US Army Announces Readiness for Total Military Takeover of America
Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers
October 21, 2006
Russian Intelligence Analysts are reporting today that final steps towards a
full Military Dictatorship of the United States have been taken with the US
Army announcing USARNORTH has now reached 'full operational capacity' and is
now ready to:
"Execute homeland defense and defense support of civil authorities missions"
, and "Conduct the Army-to-Army portion of the theater cooperation mission
with Canada and Mexico".
According to these reports, the first of the USANORTH plans for the total
military takeover of the United States, from its few remaining civilian
overseers, rest with a new series of draconian laws recently enacted by
their top Military Leaders and which, among other things, suspends the right
of habeas corpus for Americans, and which the American Military Leaders have
ordered their courts to disallow, and as we can read as reported by the
Washington Post News Service in their article titled "Court Told It Lacks
Power in Detainee Cases", and which says:
"Moving quickly to implement the bill signed by President Bush this week
that authorizes military trials of enemy combatants, the administration has
formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has
jurisdiction to consider hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed by
inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
Beyond those already imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere, the law
applies to all non-U.S. citizens, including permanent U.S. residents. Habeas
corpus, a Latin term meaning "you have the body," is one of the oldest
principles of English and American law. It requires the government to show a
legal basis for holding a prisoner."
Not being fully explained to the American people, however, are that these
new draconian laws do in fact have a direct impact upon each of them, and as
explained by an American dissident group called The Future of Freedom
Foundation, and which in their article titled "Jose Padilla and the Military
Commissions Act", states:
"Anyone who hoped that U.S. military detention of Americans accused of
terrorism expired with the transfer of American citizen Jose Padilla from
military custody to Justice Department custody have seen their hopes dashed
by the Military Commissions Act that the president signed into law
yesterday. Although the act limits to foreign citizens the use of military
tribunals and the denial of habeas corpus, any person, including American
citizens, can still be labeled and treated as an "unlawful enemy combatant"
in the war on terrorism.
What does that mean for the American people? It means the same thing it did
for Jose Padilla. You'll recall that Padilla was arrested in Chicago for
terrorism and transferred to military custody, where, according to Padilla,
he was tortured and involuntarily injected with drugs.
The government's position is that since the entire world is a battlefield in
which the war on terrorism is being waged, U.S. officials now have the power
to arrest any American suspected of terrorism, place him in military
custody, and subject him to the same "unlawful enemy combatant" treatment
that Padilla received, until the war on terrorism has finally been won, no
matter how long that takes."
More ominously for the American people is their future culpability in these
actions being done in their name by their Military Leaders, and as
articulated by one of the United States most celebrated reporters, Helen
Thomas, and who has said about these horrific new laws:
"President Bush on Tuesday signed the law that legalizes the
administration's shameful treatment of detainees suspected of terrorism. The
same measure also empowers the president to define torture. It's a sad
legacy for America and its already-tarnished world image.
The far-reaching legislation gives Bush the right to decide what constitutes
torture. The president has often said "we do not torture," despite evidence
to the contrary - and photographs from the infamous Abu Ghraib prison as
well. The president also can set guidelines for interrogation of prisoners.
White House spokesman Tony Snow declined to say whether "waterboarding" - in
which detainees are made to feel they are drowning - would be permissible.
Under the new law, the president also has extraordinary powers to designate
who is an illegal enemy combatant, which potentially subjects U.S. citizens
and foreigners to indefinite detention with no power to appeal. Bush is also
allowed to interpret the Geneva Conventions on Humane Treatment of Prisoners
of War.
One of the reasons Bush sought a green light from the lawmakers is "to have
Congress stand with him in the dock," Malinowski added. The military
commissions act is law. And all Americans will be tainted by it."
Helen Thomas' reference to American Military Leaders standing in the 'dock',
which means standing trial for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, rings
ever truer with the decision of the International Committee of the Red Cross
issuing only its second ever in history "concern" regarding the actions of a
warring Nation [the first "concern" issued by the ICRC was in 1944 over the
Nazi German treatment of concentration camp detainees], and which we can
read as reported by the SwissInfo News Service in their article titled "ICRC
"concerned" over US anti-terrorism law", and which says:
"The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) expressed concern on
Thursday at the United States' tough new anti-terrorism law. The president
of Swiss-run humanitarian body, Jakob Kellenberger, said that there were
questions over its compliance with the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of
war."
To the second part of the USANORTH plan for the unsuspecting American
people, Conduct the Army-to-Army portion of the theater cooperation mission
with Canada and Mexico", we can read from the Council on Foreign Relations
report that first outlined the merger of the independent Nations of the
United States, Canada and Mexico into a North American Union, and which
says:
"Sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations in association with the
Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos
Internacionales.
North America is vulnerable on several fronts: the region faces terrorist
and criminal security threats, increased economic competition from abroad,
and uneven economic development at home. In response to these challenges, a
trinational, Independent Task Force on the Future of North America has
developed a roadmap to promote North American security and advance the
well-being of citizens of all three countries.
When the leaders of Canada, Mexico, and the United States met in Texas
recently they underscored the deep ties and shared principles of the three
countries. The Council-sponsored Task Force applauds the announced "Security
and Prosperity Partnership of North America," but proposes a more ambitious
vision of a new community by 2010 and specific recommendations on how to
achieve it."
Also not being understood by the American people are how their young
children are currently being trained to be administrators of this North
American Union, and as we can read as reported by the World Net Daily News
Service in their article titled "N[orth] American students trained for
'merger', and which says:
"In another example of the way the three nations of North America are being
drawn into a federation, or "merger," students from 10 universities in the
U.S., Mexico and Canada are participating annually in a simulated "model
Parliament."
Under the sponsorship of the Canadian based North American Forum on
Integration, students met in the Mexican Senate for five days in May in an
event dubbed "Triumvirate," with organizers declaring "A North American
Parliament is born." A similar event took place in the Canadian Senate in
2005.
The intentions of organizers are clear. "The creation of a North American
parliament, such as the one being simulated by these young people, should be
considered," explained Raymond Chretien, the president of the Triumvirate
and the former Canadian ambassador to both Mexico and the U.S. Participants
discuss draft bills on trade corridors, immigration, provisions of the North
American Free Trade Agreement and produce a daily newspaper called "The
TrilatHerald."
To those dwindling numbers of Americans aware of the total destruction of
their Nation, and way of life, ever harsher measures to destroy all dissent
were outlined to them this past week by their Military Leaders, and as we
can read as reported by these various sources:
As reported by the Reuters News Service in their October 17th article titled
"Web could be terror training camp: Chertoff", and which says, "Disaffected
people living in the United States may develop radical ideologies and
potentially violent skills over the Internet and that could present the next
major U.S. security threat, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael
Chertoff said on Monday. "We now have a capability of someone to radicalize
themselves over the Internet," Chertoff said on the sidelines of a meeting
of International Association of the Chiefs of Police."
As reported by the CNET News Service in their October 17th article titled
"FBI director wants ISPs to track users", and which says, "FBI Director
Robert Mueller on Tuesday called on Internet service providers to record
their customers' online activities, a move that anticipates a fierce debate
over privacy and law enforcement in Washington next year."
As reported by an American dissident writer, Chris Floyd, in his October
17th report titled "Sentimental Education: Academia Signs Up for Tracking
Down Dissent", and which says, "Why is the United States government spending
millions of dollars to track down critics of George W. Bush in the press?
And why have major American universities agreed to put this technology of
tyranny into the state's hands?
The Bush administration already has spyware devouring reams of private
information in every direction. It is now paying top universities millions
of dollars to refine this data into actionable intelligence - including the
automated discernment and tracking of dissent against administration
policies and criticism of the president. Bush has openly declared that he
has no intention of obeying privacy laws - or any other laws safeguarding
the Constitutional rights of American citizens - if he doesn't want to."
More interesting, perhaps, than the simultaneous flooding of the American
media this past week with 'frightening' reports on the 'dangers' of the
Internet by the US Military Leaders, was the sensationalist reporting
revolving around an American man posting on the Internet a hoax threat, and
which has resulted in his arrest, and as we can read as reported by the KWTX
News Service in their article titled "Store Clerk Arrested In Stadium Threat
Hoax", and which says:
"A Wisconsin grocery store clerk is under arrest on charges he's behind the
hoax that claimed there would be dirty bomb attacks during this weekend's
NFL games. Jake Brahm surrendered to federal authorities Friday morning, and
was due in a Milwaukee court later in the day. The US Attorney in Newark,
N.J., says Brahm is charged in a sealed criminal complaint."
Russian Intelligence reports on this American 'hoax incident', in our
opinion, have correctly stated that these events are a false flag operation
intended to bring the ever growing American dissident community to heel by
'reminding' them that even a 20-year-old store clerk is not beyond their
reach. We can rightly imagine the fear these events have caused among the
American dissidents as what they are experiencing now we have lived with our
entire lives.
To the greater of these issues, though, remains the fact that the total
destruction of America today has long been planned, and is even now in its
final stages. To the many warning signs put before these American people
there have also been many, and, perhaps, none more chilling then a simple
letter sent from a former US Congressman, Bill Hefner, to a constituent of
his in North Carolina written in 1997, and which says:
"Enclosed is the information you requested pertaining to the Army's policy
and guidance for establishing civilian inmate labor program and civilian
prison camps on Army installations.
This information has not yet been published (it is currently at the
printers), however, it has been funded, staffed, and does reflect current
Army policy. I hope you find this information useful."
As the storm clouds continue to gather over these once great American
people, one cannot wonder at their continued insistence to not look up, see
what is coming, and prepare.
© October 21, 2006 EU and US all rights reserved.
http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index956.htm
Monday, October 23, 2006
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Negroponte Comes to Canada
U.S. intelligence chief's cover blown in Ottawa
JEFF SALLOT
OTTAWA -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper met yesterday with John Negroponte, the U.S. director of national intelligence, at what was supposed to be a secret meeting to discuss security issues at a time when the two countries are trying to smooth troubled waters in the wake of the Maher Arar affair.
The unannounced meeting in Ottawa took place 11 days after Mr. Harper called President George W. Bush to say Canada was lodging a formal diplomatic protest about the deportation of Mr. Arar, a Canadian software engineer, from the United States to the Middle East, where he was tortured.
Canadian and U.S. officials tried to keep the meeting under wraps, but Mr. Negroponte's cover was blown when reporters spotted him and U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins being escorted to Mr. Harper's Parliament Hill office.
Also attending the meeting were Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Michael Wilson, Canada's ambassador to the United States.
Traditionally, visits by cabinet-rank U.S. officials are accompanied by a bit of public fanfare, including an advance announcement by Ottawa. But Mr. Harper's guarded style of government has been characterized by unpublicized federal cabinet meetings and an unannounced visit by the Prime Minister of Haiti. Mr. Harper's office issued a hastily written note about Mr. Negroponte's visit only after journalists began asking why Mr. Bush's top intelligence official was on Parliament Hill. The note, which mistakenly referred to the director of national intelligence as the director of national security, said Mr. Negroponte was making a courtesy call.
