Creekside

The Can't Be Arsed To Get a Warrant For That Final 5% Act

2012-02-16T06:48:00.001-08:00

On CBC's The Current yesterday, internet law prof Michael Geist and Paul Gillespie, a former Toronto Police sergeant and CEO of Kids' INternet Safety Alliance, faced off on the potential for invasion of privacy afforded by the ~~Lawful Access Act~~ ... ~~Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act~~ ... Can't Be Arsed To Get a Warrant For That Final 5% Act

Partial transcript :

Gillespie explains the bill. Quote :

1)Requires service providers to give subscriber data to police upon request : name, unlisted phone #, IP address, without a warrant
2) If police have the authority, they should also have the ability to monitor peoples' communications
3) With a legitimate legal search warrant, be able to get the records logs
4) Compels service providers to store data

Michael Geist:

"If you look through the bill you don't find the words 'child pornography' anywhere because it's about far more than that.
On warrantless access to suscriber information - the reality is a warrant isn't always needed. Under current privacy law, telecom companies and internet companies have the power, the ability to provide the information, things like customer name and address information, without a warrant in appropreiate circumstances where it's part of an investigation. In fact according to RCMP data, they do so about 95% of the time. So in the overwhelming number of cases, they're already disclosing this information without any kind of court oversight. What we're talking about at the end of the day is that last 5%, instances where ISP or telecom companies say "We're not comfortable disclosing this subscriber information to you based on what you've shown us; come back with a warrant and we'll give you whatever you ask for."

That's been a bedrock principle we've had in Canada - it strikes the appropriate balance and really prevents potential fishing expeditions and prevents the prospect of a significant loss and erosion of the privacy balance we have in Canada."

From Michael Geist's column, Feb 15 :

"[W]ith ISPs and telcos providing subscriber data without a warrant 95 percent of the time, there is a huge information disclosure issue with no reporting and no oversight. This is a major issue on its own, particularly since it is not clear whether these figures also include requests to Internet companies like Google and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The RCMP alone made over 28,000 requests for customer name and address information in 2010."

Meanwhile, be sure to Tell Vic Everything #

Skynet - It's all about the children apparently

2012-02-13T13:33:00.000-08:00

Net, cellphones; Police could probe without warrant

"Public Safety Minister Vic ["Torture Lite"] Toews said the law will give the tools to police to adequately deal with 21st-century technology, and said anyone opposing the laws favours "the rights of child pornographers and organized crime ahead of the rights of law abiding citizens."

Actually, Vic, we do favour the rights of child pornographers. And organized crime. We have to if we favour the rights of everyone equally - which, if I recall correctly, is a bedrock conservative value.

Petition : STOP GOVERNMENT ONLINE SPYING
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Update : Write your MP

Dear [your MP here] :

Vic Toews says our choice is between child pornographers and online surveillance.

Fine.

Your choice is between voting against the awful access bill and losing your seat in the next election.

Sincerely, [You]

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Update 2 : U.S. seeks to mine social media

The U.S. government is seeking software that can mine social media to predict everything from future terrorist attacks to foreign uprisings, according to requests posted online by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

In a formal "request for information" from potential contractors, the FBI recently outlined its desire for a digital tool to scan the entire universe of social media - more data than humans could ever crunch.

The system sought by the research arm of the national intelligence director's office would fuse together everything from Web searches to Wikipedia edits to traffic webcams.

Counter-terrorism - Which colour-code are you?

2012-02-11T05:13:00.001-08:00

The G&M, the Star, and Vancouver Observer all carried stories yesterday about environmentalists being understandably pissed at being lumped in with white supremacists among the listed "issue-based" terrorist threats in Canada's new counter-terrorism strategy released on Thursday, Building Resilience Against Terrorism :

"...domestic extremism that is “based on grievances – real or perceived – revolving around the promotion of various causes such as animal rights, white supremacy, environmentalism and anti-capitalism."

Gosh that list sounds familiar.

Wait! Not only have I read it before - I've blogged it before.
It's from the Integrated Security Unit Joint Intelligence Group's Intelligence Assessment for the 2010 G8 summit, written back in June 2009. From page 6 :

"The 2010 G8 summit in Huntsville ... will likely be subject to actions taken by criminal extremists motivated by a variety of radical ideologies. These ideologies may include variants of anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, nihilism, socialism and/or communism. These ideologies may also include notions of racial supremacy and white power ...

"The important commonality is that these ideologies ... place these individuals and/or organizations at odds with the status quo and the current distribution of power in society.

In addition to these generally held tenets, a variety of grievances exist: These grievances are based upon notions/expectations regarding the environment, animal rights, First nations'(sic) resource-based grievances, gender/racial equality, and distribution of wealth etc."

And you all remember how well that summit security assessment worked out.

Notable that this new public list of potential terrorist threats leaves off any reference to First Nations.

Vancouver Observer :

"Public Safety spokesperson Lisa Filipps ... explained that the agency does not keep a list of domestic issue-based terrorist groups, and said the counter-terrorism strategy is not meant to target those using legal means to further their causes."

So I guess that means they've torn up the lists of people mentioned on Page 15 of the the JIG Intelligence Report, then, does it?

"The segment to follow will provide a list of investigative subjects, persons of interest, and their associates. In the following section, a specific profile sheet will be supplied for each subject according the criteria established. The profiles will be divided and color-coded into three distinct categories: Suspect (Red); Person of Interest (Orange); and Associate (Yellow).

And is this still going on? Yes it is :

RCMP records suggest that the reconnaissance continues. Report logs indicate at least 29 incidents of police surveillance between the end of the G20 summit and April 2011 — more than nine months after world leaders departed Toronto.

Look, nobody expects our government not to track and compile lists of people and groups it considers likely to blow things up, and most of this "new" strategy focuses on those. But in its determination to bash through the Enbridge Gateway tarsands-to-tankers pipeline regardless of what Canadians think about it, this government has repeatedly referred to environmentalists as "radicals" and "adversaries" and "foreign-funded socialists".

How far is that from being a Suspect (Red), a Person of Interest (Orange), or an Associate (Yellow)?
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Steve flexes his sino-pecs from China

2012-02-10T13:42:00.000-08:00

Star : Harper blasts foreign money in oil sands debate while welcoming China

*cough*

Reuters : Canada PM vows to ensure key oil pipeline is built

CBC : Harper ties China trade deals to Canadian values

"Canada does not — and cannot — disconnect our trading relationship from fundamental national values."

Meanwhile ...

CTV : Chinese dissident writer gets 7 years' jail for poem

"a poem he wrote urging his countrymen to gather at a public square"

Sinopec seeks appeal in oilsands death case

A Chinese state-owned corporation wants the Supreme Court of Canada to overturn an Alberta court judgement ruling that would force it to stand trial in the deaths of two oilsands workers and 53 safety charges.

Patrick Brown : Harper in China : Great, Glorious and Always Correct

In the Great Hall of the People, Harper told Premier Wen Jiabao that Canada and China enjoy “a strategic partnership based on respect and admiration.” Wen answered that Harper’s visits “opened a new page in our bilateral relationship,” which translated into English means, “We’re glad you finally got with the program.”

Then Harper said he would be raising human rights and consular issues. That’s when the journalists were ushered out of the room. It felt just like Ottawa.

Confused?
Mound of Sound explains : Okay, I Get It.
Harper Needs China to Buy Bitumen So Canada Can Buy F-35s to defend Canada Against China
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Torture : Twas brillig, saith the slithy Toews

2012-02-08T09:19:00.001-08:00

"Twas brillig," saith the slithy Toews

"To waterboard outside our nabe."

All mimsy went the newsy slaves

To hear the mome rath outgabe :

"Tis Ethical Torture now, my son! -

The wires that shock for me and you.

I'm the mustache of John Bolton

And John Yoo is my new guru."

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews explained his not particularly new torture directive for CSIS in the House :

"Mr. Speaker, information obtained by torture is always discounted. However the problem is whether one can safely ignore the information if Canadian lives and property are at stake."

~Dad, what does the minister mean by "torture is always discounted."

~Well, my son, probably around 15%. But once you advertise you're open for business in torture intel, the whole damned market explodes and then no one gets a decent discount.

CP via Pogge :

"The latest directive says in "exceptional circumstances" where there is a threat to human life or public safety, urgency may require CSIS to "share the most complete information available at the time with relevant authorities, including information based on intelligence provided by foreign agencies that may have been derived from the use of torture or mistreatment."

Here's the UN Convention Against Torture, to which we have been a signatory since 1984, on those "exceptional circumstances" :

“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

One of the best wrap-ups on the actual harm torture-derived info has done to western intelligence and their agencies, quite apart from the evil or legalities, comes from David Rose at Vanity Fair : Tortured Reasoning.

It ends with an interview with Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI since one week before 9/11 :

I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?

“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

Update : Dr. Dawg : Debating torture
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Ari, abortion, and alternate universes

2012-02-05T19:05:00.000-08:00

Seems former White House Bush spokesy, sometime Steve fluffer, and anti-Planned Parenthood campaigner Ari Fleischer was involved in vetting job applicants for the Susan G Komen For the Cure foundation, which then dropped their funding for Planned Parenthood's breast cancer screening last week after its anti-choice leadership reverse-engineered its funding rules to align with anti-choice groups opposed to abortion, contraception, and stem cell research.

Dr. Dawg has already done a takedown on their subsequent non-apology apology, made in the wake of considerable public backlash, and Fleischer is insisting he had nothing to with any Komen policy changes about Planned Parenthood.

This reminded me that as recently as three years ago Ari Fleischer was still plumping for an alternate universe in which Saddam Hussein was the guy behind 9/11. 15 second clip above; full Hardball show here.

Eighteen days after that March 11, 2009 TV appearance, Ari, acting in his capacity as Steve's US media fluffer, arranged the now infamous Fox News luncheon attended by Steve, Steve's director of communications Kory Teneycke, Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, and Fox News president Roger Ailes. Four months later, Teneycke left Steve's employ to pursue his dream of creating a Fox News North for Canada and voilà - the alternate universe of Sun TV where they just make shit up was born.

The night before the Foxy lunch, Ari had also arranged for Steve to have dinner in Washington with "Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, William Kristol, and conservative syndicated talk-radio host Laura Ingraham."
Good grief but those little applets never seem to fall too far from the RepubliCon family tree, do they?

In 2004 Ron Suskind related the following conversation with a Bush aide :

"The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call thereality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe thatsolutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.''

I noddedand murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut meoff. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued.''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And whileyou're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again,creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how thingswill sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be leftto just study what we do.''

Meanwhile, Con MP and Fetus Festivus alumnus Stephen Woodworth will hold a public press conference tomorrow in Ottawa to ponder the question "When is a human being a human being?"
According to Section 223 of the Criminal Code of Canada, in this universe a human being obtains upon having "completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother."
Hope this helps.

Ok, I think we're done here.

"We all live downstream"

2012-01-31T09:15:00.001-08:00

Photographer Garth Lenz' visual journey through the Alberta tarsands.

CIDA doles out corporate welfare to mining giants

2012-01-30T07:11:00.000-08:00

In Oct 2010, Bill C-300, An Act respecting Corporate Accountability for the Activities of Mining, Oil or Gas in Developing Countries, went down to defeat 140 to 134 because 13 Liberals, 4 Bloc, and 4 NDP skipped the vote. The bill sought only to limit Canadian tax dollars being spent to subsidize mining abuses committed by Canadian-registered companies abroad and only if they agreed to it.

A couple of months later in January 2011, Bev Oda, Minister of 'Not Kairos' and International Cooperation, acknowledged that Canadian tax dollars were subsidizing mining companies' CSR (corporate social responsibility) projects through CIDA - half a million to Barrick Gold, another half million to Rio Tinto, etc etc up to a total of $50-million for the year.

Today's G&M : CIDA funds seen to be subsidizing mining firms

This marks the first time that CIDA and mining firms are jointly funding aid projects abroad ... The mining industry is welcoming the new trend in Canada’s foreign-aid policy.

“There is a policy shift under way, and it’s one we’re encouraged by,” said Pierre Gratton, the president of the Canadian Mining Association.

while World Vision Canada, a CIDA partner with Barrick Gold in Peru, put it this way (italics mine):

“Anything we can do to encourage and advocate for better mining practices, and support the communities that they are displacing or affecting, we’re contributing to a better lifestyle and environment for them.”

Yes, sadly, communities will be displaced but at least our taxes will be there to help polish the image of their new corporate landlords .

It's particularly galling that multinational mining giant Rio Tinto ($US15 billion-plus earnings in 2011) is receiving Canadian corporate welfare after locking 800 Canadian workers out on New Years Day in Quebec for protesting having their union jobs replaced by contract workers. Additionally, a court injunction only permits 20 workers to demonstrate at any one time and only at a distance of 150 metres from the front gate.

Back to the G&M :

Federal officials said the policy shift at CIDA is co-ordinated with efforts by International Trade and Natural Resources to encourage the growth of Canadian firms abroad

Sure it is.
A couple of days ago, Rio Tinto took majority control of Canada's Ivanhoe Mines which owns 66% of Mongolia's Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine, the rest being owned by the state of Mongolia.
As it happens, Bev Oda was in Mongolia last August :

"looking to assist Mongolia to strengthen its democratic governance and economic growth"

presumably with the help of China :

"In 2010, Rio Tinto said that it had held talks with its biggest shareholder, Chinalco, about the possibility of bringing in the Chinese state-owned company as a partner in Oyu Tolgoi"

Why are Canadian tax dollars subsidizing these massive multinational mining corps with corporate welfare again?
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Stephen Harper - 12 billion dollar man

2012-01-29T15:35:00.000-08:00

The Jurist explains the math.

