July 2007
Monthly Archive
July 18, 2007
The Harper government never passes up an opportunity to boast how it supports the troops but, when it comes to veterans, that seems to be mainly hot air.
NDP defence critic Peter Stoffer says the Tories have failed to act on his motion passed last fall to improve veterans’ benefits:
The motion directed the government to make five reforms: eliminate the “gold-digger” clause to allow spouses access to survivor benefits if they marry a Forces retiree after age 60; extend Veterans Independence Program home-care services to all widows and widowers of veterans; stop the reduction of long-term disability benefits faced by veterans released from the military for medical reasons; increase the survivor pension amount for veterans’ spouses to 66 per cent from 50 per cent; and end the clawback of service pensions for veterans who receive the Canada Pension.
Mr. Stoffer said the improvements would help about 400,000 veterans and spouses and would cost Ottawa between $800 million and $1.2 billion a year.
He pointed out that Stephen Harper’s government had a total surplus of about $23 billion in its first two budgets.
July 18, 2007
The Guardian reports that Iraq’s seven major Sunni insurgent groups have agreed to form a political alliance.
The insurgent leaders described, …a joint political programme, including a commitment to free Iraq from all foreign troops, rejection of any cooperation with parties involved in the political institutions set up under the occupation, and a declaration that all decisions and agreements made by the US occupation and Iraqi government are null and void.
The aim of the alliance – which includes a range of Islamist and nationalist-leaning groups and is currently called the Political Office for the Iraqi Resistance – is to link up with other anti-occupation groups in Iraq to negotiate with the Americans in anticipation of an early US withdrawal. The programme envisages a temporary technocratic government to run the country during a transition period until free elections can be held.
The alliance says it is independent of either al-Qaeda or Baathist resistance forces.
July 18, 2007
We’re coming up to the sixth anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September, 2001. Six years of near-constant war. There was the war in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban. There was the war to hunt down and exterminate al-Qaeda. The war to topple Saddam and bring democracy to Iraq. The war against the “dead enders”, Saddam loyalists. The war against al-Qaeda in Iraq. The war against the Sunni insurgency. The war against the Shiite militias. The global war without end on terror.
Over the past six years the United States and NATO have dutifully followed America’s “war president”, the undisputed Leader of the Free World. So, how has that gone anyway?
The Taliban were sent packing, but they’re back. Al-Qaeda and archvillain Osama bin Laden headed for the hills. Now they’re resurgent. Afghanistan’s notional democracy is wobbly, riddled with corruption and ineffective. The only thing booming in that country is it’s record-setting opium production. Neighbouring Pakistan is destabilized and a breeding ground for Islamist radicals. The cops and security services prey on the Afghan people and drive them into the arms of the Taliban.
In Iraq, Saddam is dead and has been replaced by a fundamentalist Shia-dominated “democracy” of sorts. The country is falling apart. The Sunni insurgency and Shia militias are alive and well and killing their fellow Iraqis with a vengeance. Al-Qaeda has become established in Iraq and uses the place as a training ground for Islamist terrorism. The country can’t provide gas to its fuel pumps even though it’s awash in crude oil. Water and electricity are sporadic, even in Baghdad. The ultra-secure Green Zone now gets mortared almost daily. Civil wars, there are several, abound and now threaten the Kurdish north.
The Leader of the Free World cannot accept his failure in Iraq nor can he conceive of how to win even one of the several wars underway there. He has his army so depleted, exhausted and utterly tied down in Iraq that he’s incapable of fielding a decent size force in Afghanistan.
Canadians need to see this debacle for what it truly is. We’re part of the chorus line in Afghanistan in a miserable production that has no leading cast to be found. We can sit around and sing and dance but the plotline is going nowhere.
It would be great if America’s Congress showed the courage, honesty and vision so lacking in their executive but that’s not about to happen.
The rest of NATO knows the score. That’s why they’re not stepping up to take our place in Kandahar. They know we can’t save America from its own government and, without that, we can’t save Afghanistan either. Washington is leaving Ottawa with no option but to call down the curtain and go home.
July 18, 2007
Call it a “blast from the past.” Yesterday the Royal Air Force scrambled a pair of Tornado fighters to intercept a Russian Bear bomber as it approached Scotland.
This sort of thing was almost routine back in the Cold War days but it’s been a rarity ever since.
July 18, 2007
This year’s “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is supposed to be a record-breaking 8,500 square miles off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana. Within that area (about the size of New Jersey), there won’t be enough oxygen in the water to support life.
Spring runoffs from major US rivers pump massive amounts of farm chemicals and other contaminants into the Gulf waters. These give rise to huge algae blooms. As the algae die they sink to the bottom and undergo decomposition that strips oxygen from the water. Marine life that can’t get away simply dies.
Scientists suspect this year’s runoff was heavier than normal due to more intensive agriculture to produce biofuels. Great, just bloody lovely!
July 18, 2007
Meet the KillaCycle, the fastest electric motorcycle on the planet. 0-60 mph (that’s miles) in 1.4 seconds, 8.7 seconds in the 1/4 mile. It uses powerful lithium ion batteries, each the size of a roll of lifesavers, 880 in total. It doesn’t go all that far on a charge but it sure doesn’t take long to get there either.
July 18, 2007
The legal and illegal drug industries have one thing in common – big profits. In America, if Big Pharma and its sidekick, federal politicians, have their way that gravy train is just going to keep on rolling.
The Christian Science Monitor has published a scathing review of the Bush regime’s Medicare plan, supposed to help elderly Americans afford their prescriptions but actually helping out America’s pharmaceutical companies even more:
The White House and Congress claimed the private structure of the program would lead to lower drug prices. In fact, since the program began last year, the opposite has happened, thanks to the lobbying wizards of K Street. A fragmented band of more than 1,400 Part D insurance plans has had little negotiating power with the drug companies. Nor do those plans have much reason to bargain: Part D subsidizes patients on extended and expensive medication regimes at 80 percent.
