September 2007
Monthly Archive
September 19, 2007
The Canadian people still don’t want to give Stephen Harper a majority. That’s the good news from the latest Canadian Press poll that shows the Libs and Tories tied in popular support.
In the wake of three by-election losses in Quebec, Stephane Dion needs all the good news he can get. What he also needs is to stop taking the public support for granted and finally put it to his and the party’s benefit.
The poll wasn’t much more than a reprieve. I doubt the numbers will be as favourable next time. This is very much Stephane Dion’s defining moment. He has to show us that he has the ability and the desire to truly lead the Liberal Party. It’s not enough for him to carry on as usual. He has to come up with a clear message that connects with the Canadian people.
The fate of the Liberal Party is in the hands of Stephane Dion. If he hasn’t got the qualities to be a real leader there’s nothing any of us can do about it. If he does have those qualities, it’s time he showed it. This is his last best chance.
September 19, 2007
Hamid Karzai is a curious fellow. As Afghan president he remains, after six years, the de facto mayor of Kabul. His country remains seized by a civil war that his government cannot win even with the aid of the US and NATO. He implores Canada to stay and fight the Taliban even while he goes to our supposed enemy on bended knee seeking a deal, almost any deal. What if we kill the very guys he’s trying to negotiate with?
Some of the best advantages the Taliban enjoy come from the Karzai government itself. It’s the rampant corruption in Karzai’s government and security services that spreads disaffection through the countryside, driving peasants into the arms of the insurgency. It is widely believed that both the government and its security services are thoroughly infiltrated and compromised by the insurgents.
Hamid Karzai has had more than enough time to straighten out his own government and he’s failed miserably. He doesn’t believe we’re going to stop the Taliban, not for a minute. If he did, he wouldn’t be going through back channels desperately trying to cut a deal with them.
Karzai laments that, if Canada’s military mission ends in 2009, his country will descend into anarchy. Wow. If a thousand-strong Canadian battle group is all that stands between his country falling from its existing state of anarchy into – wait a minute – a bigger state of anarchy, then he needs an awful lot more help than we’re giving him.
Six years is a long time to be treading water but that’s all that Karzai has done at his end. It’s not entirely his fault and plenty of blame for his failure rests at the feet of the White House. That, unfortunately, doesn’t make any difference to the sorry state of affairs that is today’s Afghanistan.
What’s notable about Karzai’s whining is that he deals exclusively with dire predictions of what will happen if the Canadian military mission ends. What’s missing is any explanation of how his government’s fate will be salvaged if we stay. The fact is it won’t and Karzai knows it. That’s why he’s not offering to commit to anything if we stay. At best we’re there as a bargaining chip to help him cut a deal with the very guys who are killing our soldiers.
At this point, whines and whimpers just aren’t enough.
September 19, 2007
According to a review of a number of public opinion polls published in today’s Washington Post, the Petraeus/Crocker stage show last week has utterly failed to ease the American public’s rejection of the Iraq war.
A USA Today/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday found essentially no shift in views on whether U.S. forces are likely to win the war — two-thirds predict they won’t. .
A CBS News poll… found that the public still overwhelmingly opposes keeping any troops in Iraq longer than two years. And the percentage who feel the surge had “made things better” actually declined, to 31 percent from 35 percent a week earlier.
A Pew Research Centre Poll concluded, “Opinion about whether to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq has remained stable for most of this year. Currently, 54% support a troop withdrawal, which is virtually unchanged from measures dating back to February.”
Pew once again asked an open-ended question, asking respondents for the word that best describes the situation in Iraq these days. The most frequently volunteered expressions were mess, bad, terrible, sad, horrible, disaster, hopeless, chaos, confused, disappointing, bring troops home, disgusting, tragic and unfortunate.
…a new Reuters/Zogby poll finds “[o]nly 29 percent of Americans gave Bush a positive grade for his job performance, below his worst Zogby poll mark of 30 percent in March.”
His, and I mean “his”, Iraq war gambit firmly in a quagmire – both in Iraq and in America – Bush is now widely believed to be ready to move on – to air strikes against Iran. Peter Galbraith states a view shared by many outside the wobbly Bush administration and neo-con lobby:
“Sustained air strikes probably could halt Iran’s nuclear program. . . . But the risks from air strikes are great. Many of the potential targets are in populated places, endangering civilians both from errant bombs and the possible dispersal of radioactive material. The rest of the world would condemn the attacks and there would likely be a virulent anti-U.S. reaction in the Islamic world. In retaliation, Iran could wreak havoc on the world economy (and its own) by withholding oil from the global market and by military action to close the Persian Gulf shipping lanes.
