Democracy gone Astray: Monday, January 30, 2012

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.]

Monday, January 30, 2012

Emboldened GOP Seeks Steep Reduction Or Outright Elimination Of State Income Taxes

OKLAHOMA CITY -- A year after Republicans swept into office across the country, many have trained their sights on what has long been a fiscal conservative's dream: the steep reduction or even outright elimination of state income taxes.

The idea has circulated among academics and think-tank researchers for years. But it's moving quietly into mainstream political discourse, despite the fact that such sweeping changes would almost certainly mean a total rewiring of tax systems at a time when most states are still struggling in the aftermath of the recession.

"I think there's going to be more action that way," especially as Republican governors release their budget plans, said Kim Rueben, an expert on state taxation at the Brookings Urban Tax Policy Center.

Last year, GOP lawmakers in many states quickly went to work on a new conservative agenda: restricting abortion, cracking down on illegal immigration, expanding gun rights and taking aim at public-employee unions.

Emboldened by that success, the party has launched income tax efforts in Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma and South Carolina. But it's not clear how all those states would make up for the lost revenue, and Rueben said she's not aware of any state in modern history that has eliminated an income tax.

Expert advice commissioned by the federal government contradicts Stephen Harper’s warnings that Canada can’t afford the looming bill for Old Age Security payments.

The Prime Minister and his ministers forcefully defended their surprise plans to review OAS on Monday, as the year’s first sitting of Parliament exploded with accusations from the opposition that the Conservatives misled Canadians during the 2011 federal election.

Mr. Harper held his ground, insisting Canada’s aging population means Ottawa must change the rules for future seniors to ensure it has the long-term cash to cut a growing number of monthly cheques. The Prime Minister’s decision to signal his planned pension changes while in Europe last week was partly to remind Canadians of the deep problems European governments are facing because of social programs they can’t afford.

But research prepared at Ottawa’s request argues Canada’s pension system is in far better shape than the Europeans’, and there’s no need to raise the retirement age. Edward Whitehouse – who researches pension policy on behalf of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Bank – was asked by Ottawa to study and report on how Canada stacks up internationally when it comes to pensions.

His conclusion: “The analysis suggests that Canada does not face major challenges of financial sustainability with its public pension schemes,” and “there is no pressing financial or fiscal need to increase pension ages in the foreseeable future.”

While other OECD countries face big pension problems, the report predicts Canada will do just fine as the baby boomers retire. That’s because, as Canada heads into the boomer crunch, it spends far less than the OECD average on public pensions. Further, Canada’s relatively high levels of immigration will partially offset the distortions of an aging population, and Canadians tend to save more independently through RRSPs and workplace pensions than Europeans.

Boris Johnson sympathizes with parents who just aren’t sure how hard they can smack their children – legally speaking.

The mayor of London told the BBC he thinks parents should have more leeway, comments in line with the argument that last summer’s London riots were, in part, caused by parents easing up on physical punishment.

“People do feel anxious about imposing discipline on their children, whether the law will support them...,” he told the BBC.

“Parents ... should be seen as the natural figures of authority.”

A U.K. law in place since 2004 allows parents to smack their kids without causing the “reddening of the skin,” according to The Telegraph.

Canadian and U.S. officials disagree on whether an Edmonton man facing extradition in a terrorism case could be held indefinitely south of the border.

Faruq Khalil Muhammad ‘Isa, known locally as Sayfildin Tahir Sharif, is accused of helping co-ordinate a 2009 suicide bombing in Iraq that killed seven people, including five American soldiers. He faces seven charges.

The Iraqi Kurd, who received Canadian citizenship in 2005, made a brief court appearance on Monday, sitting quietly before his case was delayed another four months. He was returned to an Edmonton jail, where he has spent the past 12 months.

However, if he’s extradited, his time in pre-trial custody may not soon end – and that’s where the Canadians and Americans disagree.

A U.S. law signed one month ago, known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), allows the government to hold terrorism suspects indefinitely at military prisons. President Barack Obama’s administration has been under fire from human rights activists over the provision.

A spokesman for the U.S. District court in Eastern New York, which is seeking the extradition, told The Globe and Mail the U.S. court will determine whether the accused can be detained indefinitely, without trial, under the NDAA. The defence believes that’s the case.

Attacks on women happen all too often in Canada: lawyer

MONTREAL — For months during the Shafia murder trial in Kingston, Ont., the term honour killing was bandied about as if it were some exotic ritual that only happened in other countries with cultures far removed and backward from our own.

But legal experts and those who work in women's shelters say that once the words are stripped away, the crime is one that happens often in Canada: women being killed for not doing as they are told.

"I think we're fascinated right now with the concept of honour killings because that was the name given to it by the prosecution and the accused but that doesn't change what the underlying activity is," said Pearl Eliadis, a Montreal human rights lawyer.

"It's a violent assault on women because they're women."

After the first-degree murder verdict was announced Sunday, the Internet was humming with cries to send Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their son, Hamed Mohammad Shafia, back to their native Afghanistan, as if their crimes were unheard of here.

The cold-blooded killings, as the judge in the case called them, of the couple's three daughters and Shafia's first wife, were doubtless among the most horrifying in recent Canadian history.

But there have been many cases where a man, furious with the behaviour of his girlfriend or wife, kills her, or the children, or all of them.

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Monday his government recognizes and will honour its constitutional obligation to consult with First Nations on the Northern Gateway pipeline linking the Alberta oilsands to Asian markets via the northern B.C. coast.

But a Harper government official said the main tool for those consultations will be the National Energy Board hearings, which Liberal interim leader Bob Rae and one legal expert said may be inadequate.

"It's a constitutional obligation to consult aboriginal groups. The government is going to respect this obligation," Harper told the House of Commons, adding his much-repeated declaration that Canada must find a way to get diluted bitumen to energy-hungry countries such as China.

"It is vitally important to the national interests of this country that we are able to export our energy products to Asia and, obviously, that is something the government hopes will happen in the future."

A spokesman for Harper confirmed that the NEB is the main consultation tool, noting that the government gave $2.39 million to a number of First Nations in B.C. and Alberta to assist in their participation.

"We have specifically encouraged aboriginals to make use of the hearings as their means of consultation. Indeed, some of the hearings are taking place on reserves along the route," said Andrew MacDougall, Harper's associate director of communications.

At last, the hidden agenda, and not a moment too soon. Vague, indirect and overseas as it was, Stephen Harper's Davos speech was perilously close to a vision statement, of a kind the prime minister has seldom made until now, and will henceforth have to make often.

It would be nice if he had shared with us his concerns about the aging of the population, and the threat it poses to our long-run social and economic health, during the last election, rather than joining in the all-party consensus that there was nothing wrong with Canada that could not be fixed with more and richer promises to the elderly.

Instead, we are now past the Tories' sixth anniversary in power and the conversation, judging by the shocked reaction to the prime minister's speech, has barely begun. Fine: let us at least hope it now continues. Because things are about to get real in a hurry, and it is long since time we did the same.