"Mr. Negroponte is here on a liaison visit to Canada, as part of a regular exchange regarding security issues between Canada and the U.S.," the note said. "This is an indication of how closely we work together."
The U.S. embassy said Mr. Negroponte was staying for dinner and "touching base" with Canadian officials.
Speaking with reporters on his way to the Prime Minister's Office, Mr. MacKay said he did not know exactly what was on the agenda for the meeting with Mr. Negroponte. "He's meeting with Stockwell Day. He's meeting, I believe, with the Prime Minister just as a courtesy."
The United States has not yet formally responded to Canada's diplomatic protest note on the Arar case, Mr. MacKay said. Mr. Wilson delivered the note to the State Department on Monday.
Last month, a federal commission of inquiry cleared Mr. Arar of any involvement with terrorism. The inquiry also said Washington likely relied on false and inflammatory intelligence reports from the RCMP in its decision to deport Mr. Arar in 2002.
JEFF SALLOT
OTTAWA -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper met yesterday with John Negroponte, the U.S. director of national intelligence, at what was supposed to be a secret meeting to discuss security issues at a time when the two countries are trying to smooth troubled waters in the wake of the Maher Arar affair.
The unannounced meeting in Ottawa took place 11 days after Mr. Harper called President George W. Bush to say Canada was lodging a formal diplomatic protest about the deportation of Mr. Arar, a Canadian software engineer, from the United States to the Middle East, where he was tortured.
Canadian and U.S. officials tried to keep the meeting under wraps, but Mr. Negroponte's cover was blown when reporters spotted him and U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins being escorted to Mr. Harper's Parliament Hill office.
Also attending the meeting were Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Michael Wilson, Canada's ambassador to the United States.
Traditionally, visits by cabinet-rank U.S. officials are accompanied by a bit of public fanfare, including an advance announcement by Ottawa. But Mr. Harper's guarded style of government has been characterized by unpublicized federal cabinet meetings and an unannounced visit by the Prime Minister of Haiti. Mr. Harper's office issued a hastily written note about Mr. Negroponte's visit only after journalists began asking why Mr. Bush's top intelligence official was on Parliament Hill. The note, which mistakenly referred to the director of national intelligence as the director of national security, said Mr. Negroponte was making a courtesy call.
"Mr. Negroponte is here on a liaison visit to Canada, as part of a regular exchange regarding security issues between Canada and the U.S.," the note said. "This is an indication of how closely we work together."
The U.S. embassy said Mr. Negroponte was staying for dinner and "touching base" with Canadian officials.
Speaking with reporters on his way to the Prime Minister's Office, Mr. MacKay said he did not know exactly what was on the agenda for the meeting with Mr. Negroponte. "He's meeting with Stockwell Day. He's meeting, I believe, with the Prime Minister just as a courtesy."
The United States has not yet formally responded to Canada's diplomatic protest note on the Arar case, Mr. MacKay said. Mr. Wilson delivered the note to the State Department on Monday.
Last month, a federal commission of inquiry cleared Mr. Arar of any involvement with terrorism. The inquiry also said Washington likely relied on false and inflammatory intelligence reports from the RCMP in its decision to deport Mr. Arar in 2002.
Canada's New Bush-Style Politics
By Richard Fricker
October 14, 2006
As an American journalist visiting my wife’s relatives in Canada, I’ve always been struck by how ardently the country’s political discourse focused on substance – the budget, health care, schools, roads – with little of the cheap theatrics and angry divisiveness of U.S. politics and punditry.
Reading and listening to the Canadian news media during those family trips could be a tad boring, but it also was touching, like remembering your earnest grade-school civics teacher lecturing about the wonders of the American democratic process.
But in my visit this past summer, I noticed that the tone of Canada suddenly had changed. There was a nastier edge to the commentary. There were not so subtle appeals to racism and xenophobia, references to Muslim neighborhoods in Quebec as “Quebecistan” and to Lebanese-Canadians as “Hezbocrats,” a play on the Muslim group Hezbollah.
To someone who has covered U.S. politics for three decades, there was a shock of recognition. Standing out starkly against the bland traditions of Canadian governance was the pugnacious ‘tude of American political combat, wedge issues pounded in with a zeal that put the goal of winning and holding power over everything else.
It was as if a virus that had long infected the people south of the border had overnight jumped containment and spread northward establishing itself in a new host population. But – as I began to study this new phenomenon – it became clear that this infection did not just accidentally break quarantine.
Rather, it was willfully injected into the Canadian body politic by conservative strategists and right-wing media moguls who had studied the modern American model and were seeking to replicate it.
Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper even brought in Republican advisers, such as political consultant Frank Luntz, to give pointers on how the ruling Conservative Party could become as dominant in Canada as the GOP is in the United States.
Canada had its version of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News in the Asper brothers and their CanWest Global Communications Corp., which owns the National Post, the Montreal Gazette and nine other Canadian newspapers, 25 television outlets and two radio stations.
It was the Montreal Gazette and the National Post that trumpeted the phrase “Quebecistan” after demonstrators in Ottawa and Montreal protested Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon in summer 2006.
Columnist Don MacPherson equated those protests, where some demonstrators waved Hezbollah flags, with pro-terrorism. “It’s finally becoming respectable again to express support for terrorists,” MacPherson wrote on Aug. 8, 2006, in the Montreal Gazette.
Meanwhile, CanWest’s National Post offered up a Canadian version of Ann Coulter in columnist Barbara Kay.
In one of Kay’s columns, she noted that 50,000 Lebanese-Canadians lived in Montreal and added, “We can expect those numbers to swell as Hezbollah-supporting residents of southern Lebanon cash in on their Canadian citizenship and flee to safety.”
Kay denounced Quebec as “the most anti-Israel of the provinces and therefore the most vulnerable to tolerance for Islamist” causes.
“The word would go out to the Islamophere that Quebec was the Londonistan,” Kay wrote. “It won’t if our political class takes its cues from principled Stephen Harper rather than shameless Quebec politicians who led the pro-terrorist rally.”
‘Clone de Bush’
Harper, Canada’s photogenic 47-year-old prime minister, has emerged as the face of modern Canadian conservatism much the way George W. Bush has come to personify right-wing politics in the United States.
Born in Toronto in 1959, Harper moved west to Alberta in 1978 to work in the petroleum industry. Similarly, Bush cut his teeth as a Texas oilman, albeit a failed one.
Much as that oilfield experience shaped Bush’s persona and Texas money fueled the American Right, so too did Alberta and its oil industry influence the political development of Harper and the emergence of modern Canadian conservatism.
Harper earned a bachelor’s degree and his masters in economics from the University of Calgary. By 1985, then in his mid-20s, he had turned to politics, gaining recognition as a bright operative and landing a job as chief aide to a Tory member of Parliament named Jim Hawkes.
But Harper grew disenchanted with the compromising style of Canada’s Tories who – like Prime Minister Brian Mulroney – often worked collaboratively with other political parties in Ottawa to maintain social programs for Canadians. Harper concluded that Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative Party was too liberal, so he quit it in 1986.
At age 28, Harper was recruited by Preston Manning, the founder of Canada’s Reform Party, and became the party’s chief political officer. Harper ran for the House of Commons against his old mentor, Hawkes, in 1988, losing badly.
But the defeat did not dampen Harper’s political ambitions. He continued to puzzle over how a revamped conservative movement might shake up Canadian politics and ultimately gain power.
For inspiration in building this new brand of Canadian conservatism, Harper looked to Washington, where Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, was promoting a combative style designed to shatter the longtime Democratic grip on the U.S. House of Representatives. In Gingrich’s view, Republicans had to replace cooperation with confrontation.
In 1993, Harper ran for the House of Commons again, this time aided by a tactic pioneered by U.S. conservatives – having ostensibly independent organizations tear down one’s opponent with large sums of money outside the legal limits on campaign spending.
In this case, a group called the National Citizens Coalition went on the offensive against MP Hawkes, undermining his political support enough so that Harper was able to win the seat in Calgary West.
Harper was learning, too, from conservative spinmeister Frank Luntz, who helped Gingrich draft the “Contract With America,” which became the centerpiece of the Republican victory in the U.S. Congress in 1994. Luntz was a specialist at the take-no-prisoners-style of politics that envisioned permanent conservative control of Washington.
Harper picked up other tips from Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove, such as the importance of transforming the Christian evangelical movement into an activist base for conservative politics.
Harper’s brash conservatism grated on the more populist positions of Manning’s Reform Party, which once rebuked Harper for not standing with the party’s internal policies. For his part, Harper considered Manning too inclined to compromise.
In January 1997, Harper resigned his Reform Party seat in Parliament and went to work as vice president of the National Citizens Coalition, the outside organization that had helped Harper defeat Hawkes in 1993.
Harper soon rose to be the coalition’s president and served notice that the group would become a vehicle for smashing Canada’s political status quo.
In a speech in the United States to a major conservative organization, the Council for National Policy, Harper declared that “Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worse sense of the term, and very proud of it.”
Harper also mocked Canadians as complacent and ill-informed. “If you’re like most Americans, you know almost nothing except for your own country,” he told his CNP audience. “Which makes you probably knowledgeable about one more country than most Canadians.”
Back in Canada, Harper also began ratcheting up the political rhetoric, co-authoring an article referring to Canada’s Liberal government as a “benign dictatorship” held together by incompetence. The article also sought conservative unity and praised the hard-edged right-wing commentary in media outlets owned by mogul Conrad Black.
Harper cobbled together a platform of issues that exploited Canada’s latent social, cultural and economic resentments. He proposed raising the age of sexual consent, permitting more corporal punishment of children, initiating a program similar to school vouchers, and resisting issues that favored French-speaking Quebec.
As this Americanized version of Canadian conservatism took shape, Harper was cribbing, too, from another rising U.S. politician, George W. Bush. Harper said his goal was to tap into a political base “similar to what George Bush tapped.”
New Party
Amid a surge of anti-minority sentiments, Harper merged his operations at the Canadian Conservative Alliance with those of Peter MacKay, the last leader of the Progressive Conservative Party. In 2003, they officially formed the Conservative Party of Canada.
Their timing was perfect. As with the congressional Democrats in the United States a decade earlier, the Canadian Liberal Party found itself beset with corruption allegations and suffering from growing public resentment about high taxes.
In contrast to these tainted Liberals was the fresh-faced Harper at the head of a shiny new movement with powerful backing from right-wing interest groups, neoconservative media outlets and stirred-up social conservatives.
Though Conrad Black’s media empire had collapsed in a financial scandal, some of his properties, such as the National Post, were snapped up by CanWest Global, which shared Black’s staunchly pro-Israeli stance on Middle East affairs.
