Democracy gone Astray: Saturday, December 17, 2011

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Come back, Transit City, all is forgiven

Holy crap, it’s been an insanely enraging week (or month, or year) of news from the world of Toronto transit. Right now, as I type this, apparently 70 people are lined up to speak to the TTC commissioners about the proposed 10-cent fare hike. But really the increase—around the rate of inflation, thanks to TTC Chair Karen Stintz’s refusal to consider a 15-cent fare increase—is the least of a transit users’ worries.

First, the very recent news:

Earlier this week, Gordon Chong, the man hand-picked by the mayor to figure out how to give us a private-sector financed subway extension on Sheppard Avenue, told the Globe and Mail that there is no way the private sector will pay for more than 10 to 30 per cent of the cost of construction, and that to find out if we can even get that much from them, we’ll need to spend another $10 million over the next year.

Then yesterday, TTC General Manager Gary Webster told city council’s budget committee that the city will be on the hook for at least $65 million in costs simply to cancel Transit City. That was higher than the numbers previously cited, and it is mysteriously not included in the TTC capital budget currently under debate. The really troubling question about that $65 million (or more—the number has not been finalized) is that city council has never, ever authorized spending it, or agreed to spend it. City council has still never had a vote on replacing Transit City with the Ford subway scheme—the provincial agency Metrolinx has changed plans based simply on the mayor’s expressed desire, and Metrolinx and the mayor cooked up a memorandum of understanding about the change that says the province will have no additional costs related to the change and that the city will cover any sunk costs Metrolinx has already incurred related to building the original plan. The meter is still running on those costs, but so far they total $65 million.

This morning the mayor appeared on CP24 for an interview with Stephen LeDrew. The whole interview is posted in three segments on the CP24 homepage right now—I have no idea where it will live on their site once it gets bumped from the main story slot. Overall, I got a reminder while watching it that as much as he can be a controversy time-bomb when speaking off the cuff, he is also his own best weapon when he finds himself in a friendly interview environment. A lot of what he says about cutting the Land Transfer Tax or making the city responsible sounds perfectly reasonable and sensible to those not involved in the day-to-day debate at City Hall, and his “I’m just a regular guy” schtick (which isn’t actually a schtick, I don’t think, it’s how he thinks of himself) comes off perfectly. See for example how he ruefully laughs off talking on his cellphone while driving, “My staff are always on me, everybody’s on me…” Despite being born wealthy and getting wealthier, it is a role he is in many ways born to play.

Communities on water’s edge fear Trojan Horse in Ford’s port lands invasion

Nothing like vintage nonsense from Doug Ford to pack a meeting.

Nearly 700 very engaged residents, no doubt still haunted by the spectre of a Ferris wheel and mega-mall on the shoreline, turned out Wednesday night, December 7, for a consultation on the future of the port lands.

Hosted by the city of Toronto and Waterfront Toronto, the arm’s-length agency in charge of harbour development, the meeting held at the Reference Library on Yonge was the first since council voted to accelerate planning of the massive project.

But judging from the response of this crowd, most interested observers actually favour a slow and steady strategy, not a speed-up.

The fear many expressed was that rushing would risk bungling the long-term goals of making the nearly 1,000 acres of industrial land on the city’s eastern waterfront ecologically sustainable, publicly accessible and pleasing to the eye.

It’s rare for the loquacious wild bunch who occupy council’s left wing to be stuck for words, rendered speechless by the latest end-run of the Ford administration – and there have been many such plays in this regime’s first year of living dangerously.

But so flabbergasted were some at the revelations coming out of the second of two budget wrap-up sessions at City Hall Tuesday (December 13) that all they could do was shake their heads in disbelief – or was that disgust?

I think I saw a few muttering to themselves about the havoc about to be wreaked on our beloved city as a result of the mayor’s ill-thought-out directive to city departments to cut 10 per cent from their bottom line.

Those who could manage a few words used descriptors like “pitiful,” “disastrous” and “deeply disturbed.”

