DND spends $374,000 to renovate offices of two top officials

OTTAWA — The deputy minister of Defence approved a $374,000 renovation to his executive suite just three weeks after the department circulated a business plan highlighting the need to save money and eliminate the jobs of at least 2,100 civilian public servants, according to documents obtained by the Citizen.

Robert Fonberg approved in May 2011 a plan to accelerate the renovation of the executive suite at DND’s downtown headquarters and have the construction finished by the summer.

The renovations were to “ensure that my staff and I continue to provide the best possible service to your office,” Fonberg told Defence Minister Peter MacKay.

The briefing note detailing the renovations was obtained by the Citizen through the Access to Information law.

DND confirmed in an email that the renovations, which cost $374,496, are now finished. The offices are for Fonberg and Matthew King, the associate deputy minister, as well as their seven support staff. Also included is a boardroom with video-conferencing facilities.

“The area in question had not been renovated since 1992; since then, new requirements emerged that are appropriate for the offices of the senior civilian leadership at National Defence,” the Defence Department stated in an email.

It did not outline what those new requirements were. Aside from noting the boardroom and video conferencing facilities, DND did not provide specific details about what was done in the renovations. But it did point out that since high-level meetings take place in the boardroom, security measures were taken in the construction of that part of the renovations.

Rick Perry Defends Marines Who Urinated On Corpses

WASHINGTON — Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry on Sunday accused the Obama administration of "over-the-top rhetoric" and "disdain for the military" in its condemnation of a video that purportedly shows four Marines urinating on corpses in Afghanistan.

Perry's comments put him at odds with Sen. John McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who said the images could damage the war effort.

"The Marine Corps prides itself that we don't lower ourselves to the level of the enemy," McCain said when asked about Perry's position. "So it makes me sad more than anything else, because ... I can't tell you how wonderful these people (Marines) are. And it hurts their reputation and their image."

No one has been charged in the case, but officials in the U.S. and abroad have called for swift punishment of the four Marines. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last week that he worried the video could be used by the Taliban to undermine peace talks.

A military criminal investigation and an internal Marine Corps review are under way. The Geneva Conventions forbid the desecration of the dead.

Texas Gov. Perry said the Marines involved should be reprimanded but not prosecuted on criminal charges.

"Obviously, 18-, 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often. And that's what's occurred here," Perry told CNN's "State of the Union."

He later added: "What's really disturbing to me is the kind of over-the-top rhetoric from this administration and their disdain for the military."

Later appearing on the same show, McCain said he disagreed.

"We're trying to win the hearts and minds" of the Afghanistan population, he said. "And when something like that comes up, it obviously harms that ability."

Original Article
Source: Huff 

Rupert Murdoch Attacks Google, Obama In Pro-SOPA Twitter Rant

Rupert Murdoch sounded off on Saturday about the White House's rejection of SOPA and PIPA, the controversial anti-piracy bills currently being debated in Congress.

"So Obama has thrown in his lot withSilicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery," he wrote on Twitter. "Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying."

Murdoch has lobbied aggressively for the bills, which many critics call web censorship. On Saturday, the White House announced that it would not support the legislation.

Supporters of the legislation--including Murdoch's News Corp, which owns 20th Century Fox films and various successful TV shows--argue that the bills would help protect copyright.

Google is one of the most vocal opponents of SOPA and PIPA. Co-founder Sergey Brin has said that the bills "give the U.S. government and copyright holders extraordinary powers including the ability to hijack DNS and censor search results (and this is even without so much as a proper court trial)."

Original Article
Source: Huff 

Religious Freedom and the 21st Century

The Globe & Mail‘s plagiarism-happy columnist Margaret Wente has called us, this weekend, to reflect on the importance of religious freedom as the most important front in the battle for greater human freedom in the 21st century. Religious persecution is on the rise — mostly, she says, because of the expansion of Christian minorities in Muslim countries. So the Harper regime’s Office of Religious Freedom may not be the most effective way of tackling the problem, but it is a problem we have to talk about, and hopefully do something about. Thus saith Wente.

One of the last times I waded into the fray on religion, I was denounced as a racist missionary, so I won’t say I’m not a little nervous writing this, but I’m also not going to back down from a good fight. Here’s the first problem: we can’t talk about the importance of “religious freedom” until we understand what we mean by freedom. I’m not sure Wente has put much thought into this. Freedom from what, exactly? Or more to the point, for what?

First of all, let’s cut out the crap about whether or not “religious persecution” equals “Christian persecution.” People like Wente, and our government, assert that Christians are the main victims of religious persecution around the world today. Leftist critiques of the new Religious Freedom Office say that it is a front group to advance Christian prejudice.  There’s a little truth to both positions, and a lot of exaggeration. Whatever may or may not be going on in the world, the Canadian Office of Religious Freedom is not going to make one bit of difference. It’s going to be a small, underfunded government bureau producing annual reports on religious freedom, probably cribbing the lion’s share of the content from existing American sources.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Advice: Harper Regime “Streamlines” its Own Policy Advice Office

Hill Times is reporting that the Prime Minister’s Office has “streamlined” by merging its two main previously separate branches, the policy analysis unit and the public relations and lobbying unit known rather ambiguously as “stakeholder relations.” (It’s worth asking who is awarded “stakes” in the Canadian Prime Minister, and I’m sure you can guess the answer.) An unofficial spokesman, Conservative activist and lobbyist Yaroslav Baran, says the purpose is to “ensure that policy is crafted in a well-thought out manner.”

I can’t imagine how that will be the case. As I understand it (and the PMO essentially operates in secret, providing almost no public explanations or accounts), one branch provides policy advice, and the other communicates with lobbyists, business groups, and other supporters. Why exactly is it more efficient, or less “confusing” as Baran puts it, to push these together? It seems much more likely that serious policy analysis is going to be thrown out the window entirely, if it hasn’t already been, in favour of emphasizing relations with “stakeholders.” Again, Hill Times does not elaborate on who owns shares in the PMO, and again, you can probably guess yourself.

In theory, the Prime Minister of Canada has two different offices. The Prime Minister’s Office provides advice on policy from a political perspective, and the Privy Council Office provides advice on policy from a bureaucratic perspective. That’s it: they’re both advisory units. Under Trudeau, the PMO began picking up additional power, both taking over much of the policy advice function from the civil service and also becoming a propaganda arm of the government in power. Harper, who claims to hate Trudeau’s policies but is actually a secret acolyte of the man with respect to how government should be run, is now completing that transformation.

With the civil service marginalized and the Prime Minister’s Office turned into a “stakeholder relations” shop, where does the government turn for trusted analysis? Or does it see the need to turn anywhere for such a thing?