Harper also brought into play evangelical Protestants, through his membership in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which opposed gay rights, was staunchly anti-abortion and targeted North Africa’s Muslims for conversion to Christianity.
In 2004, Harper engineered a political breakthrough for the Conservatives in Ontario, boosting their standing in the House of Commons by 25 seats.
This new conservative coalition flexed its muscles again in January 2006, denying the Liberals control of Parliament by claiming 124 seats (out of 308) and putting Harper in position to piece together a coalition government, which he did.
Harper was sworn in as Canada’s new prime minister on Feb. 6, 2006, consolidating right-wing political power across the North American continent. President Bush finally had a likeminded Canadian leader who also shared Washington’s neoconservative doctrine for confronting the Islamic world.
The tone of Canadian political discourse has followed this shift in the government, especially with CanWest media outlets ready to trumpet news that puts the Islamic world in the worst possible light.
For instance, on May 19, 2006, the National Post published a front-page article by expatriate Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, claiming that Iran was enacting legislation that would require color-coded “badges” for Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians.
“Jews would be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes while Christians will be assigned the colour red” and Zoroastrians would wear blue, Taheri reported in the article distributed by Benador Associates, a public relations firm representing neoconservative writers, such as Michael Ledeen and Richard Perle.
With its obvious Holocaust allusion, Taheri’s story flashed around the world, picked up by the New York Post, Rush Limbaugh and the powerful U.S.-Israeli lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Harper and Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard, who was visiting Canada, joined in denouncing Iran for the purported badge legislation.
However, Taheri’s article turned out to be untrue. The Iranian legislation contained nothing about making religious minorities wear colored badges. After the facts were challenged, the National Post retracted the story and later published an apology.
Media Confrontation
In June 2006, Harper applied another lesson from the U.S. Republican playbook: Even with a supportive right-wing news media protecting your flanks, still pick a fight with the rest of the national news media.
Claiming to be victimized by hostile questions from Parliament Hill reporters, Harper announced that he would favor regional news outlets with interviews, while shunning the supposedly “elitist” national press corps.
“I have trouble believing that a Liberal prime minister would have this problem, but the press gallery at the leadership level has taken an anti-Conservative view,” Harper said, ignoring the role the same journalists had played in highlighting Liberal Party corruption which cleared the way for the Conservative Party victory.
Harper mandated that reporters sign up in advance to ask questions at news conferences and then weeded out journalists considered too liberal, according to Yves Malo, president of the press corps gallery.
Harper’s staff “made it very clear they were taking their cue from the White House,” Malo told me. “They were always telling us how things were done in Washington. The first time we resisted we were called ‘liberals.’ Now, we’re called ‘liberal ideologues.’”
Much as Bush speaks almost exclusively before friendly, well-screened audiences, Harper tends to grant exclusive interviews to CanWest media outlets, Malo said.
Despite the lingering embarrassment over the bogus “colored badge” story, CanWest’s neoconservative attitudes resurfaced in July 2006 when war broke out between Israel and Lebanon.
As Israeli bombers inflicted heavy civilian casualties in Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers, Lebanese-Canadians staged protests demanding that Israel cease its attacks.
Montreal Gazette columnist MacPherson chastised Quebec politicians who attended the rally for not condemning Hezbollah and for not discouraging Hezbollah sympathizers from participating. National Post writer Kay termed the rally “virulently anti-Israel.”
Launched from CanWest’s newspapers, the words “Quebecistan” and “Hezbocrats” were suddenly buzzing through Canada’s public debate.
While this kind of divisive rhetoric is common in the United States and is even encouraged as a way to energize the political base, it marked an escalation of political stridency for Canada.
Some of that fury seems to have subsided since a ceasefire took hold between Lebanon and Israel in late summer. But the larger question remains whether Harper will succeed in transforming Canada into a more belligerent and bellicose nation, much as Bush has done in the United States.
For generations, Canada has prided itself on its well-liked image around the world. It is a nation renowned for sending peacekeepers abroad not occupying armies. Aside from ice hockey and occasional over-indulgence in beer drinking, Canadians are known for their civility, not combativeness.
There is also the possibility that having seen the consequences of right-wing governance in the United States, Canadians will recoil at the thought of losing their pleasant country with its national health insurance and fairly comfortable lifestyle, in favor of the more cut-throat economic system south of the border.
Some analysts suspect, too, that the Bush connection could ultimately hurt Harper, who is sometimes referred to as “un clone de Bush.” With Canadian troops dying in Afghanistan and violence rising in the Middle East, Harper’s coziness with Bush may become a liability as it has been for British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Over the past several months, Harper has seen his popularity decline and the backing of his coalition partners erode. It remains to be seen if Harper’s American-style conservatism can survive – let alone thrive – in Canada.
The Liberal Party – after selecting new leadership in December – is expected to force a new round of elections early in 2007. That election may well turn out to be a test of whether the American brand of conservatism has a future as a political export.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/101306c.html
Three Strikes and Stephen Harper is Out
PEJ News - C. L. Cook - Though there are myriad reasons Canadians should have a quick end to the public service career of Mr. Harper - his personality, arrogant disregard of both Canadian tradition and sensibilities, and his cosy relationship with the Republican regime to the south leap immediately to mind - three recent “initiatives” are enough to sink the bastardized, remnant Conservative Party, and in so doing turn back too the latest and greatest threat to her sovereign survival Canada has faced yet in four centuries of resistance to American expansionist designs.
www.PEJ.org
Three Strikes and Stephen Harper is Out
C. L. Cook
PEJ News
October 19, 2006
Outside Alberta’s Calgary School, scholars of Canadian history are well aware of Washington’s repeated attempts to consolidate control of the North American continent, fulfilling the original intent of the (in)famous Monroe Doctrine. Canadian prairie farmer, two-time contender for the leadership of the pre-Harper Conservatives, and author of a book chronicling those expansionist efforts, David Orchard records four military invasions of the country, and the constant machinations against all spheres of Canadian life emanating from south of the 49th. This is not the stuff of fantasy, but historical fact.
Orchard was painfully aware of Harper’s Yankee tendencies in matters of economy and social engineering, and made as a condition of ceding his Tory leadership challenge Peter MacKay’s promise he would not allow political congress between Canada’s founding Conservatives and Harper’s hard right Alliance party. Orchard warned all who would listen, but ultimately, his was a voice left largely in the wilderness by an over-concentrated, and disinterested Canadian media. Of course, MacKay broke his promise immediately, enjoining Harper’s Alliance in exchange for a cabinet post and the nebulous illusion Britain’s Mr. Brown knows well; a tacit promise of eventually proving heir apparent to the party’s leadership.
What worried David Orchard’s sleep was soon made real by Harper following his January minority assumption to Sussex Drive; in the scant months since, Stephen Harper has managed to make Canada wholly unrecognizable to many of its citizens; eviscerating vital societal determinants that distinguish the country’s independence, Harper has accepted whole cloth the Republic philosophy ruling, and ruining, the United States these half-dozen horrible years past. In foreign policy, law and order, and on the environment, Ottawa now mirrors Washington perfectly. Like an echo, Harper has, on the strength of an immensely unpopular minority administration, taken it upon himself to “harmonize” the country’s judiciary, military and environmental ethos with the U.S., ostensibly determining an end to Canada’s social democratic experiment.
Striking at the very pillars of the nation, Harper has accelerated efforts begun by his Liberal predecessors to redefine Canada’s foreign policy, not only making it a more conspicuous actor within George W. Bush’s so-named Global War on Terror, but also maintaining a muscular approach in Haitian affairs. Worse, Harper shamelessly sallied forth, pre-empting our good neighbour south, to the front of the line of those nations that would support Israel’s siege and destroy campaign against the civilian inmates of Prison Camp Palestine. He followed that disgrace with equal disdain for justice and human rights, chiming his support for the rogue Jewish State’s obliteration of its neighbour Lebanon this summer. In that instance, Ottawa disregards entirely the criminality of Israel and its masters in Washington, even if it means, as was witnessed in Lebanon, leaving the wanton murder of Canadian citizens unchallenged.
With Afghanistan coming daily to look more and more like Canada’s “Iraq,” combined with Canadian’s long wariness of American imperial aims on this continent and abroad, Stephen Harper is set to inherit the collective backlash of more than a half-decade of wars and occupations just gone by and still going nowhere. Should there be another election, an early winter election, a second winter election in a row, Stephen Harper will find he and his band of diminutive Bushist Republicans vying for re-election on a war and security platform, hoping to sell Canadians on the American prescription that to any but the most determinedly uninformed is clearly a recipe for disaster. And this for Harper, already a little short of originality in his public pronouncements, means standing in front of the Canadian public, as the flagged-coffin ceremonies carry on in the background, repeating word for word George W. Bush’s worn scripts, carefully including all the right “stay the course” platitudes and other too-familiar banalities.
Despite this, Harper seems intent on forcing an early December election, perhaps hoping to shelter the campaign in the shadows of the looming U.S. mid-term elections. The tool to bring this about is a little piece of legislation, introduced in the house, that is so odious the opposition can’t allow it to pass into law. Should Harper take his Clean Air Act to the floor for a vote the opposition must call for a vote of non-confidence, and he and his neophyte colleagues will be finished.
Admitting the political course charted from the Potomac is a proven disaster being something yet beyond imagining in Harper’s Ottawa circles (that obvious and inevitable acceptance pending at some future time) Stephen “Steve” Harper’s enthusiasm for Canada’s engagement in more wars and occupations as directed remains exuberant. As does his ardour for other made in America policies.
Perhaps reflecting his political initiation in Alberta, Harper’s Conservatives are proving as environmentally regressive as their Texan brethren. Under Harper, the new government of Canada has dithered on the old government’s Kyoto commitments, and now seems ready to ditch it entirely. This week, Harper’s presentation of the Clean Air Act confirms it, as with its namesake legislation in the United States, does nothing to address Canada’s contribution to global climate heating, or diminish our massive, and growing levels of CO2 gas emissions. Environmental critics, most notable the prestigious David Suzuki Foundation, blast the act as being, at best, little more than a stalling tactic meant to keep meaningful environmental action on the backburner for another five years. It is in fact legislation so blatantly hypocritical, and ineffectual, parties hoping to bolster their green credentials cannot afford to hold their collective nose and allow it passage.
This is Harper’s gamble: Ram through an energy sector-friendly, anti-environmental package now, while the rival Liberal’s are consumed in a leadership contest that’s becoming nastier by the day, daring them to force an environmental election. But, there’s more smelling about Stephen Harper’s project than just a bad air act.
