The public depends not on mainstream media, and establishment journos like Carol Goar, to be properly and fully informed. Indeed, journos like Goar tell the lie that our politicians and their partners in the private sector are telling us what they’re doing. But that is not the case. And if the nastiness that they were doing is so good, then how come, when the people find out about it, which they do eventually as a result of the efforts of organizations like The Council Of Canadians and individuals like Maude Barlow, they want nothing to do with it and leaders back off? Not always, but often. (for examle: MAI, SPP)
“To hear Maude Barlow tell it, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be sacrificing Canada’s energy security, weakening its environmental safeguards and relinquishing control over its water supply when he meets U.S. President George Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon at the Château Montebello next week…
“What is at stake in the two-day summit is a sprawling package of regulatory reforms known as the Security and Prosperity Partnership…
“But to say that “corporations are drafting government policy behind closed doors,” as the Council of Canadians does, is a bit of a stretch.” (Carol Goar, “We need a dialogue, not protests,” August 13, 2007, Toronto Star)
The SPP formally died in August of 2009 (but in substance, many policies and measures it was meant to establish are alive and well). See this interesting summation, by Stuart Trew, of the push by fascists to implement this nasty program and progressives’ successful push back against it here: “The SPP Is Dead, So Where’s the Champagne?”
Here’s some archived material from the COC’s website dealing with the then current fight against the SPP. Visit the website for the links provided:
“Big business corporations on both sides of the border are pushing for stronger economic and political ties with the United States. Led in Canada by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) – an organization representing Canada’s top 150 corporations – and supported by right-wing think tanks like the C.D. Howe Institute and the Fraser Institute, corporate groups are lobbying the Canadian government to get rid of border restrictions and policy differences with the U.S. in order to make it easier to do business.
““Deep integration” is a term that refers to the dismantling of the border between Canada and the United States. It could affect everything – the economy, social programs, resources and the environment. Deep integration is the harmonization of policies and regulations that govern the foods we eat, the items we buy, and how we live. It calls for the formation of a new North America that effectively erases the border between Canada and the United States in the interest of trade north of the border and security concerns south of the border.
“Documents obtained by the Council of Canadians provide damning evidence of how North American integration is being carried out by stealth. They describe a series of closed-door meetings with government officials and business leaders from Canada, Mexico and the United States to discuss everything from bulk water exports to a joint security perimeter and a continental resource pact, all with the explicit aim of helping executive-level politicians further integrate our three countries.”
Who’s the rat? Maude et al? Or Carol Goar et al? Decide for yourselves.
*I first encountered the word “Richistan” in Richard Gwyn’s (June 26, 2007) Toronto Star article titled “The rich get their own nationality.” The following is an excerpt: “…Stephen Schwarzman…runs a company called the Blackstone Group. It’s a private equity firm (more about that in a moment). It’s just made a public share offering, a most successful one, of which Schwarzman, as the principal shareholder is, naturally and properly, the principal beneficiary. But a beneficiary on a scale without precedent. He’s now worth just under $8 billion (U.S.). That’s on top of last year’s earnings of $398.3 million. Besides those who wish they were him and those who now hate him, there is a one group of naysayers who are especially interesting. According to the Financial Times of London, a lot of other top executives of private equity companies are enraged at Schwarzman because he’s drawing attention to the fact that they, exactly like him, are sitting on gigantic golden eggs. Apparently, these types are worried that the politicians, egged on by the mob, or the proletariat, or ordinary types like most readers of this column, will feel they need to “do something” about those like Schwarzman who make incredible fortunes by financial juggling while making not a single product nor providing a single new service to the public… In the U.S. in 1985, there were 13 billionaires. Today, there are more than 1,000. Just in 2005, another 227,000 new American millionaires were minted. In his book Richistan, Robert Frank calls this new class “financial foreigners.” They may live in the U.S., or London or Hong Kong or Toronto, but they really live in their own space, with their own health system, own transportation system (private jets, limousines), even their own time system (watches that cost up to $600,000). Except nominally, they aren’t Americans or Brits or Chinese or Canadians. Their real nationality is that of “Richistan,” because they are very, very, very, rich.”