Incidentally, the Hill Times reports that the appointment of Rachel Curran to head the merged office proves that the PMO is not “an old boy’s club.” Well, maybe. Harper’s Chief of Staff is a man, as usual. By my count, men outnumber women in the PMO 57 to 47, and most of the latter occupy junior and administrative positions.
Original Article
Source: sixth Estate 

If We Don’t Pay Our MPs, Someone Else Will

Of course, the Harper regime is being more than a little hypocritical when it launches an attack on public-sector pensions while continuing to collect its own gold-plated pensions, currently at a cost of around $50 million per year. And Stephen I’s about-face on pensions — he once claimed that every MP who refused to opt out of the pension should be kicked out of the party, but now pays into one himself — is one of the most scandalous episodes in the history of Conservative corruption.

But with all that said, I think we have to be very careful how we word our criticism here. Would you really be happier seeing your own pension (if you’re fortunate enough to have one) cut to the bone if you knew that MPs, most of whom have other sources of income or even other pensions anyways, were making the same cuts? And, more to the point, would government really be more democratic if we paid our MPs less money?

Maybe. But there are two points to keep in mind here. First, the MP pension scheme doesn’t actually cost us all that much money. According to John Ivison’s latest broadside against Parliamentary pensions, the scheme pays out around $50 million per year. That amounts to less than $1.50 per Canadian. Let’s suppose we slashed MP pensions by half. That would bring the cost down to 75 cents. You can take your personal savings and go buy an extra juice box.

Second, we should be asking ourselves what MPs should be paid. CEOs of large multinational companies get anywhere from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars per year, running corporations a fraction of the size of the Canadian economy. Now, I’m not saying that Stephen I deserves a $100 million a year salary, let alone anyone else.

But, every Member of Parliament is charged with passing laws which apply to all Canadians, representing their particular riding at the national level, and either overseeing government (if they are in Cabinet) or holding government accountable to the people (if they are not). Now, how much should someone with those responsibilities be paid? Pierre Karl Peladeau, the Quebecor CEO who oversees the odious Sun Media enterprise, only performs the last of those four duties, and not very well at that. He gets $5 million per year.

And there’s another equally serious point, which I’ve left to last only because it sounds vaguely paranoid. When it comes to paying people in positions of high public trust, we’re not just paying what we think is reasonable — we’re paying enough, and keeping them under a tight enough legal leash, that they’re not sorely tempted to accept additional pay from somebody else. As in, bribes.

As I say, that sounds slightly paranoid. But then again, the man who is currently our Prime Minister once tried to bribe a terminally ill MP with a $1 million life insurance policy in exchange for his cooperation on a single vote. If we don’t pay our MPs generously, someone else will.
Original Article
Source: sixth Estate 

Would-Be Foreign Influencer in the National Post: Our Incomes Can be Infinite!

I have very little to do with the Cato Institute, preferring to spend my time jousting with their intellectually subordinate Canadian cousins, the Fraser Institute. But I couldn’t help notice the following manic rant about the importance of economic inequality in the National Post by Cato “scholar” Michael Tanner, not least because it seems decidedly out of place at a time when Canada’s New Right, of which the Post is a founding member, is baying about the danger of letting foreign varmints pollute the purity of Canadan debating halls:

 In what way does someone else’s success harm me? Such a viewpoint stems from the misguided notion that the economy is a pie of fixed size… In reality, though, the size of the pie is infinite. But to make it grow, we need people who are ambitious, skilled risk-takers.

This sort of cheerfully ignorant hocus pocus, much like the oft-repeated statement that “there are no absolute truths” (which I ran across in a peer-reviewed article yesterday, much to my disappointment) is an alarm signal. Any time you read it, you can be sure that the person whose work you are reading is so profoundly incapable of critical thinking that nothing else they say is likely to be of any value.

The size of the economy cannot be infinite. We live in a world of scarce and limited resources. This is actually the founding principle of economics — their first commandment, their Prime Directive. Things can’t be infinite. And it gets more amusing, too. Tanner would agree, I think, that the number of people in the world isn’t actually infinite. Dividing an infinite number by a finite one gets you back to infinite again, so what Tanner is also saying here is that your individual income is also potentially infinite.

Now, how feasible do you think that is?

Incidentally, I also want to vent my spleen at another much more widely accepted phrase he sneaks in: the idea that “risk-takers” are the leaders we should seek out. This is simple foolishness. By definition, taking a risk means entering a situation where you don’t know what the outcome will be, and in which there is a likelihood the outcome will be bad. So we have, here, leadership by willful ignorance.

Now, what Tanner really means is that we should seek out people who take risks and, so far, have always won their gambles. Again, this is foolishness. Either you are seeking out intelligent people who saw something the rest of us didn’t, in which case they aren’t risk-takers, or you’re advocating that we reduce leadership contests to something equivalent to gambling that your friend is probably going to win his next spin at the slot machine because, after all, he won the last one and that makes him a successful “risk-taker.”
Original Article
Source: sixth Estate 

24 Losing Candidates in 2011 Receive Government Jobs Anyways: Sixth Estate Patronage List Updated

Another update has been made to the Sixth Estate Patronage List, which tracks Crown appointments (theoretically impartial and non-partisan) given to Conservative Party insiders, retired politicians, and donors. While in opposition, Stephen Harper complained that patronage appointments were immoral and illegitimate in a modern democracy. Once in power, he has executed a stunning volte-face. The Patronage List now stands at a total of 805 names, with roughly 40% of new external appointments since the May 2011 election going to apparent Conservatives.

Probably the most egregious entry on the list this week is Rumina Velshi, the mother of Conservative staffer and recent Ethical Oil front man Alykhan Velshi, who is apparently qualified to sit on the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. However, since that’s already made the news, I thought that an equally revealing trend to highlight would be the steadily accumulating detritus from the 2011 election: Conservative candidates which the public rejected at the ballot box, but whom we are now paying anyways thanks to the generosity of the Harper regime.