At one point, the back-and-forth got so testy between Budget Committee vice-chair Doug Ford and opposition councillors that chair Mike Del Grande threatened to remove them from the meeting. That was during a tiff over wading pools after Adam Vaughan and others took exception to Ford’s comments that “the burbs got nuthin’” when David Miller was running the city. So this is what the budget deliberations have come down to: petty jealousies – what Councillor Gord Perks termed “a race to the bottom.”

Victoria’s Secret Revealed in Child Picking Burkina Faso Cotton

Clarisse Kambire’s nightmare rarely changes. It’s daytime. In a field of cotton plants that burst with purple and white flowers, a man in rags towers over her, a stick raised above his head. Then a voice booms, jerking Clarisse from her slumber and making her heart leap. “Get up!”

The man ordering her awake is the same one who haunts the 13-year-old girl’s sleep: Victorien Kamboule, the farmer she labors for in a West African cotton field. Before sunrise on a November morning she rises from the faded plastic mat that serves as her mattress, barely thicker than the cover of a glossy magazine, opens the metal door of her mud hut and sets her almond-shaped eyes on the first day of this season’s harvest. (Follow her journey in videos, photos and more here.)

She had been dreading it. “I’m starting to think about how he will shout at me and beat me again,” she said two days earlier. Preparing the field was even worse. Clarisse helped dig more than 500 rows with only her muscles and a hoe, substituting for the ox and the plow the farmer can’t afford. If she’s slow, Kamboule whips her with a tree branch.

This harvest is Clarisse’s second. Cotton from her first went from her hands onto the trucks of a Burkina Faso program that deals in cotton certified as fair trade. The fiber from that harvest then went to factories in India and Sri Lanka, where it was fashioned into Victoria’s Secret underwear -- like the pair of zebra-print, hip-hugger panties sold for $8.50 at the lingerie retailer’s Water Tower Place store on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile.

Syria must accept peace plan by Wednesday or UN to step in: Arab League

BEIRUT — The Arab League has given Syria until Wednesday to allow observers into the country or else it will likely turn to the UN Security Council for action to try to end the deadly violence against regime opponents, Qatar’s prime minister said Saturday.

Sheik Hamad Bin Jassem Bin Jabr Al Thani said in Qatar that Arab foreign ministers will hold a “decisive and important” meeting in Cairo on Wednesday to decide on next steps.

He said there is near unanimity among Arab states on taking the issue to the UN after Syria demanded changes to the Arab League’s proposal for ending the violence.

The Arab plan called for Syria to halt its crackdown and to allow in Arab observers to ensure compliance with the deal. Syria had asked for some amendments regarding the work of the observers.

The 22-member League has also suspended Syria’s membership and imposed sanctions, but it has been divided over whether to seek the help of the wider international community beyond the Arab world.

MURMANSK, Russia— In the noonday twilight, as dockworkers squint through the gloom to move mountainous heaps of coal bound for Europe, the hum of Arctic power is unmistakable.

The stevedores labour in the damp cold, 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, part of the vanguard leading Russia’s latest push to build its future on the rich resources of the Far North.

Grab buckets with massive steel jaws, dangling from yellow cranes several storeys high, chomp at mounds of coal, iron ore pellets and other bulk cargo steadily replenished by a stream of trains from the south. And this is a slow winter’s day.

Russians stopped wondering about whether to develop the Arctic generations ago. The only question now is, how fast can progress march?

The Kremlin has declared the Arctic critical to the country’s 21st-century economy and national security. And it is risking billions on a strategy to reverse years of neglect and decline in its Far North.

A once-utopian vision of the north heavy on Soviet control has given way to a pragmatic view that science and technology, driven by political will and business savvy, can re-energize a slowing economy.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate has approved a budget legislation that contains a provision demanded by the Republicans to pressure President Barack Obama into approving construction of a Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline.

The Republicans have cited the 2,735-kilometre Keystone XL pipeline as an example of a project that could put people back to work.