While Canadians face the prospect of being treated to scientific side-show of an election, the third strike against the nation’s integrity is unfolding in the background. The transformation of Canada’s judiciary has carried on, with little comment from either the press, or the opposition. Most worryingly is the Conservative’s proposed adoption of a “three strike” provision, as in America, that allows endless incarceration for crimes that would otherwise not merit a life sentence. The enactment of three strike laws in the United States has proven a large contributor to that incarceration-crazy country’s burgeoning prison/slave population. Stephen Harper will argue from the stump that Canada needs to import the more draconian American penal measures, precepts and practice to keep us safe. This despite crime trends turning in the opposite direction. It’s an approach guaranteed to balloon the prison system, filling the jails with B.C. potheads, and indigent panhandlers. The subsequently overburdened system will doubtless require privatization.
Just this week past, George W. Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act, (HR 6616) putting the finishing touch on the disintegration of the rule of law that led the West out of the dark age, birthing first the Enlightenment, then the modern democratic state. The Act legalizes everything done contrary to both U.S. and international law by this administration going back to September 11, 2001, and O.K.’s all it may yet do. It is, in effect the final flourish, a stroking into law the lawlessness practiced by this administration from its beginnings.
Stephen Harper will this winter be made to defend his decisions to repeat America’s crime and punishment failures, ally with the torturers of Maher Arar (and uncounted others), and further enjoin the slaughter of innocents in Afghanistan, while turning a blind eye to the atrocities practiced by his friends in Israel, Britain, Australia, and the of course, America. And, should Canada’s supine pressmen find more nerve than so far demonstrated, Stephen, the enthusiastic defender of the abandonment of the ancient right of Habeas Corpus, and all else undone by Washington, must too answer for his determination to abandon the environment in favour of corporate oligarchs.
Should Harper's fatally flawed "Clean Air Act" bill be presented for a vote in the house, Mr. Harper will certainly follow the short-lived administration of Joe Clark, while gaining a degree of contempt it took Brian Mulroney a decade to nurture.
Chris Cook is a contributing editor to PEJ News, host of the weekly public affairs program, Gorilla Radio, and associate editor for the Atlantic Free Press. You can check out the GR Blog here.
additional source materials:
Globe re: negroponte in Canada:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/
LAC.20061018.NEGROPONTE18/TPStory/National
Globe re: bad air
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/
TPStory/LAC/20061011/IBBITSON11/Columnists/
Columnist?author=John+Ibbitson
Torstar Chantal 3
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?
pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&col=
968350116795&c=Article&cid=
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Sunday, October 15, 2006
Climbing Rates Shock Private Elec Customers
Competitive Era Fails to Shrink Electric Bills
New York Times
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Published: October 15, 2006
A decade after competition was introduced in their industries,
long-distance phone rates had fallen by half, air fares by more than a
fourth and trucking rates by a fourth. But a decade after the federal
government opened the business of generating electricity to competition,
the market has produced no such decline.
Instead, more rate increase requests are pending now than ever before,
said Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, the
association for the investor-owned utilities that provide about 60
percent of the nation’s power. The investor-owned electric utility
industry published a June report entitled “Why Are Electricity Prices
Increasing?”
About 40 percent of all electricity customers — those in 23 states and
the District of Columbia where new competition was approved — mostly
paid modestly lower prices over the past decade. But those savings were
primarily because states, which continue to have some rate-setting
power, imposed cuts, freezes and caps at the behest of consumer groups
that wanted to insulate customers from any initial price swings.
The last of those rate protections expire next year, and the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission and other federal agencies warn in a draft
report to Congress that “customers may experience rate shock” as
utilities seek to make up for revenue they did not collect during the
period of artificially reduced prices and to cover higher costs of fuel.
They warned that “this rate shock can create public pressure” to turn
back from electricity prices set by the market to prices set by
government regulators.
The disappointing results stem in good part from the fact that a
genuinely competitive market for electricity production has not developed.
Concerned about rising prices, California and five other states have
suspended or delayed transition to the competitive system.
And voters around two California cities, Sacramento and Davis, will
decide next month whether to replace investor-owned utilities with
municipal power in hopes of lowering rates. Drives are under way to
expand public power in Massachusetts. In Portland, Ore., the city
council tried and failed to buy the local utility company.
Electric customers in other states are facing rude surprises.
In Baltimore, an expected 72 percent rate increase in electricity prices
has aroused so much protest that the state legislature met in special
session, where it arranged to phase in the higher costs over several
years. In Illinois, rates are about to rise as much as 55 percent.
The three New York area states opened their electricity markets to
competition, with different results.
In Connecticut, residential electric rates rose up to 27 percent last
year to an average of $128 a month, and are expected to go up as much as
50 percent more in January.
In New Jersey, rates rose up to 13 percent this year, and are poised to
go much higher.
New York residential customers, by contrast, paid an inflation-adjusted
average of 16 percent less in 2004 than in 1996, a state report said. It
is not known how much of that is attributable to government-ordered rate
cuts, but the state benefited from huge increases in power generated by
its nuclear plants and by buying power from New England plants that,
starting next year, may have less electricity to sell to New York.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and five other agencies, in the
draft of the report to Congress, are unable to specify any overall
savings. “It has been difficult,” the report states, “to determine
whether retail prices” in the states that opened to competition “are
higher or lower than they otherwise would have been” under the old system.
Joseph T. Kelliher, the commission chairman, said Friday that eventually
“market discipline will deliver the best prices” and noted that every
administration and Congress since 1978 had pushed the industry toward
competition. He added that the commission recognized a need for
“constant reform of the rules.”
Under the old system, regulated utilities generated electricity and
distributed it to customers. Under the new system, many regulated
utilities only deliver power, which they buy from competing producers
whose prices are not regulated. For example, Consolidated Edison, which
serves the New York City area, once produced almost all the power it
delivered; now it must buy virtually all its electricity from companies
that bought its power plants and from other independent generators.
The goal is for producers to compete to offer electricity at the lowest
price, savings customers money.
Independent power producers, free-market economists and the Clinton
Administration cheered in 1996 when the federal government allowed
states to adopt the new system. The new rules “will benefit the industry
and consumers to the tune of billions of dollars every year,” Elizabeth
A. Moler, then chairwoman of FERC, said at the time. She said the new
rules would “accelerate competition and bring lower prices and more
choices to energy customers.”
But that has not happened. A truly competitive market has never
developed, and, in most areas, the number of power producers is small.
In New Jersey, for example, only six companies produce power, and not
all of them sell to every utility.
Some utilities have decided to buy electricity not from the cheapest
supplier but from one owned by a sister to the utility company, even if
that electricity is more expensive. That has been the case in Ohio.
And if electricity is needed from more than one producer, utilities pay
each one the highest price accepted in the bidding, not the lowest. This
one-price system, adopted by the industry and approved by the federal
government, is intended to encourage investment in new power plants,
which are costlier than older ones.
But critics say that, as in California five years ago in a scandal that
enveloped Enron, the auction system can be manipulated to drive up
prices, with the increases passed on to customers. What is more,
companies that produce electricity can withhold it or limit production
even when demand is at its highest, lifting prices. This happened in
California, and the federal commission has found that it occurred in a
few more instances since then. Critics say that more subtle techniques
to reduce the supply of power are common and that the commission shows
little interest in investigating.
Bryan Lee, a FERC spokesman, said complaints of manipulation are
investigated, but only last year did Congress give the commission the
legal tools to punish manipulators.
Under the new system there have been some big winners — including
Goldman Sachs and the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm — that
figured out that there were huge profits to be made in one area of the
new system.
Such investors have in some cases resold power plants they just bought,
making a large profit. In other cases, investors have bought power
plants from the utilities at what proved to be bargain prices, then sold
the electricity back at much higher prices than it would have cost the
utility to generate the electricity.
Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, said the
supposedly competitive market has been “a complete failure and colossal
waste of time and money.”
He asked the federal commission to revoke competitive pricing in his
state, but the commission dismissed the complaint last Wednesday, saying
the state had not proved its case.
Advocates of moving to the new system say that, in time, the discipline
of the competitive market will mean the best possible prices for
customers. Alfred E. Kahn, the Cornell University economist who led the
fight to deregulate airlines and who, as New York’s chief utility
regulator in the 1970’s, nudged electric utilities toward the new
system, said that he was not troubled by the uneven results so far.
“Change,” Professor Kahn said, “is always messy.”
But some advocates of introducing competition to the electric industry
have soured on the idea. They include the Cato Institute, a leading
promoter of libertarian thought that favors the least possible
regulation and that concluded earlier this year that government and
electric utilities have made such hash of the new system that the whole
effort should be scrapped.
“We recommend total abandonment of restructuring,” Cato said. If the
public rejects a greater embrace of markets, Cato wrote, the next best
choice would be a “return to an updated version of the old” system.
The conflicting results among the many studies of electric prices stand
in contrast to the sharp, unambiguous drops in the prices of telephone
calls, air travel and trucking.
One study by the utility economist Mark L. Fagan, a senior fellow at the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a consultant to various
businesses who favors a competitive system, found that the new system
often produces better results. He found that in 12 of 18 states that
restructured, prices were lower for industrial customers than they would
have been under the old system. But he also found that prices were
somewhat lower than his model predicted in seven of 27 states that did
not open to competition.
In Virginia, a state that did not move to the new system, a report last
month by the agency that regulates utilities found “no discernible
benefit” to customers in the 16 states that had gone the farthest and
warned that electricity prices in those states “may actually be
increasing faster than for customers in states that did not restructure.”
And Professor Jay Apt, a former astronaut who runs the electricity study
center at Carnegie-Mellon University, found that savings from
introducing competition to sales of electricity to large industrial
customers “are so small that they are not meaningful.”
Regardless of the debate over the effectiveness of the new system,
electricity prices are expected to rise in the next few years for
several reasons apart from any rise in the price of coal, natural gas,
oil, uranium and other fuels.
A study issued in June by the Edison Foundation, which represents
investor-owned utilities concluded that utilities would have to raise
rates to upgrade local distribution systems and to finance long-distance
transmission lines, as well as for new power plants. The study found
that utility profit margins had thinned and financial strength had
weakened. It called for relief in the form of higher rates.
New York Times
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
Published: October 15, 2006
A decade after competition was introduced in their industries,
long-distance phone rates had fallen by half, air fares by more than a
fourth and trucking rates by a fourth. But a decade after the federal
government opened the business of generating electricity to competition,
the market has produced no such decline.
Instead, more rate increase requests are pending now than ever before,
said Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, the
association for the investor-owned utilities that provide about 60
percent of the nation’s power. The investor-owned electric utility
industry published a June report entitled “Why Are Electricity Prices
Increasing?”
About 40 percent of all electricity customers — those in 23 states and
the District of Columbia where new competition was approved — mostly
paid modestly lower prices over the past decade. But those savings were
primarily because states, which continue to have some rate-setting
power, imposed cuts, freezes and caps at the behest of consumer groups
that wanted to insulate customers from any initial price swings.
The last of those rate protections expire next year, and the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission and other federal agencies warn in a draft
report to Congress that “customers may experience rate shock” as
utilities seek to make up for revenue they did not collect during the
period of artificially reduced prices and to cover higher costs of fuel.