Right now this Losers List stands at 24 people, which means that in just one year since the 2011 election, around one in six of the Conservatives who went down to defeat on election night is already living off the public dole anyways:

1. Jean-Philippe Bachand (Richmond-Arthabaska) — Employment Insurance Act Board of Referees
2. Richard Bélisle (Longueuil-Pierre Boucher) — National Parole Board
3. Jean-Pierre Blackburn (Jonquière-Alma) — Ambassador to UNESCO
4. Sylvie Boucher (Beauport-Limoilou) – Caucus Liaison Assistant for Minister Leona Aglukkaq
5. Nancy Brassard-Fortin (Hull-Aylmer) — Assistant to Parliamentary Secretary Jacques Gourde
6. Cecil Clarke (Sydney-Victoria) — “Consultant” to the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency
7. Matthew Conway (Notre Dame de Grâce-Lachine) — Quebec desk officer for Heritage Minister James Moore
8. Jean-Guy Dagenais (Saint Hyacinthe-Bagot) — Senator
9. Neil Drabkin (Westmount-Ville Marie) — Chief of Staff to the Natural Resources Minister
10. Bernard Généreux (Montmagny-L’Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière du Loup) – Appointed to the Quebec Port Authority
11. Marie-Claude Godue (Berthier-Maskinongé) — Appointed to the Employment Insurance Board of Referees in 2012.
12. Rudy Husny (Outremont) — Press Secretary to Minister Ed Fast
13. Aaron Hynes (Bonavista-Gander-Grand Falls-Windsor) — Policy Advisor to Minister Peter Penashue
14. Pierre Lafontaine (Jeanne Le Ber) — Employment Insurance Act Board of Referees
15. Mélisa Leclerc (Shefford) — Chief of Staff to Minister of State Bernard Valcourt
16. Sandy Lee (Western Arctic) — NWT policy advisor to Minister Leona Aglukkaq
17. Fabian Manning (Avalon) — Senator
18. Ann Matejicka (Winnipeg North) — Chief of Staff to Minister Diane Finley
19. Jean-Philippe Payment (Terrebonne-Blainville) – Appointed to the Employment Insurance Board of Referees in 2012.
20. Elie Salibi (Ottawa South) — Assistant to Parliamentary Secretary Dean Del Mastro
21. Larry Smith (Lac Saint Louis) — Senator
22. Josée Verner (Louis Saint Laurent) — Senator
23. Leanne Villella (Welland) – Employment Insurance Board of Referees
24. Saulie Zajdel (Mount Royal) — Government “consultant” on Montreal communities

I should note that many of these people are listed on ministerial staffs, and thus do not count on my actual Patronage List. Ministerial staffs are always political, and therefore do not count as patronage appointments, although they are still funded by the taxpayer.

Original Article
Source: sixth Estate 

Finding Virtue in a Culture of Vengeance - The Harper Approach to Crime

In the coming months, the now-majority Conservative government will make good on their campaign promises to move forward a series of “tough-on-crime” bills that fell to the floor prior to the dissolution of Parliament this past March. While the final bill has yet to be introduced, the previous bills which are almost certain to be included will increase police powers, weaken privacy and civil liberties protections, “toughen” youth criminal justice policies, restrict or eliminate conditional sentencing, and legislate more mandatory minimum sentences, further decreasing judicial discretion. In short, it will focus on punishment and put more people in prison for longer periods of time. Prison populations are estimated to increase by thousands over the next few years. Such a shift in policy might very well be dangerous in itself and Canadians can look south of the border for evidence of where a highly punitive, “war on crime”style criminal justice system can lead.

Easy Targets: The making of vengeance culture

Since 2006, the Harper government has skipped few beats on its political war drum of justice. From the release of Karla Homolka and the pardon of convicted sexual offender Graham James to the removal of two-for-one remand credits, to rhetoric about liberal judges and the closure of prison rehabilitative farms at federal institutions – Conservatives elicit moral condemnation at a justice system perceived to be soft on offenders. With overflowing confidence they bait progressives with comments like “hug-a-thug,” some openly questioning nearly two decades of statistics suggesting crime rates are in decline.

What the punishment-driven crime overhaul really represents is the implementation of a policy agenda very much grounded in the ideology of the Conservative party and emotionally-driven sensationalism. The image of the immoral “dangerous offender” juxtaposed with a Conservative moral agenda has served neo-cons well—so well they are willing to ante up an estimated $5 billion annual increase to justice spending by 2015-2016.

The Harper Offensive - Selling Tar Sands to Europe and the USA

In the halls of power in Europe and the United States, well out of sight of Canadians, the Harper government has been waging a diplomatic and political war over the energy future of North America.

The Alberta tar sands are the centrepiece of Harper’s Canadian energy agenda, and he and his Conservative government have spared no effort in protecting and promoting the industry.

On the domestic scene, Harper has carefully defended the industry in the face of increasingly loud criticism about the industry’s environmental destructiveness and massive output of greenhouse gases. But as new threats over the last few years have emerged to markets abroad, his government has mounted an under-the-radar and increasingly sprawling offensive to undermine European and American green initiatives and environmental campaigns, ensuring that the tar sands can expand unfettered.

An international firewall

When it comes to Alberta’s bitumen, Harper appears to be sticking to a map laid out in his notorious 2001 “firewall” letter to Alberta premier Ralph Klein, which he co-signed while the president of the right-wing National Citizens Coalition. That letter called for a “more autonomous Alberta” that would protect its prosperity by “taking the initiative, to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction.”

Harper succeeded in this objective when he took over the machinery of the federal state and gave the Alberta industry direct access to Ottawa. Harper’s allegiances to oil run deep: the son of an Imperial Oil employee, his close friends include climate denier Barry Cooper, a University of Calgary professor who been funded by Talisman Energy, and Gywn Morgan, former CEO of EnCana. Members of Harper’s most trusted communications team have moved regularly through the revolving door between government and the tar sands lobby. Big Oil’s direct line to the Prime Minister’s Office has assured it a generous subsidies regime, the perpetual delay of regulatory measures that would force it to curb emissions, and a government willing to go to bat for it in United Nations climate negotiations.

But as the industry has continued to frenetically expand—with hopes to produce four or five millions barrels a day by the end of the decade, and eventually to “sell every drop of oil Canada can produce,” according to Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert— new threats have emerged to its markets.

Dinner for two’ for first journalist who dares to explain Conservative ideology

Journalists in the mainstream Canadian media are being intimidated from fully describing the soulless ideology practised by the Harper Conservative government — at least this has been my impression for some time now.

Wanting to find out what journalists are really writing about the Tories and neoliberalism, I spent some time this week searching the Internet for any 2011 articles that would link the two.

I felt that, if the mainstream media is involved in an unspoken conspiracy of silence to hide the evil economic philosophy of the Harper government, the public needs to know.

And if this is the case, I also want to publicly expose and embarrass the big media corporations for their censorship of this important information — thus my challenge.

First of all, it was no surprise that several independent and alternative media — such as rabble.ca and Straight Goods — allowed their journalists to describe the Harper Conservatives’ ideology.

Searching two dozen mainstream newspapers, I found many articles describing individual Conservative economic policies, such as budget cutting and reducing the taxes on corporations, but nothing that drew them all together under the economic policy of neoliberalism and explained that these were not one-off policies but a political and economic outlook.