Most remarkably the bill that Congress pushed through in 2003 didn’t let the government negotiate drug prices. Why? Because the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) got no authority to define the “formulary” list of drugs for which Medicare will pay. Absent a credible threat to drop from that list any overpriced drugs that have branded alternatives – which the vast majority has – the government lost its negotiating stick.
Surprise! No price competition. So drug companies were able to raise rates for brand-name medications (that have comparable alternatives, but for which there are no generics) at twice the rate of inflation in the first six months of the program. And together, the five largest drug firms enjoyed a 45 percent increase in profits over the prior year.
This year, prices under Medicare private insurance plans for 10 of the most prescribed brand-name drugs (that have comparable alternatives) shot up an average of 6.8 percent in just four months.
When the bill was being debated, taxpayers were told the program would cost $400 billion. Today, realistic estimates put the figure at more than $1 trillion. The big drug companies, of course, love this. All those multiyear investments in lobbying have paid off – allowing them to use your tax dollars to boost their earnings.
So, let’s see what we’ve got here. A programme that’s touted as helping needy Americans that actually helps out American corporations already awash in cash. Gee that sounds like Bush/Cheney, doesn’t it?
July 18, 2007
A British government report warns that failing to bolster the increasingly irrelevant government of Hamid Karzai could lead to an Islamist tide that could sweep into Pakistan and, some claim, eventually lead into a widespread Shia/Sunni regional war. From The Observer:
A report by the British Parliament yesterday said the British-led NATO force in Afghanistan, which includes about 2,500 Canadians, doesn’t have enough troops to carry out its mission and the Taliban show worrying signs of strength.
The report, by the British House of Commons defence committee, highlighted a series of concerns, from a lack of training for Afghan police and armed forces to an unclear policy on eradicating the country’s vast opium poppy fields.
But the chief preoccupation was a lack of support from other NATO countries to provide more troops to the 36,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission, and evidence that violence, including Iraq-style suicide bombings, was growing as Taliban and Al Qaeda-linked insurgents expand their sphere of influence.
Peter Inge, the U.K.’s former chief of the defence staff, highlighted the generals’ fears in public recently when he warned of a “strategic failure” in Afghanistan. It is understood that Inge was speaking with the direct authority of the general staff when he made an intervention in a debate in the House of Lords, the parliament’s second chamber.
“The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than many people recognize,” Inge said. “We need to face up to that issue, the consequence of strategic failure in Afghanistan and what that would mean for NATO … We need to recognize that the situation – in my view, and I have recently been in Afghanistan – is much, much more serious than people want to recognize.”
Inge endorsed a speech by Paddy Ashdown, , who painted a bleak picture during the debate. Ashdown said Afghanistan presented a graver threat than Iraq.
“The consequences of failure in Afghanistan are far greater than in Iraq,” he said. “If we fail in Afghanistan, then Pakistan goes down. The security problems for Britain would be massively multiplied.
“I think you could not then stop a widening regional war that would start off in warlordism but it would become essentially a war in the end between Sunni and Shia right across the Middle East.”
Curiously the report seems to omit any mention of the 160,000 American troops now losing their war in Iraq who could, presumably, do a lot more good were they shifted to Afghanistan, the war they were supposed to win in the wake of 9/11. Oh dear.
July 18, 2007
The way Canada’s crime rate is falling, Harpo had better get on with bringing back capital punishment while he can still find someone to hang.
A Stats Can report found crime in 2006 at its lowest level in 25-years. No wonder Vic Toews was on such a law and order rampage!
Minor violent crime (petty assaults, etc.) was stable but – oh my gosh – the national homicide rate fell 10%.
July 18, 2007
The miracle is China’s skyrocketing industrial economy. The filth is what that miracle has already cost the country and its people.
China built up its economic momentum without really thinking much about the consequences of rampant, unregulated industrialization. Now it is beset by those consequences and facing an environmental nightmare on a scale unprecedented in man’s history. From The Guardian:
“…up to 300 million people are drinking contaminated water every day, and 190 million are suffering from water related illnesses each year. If air pollution is not controlled there will be 600,000 premature deaths in urban areas and 20m cases of respiratory illness a year within 15 years.
China’s water quality gives the researchers greatest concern. One third of the length of all China’s rivers are now “highly polluted” as are 75% of its major lakes and 25% of all its coastal waters. Nearly 30,000 children die from diarrhoea due to polluted water each year.
Although China is the world’s fourth largest economy, growing 10% a year and closing rapidly on the US, Japan and Germany, its environmental standards are often closer to those in some of the poorest countries in the world, says the report. More than 17,000 towns have no sewage works at all and the human waste from nearly one billion people is barely collected or treated. Nearly 70% of the rural population has no access to safe sanitation.
Although China has tried to improve its air quality, it has not invested enough to keep up with the flood of people to its cities, many of which have some of the worst pollution in the world. The burning of more than 2bn tonnes of the dirtiest coal a year is costing the economy the equivalent of 3-7% of GDP (£8-15bn a year), according to the report. While no specific figure is given for the overall cost of China’s pollution, in 2004 it was thought to be in the region of £32bn.
“A healthy economy needs a healthy environment,” said Mario Amano, deputy secretary-general of the OECD – the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – in Beijing yesterday.
The report estimates that 27% of the landmass of the country is now becoming desertified. Much of the country already suffers from water shortages, but the Chinese Academy of Sciences expects water demand to increase by nearly 50% in the next 40 years. Industry’s share of this is expected to grow from 16% to 41%.
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