“The main risk to the U.S. comes in Iraq. Faced with choosing between the U.S. and Iran, Iraq’s government may not choose its liberator. And even if the Iraqi government did not openly cooperate with the Iranians, pro-Iranian elements in the U.S.-armed military and police almost certainly would facilitate attacks on U.S. troops by pro-Iranian Iraqi militia or by Iranian forces infiltrated across Iraq’s porous border.”
If there’s any message in this it may be that the delusional ways of George w. Bush are set to continue until he’s out of office or finally stopped by Congressional Republicans bailing out to side with the Democrats.
(Thanks to Matt for the graphic)
September 19, 2007
I just received this alert from Avaaz.org. Read it and, if you agree, follow the link:
Dear fellow Canadian Avaaz members,
The Canadian government is breaking its own environmental laws, and could get away with it if we don’t act within 24 hours. Last June, Parliament passed a law confirming our legal obligation to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, and gave a heel-dragging Harper government 60 days to show how they would do it. Harper’s plan is out, and meets Kyoto’s targets 13 years too late – it clearly breaks the law.
Canadians are irate over this, but somehow everyone failed to notice the official public consultation period on the law, which ends TOMORROW. The comments that Environment Canada receives in this period will be admissible in court, when the Harper government is brought before a judge on this. If there are no comments, the government will claim in court that the public supports its bogus plan. This argument has worked before, and we must not let it happen again. Please click below to send a quick message to Environment Minister Baird, and tell everyone you know to act
right away:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/canadian_climate_crime/c.php/
Sincerely,Ricken Patel and the rest of the Avaaz team
September 18, 2007
Media concentration has been a key to the rise of the political right in both the US and Canada. Big Journalism, like other big business, finds a comfortable home in the right wing. This month’s online edition of Adbusters.org has a terrific expose on CanWest, focusing on the Vancouver Sun. Here are a few excerpts:
Overly anxious that they’re not caught exposing the paper’s dirty secret, reporters at the Sun say that morale has hit rock bottom and an alarming atmosphere of fear and paranoia has infected the newsroom. With a tone of anger and resentment, reporters tell stories about vindictive editors who spend more time attacking them over personal and petty grievances than they do worrying about the deteriorating quality of the paper. Anyone that dares question the authority of Editor-in-Chief Patricia Graham is bullied, isolated and forced out of the paper.
“The culture at The Vancouver Sun is incredibly poisonous and it extends right through the newsroom,” confides Charles Campbell, a former editorial board member at the paper, who says he was surprised at how much disdain senior management had towards the paper’s star reporters. “There are very few [reporters] who are particularly happy or proud of The Vancouver Sun as a newspaper.”
While the Sun has a long history of acrimonious newsrooms and lengthy labor disputes, it was also once a respected paper that boasted some of the top journalists in the country and consistently broke stories that changed the political landscape of the city and province. When the paper was part of the Southam chain, the newsroom had a bigger budget and more independence – reporters were even allowed to criticize the paper in print. But once CanWest Global Communications got its hands on the Sun in 2000, it slashed funding, silenced writers and allowed an inexperienced, and strangely insecure, management to take control. The paper has never been as irrelevant or dysfunctional as it is today.
CanWest has such a stranglehold on the city that any reporter caught speaking out against them would have trouble finding work in Vancouver again. This toxic environment has created such a chill amongst reporters that getting them to talk about the turmoil is extremely difficult. One news staffer that initially agreed to be quoted as an anonymous source later backed out for fear of repercussion. A former reporter was so worried by the ruthless reach of the editors that they would only talk off-the-record. Most wouldn’t even take that risk.
“If [the Editor-in-Chief] found out I talked, I’d be finished,” said one reporter when declining an interview. “If there was another game in town it’d be different, but there’s nothing else in this city. There’s nowhere else to go.”
Led by CEO Leonard Asper and the powerful Asper family, the Winnipeg-based corporation now owns both of Vancouver’s daily newspapers (the Sun and the tabloid Province), the city’s top-rated television station (GlobalTV), 12 community newspapers, eight analog and digital television stations, and one of two national papers. For good measure, it also owns the only daily in the nearby provincial capital, Victoria’s Times Colonist. A throwback to the classic Company Town, CanWest has turned Vancouver into the single-most media concentrated city in the western world.
“The story of the Sun should be presented as a cautionary tale [to the rest of the world],” says Marc Edge, a former Vancouver journalist and author of Pacific Press: The Unauthorized Story of Vancouver’s Newspaper Monopoly. “If you want to see the future of media, just look at Vancouver where you have the tightest control of media in the free world. If you allow cross-media ownership like the [Federal Communications Commission in the United States] has been considering, this is how it could end up.”
September 18, 2007
There’s an interesting inteview with Seymour Hersh in the latest edition of Adbusters.org.
On the impact of the Bush administration on America:
To me it shows just how fragile the whole society is. These guys come in and we’ve had a collapse of the military, collapse of Congress, collapse of the press, collapse of the federal government. It’s pretty shocking how easily it slips.