Obama recently announced that he was postponing a decision on the pipeline until after the 2012 elections to allow for more time to study the environmental ramifications of the proposal.

An agreement reached by Senate leaders Friday night and approved during a rare Saturday session would require Obama to decide within 60 days whether to grant a permit for the pipeline.

But the legislation also allows Obama to decide not to do so if he determines that the pipeline is “not in the national interest.”

Aboriginal Affairs is planning reductions in First Nation housing for the next four years, government documents tabled with the House of Commons show.

However, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., which runs a separate envelope of funding for reserves, is planning to gradually increase subsidies for building and renovating homes over the next few years.

The end result is a relatively stagnant and unreliable pool of funding despite mounting costs and a rapidly growing population, chiefs say.

“We have to try to make do with what is there. It's the same level of funding year after year,” says Stan Beardy, grand chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation in northern Ontario.

“We have to keep in mind that there are escalating costs to doing business — the increased costs of goods as well as the population increases that are at a rapid rate among First Nations people.”

In her home city of São Paulo, Brazil, Yane Brogiollo was a manager at Hewlett-Packard Co., where she oversaw a team of 15 database professionals. She also designed and taught courses for a local university’s MBA program.

They were “wonderful” jobs, and she earned a good salary. São Paolo was crowded, though, and too big. Crime was escalating. So a year and a half ago, she moved to Vancouver, hoping to find a better quality of life.

That hasn’t happened. Despite 15 years of IT experience and a master of science degree in computer engineering, 70 job applications have yielded only five interviews and no offers.

“The first thing they look is for Canadian experience,” she says. “If you don’t have that, they don’t call you for an interview. And if you don’t get an interview, it’s hard to show your skills.”

She’s not alone. Canada has a well-documented history of attracting the best and brightest immigrants from developing countries. But many of these people wind up jobless, or in minimum-wage survival jobs. And there’s a wider economic cost to the country of under-utilizing these skilled workers.

WASHINGTON -- As House Republicans and Democrats patted one another on the back over their new spending agreement Friday, advocates for coal miners were dismayed to see that the budget bill expected to pass the Senate this weekend will delay new regulations meant to reduce black lung disease.

The rider attached by the GOP pushes back a rule that would further restrict the amount of respirable coal dust allowed in a mine's atmosphere and thereby reduce the amount of damage to miners' lungs. Mining interests have strongly opposed the new rule, arguing that it will needlessly raise costs for coal companies, and they've found plenty of allies among anti-regulatory Republicans in Congress.

The pending bill requires that the Government Accountability Office conduct an investigation into the methodology behind the Labor Department's new rule. The coal dust rule then can't go into effect until either the GAO's report is released or 240 days have passed. The rider was first pointed out on the Coal Tattoo blog.

Critics say the rider gives coal operators at least another 8 months to have unacceptably high levels of coal dust in their mines.

WASHINGTON -- After two days of debate, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) abruptly halted a key hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act, postponing a Committee vote on the bill until 2012. The move marks a win for hordes of internet activists who oppose the bill, but gives lawmakers another opportunity to juice deep-pocketed corporations for campaign contributions.

"This is a huge victory for everyone who uses the Internet -- and proof that millions of people speaking out can still make a difference in a Congress usually run by corporate lobbyists," said Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit and Demand Progress, an organization that has staunchly opposed the bills for months.

SOPA is being aggressively pushed by Hollywood movie studios, major record labels and luxury goods providers as an effort to crackdown on internet piracy of their products. But the tools envisioned are so extreme that tech experts warn the legislation threatens the very functionality of the Internet. The ACLU and other free-speech groups emphasize that by authorizing the federal government and corporations to shut down entire websites without a trial for posting just a single piece of copyright-infringing content, the bill would sharply curb the exercise of free speech online.

First he gutted worker's rights, then slashed state education funding and dumbed-down sex ed. Next on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's hit list? Breast and cervical cancer screenings for women. Come January 1, Wisconsinites who rely on Planned Parenthood to access free cancer screenings may be out of luck.