*I had embedded this video in a previous post. But just so folks understand what kind of people are running the state of Israel, I’ll present “There Was No War In Gaza. It Was A Massacre,” by Norman Finkelstein, again:
An excerpt from the above linked-to article follows:
** Paul Martin knew a thing or two about retrenching. When he became finance minister in 1993 he faced a much bigger challenge than today’s cost-cutters. Canada’s chronic deficit had hit a record $42 billion. Two international agencies, Standard and Poors and Moody’s, had lowered Canada’s credit rating. The Wall Street Journal branded Canada a “Third World banana republic.” Economists were speculating on when — not whether — Canada would hit the debt wall…
“Rather than sneering, his successors would be smart to see what they can learn from his approach. **
Following are my two online responses to the above linked-to article:
********************************* Save It Carol
I stopped reading Carol Goar long ago after reading her pro free trade propaganda. (The disturbing reference to rightwinger Paul Martin got my attention.) I should quit reading Haroon Siddiqui as well, seeing how he wants us to believe that the system doesn’t need changing. (See his most recent propaganda piece.) We just need to make it work for us – by electing democrats, like Obama. Lol! Has the 1% been harping on it’s media to get busy and out-shout the 99%? / “But members of the investment community, who profit enormously from the war on inflation… rarely miss an opportunity to flog the deficit horse. Since developments in the market are difficult to decipher at the best of times, financial analysts are more or less free to give whatever spin they want – especially since no one questions them.” -pg 119 of “Shooting The Hippo,” by Linda McQuaig.
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Speaking Of Archives…
I’d love the Star to unearth the disappeared CBC expose of tax evader Paul Martin titled Anchors Away. Are you familiar with it, Carol? Nothing to say?
**********************************
It’s stunning how shameless and bold the 1 percent’s media assets can be. It’s one thing when a Rush Limbaugh or Terence Corcoran spouts rightwing propaganda, but when journos who ‘those’ ones denounce as socialists (for propaganda purposes) bundle rightwing propaganda with a handful of pro civil society statements, then you can be forgiven for being angered, frightened, confused, frustrated and even discouraged. Be any or all of the above, but stay focussed. Stay focussed on right and wrong, on principles and base your decisions and actions on evidence, just like scientists would. Liars have mothers, fathers, sons and daughters and friends and neighbors. None of those connections made the lies of the liars truths. When your allies do and say things that you know that they know are wrong, Don’t go off the deep end. They must spiritually fail on their own. Don’t join them.
Mysterious lawlessness, which I have not blogged about (that I recall) but which I’ve wrote about (in my unpublished two-volume book), obtains when our political and other leaders, namely people who are educated and professional and who know right from wrong, publicly do and say evil things. Why mysterious? It’s mysterious from the standpoint of those observers (neither good nor bad) who lack a moral foundation. They observe the lawlessness of their betters and note that they are consciously and deliberately rule-breaking and they conclude from watching that behavior that “Bad must sometimes be good.” That’s the logical conclusion for morally immature observers of such lawlessness to reach. And once they do embrace that darkness, What does that do for civilization? It certainly doesn’t bring God’s blessing.
Carol’s opening sentences are disturbing for a number of reasons. Linda McQuaig is a freelance writer who often has articles in this daily that rightwingers view (for propaganda purposes) as a socialist rag. Linda’s pieces are, however, very good. She’s with the people rather than with the elites. So, It’s as if Goar is telling this sometime colleague to go f**k herself! “Really?,” you ask. Really, I answer.
Have you read “Shooting The Hippo”? The first chapter of Linda’s book is taken up with an explanation of the title, which serves in itself to tell the whole story of the self-serving propaganda surrounding the subject of deficits. Canada was in the grip of deficit hysteria in 1993, whipped up by the business community and it’s media allies. Eric Malling was the host of a television show called W5 and he was responsible for an episode which incorrectly compared New Zeland’s fiscal situation with Canada’s in order to make a case (we are hitting a debt wall) that, if bought by the public, would help the net lenders (Malling’s class) in society reap rewards from. With the public convinced that we were in a desperate situation in which only cuts to social spending (what makes society civilized) could rescue us, then a regime of tight money, extremely low inflation and high real interests – resulting in price stability and guaranteed good returns on investments as well as favorable conditions for privatization – could be put in place by rightwing governments.
The hippo? New Zealand’s rightwingers successfully attacked and dismantled New Zealand’s progressive, successful welfare state and in the process had people there believing that their government couldn’t even afford to house and feed the hippo in the zoo. Ergo…
“Malling, the consummate TV host, makes it all sound necessary, even reasonable. What choice is there but to shoot the baby hippo? The government is in debt…
“The show is about debt, about what happens when a country hits the “debt wall.” Ostensibly, it is a story about New Zealand, but Malling makes clear it is really about what lies ahead for Canada…
“…Malling traces the dramatic cuts New Zealand has made in government spending over the last decade, slashing social programs, introducing user fees, removing government regulations and privatizing just about everything the government owned, including the post office and the national airline.