First, a little demographic arithmetic. Over the next 20 years, as each year's litter of baby boomers reaches the traditional retirement age of 65, the proportion of the population drawing a pension will double, from roughly 12 per cent now to 25 per cent. That not only entails a sharp rise in costs — both for pensions and, more seriously, for health care, of which the old consume vastly more, proportionately, than the young — but a concomitant decline in numbers among those who will have to pay for them all: the working-age population.

Until this fall, Ray Kachel had lived virtually all of his fifty-three years within a few miles of his birthplace, in Seattle. He was a self-taught Jack-of-all-trades in the computer industry, who bought his first Mac in 1984. He attended Seattle Central Community College but dropped out; not long afterward, he was hired by a company that specialized in optical character recognition, transferring printed material into digital records for storage. Eventually, Kachel was laid off, but for a long time he continued to make a decent living; keeping up with advances in audio and video production, he picked up freelance work editing online content. He also programmed and played keyboards in a band, and had a gig as a night-club d.j.; sometimes, between technology jobs, he worked in his adoptive parents’ janitorial business. He spent his money on a few pleasures, like microbrewery beer and DVDs. His favorite movie was “Stalker,” the 1979 sci-fi film by Andrei Tarkovsky. “Three guys traipsing through the woods—it’s visually and aurally very, very strange,” Kachel said. “Tarkovsky is famous for painfully long takes, creating an environment that’s uncomfortable without it being clear why.”

Kachel lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment. In the nineties, after his parents died, he became something of a hermit, with just a few friends. Small of stature, with short-cropped hair, drab clothes, and a mild manner, he was the sort of person no one noticed. Then again, a lot of tech workers were antisocial, and the information economy embraced millions of skilled, culturally literate, freelance oddballs. As long as the new economy made room for him, Kachel lived the life he wanted.

THE breezy hilltop resort of Zabadani is usually occupied by rich Syrians in second homes and Gulf tourists enjoying the picturesque mountains on the Lebanese border. But for much of January the town of some 40,000 people has been a rebel enclave. After several days of fighting by daring but lightly armed opposition forces, the army, equipped with tanks and heavy weaponry, was forced to pull back on January 18th. Residents hailed their “liberated city” and hung pictures of the dead in a tree. They waved placards and shouted slogans ridiculing the regime. Civilians guarded checkpoints usually manned by the security forces.

Zabadani is not the first place in Syria to experience a brief taste of freedom over the past ten months. Last year Mr Assad’s forces temporarily lost control to the opposition in Hama, the country’s fourth-largest city. Rastan and Tel Kalakh, two small towns close to Homs, have at times barricaded themselves in. Parts of Homs, the third-largest city, and villages near Idleb have also enjoyed a measure of autonomy.

But Zabadani is much closer to Damascus, the capital, than any of them—about 25 miles (40km). The fight for control of the country is no longer taking place far from the centre of power. Just days after Zabadani was liberated, armed clashes erupted in Douma, a suburb six miles from Damascus. Army defectors seized control of the town for a few hours.

Reports of firefights are no longer rare in what was once a peaceful capital. Two large car bombs exploded in front of a security-services’ building on December 23rd. It was followed by another one in a residential area a fortnight later. Few Syrians now dare to drive on the country’s main artery, the highway from the capital north to Aleppo, a commercial hub, fearing ambushes on the road. Military buses and oil pipelines are often hit by explosions. Who is responsible is hard to know. “There is so much going on that it gives the feeling that everything is starting to unravel,” says a Western diplomat in Damascus.

The Information Commissioner asked police to raid the home of a whistleblower days before he was due to give damaging evidence about alleged failings by the watchdog to Lord Justice Leveson's public inquiry into media standards.

Christopher Graham wrote to David Whatton, Chief Constable of Cheshire Police, asking for a search to be carried out on the home of Alec Owens, a former special branch officer and former senior investigator at the Information Commissioner's Office. The raid was denounced last night as a "total misuse of resources and power".

Mr Owens had headed the ICO's Operation Motorman inquiry into the media's use of a private detective to obtain vast amounts of illicit personal data, and has claimed the organisation was afraid to investigate the national press.

Officers raided his Widnes home in November, 12 days before he was due to give evidence to Leveson. Mr Graham's predecessor, Richard Thomas, who had been criticised by Owens in an article published in The Independent in September, was due to attend the inquiry the day after Mr Owens.

They took a computer file detailing 17,000 transactions made between the private detective Steve Whittamore and reporters working for national newspapers, magazines and television companies. Whittamore was convicted in 2005 of illegally accessing personal data.

Michael Ashcroft, the billionaire peer who for years bankrolled the Conservative Party, has been accused of hiding his business involvement in a Caribbean state whose government was brought down by corruption scandals.

BBC's Panorama programme alleged last night that Lord Ashcroft was secretly controlling the biggest construction company on the Turks and Caicos Islands, though he claims to have severed his link with the company in 1999.

The islands, a British overseas territory, have been under direct rule by the Foreign Office since August 2009, when the then Prime Minister, Michael Misick, became embroiled in corruption allegations. Panorama reported that one of the allegations being investigated by the police is how Mr Misick could afford a luxury home, valued at $16m, which was built in 2006 by Johnston International.

The programme stated that Lord Ashcroft announced on the London Stock Exchange in 1999 that he had sold Johnston International, and has repeatedly asserted that he has had "no interest whatsoever" in the company since that date. But Panorama showed fax messages which it said were exchanged between Lord Ashcroft and the chief executive of Johnston International, Allan Forrest.

The faxes suggest that Mr Forrest repeatedly sought and got Lord Ashcroft's instructions or advice, despite the peer's denials that he was running the company. One fax said: "Dear Michael, a short note to thank you for the salary increase. Much appreciated."

At $153.2 billion, the Canadian Pension Plan is one of the largest single-purpose pools of money in the world.

Caretaker to our public retirement system is the CPP’s Investment Board, an arms length organization founded to administer the assets of some 17 million Canadians.

The CPPIB is widely acknowledged as one of the most highly functioning investment managing organizations, and yet what frustrates the hard workers at CPPIB the most is the widely held misconception – in part inspired by the social security fear-mongering of the U.S. – that the Canadian pension programme is not sustainable.

Says CEO of CPPIB David Denison, “Canadians don’t believe that the CPP will deliver the promised pension for them when they retire, though it is the gold standard for a sustainable national pension system. It is a terrific story for Canada, and sadly still is under appreciated.

“True,” Denison adds, “part of the investment income will have to be rerouted to paying CPP benefits starting in 2020.” But will this harm the nest egg? Denison says no.

“The great news for Canadians is that unlike the U.S. or most European countries that are only now getting around to fixing their pension, our national pension system was fixed in 1997.”

The beleaguered Attawapiskat First Nation in northern Ontario, whose finances are now controlled by a federally appointed third-party manager, will file a court injunction Tuesday to give control of the community's finances back to Chief Theresa Spence and her council while the decision to put the community under third-party management is under judicial review.

The results of review, which is looking at the legitimacy of the government's decision to impose an outside financial manager, are expected on April 24 and the community wants to regain control of their books in the interim.