The Wisconsin Well Woman Program is an 17-year-old state service created to ensure that women ages 45 to 64 who lack health insurance can access preventive health screenings. It is administered by the Department of Health Services and provides referrals and screenings for breast cancer, cervical cancer, and multiple sclerosis at no cost. The state currently uses a number of contractors to coordinate and provide those services, including Planned Parenthood. But now, in a move that could leave many women in the state without access to the program, the Walker government is ending Planned Parenthood's contract.

In four Wisconsin counties, Planned Parenthood is the only health care provider currently contracted as a coordinator for the cancer screenings. Coordinators evaluate women for eligibility, enroll them in the program, and then connect them to health care providers that can perform the exams. The coordinators also do community outreach, letting women know that there are options for preventative care even if they don't have health insurance. Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin has been a contractor since the program began—including during the terms of previous GOP governors Tommy Thompson and Scott McCallum—but the group recently learned that its contract is being terminated at the end of the month.

First, the numbers. From 1970 to 2007, the percentage of families in the Milwaukee metropolitan area that were middle class declined from 37 to 24 percent, according to a new analysis by the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission. During the same period, the proportion of affluent families grew from 22 to 27 percent-while the percentage of poor households swelled from 23 to 31 percent. In short, Milwaukee's middle class families went from a plurality to its smallest minority.

The biggest culprit is the disappearance of well-paying manufacturing jobs. Despite a promising recent uptick in high-end manufacturing, Milwaukee has suffered a 40 percent decline in manufacturing jobs since 1970, when Schlitz, Pabst and American Motors reigned. Instead of shrinking, the city's urban poverty is creeping outward toward suburbs.

Late Wednesday afternoon, that was evident in the Jefferson Elementary school of West Allis, a once solidly middle class suburb bordering Milwaukee. In a crowded school gymnasium, principal Shelly Strasser said that fifty percent of students now qualify for free or reduced price school lunch programs. In other local schools, the number is ninety percent.

"It breaks your heart," said Strasser, a West Allis native who said she now has homeless students. "That's something we've never seen as a district."

OTTAWA - A Conservative senator is speaking out against his own government's omnibus crime bill.

Quebec Senator Pierre Claude Nolin says he can't support the massive Bill C-10 mainly because of a section that deals with growing marijuana plants.

The proposed legislation has just passed second reading in the upper chamber, and will land in a Senate committee when Parliament resumes at the end of January.

Nolin has been a longtime advocate for ending the prohibition on pot. He was the chairman of a landmark Senate committee in 2002 that called for the substance to be legalized.

The omnibus crime bill covers nine distinct pieces of legislation, and introduces mandatory minimum sentences for a number of new offences.

Many people consider high heels and miniskirts to be degrading to women. High heels can restrict a woman's movements. Fitted clothes objectify women, which is intrinsically demeaning to them and prevents them from achieving equality with men – so the theory goes.

Yet women have never worn less and achieved more in the public sphere than they do now, and so – arguably – there goes the theory.

My own feeling is that if it were the men in our society who wore the four-inch Louboutins, we might well theorize that this reflects their privileged position in society: Men know they'll never have to stand all night, or chase after a bus, it would be said of the men in pencil skirts.

When I was growing up, my mother used to say to me, both of us wearing our sensible Mary Janes, that her mother told her, “There's nothing less appealing to a man than a woman in high heels. No man would ever want to be with a woman with pretty feet and a pained expression on her face.”

From a fairly early age, I remember thinking, “Oh, granny, I think we're going to move in very different circles.”

The intensity of oilsands carbon emissions — the amount of greenhouse gases created per every barrel of oil produced — increased by two per cent between 2009 and 2010, according to an industry report.

The 2010 Responsible Canadian Energy progress report by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) also found that overall greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the oilsands rose 14 per cent in the same time period as the number of oilsands operations expanded.