The only use of the unmentionable word — neoliberalism — I could find in our national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, was in a column by freelance journalist Gerald Caplan, but there was no mention of the Harper government. The Vancouver Sun carried a short review of a book by Henry Giroux about the evils of neoliberalism.

The Assault on Public Services

The aftermath of the deepest capitalist crisis since the Great Depression has provided political and economic elites with an opportunity to lock-in two longer-term changes: a reduction and privatization in public services on a scale not seen before, and — with private sector unions devastated by job loss and unable to significantly expand unionization — weakening the remaining stronghold of unionism, public sector workers.

The attack on public services is commonly posed in terms of “cutbacks,” but it’s crucial to link it also to privatization. For some time now corporations have been chomping at the bit to profit from what are now public services and this has emerged. Governments have been moving to accommodate this by restructuring how these services are organized and delivered so that they can, piecemeal if necessary, be privatized. The crisis in government finances is being used to accelerate this trend. The end result will be losing services that aren’t privately profitable and sacrificing quality and access while paying more for the health care, garbage collection, utilities, mail, and all the other services we will then need to buy (or still finance through our taxes).

An effective response requires a movement much stronger than what we currently have, and this gets to the second issue, the attack on unions. We obviously need to fight back; we know from experience that if we don’t, that only invites the other side to be even more aggressive. But given what we are up against — a state committed to radically changing the rules — it’s also clear that “business as usual,” even if more militant, won’t be enough. We need to engage this struggle in new ways and this means re-evaluating everything about our own structures, processes and strategies.

Among the Wealthiest One Percent, Many Variations

KINGS POINT, N.Y. — Adam Katz is happy to talk to reporters when he is promoting his business, a charter flight company based on Long Island called Talon Air.       

But when the subject was his position as one of America’s top earners, he balked. Seated at a desk fashioned from a jet fuel cell, wearing a button-down shirt with the company logo, he considered the public relations benefits and found them lacking: “It’s not very popular to be in the 1 percent these days, is it?”

A few months ago, Mr. Katz was just a successful businessman with five children, an $8 million home, a family real estate company in Manhattan and his passion, 10-year-old Talon Air.

Now, the colossal gap between the very rich and everyone else — the 1 percent versus the 99 percent — has become a rallying point in this election season. As President Obama positions himself as a defender of the middle class, and Mitt Romney, the wealthiest of the Republican presidential candidates, decries such talk as “the bitter politics of envy,” Mr. Katz has found himself on the wrong end of a new paradigm.

As a member of the 1 percent, he is part of a club whose name conjures images of Wall Street bosses who are chauffeured from manse to Manhattan and fat cats who have armies of lobbyists at the ready.

But in reality it is a far larger and more varied group, one that includes podiatrists and actuaries, executives and entrepreneurs, the self-made and the silver spoon set. They are clustered not just in New York and Los Angeles, but also in Denver and Dallas. The range of wealth in the 1 percent is vast — from households that bring in $380,000 a year, according to census data, up to billionaires like Warren E. Buffett and Bill Gates.

Recession In Canada? Economists Say No, But Good Reason To Believe Otherwise

OTTAWA - Is Canada in a recession? A majority of Canadians think so. The data and economists say otherwise.

The issue arose when pollster Michael Marzolini of Pollara reported to the Economic Club recently that an astounding 70 per cent of Canadians felt the R-word applied to today's economy, and a similar number thought the downturn would last at least another year.

The finding was immediately scoffed at by economists and policy-makers who pointed out that the recession officially ended two and a half years ago, in the summer of 2009. Since then, except for a brief skid in the second quarter of 2011, the economy has been growing steadily.

Numbers don't lie, they say. Hardly a day goes by when Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty — among other government ministers — don't trumpet the fact that Canada has created more than 600,000 new jobs since the slump, much more than the 400,000 or so that were lost.
So why do Canadians feel so poorly?

The main reason is that Canadians likely perceive what is a recession differently than economists, and if numbers don't lie, they can be selective.

The technical definition of recession is when real, inflation-adjusted gross domestic product — the broad measure of economic output — falls in back-to-back quarters. That happened in the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first two quarters of 2009 — a nine month retreat.

Arab Spring passes Canada by

A year ago yesterday, six limos left the presidential palace in Tunis for the airport where the waiting presidential jet whisked Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his family into exile. Ten days later, on Jan. 25, Egyptians took to Tahrir Square and by Feb. 11 had toppled Hosni Mubarak. On Feb. 17, Libyans started their own revolution and by Aug. 21 had taken over Tripoli, with NATO’s help, and by October captured and killed Moammar Gadhafi.

Dictators in Yemen, Syria and Bahrain are still in power only by murdering, jailing and torturing their own people.

Monarchs in Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and elsewhere have made legislative concessions or bribed their citizens to buy temporary peace.

Never before has the world witnessed such momentous uprisings in so many nations in such sequence. The revolutions have ushered in historic changes and upended decades-long western-domination of the Middle East through autocratic and corrupt client regimes.

The United States, under Barack Obama, is adjusting to this new reality with alacrity. But Canada, under Stephen Harper, is not.

While the Prime Minister makes much of Canada’s minuscule role in the military mission in Libya — it served his wish to flex our mini-military muscle abroad — he has offered little help to the millions of Arabs risking their lives for freedom. He does not relate to them. Indeed, he has let it be known that he preferred the “stability” of the autocrats.

The time for private health care has arrived

As a physician who has worked in the public health-care system for more than 30 years, I have seen many positives in health-care delivery, such as primary care networks and electronic medical records.

At the same time, I have been dismayed to see that access has deteriorated for many patients seeking care with my colleagues and me. Our health-care system, mandated by the Canada Health Act to have public administration, has become bloated and inefficient.

Our health outcomes in Canada underperform compared with our 34 peers in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, given the fact we are spending at the sixth highest level per capita and as a percentage of GDP. In its latest OECD health report released in November 2011, Canada was second lowest in the number of acute care beds per 1,000 population, the second highest occupancy of those fewer beds, and the longest wait from referral to specialist consultation.

More recently, it has been alarming to see many new specialist MD graduates across Canada having difficulty finding jobs in spite of overwhelming demand from family physicians seeking timely access to specialists for their patients.

In Canada, governments have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on increasing the number of doctors being trained as witnessed by the change from 1,700 trainees in 2005 to just over 3,000 this year, of which 1,800 will train as specialists. We are finally going to have enough family physicians and specialists to make a real difference in access to medical care.

Change to Elections Act just a start, Clement says

The head of Canada's Open Government initiative said the change in election laws to account for Twitter is part of a greater transformation the government must make.

The Harper government said Friday it would end a ban on posting early election results before polls close across the country.