"We feel that (Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan) made decisions in haste," said Grand Chief Stan Louttit, who has stood beside Spence throughout the dispute. "And we feel that the decision made to impose the third-party manager was wrong, legally and morally."

"There was no justifiable reason to bring in a third-party manager," said Charlie Angus, the NDP MP for the area, after Spence asked for the judicial review on Dec. 15, 2011.

"A third-party manager is brought in to communities basically as a punishment battalion — it destroys the ability of a community to do any response in an adequate way. This is an emergency . . . and the third-party manager is interfering, I think, with a process that could have been solved very easily. The community is well within their rights to go to court."

The federal Conservative government is ending a popular program that helped Canadians make their homes more energy efficient even though industry officials say less than half of the $400-million promised for the initiative in the last federal budget has been spent.

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver announced in a release issued Sunday morning that the government would no longer be accepting applications for funding under the ecoENERGY Retrofit program.

The government originally gave homeowners until March 31 to register for the program – which helped offset the costs of replacing aging doors, windows, insulation and other energy draws – but that has been cut off two months early.

The explanation given by the minister for refusing new requests for money was that the ecoENERGY retrofit program had successfully reached its goal of helping 250,000 registered homeowners.

But there was no such qualification included in the budget promise to provide $400-million to help retrofit homes – something that was added to the Conservative government’s financial plan before the election in an unsuccessful effort to convince the New Democrats from voting to bring down what was then a minority.

Only when the details of how the money would be awarded were rolled out in July, after the Conservatives had won a majority, did the government state that it would be limited to 250,000 people.

The Scene. For the benefit of the House, Nycole Turmel relayed what she’d taken from what the Prime Minister said last week when he was some 6,264 kilometres from here.

“Mr. Speaker, Canadians are bracing themselves for the deepest round of cuts since Paul Martin, cuts to services Canadians need, like the OAS and EI,” she offered.

Members of the government side audibly whined at this reference to the previous prime minister.

“These cuts will hurt people, hurt seniors, hurt jobs and hurt our communities,” Ms. Turmel continued. “When will the Prime Minister tell Canadians the bad news, on his next trip to Switzerland or somewhere else in the world?”

Last week, so far away from this place, the Prime Minister had been full of dramatic phrasing. “Major transformations,” he said. Demographics posed a “threat” to that which we “cherished.” The deep holes of Europe and the United States threatened to grow deeper. The very future of our society hung in the proverbial balance.

“In every decision, or failure to decide, we are choosing our future right now,” he surmised. “And, as we all know, both from the global crises of the past few years and from past experience in our own countries, easy choices now mean fewer choices later.”

European Summit: German Austerity Blues

“Nein! Nein! Nein!” roars today’s headline on Ta Nea, Greece’s largest circulation daily, over a caricature of Angela Merkel controlling a map of Greece with puppet strings. This is not just the usual Greek rage against the EU’s austerity measures: Last Friday the Financial Times made public a German proposal to take over Greece’s finances so extreme as to look like parody. In order to receive the next tranche of its bailout, the document explains, Greece would have to agree a “transfer of national budgetary sovereignty” to a European commissar, “preferably through constitutional amendment,” making an absolute commitment to service its debt before spending public funds on anything else

Merkel has since backed off from the document, but whoever leaked it obviously wasn’t aiming at a warm, candle-lit atmostphere between Greece and Germany at the ongoing negotiations for a write-down of Greece’s private sector debt, or at today’s European summit in Brussels (where there’s also a general strike in progress against austerity measures). Once again, the Greek crisis is at the heart of the talks, though it’s not on the published agenda. The official business on the table includes the new European fiscal compact, due to be signed in March, which would punish states that exceed fixed deficit and debt levels and has been described by one official as a plan to outlaw Keynesianism; and measures to promote growth and create jobs, especially for the young, who are now being tagged as a “lost generation.”

If that sounds a bit schizophrenic, that’s because it is: the tensions at the heart of the Eurozone, between German-style take-no-prisoners fiscal discipline and a more growth-oriented Gallic approach, are being pulled to breaking point. Germany, as Europe’s engine, still holds most of the cards. But with all the southern countries now in crisis (the bond markets are dropping Portugal; Spanish unemployment is at 22 percent, and 51 percent for the young; Italy will be in recession at least until the end of 2013 even though Mario Monti’s cuts have made him the darling of the Eurocrats; Greece’s economy is in meltdown), it’s become obvious to almost everyone else that austerity isn’t working. Financiers tend to speak softly: when IMF chief Christine Lagarde acknowledged earlier this month that austerity “could strangle growth prospects”, and when the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s pointed out that reform “based on…fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating,” what they really meant was, Wake up and smell the coffee, we’re heading for the cliff.

America's Double Standards for Iran

Exclusive: New Iranian Commando Team Operating Near United States

(Tehran, FNA) The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard’s North American Operations Command that a new elite Iranian commando team is operating in the US-Mexican border region. The primary day-to-day mission of the team, known as the Joint Special Operations Gulf of Mexico Task Force, or JSOG-MTF, is to mentor Mexican military units in the border areas in their war with the deadly drug cartels. The task force provides “highly trained personnel that excel in uncertain environments,” Maj. Amir Arastoo, a spokesman for Republican Guard special operations forces in North America, tells Fars, and “seeks to confront irregular threats…”
The unit began its existence in mid-2009—around the time that Washington rejected the Iranian leadership’s wish for a new diplomatic dialogue. But whatever the task force does about the United States—or might do in the future—is a sensitive subject with the Republican Guard. “It would be inappropriate to discuss operational plans regarding any particular nation,” Arastoo says about the United States.

Okay, so I made that up. Sue me. But first admit that, a line or two in, you knew it was fiction. After all, despite the talk about American decline, we are still on a one-way imperial planet. Yes, there is a new US special operations team known as Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Cooperation Council, or JSOTF-GCC, at work near Iran and, according to Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, we really don’t quite know what it’s tasked with doing (other than helping train the forces of such allies as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia).

And yes, the quotes are perfectly real, just out of the mouth of a US “spokesman for special-operations forces in the Mideast,” not a representative of Iran’s Republican Guard. And yes, most Americans, if they were to read about the existence of the new special ops team, wouldn’t think it strange that US forces were edging up to (if not across) the Iranian border, not when our “safety” was at stake.

Reverse the story, though, and it immediately becomes a malign, if unimaginable, fairy tale. Of course, no Iranian elite forces will ever operate along the US border. Not in this world. Washington wouldn’t live with it and it remains the military giant of giants on this planet. By comparison, Iran is, in military terms, a minor power.

NYC Marches In Solidarity Following Oakland Mass Arrest

Hundreds of protesters were arrested in Oakland this weekend following activists’ unsuccessful afternoon effort to occupy a former convention center. Over a thousand protesters decided to head back to their former encampment outside City Hall, which is when police confronted the marchers and began arresting them en masse.

Those arrested included six journalists: Mother Jones’s Gavin Aronsen, independent journalist Susie Cagle, Kristen Hanes of KGO Radio, Vivian Ho of the San Francisco Chronicle, John C. Osborn of the East Bay Express, and Yael Chanoff of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Hanes had credentials, though from San Francisco police, not OPD, and Ho did have OPD credentials.