They warned that “this rate shock can create public pressure” to turn
back from electricity prices set by the market to prices set by
government regulators.
The disappointing results stem in good part from the fact that a
genuinely competitive market for electricity production has not developed.
Concerned about rising prices, California and five other states have
suspended or delayed transition to the competitive system.
And voters around two California cities, Sacramento and Davis, will
decide next month whether to replace investor-owned utilities with
municipal power in hopes of lowering rates. Drives are under way to
expand public power in Massachusetts. In Portland, Ore., the city
council tried and failed to buy the local utility company.
Electric customers in other states are facing rude surprises.
In Baltimore, an expected 72 percent rate increase in electricity prices
has aroused so much protest that the state legislature met in special
session, where it arranged to phase in the higher costs over several
years. In Illinois, rates are about to rise as much as 55 percent.
The three New York area states opened their electricity markets to
competition, with different results.
In Connecticut, residential electric rates rose up to 27 percent last
year to an average of $128 a month, and are expected to go up as much as
50 percent more in January.
In New Jersey, rates rose up to 13 percent this year, and are poised to
go much higher.
New York residential customers, by contrast, paid an inflation-adjusted
average of 16 percent less in 2004 than in 1996, a state report said. It
is not known how much of that is attributable to government-ordered rate
cuts, but the state benefited from huge increases in power generated by
its nuclear plants and by buying power from New England plants that,
starting next year, may have less electricity to sell to New York.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and five other agencies, in the
draft of the report to Congress, are unable to specify any overall
savings. “It has been difficult,” the report states, “to determine
whether retail prices” in the states that opened to competition “are
higher or lower than they otherwise would have been” under the old system.
Joseph T. Kelliher, the commission chairman, said Friday that eventually
“market discipline will deliver the best prices” and noted that every
administration and Congress since 1978 had pushed the industry toward
competition. He added that the commission recognized a need for
“constant reform of the rules.”
Under the old system, regulated utilities generated electricity and
distributed it to customers. Under the new system, many regulated
utilities only deliver power, which they buy from competing producers
whose prices are not regulated. For example, Consolidated Edison, which
serves the New York City area, once produced almost all the power it
delivered; now it must buy virtually all its electricity from companies
that bought its power plants and from other independent generators.
The goal is for producers to compete to offer electricity at the lowest
price, savings customers money.
Independent power producers, free-market economists and the Clinton
Administration cheered in 1996 when the federal government allowed
states to adopt the new system. The new rules “will benefit the industry
and consumers to the tune of billions of dollars every year,” Elizabeth
A. Moler, then chairwoman of FERC, said at the time. She said the new
rules would “accelerate competition and bring lower prices and more
choices to energy customers.”
But that has not happened. A truly competitive market has never
developed, and, in most areas, the number of power producers is small.
In New Jersey, for example, only six companies produce power, and not
all of them sell to every utility.
Some utilities have decided to buy electricity not from the cheapest
supplier but from one owned by a sister to the utility company, even if
that electricity is more expensive. That has been the case in Ohio.
And if electricity is needed from more than one producer, utilities pay
each one the highest price accepted in the bidding, not the lowest. This
one-price system, adopted by the industry and approved by the federal
government, is intended to encourage investment in new power plants,
which are costlier than older ones.
But critics say that, as in California five years ago in a scandal that
enveloped Enron, the auction system can be manipulated to drive up
prices, with the increases passed on to customers. What is more,
companies that produce electricity can withhold it or limit production
even when demand is at its highest, lifting prices. This happened in
California, and the federal commission has found that it occurred in a
few more instances since then. Critics say that more subtle techniques
to reduce the supply of power are common and that the commission shows
little interest in investigating.
Bryan Lee, a FERC spokesman, said complaints of manipulation are
investigated, but only last year did Congress give the commission the
legal tools to punish manipulators.
Under the new system there have been some big winners — including
Goldman Sachs and the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm — that
figured out that there were huge profits to be made in one area of the
new system.
Such investors have in some cases resold power plants they just bought,
making a large profit. In other cases, investors have bought power
plants from the utilities at what proved to be bargain prices, then sold
the electricity back at much higher prices than it would have cost the
utility to generate the electricity.
Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, said the
supposedly competitive market has been “a complete failure and colossal
waste of time and money.”
He asked the federal commission to revoke competitive pricing in his
state, but the commission dismissed the complaint last Wednesday, saying
the state had not proved its case.
Advocates of moving to the new system say that, in time, the discipline
of the competitive market will mean the best possible prices for
customers. Alfred E. Kahn, the Cornell University economist who led the
fight to deregulate airlines and who, as New York’s chief utility
regulator in the 1970’s, nudged electric utilities toward the new
system, said that he was not troubled by the uneven results so far.
“Change,” Professor Kahn said, “is always messy.”
But some advocates of introducing competition to the electric industry
have soured on the idea. They include the Cato Institute, a leading
promoter of libertarian thought that favors the least possible
regulation and that concluded earlier this year that government and
electric utilities have made such hash of the new system that the whole
effort should be scrapped.
“We recommend total abandonment of restructuring,” Cato said. If the
public rejects a greater embrace of markets, Cato wrote, the next best
choice would be a “return to an updated version of the old” system.
The conflicting results among the many studies of electric prices stand
in contrast to the sharp, unambiguous drops in the prices of telephone
calls, air travel and trucking.
One study by the utility economist Mark L. Fagan, a senior fellow at the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a consultant to various
businesses who favors a competitive system, found that the new system
often produces better results. He found that in 12 of 18 states that
restructured, prices were lower for industrial customers than they would
have been under the old system. But he also found that prices were
somewhat lower than his model predicted in seven of 27 states that did
not open to competition.
In Virginia, a state that did not move to the new system, a report last
month by the agency that regulates utilities found “no discernible
benefit” to customers in the 16 states that had gone the farthest and
warned that electricity prices in those states “may actually be
increasing faster than for customers in states that did not restructure.”
And Professor Jay Apt, a former astronaut who runs the electricity study
center at Carnegie-Mellon University, found that savings from
introducing competition to sales of electricity to large industrial
customers “are so small that they are not meaningful.”
Regardless of the debate over the effectiveness of the new system,
electricity prices are expected to rise in the next few years for
several reasons apart from any rise in the price of coal, natural gas,
oil, uranium and other fuels.
A study issued in June by the Edison Foundation, which represents
investor-owned utilities concluded that utilities would have to raise
rates to upgrade local distribution systems and to finance long-distance
transmission lines, as well as for new power plants. The study found
that utility profit margins had thinned and financial strength had
weakened. It called for relief in the form of higher rates.
Gorilla Radio for Monday, October 16, 2006
PEJ News - C. L. Cook - This week on GR: Veteran for peace, Mike Ferner and reports from inside Iraq's Red Zone. Tom Rankin and the hijacking of B.C. Hydro. And; Janine Bandcroft brings us up to speed with all that's good to do in and around Victoria this week.
Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca He also serves as a contributing editor at the progressive web news site: http://www.pej.org. You can check out the GR blog at: http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com
www.PEJ.org
www.PEJ.org
Gorilla Radio for Monday,
October 16, 2006
C. L. Cook
PEJ Radio
Ocotober 15, 2006
Who could have known? Who could have foreseen the disaster Iraq would become before the missiles and bombs fell, before the shock and awe?
The millions marching in the streets of towns and cities across the world knew. Movie stars and lesser artists and political celebrities who were ridiculed and refused air time knew. The myriad organizations, both established and hurriedly cobbled against the impeding attack knew. And, the men who planned and executed this horror knew they would profit it.
More than three and a half years on, and the situation in Iraq is worse now than ever. Mike Ferner is an American peace activist, freelance journalist, and author of the book, ‘Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran for Peace Reports from Iraq.’
Mike Ferner in the first half.
And; Memories of the greatest rip-off perpetrated against the public weal of the young 21st have faded in light of George W. Bush’s titanic criminality since, but British Colombian’s forget the Enron electricity market scam at their peril.
Though George Bush’s ‘Kenny Boy’ Lay may rest in peace, while his lieutenants in the looting spree of California and beyond call cells home, privatized power is still with us, and as then it is casting a greedy eye to B.C.’s market and generating capacity.
Tom Rankin is one British Colombian not prepared to stand by as Premier Campbell and his privateers take the continent’s best run public utility out of the people’s hands.
Tom Rankin and stopping the Hydro hijacking in the second half.
And; Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of the groovy things to do in and around Victoria this week.
G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.
Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, M. Shahid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, David Barsamian, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, William Bowles, Vincent Bugliosi, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Juan Cole, David Cromwell, Murray Dobbin, Jon Elmer, Reese Erlich, Anthony Fenton, Jim Fetzer, Laura Flanders, Chris Floyd, Connie Fogal, Susan George, Stan Goff, Robert Greenwald, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Sander Hicks, Julia Butterfly Hill, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Diana Johnstone, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Anthony Lappe, Frances Moore Lappe, Jason Leopold, Jeff Leys, Dave Lindorff, Jim Lobe, Jennifer Loewenstein, Wayne Madsen, Stephen Marshall, Linda McQuaig, George Monbiot, Loretta Napoleoni, John Nichols, Kurt Nimmo, David Orchard, Greg Palast, Mike Palecek, Michael Parenti, Robert Parry, Kevin Pina, William Rivers Pitt, Justin Podur, Jack Random, Sheldon Rampton, Paul Craig Roberts, Paul de Rooij, John Ross, Danny Schechter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, Starhawk, Grant Wakefield, Paul Watson, Bernard Weiner, Mickey Z., Dave Zirin, and many others.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
George Butcher and James Baker: Next Course, Please
October 10, 2006 at 06:05:52
by Missy Comley Beattie
http://www.opednews.com
So James Baker III, co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan team strategizing about the situation in Iraq and U.S interests in the region, is attempting to create an exit plan for our troops that will leave George Bush without a bruise and smelling like the roses all those Iraqis were supposed to present us for liberating them. The distillate is that Bush's utopian plan for Iraq, a Xanadu of Starbuck's 'pleasure domes' and American fast-food restaurants is a catastrophic failure. Bush has McMuffin all over his face no matter how many horses or king's men try to wipe him clean.
James Baker is talking departure from "stay the course."
Meanwhile, the president has continued his Desperation Comeback Tour, crisscrossing the country to campaign for Republicans, stating at every stop that a vote for Democrats aids the enemy and appeases terrorists. His lyrics are the same and he is not harmonizing with the opinion of the public. In fact, George is off key and tone deaf.
Baker has just said, "...it's not appeasement to talk to your enemies," something George Bush has stubbornly refused to do during his performance as occupier of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. James Baker has already talked with leaders of Syria and Iran about the future of Iraq.