“All this has been done, not by choice, but because debt left New Zealanders with no other options, Malling explains. The health minister tells Malling this had to happen because New Zealand was “at the edge of a cliff.” Malling quickly tells his audience, “Well now, a lot of Canadians, I think, are getting a view of the cliff too.”
“The show is a masterpiece of TV journalism…
“Its only shortcoming – which went largely unnoticed – was that it distorted what actually happened in New Zealand… The real story is about how New Zealand’s politicians embarked on a huge experiment in which they transformed their country from an advanced social democracy into a free-market jungle with massive unemployment, growing inequality and a damaged manufacturing base…
“…What Malling was referring to was not the bankruptcy of the country, which never happened, but a very short-term currency crisis. “It is simply not true that we reached the limits of our borrowing capacity,” said Jonathan Boston, associate professor of public policy at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, after reading the transcript of Malling’s New Zealand program.” – from chapter 1 of “Shooting The Hippo – Death By Deficit And Other Canadian Myths,” by Linda McQuaig
Again, Carol Goar wrote: “Paul Martin knew a thing or two about retrenching… The Wall Street Journal branded Canada a “Third World banana republic.” Economists were speculating on when — not whether — Canada would hit the debt wall.”
** Monarchs in Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and elsewhere have made legislative concessions or bribed their citizens to buy temporary peace.
The Islamists have turned out not to have horns. Some have sounded scary but most have been pragmatic…
The Obama administration is talking to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It has warned the military regime against delaying transferring real power to the elected government…
As the decrepit old order is being replaced by a healthier one, the U.S. and others are trying to be on the right side of history. But not Canada. **
Siddiqui is trying hard to preserve the myth of Camelot (originally created in order to make the US system seem okay by presenting the murderous JFK as a shining knight in white armor who died at the hands of powerful enemies because he attempted to stop the killing in Vietnam, showing that the system ‘could’ produce good presidents), which has utility for all corporatocracy governments, and to help make that easier by encouraging us to lower our standards. He notes that the U.S. is complicit in the past repression of Arabs by their murderous leaders and then he goes on to prop up Obama, who has out-Bushed Bush, which would suggest that Siddiqui thinks we are not to be bothered ‘too’ much by all that evil.
In an effort to frame the debate, he mentions that Obama is talking to the Brotherhood, as though that is a virtuous thing and there’s nothing else to say about it when, we saw, The Brotherhood isn’t democratic in any positive sense, caring about itself (and the potential for it to survive the then current upheavel and later maneuver for power) and it’s followers only, as demonstrated during the initial uprising when not a single brotherhood member risked displeasing the Egytpian government by being out in the street with the young people who were stepping up. Any way you slice that, The Brotherhood has no proper interest in democracy. Where was the concern for those bringing badly needed democracy to Egypt? And if you buy the idea that members were instructed by their leaders to stay put, then you have to ask yourself, What does that say about members that they ‘agreed’ to let those who were fighting for democracy face soldiers and thugs alone?
I wrote about this before. I suspected that the Americans would try somehow to rescue their Egytpian asset, namely the military, that being the one sure, powerful force capable of preventing the revolution from succeeding.
Some on the Right might call the Star a socialist newspaper, but clearly it serves their class well. Don’t be fooled. As for myself, I’ll take Christopher Simpson’s, and John Stauber’s, advice (in the documentary called “Psywar”). Simpson says that you can’t, and shouldn’t, stop propaganda, for that would mean you are against free speech. There is no mind control happening or perhaps the situation would be hopeless. But people need to know that there is propaganda and they need to know how it works, which is how you take away it’s power. You should force the players to the surface so that where you have campaigns (like deficit terrorism), you can show what faction of society that propaganda comes from by explaining how it would benefit from acceptance of the propaganda.
Here’s my effort to do that. I don’t know who Carol and Haroon hang with… physically.
An excerpt from the above linked-to article follows:
** Because our Constitution contains no special provisions for the government of corporations, protection of the public interest depends upon corporate citizenship just as it does on individual citizenship. Indeed, it depends on corporate citizenship more. A big corporation has the capacity to do more harm to the public interest in one afternoon legally than the average human being can do in a lifetime.
In the case of modern corporations with huge amounts of money invested in factories, processes and products that harm the public interest, that citizenship is not present. The reason for this has to do with state corporate laws that say, so long as corporations are operating in accordance with existing laws, corporate directors must act in the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders.