While Stephen 'Jets & Jails' Harper did not directly mention raising Canadians' OAS pension eligibility age from 65 to 67 in his SOTU speech from the Davos 1%-ers bunfest :

"We've already taken steps to limit the growth of our health care spending over that period. We must do the same for our retirement income system."

... Con house organ the National Post cranked out three articles this month stating the Cons are considering it.

PMO Office today: "Fact: If we do nothing, OAS will eventually become too expensive and unsustainable"

Fun fact : Steve's projected MP pension is +$5M if he retires in 2019.

In other not-quite-$12-billion Con news, Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page estimates the Cons' plan to cut the corporate tax rate from 18% to 15% will cost $11.5 billion in government revenue next year.

And Mound of Sound reminds us in comments that $12 billion is also the yearly amount slashed from government revenues by the Cons 2% cut to the GST.

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Monday Update : G&M : Research belies PM's warning on OAS

"Expert advice commissioned by the federal government contradicts Stephen Harper’s warnings that Canada can’t afford the looming bill for Old Age Security payments."

Seems the finance committee heard from six expert witnesses who said the OAS is in fine shape with no need to raise pension eligibility age so the committee's final report reflected this testimony but ...
but there was a dissenting minority report from Cons on the committee advising a pension review so naturally Steve is going with that instead.
Ideology uber alles.
Apparently undaunted by this disclosure, Steve pressed on in the House today with his dire OAS frowny face. Wanker.

You get how this works, right? Steve says burgeoning OAS threatens social programs.
By setting up a false choice between working two more years or having social programs, he gets seniors' consent to up the age eligibility. This course of action is much easier than negotiating with unions or the provinces to get cuts .
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Yo! 'Freedom 75' Harper supporters!

2012-01-27T14:16:00.001-08:00

Corporate Tax Freedom Day now arrives on Feb 1 next week as corporate income tax has been slashed to 8% of all government revenue at a cost of $13 billion a year.

Notice that invisible hand of the marketplace giving the PotashCorp green piggie a surreptitious extra little push in the vid?
That's because Saskatchewan PotashCorp was the “leading cash hoarder” between 2000 and 2010, porking away over $5 billion for a rainy day that only ever rains on you.
PotashCorp CEO Bill Doyle of Chicago pulled down $11.6 million in benefits in 2010. While his base salary was only $1.17 million, he also aced a $2.06 million bonus for 2010, in addition to $3.7mil in stock options and $4.5 mil in pension benefits.

Speaking of pension benefits, who exactly does Steve have slated to make up all that lost corporate tax revenue?
Low income pensioners, apparently, according to his SOTU delivered from Davos, home of the .01%.

But wait a minute. Aren't Freedom 75 guys his main voter demographic?
Damage control alert! Urgent update from PMO-bot quickly spreads across the media :

"The memo tells MPs to counter opposition attacks by pledging there will be substantial notice and an adjustment period so that any cuts don't impact benefits to those close to retirement. The talking points say other Canadians will have time to adjust."

Yeah. Time to adjust. Flashback to Steve in 2008 :

"I think there's probably some great buying opportunities emerging in the stock market as a consequence of all this panic," Harper told reporters as the S&P/TSX fell for the fifth straight day."

On CBC's The Current (9:40 mark) this morning - Privatizing Water - Elizabeth Brubaker of the water privatization lobby group Environment Probe said Canada needs at least $90B, maybe more, to invest in water and sewage utilities in Canada and only corporations have the money to do it.

And why is that? Because we have starved government revenue for a decade by slashing corporate taxes.

Hope all you 'Freedom 75' Harper supporters are paying attention here.
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Friday night update : Stephen Maher totally nails it. Tories have put Canadians in a hole

Sunday am OAS quotes :
Con MP Shelly Glover on CTV : "There are no changes that are going to be occurring with our seniors with regards to OAS at this point", plus complaints about media bring it up
PMO Office : "Fact: If we do nothing, OAS will eventually become too expensive and unsustainable", plus complaints about media bringing it up.

Hey, it was Steve who brought it up.
Confused? The Jurist explains.
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Combined Defence Plan - So we're a "homeland" now?

2012-01-25T06:17:00.000-08:00

Last night DefMin Peter Airshow MacKay announced a pending "Combined Defence Plan" between Canada and the US to "further integrate cross-border military co-operation" :

"This agreement provides a framework for the combined defence of Canada and the U.S. during peace, contingencies, and war," MacKay told the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, comprising senior military officers, government officials and diplomats from both nations.

"The plan describes the authorities and means by which the two governments would approve homeland military operations in the event of a mutually agreed threat, and how our two militaries would collaborate and share information."

So we're a homeland now? With homeland military operations?

Canada and the U.S. also will extend the Civil Assistance Plan, which allows for the deployment of troops and equipment from one country to the other in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist attack

In his speech, MacKay called for increased military involvement implementing the Beyond the Border strategy, saying the Canadian Forces and its American counterparts should be supporting civilian agencies monitoring the cross-border security.

Huh. So the increasing integration of Canadian and US economies under Steve and Barry's Beyond the Border deal requires military backup?
Gosh this is sounding more like Security and Prosperity Partnership leftovers reheated and served up again all the time.

Back in March 2008 when Dick Cheney and then Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day both happened to be in Israel, Doris announced from Tel Aviv a new Canada-Israel Declaration of Intent to cooperate on mutually agreed threats like border security, a Canada-Israel border pact. The deal had been leaked months before, when both Israel's Ministry of Public Security and the Israeli press referred to it as "cooperation on homeland security".

"Homeland security" is still not a phrase we normally associate with a sovereign Canada.

Meanwhile the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence has recommended the "Department of National Defence/Canadian Forces consider re-establishing a military presence on the campuses of educational institutions."
The executive director of the DND-funded Conference of Defence Associations, Alain "we have to write a number of op-eds to the press" Pellerin , says he believes the time is right to reinstate the Canadian Officers Training Corps program at universities :

"I think the military is very popular in the public eye," Pellerin said. "I think the universities wouldn't want to be out of step and say we don't want the COTC program."

You know, the one we haven't had since 1968.
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Beyond the Border War on Drugs

2012-01-23T18:25:00.000-08:00

Seven months after Steve and Barry signed off on Beyond the Border last year, agreeing to improve cross-border investigations and share more info on Canadian travelers with Homeland Security, US AG Eric Holder explained to the Northern Border Summit that while Canada and the US already had an "excellent relationship" on "cooperation in criminal investigations and prosecutions", " certain sentencing laws – and information sharing policies and practices – should be updated."

Uh-oh, I wrote at the time, here comes Operation Doobie - the source of Steve's hardon for "spending hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers dollars on prison building, in order to impose a mandatory minimum term of six months in jail for anyone who grows more than six pot plants" - and this in a country that overwhelmingly supports decriminalization if not outright legalization.

Well, it would appear Operation Doobie has now entered the building.

There are a number of curious things about the Whitehouse National Northern Border Counternarcotics Strategy, January 2012, which I'll get to in a minute, but basically it calls for more info sharing from ISPs :

"It is imperative that Canada and the United States work together to expedite the sharing of information from electronic communication service providers; and share information necessary to lay the foundation for intercepting internet and voice communications under their respective laws in a timely manner." (Pages 33-34)

Plus greater integration of Canada and US law enforcement agencies in Border Enforcement Security Task forces (BESTs) and the 15 Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (IBETs), including FBI, ICE, CBP, USCG, CBSA, RCMP, DEA, OPP, etc etc. Mention is made of the coordinating duties of the DEA and FBI offices located in Ottawa, Vancouver, and Toronto.

And more tech. Lots and lots more tech : thermal cameras, license plate readers, unmanned aerial vehicles, mobile and remote video surveillance systems.

Naturally this is reported in the US media as being about keeping Canadian marijuana out of the US, however small potatoes we might be compared to the US Mexico border :

"Agents seized about 9,470 pounds of marijuana along the northern border in fiscal 2011, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics, less than 1 percent of the roughly 2.4 million pounds seized along the southwestern border."

Ok, now for those curious bits ...

It really is all about pot.

"Marijuana is the most widely abused illicit drug in the United States and Canada.

Marijuana and Ecstasy remain the most significant Canadian drug threats to the United States. While still responsible for significant social harm and public health and safety consequences at the individual and community levels, methamphetamine (meth) and heroin pose much lesser threats to each country, as evidenced by case reporting and limited northbound and southbound seizures."

See now I would have thought meth and smack were a greater threat than pot but apparently that's just me.

However if I was trying to justify expanding internet spying or spending billions to further integrate Canadian law enforcement under DEA and Homeland Security, then I guess I'd pick a viable target like potheads over the junkies in the DTES.

In the report, various Canadian ethnic groups are held responsible for grows and labs - Vietnamese, Italian, Irish, Indian, eastern European, plus the Hell's Angels and FN border reservations - but then the report elsewhere undercuts its own message by noting that the prevalence of reported drug use - cannabis, cocaine or crack, speed, Ecstasy, hallucinogens (excluding salvia) or heroin - is down slightly in the US and down a whopping 14.5% in Canada from 2004 to 2009.

Aside from its considerable preoccupation with pot, the report states that "Canadian-produced meth currently poses a limited threat to the United States" and "the vast majority of cocaine that crosses the U .S .–Canada border is northbound into Canada".

Plus ""Vietnamese Transnational Crime Organizations, in some cases with ties to Canada, have moved their indoor marijuana grow activities to the United States in an effort to decrease transportation costs and limit the risk of seizure associated with smuggling marijuana across the Northern border."

So ... drug use down, meth no biggie, cocaine flows north, and pot grows moving stateside.

So what, aside from the danger posed by people staring raptly at their hands while eating a shitload of cookie sandwiches, has any of this got to do with integrating the border again?

Back to the National Northern Border Counternarcotics Strategy :

"During the November 9-10, 2010 Cross Border Crime Forum Ministerial, the four co-chairs, the Attorneys General for the United States and Canada, the Minister for Public Safety and the Secretary of DHS ... officials underscored the importance of a shared vision for border security and highlighted progress made by the United States and Canada over the past year to safeguard the critical resources, infrastructure, and citizens of both nations, focusing on streamlining information sharing and enforcement efforts and enhancing the ability of both countries to identify and respond to a wide range of threats."

Safeguard the critical resources of both nations? Are we still talking about pot here?
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Monday night update : Via Greenvie at Bread & Roses, a great piece comparing SOPA to the war on drugs :
Stonekettle Kitchen : SOPA, PIPA, Good Intentions and the Road to Hell
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Foreign Special Interests and their Deep Pocket Puppet

2012-01-20T03:56:00.003-08:00

A remix of the now-infamous video to include a few of those "foreign special interests" not mentioned in the original broadcast, as Ethical Oil pocket puppet Kathryn Marshall strives mightily - eight times! - to limit the phrase to describe only the environmental opposition to the Enbridge Northern Gateway tarsands project.

Original broadcast, including a more generous sprinkling of "deep pockets" and "puppets", here .
Or there's always Rick Mercer's version.

Harsha Walia : Enbridge's pipeline of distortions

Terry Glavin : China has our forests, Now we're sending our oilfields too.

*Brilliant post from Emma Pullman @ DeSmogBlog*:
Friends With Benefits: The Harper Government, EthicalOil.org and Sun Media Connection
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Harper's Angels

2012-01-19T06:02:00.000-08:00

In 1973 the federal LeDain Commission called for the end of marijuana prohibition, and since then public opinion polls show a majority of Canadians of all ages and political stripes from right across the country agree.

How we doin' with that?

In 2010, nearly four decades later, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police handed Canadian pot activist Marc Emery over to the entirely discredited US War on Drugs machine to serve a five year prison sentence in Mississippi for selling seeds through the mail in Canada.

According to StatsCan, over 75,000 Canadians were busted for pot last year (56,870 for simple possession plus another 18,256 for trafficking or distribution), a 14% increase over 2009.

Steve's new Safe Streets and Communities Act- Bill C10, aka the Minimum Sense on Marijuana Bill, will introduce mandaTory sentences for possession :

Six months mandatory jail time for growing six pot plants.
Nine months mandatory jail time for passing a joint harvested from just one plant grown in the privacy of your own home if you are a renter.

In BC, where support for ending the doobie prohibition is currently running at 73%, the main beneficiary of the Cons Dumb-on-Crime Agenda is the Hell's Angels with their estimated $6-billion annual organized crime drug industry.
They must be thrilled that Steve is going to chill amateur grower competition for them, driving up prices and profits. They should look into making him an honorary member.
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Internet on strike!

2012-01-18T00:30:00.000-08:00

Why this matters in Canada : Michael Geist :

Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and BoingBoing, will go dark tomorrow to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).
My blog will join the protest by going dark tomorrow. While there is little that Canadians can do to influence U.S. legislation, there are many reasons why I think it is important for Canadians to participate.