The task to clean up after Bush is tremendous. Baker is a Bush family loyalist with years of experience. In other words, he is your typical politico, reluctant to rock any boats before the vote. If he were a statesman, he'd say "troops out now." He knows that polls taken in Iraq show that most Iraqis want us out of their country and believe that violence will abate once the occupiers have left. Baker is also aware that al-Qaeda leaders regard U.S. presence in Iraq as their greatest recruitment tool. Further, Baker certainly has examined the National Intelligence Estimate report that terrorism has increased because of the invasion of Iraq. But most importantly, he sees the mounting casualties in Iraq. During the first nine days of October, the U.S. lost 33 troops. Two other coalition soldiers were killed. Hundreds of Iraqis have died this month. And there is this staggering truth: for every soldier killed, eight are wounded.
Is Baker losing sleep, asking himself as he tosses and turns, "What to do, what to do?" After all, if we continue to lose two or three young men and women a day while he protects Republicans who are on the ballot, a lot of doorbells will be ringing, followed by the military messengers' words, "We regret to inform you."
This has to be a dilemma for Baker. Allegiance to Bush who could be forced to exit the building if Democrats take back Congress in November or the huge weight on his conscience if, perhaps, 60 to 100 more troops die in Iraq? And if 800 more are wounded?
I know what I would do. But I'm just an ordinary citizen, not a member of the political elite.
Missy Beattie lives in New York City. She's written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. An outspoken critic of the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq, she's a member of Gold Star Families for Peace. She completed a novel last year, but since the death of her nephew, Marine Lance Cpl. Chase J. Comley, in Iraq on August 6,'05, she has been writing political articles.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/
opedne_missy_co_061010_george_butcher_and_j.htm
by Missy Comley Beattie
http://www.opednews.com
So James Baker III, co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan team strategizing about the situation in Iraq and U.S interests in the region, is attempting to create an exit plan for our troops that will leave George Bush without a bruise and smelling like the roses all those Iraqis were supposed to present us for liberating them. The distillate is that Bush's utopian plan for Iraq, a Xanadu of Starbuck's 'pleasure domes' and American fast-food restaurants is a catastrophic failure. Bush has McMuffin all over his face no matter how many horses or king's men try to wipe him clean.
James Baker is talking departure from "stay the course."
Meanwhile, the president has continued his Desperation Comeback Tour, crisscrossing the country to campaign for Republicans, stating at every stop that a vote for Democrats aids the enemy and appeases terrorists. His lyrics are the same and he is not harmonizing with the opinion of the public. In fact, George is off key and tone deaf.
Baker has just said, "...it's not appeasement to talk to your enemies," something George Bush has stubbornly refused to do during his performance as occupier of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. James Baker has already talked with leaders of Syria and Iran about the future of Iraq.
The task to clean up after Bush is tremendous. Baker is a Bush family loyalist with years of experience. In other words, he is your typical politico, reluctant to rock any boats before the vote. If he were a statesman, he'd say "troops out now." He knows that polls taken in Iraq show that most Iraqis want us out of their country and believe that violence will abate once the occupiers have left. Baker is also aware that al-Qaeda leaders regard U.S. presence in Iraq as their greatest recruitment tool. Further, Baker certainly has examined the National Intelligence Estimate report that terrorism has increased because of the invasion of Iraq. But most importantly, he sees the mounting casualties in Iraq. During the first nine days of October, the U.S. lost 33 troops. Two other coalition soldiers were killed. Hundreds of Iraqis have died this month. And there is this staggering truth: for every soldier killed, eight are wounded.
Is Baker losing sleep, asking himself as he tosses and turns, "What to do, what to do?" After all, if we continue to lose two or three young men and women a day while he protects Republicans who are on the ballot, a lot of doorbells will be ringing, followed by the military messengers' words, "We regret to inform you."
This has to be a dilemma for Baker. Allegiance to Bush who could be forced to exit the building if Democrats take back Congress in November or the huge weight on his conscience if, perhaps, 60 to 100 more troops die in Iraq? And if 800 more are wounded?
I know what I would do. But I'm just an ordinary citizen, not a member of the political elite.
Missy Beattie lives in New York City. She's written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. An outspoken critic of the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq, she's a member of Gold Star Families for Peace. She completed a novel last year, but since the death of her nephew, Marine Lance Cpl. Chase J. Comley, in Iraq on August 6,'05, she has been writing political articles.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/
opedne_missy_co_061010_george_butcher_and_j.htm
Monday, October 09, 2006
Weak blast hints at partial failure
Oct. 10, 2006. 01:00 AM
WILLIAM J. BROAD AND MARK MAZZETTI
NEW YORK TIMES
NEW YORK—The North Korean test appears to have been a nuclear detonation but was fairly small by conventional standards, and possibly a failure or a partial success, federal and private analysts said yesterday.
Throughout history, the first detonations of aspiring nuclear powers have tended to pack the destructive power of 10,000 to 60,000 tons — 10 to 60 kilotons — of conventional high explosives.
But the strength of the North Korean test appears to have been a small fraction of that: around a kiloton or less, according to scientists monitoring the global arrays of seismometers that detect faint trembles in the earth from distant blasts.
"It's pretty remarkable that such a small explosion was promptly apparent on seismometers all over the world," said Paul Richards, a seismologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. "The detection of this was really good. You can't hide these kinds of things, even very small tests."
A senior official in the administration of George W. Bush said he had learned through Asian contacts that the North Koreans had expected the detonation to have a force of about 4 kilotons. Because classified information was involved and there was lingering uncertainty, he would not let his name be used.
Philip Coyle, a former director of weapons testing at the Pentagon and former director of nuclear testing for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons design centre in California, said the small size of the test signalled the possibility of what might be described as a partial success or a partial failure.
"As first tests go, this is smaller and less successful than those of the other nuclear powers," he said.
Perhaps the North Koreans wanted to keep it small, he added. "But if it turns out to be a kiloton or less," Coyle said, "that would suggest that they hoped for more than that and didn't get it."
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov told the Itar-Tass news agency Moscow believed the strength of the blast to have been 5 to 15 kilotons. The basis for his claim was not immediately clear.
In Washington, intelligence officials said they were still in the early stages of evaluating the North Korean blast. But one said analysts had estimated its force at less than a kiloton.
It will probably take several days to determine with confidence if the explosion was in fact nuclear, one official said. He added sensors had not yet detected radiation leaking from the blast site, which could prove its atomic origin.
Federal and private experts said it seemed unlikely the North Koreans had faked an underground nuclear blast with a large pile of conventional high explosives. First, they said, the political risks involved would seem disproportionate.
More important, federal and private analysts said, the United States has long had spy satellites observing the North Korean site and has apparently found no signs of chemical explosives being unloaded.
"It's difficult to fake it when you know people are looking down on you," said Richards, the Columbia seismologist. "The execution of a chemical explosion would be hard to hide."
Xavier Clement of France's Atomic Energy Commission said the natural sound of the Earth, with its constant seismic activity of tectonic plates grinding together, complicates the task of trying to determine whether a smaller blast was caused by conventional explosives or a nuclear device.
He likened the problem to trying to "detect the violins or a flute in a symphony orchestra when you are playing the cymbals."
His agency estimated the North Korean blast at around 1 kiloton or less. For a nuclear device, that would be so weak that the French defence minister suggested "there could have been a failure" with the North Korean reported test.
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, or CTBTO, has about 200 stations worldwide designed for monitoring nuclear tests as part of what it hopes will become the world's most reliable source for such tests. But until the treaty comes into force, the data are not made public, only released to governments and vetted partners.
Seismic data comes in almost immediately, and is usually passed to governments within an hour or so. Their scientists must decide what the numbers and graphs mean.
"People have different way of cross cutting the data and interpreting them," said Lassina Zerbo, director of the International Data Centre at the CTBTO, based in Vienna, Austria.
While the North Korean explosion was small, potentially complicating monitoring efforts, sensors in South Korea were likely close enough to categorize it as nuclear, if that is what is was, said Friedrich Steinhaeusler, professor of physics at Salzburg University.
A nuclear blast also gives off a clear signature — a clear graph of peaks and curves — that differentiates it from other kinds of shocks, he added.
"We'll have the confirmation soon," he said.
WITH FILES FROM ASSOCIATED PRESS
WILLIAM J. BROAD AND MARK MAZZETTI
NEW YORK TIMES
NEW YORK—The North Korean test appears to have been a nuclear detonation but was fairly small by conventional standards, and possibly a failure or a partial success, federal and private analysts said yesterday.
Throughout history, the first detonations of aspiring nuclear powers have tended to pack the destructive power of 10,000 to 60,000 tons — 10 to 60 kilotons — of conventional high explosives.
But the strength of the North Korean test appears to have been a small fraction of that: around a kiloton or less, according to scientists monitoring the global arrays of seismometers that detect faint trembles in the earth from distant blasts.
"It's pretty remarkable that such a small explosion was promptly apparent on seismometers all over the world," said Paul Richards, a seismologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. "The detection of this was really good. You can't hide these kinds of things, even very small tests."
A senior official in the administration of George W. Bush said he had learned through Asian contacts that the North Koreans had expected the detonation to have a force of about 4 kilotons. Because classified information was involved and there was lingering uncertainty, he would not let his name be used.
Philip Coyle, a former director of weapons testing at the Pentagon and former director of nuclear testing for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons design centre in California, said the small size of the test signalled the possibility of what might be described as a partial success or a partial failure.
"As first tests go, this is smaller and less successful than those of the other nuclear powers," he said.
Perhaps the North Koreans wanted to keep it small, he added. "But if it turns out to be a kiloton or less," Coyle said, "that would suggest that they hoped for more than that and didn't get it."
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov told the Itar-Tass news agency Moscow believed the strength of the blast to have been 5 to 15 kilotons. The basis for his claim was not immediately clear.
In Washington, intelligence officials said they were still in the early stages of evaluating the North Korean blast. But one said analysts had estimated its force at less than a kiloton.
It will probably take several days to determine with confidence if the explosion was in fact nuclear, one official said. He added sensors had not yet detected radiation leaking from the blast site, which could prove its atomic origin.
Federal and private experts said it seemed unlikely the North Koreans had faked an underground nuclear blast with a large pile of conventional high explosives. First, they said, the political risks involved would seem disproportionate.
More important, federal and private analysts said, the United States has long had spy satellites observing the North Korean site and has apparently found no signs of chemical explosives being unloaded.
"It's difficult to fake it when you know people are looking down on you," said Richards, the Columbia seismologist. "The execution of a chemical explosion would be hard to hide."
Xavier Clement of France's Atomic Energy Commission said the natural sound of the Earth, with its constant seismic activity of tectonic plates grinding together, complicates the task of trying to determine whether a smaller blast was caused by conventional explosives or a nuclear device.
He likened the problem to trying to "detect the violins or a flute in a symphony orchestra when you are playing the cymbals."
His agency estimated the North Korean blast at around 1 kiloton or less. For a nuclear device, that would be so weak that the French defence minister suggested "there could have been a failure" with the North Korean reported test.