"The increase in total GHG emissions is a result of the significant increase in both mining and in situ production, both of which require more fuel — for mine trucks, in situ steam production and upgraders," read the report.

The document offered the same explanation for the increase in intensity.

TORONTO — Job creation and managing the economy will continue to be the federal government's top priorities going into the new year, said Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Friday.

Much of the focus will remain on the government's long-term economic plan, which will not involve lowering provincial health transfers.

"We will be looking as we go forward into the next year, not just to do things that will hopefully, immediately, improve prospects for Canadians but also things that will put our economy on a very good path for the generation to come," he said.

The government also plans on keeping ahead of plans on reducing the country's $31 billion national deficit.

"I think Canadians understand that our deficit and debt situation are far, far superior to the situations we see in virtually the entire rest of the developed world," he said. "This is a big Canadian advantage and one we must keep. That's why our government will continue to tackle that problem."

Justine Winder was only eight years old when she first heard the odious voices in her head, over and over, telling her to light a fire in her brother's bedroom.

So she did.

On that day, the little girl with a lighter and a deeply troubled mind had no way of knowing she had just set her own life ablaze.

For the next 18 years, Justine would ricochet from one miserable human warehouse to another, from group homes to youth detention centres to provincial jails and finally to federal prison after beating up her ex-husband.

Each stop only made her mental illness worse, her behaviour more uncontrollable, her re-offending ever more certain.

Once in the federal prison system, she was locked in solitary confinement, sometimes strapped to a wooden restraint board, her life reduced to dreaming of death — and regular attempts to kill herself.

On Thursday, in the penultimate question period of the fall session of Parliament, NDP environment critic Megan Leslie accused the government of withdrawing from the Kyoto climate accord to "hide our failure and to hide our job-killing inaction on climate."

Here's how Hansard records what followed:

"Hon. Peter Kent (Minister of the Environment, CPC): Mr. Speaker, if my hon. colleague had been in Durban she would have seen that Canada was among the leaders in the —"

"Some hon. members: Oh! Oh!"

"The Speaker: Order. We can deal with this after Question Period."

In the emotional high point of the session, Justin Trudeau reacted to Kent's comment by bellowing, "Oh you piece of s---," at the top of his lungs, setting off pandemonium in the Chamber, which is demurely recorded in Hansard as "Oh! Oh!"

After question period, Trudeau apologized for his bad language, then Kent rose to ask for an apology, like a badly programmed robot.

[Series] Understanding how the reasons, actors, and methods of war have changed.

A special series from Opencanada.org: Canada's hub for international affairs.

Last week, when asked to respond to Republican presidential primary candidates’ charges of appeasement, U.S. President Barack Obama answered coolly, “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 50 top al-Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field.” Indeed, targeted assassination is now a widely accepted tool of American foreign policy.

The rise of targeted killing is part of a broader change in how we fight. The exact process that introduced war as we know it – state versus state – is now in reverse. Traditional warfare emerged alongside the rise of the modern state; as globalization erodes state sovereignty, traditional warfare turns upside down. The result is a distinctly new type of warfare – new in terms of reasons, actors, and methods.

In the How We Fight series, OpenCanada examines the impact of these changes on the methods of war. How is technology changing weaponry? Soldiers? Threats? Enemies? How do drones change the social relations of war? They make assassination easier, but do they make it okay? They decrease combatant casualties, but what is their impact on civilian casualties? And how do we even know how many children die when a robot drops a bomb in a remote Yemeni village?

Over the course of the next three weeks, OpenCanada will engage international experts in discussions about these issues. By the end of the series, we hope that you will have a better sense of where the $600 every Canadian spent on the military this year goes – and where it ought to go.

Check out the series content here:

A View to Kill: Professor Stephanie Carvin gives three reasons why assassination is unethical and ineffective.
A Defence of Assasination: The American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin defends assassination as a way to get rid of enemies without causing civilian casualties. And it’s legal too.