These laws encourage corporate managers to continue harming the public interest in the pursuit of their company’s own interest (profit and survival). It’s time to start thinking about changing these laws. The law should balance the duty of directors to act in the company’s best interest with safeguards that will ensure protection of the environment and other elements of the public interest. **
My online responses (2) to the above linked-to article. My second, longer, response, was to someone else’s comment, but I somehow lost track of things and it simply appeared under my first short comment:
** At a time when the people – very belatedly – are starting to look more like people than cattle and their masters, appropriately, are feeling a little less comfortable in their mansions, Robert Hinkely argues for everyone to calm down. People are becoming radicalized. Hinkely demonstrates docility. He’s welcome to join the democratic debate. I hope he doesn’t think ‘he’ alone has the answers. What are the answers? Democratic debate and democratic everything.
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The famous environmentalist, Eward Abbey (http://bit.ly/RsfPq) spoke of growth for the sake of growth as the ideology the cancer cell.
Phil Gaspar talks about growth in his ISR article (http://bit.ly/xqmTDu) titled “The Crisis That Won’t Go Away.” Macho corporations irrationally (from a socialist’s standpoint) overproduce even while their greed – cost cutting (everything from wages, to taxes, to capturing governments and making or not making laws that ‘free’ them) – ensures that demand will never keep up, leading to periodic spasms of clear cutting (closing factories and tossing thousands out into the cold, neoliberal streets), with bosses doing just fine all the while, as they adjust and make room again for capitalist expansion, or growth.
If they are able to. If there is an ‘again’, for their insanity by no means recommends a belief that such madness will be universally accepted forever.
“The underlying economic problems that led to the last downturn have not been solved, and Marx is suddenly making an encore appearance in mainstream publications. Nouriel Roubini, one of the few economists who predicted the last slump, told the Wall Street Journal in August, “Karl Marx had it right.”
At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to Capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That’s what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They’re not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else’s income and consumption. That’s why it’s a self-destructive process.
“A few weeks later, George Magnus, senior economic adviser for UBS bank, wrote in an article for Bloomberg that “Policy makers struggling to understand the barrage of financial panics, protests and other ills afflicting the world would do well to study the works of a long-dead economist: Karl Marx.”
“Both Roubini and Magnus take Marx seriously, but their aim is to use his ideas to save capitalism. If demand is low, then it needs to be boosted, and that can be done by increasing government spending, and putting more money into the hands of consumers by reducing the huge inequalities of income and wealth in the United States.
“But while these measures would be welcome, neither Roubini nor Magnus addresses the political question of how it would be possible to institute such policies in the face of opposition from the establishment. More importantly, though, their understanding of Marx is rather superficial, meaning that their proposed solutions are too. First, lack of consumer demand due to falling wages and reduced purchasing ability is only one cause of overcapacity in the economy. A second is the unplanned nature of capitalism itself, which time and time again has resulted in an oversupply of capital as well as consumer goods, as separate producers each attempt to meet expected demand. Until this overcapacity is substantially reduced, investment will not pick up and the economy will not revive. In the past, this has required the destruction of excess commodities on a mass scale.” – Phil Gaspar
A few things. Growth, in a capitalist system, cannot, in my view ever be good. It can be relatively good. If there’s demand sufficient to satisfy capacity, or people have decent jobs and can spend the money to buy the crap that capitalists make, then at least everyone, theoretically, can be comfortable. Another point: Gaspar takes account of the machismo of capitalists, which I appreciate. William Greider talks about overcapacity in the auto industry in his incredible book, “One World, Ready Or Not.” It struck me that this whole system is so totally wild west. Capitalists have created this wild west situation (and are now stuck in it with the rest of us) in which they ‘have to’ play chicken. GM won’t commit suicide and go away just because there’s too many cars for buyers. Neither will Ford. They won’t go away and they can’t go away.
But I not only have no use for capitalism, in any form. I also don’t believe in money. And I wish I could have a discussion with socialists about it because I’d love to know exactly where they stand on the subject of money. Isn’t capitalism sort of like moneyism? **
The following is an excerpt from the above linked-to article:
** Doctors, professors, teachers, and others on the public payroll will have do their bit in the new age of austerity, warns Premier Dalton McGuinty.
“We’re all going to have a role to play,” the premier told reporters here in his first public event of the New Year.
“If we’re going to be as effective as we need to be in terms of strengthening this economy and ensuring that we’re getting ever more value for the public dollars that are being invested in our public institutions, whether that’s education at whatever level or health care … then we’re all going to bring something to the table,” he said. **
The following is my online response to the above linked-to article:
***************** Tax Fairly. Period
The Big Lie is alive and well. Neoliberals croon that “We have spending problems,” while their private sector partners in the audience nod in approval. We have revenue problems, by design. Corporatocracy governments will not quit this tact. It’s an essential component of the neoliberal agenda of privatization and deregulation. Capitalists, who are destroying the world and consigning millions to misery, will save us, if we just free them. More. And we mustn’t tax them, while they use offshore tax havens and loopholes (like deferred taxes and trade mispricing. Read “A Game As Old As Empire”) and while they hoard their money or invest it in the stock market instead of stepping up to the plate and investing in real factories and jobs. / We won’t fix this folks, by asking corporacrats to bite the hands that feed them. We need proper, neutral, governments. That’s far away for the moment.