Aronsen describes his arrest:

As I waited in line to be processed and transported to jail, Ho approached me with an officer who had released her from custody. The two explained to my arresting officer that I was with the media. “Oh, he’s with the media?” the officer replied, although I had already repeatedly told him as much and my credentials had been plainly visible all night. He appeared ready to release me, until a nearby officer piped in, without explanation: “He’s getting arrested.”

How much Americans hate Congress has become cliché. Congress’s approval rating is at an all-time low, and it’s not hard to see why: the institution is broken. Plenty of structural forces have contributed to Congress’s dysfunction: the increasing flow of money in politics, the emergence of the 24/7 cable news cycle, the increasing polarization of the electorate. But perhaps no single person bears as much responsibility as Newt Gingrich.

“I spent 16 years building a majority in the House for the first time since 1954,” Gingrich said during NBC’s Florida GOP debate Monday night, referring to the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. Over those sixteen years of personal and partisan striving, Gingrich invented or perfected many of the things that Americans dislike most about Congress. “I think I am a transformational figure,” Gingrich said before the 1994 election. “I am trying to effect a change so large that the people who would be hurt by the change, the liberal Democratic machine” will fight it, Gingrich explained.

There is no greater pathology in today’s Congress than obstructionism, from Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) refusal to raise the debt ceiling in July to Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) taking disaster relief funds for Hurricane Irene hostage. Both parties have long used Congress’s procedural rules to promote legislation they favor, but Gingrich created something new. “There is the assumption—pioneered by Newt Gingrich himself, as early as the 1970s—that the minority wins when Congress accomplishes less,” Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the number-two Democrat in the House, explained in a 2009 speech at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “Gingrich’s proposition, and maybe accurately, was that as long as…our party cooperate[s] with Democrats and get[s] 20 or 30 percent of what we want and they get to say they solved the problem and had a bipartisan bill, there’s no incentive for the American people to change leadership,” Hoyer told the Washington Post after the speech. “To some degree, he was proven right in 1994.”

Politicians and bureaucrats of all persuasions typically trip over themselves when it comes to praising the values and virtues, the courage and the sacrifice, of America's military families. East Coast. West Coast. Red State. Blue State. Democrats. Republicans. It doesn't matter. Everyone wants to stand up in public and say that brave and stoic military families should get the best that America can offer (cue the applause). Take the First Lady herself, Michelle Obama, who has worked consistently with and for these families since 2009.

Commemorating the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks on America, Mrs. Obama wrote in USA Today:

As we reaffirm our commitment to hold dear the heroism, strength and compassion we saw on Sept. 11, let's also pledge to keep our military families in our hearts long after this anniversary has passed. These men, women and children have served valiantly in the decade since that fateful day. Now it's up to us to serve them as well.

Amen. But while public officials are out waving the flag toward these families, federal lawyers in court are now quietly trying to expand the U.S. government's legal immunity from exposure to medical malpractice claims brought by those very same military folks. Now, the feds want the courts to recognize a bold application of an old doctrine -- an already heavily criticized old doctrine -- that would bar many plaintiffs, whose loved ones serve their country, from exercising the right merely to be able to present the substance of their claims at trial.

Worse, Congress has consistently refused over the past 60 years to ensure that courthouse doors remain open to military personnel and their families. In one recent iteration of this battle, in 2009, it was reported that Congressional Republicans refused to go along because doing so it would allow more malpractice cases to get to trial, a goal many of those very same Republicans find contrary to their so-called "tort reform" agenda. It's a legal issue, it's a political issue, and its a moral one: How much do we really care about these families?

Military traditionalists and aviation fan boys, you might need to sit down for this: In its zeal to stay relevant and (sort of) save bucks, America's flying corps is ridding itself of some of its cheapest, most reliable attack jets in favor of an overpriced, underperforming boondoggle of an aircraft.

The Air Force announced plans on Friday to cut five squadrons of A-10 attack jets (as well as a number of cargo aircraft) in the hopes that they'll ultimately be replaced by the notoriously expensive F-35 fighter program.

The plan is bound to be controversial. Imagine an unstoppable commercial Learjet with a full-automatic cannon in its nose and an iron bathtub surrounding the cockpit. That gives you some idea of the A-10's appearance and performance. Nicknamed the Thunderbolt (though most salty service members call it a Warthog, since that nose cannon kind of looks like a snout), the A-10 was developed in the Cold War to fly low and slow and destroy Soviet tanks. After 9/11, war planners realized the A-10's close-air support capabilities made it an ideal tool to defeat insurgents, too; by 2010, 60 of the planes had fired more than 300,000 rounds of ammunition in combat over Iraq (as well as flown a handful of propaganda-leaflet drops), with an 85 percent success rate [PDF]. The plane has done equally well in Afghanistan and Libya.

Vale's general manager for Ontario says operations at all five mines in the Sudbury area will be suspended indefinitely while the death of a 47-year-old miner is investigated.

Kelly Strong said this is the first time he can remember this happening in his 11 years with company. The move affects close to 1,600 workers.

The president of the Steelworkers union local in Sudbury is calling Sunday's mining fatality "unacceptable."

The worker, who has still not been named, was killed Sunday afternoon while he was underground at Vale's Coleman Mine in Levack, Ont., northwest of Sudbury.

Union boss 'angry'

"It's a really difficult … I'm very angry," Rick Bertand said. "And the reason for that is … four fatalities in seven months is unacceptable — three in Sudbury, one in Thompson [Man.]."

Investigations by the company and the union are in the works. Ministry of Labour investigators were at the scene of Sunday's workplace death.

"All we know at this time is a worker was loading the face of the rock with explosives, from a man-basket, when the incident occurred," said ministry spokesman Matt Blajer.

At a Monday press conference, Vale said it appears a piece of the rock face fell on the miner, but the explosives he was working with did not play any part in the accident.

The ministry has issued two requirements to Vale: that it not disturb the area or any equipment until ministry inspectors give the OK and to release a number of documents related to training and equipment.

Bertand said a plan needs to be forged when it comes to health and safety at Vale mines.

"I think what we need to do is sit down in the room together — the Steelworkers and Vale — and have discussions about the health and safety and where we're at and where we need to go, because … this is unacceptable," Bertand said. "This can’t continue to happen."

The dead employee, who had worked for Vale for 16 years, was working in the main ore body at the 4,215-foot level of Coleman mine. He was found and brought to the surface, where he was subsequently pronounced dead by medical authorities.

"We are saddened and devastated by the loss of this employee," Strong said.

"Our deepest sympathies and prayers go out to the employee's family, and everyone who knew and worked with him. Our efforts are now focused on supporting the family and our employees at the mine site, and on understanding exactly what occurred."

The incident is also being investigated by the Greater Sudbury Police Service.

Last June, Jason Chenier and Jordan Fram were killed underground while working at Stobie Mine in Sudbury.

The two were overtaken by a run of rock material or "muck," when they opened a gate and the material overflowed into the area where they were working.