First, the SOPA provisions are designed to have an extra-territorial effect that manifests itself particularly strongly in Canada. As I discussed in a column last year, SOPA treats all dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org domain as domestic domain names for U.S. law purposes. Moreover, it defines "domestic Internet protocol addresses" - the numeric strings that constitute the actual address of a website or Internet connection - as "an Internet Protocol address for which the corresponding Internet Protocol allocation entity is located within a judicial district of the United States." Yet IP addresses are allocated by regional organizations, not national ones. The allocation entity located in the U.S. is called ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers. Its territory includes the U.S., Canada, and 20 Caribbean nations. This bill treats all IP addresses in this region as domestic for U.S. law purposes. To put this is context, every Canadian Internet provider relies on ARIN for its block of IP addresses. In fact, ARIN even allocates the block of IP addresses used by federal and provincial governments. The U.S. bill would treat them all as domestic for U.S. law purposes.

continued ...

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Thursday Update : Go People Power! SOPA protest works : Key supporters of bills back off
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Six Degrees of Separation

2012-01-17T16:04:00.000-08:00

From Matt Price @ HuffPost, who in turn credits Deep Climate and DeSmogBlog for the research

Meanwhile, about that "foreign money" and "foreign special interest groups" that Steve and Joe are so worried will influence what should be a purely Canadian decision on the Enbridge Northern Gateway project :
Enbridge would like you to know that only its Chair and 6 out of 12 of its directors are American.
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Enbridge vs the Great Bear Rainforest

2012-01-13T17:26:00.000-08:00

Spoil. A beautiful and powerful documentary on the Great Bear Rainforest - extraordinarily footage from some of the world's best photographers hoping to show us what we have to lose if the Enbridge Gateway Project goes through.

For an idea of the combined PR force we're up against here, check out DeSmogBlog and Deep Climate's posts on how Ethical Oil Kathryn Marshall's hubby, previously Harper's Manager of Strategic Planning, is generously hosting Ethical Oil, Dame Ezra, Joe Oliver, Jason Kenney, Pierre Poilievre, Kevin Falcon, a half dozen Alberta Wild Rose candidates and one Sun News IP on his GoNewClear server based in Texas.

Click right hand bottom corner of vid for full screen. Really. It's worth it.

h/t Holly Stick
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Enbridge hearings hit with Snuffaluffagus hoax

2012-01-12T06:48:00.002-08:00

Two Brazilians who have never even heard of the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway tarsands-to-tankers pipeline appear to have been signed up as applicants to speak at the hearings. A Calgary Herald editor confirmed their applications were fake by simply pulling their names off the National Energy Board list, phoning them up in Brazil, and asking them.

And right about now I'm guessing you're remembering Kory Teneycke and the Snuffaluffagus hoax.

On Sept 3 2010, former Harper director of communications Kory Teneycke was striving to get his dream of a Fox News North up and running in Canada just as a Stop Fox News North petition from Avaaz was circulating.

"It is safe to assume many, if not most, are Americans"

he wrote in an op ed slamming the petition that day, sounding eerily similar to Joe Oliver this week.
And not only that, he said, but they were fake names : Snuffaluffagus and Homer Simpson were signatories to the Avaaz petition along with real people who had not signed it, including Andrew Coyne, Paul Wells, and Kady O'Malley.

Kady was immediately suspicious :

okay, this is weird. how did @KoryTeneycke get a list of *fake* (not fraudulent) sigs on a list that isn't available online?

Teneycke then revealed that he had been contacted with the list of fake names by the prankster who had added them. When Kady told him of her displeasure at being included, Teneycke said his "source" told him he had not added the journalists' names.

Avaaz was understandably livid at this first ever spamming of one of their petitions and filed a complaint with the RCMP and the Ottawa police to investigate the source behind the single IP address from which they had all apparently originated. Although police declined to investigate, Teneycke resigned from Sun TV the next day. for three months before returning as VP in January.

Flash forward to the The Calgary Herald yesterday, who were questioning environmental groups about the two fake Brazilian sign ups :

Unfortunately, after just one day of searching, finding two people who were signed up against their knowledge indicates that at least some people are not interested in acting ethically or hearing the science and the facts. They simply want to mess with the process and throw a wrench into the gears.

Well I certainly agree with that assessment although I don't see any particular advantage to the environmental groups to falsely add the names of people who are never going to testify. This isn't a petition.
No, I think it would more likely be perpetrated by someone seeking to undermine the very legitimacy of the public hearing process itself. Back to the Calgary Herald :

Clearly, the National Energy board and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency have not done a very good job of ensuring the legitimacy of the process.

It's the Snuffaluffagus hoax all over again.
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Update : Big City Lib! Go! Now!
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Enbridge Joe Oliver and his 19 radical foreigners

2012-01-10T04:56:00.000-08:00

Tonight on As It Happens, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver continued on with his rant published in today's G&M against the "foreign special interest groups" and "jet-setting celebrities" that use "a quintessential American approach" to "hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda."

"The system is broken," he wrote. "It is an urgent matter of Canada's national interest."

"Canada's national interest" here being the proposed Enbridge tarsands project and the Cons need to derail the shitstorm of protest coming down the pike at them by discrediting pipeline opponents as unpatriotic pawns of sneaky foreign astroturf experts.

About those radical foreign special interest groups.
Carol Off noted that 4,522 individuals had registered to make their allotted ten minute submissions to the hearing.
Yup, said Oliver : "thousands of people repeating repeating the same the same studied lines."

Well, said Off, most of them appeared to live along the proposed pipeline route, and in looking though their requests to appear before the hearing listed on the Natural Resources website, "19 of the 4500 people were registered in the United States."

Nineteen.
A regular juggernaut of 19 jet-setting hi-jacking celebrity furriners, each speaking their allotted 10 minutes in their radical 'quintessential American approach' .
How will Canada's national interest ever survive three hours of it?

And yet, continued Off, "on that list, the foreigners appear to be mostly oil companies."

Well that's different, explained Oliver. They're bringing tens of billions of dollars to "diversify our markets to Asia" .

But "the concern here is that foreign influences do not have Canada's best interests in mind," pursued Off. "How is it that you can trust the foreign oil companies who are intervening to have Canada's best interests in mind?"

Because they're bringing their own money, repeated Oliver.

Here's the show. Complete transcript below.
Well done, Carol Off.

"Canada's economic development is being hindered by radical environmental groups financed from the US.

That was the thrust of an open letter published today written by Canada's Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver.
In the letter Mr Oliver called for a revamp of how environmental reviews are done, namely that they be protected from interference by environmental lobby groups. This comes just one day before the public hearing into Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway project. if approved the pipeline will run from the Alberta oil sands to the coastal town of Kitimat, BC.

We reached Joe Oliver, Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, on his cell phone in Toronto."

Carol Off : Mr Oliver, who are these radical groups you mention in your letter?

Oliver : Well I'm not going to name names but there are, as people know, a number of groups who are opposed to the development of hydro carbons - they even oppose hydro-electricity development. I don't know where they think we're going to get the energy to maintain our current level of civilization but that's where they're coming from and they're trying to game the system.

Carol Off : Why can't you tell us who they are?

Oliver : Well because I don't think we need to get into that level of specificity. The point is they're there, some of them are being financed by, er, by groups, and we think that these decisions which are so important for the Canadian economy, for Canadian jobs, should be made by Canadians in Canada.

Carol Off : If you can't tell us who the people are that you're concerned about - the radical groups - can you tell us what their sources of money are?

Oliver : Well we know for example the Tides group is one but there are others that are providing, er, that are providing funding, and that information I think is available or will be available.

Carol Off : And do they have less money or more money than the oil companies who are lobbying to have the project go through.

Oliver : The issue is what they're using the money for and how much money is being used.

Carol Off : There are 4,522 individuals who are registered to make oral statements, according to your website - they will get about 10 minutes to do that - and 216 registered intervenors. How many of these are under the influence of these radical groups?

Oliver : Well I don't know precisely but it's uh ... and I don't want to get into that particular project which is under regulatory review ... but this is not an unknown tactic where a particular organization will send many of its members in to repeat the same message. In a court environment that wouldn't happen; the court would take a count of the numbers but they would wanna hear from people who have something new, different, and relevant to say ... rather than just you know thousands of people repeating repeating the same the same studied lines.

Carol Off : Well, these kinds of hearings, especially something this large, often attract hundreds and even thousands of people who have something to say, and just looking at the website, on your Ministry of Natural Resources website, it shows that most of these people appear to be Canadians who live along the pipeline route. In fact we found 19 of the 4500 people were registered in the United States.

Oliver : Well the issue ... and some from you know Venezuela and so on ... but um the issue is whether people who are participating - and that's something that the panelists will look at - but just as a broad statement, yeah, the issue is whether panelists have something new, different, and relevant to say or whether they're just simply parrotting a message. You know what these letters are, and we receive them and I imagine CBC sometimes receives them as well, where people are basically have been given a line and they just add their name to essentially the same letter. When we receive that, we take account of the numbers but understand that the hundreds, the thousands of letters relating to a particular issue represent a particular perspective. It's relevant to know how many people have that perspective but we don't have to take each letter and question each person if they're merely using a form to sign a letter. I think everyone understands that and it's the same kind of issue in respect to an oral presentation.

Carol Off : So the letters and oil statements are just simply that - they make a statement or sign a letter - but the intervenors are obviously more important where they can actually cross-question, and on that list the foreigners appear to be mostly oil companies.

Oliver : Well I was talking about foreign money supporting Canadian intervention. The distinction here which is fundamental is that there are a number of foreign companies who are supplying capital to finance this project. This is the largest industrial project in the entire world. We don't have enough capital in Canada to finance it therefore we have welcomed foreign investment from the US, France, England, China, and other countries - companies who see the economic prospects for the development of our resources and are investing tens of billions of dollars to advance the creation of infrastructure which will help us in our in our historic choice here to diversify our markets to Asia.

Carol Off : But I guess the question is .. the concern here is that foreign influences do not have Canada's best interests in mind. How is it that you can trust the foreign oil companies who are intervening to have Canada's best interests in mind?

Oliver : Because they're investing in Canada and their financial success is tied to the success of the projects which are Canadian projects which will generate employment and economic activity for Canada.

Carol Off : But not necessarily tied to the protection of the Canadian environment and to Aboriginal rights.

Oliver : Those issues have to be dealt with by objective regulatory review which will hear the interests of the Aboriginal communities and of environmental groups. I have no problem and neither does the government have any problem with Canadian environmental groups presenting their case because at the end of the day we want these projects to be safe for the environment and safe for Canada.

Carol Off : Mr Oliver, thank you for your time.
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Steve frets about foreign influence on Enbridge pipeline

2012-01-08T16:28:00.000-08:00

G&M : 'Foreign money' could gum up pipeline approval, Harper warns

"Stephen Harper is warning about the possibility that hearings into Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline will be "hijacked" by foreign interests. The Prime Minister is threatening to prevent foreign environmental interests from delaying the approval of a pipeline that would take bitumen from the Alberta oil sands to the West Coast for shipment to Asian markets."

Ok then, let's have a look at some of those 'foreign interests' which have applied for intervenor status at the Enbridge hearings due to start in two days, courtesy of the National Energy Board's Regulatory Document Index:

Enbridge Northern Gateway Project Joint Review Process

Registration for Intervenor Status

DAEWOOD INTERNATIONAL AMERICA CORP, Anaheim, California

BP CANADA, subsidiary of BP (formerly British Petroleum) of Gulf Oil disaster fame

TOTAL E&P, a wholly-owned subsidiary of TOTAL SA, France

EXXON MOBIL OIL, Fairfax, Virginia

FLINT HILLS RESOURCES LTD, a Koch Industries subsidiary

SINOCANADA PETROLEUM, Sinopec, China

Bloomberg, Jan 4, 2012:

"Ten companies have contributed $10 million each to help Enbridge finance the regulatory approval process, Enbridge spokesman Paul Stanway said in October.

China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. also known as Sinopec, was previously the only company that had publicly stated its participation."

G&M : Oil giants back Gateway pipe :

"Gateway’s financial backers include Chinese state-owned energy company Sinopec. Market sources have said they believe China National Petroleum Corp. also holds an interest in Gateway. Sinochem Group, another Chinese energy firm, is also believed to support Gateway."

According to StatsCan in October last year, much of our tarsands is already "hijacked by foreign interests".

StatsCan : Total assets, operating revenues and operating profits under foreign control

Oil and gas extraction and support activities - 2009

Assets - 35.9% under foreign control
Operating revenues - 51.1% under foreign control
Operating profits : 41.3% under foreign control

"American-controlled enterprises continued to dominate the shares of assets, revenues and profits under foreign-control. These enterprises increased their share of both revenues and profits to 59.1% and 58.3% respectively."

"In the oil and gas extraction industry, foreign-controlled enterprises increased their share of revenues to 51.1%. This occurred as revenues declined nearly twice as fast in 2009 for domestic enterprises as they did for foreign enterprises."

I thought this was kinda cute from Ethical Oil's Kathryn Marshall though :

Canadians have much at stake in the construction of the pipeline and “must take a stand against foreigners and their lobbying groups interfering in our decision.”

Okey dokey then. Really looking forward to her defence of China as a foreign 'ethical oil' majority financial backer of the pipeline.

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Updates via Dave : There's nothing ethical about it :

The Real Story : Unethical oil and its friends and

Northern Insights : "Ethical Oil" - an argument that makes no sense

Campaign Research Con cats are out of the bag

2011-12-17T05:12:00.000-08:00

[Tuesday update below]

Campaign Research client and House Speaker Andrew Scheer ruled it "reprehensible" while Campaign Research client and Con House Leader Peter Van Loan defended it as "vital free speech", but Campaign Research cofounder Nick Kouvalis put it best when he described his firm's now infamous phone calls to Lib MP Irwin Cotler's constituents :

“We’re in the business of getting Conservatives elected and ending Liberal careers. We’re good at it.”