Tony Clement, who is the president of the Treasury Board, and is leading the government's initiative into more open data and communications, said this was long overdue.

"I think it recognizes the inevitable," Clement said. "The fact is when news can travel at the speed of light, to have these antiquarian rules in place, just doesn't work. Elections Canada will have to adjust within reason the opening and closing times of the polls."

In Montreal to meet with business leaders Friday, Clement said there is a major change in mentality that must take place among MPs and bureaucrats in order to make communication with the public easier.

Nexus members nabbed at the border

At least 50 travellers considered so low risk the federal government granted them access to a special program that speeds their passage across the border were caught trying to bring unauthorized passengers into the country in 2010, newly released documents show.

The Nexus program allows those who have gone through a pre-screening process to pass through special lanes when they are travelling back into Canada from the United States. The idea is to make border crossing faster by getting those who are least likely to break the law through with minimal surveillance.

But in 2010, some members were caught trying to pass through highway Nexus lanes with other passengers who weren't part of the program.

Every time a Nexus member is found trying to pass through the special lanes with a passenger who is not part of the program, a border security employee fills out an "Alternative Inspection Program Violation Card." The Citizen obtained copies of the cards that were filled out in 2010 under the Access to Information Act.

If the travellers had not been caught, they would have entered the country without going through the rigorous screening that most people have to go through. Some security experts say this could make the program a security risk, particularly if the federal government doesn't provide enough money as it expands the program as part of a new agreement with the U.S.

The federal government has a rigorous monitoring program in place to ensure members continue to comply with the program after they go through the initial screening process, said a spokesman for the department that oversees the Nexus program.

"When travelling by land, a Nexus member does not complete a passage until a border service officer has verified that the member is in good standing and that all travellers in the vehicle are members of the Nexus program," wrote Ian Trites of the Canada Border Services Agency in an email.

This is usually done through a visual inspection, the CBSA website said.

Premiers, territorial leaders seek common health front

Provincial and territorial leaders will gather in Victoria on Sunday evening for their first meeting together since Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced the federal government would stop providing health-care transfers at an annual increase of six per cent after 2016-17, and instead tie funding to economic growth.

In an interview airing on CBC Radio's The House, British Columbia Premier Christy Clark and Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter made their positions on health-care funding known ahead of the two-day Council of the Federation meeting.

Clark told host Evan Solomon "the prime minister is right about this. If we keep spending increases at the rate that we have, we will bankrupt the system."

While Clark, who is hosting the meeting, agrees with the federal government's decision to link the funding of health transfers to the rate of growth in nominal GDP, she told Solomon she had a word with Prime Minister Stephen Harper about moving to per-capita funding.

"This idea that we're going to go to a straight per-capita funding for health care without adjusting it for age, it can't happen," said Clark. "I'm not saying throw away per capita. I'm saying refine it."

The move to per-capita allocation was announced by the federal government in 2007 to ensure that all Canadians would receive the same health-care support from Ottawa, no matter where they reside.

Conservative Ridings To Benefit From Service Canada Closures

As the battle gets even tougher for out-of-work Canadians trying to get Employment Insurance, there are new accusations that planned closures of Service Canada processing centres will benefit Conservative ridings, while harming opposition ridings, especially in Atlantic Canada.

Over the next three years, Human Resources and Development Canada plans to cut the number of offices that process EI claims from 120 nationwide down to about 20.

Of the 20 processing centres left, more than half will be in Conservative ridings and only one will be in a Liberal riding.

The government argues that an ongoing process of automation will eliminate the need for so many workers in so many locations. That's despite a current months-long backlog of more than 80,000 claims that have waited longer than the four-week limit, part of which has been blamed on flawed automation.

About a third of people with EI claims now pending have been waiting more than a month for cheques, and many more than two months.

Human Resources Minister Diane Finley said there is always a surge in applications in December and January, and this year the spike was higher than usual. Her office said the department has added 400 employees in recent weeks and shifted 120 people from part-time to full-time to deal with the backlog.

'Mega Quarry' Fight In Melancthon, Ontario Pits Rural Residents Against The Highland Companies

An hour and a half north of Toronto, residents of a quiet rural community are pitted against Ontario’s largest potato grower and the multi-billion dollar hedge fund that backs it over a proposed “mega quarry” in some of the province’s best farmland.

At stake, locals claim, is a way of life and the potential contamination of the community’s water supply — fears the company dismisses as unfounded.

* * *

On a dirt side road in Melancthon Township, an hour and a half northwest of Toronto, the cold fall wind whips through the bare limbs of two trees that line an old farm lane. The trees are like grave markers; the last hint of an extensive farmstead that once stood at the end of the drive before it was razed to the ground.

With towering silos and sprawling outbuildings, farmsteads are the castles of Ontario’s rural townships. A farmer will tell you that his job is different from any other vocation; that there is something uniquely tangible about tilling the soil, caring for livestock and witnessing first-hand the cycle of life. Farmers are the businessmen of life’s essentials, but they often speak of their vocation like romantics.

Melancthon wasn’t the sort of community that looked for conflict – an unpretentious farming township more in tune to the turning of the seasons.

But sometimes the allure of riches will sway even the romantics.

Glacier Time Lapse Video Reveals 'Epochal Change' Captured By Extreme Ice Survey

Anyone with doubts about the legitimacy of climate change need only glance at James Balog's time lapse footage of Alaska's Columbia Glacier.

Captured between May 2007 and September 2011, by the photographer and his team, the stunning images show the the alarming rate at which the world is losing its precious glaciers.

Balog is the founder of the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), the most wide-ranging photographic study of glaciers ever conducted.

So far, the EIS team has installed 27 time lapse cameras at 15 sites in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and in the Rocky Mountains.

Now Balog is planning to expand EIS to British Colombia, Canada, CBC reports.

Once a climate change skeptic himself, Balog believes our actions are dangerously accelerating global warming.

"Shrinking glaciers are the canary in the global coal mine," Balog told the Idaho Press. "They are the most visible, tangible manifestations of climate change on the planet today."

On their website, the Extreme Ice Survey explains the effects of melting glaciers on the global climate.

The melting fresh water from glaciers alters the ocean, not only by directly contributing to the global sea level rise, but also because it pushes down the heavier salt water, thereby changing what scientists call the THC, or Thermo (heat) Haline (salt) Circulation, meaning currents in the ocean. This has an immediate effect on the near region, such as the north Atlantic off the coast of Greenland, but ultimately the impacts can ripple far beyond the immediate area and climate.