On the latest White House policy on the Middle East:
That seems to be this administration’s goal, to mobilize the moderate Sunnis such as they are in Egypt, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, to join with the United States, Great Britain and Israel, against the Shia. Pretty amazing stuff.
On the state of contemporary, American journalism:
…it’s a little shocking to me that the mainstream press has so completely missed the story of this war in Iraq and this presidency. I think when we look back on this era we’re going to be very critical of the press. They really missed one of the great moral issues of our time, just as they missed Vietnam for many years. So it’s really pretty sad.
September 18, 2007
This is from today’s Globe & Mail:
”Most people decided to support the NDP candidate. They thought maybe that it was a clear signal about their disagreement with the current government,” said Mr. Dion who, along with many other political leaders is attending a plowing match in this rural Ontario community.
”I just want to say that our policy about Afghanistan is realistic. The one of the NDP is not. We cannot leave tomorrow, whatever the people may think. It would not be responsible for Canada to do so.”
People should remember, he said, that he wants to be Prime Minister of the country some day ”and Mr. Layton will never be Prime Minister of this country.”
I’m sorry but that’s it.
September 18, 2007
I’m from Vancouver Island, about as far removed from Outremont as you can get and still be in Canada. I was a supporter of Stephane Dion when he contested the Liberal leadership. My support didn’t last long as I saw his ineffectual leadership come to plague the party.
I’m not going to comment about what went wrong in Quebec. You Easterners have the right to call that one. What I will say is that Stephane, intelligent and well-intentioned as he is, has been a total dud out here. He isn’t gaining traction, he isn’t even scratching the surface. He’s a dead loss.
My loyalty is to the Liberal Party and what that means as I see it, not to its leader or those who elected him. I want my party to be relevant where I choose to live. It’s not.
I guess Dion has earned the right to drag the party down in the next general election but I sure hope his successor will be everything he’s shown himself not to be and the sort of person who this region of mine is waiting for.
September 17, 2007
If there’s one thing Harpo and Special Ed don’t like to mention, it’s the environmental nightmare of the Athabasca Tar Sands. Thanks to the tar sands, Canada is now considered to have the second largest oil reserves in the world behind only Saudi Arabia and, unlike those distant and unstable Arabs, Canada’s oil is secure and right on America’s doorstep.
The Tar Sands have caught the attention of Alternet.Org which has published one of the most comprehensive and comprehensible articles I’ve ever read on the subject. Here are a few facts from that piece:
Canada exports 66 percent of its domestic crude oil production, and since 1995 the United States has received 99 percent of these exports.
The tar sands deposits underlie more than 140,000 square kilometers of relatively pristine boreal forest, an area larger than the state of Florida.
Tar sands consist of a mixture of 85 percent sand, clay, and silt; 5 percent water; and 10 percent crude bitumen, the tarlike substance that can be converted to oil. Bitumen doesn’t flow like crude oil, and getting it out of the tar sands is a messy job. …Imagine mixing a bucket of roofing tar into a child’s sandbox. Then boil some water, pour it into the sandbox, and try to wash the tar out of the sand.
Most tar sands production takes place in vast open-pit mines, some as large as 150 square kilometers and as deep as 90 meters. Before strip-mining can begin, the boreal forest must be clear-cut, rivers and streams diverted, and wetlands drained. Four tons of material are moved to produce every barrel of bitumen.
Once separated from the sand, the bitumen is still a low-grade, heavy fossil fuel that must undergo an energy-intensive process to upgrade it into a synthetic crude oil more like conventional crude, either by adding hydrogen or removing carbon.
…producing a barrel of synthetic crude oil from the tar sands releases up to three times more greenhouse gas pollution than conventional oil. This is a result of the huge amount of energy (primarily from burning natural gas) required to generate the heat needed to extract bitumen from the tar sands and upgrade it into synthetic crude. The energy equivalent of one barrel of oil is required to produce just three barrels of oil from the tar sands.
Regulations introduced in early 2007 are so fraught with loopholes and gaps that greenhouse gas pollution from tar sands is predicted to triple by 2020.
Satellite images readily illustrate the magnitude of boreal forest impacts from tar sands mining operations. The United Nations Environment Program has identified Alberta’s tar sands mines as one of 100 key global “hotspots” of environmental degradation.
Very little of the area directly affected by mining operations has been reclaimed, and after 40 years of mining, not a single operation has received a reclamation certificate from the government of Alberta.
Tar sands mining operations withdraw 2-4.5 barrels of fresh water from the [Athabasca] river for every barrel of oil they produce. Current operations are permitted to withdraw more than 349 million cubic meters of water per year, a volume equivalent to the amount required by a city of 2 million people. But unlike city effluent waters, which are treated and released back into the river, tar sands mining effluent becomes so contaminated that it must be impounded.