Origin
Source: the Mark

Why Ottawa’s ban on veils at citizenship ceremonies is unlikely to survive

Fierce debates over religious symbols and beliefs are nothing new in Canada. Should a Mountie be allowed to wear a turban? Should a Sikh boy be permitted to carry a symbolic dagger in school? Should Hutterites who disapprove of photography on grounds of faith be excused from having their pictures on their driver’s licences? These controversies all ignited heated disputes over cultural sensitivities and legal rights. But none arguably has generated reactions quite so intense as Muslim women who cover their faces by wearing the niqab or burka—a practice Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has now challenged on unusually sweeping grounds.

Kenney decreed this week that immigrants who wish to become Canadians will no longer be allowed to keep their faces covered while taking the citizenship oath. He made the move after a Conservative MP from a Toronto suburb reported seeing four burka-clad women taking part in a recent group citizenship ceremony. Kenney said it’s hard for a presiding judge to tell if a veiled woman is really speaking the oath. But that practical quibble was clearly secondary to him. “It is,” he said, “a matter of deep principle that goes to the heart of our identity and our values of openness and equality.”

The need for Canadian oilsands is "overwhelming" and the government will work hard to combat misinformation about its environmental impact, the prime minister said Friday.

Stephen Harper launched into a defence of the controversial oilsands at an unrelated event in Toronto, saying his government will push to get the "real information out there."

"The fact of the matter is that emissions from our oilsands are comparable to other heavy oils and that the industry continues to invest and continues to find ways to reduce those emissions," Harper said.

"It is absolutely clear if you look at the trajectory of world supply and demand, of North American supply and demand that the need for this energy is just overwhelming."

Harper's comments came in response to a question about Chiquita Brands, which announced Thursday that it would avoid using fuel from Alberta's oilsands.

The company, which sells hundreds of millions of dollars of fruit, juice and snacks around the world, said it has joined 13 other companies and one city in trying to reduce its carbon footprint.

"We are committed to directing our transportation providers to avoid, where possible, fuels from tarsands refineries," Chiquita vice-president Manuel Rodriguez wrote in a letter to Aaron Sanger of the environmental group ForestEthics.

Even a brief period under third-party management is too much for Attawapiskat, according to a local grand chief.

Stan Louttit of the Mushkegowuk Council, which includes the James Bay community, says the federal government imposed outside control on the band’s finances with no warning and insufficient reason.

He says assurances on Thursday from the aboriginal affairs minister that the control would only last until spring don’t make up for the offensive gesture.

“It doesn’t matter, it could be one day of third-party manager. It’s the principle of … kicking people while they’re down,” Mr. Louttit said in a phone interview from Moose Factory, Ont.

Band members have a hard time believing this time it will be different, he explained.

The third-party manager showed up unexpectedly “out of the blue” at the reserve while Chief Theresa Spence was in Ottawa for meetings, and in the midst of a housing crisis on the reserve, Mr. Louttit said.

“There are more respectful ways to do business. The way it happens, it ticks everybody off.”

Chief Spence has filed for a court injunction to oust the overseer immediately. Mr. Louttit says she expects a ruling Monday or Tuesday.

A day before federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is set to meet with his provincial and territorial counterparts in Victoria, Conservative cabinet minister Jason Kenney says while a new deal on health transfers has yet to be reached, the current level of funding is unsustainable and his party's election promise to fund health transfers to the provinces at six per cent does not extend beyond 2016.

In an interview with CBC Radio's The House, Kenney tells Evan Solomon, "We did commit in the platform, during the election, to six per cent growth for the balance of the Health Accord, plus two years."

With the current Health Accord set to expire in 2014, the federal government "will be having discussions with the provinces on where to go beyond that," said Kenney.

"Many of the provinces are [already] controlling the growth in health care costs, and it's less than six per cent."

"I think everyone recognizes that we cannot continue annual increases of six per cent, or more in some of the provinces, year after year," said Kenney.

"For some of the provinces, if they continue in that trajectory, there will be nothing left for education, for universities, for anything else."

Origin
Source: CBC

Democracy gone Astray