Sunday's fatality comes on the heels of a report released by Vale Wednesday, which discussed outcomes of the company's investigation into the June deaths.

According to Vale spokesperson Angie Robson, up until yesterday there were no Vale employees that have died at Coleman Mine, which has been in operation since 1970.

There have been four fatalities at Coleman Mine involving contractors, however — three in the late 1960s/early 1970s and one in 2002.

Original Article
Source: Huff
Author: cbc

Harper's way or the highway? So far, it has been his way

In my previous column, I described how a political phenomenon I call Harpertism modified the ideological underpinnings of Canadian conservatism. Now, I'll show how Harpertism resonated with Canadian voters - and changed conservatism as we know it.

After the 2004 federal election, the Conservatives continued to adjust the public's impression of right leaning political ideology. An important lesson had been learned on the campaign trail: Liberal scare tactics about a so-called "hidden political agenda" on issues like abortion and gay marriage had successfully swayed disgruntled Liberals, provincial PCs and right-leaning independents from voting Tory. Even though Paul Martin's Liberals were held to a minority, it was clear Canadian voters still didn't trust the Tories.

Hence, the Conservatives watered down their ideological component to mesh with a wider net of viewpoints. Targeted tax credits were favoured instead of broadbased tax relief. Patient wait times guarantees replaced the bogeyman of private health care. The Universal Child Care Benefit became a reasonable alternative to the Liberals' national daycare strategy. Calls for a crackdown on crime resonated with voters across ideological lines.

The Liberals also made a huge strategic blunder: the 2006 campaign was a near-carbon copy of 2004. Voters weren't buying it this time around, as Harpertism had created a more moderate Conservative party. You can't go back to the same political well if the water has already dried up. The Liberals didn't realize this, and paid for it.

JERUSALEM—Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird kicked off his first full day in Israel by attending the opening of a new Holocaust education facility in Jerusalem.

Baird says the new seminars wing of the International School for Holocaust Education at Yad Vashem will play a key role in ensuring humanity doesn’t forget the lessons of genocide.

And he says Israel has no better friend in the world than Canada.

Baird and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will spend the next several days visiting Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The campus holds seminars each year for educators from 55 countries around the world and Israel, and develops country-specific and custom-made tools for different age groups in more than 20 languages.

Jewish philanthropist Joseph Gottdenker, himself a Holocaust survivor, says Yad Vashem gives a voice and a name to each person who perished, “and restores to them the dignity of living history.”

“Holocaust education enables us to remember the lessons of the past and provides guidance to a more tolerant, hopeful and brighter future,” Gottdenker said.

In 2011, the school hosted 67 seminars for educators and lay leaders around the world, twice the numbers held in recent years.

Baird, a black skull cap perched on his head, emphasized the importance of Yad Vashem and its new 4,100-square-metre facility in documenting and teaching the lessons of the Holocaust.

“There is no better friend to Israel than Canada,”Baird said. “We shall always be there for you, and in front of you.”

Original Article
Source: Star
Author: The Canadian Press

Conservatives vague on potential MP pension cuts

OTTAWA—Federal politicians appear united in their resolve to cut their glitzy pension plan at the same time as Ottawa debates overhauling seniors’ payments.

The only question is how best to proceed and how deep the cuts will be to a plan that provides a member of Parliament with only six years of service an annual payment of at least $40,000 by the age of 55.

And like all questions about how politicians use taxpayer dollars for expenses, salaries or for retirement, most MPs don’t want to talk about it.

“If there are (proposed) changes to it, then show us and then we’ll talk, but other than that I don’t really know what we’re talking about other than a trial balloon,” said New Democrat Charlie Angus.

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews was even more evasive.

“That’s something for the members to determine, I guess,” he said.

What’s clear is that as the government moves forward with proposed changes to the retirement payments to millions of elderly Canadians, they can’t avoid taking a hit in their own pensions.

The government isn't going to cut old age security but will take a look at the "challenges" facing the retirement income system, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Monday.

Other ministers in the government, however, specified there wouldn't be cuts for anyone currently receiving OAS.

In the first question period since MPs left in December — and his first comments since suggesting last week there could be changes to Canada's retirement income system — Harper said there would be no cuts to the OAS.

"We will ensure our vital programs are sustainable in the long-term and for future generations," Harper said.

"The reality is that we aren’t cutting programs for seniors."

Last week in a speech in Davos, Switzerland, Prime Minister Stephen Harper hinted at possible changes to Old Age Security benefits. The ratio of workers to retired people will decline from four to one to two to one by 2030, leaving fewer people to fund OAS through their taxes.

Mayor Rob Ford denies that he was out of bounds when he unilaterally cancelled Transit City and made a deal with the province to pursue a new underground transit plan on Sheppard and Eglinton Aves.

“I didn’t overstep my boundaries, I did what the taxpayers want. They want subways. That’s it. They don’t want streetcars. I was out in Scarborough over the weekend, people came up to me and said they want subways. That’s it,” Ford told reporters at the weekly weigh-in for his weight-loss program.

His comments came in the wake of a report by a lawyer who is an expert in municipal governance. It says the mayor didn’t have the authority to cancel the Transit City light rail plan without city council approval.

Nor was it within his authority to sign a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the province pursuing an alternative transit plan, said Freya Kristjanson, who was asked for her legal opinion by Councillor Joe Mihevc (Ward 21, St. Paul’s).

“Toronto has a weak-mayor, strong-council system of municipal governance. This means that the power of the city resides in city council. The mayor has very little independent authority unless it is specifically delegated to him by council,” she said.

Her opinion is based within the legal framework of the City of Toronto Act, which took effect in 2007, said Kristjanson.

When Washington puts policy on the auction block, bankers are consistently the highest bidders.

The industry's most striking victory has been the watering down of post-financial crisis reforms, to the point that banks are now bigger than ever and the bonuses keep flowing. But Wall Street's campaign spending and lobbying power is so intimidating that banks have repeatedly stuck the public with the tab for their losses and no one in Washington stops them.

Why hasn't the government done something about outrageous ATM fees? Or credit card interest rates up to 30 percent? Bankers' clout is such that common-sense pro-consumer legislation is presumptively dead on arrival at Capitol Hill if it threatens banks' revenue streams.

An epic recent battle between consumers and Wall Street was fought over a congressional proposal to give bankruptcy judges the legal authority to modify principal balances on mortgages in a way that is fair to both parties. Known as "cramdown," it would have allowed more than a million ordinary Americans to keep their homes. But because it would have leveled the playing field between banks and debtors -- and would have forced banks to officially recognize losses they don't want to acknowledge -- the financial services industry fought cramdown with everything it had.

This article is the first in a two-part series tracing the development of the amorphous online community known as Anonymous, pranksters who have become a force in global affairs.

Late in the afternoon of Jan. 19, the U.S. Department of Justice website vanished from the Internet. Anyone attempting to visit it to report a crime or submit a complaint received a message saying the site was unable to load. More websites disappeared in rapid succession. The Recording Industry Association of America. The Motion Picture Association of America. Universal Music. Warner Brothers. The FBI.