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, or CTBTO, has about 200 stations worldwide designed for monitoring nuclear tests as part of what it hopes will become the world's most reliable source for such tests. But until the treaty comes into force, the data are not made public, only released to governments and vetted partners.
Seismic data comes in almost immediately, and is usually passed to governments within an hour or so. Their scientists must decide what the numbers and graphs mean.
"People have different way of cross cutting the data and interpreting them," said Lassina Zerbo, director of the International Data Centre at the CTBTO, based in Vienna, Austria.
While the North Korean explosion was small, potentially complicating monitoring efforts, sensors in South Korea were likely close enough to categorize it as nuclear, if that is what is was, said Friedrich Steinhaeusler, professor of physics at Salzburg University.
A nuclear blast also gives off a clear signature — a clear graph of peaks and curves — that differentiates it from other kinds of shocks, he added.
"We'll have the confirmation soon," he said.
WITH FILES FROM ASSOCIATED PRESS
Gorilla Radio for Monday October 9, 2006
PEJ News - C. L. Cook - This week on GR: Journalist and author Jennifer Van Bergen and George W. Bush's disappearing of habeas corpus; film maker Kevin Pina and killing Haiti's "bandits"; and Janine Bandcroft bringing us up to speed with some of the good things to do in and around Victoria this week.
Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca He also serves as a contributing editor at the progressive web news site: http://www.pej.org.
Gorilla Radio for Monday
October 9, 2006
C. L. Cook
PEJ News
October 9, 2006
I’m a big fan of Robin Hood, the 12th century noble highwayman who, from his lurk in Sherwood Forest would prey upon the fatted courtiers of an evil, usurper king and bedevil acolytes of the pretender’s enablers. So it was with heavy heart I heard of the death of all Robin engendered, and the end to the dreams he and his merry men held for an end to the tyranny and despotism King John represented.
Under the Feudal system, the king, or his agents, could kick in the door of any peon’s hovel, drag the unfortunate away, and torture and imprison her forever without charge, or trial. Or, they could simply kill her outright. Neither she nor her family had legal recourse, and any raising objection could expect the same treatment.
With the passing recently of the Military Commissions Act, the Bush administration has reconstituted the powers of the monarch, putting to the torch nine hundred years of legal precedent. Now, George W. Bush, or his agents, can kick in the door of any peon’s hovel, drag the unfortunate away, and torture and imprison her forever without charge, or trial. Or, they could simply kill her outright.
Jennifer van Bergen is an America journalist, with a law degree, whose book, ‘The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America’ has been called a “primer for citizenship.” Jennifer van Bergen and disappearing Habeas Corpus in the first half.
And; the neo and not improved face of “democracy” is no stranger to the people of Haiti. Two and half years since the orchestrated overthrow of their democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haitians are yet to see the justice, security, and stability promised by the western countries behind Aristide’s ouster.
Kevin Pina is an American journalist and film maker living in Haiti. His new film, ‘We Must Kill the Bandits!’ chronicles Haitian’s daily struggle for survival, and fight for a true democracy. Kevin Pina in the second half.
And; Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with all that’s good to do in and around Victoria in the coming week.
But first, Jennifer van Bergen and the latest Bush administration outrage against the Constitution.
Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca He also serves as a contributing editor at the progressive web news site: http://www.pej.org.
You can check out the GR blog at: http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com
G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media. Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, M. Shahid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, David Barsamian, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, William Bowles, Vincent Bugliosi, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Juan Cole, David Cromwell, Murray Dobbin, Jon Elmer, Reese Erlich, Anthony Fenton, Jim Fetzer, Laura Flanders, Chris Floyd, Connie Fogal, Susan George, Stan Goff, Robert Greenwald, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Sander Hicks, Julia Butterfly Hill, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Diana Johnstone, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Anthony Lappe, Frances Moore Lappe, Jason Leopold, Jeff Leys, Dave Lindorff, Jim Lobe, Jennifer Loewenstein, Wayne Madsen, Stephen Marshall, Linda McQuaig, George Monbiot, Loretta Napoleoni, John Nichols, Kurt Nimmo, David Orchard, Greg Palast, Mike Palecek, Michael Parenti, Robert Parry, Kevin Pina, William Rivers Pitt, Justin Podur, Jack Random, Sheldon Rampton, Paul Craig Roberts, Paul de Rooij, John Ross, Danny Schechter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, Starhawk, Grant Wakefield, Paul Watson, Bernard Weiner, Mickey Z., Dave Zirin, and many others.
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Sunday, October 08, 2006
Abandoning Hypocrisy
| |
[Talk given at the Canadian launch of Bleeding Afghanistan September 21, 2006]
Just over five years ago I visited Colombia for the first time. I walked through some farmers’ fields that had been fumigated as part of the ‘war on drugs’. Parents showed me rashes on their children’s skin. A little garden behind a grade school had been destroyed. So had fields of yucca, plantain, beans, corn. The farmers in Putumayo told us they didn’t think of themselves as cockroaches to be fumigated. Their crime was growing a little bush called coca. I saw some of it. It struck me as fairly innocuous. I even chewed a coca leaf. Nothing much happened – though I know that coca leaf is very nutritious and kept Andean miners going through centuries of backbreaking labour.
On that same trip I visited the US Embassy to Colombia. The embassy staff told us that the chemicals they were spraying on the peasants were safe. They explained Plan Colombia: the US would give Colombia aid (1.3 billion dollars, though Colombia ended up paying four times as much) and Colombia would buy American military helicopters with it. The helicopters would accompany planes that would fumigate Colombian peasants. This would supposedly stop Americans from snorting cocaine.
The military attaché told us that they were thinking about moving from counternarcotics to counterinsurgency. You see, the Colombian guerrillas did not rely on popular support, the US Embassy told us. They relied on drug money. So by fumigating the peasants the US was actually starving the guerrillas and thus contributing to peace in the country, all the while protecting American children from the scourge of drugs.
We actually asked them about the paramilitaries. These warlords were armed men, thousands of them in all parts of the country, who worked very closely with the Colombian Army and massacred, raped, and displaced millions of Colombians. They threw peasants, indigenous people, Afro-Colombians off the land by brutal massacre and torture. They murdered unionists, human rights activists, journalists, accusing anyone suspected of social progress of being a guerrilla. They also happened to be drug traffickers, deriving, according to confessions by paramilitary leaders at the time, 70% of their revenue from the drug trade. They could not have done that murder without the protection of the Colombian government and the Colombian Army. The same Colombian Army who the US was supporting in its counternarcotics and counterinsurgency campaigns.
I’m telling this story because it raises a question. How does a government that wants to fight a war against a plant or a powder (or a tactic) measure success? If the point was to reduce the availability of drugs, there’s been no effect but to raise the price and the profits for the cartels. If the point was to destroy the guerrillas, well the guerrillas did spend a couple of years laying low. They had held a lot of territory and they were forced to give it up. But after five years they are doing fine. They still have plenty of military capacity and they operate in a very big country. They simply go where the army is not.
On the other hand, if the point was to displace people from resource rich territories, to destroy the labor movement, and to hand key sectors of the economy, like the state oil company, over to multinational corporations, the mission was a success. And is a success. Today the paramilitaries are being rehabilitated, rewarded for their work of massacring people with amnesty and subsidies. The latest estimates are that 1/3 of the Colombian congress are controlled by the paras. And then there’s the president.
Plan Colombia was a failure by one measure (fighting drugs or getting peace) and a success by another (handing industries and territories over to multinationals). Let us not be fooled by the stated goals. It is not about narcotics or insurgency.
So, here we are, talking about Afghanistan. Afghanistan that supplies 90% of the world’s heroin. Canada is doing counternarcotics in Afghanistan, as well as counterinsurgency. The drugs Canada is fighting are, of course, a product of the occupation. They are a product of the alliances the Afghan government has made, with the warlords who actually control the country. They are a product of the sham, the falsehood, that Canada or the US is interested in ‘development’ in Afghanistan. They are a product of fact that the only hope a farmer has of earning a livelihood is through this crop that can bring a little cash – not a lot of cash, because no peasant ever gets rich from growing poppy in Afghanistan or coca in Colombia. No no, the money ends up in banks in the west – and in all of our hands. My Colombian friend Manuel Rozental likes to pull a 20 dollar bill out when he talks about this, and ask whether anyone in the audience knows if it’s drug money. If it has been laundered. The answer is, no, no one can know.
Canada is fighting drugs that are a product of the occupation because the Taliban, who ruled the country before the US and Canadian occupation, had banned the poppy. That’s not praise for the Taliban - they also banned music, sports, television, and laughter. That isn’t the solution to the problem either – it can’t be a solution to the livelihood of 2.3 million people, the 10% of the Afghan population, who rely on the poppy. Solutions to drug problems are clear enough and well enough known – treatment for addiction, legalization and control, education and support for the agrarian economy. So long as our memories are short and we can’t see obvious connections, we won’t realize that the drug war is nothing but a useful pretext.
So much for counternarcotics. We can take it up later if people are interested. We should talk about counterinsurgency.
How did Canada get involved in a counterinsurgency? What drove the Canadian government and the Canadian military to think they could take 2,200 soldiers to Afghanistan for some purpose there? How did this come to pass?
The Drift from Hypocrisy
Canadian foreign policy used to be based on hypocrisy. Oh, there is plenty of continuity. Canada’s leaders have always seen themselves, and presented themselves, as men of the West, involved in the wars the West was involved in. Including colonial wars. Especially colonial wars. The relationship of the Canadian state to indigenous people has been one of intensifying colonialism. So it should be no surprise that Canada has taken the side of the powerful and shows contempt for the world’s peoples internationally. But Canada has also tried to present itself as a country without a colonial history, an honest broker and peacekeeper that has, and deserves, the trust of the world.
Harper’s recent utterances about how we can’t back down an inch in the war in Afghanistan and must support the Americans and the Israelis or fear the consequences – these have a new element, but they are not so new as they might seem. Take Paul Martin, for example. Martin said to the House of Commons in 1965, as External Affairs Secretary:
"Vietnam is a test case. I suggest that if the North Vietnamese aggression with Chinese connivance succeeds, it will only be a matter of time before the next victim is selected… If the US were to leave Vietnam at the present time, what would happen to that country?” (Levant pg. 30, quoted in my “Canada for Anti-Imperialists”).
That’s Paul Martin, Sr., by the way. Lester B. Pearson talked about "aggression" by the Vietnamese against France, in Vietnam, as early as the 1950s.
That was the public diplomacy. Canada acted as the US’s representative on the body that was monitoring the US war on Vietnam, the International Control Commission. Canada was also a supply center and a training ground throughout that war – a war that killed 2-5 million people throughout Indochina.
Canada was a supply centre, a diplomatic supporter, and a training ground – but it shied away from direct military participation in colonial wars.