*****************
“Much of the tax evasion by corporations involved trade mispricing. Many of our clients were multinational businesses,which use tax havens to move profits away from higher-tax jurisdictions through what’s called transfer pricing: the process through which two or more businesses owned by the same people trade with each other. Technically speaking, transfer pricing is legal and necessary because the majority of world trade occurs between subsidiaries of the same company, ” writes John Christensen in “A Game As Old As Empire.” “In practice, however, the international conventions relating to transfer pricing are largely ineffective because there is no market price for goods traded between units of a multinational company. Businesses thus use their tax haven subsidiaries to overprice their imports and underprice their exports, thereby massively reducing their tax bill…” -page 49 (John’s contribution to “A Game,” edited by Steven Hiatt and published in 2007, is a section titled “Dirty Money: Inside the Secret World of Offshore Banking.”)
“Deferred taxes are a Bay Street fiction. They result from a series of corporate tax breaks that allow companies to depreciate their purchases of machinery, equipment and buildings at artificially fast rates. If a company purchases a machine with an estimated life of eight years, for instance, it might be expected to deduct the cost of the machine over that period, reducing its taxable income a little bit in each of the eight years. For accounting purposes, this is the way the machine is depreciated on the company’s books, as specified by accepted accounting principles.
“But companies actually keep two sets of books – one for accounting purposes and one for tax purposes. For tax purposes, the machine can be written off much faster, sometimes in as little as two years, even though the company is paying for it and using it over a much longer period. This provides companies right away with large deductions which allow them to significantly reduce their tax bills. Theoretically, the taxes they avoid paying are not actually eliminated, just deferred. But as long as the company keeps purchasing new equipment, it can keep deferring these taxes indefinitely. In practice, the taxes are almost never paid.*
“Deferred taxes are really tax breaks Ottawa has provided to business over the years in allowing them to write off their plant and equipment at artificially fast rates. Since the taxes are almost never paid, the money amounts to an interest-free loan from Ottawa, without any collateral required or any due date.
“But what is curious about them is their clandestine nature. Why are they called “deferred” when they are actually, in almost all cases, effectively “eliminated”?…” -pages 60 & 61 of “Behind Closed Doors – How The Rich Won Control Of Canada’s Tax System… And Ended Up Richer,” by Linda McQuaig
When it comes to paying taxes, corporations and the rich, who have captured governments, can lie to those governments. Little people cannot. Rich people can run to the nanny state to suck on it’s teats whenever they want, whether or not they need to or deserve to. Little people cannot for that would be tantamount to committing the sin of socialism, which isn’t a sin when the rich, who denounce socialism, do it.
“We don’t have a progressive tax system because the rich have indicated that they don’t want one.” – Introduction to “Behind Closed Doors,” by Linda McQuaig
“But he said to them: “The kings of the nations lord it over them, and those having authority over them are called Benefactors. You, though, are not to be that way.”" -Luke 22:25,26a
Coffee! I do not have a dedicated blog about coffee. I don’t yet blog frequently enough for that, I feel. As well, I don’t consider myself expert enough. I know that that doesn’t necessarily matter if the blog is done half decently. But that’s how I feel. In lieu of such a blog, I have my coffee posts scattered throughout this blog and easily available to you. To find them, click on the link at the bottom of the coffee post you read that says “Explore posts in the same categories.” That’s poorly expressed, but you get the idea. It ought to say “Explore other posts in this category.” But WP isn’t immune from the plague of illiteracy sweeping the planet.
Disappeared! Going forward, I will more closely track interactive sites where I post commentary and the post doesn’t get accepted. I never submit commentary that is unacceptable to reasonable, decent people. The politics I espouse and talk about may offend many, but that’s different. Also, It’s one thing when a nasty organization disappears my posts. But it’s another thing altogether when an organization that I consider useful and on the side of ‘the people’ disappears my posts. Then again, Gatekeepers are everywhere (hint: Click on the word ‘gatekeeper’ in the tag cloud). Click on the word ‘censored’ in the tag cloud to see posts that I submit to various discussions but which never appeared or appeared and then disappeared. I won’t always know why my posts are disappeared. But so what? Let’s see what’s going on out there. Right?
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