Since 2003. For 39 Conservative candidates in the last federal election alone.

Kouvalis, who managed Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's successful campaign, was also election day chair for Kitchener-Waterloo Con MP Peter Braid.

Other Campaign Research staff currently include the other co-founder Richard Ciano, now running for presidency of the Ontario Con Party, and Aaron Lee-Wudrick, campaign manager for Con MP Peter Braid.

In 2009, Ciano, Wudrick and Braid participated in a series of workshops hosted by the Ontario Progressive Conservative Campus Association and the Preston Manning's Manning Centre for Building Democracy, where Ciano was Executive Director of Practical Politics til Feb 2010 . At one such training session in February 2009, Wudrick and Ryan O'Connor, 9th VP of the Ontario Con Party, were taped instructing students to set up Con-friendly "shell organizations" and "front groups" :

Wikileaks :

"With the apparent support of representatives from both the Ontario Progressive Conservatives and the Conservative Party of Canada, the OPCCA is attempting to covertly influence the political climate of Ontario's university campuses.

Presenters and participants are caught on tape advocating for the creation of front groups for the Conservative Party to masquerade as non-partisan grassroots organizations, influencing the political discourse on campus, stacking student elections with Party members, and conspiring to defeat non-profit organizations because of political differences, all with the intention of hiding their affiliations to the Party in the process."

(37:10) Aaron Lee-Wudrick : I say we, because, even though [Ryan O'Connor] was the forced neutral [as Student President] and me as the Tory president, it was all orchestrated obviously behind closed doors, and it actually worked out well because it looked like different groups of stakeholders, like I'm the outsider coming in, and you guys were just the responsible student government and we had other members of council, a guy he appointed to council, he got speaking rights but he wasn't an elected member, but just as another voice at the table, it made it look like there were all kinds of different corners where in fact we were all on the same team.

(42:14) Aaron Lee-Wudrick : Campus Radicals for Action on Zimbabwe Yes, or something like that, they were a great shell group. Feel free to use Campus Coalition for Liberty, that's ours so we have a logo and everything.

(50:05) Ryan O'Connor : When Aaron was doing the petition campaign, which "I knew nothing about;" I was printing them in my frickin office in student government, of course I knew about it, of course we were behind it, I couldn't take a public position on that issue because although I wasn't running for reelection, this was three months before the end of my mandate ... if we had made them an issue, no Tory would ever get elected to student government again.

Ryan O'Connor : Sometimes you can't attach the party's name to something. You just can't. If it's a really controversial issue on campus or something that might show up in the newspaper, you want to be careful. You just have your shell organization and have the Campus Coalition for Liberty and two other Tory front groups which are front organizations, all of those groups might actually qualify for funding too.

Aaron Lee-Wudrick : Don't think that the Party doesn't like that, because they do. They're things that will help the Party, but it looks like it's an organically-grown organization and it just stimulated from the grassroots spontaneously. They love that stuff. And they don't have to bear the burden of having any of it attached to their name."

You know, like pretending to be spontaneous grassroots fake twitterer Karen Philby or making anonymous calls to talk radio. (h/t Montreal Simon)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la fucking Con même chose, eh?

Bonus : Out here in BC, Campaign Research was "the single largest beneficiary of the HST contracts, pulling down $167,000 of the $250,000 total budget for "conducting telephone town hall meetings" related to the implementation of the controversial tax change".

They were hired on by BC rightwinger Suzanne Anton in her unsuccessful Vancouver mayoralty bid, and also set up a fake website mocking Christy Clark for signing up a cat as part of her party membership drive in their campaign work for her rival George Abbott :

In the source code, the author of the website was identified as Bo Chen, who works for Toronto-based Campaign Research

The Campaign Research Con cats are definitely out of the bag.
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Tuesday Dec. 20 Update : Phone calls to presumed Liberal voters in Con MP Peter Braid's riding advising them of false polling station location changes in the days days before the May 2 federal election have been traced to a "Conservative Party of Canada voicemail".

“I used them for a very specific and limited purpose and that was phone calling to constituents and voter identification,” said Braid. “Nick [Kouvalis] has a particular expertise in this and that’s why it was helpful to have him involved.”

Braid said he’d consider using Campaign Research again, citing its excellent record with live phone calls. He added “It doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with everything they do.”

Presumably another example of Jason Kenney's "vital free speech" argument.
Despite evidence of just how entwined the history between the Cons and Campaign Research has become, expect imminent use of distancing weasel words like "over-zealous" and "party volunteer" from the Cons any moment now.

h/t The Record.
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Attawapiskat vs Toronto

2011-12-15T05:39:00.001-08:00

Rabble : Compare and contrast: Those Attawapiskat numbers vs. Toronto numbers
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It's still class warfare

2011-12-12T11:21:00.000-08:00

The European Monetary Unionwas born of countries pegging theirexchange rate to Germany's so all countries would have the same inflation rate of2 %. The EMU gave those countries a formal voice.

The plan was to have each European country’s wages rise inline with their own productivity plus 2%, ie living according to your means– not above it, not below it.

Just before the euro was implemented, Germany cut wages tobring down unemployment, deviatingdownward from the agreed-upon 2%, resulting in the beggaring of all itsneighbours by making German products cheaper and wiping out its EMU partners' exports.

German economist Dr. Heiner Flassbeck:

“The big battle that we have in this world is not betweenGermany and the other Europeans, is not between south and north, China and soon. The big battle is still, believe it or not, between labour and capital.This is still the big battle. I know it’s fashionable in the US to a prioridismiss such arguments by calling them class warfare arguments – Republicanslike this very much to say “This is class warfare”.

I’ll tell you what happens in this world is classwarfare. Look at the US. What happens in the US right now? For the first timein modern history since WW2, we are two years into a recovery and nominal wagesare rising by absolutely zero - they’re not rising at all. For the first timewe have not only a jobless recovery - that’s a normal thing – for the firsttime in the US we have a wageless recovery. Wageless recovery. And that isexactly what Germany did 15 years ago – wageless recovery – and I can tell youhow this experiment is going to end because in the US there is no market thatthey can occupy, no partners that they can exploit, there is no currency unionthat they can use - the experiment will end in disaster. It will end indisaster because if you do not have a regime that allows the systematicparticipation of workers in the productivity increase – and this is what thepeople are talking about when they talk about the 99% but it is worse now than10 years ago, worse than ever - then capitalism hits the wall because noeconomy can grow successfully if their people only have to rely on bubbles, thatsooner or later burst, to consume, and if they cannot expect that they will participatein the success of all.”

Via The Real News Network

Iceland arrested the former CEO of one of its three failed banks, along with a broker and market director. Here in North America we arrest people for protesting the banks instead.

Bruce Campbell, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives : Rising Inequality, Declining Democracy
on how this works in Canada.

Another thrilling episode of Beyond the Border

2011-12-09T05:30:00.000-08:00

In this week's episode, Steve lays a cunning trap for Barry. In exchange for agreeing to pass travel and "informal" info about Canadians on to Homeland Security, Steve gets Barry to promise to maybe match $1-billion in Canadian taxpayer dollars to fund some pilot projects sometime in the future that will principally benefit the 40% of Canada-US corporations that rely on a cross-border supply chain. Will Barry take the bait?

Well you can clearly see the advantage to Canada here. If US security dudes are openly operating in Canada, never again will the RCMP suffer the humiliation of delivering a Canadian citizen to the US border so he can be tried and jailed in the US for acts committed and not considered criminal in Canada. So there's that.

And "informal information exchange", ie unsubstantiated spook-thinks about brown Canadians with funny names like Abdelrazik and Arar, has clearly worked out really well in previous informal information exchanges.

From the Canadian Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness Action Plan:

Canada and the United States have a long history of working together to defend the freedoms and rights of our citizens and to deal with threats to our collective way of life. Cross-border cooperation and information sharing are crucial to these efforts.

See how that works?
None of that old "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" nonsense. It's all the same thing now - it's "collective". And if we have to pitch a few more hippies/troublemakers/brown peoples into the gaping maw of US security paranoia, well that's just a price we're willing to pay to keep those trucks rolling back and forth over the border.

Most of the TV and print media commentary in favour of this latest episode of Beyond the Border has come from Canada-US Project luminaries Derek Burney, Colin Robertson, and Fen Osler Hampson, whose Blueprint for Canada-US Engagement appears to be the blueprint for Steve and Barry's deal. They say it will be very good for Canada and is in no way a threat to our sovereignty, a defence which would be rather more reassuring had Hampson not made a pitch to the Foreign Affairs committee in 2009 in favour of dropping the national border altogether.
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Parliamentary cakewalk

2011-12-06T05:03:00.000-08:00

"I'll see your liar, liar, pants-on-fire," the Honorable Minister Peter MacKay told the House of Commons yesterday, "and raise you an easy peasy lemon squeezy."

"Neener, neener," added Steve.

Attawapiskat vs gazebos

2011-12-01T03:25:00.001-08:00

Steve very unhappy about Attawapiskat housing crisis and "missing" dough :

"This government has spent some $90 million since coming to office just on Attawapiskat," he told the Commons on Tuesday. "That's over $50,000 for every man, woman and child in the community."

Yeah, Steve, it must be their own fault they're living in tents and sheds without electricity or running water or indoor plumbing. Better punish them for embarrassing you. And how's that school coming along after 10 years? Ah - next year, is it?

But according to Aaron Wherry's breakdown of the figures, the housing budget is only $500 per person per year, which would not even cover upkeep on the existing homes never mind building any new ones in a community where shipping the materials in costs more than the materials themselves.

A lot of racist crap in comments under these articles - in particular repeating rubbish like the G&M's More than 80 on-reserve politicians paid more than PM! - a lie already deftly demolished here .

Instead try this excellent article from Patricia Pearson and a really really must read from âpihtawikosisân.
Donations via the Red Cross here. Attawapiskat page from Another Voice here.
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Sunday update : Âpihtawikosisan's entire blogpost reprinted word for word today in the National Post as :
Brett Hodnett: The real math behind Attawapiskat’s $90 million

with tiny credit to her tacked on at the end.

NaPo commenters busy congratulating NaPo on their excellent journalism.

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Hours later ... via Holly Stick :
The National Post has changed its headline and added a note:

"Note: This article was inadvertently credited to Brett Hodnett. Full Comment apologizes for any confusion, which was due to a misunderstanding on our part. As noted, the original article appeared on the site âpihtawikosisân."

then amended once more to include : "The original article, written by Chelsea Vowel, appeared on the site âpihtawikosisân."
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Dec 13 APTN :
De Beers decision to dump sewage into Attawapiskat played role in current housing crisis

(h/t Holly Stick ... again!)
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Dec 15 Funding by the numbers : Attawapiskat vs Toronto
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The Harper Government™ ©

2011-11-30T09:51:00.001-08:00

Under this PM the state is everywhere

Industry Canada documents show 'Harperization' of government communications

Harperized : Rebranding the federal government

The Politics of Destruction

PM Harper takes communications strategy to new level

A Convenient Anti-Semitism
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Given the final word at the end of CBC's Harperized debate on today's The Current linked above, Con MP Dean Del Mastro stated :

"People at home are not concerned about this."

Everybody loves a SIRCus

2011-11-28T13:30:00.000-08:00

In response to media reports that CSIS had been complicit in the detention of Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik in Sudan, outgoing CSIS director Jim Judd requested that CSIS watchdog and review panel, the Security Intelligence Review Committee, "investigate and report on the performance of the Service’s [CSIS's] duties and functions with respect to the case of Abousofian Abdelrazik at the earliest opportunity". That was in March 2009.

Three months later Federal Court Justice Russel Zinn ruled that CSIS was indeed "complicit in the detention" of Abdelrazik in Sudan. Then in September of this year, newly released CSIS documents revealed the spy agency's attempts to delay Abdelrazik's return to Canada long enough for the CIA to spirit him off to Guantanamo, even as Foreign Affairs diplomats were arranging for his return, making this the biggest known Canadian intelligence agency scandal since Maher Arar.

So how's that full investigation by SIRC requested by Judd coming along then?

Dead in the water apparently.

Steve promoted Dr. Arthur Porter, the SIRC committee member charged with leading the Abdelrazik investigation, to chair of the committee in June last year, and then accepted his resignation this month following a NaPo story regarding Dr Porter's offshore cash payment to a former Israeli arms trafficker - now acting as a lobbyist for the Russian Federation - to sell infrastructure deals to Sierra Leone where Porter has mining interests and holds the title of "His Excellency, Ambassador Plenipotentiary, Republic of Sierra Leone".

"I wish to state for the record that I have fulfilled with diligence my mandate,"

wrote Dr. Porter in his letter of resignation to Steve.

... which got me to wondering just what was so gosh-darned important in SIRC's mandate last year that it bumped the Abdelrazik investigation requested by CSIS right off the list.

From the Security Intelligence Review Committee 2010-2011 Annual Report
Checks and Balances : Viewing Security Intelligence Through the Lens of Accountability

The Lens of Accountability interested itself in five SIRC-initiated reviews and three public complaints.
The Reviews :

~ a pitch for "retooloing" SIRC to allow for "independent review" of Canada's other intelligence agencies as well as CSIS

~ "SIRC also followed through on its commitment to pay close attention to CSIS’s expanding foreign investigative activities. Although overseas operations unfold in unique circumstances and present different challenges, CSIS should strive to ensure that the management of its operations abroad mirrors, to the extent practicable, the standards of administration and accountability that are maintained domestically."