By nightfall, most of the sites had come back online, but the people responsible for the outages had made their point. They'd landed what they hailed as the biggest blow yet in an escalating war for control of the Internet, and in one of their online command centers, "Phoenix" and his associates were celebrating.

Phoenix, a college student, is a member of Anonymous, the loose coalition of hackers, pranksters and other creatures of the Internet who have made headlines over the last 13 months for attacks on the computer systems of a wide range of targets: MasterCard, Visa and PayPal; the San Francisco public transit system; a Texas think tank; Sony; a host of computer-security companies; authoritarian governments in Tunisia and Egypt.

Just a few days ago the issue of psychiatric drugs being prescribed to kids having trouble concentrating in class arose in a private conversation I had with friends of high school-aged children. This morning the sorts of troubling questions we talked about were on the front on my morning Ottawa Citizen and an opinion piece prominently featured in the Sunday New York Times.

The Citizen’s story, by health reporter Sharon Kirkey, reported on a Canadian Journal of Psychiatry study that showed a dramatic increase in the prescribing of the latest generation of antipsychotic drugs to kids in Manitoba, a trend the researchers suspect is happening across the country. Most troubling is the finding that doctors are resorting to drugs to treat conditions for which they are not even approved by Health Canada. The scale is disturbing:

“Researchers looked at the number of prescriptions for antipsychotics dispensed for those aged 18 and younger between 1998 and 2008,” Kirkey writes of the Manitoba study. “Overall, antipsychotic use increased from 1.9 per 1,000 in 1999, to 7.4 per 1,000 in 2008. The total number of prescriptions for the newer antipsychotics also increased significantly, from 2,746 in 1999, to 21,320 in 2008.”

In the Times, L. Alan Sroufe, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota, points to reasons doctors might be so inclined to try putting kids on drugs—and on why this tendency to prescribe isn’t, in the long run, good medicine. He cites finding published in 2009 from a study that had been going on for more than a decade:

“The study randomly assigned almost 600 children with attention problems to four treatment conditions,” Sroufe writes. “Some received medication alone, some cognitive-behavior therapy alone, some medication plus therapy, and some were in a community-care control group that received no systematic treatment. At first this study suggested that medication, or medication plus therapy, produced the best results. However, after three years, these effects had faded, and by eight years there was no evidence that medication produced any academic or behavioral benefits.”

Parents and teachers in my circle, and I suspect across the continent, will find these stories deeply unsettling. It’s not the first time these concerns have been brought to light, but clearly the healing professions and health policy leaders need to take a closer, critical look at what’s going on.

Original Article
Source: macleans
Author: John Geddes

Chiefs want Crown-First Nations meeting to become an annual event

The historic Crown-First Nations meeting that took place in Ottawa on Jan. 24 led to government commitments to an economic task force, the review of an education report and a commitment to remove barriers to First Nations self-governance, but chiefs say the meeting’s real accomplishment was the opportunity to communicate their message to a nation-wide audience.

Ahead of the meeting, many of the hundreds of First Nations chiefs who made their way to Ottawa to attend the historic Crown-First Nations meeting were vocal in the media about the fact that they wanted the meeting to result in action, not just a “photo-op” of “symbolic” gestures.

Assembly of First Nations National Chief Shawn Atleo said “urgent” action is needed, with the next generation at risk.

Leaving the meeting many chiefs, like Assembly of First Nations Alberta Regional Chief George Stanley, said they were “disappointed” by the meetings outcome, but many also said it was a “good first step” and allowed them to get their message out to Canadians, and to Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) and his Cabinet ministers.

“The feedback that I received from chiefs and from people was they felt good about being heard,” said National Chief Atleo in an interview last week with The Hill Times.

DUBLIN - Northern Ireland should hold a referendum as early as 2016 on whether to remain British or join a united Ireland, Sinn Fein, the main pro-Irish nationalist party in the province, said on Monday.

The British government in London, which is already facing calls for a referendum in 2014 on ending Scotland’s 300-year union with England, has the final say on whether a referendum on the future of Northern Ireland can be held.

Sinn Fein’s leader in Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, said he favoured a referendum after the next election to Northern Ireland’s assembly, which is likely to happen in 2015 or 2016.

“It could take place anytime between 2016 and 2020/21,” McGuinness, a former commander with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) guerrilla group, told the Irish Examiner newspaper. “I don’t see any reason whatsoever why that should not be considered.”

Just as 2014 is a key year for Scottish nationalists, marking the 700th anniversary of a historic victory over the English, so 2016 is important for Irish nationalists, as it marks the centenary of a popular uprising against British rule.

One political analyst dismissed the referendum idea as being outside “the realm of pratical politics”.

The Harper government weathered a storm when it cut funding to long-standing foreign-aid groups, but is now facing more controversy over its decision to launch development projects in partnership with mining firms.

The Canadian International Development Agency has established three foreign-aid pilot projects in Africa and South America with large mining corporations, as part of a plan to ensure that foreign aid also fuels economic growth and international trade at home.

Critics argue that Canada is needlessly subsidizing the foreign operations of profitable corporations, but the government is encouraging non-governmental organizations to come up with more projects with the private sector. This marks the first time that CIDA and mining firms are jointly funding aid projects abroad, and comes after the Conservatives faced a massive pre-election controversy over funding cuts to traditional partners, such as church-backed Kairos.

The mining industry is welcoming the new trend in Canada’s foreign-aid policy.

“There is a policy shift under way, and it’s one we’re encouraged by,” said Pierre Gratton, the president of the Canadian Mining Association.

Layoffs seldom come as a surprise. Workers know when a plant is losing business; when an employer is driven to cut costs; when a government is poised to slash its payroll.

When the axe finally falls, they’ve lived through months of debilitating anxiety. They need to be able to count on their employment insurance (EI) benefits.

Today, they can’t. An applicant who provides all the information required by Service Canada is supposed to get his or her first benefit payment within 28 days. But thousands of laid-off workers say they’ve been waiting months.

It’s impossible to get though to Service Canada; the phone lines are jammed. It takes hours to get an appointment with a claims officer when they go to the office in person. And when their turn finally comes, they’re often told their claim is “spooling” or “churning” in the computer and won’t be retrievable for three weeks.

Those whose layoff deviates in any way from the norm have to wait until an experienced claims evaluator — not a short-term contract employee — is available to review their application.

It is important to remember this isn’t government money. Service Canada is merely acting as the delivery agent for money entrusted to Ottawa’s care by employers and workers. These contributors have a right to the benefits for which they paid.

Why is the federal agency failing to keep its part of the bargain?

WASHINGTON, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Ben Bernanke has achieved at the Federal Reserve what John Maynard Keynes only dreamed of - that economists be viewed not as cult heroes but as humble, competent people on a level with dentists.

Alan Greenspan, Bernanke's predecessor as Fed chairman, was proclaimed a "Maestro" in a 2000 biography as he presided over the longest-ever U.S. economic expansion, working mostly behind a veil of secrecy and boasting of mumbling incoherently.