That started to change in the 1990s, for various reasons. Canada was in the process of adopting a ‘free trade’ agreement that was integrating the economies of Canada and the US in new ways. Neoliberalism was locking other countries into weakness and dependency on the US. Everywhere, the segment of the elite that sought a degree of independence was weakened. People who tried to fight back were told they were on the wrong side of history.
There are three stories about Canadian foreign policy in this period that should be shared.
Back in the 1980s, there was a little ‘blip’ in Canadian support for Israel against the Palestinians. During the initial expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, Canada followed Britain. During the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Canada followed the US. But in the 1980s, when Israel invaded Lebanon, when Israel was crushing the first Palestinian Intifada, some Canadian leaders – Trudeau and Clark – actually criticized Israel. But in the 1990s, when the Oslo Accords brought a phony “peace” to Palestine, Canada was able to return to its hypocritical role: supporting “peace” publicly, while supporting Israel privately – and moving towards increasingly public support, on which more in a minute.
In 1990/1, Mulroney rushed to Bush’s side when Bush started the destruction of Iraq. That’s Bush Sr., by the way. Canada made sure that its warplanes and ships were active, involved in bombing the relatively defenceless Iraqi military and the completely defenceless Iraqi population. That campaign killed hundreds of thousands of people and was followed by sanctions against Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands more – sanctions Canada participated in. The sanctions were followed by another invasion that has killed over a hundred thousand more, by conservative and not-very-recent estimates. But we’ll come back to that 2003 invasion.
In 1993, the Canadian Airborne Regiment was sent to Somalia. This one is worth remembering. Here, too, Canada went with the US. The US was there to “Restore Hope”, and killed several hundred (or was it several thousand) Somalis in the process, before leaving ignominiously. Canada went along to support the mission. The story was familiar. Somalia was a “failed state”. Canada had a “responsibility to protect” the people from evil. So Canada set up a base in a town called Belet Huen. A well-supplied base in the middle of a miserably poor country, a country of desperate shortages and starving people. Some of those people started to sneak on to the base and steal supplies. If the Canadians were to lock them up, they’d have to lock up a lot of them. So they came up with punishments. Humiliations – keeping them out under the sun under armed guard. Tying them up. Beating them up. Shooting them. Torturing them. Eventually, torturing a 16-year old child to death over the course of a whole night. There is a picture of the child, Shidane Arone, being held up by the neck, by a baton, by a Canadian soldier. You can find it if you like. It was the first thing that I remembered when I saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib. I remembered the photo of Shidane Arone – I was in high school when that photo came out.
If you read the debates and discussions about Canada in Afghanistan you have heard about the moral dilemma Canadian soldiers face when they capture “suspected guerrillas”. Should the Canadians turn them over to the Afghan government, when they might be tortured? The most radical commentators dare to suggest that perhaps Canada should not turn them over to the US, given the US’s record on torture (Maher Arar’s case springs to mind). But can the Canadians turn them over to themselves?
Today Canadian commentators talk about the “Somalia Affair” as a national trauma – for Canadians. It is narcissism. We focus on ourselves, rather than the victims. The same is true in Afghanistan.
Abandoning Hypocrisy
That was the period of hypocrisy in Canadian foreign policy. That period is over now. The last hiccup of it was the second destruction of Iraq in 2003. Canada performed, and continues to perform, its historical services of supply centre, training ground, and diplomatic supporter. But the US wanted more from its allies, and that meant Canada had to ‘mend fences’. How did it ‘mend fences’? On the bones of Haitians, first – a story I won’t have time to tell here – and on the bones of Palestinians, and Lebanese, and Afghans. Afghans, because everyone recognized that the principal way Canada was going to help the US invasion of Iraq was by relieving the US in Afghanistan. It isn’t much relief: 2,200 troops in a mission that involves some 36,000 troops, including 20,000 Americans. But it goes some way, presumably, to ‘mending fences’.
Canada’s first move towards abandoning hypocrisy was joining the invasion of Afghanistan. But until recently, Canada was pretending that the Afghan mission was of the innocent peacekeeping variety that was done in Somalia, for example.
The second move towards abandoning hypocrisy happened in December 2004, on the heels of the Bush visit to Ottawa. That’s Bush Jr., by the way. Previously, Canada had abstained from several votes requiring Israel to comply with its obligations under international law and withdraw from the territories it occupied in 1967. Canada’s Ambassador to the UN at the time, Allan Rock, said that the “value added” of the committees trying to put Palestinian rights on the agenda at the UN was “questionable” and that the process was biased – against Israel. So Canada started to vote against Palestinian rights.
Next, six months later, in July 2005, Canada’s Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier put the “peacekeeping” and “failed states” story to bed with a rhetorical flourish. Talking about the Afghans on the receiving end of Canada’s military, he said: “These are detestable murderers and scumbags. They detest our freedoms, they detest our society, they detest our liberties… We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to kill people.” Hillier was concentrating his fire directly on the Canadian myth that we are innocent peacekeepers. He was doing that because he wants to see Canada involved in a counterinsurgency that he knows is going to be bloody and brutal. Like Harper, he hopes that by talking tough he can increase people’s tolerance for blood.
These moves by the Liberals preceding the Tories’ rise to power, set Harper up nicely. He was the first to cut all aid to the Palestinians earlier this year, to starve them for the election they held shortly after the one that brought him to power. This summer, when Israel destroyed Gaza’s power plant and massacred hundreds of Palestinians from the air, Harper called the response “measured”. While Israel was massacring civilians in Lebanon, suffering largely military casualties at the hands of Hizbullah, Peter MacKay was calling the resistance “cold-blooded killers” and a “cancer on Lebanon.”
If you listen carefully you’ll notice that something has happened over the past few years: Canada is no longer talking out of both sides of its mouth. Canada has committed itself, openly, to colonialism. And in the process, Canada has talked itself into its own colonial war.
Canada’s Afghan War
Now back to the first question of the talk. How did this happen?
One thing that is striking about oppressed people is how patient and how forgiving they are. Palestinians waited seven years, after Oslo, for the Israelis to fulfill their end of the bargain – to dismantle the settlements, to stop acting like an occupier and a colonizer. They waited seven years before the current Intifada began, and even then it took the most drastic provocation, Sharon visiting al-Aqsa, six years ago less one week.
Afghans are patient, too.
Hillier was talking tough in July of 2005, but even back then Afghans were waiting. There had been terrible abuses by the occupiers. Tortures, indiscriminate bombings, disrespect and callous driving that killed people regularly. But Afghans had lived through plenty of hard times, and if some fraction of the promises of development and security had been sincere, things may have been different. I won’t dwell on this, Sonali and Jim will talk about it more. But people had placed faith in politics, people had hoped that disarmament would actually happen, and they were willing to sacrifice a great deal to move forward.
But the promises of development were insincere. Since 2001, the ‘international community’ has spent $82.5B on military operations, $7.3B in aid and development. The Canadian figures are similarly skewed. The CIDA aid figures are in the hundreds of millions and most of them have not actually been spent. The military budgets are in the billions and forever rising.
Remember how, in Belet Huen, the presence of a well-equipped base in the midst of such poverty led to theft, and then to abuse and torture? What effect does setting up a camp with a Tim Horton’s then have? How much of an insult is that?
We read reports every few days of two, three, four Canadian soldiers killed. Read a little further and you’ll see a few dozen or a few hundred “suspected Taliban” were also killed, in US air strikes with Canadians “mopping up”.
Remember Major General Andrew Leslie, earlier this year, telling reporters that “every time you kill an angry young man overseas, you’re creating 15 more who will come after you.” Are we doing that math?
Canada’s population is about the same size as Afghanistan’s, and the country is halfway around the world. Even if Hillier’s wildest recruitment dreams are fulfilled, does he really believe that Canada can “pacify” a population that is very quickly beginning to believe it wants nothing to do with us? Does he believe Canada, with its 2,200 troops, can “succeed” where the USSR, with three divisions, tens of thousands of troops, failed? And would he kill a million Afghans and displace 5 million to do it, as the USSR did?
Hillier would, like Harper, no doubt answer my rhetorical question with one of his own. Do you want the Taliban back? No, I’d say. Not the Taliban and not the warlords who the Americans returned to power, either. Not when there are Afghans who have been giving their lives, their souls, people whose feet Harper and Hillier are not fit to touch, to fight for and build their country. But Canada is not there to work with such people. Canada is not in Afghanistan to support them, even though they are there – and Sonali and Jim will tell you more about them and their ideas.
I’m concluding now, returning to that first trip to Colombia five years ago. The night before we left for the paramilitary controlled zone I met someone who is now a good friend of mine, Hector Mondragon. What I understand about Colombia is due to him, and a few others. He told us that night that he could name hundreds of friends that had been killed in that country’s war. He said that night that Colombia’s problems were like a fire. The US was pouring gasoline on the fire. A fire, he said, that Colombians were giving their lives trying to put out.
Afghanistan is like that. Canada is pouring gasoline on a fire. And Afghans have been giving their lives to try to put it out.
Let us not be fooled by stated goals. Canada’s counternarcotics have placed Afghanistan at the centre of the world’s opium trade. Canada’s counterinsurgency has the Taliban controlling half the country, and going from strength to strength. Canada’s development program has led to massive hunger and starvation, right under the noses of the Canadian military presence in the south and within a distance to smell Tim Horton’s coffee and donuts. With Canada guaranteeing security, schools are being burned all over the south.
No, Canada should go, should apologize for what it has done and make amends, stop killing people and calling whoever is killed ‘Taliban’, stop letting young Canadians who have no idea kill and get killed so that colonial powers can ‘mend fences’.
And Canada will go. For all the bluster of Harper and Hillier, the military realities are stark and there are at least some, even in Canada, who know it. Canada will go. But what will Canadians learn? Will we come to think of Afghanistan as a ‘national trauma’, in which we were scarred, forgetting our victims, like we did in Somalia? Will we say that was a bad bit of business, but at least we managed to mend fences? At least we stopped being hypocritical?
Maybe that’s what an anti-imperialist movement could do. It could help Canadians learn that we are not actually innocent peacekeepers and never have been. It could help Canadians learn that the traumas we cause in the world are actually worse than the ones we suffer in it. It could help us learn that our place isn’t cheering for slaughter but fighting against it.
Harper, like Martin before him, is energetic and internationalist. They moved quickly on Afghanistan, on Palestine, on Lebanon, on Haiti, against indigenous people here, at Six Nations. They have plenty of cards yet to play.
But they couldn’t dislodge Six Nations from the blockade.
They could not stop Haitians from having an election and protecting its results.
They could not stop the Lebanese from repelling the Israeli invasion.
They could not stop the Palestinians from surviving and remaining on their lands despite the most savage onslaughts over 60 years.
They won’t stop Afghanistan from being free, and if we have a fraction of that kind of courage, their game will be up.
Come to the CAIA conference on October 6-8. Be on the streets on October 28.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=49&ItemID=11064
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