~ "Today the Service is also reaching out to non-traditional partners, such as the private sector."

"In SIRC’s opinion, an effective strategy would involve identifying those sectors with the greatest potential to be of investigative value to the Service. ... the Service strives to engage and support the private sector’s security needs in other ways. Efforts are also underway to increase the number of security clearances for individuals in the private sector."

~ "an appreciation of the way in which the internet supports CSIS’s activities"
although it notes :

" At issue was the volume of information pertaining to young people being retained by CSIS as part of its operational reporting."

~ A positive review of CSIS’s cooperation "with a “Five Eyes” partner" - which could be either the US, UK, Australia, or NZ.

Note to SIRC : If you have to use evasive terminology like "a Five Eyes partner" in your "positive review" rather than actually name the country you are feeling positive about, it's not really much of a public account, is it?

~ "a positive impression of RCMP–CSIS cooperation"

"The relationship between CSIS and the RCMP, in particular, has moved to the forefront following the passage of the Anti-terrorism Act (2001). As a result of this legislation, CSIS and the RCMP have had to work more closely together"

~ "Canada is experiencing levels of espionage comparable to the height of the Cold War."

~ Afghan detainees.

" In particular, SIRC’s review found no indication that in the period during which CSIS conducted detainee interviews, CSIS officers posted to Afghanistan had any first-hand knowledge of the alleged abuse, mistreatment or torture of detainees by Afghan authorities."

however :

"SIRC noted that CSIS did not comprehensively document its role in the interviews of Afghan detainees by keeping records that would confirm the numbers and details of all of the detainee interviews"

SIRC also handles citizen complaints against CSIS. This year three were investigated and written up, which included the following complaints :
CSIS failing to identify itself as CSIS, harrassment of family members, suggesting to interviewee that a lawyer was not necessary, delay in providing security assessment for a site access, and allegedly providing an "unjust, unfounded, and unethical" assessment to Citizenship and Immigration Canada regarding a complainant's application for permanent resident status.

Aside from providing some gentle advice, like that in its reports to Citizenship and Immigration Canada "the Service not include certain information unless it has been corroborated", SIRC did not find anything unduly alarming in its public report of the three out of 48 new and carried-over complaints.

I'm sure the four out of five health industry experts that comprise SIRC's review panel on CSIS did the best they could with their unwieldy $3-million Lens of Accountability. Unfortunately that lens is looking the other way in the case Abousfian Abdelrazik, the largest CSIS intelligence scandal since Maher Arar.
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The Tony Gazebo Ministerial Backdrop

2011-11-25T13:06:00.001-08:00

Kady blogs the small stink about ministerial backdrops used in committee to block media and public view while providing free advertising for MP's to promote their own particular hobbyhorse.

Above provided free of charge to Tony Gazebo in case he doesn't have one of his own yet ....
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G20 investigation: RCMP spies vs conspiracy group

2011-11-23T03:30:00.000-08:00

The JIG is up.
An RCMP 'joint intelligence group' - comprised of federal, provincial and municipal police - infiltrated activist groups prior to the G20 and Vancouver Olympics in what they call "one of the largest domestic intelligence operations in Canadian history".

Constable Bindo Showan of the Ontario Provincial Police, one of the two principal undercover Ontario spies, is a stunning example of their intelligence at work.

Earlier this fall, Showan told the court about how he attended a meeting prior to the Toronto summit. There, a protest-planning group that included several of the 17 main G20 defendants was discussing whether to lend their support to a First Nations rally.
Adam Lewis, one of the 17 accused conspirators in the G20 case, interjected, “Kill whitey!” The group chuckled. Lewis, like all but one of his co-accused, is white.

When a Crown lawyer asked the officer what he thought Lewis meant, Showan said in complete seriousness, to "kill white people."

Apparently we do not have the right not to be spied and reported on by morons or covert operatives pretending to be morons.

This 2009 RCMP 'joint intelligence group' statement defines their mission :

"The 2010 G8 summit in Huntsville ... will likely be subject to actions taken by criminal extremists motivated by a variety of radical ideologies. These ideologies may include variants of anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, nihilism, socialism and/or communism. These ideologies may also include notions of racial supremacy and white power ...

"The important commonality is that these ideologies ... place these individuals and/or organizations at odds with the status quo and the current distribution of power in society.

In addition to these generally held tenets, a variety of grievances exist: These grievances are based upon notions/expectations regarding the environment, animal rights, First nations' resource-based grievances, gender/racial equality, and distribution of wealth etc."

And it is apparently still in operation :

RCMP records suggest that the reconnaissance continues. Report logs indicate at least 29 incidents of police surveillance between the end of the G20 summit and April 2011 — more than nine months after world leaders departed Toronto.

The same document indicates that the RCMP-led intelligence team made a series of presentations to private-sector corporations, including one to "energy sector stakeholders" in November 2011.

Good to know.

After millions of dollars and 70,000 pages of Crown evidence, conspiracy charges have been dropped against the 17 activists held in jail or under house arrest for the last 18 months, but 6 of them will serve jail time for counselling mischief, with an additional charge of counselling to obstruct police leveraged against Alex Hundert and Mandy Hiscocks.

Toronto Star : Behind the G20 plea deal

A Message from the So-Called "G-20 Main Conspiracy Group" below.
Their written statement regarding the charges can be read here.

Canada on Iran: Hate the banks; love the banksters

2011-11-21T15:51:00.001-08:00

Canada, the US and the UK announced sanctions against Iran today :

"in an effort to pressure Tehran to halt its suspected nuclear weapons program. The British announced the first measures, declaring they would cut off all financial ties with Iranian banks to stem the flow of funds for its nuclear and ballistic missile programs."

Although Haaretz reported this wee additional morsel about slightly more selective US sanctions :

"One U.S. official told ABC that Iran’s Central Bank and oil and gas sector would not be targeted in this new round of sanctions out of fear that these measures would lead to increased oil prices, and damage to the U.S economy."

also borne out in the NYTimes

Meanwhile, back in Canada, Iranian banksters connected to Iran's Revolutionary Guards have been quietly salting it away and settling down in their million-dollar mansions in Toronto and Montreal (italics mine):

A recent example is the former head of Iran's Melli and Sepah Banks, Mahmoud Reza Khavari, who acquired Canadian citizenship under questionable circumstances and then fled this October to his multi-million-dollar Toronto mansion following a $2.6 billion embezzlement scandal in Iran.

Khavari has ties to Ahmadinejad, currently engaged in a bitter power struggle against the Islamic Republic's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. The banks he led are blacklisted by the UN Security Council and the U.S. government for supporting Iran's efforts to acquire nuclear and ballistic missile technology. The banks are also closely linked to Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps.

More. More. More. More

Well the important thing here is to beggar Iran for the benefit of Israel, nukes or no nukes, right?

"Remember," said former Chief of the Strategic Planning Division of the Israeli Defense Forces Shlomo Brom in October 2004 referring to 25 years of almost constant "Iran nearly has the bomb!"alarums :

"the Iranians are always ﬁve to seven years from the bomb. Time passes but they’re always ﬁve to seven years from the bomb."

For an exhaustive list of fear-mongering about Iran's imminent nukes beginning in 1984, see Wide Asleep in America : The Phantom Menace (h/t Pogge)
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Trying to stop OWS with pepper spray : FAIL

2011-11-19T22:37:00.001-08:00

As appalling as the first few seconds of this video are - UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike casually walking along a line of seated students and pepper-spraying them point blank in the face - it's worth watching to the end to see how brilliantly the students handle it.

Human microphone :

"Mike check ... mike check .... We are willing ... to give you a brief moment ... of peace ... so that you may take your weapons ... and our friends ... and go. ... Please do not return ... We are giving you a moment of peace ... We are giving you a moment of peace ... You can go ... and we will not follow you ... You can go you can go you can go you can go you can go you can go ....."

And after a brief show of waving their paintguns about and shaking up their pepper spray cans ... the police retreat. Score one for #Occupy.

Later, UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza explained the pepper-spraying of the row of seated students was necessary because the police were afraid for their own personal safety :

"There was no way out of that circle," Spicuzza said. "They were cutting officers off from their support. It's a very volatile situation."

Sure it was :

Another angle showing the open expanse of lawn behind Lt. John Pike that so alarmed the "encircled" police officers.

Up here in BC, that's known locally as the 'stapler defence'.

Monday Update : Police Chief Spicuzza, Lt. Pike and one other pepperspraying police officer placed on administrative leave.
Statements from the university chancellor and this from the president of the University of the California system :

"The time has come to take strong action to recommit to the ideal of peaceful protest."

More : Dr. Dawg . Let Freedom Rain

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Steve makes an eminent domain funny

2011-11-16T09:42:00.001-08:00

Actual Harper quote : "I remain optimistic that the project will eventually go ahead because it makes eminent sense."

I'm surprised that TransCanada's forays into eminent domain - a corporations' state-sanctioned right to expropriate private property for the public good - and you're not fooling us with that jobs, jobs, jobs crap, btw - has not made more of a splash with the property rights crowd up here. It certainly was the key to opposition to the pipeline south of the border.

NYTimes, one month ago :

A Canadian company (sic) has been threatening to confiscate private land from South Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico, and is already suing many who have refused to allow the Keystone XL pipeline on their property even though the controversial project has yet to receive federal approval.

While it is impossible to say how many cases are working their way through the legal system, in addition to the 56 Texas and South Dakota cases, TransCanada acknowledges it has sent “Dear Owner” letters to dozens of families in Nebraska.

Here is one such letter, sent back in April to Nebraska landowner Randy Thompson from the TransCanada office in Houston, Texas.

Nebraska : Eminent domain pressure targeted

A Nebraska lawmaker [State Sen. Bill Avery] is proposing criminal penalties for pipeline officials who pressure landowners with eminent domain before a pipeline gets the official green light.

Eminent domain refers to the power of governments to take private property for a public use with appropriate compensation. The power is granted to some private companies, such as utilities and railroads.
Current state law sets no limits on pipeline companies' use of eminent domain, said Norfolk attorney David Domina. That allowed TransCanada to send out two rounds of letters pressuring landowners to sign easements allowing the controversial Keystone XL pipeline across their land.
The letters said that if landowners did not sign within 30 days, the company would use eminent domain to get the right to cross their land.

On Monday, after being hit with a 2 year delay from the US State Dept, TransCanada announced it has reached an agreement with the Nebraska government to change the route of its proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline by 50 km in order to avoid the ecologically sensitive Sandhills region and the most vulnerable part of the Ogallala aquifer, taking one whole day to walk back from its previous claim that any change to the route would be an automatic deal-killer.

Presumably the TransCanada Houston office has now recommenced cranking out eminent domain letters.

You don't hear much about the use of Canada's Expropriation Act. Last time I wrote about it was when the government of Saskatchewan expropriated a farmer's land last year for Loblaws.

Alykhan Velshi comes home to roost

2011-11-14T17:20:00.001-08:00

Ever since Patrick Muttart left the PMO war room under a cloud back in April for sending a photo of an Iggy look-alike posing in full combat gear in Kuwait to SunNews during a Canadian election while working for a US PR firm, Steve has been struggling along without a proper planning director.

Beginning next month, fresh from his fabulously successful stint promoting the Keystone XL tarsands pipeline as the "no-brainer" ethical oil alternative to 'conflict oil', Ethical Oilster Alykhan Velshi will be in charge of planning new things for Steve. From an intern at the American Enterprise Institute to Steve's ear. Oy!

Will Mr. Velshi be continuing his crusade to save the US from importing oil from what he describes as the "blood-soaked, conflict oil-fueled foreign dictatorship" of Saudi Arabia.?

According to the StatsCan Energy Statistics Handbook, Second Quarter, 2011, page 53 and 54, Canada imported 45,125.7 thousands of cubic meters of crude petroleum last year at a cost of $23,855- million, and 3,986.5 thousand cubic meters of it was from the " blood-soaked, conflict oil-fueled foreign dictatorship" of Saudi Arabia, our fifth highest oil import country of origin after Algeria, the UK, Nigeria, and Norway.

More likely Mr Velshi's new job will involve selling us on the idea of shipping ethical oil across BC to China.
Good luck with that.
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Keystone XL vs owning the tarsands

2011-11-12T06:47:00.001-08:00

Former U.S. ambassador to Canada David Wilkins calls it "catastrophic", FinMin Flaherty said "the delay may kill the project" so Canada will look into sending our oil to China via BC instead, and TransCanada Corp is "deeply disappointed". So goes the official reaction to the US State Dept decision to delay Keystone XL for further examination.

But the vast majority of comments from the public under these news stories boil down to this :
Why doesn't Canada do its own tarsands refining?
Why isn't Canada building its own refineries and keeping the jobs here rather than just shipping the raw material abroad?

The response from purported industry insiders under these comments runs as follows :

that no investors are willing to undertake building tarsands refineries because it would be very very expensive; not enough profit margin; that there would be considerable Canadian nimby, environmental, and FN opposition to building them leading to a protracted approval process of uncertain outcome; that Canada does not have the expertise to build them; that Canadian labour costs are too high.

I guess it's too obvious to include that multicorps and foreign companies operating in the tarsands likely want to optimize corporate control and profits by owning both ends of the supply line.

Or that we're importing 1,088,000 barrels of oil per day against the 1,929,000 that we're exporting because even though TransCanada CEO Russ Girling says :

“We can route a pipeline through the Andes, over the Rocky Mountains, through the Everglades, through the Sand Hills”

apparently we can't route one to eastern Canada.