Both tar sands mining and in situ operations produce large volumes of waste as a result of their water use. For in situ operations, the primary waste stream, a result of treating salt water and the water that is pumped up with the bitumen, is disposed of in landfills or injected underground. Tar sands mining operations present a much more significant risk, because they produce large volumes of waste in the form of mine tailings (six barrels of tailings per barrel of bitumen extracted). These tailings, a slurry of water, sand, fine clay and residual bitumen, are stored in vast wastewater reservoirs.
The industry misleadingly refers to them as “tailings ponds,” but collectively these pools of waste cover more than 50 square kilometers and are so extensive that they can be seen from space. One tailings pond at Syncrude’s mining operation is held in check by the third-largest dam in the world. These tailings dumps pose an environmental threat resulting from the migration of pollutants through the groundwater system and the risk of leaks to the surrounding soil and surface water.
Tar sands air pollution, both provincial and transboundary, is rapidly increasing. Since 2003 Alberta has been the industrial air pollution capital of Canada.
The tar sands industry is now focused on quintupling production as quickly as possible. It is projected that tar sands production will reach 3-4 million barrels per day by 2015 and could grow to 5 million barrels per day by 2030, if not sooner. It is the prospect of this growth that has led Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to label Canada an “emerging energy superpower.”
The environmental and global warming consequences of even 1 million barrels per day of tar sands production must serve as a wake-up call, and we must acknowledge that increased reliance upon this unconventional, high-impact fossil fuel is not a viable path forward.
Stephen Harper now likes to depict himself as environmentally conscious and absolutely dedicated to the fight against global warming. Until he deals with the environmental disaster that is the Athabasca Tar Sands, he’s just another goddamned liar.
September 17, 2007
That nasty Paul Krugman is at it again, poking former Fed Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan with a sharp stick. Greenspan, like so many US Generals, has taken the opportunity of his retirement to write a book criticizing the Bush regime – criticisms they all carefully kept to themselves back when they might have done some real good.
Krugman has for years criticized Greenspsan for kowtowing to the Bush administration over its tax cuts and deficit ways. In today’s New York Times, he gleefully castigates Greenspan for his “moral collapse” that began in 2001 and continued until his recent retirement. Greenspan has a little problem with his credibility – it’s called “facts.”
Meanwhile, Asia Times Online, has published an interesting article that suggests the current subprime mortgage meltdown is the result of our governments deliberately lying to us. Richard Daughty is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group wrote the following:
Robert Hardaway, who is a professor of law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, tells how this started. He relates, “In 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS] was faced with an awkward dilemma. If it continued to include the cost of housing in the Consumer Price Index, the CPI would reflect an inflation rate of 15%, thereby making the country’s economy look like a banana republic. Worse, since investors and bond traders have historically demanded a 2% real return after inflation, that would mean that bond and money market yields could climb as high as 17%.”
Yikes! What to do, what to do, what to do whattodowhattodo? “The BLS’s solution was as simple as it was shocking: exclude the cost of housing as a component in the CPI, and substitute a so-called ‘Owner Equivalent Rent’ component based on what a homeowner might ‘rent’ his house for.” Hahaha! The government resorts to lying! “Wow! Why didn’t we think of this before?” they are heard to ask among themselves.
Fortunately for the government, it worked. “The result of this statistical sleight of hand was immediate and gratifying,” Mr Hardaway writes, “for the reported inflation index quickly dropped to 2%”, down from the real, and horrifying, 15% which was due “in part” to the drop in rents caused by speculators wanting to “offset their holding costs by renting out their homes while their prices skyrocketed, thereby flooding the market with rentals that pushed down the cost of renting a house or apartment.” Hahaha!
You can almost hear the contempt in his voice when he says, “While the BLS was correct in assuming that this statistical ruse would fool the average citizen into believing that inflation was only 2% (and therefore be willing to accept a meager 4% return on his bank savings), what is remarkable is that the ruse also fooled the bond traders, and apparently continues to do so, leading analyst Peter Schiff to describe these supposed savvy bond traders as the ‘hormonal teenagers of the capital markets’.”
Putting it all together, he concludes, “The present subprime credit crisis can be directly traced back to the BLS decision to exclude the price of housing from the CPI. It is now clear that the ‘benign’ inflation figures reported over the last 10 years” were, (using my awesome editorial powers to insert my own words for special emphasis), “A big stinking load of lying crap by the corrupt Federal Reserve and the despicable government (except Ron Paul).” 1
In essence, the claim is that we’ve been living in seriously inflationary times for years now while we avoided taking the only effective remedy – higher interest rates. By dodging realistic interest rates it became possible to get rich (at least in the US) by making mortgage loans to unqualified buyers, fueling the ongoing but unsustainable housing bubble.
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