If you like James Balog's time lapse video, you won't want to miss "Chasing Ice", a film documenting the pioneering climate change work of Extreme Ice Survey, which will premiere Jan. 21 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

Original Article
Source: Huff 

Groups Move to Force Obama's Hand on the FEC

In the wild post–Citizen’s United world of campaign finance, where unlimited, secret cash flows and the Super PAC are increasingly the preferred tools with which to get candidates elected (or defeated), boundaries are constantly tested with no clear answers. To what extent can Super PACs work with campaigns? What stops all outside groups from going beyond “issue ads” to direct advocacy? How can one be sure the money to Super PACs isn’t from illegal sources, like foreign entities?

The referee to these disputes, and many others, should be the Federal Election Commission. But in recent years the agency has been completely moribund—a “broken agency that refuses to fulfill its basic statutory functions.” In fact, while it has given some guidance in this area, the FEC has not issued a single rule specifically related to Super PACs. Ever.

A key problem is that the commissioners, which are now split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, haven’t rotated for years, staying in their positions because no new nominations can get through the Senate. So the commission is in perpetual stalemate, with the Republican members freezing action on virtually every issue of importance.

Some good government groups hoped that recess appointments to the FEC would accompany the recent White House moves to staff the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board. It didn’t happen—and now several of these groups are determined to get an answer.

SOPA's Architect Is Finally Starting to Back Down

Less than 24-hours after promising not to yield, the Texas congressman and author of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) Lamar Smith is yielding on the bill's controversial language that would allow the government to censor the Internet -- for now. "After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the [Judiciary] Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision," Smith said in a Friday afternoon press release. "We will continue to look for ways to ensure that foreign websites cannot sell and distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers."

First of all, three cheers for the Internet. (That's an evergreen sort of thing to say, but we're pretty sure the Internet is collectively cheering the new.) Second of all, it's still not time for civil rights types to start popping corks. The bill is not dead. As Chairman Smith says, the Judiciary Committee is only pumping the brakes on the progress of the bill, while Internet experts can properly study the implications of censoring the web by using DNS blocking. This is weird because pretty much every Internet expert in the country has unabashedly condemned SOPA's domain-blocking measures and, well, the entire bill. But it is certainly a little victory for the tens if not hundreds of thousands of freedom advocates who've been protesting the bill for months. If anything, it's a major, frankly embarrassing loss for Smith. Now, he not only looks like a hypocrite, he also looks like a waffler. Americans have a tendency not to (re-)elect wafflers.

Oh, and if you think that the attacks on SOPA's supporters, past and present, are going to end, think again. Anonymous has declared war on the media executives from Viacom, Disney and other organizations that have pushed the bill, opposed Occupy Wall Street, blocked WikiLeaks and pretty much anything else that's annoyed Anonymous in the past year or so. Since January 1, they've been pumping the internet full of personal details they've hacked from the files of everyone from Michael Bloomberg to Time Warner chief Jeffrey L. Bewkes, and of course, they've promised destruction. They're calling the project Operation Hiroshima.

Original Article
Source: the Atlantic Wire 

John Hoeven, North Dakota Senator, Pushes Keystone XL Pipeline

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. -- A proposed pipeline to carry oil from Canada to Texas Gulf Coast refineries is the "largest shovel-ready project in the country" with the potential to create thousands of jobs and reduce American dependence on oil from the Middle East, North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven said Saturday.

President Barack Obama faces a Feb. 21 deadline to decide whether the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline expansion proposed by Calgary-based TransCanada Corp. is in the national interest.

Republicans have been pounding him on the issue, saying it's a question of whether the president wants to create jobs and import energy from a close friend and ally, or lose jobs and see Canadian oil go to Asia. Hoeven used his party's weekly radio and Internet address to continue pushing the pipeline.

"It's hard to imagine a project that is more in the national interest and the interest of the American people," Hoeven said in the address.

Government’s failure on First Nations is ‘beyond belief,’ Paul Martin says

Conservative policies will send more aboriginal kids to jail than to school, former prime minister Paul Martin charged.

The Liberal party stalwart and ex long-time finance minister called it an “act of discrimination” that the federal government killed the Kelowna Accord — a shortchanging of aboriginal youth that has fuelled high illiteracy and drop-out rates.

“The fact that the federal Conservative government walked away from Kelowna, walked away from providing the same funding for aboriginal education as is provided for non-aboriginal education, is nothing but an act of discrimination against the youngest and the fastest growing segment of our population,” Martin said after speaking to a convention session with the Aboriginal Peoples’ Commission.

Delivering a blistering attack against the Harper Conservatives for abdicating its responsibilities on health and aboriginal funding, Martin called it “fundamentally beyond belief” that the government was not aware of the problems plaguing First Nations such as Attawapiskat. He also accused the Conservatives of fudging numbers, misleading the Canadian public and pointing fingers of blame instead of fixing the roots of the “tragedy.”

EPA sees risks to water, workers in New York fracking rules

New York’s emerging plan to regulate natural gas drilling in the gas-rich Marcellus Shale needs to go further to safeguard drinking water, environmentally sensitive areas and gas industry workers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has informed state officials.

The EPA’s comments, in a series of letters this week to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, are significant because they suggest the agency will be watching closely as states in the Northeast and Midwest embrace new drilling technologies to tap vast reserves of shale gas.

New York is in the forefront of the shale gas boom and has been working on regulations for more than three years. Judith Enck, the EPA regional administrator who issued the agency comments, noted that New York “will help set the pace for improved safeguards across the country.”

The EPA’s comments are among 20,000 the state has received on its proposed plan to regulate the environmental effects of drilling. Many of the EPA’s comments focus on how the state DEC will handle the chemically tainted wastewater from the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

To free the gas trapped in the Marcellus and other shale formations, drillers pump millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals deep underground under pressure. The wastewater can get into drinking water by being disposed of at sewage treatment plants, the EPA wrote.

Harper vs. the provinces in 2012: ‘We’re heading towards a perfect storm’

With a fiscal vice gripping all levels of government, 2012 is on track for testy confrontations and all-out feuds between federal and provincial cousins.

Finance ministers across the country are staring at varying levels of deficits, while bracing for new costs associated with Conservative tough-on-crime legislation. Add to that some bitter feelings about the new health care funding model announced by Jim Flaherty before Christmas.

All this breeds fertile ground for serious intergovernmental tug-of-wars, says Steve Patten, a political scientist at the University of Alberta.

“There’s an awful lot of potential for heightened conflict over the cost of federal initiatives, and the implications of the federal government’s decisions about the health transfer and also the social transfer,” he told iPolitics. “The impact it has on federal-provincial relations, as we’ve already seen, won’t be uniform across the country because there are some provinces that can afford the costs of the federal initiatives more easily than others, but there are also some provinces that have made political decisions to try and have better relations with the federal government. I think we’ve seen that in Alberta.”