Foreign ownership :

StatsCan : Total assets, operating revenues and operating profits under foreign control

Oil and gas extraction and support activities - 2009

Assets - 35.9% under foreign control
Operating revenues - 51.1% under foreign control
Operating profits : 41.3% under foreign control

"American-controlled enterprises continued to dominate the shares of assets, revenues and profits under foreign-control. These enterprises increased their share of both revenues and profits to 59.1% and 58.3% respectively."

"In the oil and gas extraction industry, foreign-controlled enterprises increased their share of revenues to 51.1%. This occurred as revenues declined nearly twice as fast in 2009 for domestic enterprises as they did for foreign enterprises."

Looking through the producing members of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, I notice nearly 20% of them list their head offices outside Canada, mostly in Texas. 20% doesn't sound like much but many of them are the bigs, including Koch, ExxonMobil, Shell.

Meanwhile China's investment in the tarsands is up to what - $13-billion now?

Leo De Bever is head of Alberta’s $70-billion pool of public sector funds, including pension funds, endowments, and the $15-billion Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund.

"My simple point is that you lose ownership, you lose control. Those who control the resource always have the incentive to dig it up as soon as possible,” Mr. De Bever said.

Mr. De Bever said it would make more sense for Canada to accelerate the development of technologies to produce the oil sands, improving environmental impacts and efficiency, rather than accelerate extraction.
“That is where that tradeoff of digging up now versus digging up later comes in,” he said. “If you know that in a few years you can make it drastically more efficient, it makes the resource more valuable.”

“If you want a strong Canadian economy, to some degree large Canadian institutions have got to take it upon themselves to be not just passive investors,” said Mr. De Bever. “Doing the right thing is not part of my mandate. Doing the profitable thing is. But if I can do the right thing and the profitable thing, I would do so.”

Sounds like a "no-brainer", doesn't it, Steve?

Outsource This! Boeing and Lockheed Martin war bling 'full of fake Chinese parts'

2011-11-09T19:03:00.000-08:00

Telegraph : Thousands of U.S. warplanes, ships and missiles contain fake electronic components from China, leaving them open to malfunction, according to a US Senate committee.

In total, the committee said it had found more than a million fake parts had made their way into warplanes such as the Boeing C-17 transport jet and the Lockheed Martin C-130J "Super Hercules".

... each of which Canada has recently signed on to buy more of : a $1.4-billion contract for 17 Lockheed Martin C-130J-30s, and a $869-million for four Boeing C-17s.

No worries though - the Senate Armed Services Committee 'discovered' exactly this same Chinese fake parts racket back in 2005, and again in 2008, and everyone on the committee had a cow both of those times as well but nothing came of it.

"As electronics manufacturing migrated to China, the US has been less and less able to control the quality of its military hardware. Some of the fake chips are bought by the Pentagon on the open market .... These chips are often salvaged by Chinese scrap merchants from the dumps of electronic waste that have accumulated in the south of the country "

... where they are burned off old computer circuit boards, sanded down, repainted, and voilà - the new F-35 chop shop war bling!

" 'Ello, I wish register a complaint about this plane which I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique."

" Ah yes, the F-35. Remarkable plane, the F-35, beautiful fuselage. What's wrong with it?"

"Well if you scrape away the loose paint just here, you'll see that underneath it says "Hello Kitty".

It's your own fault, said 'a former Peoples' Liberation Army officer who has become a commentator in the Chinese media' :

"The US has been dismantling its factories since the 1960s," he said.

OccupyVancouver told to get the hell off our lawn

2011-11-07T16:46:00.000-08:00

Gary Mason, Globe & Mail :

"The weekend death of a female protester at the Occupy Vancouver site has done incalculable damage to a global protest campaign that suddenly finds itself at a crossroads.
Increasing problems at the sites are now overshadowing Occupy’s root cause and tarnishing the image of the entire movement. Its future gets cloudier by the day."

See, Gary would really like to support the movement but because 22 year old Ashlie Gough selfishly died at Occupy Vancouver instead of a few blocks away in the Downtown Eastside where these things go unreported, sadly he now finds himself irrevocably drawn into the get-the-hell-off-my-public-lawn media camp.

Gary declares that with the Vancouver election just 12 days away, this is "a referendum on Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson's leadership", a quote happily repeated by CKNW's Bill Good on his mayoralty debate radio show between Robertson and NPA hopeful Susan Anton this morning.

Yup, Robertson better get cracking on evicting the homeless for safety reasons, even if they're safer here than anywhere else.

Robertson is indeed going for a fast-track court injunction to evict them tomorrow, backed up by the VPD:

"The Occupy Vancouver protest can continue. The tent encampment, as it stands now, cannot."

Luckily Kev at Trapped in a Whirlpool has provided this excellent rebuttal :

"Those who feel threatened by the Occupy movement think that by forcibly clearing out the encampments that they will cut the movement off at the knees, nothing could be further from reality. The camps will eventually end organically on their own, signalling the onset of the next phase of the movement towards social justice. But no matter how they end the movement has become unstoppable.

The Occupiers and their supporters have already succeeded in changing the conversation from one of tax cuts , deficits and the necessity of austerity to one of social and economic injustice. This is no small feat. Thanks to the Occupy Movement, Labour appears ready to end it's internecine wars and start to unite again in order to battle for the common good once more, again no small feat.

In other words this first phase of the movement has already been a huge success, violently suppressing this outpouring of dissatisfaction with the current sate of affairs will only prove to many that they Occupiers are right and can only as it has already done result in it's growth.
The battle for a better world has been joined and while it will likely be a long one, those who hanker for a more just society will never surrender."

Thank you, Kev.

Linking arms for OccupyVancouver :

A wonderful "Open Love Letter to #OccupyVancover" from My Little Soapbox.

Some sage advice from my friend Chris Corrigan on how the movement can continue : Revitalizing #OccupyVancouver

Boris : Testing Occupy .

Montreal Simon : The Occupy Movement and the Marginalized

Dope City Free Press: Letter To the Mayor of Vancouver and a Letter Written the Next Morning To Occupy Vancouver's Organizing Committee

with an intro to Mr. Beer 'N Hockey above from RossK

Petition : I Support Occupy Vancouver
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Ethical Oil Ethics For Dummies

2011-11-01T06:30:00.002-07:00

Ethical Oil's new spokesy Kathryn Marshall had a little think yesterday about whether the tarsands are still ethical even if bits of it are owned by China and its unethical oil company, and even if Ottawa and Alberta are successful in their bid to hawk the stuff to communist China.

"Is Canadian oil suddenly less ethical, " she asks, "when it's produced and used by unethical countries?"
No! she answers, it's still ethical!
You're shocked, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, over at the Christian Science Monitor :

"The whole notion of ethical oil sets up a false dilemma because the very viscous Canadian crude needs to be cut with lighter oils from places like Saudi Arabia in order to be transported down a pipeline, says Chris MacDonald, a visiting scholar for the Clarkson Centre for Business Ethics at the University of Toronto.

"So what's the point of having ethical oil if you are mixing it with this 'conflict oil'?"

Andrew Nikiforuk @ The Tyee :

"By 2025, for example Canada could be importing more than two million barrels of foreign or so-called "unethical" oil a day, just to transport bitumen to U.S. refineries."

The problem of adding imported diluents to tarsands crude is of considerable concern to CAPP, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, says Nikiforuk. Seems foreign diluents could be subject to US country-of-origin duty charges both when it is imported into Canada from non-NAFTA sources via US ports, and again when it is shipped from Canada back to US refineries.

CAPP, November 2010 : Rethinking NAFTA Certification of Canadian Heavy Crude Oil

After 2005 regional condensate/pentanes + supply was no longer sufficient to satisfy diluent needs
This has led to a rapid increase in diluent imports
Initially, diluent imports were small and were sourced from the U.S.
With development of the EnCana/Cenovus Kitimat terminal, non-NAFTA diluent began entering the western Canadian diluent pool
Export to U.S. of Dilbit and Diluted Heavy Crude in 2009 – 970,000 BPD
Export to U.S. of Light Crude in 2009 - 300,000 BPD
If U.S. duty were charged on both streams, annual cost to industry - $30,000,000

Huh.

When former Ethical Oil spokesy Alykhan Velshi slagged Saudi Arabia's human rights record in a 30 second ad which resulted in Saudi cease and desist lawyery letters sent to CTV/Bell Media, Velshi's former boss Immigration Minister Jason Kenney leapt to his defence, and Dame Ezra, author of Ethical Oil : The Book and The Website, milked the speechey hell out of it over at SunTV.

This time I'm betting Steve is thinking : Just STFU about ethics, Kathryn, we're trying to do a deal here.

Tune in next week when Kathryn considers whether it's ok for ethical oil to steal a loaf of bread to feed a hungry child ...

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Update : The CAPP Industry presentation "Rethinking Nafta Certification of Canadian Heavy Crude Oil" link appears to no longer be available so here's a google cache copy and a pdf copy .
Info quoted above is from pages 5 to 10.
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TransCanada : an "American company"

2011-10-29T04:02:00.001-07:00

Hey, did you think TransCanada, the company intending to extend the Keystone XL pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta to the Free Tariff Zone refineries in Texas, was a Canadian company?
Me too. Must be something about the name. And the fact that articles about TransCanada always refer to it as "Alberta-based".

However TransCanada's own K-XL Know the Facts webpage begs to differ. Debunking the "Myth" that TransCanada is a foreign company operating in the US :

"Like many American companies with operations in Canada, we are incorporated and registered in both Canada and the United States. We currently have 1,631 talented employees in 33 U.S. states. Our U.S. operations are headquartered in Houston and will be responsible for the U.S. construction of Keystone XL."

Huh.

Now as we already know via Inside Climate News, Koch exports 25% of all tarsands crude to the US.

In 2009, Flint Hills Resources Canada LP, an Alberta-based subsidiary of Koch Industries, applied for—and won—"intervenor status" in the National Energy Board hearings that led to Canada's 2010 approval of its 327-mile portion of the pipeline.

The company's Flint Hills subsidiary already has an oil terminal in Hardisty, Alberta, the starting point of the Keystone XL. It sends about 250,000 barrels of diluted bitumen a day to a heavy oil refinery it owns near St. Paul, Minn., making that refinery "among the top processors of Canadian crude in the United States," the company website says.

Yesterday that same National Energy Board, Canada's presumed energy regulator, rejected the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union's request to hold a new hearing into K-XL.
CEP, which opposes K-XL on the reasonable grounds it would rather see tarsands refineries built in Canada, maintained "the project had violated its permit by not starting construction by a March 2011 deadline". However, according to the NEB, TransCanada's 'earth moving' activities in Canada apparently counts as a start.

Meanwhile, south of the border, three environmental groups filed a lawsuit against TransCanada earlier this month for mowing a 110 ft wide swath clear across the state of Nebraska prior to receiving the official US go ahead for K-XL to begin. TransCanada responded that mowing grasslands and moving endangered beetles out of the way of the proposed pipeline doesn't count as a start.

So far, no matter which side of the border you're on, things really do go better for Koch.
And for TransCanada, an "American company".
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Stupid Senate Pet Tricks

2011-10-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

Harper-appointed Senator Nicole Eaton is calling for a private members bill to replace the beaver with the more "stately" polar bear as the national symbol of Canada.

In her remarks to the Senate, the former National Post gardening columnist from the Eaton department store family referred to the beaver as "a has-been", "a dentally defective rat", and "a big rat that doesn't reflect our new values".

Apparently overlooked in the flurry of CBC, G&M, CTV, National Post, and Vancouver Sun coverage of her remarks is the source of her enmity for beavers and the presumed reason why she feels Canada should agree to her request for "a national emblem makeover" :

"We have a cottage on Georgian Bay (in Ontario), and beavers eat away our dock every year. There are thousands of trees around, but no, they choose our dock," Eaton said.

Okey dokey then. Brought to you live from the Canadian chamber of sober second thought.
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"Never again," said Harper

2011-10-27T10:47:00.001-07:00

.... last Friday, “Never again will Gadhafi be in a position to support terrorism or to turn guns on his own citizens."

No, because as you can see from the pictuure above, that was our job.
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Steve gets his long gun wedge on

2011-10-26T12:07:00.001-07:00

Never mind that rifles and shotguns are the weapon of choice for spousal homicides (71% in the last decade, of which the majority of victims are women), or that 14 of the last 18 officer shooting deaths were committed with a long gun, or that the long gun registry last year cost less than 40 Gazebos ($1Gazebo =$100K) and less than one one-hundredth of what just one of the Cons nine new war on invisible crime bills will cost next year ($4M vs $458M) .... the important thing for Steve is that the long gun registry is a nice wedge issue with which to divide the official opposition and a fuck you to the rest of us not happy about his party's NRA-Canada long gun registry connection.

Bonus :Cowboys For Social Responsibility reports (via the gun lobby National Firearms Association) :

"the bill removes the requirement to call and confirm transfers".
That means that a gun shop doesn't have to check if a buyer's licence is valid before he or she sells a weapon powerful enough to penetrate soft body armour.
As a consequence, criminals with fake firearms licenses and domestic abusers with a firearms licence card they shouldn't have can walk out of a gun shop with a shiny new gun, no questions asked.