In the 1980s, then-Chairman Paul Volcker chomped on a huge cigar, glowered and blinded the public with a blizzard of data on monetary aggregates to wrestle down inflation.

Both were larger-than-life personalities.

Bernanke in contrast cuts a modest figure, and has taken much of the mystique from U.S. central banking by making the Fed a more open institution - a move he forwarded this week by unveiling a new monetary policy framework with an explicit inflation target of 2 percent.

In the process, he is quietly revolutionizing the Fed and leaving a lasting legacy for the framing of U.S. monetary policy.

WASHINGTON -- Union membership grew slightly last year, giving labor leaders hope that a period of steep declines has finally bottomed out.

The number of unionized workers increased by about 50,000 to nearly 14.8 million members in 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. The increase comes after unions lost nearly 1.4 million members over the previous two years.

Still, unions' share of the overall workforce fell, from 11.9 percent to 11.8 percent, as state and local governments trimmed thousands of jobs to address budget shortfalls. That's the lowest percentage of union workers since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Unions saw losses of about 61,000 workers in government employment. But they grew by 110,000 workers in the private sector, mainly in construction and health care. Despite that growth, unions still represent just 6.9 percent of all workers at private companies, unchanged from 2010.

"The devastating losses from 2009 and 2010 have stopped and that's got to be good news for the labor movement," said John Schmitt, a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

Schmitt said another positive for unions is that private sector membership grew at about the same rate as overall job growth.

HOUSTON, Jan 28 (Reuters) - The United Steelworkers union warned on Saturday that a strike by U.S. refinery workers as early as 12 a.m. Wednesday was becoming more likely due to "the lack of a more substantive response from the industry."

Union and oil company negotiators have been meeting since Jan. 17 to hammer out a new three-year agreement for workers at nearly two-thirds of U.S. refining capacity.

Union negotiators have not sent out a similar warning to refinery workers in the past three rounds of contract talks with the industry.

A representative for Shell Oil Co, the U.S. unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, which is the lead oil company negotiator, was not immediately available to discuss the union statement.

As late as Friday, Shell said it was optimistic an agreement could be reached with the union.

In the statement issued Saturday night, the USW's bargaining committee said that without further progress in the talks a strike could take place at "one or more locations when the collective bargaining agreements expire."

For-Profit College Executives Make Much More Than Their Higher Education Counterparts

For-profit colleges have been in the hot seat over the past two years, with the federal government and more than a dozen state attorneys general probing fraudulent recruiting tactics and high student debt levels.

But there has been relatively little attention paid to how the Wall Street corporations that own many for-profit colleges pay those at the top.

A Huffington Post analysis of compensation across higher education reveals that CEOs and former CEOs at for-profit college corporations bring home much more than the presidents of some the most prestigious public and private universities in America, despite questionable outcomes for students. In addition, many of the top earners at for-profit colleges received more in compensation than football and basketball coaches at large public universities - traditionally the highest-paid officials at schools with major sports programs.

The Austerity Debacle

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.

Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy.

And it’s a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.

O.K., about those caveats: On one side, British unemployment was much higher in the 1930s than it is now, because the British economy was depressed — mainly thanks to an ill-advised return to the gold standard — even before the Depression struck. On the other side, Britain had a notably mild Depression compared with the United States.

As Republican primary voters head to the polls in Florida on Tuesday, both GOP front-runners have endorsed a policy that would contradict existing law and could disenfranchise millions of voters across the country.

During a recent debate, both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney supported getting rid of bilingual ballots when the topic was brought up by the moderator. "I would have ballots in English," Gingrich said. "And I think you could have programs where virtually everybody would be able to read the ballots." Romney agreed. "I think Speaker Gingrich is right with regards to what he's described," he said.

That wasn't much of a stretch for Gingrich, who once called Spanish "the language of living in a ghetto." Yet their glib demand for English-only ballots would require amending the Voting Rights Act and doing away with hard-won legal requirements that have existed for decades. It's a sharp turn away from the Bush administration, which despite a spotty civil rights record filed more ballot access cases on behalf of non-English speakers than any administration had before.

"We used to have poll taxes, we used to have whites-only primaries, we used to not let women vote," says Myrna Perez, senior counsel with the Brennan Center's Democracy Program. "Policies that would make our ballots less accessible to Americans based on what language they speak would be at odds with that historical arc towards expanding the franchise."

Bilingual ballots are no abstract issue in Florida, which has a sizeable population of Americans whose first languages are Spanish or Haitian Creole. "The Haitian population is a voting bloc, the Hispanic community is a voting bloc," says Carolyn Thompson, a Florida-based activist with the Advancement Project, a civil rights group. "They pay taxes, they've won the right to vote in their language."

Under the 1975 revision of the Voting Rights Act, communities whose non-English speaking populations reach a certain level have to provide voting materials in alternate languages.

Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-owned mortgage giant, has placed multibillion-dollar bets that pay off if homeowners stay trapped in expensive mortgages with interest rates well above current rates.

Freddie began increasing these bets dramatically in late 2010, the same time that the company was making it harder for homeowners to get out of such high-interest mortgages.

No evidence has emerged that these decisions were coordinated. The company is a key gatekeeper for home loans but says its traders are “walled off” from the officials who have restricted homeowners from taking advantage of historically low interest rates by imposing higher fees and new rules.

Freddie’s charter calls for the company to make home loans more accessible. Its chief executive, Charles Haldeman Jr., recently told Congress that his company is “helping financially strapped families reduce their mortgage costs through refinancing their mortgages.”

But the trades, uncovered for the first time in an investigation by ProPublica and NPR, give Freddie a powerful incentive to do the opposite, highlighting a conflict of interest at the heart of the company. In addition to being an instrument of government policy dedicated to making home loans more accessible, Freddie also has giant investment portfolios and could lose substantial amounts of money if too many borrowers refinance.

“We were actually shocked they did this,” says Scott Simon, who as the head of the giant bond fund PIMCO’s mortgage-backed securities team is one of the world’s biggest mortgage bond traders. “It seemed so out of line with their mission.”

The trades “put them squarely against the homeowner,” he says.

Those homeowners have a lot at stake, too. Many of them could cut their interest payments by thousands of dollars a year.

On Saturday, Occupy Oakland re-entered the national spotlight during a day-long effort to take over an empty building and transform it into a social center. Oakland police thwarted the efforts, arresting more than 400 people in the process, primarily during a mass nighttime arrest outside a downtown YMCA. That number included at least six journalists, myself included, in direct violation of OPD media relations policy that states "media shall never be targeted for dispersal or enforcement action because of their status."

After an unsuccessful afternoon effort to occupy a former convention center, the more than 1,000 protesters elected to return to the site of their former encampment outside City Hall. On the way, they clashed with officers, advancing down a street with makeshift shields of corrugated metal and throwing objects at a police line. Officers responded with smoke grenades, tear gas, and bean bag projectiles. After protesters regrouped, they marched through downtown as police pursued and eventually contained a few hundred of them in an enclosed space outside a YMCA. Some entered the gym and were arrested inside.