Charter challenge to C-10 inevitable, Cotler says: ‘Last word still to be heard’

The Conservative government’s omnibus crime bill hasn’t passed yet, but plans are already underway to a launch Charter challenge because it will lead to overcrowded, dangerous prison conditions.

During a justice policy session at the biennial Liberal convention in Ottawa Saturday, Catherine Latimer, executive director of the John Howard Society, said two students from the University of Ottawa are working pro bono at what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and what level of jail and prison overcrowding would meet that threshold.

“Hopefully we will be to come up with concrete case that will allow people to come forward with a case in the Canadian court system,” she said.

Bill C-10 is expected to put more offenders in provincial jail and federal prisons, and for longer periods of time. The Correctional Service of Canada has plans to add 2,700 new spaces by 2014, which will be a combination of new cells and double bunks. Many provincial and territorial jails are already filled to the brim.

The Commons: ‘I didn’t get there’

After a nice story about Michael Ignatieff’s willingness to listen, the man’s disembodied voice filled the room as a montage of still images hovered on screen—little moments when it must’ve seemed he was bound for a better fate.

The soft-focus retrospective continued as the voice intoned about the vastness of the land and the vastness of the party. A few dozen young people then bounded on stage. These, explained a young man and a young woman at the lectern, were some of those inspired to join the Liberal cause because of Mr. Ignatieff. He was duly described in fawning term. Indeed, the politician they were here to honour sounded like a fine one: passionate, caring, courageous, substantive, generous. A good listener. A visionary. A man blessed of a devoted wife. It was announced that a scholarship would be created in his name.

Shortly thereafter the man was welcomed to step forward and explain himself. Here the Liberal party has gathered to discuss the extent to which it can be described as “dying.” And so here it would hear from the man who (at least nominally) put it in this place.

On initial viewing, he seems better for the experience—both for having done it and now for being done with it. He bounded on stage and shook hands with those he’d inspired and hugged those who’d spoken on his behalf. As he did when he was doing it, he spoke with a certain degree of distance.

A staunch defence of same-sex marriage

The institution of gay marriage has emerged in stronger shape than ever from the confusion sown by the Canadian Justice Department in a Toronto courtroom this week.

The Conservative government defended that institution – promptly and unequivocally. As a result, same-sex marriage cannot be diminished or sent to the back of the bus by this party or that party. It is the law of Canada, from here on to be staunchly defended by the government of Canada. (Including the Justice Department.)

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson did the right and necessary thing in making absolutely clear that gay marriages of foreigners in Canada are legal – including the thousands already married here, and those who may marry in the future. Also important, he said he understood the pain and confusion that have been caused. And he will not let legal technicalities, even long-standing legal principles, whether residency requirements or the “law of domicile,” stand in the way.

Trudeau supports PR, even though he would have lost his seat under it

OTTAWA CONVENTION CENTRE—If Canada had a preferential ballot voting system, Liberal MP Justin Trudeau says he would have likely lost his seat, but a move to democratize how people elect their representatives is better for the country than political self-interest.

“I happen to be a very polarizing figure in my own riding. A lot of people really like me, a lot of people react very strongly to me one way or the other and a number of sovereigntists and NDP supporters together in the riding, if they decide they don’t like me, they have more than 50 per cent. Now, it sucks for me, but, ultimately, I think we want to have a system that moves away from people who are polarizing and towards people who can bring people together because we’re a country of diversity and differences,” Mr. Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) said Saturday morning at the Liberal biennial convention in Ottawa. “We need MPs who represent more than 50 per cent of their riding so that everyone will have the majority of citizens who voted for them.”

Mr. Trudeau won his Papineau riding with 38.4 per cent of the vote in the May 2 election. Bloc Québécois candidate Vivian Barbot, who held the riding before Mr. Trudeau won it in 2008, garnered 25.9 per cent of the vote, while the NDP’s Marcos Radhames Tejada received 28.3 per cent of the vote.

The sad anniversary and shameful legacy of Guantánamo

Last week marked the 10th anniversary of the creation of the infamous Guantánamo Bay. This place created by G. W. Bush but still in existence today under the presidency of Barack Obama is a symbol of of blatant human rights injustice and human rights violations.

The first flashbacks that come to our minds when we speak of Guantánamo Bay are of chained and shackled detainees, wearing orange jumpsuits, their heads bent down, transported in cages like ferocious animals.

On this U.S. naval base near Cuba, in the middle of the ocean, 779 detainees had once been held. The vast majority of these detainees were held there without charge or criminal trial. About 600 hundred of them were eventually released. However, 171 detainees, mainly Yemenis, are still being detained at the camp.

Human rights organizations all over the world decried and condemned the creation and continued existence of Guantánamo Bay, as well as the treatment afflicted on detainees. The horrible treatment consisted of psychological torture, sexual harassment and religious intimidation.

Many Western politicians spoke against Guantánamo Bay, except Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who never uttered a word about it and is still silent on the issue. His silence is more troubling especially knowing that Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen and a child soldier who was brought to the camp as a minor, is still detained there without any political commitment from the current government to bring him home.

In 2006, Mrs. Merkel told the German magazine Der Spiegel: "An institution like Guantánamo can and should not exist in the longer term."

Stephen Harper-Toronto Port Authority scandal

In an appalling misuse of public resources, for no public benefit, the Toronto Port Authority, a Harper Government agency, announced construction is to start in February on a pedestrian tunnel to the Island airport.

“If they have access to that kind of money, we insist that the TPA pay the city the longstanding taxes it owes to the City. And then, perhaps, Mayor Ford will deign to keep our libraries open.”

The tunnel that was originally projected to cost as little as $20 million (Star June 3, 2009) went up to $38 million in August 2009, and $45 million in 2010. Significantly, the TPA failed to reveal today what the current cost estimate is, or just how much in the way of public resources will be devoted to it.

According to Porter CEO Robert Deluce, this tunnel is a key component of yet more airport expansion:

“…But Mr. Deluce said the TPA isn't constrained by the existing cap, and could increase the total number of commercial slots available to 300 within three years, if a pedestrian tunnel is built by 2012 or so. "It's very much dependent on improvements to infrastructure," he said after a presentation to Insight Information Co.'s airline investment conference in Toronto [ as reported in  the Nov. 16, 2010 Globe and Mail].”

France to press on with austerity after ratings blow

AP - France’s prime minister said on Saturday his country will push ahead with cost-cutting measures after its top-tier debt rating was downgraded, a blow with repercussions across financially beleaguered Europe.