And about those transfers :

CBC : Transfers of firearms registration to a new owner, July - September 2011

using the internet, 142,516
over the phone, 76,002
total 218,518

Glen McGregor at the Ottawa Citizen, writes about the bill's clause mandating destruction of all records of registered long-guns.
Glen doesn't much care for the destruction of government data and has published, sans names and addresses of course, 7 million records from the 2007 gun registry database. Go, Glen!
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Harper's very own "Mission Accomplished"

2011-10-22T03:28:00.002-07:00

As already noted by Pogge, Campbell Clark at the Globe and Mail is just awesome proud of Steve winning his first ever war of his very own :
With Libyan liberation, a political victory for Harper

"Stephen Harper’s first war victory was clinched in a few sudden hours when Moammar Gadhafi was captured and killed and his last bastion of Sirte fell.

Although Mr. Harper has led a nation with forces in combat since he took office in 2006, this was not a war he inherited but one he chose ..."

Clark then quotes from Steve's victory speech :

“Our government shall be speaking with our allies to prepare for the end of our military mission in the next few days,” he said.

Although as is clear from the clip above (full speech here), what Steve actually said was :

"Our government shall be speaking with our allies to pretend to prepare for the end of our military mission in the next few days."

Just an unfortunate slip of the tongue surely.
Like when Government House Leader Peter van Loan told CBC's The House last month that the Conservative government wants to extend Canada's military role in Libya beyond the scheduled end date, a statement 'government sources' quickly denied the next day.

War in Africa is an investment.
As returning US Ambassador to Libya Gene Cretz put it last month " in a State Department conference call with about 150 American companies hoping to do business with Libya" :

“We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources, but even in Qaddafi’s time they were starting from A to Z in terms of building infrastructure and other things” after the country had begun opening up to the West six years ago, he said. “If we can get American companies here on a fairly big scale, which we will try to do everything we can to do that, then this will redound to improve the situation in the United States with respect to our own jobs.”

R2P - the responsibility to protect investments.

Of course we don't talk about our humanitarian intervention like that up here when we're sponsoring regime change we can believe in! - in countries with the bad luck to be situated on top of what is clearly NATO's stuff to fight over.

"Never again," said Steve yesterday, will Gadhafi "be in a position to support terrorism or to turn guns on his own citizens."
Sure. Here's a list of 10 things likely to be missing from any future G&M account of Steve's war.

Rather heartening however is the G&M readers' response to Clark's article, with the majority of the 960 comments under it using terms like "delusional" and "jingoistic" and "colonialism".
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Canadian Wheat Board : The Cons being cons

2011-10-20T14:39:00.003-07:00

On Tuesday AgMin Gerry Ritz stood in the middle of a suburban Ottawa farm behind a desk hung with the sign "Marketing Freedom" and announced the end of the Canadian Wheat Board single desk monopoly.
" ... freedom to choose ... marketing freedom ... market forces ... jobs, jobs, jobs ... "

There were questions.

Chris Rands, CBC : "Back in 2007 the prime minister was in Churchill and he said the fate of the Wheat Board is in farmers' hands, so why aren't you opening up to the farmers to have a vote to say whether the wheat board should be removed as a single desk?"

AgMin Gerry Ritz : "Well we actually had that vote, Chris, on May 2nd. We campaigned in all rural areas across western Canada on an open voluntary wheat board. Farmers sent us back here with that mandate; we're following through."

Rands (referring to farmers' plebiscite in which 62% voted in favour of keeping the CWB) : "But you didn't like the results. You called the vote flawed, if I recall?"

Ritz : "No, I'm talking about the general election, May the 2nd. That's our mandate. Thank you."

NDP Pat Martin to Gerry Ritz in the House : "13 times the US went to the WTO to complain about the Wheat Board and 13 times the WTO ruled that there's nothing unfair about Canadian farmers acting collectively in their own best interests. The question is : why is American agribiz so willing to kill it and why are they [the Cons] so willing to do it for them?"

Outside the House, Pat Martin related that three years after Australia privatized their single marketing desk, it went bankrupt and was bought out by Cargill. As a non-profit marketing board with no assets and without its monopoly, the CWB is not in a position to compete with big agribiz.

Prior to the May 2 election, farmers were told by Gerry Ritz there would not be any attempt to dismantle the Canadian Wheat Board without a vote.

They were conned. He meant the general election.

Friday Update : Hill Times :

Majority-governing Tories shut down Wheat Board debate, third time to cut off debate since House resumed.

"The majority-governing Conservatives used their majority Thursday to cut short debate on the controversial bill to eliminate the 76-year-old Canadian Wheat Board, the third time it has muscled legislation through the House since Parliament resumed in September."

The other two times being the massive crime omnibus bill and the end of government subsidies for political parties.

The George and Bill Show comes to Surrey

2011-10-20T10:15:00.009-07:00

[updated below]

And hey, you could win a CBSA cash reward!

George W. Bush in Surrey

Thursday Oct. 20

Tickets - $599 per head. No media allowed.

Thursday, October 20, 11:00 am

Gather at the parking lot outside the Bay, Guildford Mall, SW corner of 152 St. & 104 Ave.
If you are coming from Occupy Vancouver at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Amnesty International is organizing a contingent leaving from there at 9:15am at taking the Skytrain to Surrey.

Transit :Take the Expo Line to Gateway Station in Surrey, then the 332 bus to Guildford, exit 104 Ave and 150 St. , walk to 152 St.

But remember what CBSA says : Don't try to make the arrest yourself. That's the RCMP's job.
#Arrestbush

Update :
Via Stephen Hui at the Georgia Straight : the Surrey Regional Economic Summit's proud corporate sponsors at left. Click pic to read.

Brigette DePape spoke to the 200 or so demonstrators outside.

Glob showed vid of Occupy Vancouver folks arriving.

Inside : BC premier Christy Clark attended, Kevin Falcon's former flackman was one of the organizers, and honorary chair of the summit Surrey mayor Diane Watts was interviewed about torture.

Matt Eisenbrandt in Embassy Mag : The case for Canadian prosecution of George W. Bush

"The government has recently taken a very public position that Canada should not be a safe haven for alleged torturers and war criminals. To open its doors yet again to Mr. Bush sets a disturbing double standard."

Tiananmen Square and Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-17T11:25:00.000-07:00

From Garnotte at Le Devoir
h/t Lagatta at Bread and Roses
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New mandaTory minimum sense on marijuana

2011-10-17T05:33:00.005-07:00

Dan Gardner blasts the Cons' proposed 'war on drugs' mandatory minimum sentences for growing pot :

Six months mandatory jail time for growing six pot plants.
Nine months mandatory jail time for passing a joint from one plant grown in the privacy of your own home if you are a renter.

I assume this represents the Cons' attempt to 'harmonize' Canadian policy within the security perimeter deal, or as US AG Eric Holder put it in his "Beyond the Border" speech : the need for "certain sentencing laws" to be "updated".
This, even as more than a dozen US states are currently repealing mandatory minimum sentences.and reducing sentences.

Besides, notes Gardner, they don't even deliver what they promise :

"The standard argument in favour of mandatory minimum sentences is that they deliver certainty. ...

But mandatory minimums don't actually do away with discretion.

They merely transfer it from judges, by restricting their ability to choose the sentence, to prosecutors, who choose the charge. The system is still ambiguous, uncertain, and unpredictable. It's just ambiguous, uncertain, and unpredictable in a different way."

From the discretion of judges to the better nature of prosecutors.
What could possibly go wrong?
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h/t Pogge
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Update : Terry Milewski, CBC : Texas Conservatives reject Harper's crime plan
'Been there; done that; didn't work,' say Texas crime-fighters
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All day, all week, occupy your streets!

2011-10-15T09:09:00.004-07:00

h/t Boris

But that's just the US, right? No reason for us to protest up here in Canada, origin of the Occupy movement.

NOW Mag : The Arsenal of Corporatocracy : Why We Should Occupy Bay Street

A person making $45,000 a year and a person making $1 billion essentially pay the same tax rate.
A person making $130,000 a year and a person making $1 billion a year pay the exact same tax rate.
A person making $45,000 a year pays a higher tax rate than a multi-billion dollar corporation

Muldoon began this by lowering the corporate tax rate from 36% to 28%. By next year it will be down to 15%, for those that pay any at all.

Meanwhile, over at The Onion ...
Nation Waiting For Protesters to Clearly Articulate Demands Before Ignoring Them

"If they don’t have a clear power structure organized around specific demands first, then I'll never be able to completely tune them out due to a political conflict of interest or an inability to comprehend complex, detailed economic concepts. These people really need to get their act together."

Once Occupy Wall Street has a concrete set of objectives in place, the majority of Americans said they would go back to waiting for the sluggish economy to recover while blindly accepting things the way they are."

For everyone else : How to Stream Live From a Mobile Phone

Occupy Vancouver vid and photos from: West End Bob @ The Beav and Jymn @ Let Freedom Rain

Canadian owners of Zuccotti Park to evict Occupy Wall Street protesters tomorrow

2011-10-13T23:53:00.008-07:00

[updated below]
A New York subsidiary of the Toronto-based Canadian asset management company that owns Zuccotti Park has written to the NYPD asking them to evict the Wall Street protesters who have occupied the park since Sept. 17.

Commissioner Raymond W Kelly October 11, 2011
New York City Police Department
One Police Plaza
Room 1400
New York, New York 10038
Facsimile: (646) 610-5865

Re Zuccotti Park

Dear Commissioner Kelly:

As you know, for over three weeks, Zuccotti Park (the "Park") has been used by "Occupy Wall Street" and other protesters as their home base. The Park is owned by a Brookfield affiliate and was recently renovated at Brookfield's considerable expense as an amenity for the general public. It is intended to be a relaxing tree-filled oasis in the midst of the hustle and bustle of Lower Manhattan. We fully support the rights of free speech and assembly, but the manner in which the protesters are occupying the Park violates the law, violates the rules of the Park, deprives the community of its rights of quiet enjoyment of the Park, and creates health and public safety issues that need to be addressed immediately.

Within the Park, the protesters have set up living spaces with tarpaulins, mattresses, sleeping bags, tables, bookshelves, gasoline-powered generators and other items that are inconsistent with the rules and normal use of the Park. At all hours of the day and night, protesters are sleeping on benches and walkways, blocking normal normal pedestrian access to the general public and preventing cleaning and maintenance workers from performing necessary upkeep. When not blocked by protesters, the walkways throughout the Park are blocked by various items and equipment brought to the Park by protesters.

We are extremely concerned about dangers posed by damage that may have been incurred within the Park and by materials and equipment brought into the Park by the protesters. Brookfield protocol and practice is to clean the Park on a daily basis, power-washing it each weeknight, and to perform necessary inspection, maintenance and repairs on a regular, as-needed basis. Since the occupation began, we have not been able to perform basic cleaning and maintenance activity, let alone perform more invasive repairs. For example, if the lenses to the underground lighting have become cracked, water could infiltrate the electrical system, putting occupants of the Park at risk of an electrical hazard or causing short-circuiting which would result in repairs requiring the Park to be torn apart for re-wiring. Any such repairs would force the Park to be closed to the public for indeterminate periods of time, depriving the city of a vital green space. Moreover, we are concerned about the fire safety hazard that gasoline and the gas-fired generators pose to the Park's occupants.

After weeks of occupation, conditions at the Park have deteriorated to unsanitary and unsafe levels. The Park has no toilets and while the existing trash receptacles have always been more than adequate to accommodate normal waste in the Park, those receptacles are no longer even close to sufficient and the resulting trash accumulation is attracting rodents.

Additionally, we have received hundreds of phone calls and e-mails from concerned citizens and office workers in the neighbourhood. Complaints range from outrage over numerous laws being broken including but not limited to lewdness, groping, drinking and drug use, to the lack of safe access and usage of the Park, to ongoing noise at all hours, to unsanitary conditions and to offensive odors. We have received complaints of harassment, one woman stating that she was verbally abused in front of her 5-year-old child and complaining that she had a package stolen from her as she tried to cross the Park.

We are also concerned with the constant deliveries of materials to the Park. Delivery vehicles have now been appearing on a daily basis with packages of all shapes and sizes for the Park's occupants. None of these deliveries are being screened by our security team or the police for suspicious or harmful materials. The Park's location in the financial district makes this activity particularly concerning.

For all of these reasons, we cannot currently ensure that the Park is safe nor can we perform the necessary cleaning, inspection, damage assessment and repairs. In light of this and the ongoing trespassing of the protesters, we are again requesting the assistance of the New York City Police Department to help clear the Park so that we can undertake this work at the earliest possible time. We will defer to the Department's judgment on how best to accomplish this, but the Department's intervention is necessary both to ensure our ability to comply with our obligations a owners and to make the Park safe for the neighborhood and public.

Once we have completed our cleanup and maintenance, we would ask that the Department assist Brookfield on an ongoing basis to ensure the safety of all those using and enjoying the Park.

As you know, we have discussed this situation with you and/or others under your command on a daily basis seeking assistance. The situation continues to worsen and we need your assistance to ensure public safety.

I appreciate your time and consideration in addressing this important and pressing matter. Please call me at (212) 417-7063 with any questions or if you wish to discuss our request further.

Sincerely,
[signed : CEO Richard B. Clark]

Brookfield Office Properties
Brookfield Global Real Estate

Sheesh. If anything needs cleaning up here, it's Wall Street, not OWS.

Reality check from a comment left at the New York Observer
(h/t greenvie at Bread & Roses) :

"the right to assemble and protest does, in fact, trump private property rights when the private property in question is commonly used as a public amenity as Brookfield itself has admitted. Brookfield did not create the plaza out of altruism, but rather created the plaza in exchange for significant allowances in building height restrictions from the City of New York. In other words, they were required to build a PUBLIC plaza in order to build their building.