As soon as it became clear that I would be kettled with the protesters, I displayed my press credentials to a line of officers and asked where to stand to avoid arrest. In past protests, the technique always proved successful. But this time, no officer said a word. One pointed back in the direction of the protesters, refusing to let me leave. Another issued a notice that everyone in the area was under arrest.

ALEC's Latest Actions

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization that has been leading recent coordinated attempts to move state laws rightward, has some busy minions in the New Hampshire state legislature. In the past week, they introduced seven pieces of ALEC’s model legislation.

These include bills that are plainly counter-productive, such as an act to eliminate payments for additional children of parents on welfare. According to Granite Progress, “This legislation would eliminate support services for newborn children whose parents are utilizing TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families).” How that will break the cycle of the poverty or give the disadvantaged children of poor people a more fair shot at becoming productive citizens is unclear. It seems to proceed from the false premise that people decide whether to have children on the basis on minuscule increases in aid they may receive. In any case, it punishes children for the perceived sins of their parents.

Some of the other proposals are just doctrinaire right-wing ideology, such as instituting a tax credit to divert money from public education to private school vouchers.

The farthest-reaching proposal would impede the people of New Hampshire from tossing out the Republican legislative majority that is trying to impose this agenda. That’s a bill to require voters to present photo identification at the polling place. Such laws are designed to combat a non-existent problem of in-person voter impersonation. But they are very effective at disenfranchising poor people, young people and people of color. In other words, it’s a partisan scheme to stop Democrats from voting.

One evening this past October, I went prospecting for natural-gas man Trevor Rees-Jones at the posh Hilton Anatole in Dallas. He was there to receive the Robert S. Folsom Leadership Award, a philanthropic prize that in recent years has gone to the likes of Laura Bush and former Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman. Unlike these prominent Texans, Rees-Jones is not widely known outside his hometown. If the name sounds familiar, it's probably because he shares it with the British bodyguard who survived Princess Diana's fatal car crash. The Trevor Rees-Jones that I came to see is the billionaire founder of Dallas-based Chief Oil & Gas and perhaps the fastest-rising star in Republican big-money circles.

The dinner's PR people had promised me tickets, then changed their minds and, with apologies, yanked them. So I called up my sister, a Dallas debutante of recent vintage, to help me crash the thing. As we strolled through the Hilton's cave-like lobby in cocktail attire, we saw a troop of young Boy Scouts milling about. One of them inquired about our destination and then helpfully directed us to the event's open bar. An Eagle Scout himself, Rees-Jones has donated millions of dollars to scouting causes.

A few days earlier, Rees-Jones' high school acquaintance, the renowned GOP bundler Jim Francis, had thrown him a party with guests that included George W. Bush. Now Francis' broad-shouldered son, Jim Jr., was holding forth in the lobby about a Lenin statue that once stood outside his burger joint. (Inscription: "America Won.") It was eventually sold on eBay to some guy in Arkansas. "Perfect!" someone exclaimed. "That's where it should be!"

We all laughed at the Clintons' expense. I then asked Francis if he thought Rees-Jones would go all in on the 2012 presidential race. "Oh, yeah!" he gushed before realizing he had no idea who I was. "Uh, I think a lot of the big political backers are waiting to see what happens," he added vaguely. "I think it will be a real interesting year."

OTTAWA — Should you have the right to know how much your member of Parliament expensed yesterday for lunch? Or how they spent their housing allowance? Or what salaries they pay their staff?

Former Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe’s alleged misuse of his parliamentary budget to pay the salaries of people employed by his political party has led to growing calls for MPs to be included under the Access to Information Act — federal legislation that would force parliamentarians to open up their books and release internal documents.

Duff Conacher, the founding board member of Democracy Watch, said he believes Duceppe’s spending would have been uncovered if MPs were subject to the Access to Information program (ATIP).

“Definitely, the patterns that we have seen in England and Nova Scotia of some of them abusing their budgets and resources of their offices would have been seen at the federal level,” Conacher told The Huffington Post Canada.

“Right now MPs’ offices and budgets are ripe for abuse because the Access to Information Act does not apply and there is no disclosure ... through Auditor General audit of what they are spending their money on,” he added.

The Montreal newspaper La Presse reported last week that for years Duceppe used his parliamentary budget to pay the salaries of his party’s general manager and others employed to do work for the Bloc Quebecois.

Duceppe told La Presse he acted within the rules, but parliamentarians of all stripe have come out to say that it is very clear to them that the former Bloc leader breached protocol and should have known better.

Transforming government: Ottawa vs. Ontario

It’s crunch time. The next federal and Ontario budgets will start eliminating deficits. This, in turn, will shape the agenda in Ottawa and Queen’s Park for years to come.

According to conventional wisdom, there are three ways to balance a budget: cut spending, raise taxes, or some combination of both. Lately, however, there’s talk of a fourth option: transforming government.

We can shed some light on this term by comparing deficit reduction in Ottawa and Ontario.

Last week in Davos Prime Minister Stephen Harper outlined his plan to get spending under control. Deficit reduction, he says, is linked to a larger set of issues, including changing demographics and weakening demand from our key markets in the United States.

An aging population will increase the cost of social programs, such as health care and Old Age Security, at the same time that it shrinks the work force whose taxes pay for these programs. Finally, sluggish growth in the U.S. means our biggest markets are shrinking.

Harper’s plan is to reduce the cost of social programs, re-focus immigration on rebuilding the labour force, and treat energy and other natural resources as strategic assets to find new markets in Asia.

The Prime Minister calls his plan transformational, by which he seems to mean it will result in a smaller, leaner and more business-oriented government that can help Canadians position themselves in a highly competitive, global economy.

Canada is at the brink of a radical shift in energy and foreign policy. But there has been no debate of any consequence about it - not in the House of Commons, not in the Senate, not in the proceedings of a Royal Commission. Certainly not in the news media.

Here's what you've been missing.

Ostensibly, it's about the Enbridge project, a plan to pump condensate eastward from the coast to Alberta so that Alberta bitumen can be made fluid enough to be pumped back to the coast at Kitimat - then put into oil tankers to be sent down Douglas Channel and out into the roaring North Pacific, eventually landing in California and Asia.

As recently as last fall, John Bruk, the founding president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and as fervent a booster of trade with China as you'll meet, was cheering Stephen Harper and wishing him all the best with his trade engagements in the Forbidden City. But Bruk's good wishes came with a caution: "Are we going to sell the ownership of our natural resources to pay for consumer goods we can ill afford and thereby speed up the indebtedness of Canada as export revenue from those resources would be lost?" Turns out that's exactly what we're doing.

It's not just about the jettisoning of a national consensus that Canada's bitumen should not be sent overseas to be processed. It's not just the $20-billion deluge of takeovers and beachheads Beijing has established almost overnight in Alberta's oil sands. It's about Chinese state-owned corporations moving in. It's about a proper review of Investment Canada Act rules the Conservatives were promising only a year ago, before quietly scrapping the promise without explanation. It's about recommendations from the federal Competition Policy Review Panel that were ignored. It's about the abdication of Canada's capacity to articulate a national energy strategy, and all to the advantage of the police state in Beijing.