Other European countries from Austria to Cyprus assailed ratings agency Standard & Poor’s after a raft of downgrades Friday night. The move may make it more expensive for struggling countries to borrow money, reduce debts and avoid a new recession.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon struck a somber, measured tone when responding Saturday to the downgrade, which was particularly wounding to France’s self-image and could hurt bailout efforts for struggling eurozone countries.

France is central to those efforts, and the downgrade, by pushing up its own borrowing costs, could make it harder for France to help others. 

Fillon said the downgrade confirmed his conservative government’s plans for more reforms to bring down debts, despite worries that more austerity measures could suffocate growth. 

The downgrade, coming three months before France holds presidential elections, was "an alert that should not be dramatized any more than it should be under-estimated," he said. He insisted that France is a reliable investment.

Robert Fisk: This is not about 'bad apples'. This is the horror of war

So now it's snapshots of US Marines pissing on the Afghan dead. Better, I suppose, than the US soldiers pictured beside the innocent Afghan teenager they fragged back in March of last year. Or the female guard posing with the dead Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib. Not to mention Haditha or the murder videos taken by US troops in the field – the grenading of an old shepherd by an Iraqi highway comes to mind – or My Lai or the massacre of refugees by US forces in Korea or the murder of Malayan villagers by British troops. Or the Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 Catholics by British troops in Derry in 1972. And please note, I have not even mentioned the name of Baha Mousa.

The US Marines' response to the pissing pictures was oh so typical. These men were not abiding by the "core values" of the Marines, we were informed. Same old story. A "rogue" unit, a few "bad apples", rotten eggs. Maybe.

But if there is one game of pissing on the dead, how many others happened without pictures? How many other shepherds got fragged in Iraq? How many other Hadithas have there been? There were plenty of other My Lais.

As laptop filmography gets better, so it all comes slopping out, the rapes and slaughter – and yes, by the Taliban the stoning of young women for supposed sexual misconduct in Afghanistan; by al-Qa'ida, executions and throat-cuttings in Iraq.

Which presidential candidates have earned the defense industry’s support?

Though Americans far and away identify economic problems as the biggest issue facing the nation, according to Gallup, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) has been gaining support by talking about the need to restrict the military industrial complex and end what he terms “war profiteering” — most recently in his victory speech after the New Hampshire primary.

By contrast, former governor Mitt Romney (R-MA), currently leading the pack of GOP candidates, called for a strong America and a strong relationship with Israel — rhetoric that has most often accompanied robust military spending. Meanwhile, back in Washington, President Obama thought last year that the prospect of automatic defense spending cuts would be enough to pressure the supercommittee into a deal on the debt: it wasn’t, and now he may be stuck with them.

Given all of that, and Romney’s pro-business platform, you would think he’d be the favored son of the defense industry, even in the early stages of the 2012 race. You’d be wrong.

President Obama is leading the pack in donations from the defense industry: according to the Center for Responsive Politics, he’d taken in almost $112,000 from defense industry donors through December 2011, despite not accepting any donations from super PACs or lobbyists. (Complete fourth quarter numbers were only released yesterday, so break-downs aren’t yet available by industry.)

Vaclav Havel: A Critical Evaluation

The death of Vaclav Havel on December 18, 2011, last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic, has brought accolades from media pundits and political and plutocratic luminaries for the role he played in the dismantling of the Soviet bloc. Given that the Warsaw Pact was the only geopolitical entity that constrained American global hegemony Havel’s contribution to its demise is lauded as a great victory for “democracy” and “freedom.” However, those are words that are used by many regimes and systems, no matter what their character, and have been euphemisms since the time of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points for post-war international reconstruction in the image desired by the USA, for the subordination of all nations, peoples and cultures to everything that is conjured by the word “America.”

Havel is said to have been an idealistic opponent of the consumerist ethic, yet what is one to think of an individual who allowed himself to be mentored and patronized by the likes of George Soros, and flitted about among the luminaries of plutocracy? His critique of “The West” was perceptive, stating:

There is no need at all for different people, religions and cultures to adapt or conform to one another…. I think we help one another best if we make no pretenses, remain ourselves, and simply respect and honor one another, just as we are.[1]

Behind the Deepening Crisis with Iran: the Real Story Versus the Cover Story

Recently, President Obama imposed new sanctions on Iran which according to reports have been very effective, causing a sudden major devaluation of Iran’s currency. The Iranians correctly understand that they are under attack, and have threatened to respond by closing the strait of Hormuz, through which a large percentage of oil from the Mideast flows to the global economy.

If the crisis deepens and Iran makes good on its threat to close Hormuz, there is little doubt that the US will intervene to reopen the strait. This will lead to a shooting war for which Iran will be blamed, even though the recent US sanctions were tantamount to overt aggression.

I believe the US will exploit the situation to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. But, even more importantly, the US will target Iran’s conventional missiles. Indeed, I believe this is the real reason for US sanctions in the first place, and for the buildup of tensions in recent days. Despite public perceptions, and all the rhetoric about nukes, the present crisis has nothing to do with Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. In my opinion, that is just a cover story.

Israel's High Court doesn't deserve to be defended

The fight to defend the High Court of Justice from those who would bring it down must stop now. Enough self-righteousness, enough of this masquerade, in which we imagine that we are trying to protect the last beacon of justice and the last bastion of Israeli democracy. Not only is there no longer any point to the struggle - the last-ditch battle has already failed - it is also no longer justified. No more is there reason to defend an institution that issued the shameful rejection of the petition against the amendment to the Citizenship Law.

A court that vets this nationalistic and racist amendment, which discriminates against Arab citizens of Israel solely on the basis of their ethnicity, which in the name of security is prepared to deny basic rights and destroy the lives of thousands of Israeli families, which makes false use of security to try to cover up its racism - is an institution that must no longer be defended. Its name has been taken in vain, and defending it is misleading because it makes it seem to be an institution worth fighting for. It is better to tell the truth: It is not the guardian of the seal of democracy and human rights in Israel. The right wing can continue demolishing it to their hearts' content; they are only demolishing ruins.

Let's speak plainly: This is about transfer. Not by the army, the settlers or the extreme right, but expulsion under the aegis of the law and with the court's seal of approval.

The ruling of the justices in Jerusalem means breaking up thousands of Israeli families whose mother or father will be expelled. Vladimir can marry Yana, but Mohammed cannot marry Sana.

Among the justifications and pretexts of the majority of the bench, from Justice Eliezer Rivlin's "the damage is for a worthy goal" to Justice Hanan Melcer's "the law protects the security of the state," Justice Miriam Naor's diabolical reasoning stands out: "Protection does not extend to fulfillment of family life specifically in Israel." And just where will the people of this land who come from Taibeh or Nazareth go? And why should they go?