The real constitutional question we should be asking is why the protesters are not allowed to camp on Wall Street itself - a public street and a public right of way which is somehow off limits to our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech - as if it is located in another country and not subject to the constitution. But then again, it kind of embodies what the protesters are complaining about anyway, doesn't it ?"

Chairman of the board of directors for Toronto parent company Brookfield Asset Management Inc. - assets $120-billion - is Frank McKenna. Other directors include Jack Mintz, Jimmy Patterson, the Vice Chair of Rogers Comm., the former Chair of HSBC, the CEO of Canada Oil Sands and Chair of Syncrude.
New York Mayor Bloomberg's girlfriend Diana L. T aylor is a director of the NY subsidiary office Brookfield Office Properties which sent the letter to the NYPD.

Dear Occupy Toronto : : Brookfield Office Properties in Canada :
Brookfield Place, 181 Bay Street, Suite 330, Toronto, Ontario M5J 2T3
Tel: 416-369-2300
Just sayin'.

Leadnow.ca has a petition to stop the eviction, due to begin at 7am Friday, and to make Canadians aware of a Canadian corp's role in the eviction.

OWS responds : "Tell Bloomberg: Don’t Foreclose the Occupation.
Join us at 6AM FRIDAY for non-violent eviction defense."

Friday AM Update : WSJ :

"Bloomberg says the city was notified shortly before midnight that Brookfield wanted to postpone the cleanup of Zuccotti Park. He says the property owner hopes to work out an agreement with the protesters. Bloomberg also says Brookfield has received "lots of calls" from elected officials siding with protesters."

Wow
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Chris Hedges smacks down Kevin O'Leary

2011-10-07T23:58:00.002-07:00

Yesterday CBC continued its ongoing snide, dismissive, and condescending coverage of the third week of Occupy Wall Street with an interview with author/activist/Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges on its "inside the business world" show, the Lang and O'Leary Exchange. After the by now obligatory opening protestations of puzzlement as to what OWS is all about - "low budget" and "pretty nothing burgers" as blowhard host Kevin O'Leary described it - he then responded to Hedges' patient explanation by calling him "a left wing nutbar".

Since Holly Stick kindly left me the link this morning, Let Freedom Rain has posted a link and commentary on O'Leary's FoxNews behavior but I'm putting the vid and a transcript up here because Hedges' argument bears repeating and also because, as appalling as O'Leary's behavior certainly was, even more appalling is that O'Leary affects to be completely unable to follow Hedges' logic as to what exactly went wrong that caused OWS to happen.
He and other CBC talking heads either don't get it or pretend not to get it but you got it right away, didn't you? A more damning example of how completely dissociated our state broadcaster is with the plight of the 99% I cannot imagine.

CBC link here. Transcript follows ...

The show opens with a clip of Obama talking about Occupy Wall Street :

"I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel that we have the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country, all across Main Street. And yet you're still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on abusive practises that got us into this problem in the first place."

Introduction to Hedges and Occupy Wall Street movement ...

O'Leary : So what exactly is everyone complaining about? And also give me a sense of how much momentum this movement has because it's pretty nothing burgers so far - just a few guys, guitars. Nobody knows what they want - they can't even name the names of the firms that they're protesting against - very weak, low budget.

Hedges : I wouldn't agree with that assessment at all. They pulled thousands of people into the street last night and here in Washington when everyone marched past the Bank of America, they were shouting Shame! Shame! Shame! They know the names of these firms and they know what these firms have done not only to the American economy but to the global economy, and the criminal class who runs them.

Fill-in for Lang : Well Kevin made this point that nobody knows what they want. What do you say to that? We know that this is a very diverse group, there are many different agendas at play ... what is the sense you have of what this movement would like to see happen?

Hedges : They know precisely what they want ; they want to reverse the corporate coup that's taken place in the US and rendered the citizenry impotent and they won't stop until that happens and frankly if we don't break the back of corporations, we're all finished anyway since we're rapidly trashing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for survival. This is literally a fight for life - it's that grave, it's that serious. Corporations, unfettered capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, is a revolutionary force - it commodifies everything - human beings, the natural world which it exploits for profit until exhaustion and collapse. The bottom line is we don't have much time left - we are on the cusp of perhaps another major banking crisis in Europe, defaults in Greece, followed by Spain, Portugal. There's been no restrictions, no regulations on Wall Street - they've looted the US Treasury, they've played all the games that they were playing before and we're about to pay for it all over again.

O'Leary : Listen don't take this the wrong way but you sound like a left wing nutbar. If you want to shut down every corporation, every bank, where are you going to get a job? Where are you gonna work? Where's the economy gonna go?

Hedges : Corporations don't produce anything and

O'Leary : Oh really!?

Hedges : No. Financial corporations on Wall Street

O'Leary : Are you driving a car to the protest?

Hedges : They are speculators. I'm talking about the financial institutions like Goldman Sachs. They don't manufacture, they don't make anything - they gamble, they use money, and they believe falsely that money is real as we dismantle our manufacturing base and send jobs over the border to Mexico and finally into the embrace of China.

Fill-in for Lang : Well I see that you and Kevin could get into an actually huge argument here.

Hedges : Well you know I don't usually go on shows where people descend to character assassination. if you want to discuss issues, that's fine but this sounds like Fox News and I don't go on Fox News. Either you discuss the issues and ... look, you have had very eloquent writers - people like John Ralston Saul in Canada who have laid this out with incredible lucidity - and to somehow attack this critique by calling someone a nutcase engages in the kind of trash talk that's polluted the corporate airwaves.

O'Leary : Excuse me, let's debate the issues then. ...

Hedges : You were the one who started it - you were not debating the issues.

[crosstalk] ...I did not call you a nutcase, I called you a nutbar.

Hedges : You said [I] sounded like a leftwing nutcase .. bar

O'Leary : Yes, bar, nutbar.

Hedges : That's an insult.

O'Leary : Are you left wing in leaning at least would you say?

Hedges : No, I would say ..

O'Leary : You're a centrist?

Hedges : Can I finish?

O'Leary : Please.

Hedges : I would say that those who are protesting the rise of the corporate state are in fact on the political spectrum the true conservatives because they're calling for the restoration of the rule of law. The radicals have seized power and they have trashed all regulations and legal impediments to a corporate reconfiguration of American society into a form of neo-feudalism. And that's what we're really asking for - is the restoration of the rule of law.

O'Leary : Ok, but you don't see any value in the banking system providing a financial infrastructure ...

Hedges : That's not what I said.

O'Leary : I'm asking you.

Hedges : A banking system that functions as a banking system should. And in Canada you do not have a banking crisis because you did not tear down the walls between commercial and investment banks and turn all of your banks into hedge funds. If, instead of handing massive sums of money to CitiBank, Wells Fargo - which are basically zombie banks that still hold tremendous toxic assets - we had created ten regional banks with $10 billion each and leveraged them 10 to 1, people could have been saved. Six million people have been pushed out of their homes because of foreclosures and mortgages. We could have reinvested in communities, small businesses which cannot get credit would have gotten credit. Instead they're just sitting on the capital and not lending it.

O'Leary : So we're certainly giving you an opportunity to speak your mind. Just so we can come full circle, what do you suggest should be done with Goldman Sachs specifically?

Hedges : They should be prosecuted. When you shove sub-prime mortgages on families that you know can't repay it and then you dice up those mortgages as assets and sell them and bet against them through AIG, that's fraudulent activity.

Fill-in for Lang : Alright, well thank you so much for joining us - we like to hear your thoughts.

Hedges : Well it'll be the last time.

Update : Dianne Buckner was the other co-host. h/t to Christine in comments
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Occupy Wall Street - Day 19

2011-10-06T02:08:00.004-07:00

Occupy Wall Street Arrests; Fox 5 Crew and Protesters Hit by Mace, Batons: MyFoxNY.com

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Yeah, that terrifying-looking kid definitely needs arresting.
h/t enigma4ever

Ditto this armless man.

So what is it they want? a puzzled media asks over and over again. What are their demands?

After a 30 second ad - sorry! - and a quick rundown on the events of Day 19, Keith Olberman reads the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, voted on by all members of Occupy Wall Street on Sept 29.

Dear thickie media : Hope this helps ....

Update : Great pix at Cryptome of the huge daytime crowds. Introducing Lieutenant Brian Connolly and his now famous nightstick.
Very moving : We Are the 99 Percent

And finally Occupy Portland : This is how it's supposed to work.
#OWS ...

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Hey Joe, where you goin with that gunk in your hand?

2011-10-05T16:45:00.001-07:00

While in Washington oildrumming up K-XL support with US senators yesterday, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver plumped for the Keystone XL pipeline in his keynote address to the 4th Annual United States Energy Association (USEA) Energy Supply Forum.
Here is the quote chosen by Natural Resources Canada "for broadcast use" :

“The future of North America’s economy and our national security is inextricably tied to energy,” said Minister Oliver. “Clearly, it is in both of our interests to ensure that our future oil supply remains stable, secure and developed in an environmentally responsible way.”

Our future oil supply? Really, Joe?
We're still going with the tarsands = North American security model?

For starters, Canada imports half of its oil for domestic use - over a million barrels per day - from various "conflict oil" states, while exporting 65% of its "ethical oil" tarsands crude to the US.

Dear Joe : How does the K-XL proposal to export tarsands - owned in part by the Chinese state - to Texas to be refined by Saudi's Aramco refinery in a Foreign Trade Zone [read: no import/export duties or taxes] so that it can then be shipped off to Europe and Latin America have anything to do with "our national security"?

Exporting Energy Security : Keystone XL Exposed
Interesting report. It contends that there is currently a glut of domestic oil in the US due to increasing vehicle efficiency and slow economic growth, so the real purpose of the K-XL is to make tarsands crude available to the FTZ refineries in Texas which are specifically set up to turn it into diesel for export.

Nothing to do with national security, nothing to do with energy independence, nothing to do with gasoline prices at the pump.
So who is it all you guys are working for again?

The Guardian : Koch company declared 'substantial interest' in Keystone XL pipeline

"In recent months Koch Industries Inc., the business conglomerate run by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, has repeatedly told a U.S. Congressional committee and the news media that the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline has "nothing to do with any of our businesses."
But the company has told Canadian energy regulators a different story.

In 2009, Flint Hills Resources Canada LP, an Alberta-based subsidiary of Koch Industries, applied for—and won—"intervenor status" in the National Energy Board hearings that led to Canada's 2010 approval of its 327-mile portion of the pipeline.

In the form it submitted to the Energy Board, Flint Hills wrote that it "is among Canada's largest crude oil purchasers, shippers and exporters. Consequently, Flint Hills has a direct and substantial interest in the application" for the pipeline under consideration.

The Koch brothers own nearly all of Wichita, Kan.-based Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the United States. The energy and manufacturing conglomerate earns an estimated $100 billion in annual revenue from its network of subsidiaries—a mix of oil, gas, pipeline, chemical, fertilizer and paper and pulp companies. In addition to its Canadian operation, Koch's Flint Hills subsidiary operates oil refineries in Alaska, Texas and Minnesota as well as a dozen fuel terminals in the Midwest and Texas.

The Koch brothers have donated millions to Republican candidates and conservative movements, bankrolling groups involved in Tea Party causes and in campaigns to deny climate change science and the need for cleaner energy."

Steve plugs for Harper Hudak Ford TeaCon trifecta

2011-10-03T11:26:00.007-07:00

At a barbecue this summer at Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's house, Steve lays out his hopes for a federal provincial GTA TeaCon sweep :

Flaherty endorses Hudak for premier; the National Post endorses Hudak for premier.

US Tea Party consultant Michael Prell, who bills himself as a "strategist for the Tea Party Patriots," has joined the campaign of Tim Hudak. (h/t Sabina Becker)

So how is Hudak's Ontario election campaign going? Oh, about as you would expect, as this Ontario Cons campaign flyer distributed across greater Toronto this last weekend shows :

Quotes are lifted completely and misleadingly out of context, I'm sure you will not be surprised to learn, from Corporate Television Vehicle and the Toronto District School Board Curriculum Resource Guide. Repeat : Resource Guide.

G&M : "The sex-ed curriculum being taught in schools is the one that has been in place since 1998 when the previous Tory government introduced it, and remains unchanged, the Liberals said in a statement on Monday."

That teeny tiny type at the bottom of the campaign flyer?
Click to enlarge : "Authorized by the C.F.O. for the Ontario PC Party."

Go, Hudak! Go, US Tea Party strategists!
Go, Harper Hudak Ford TeaCon Trifecta!
It's an election! Just make shit up!

Coincidentally, Charles McVety's Institute for Canadian Values(sic) - McVety himself being the very poster child for the need for anti-bullying programs in schools - ran a weirdly disgusting anti-gay anti-trans ad in the National Post on Sept 28 that the Natty Post later apologized for. Yesterday a similar version of the same McVety ad reappeared in the Toronto Sun.
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Update : Toronto Standard : Fact-checking Hudak's "Homophobic" Flyer
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Tony Gazebo's new bizcard

2011-10-01T06:04:00.000-07:00

Apparently Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird did not much care for the wordmark "Canada" being larger than his name on his business card so he had it deleted altogether and some goldleaf embossing added instead.

We can hardly wait to see Tony Gazebo's response on his new Treasury Board bizcard.

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