Pipeline to Beijing

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.

Stephen Harper’s ‘tough-on-crime’ laws are more misguided than ever

For 20 years there’s been a troubling disconnect between the reality of crime in Canada and people’s fear of it. The persistent — though mistaken — view that crime is on the rise has allowed governments to push through ever more “tough-on-crime” laws.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have taken this to extremes. The omnibus Bill C-10 before the Senate right now will foist enormous and unnecessary costs on taxpayers.

Yet in reality violent crime is down. Property crime is down. Other crimes are down. Crime is at its lowest since 1973.

Finally, people are getting it. An Environics Focus Canada poll released last week show that the number who think crime is on the rise has dropped from 52 per cent to 46 per cent. Moreover 63 per cent think Ottawa’s crime-fighting focus should be on prevention.

Too bad Harper isn’t listening. The Tories are as obstinate as ever in their desire for harsher sentences, including for young offenders and mandatory minimums for drug crimes. They ignore evidence from the United States that a lock ’em up and throw away the key approach does not reduce crime.

They also seem content to dump the costs of building more prisons onto provincial taxpayers, even if services like health and education suffer. Ontario may face $1 billion in new costs.

With a $16 billion deficit, the province is so short on cash that it has scrapped popular programs like the $150 textbook grant for college and university students. Now it is combing the health budget looking for savings.

As more Canadians awake to declining crime rates, they will become less tolerant of senseless, ideologically driven justice policy and of bids to garner votes by fear-mongering. Provincial deficits and the prospects of cuts to health and education will reinforce that trend.

Canadians might still rank crime as a big concern but it doesn’t top health care. Few will thank any government that closes a hospital to pay for a new prison.

Original Article
Source: Star 
Author: - 

The Invisible War: New Film Exposes Rape, Sexual Assault Epidemic in U.S. Military

On the heels of a new military survey that the number of reported violent sex crimes jumped 30 percent in 2011, with active-duty female soldiers ages 18 to 21 accounting for more than half of the of the victims, we speak with Trina McDonald and Kori Cioca, two subjects of "The Invisible War,” a new documentary that examines the epidemic of rape of soldiers within the U.S. military, which won the Audience Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. "Not only was I astounded by the numbers, but when I started talking to the women and men who had experienced this, I was just so devastated by their stories," says the film’s Academy Award-nominated director, Kirby Dick. "These are women and men who are very idealistic. They joined the military because they wanted to serve their country. They were incredible soldiers. And then, when they were assaulted, they had the courage to come forward, even though many people advised them not to," Dick says.

Video
Source: Democracy Now! 
Author: - 

F-35: Out of Altitude, Airspeed, and Ideas — But Never Money

No program better illustrates the pathologies of the weapons acquisition process as it is currently practiced by the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) than the entirely predictable, and in this case, predicted, problems dragging the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter into a dead man’s spiral.

The F-35 in on track to be the most expensive program in the history of the Defense Department, and it has repeated just about every mistake we invented since Robert McNamara concocted the multimission, multi-service  TFX — a program conceived with the same kind of fanciful one-shoe fits all imaginings as the F-35.

 Technical problems, cost overruns, and schedule slippages caused the TFX to implode into one of the most infamous debacles in Pentagon’s history. The result was the super-costly single-mission (deep strike), single service, swing-wing F-111. Planes were delivered without mission essential avionics and sat on the runway for two years awaiting parts. Production rates were slowed and total production quantities were reduced from 1,500 to 500.  That cutback would have worked materially to wreck tactical fighter aviation in the Air Force, had it not been for the intervention of a brilliant iconoclastic band of military officers and civilians, who became known in the Pentagon and industry as the Fighter Mafia (their exploits are described here).

Are there really 287,000 law-abiding farmers, trappers, hunters and fishers in Toronto?

The Conservative Member of Parliament for Edmonton-St. Albert, the riding in which I reside, has made a name for himself by being a noisy defender of the Harper Government's effort to shut down the national rifle and shotgun registry and destroy all its records.

Brent Rathgeber likes to describe his party's nearly completed plan to eliminate the registry and permanently trash all its information, despite the pleas of the police whom he also purports to support, as a way to preserve "the liberty of law-abiding farmers, hunters, fishermen, trappers and others."

Liberty is good, as I think we can all agree, especially for someone who like Rathgeber also describes himself as a "libertarian."

I was thinking about this yesterday as I read the Toronto Star's scoop, based on a geographical breakdown of the federal long-gun registry's collected data that had fallen into the newspaper's hands, that there are approximately 287,000 "long guns" registered in Toronto!

Most of these, about 263,000 firearms according to the Star, are held by individuals, presumably in their homes.

Neo-liberalism and the ongoing economic assault on ordinary Canadians

Two recent stories out of Ottawa underline the ongoing political and economic assault on ordinary Canadians. More Canadians are now working for low wages than at any time in decades, continuing a trend that began in the early 1990s, and Stephen Harper has announced major changes to retirement benefits -- including delaying Old Age Security(OAS) eligibility to age 67. What kind of society beggars those of its citizens who worked all their lives and now want to retire in dignity while privileging the rich and super-rich by slashing their income taxes and allowing them to transfer their wealth to their children untouched?

Since the mid-1980s, and accelerating with the signing of the Canada-U.S. "free trade" deal, the guiding principle of neo-liberalism seems to have been, "Ask not what your economy can do for you, ask what you can do for your economy." This re-framing of the relationship between the economy, society and democracy has been largely successful with most Canadians accepting this personification of the economy and willing to adjust their lives to accommodate it. The economy is now defined as the narrow interests of global corporations. The old notion that economy should serve the national interest and that of workers and their communities now seems almost quaint.

But the results of this re-making of the world of work are increasingly disastrous for working people and the economy -- even using capitalism's own measures. Capitalism has to grow just to survive and the fact that the biggest firms in Canada are sitting on up to half a trillion dollars of cash that they cannot or will not invest does not bode well for growth. Ultimately that's a good thing as the obsession with growth is at the root of climate change and the rapid depletion of resources. But until we have governments which recognize this, we are all trapped in a growth paradigm and suffer when it fails.

Yet there is precious little recognition that deregulation and the endless promotion of the interests of capital are at the root of the problem. The half trillion in unusable capital represents part of the distortion of the economy caused by policies of labour flexibility and the suppression of wages and salaries. That much and more has no doubt been accumulated by the wealthy as their share of annual income continues to grow -- from 7 per cent in the 1970s to close to 15 per cent today (just above the level of 1929). Like the cash-bloated corporations, the wealthy will only spend so much -- the rest gets squirrelled away in stocks and bonds.

U.S. Drones Patrolling Its Skies Provoke Outrage in Iraq

BAGHDAD — A month after the last American troops left Iraq, the State Department is operating a small fleet of surveillance drones here to help protect the United States Embassy and consulates, as well as American personnel. Some senior Iraqi officials expressed outrage at the program, saying the unarmed aircraft are an affront to Iraqi sovereignty.       

The program was described by the department’s diplomatic security branch in a little-noticed section of its most recent annual report and outlined in broad terms in a two-page online prospectus for companies that might bid on a contract to manage the program. It foreshadows a possible expansion of unmanned drone operations into the diplomatic arm of the American government; until now they have been mainly the province of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.

American contractors say they have been told that the State Department is considering to field unarmed surveillance drones in the future in a handful of other potentially “high-threat” countries, including Indonesia and Pakistan, and in Afghanistan after the bulk of American troops leave in the next two years. State Department officials say that no decisions have been made beyond the drone operations in Iraq.

The drones are the latest example of the State Department’s efforts to take over functions in Iraq that the military used to perform. Some 5,000 private security contractors now protect the embassy’s 11,000-person staff, for example, and typically drive around in heavily armored military vehicles.

A Way to Slow Climate Change?

[Q&A] A groundbreaking new study shows we have the tools to halve the predicted warming rate over the next 40 years.

The Mark sat down with Drew Shindell, a NASA climate scientist and the lead researcher of a new study that proposes cuts to non-carbon emissions as the key to slowing global warming in the short term.

According to your study, we could eliminate half the climactic warming predicted to take place over the next 40 years, a stunning number. How?

To reduce the near-term warming, we would target emissions that lead to two of the most important near-term pollutants: ozone in the lower atmosphere, and black carbon, which is what most people think of as soot. While carbon dioxide lasts for decades to millennia in the atmosphere, these pollutants have lifetimes of a month or less. So if you reduce the emissions that lead to these pollutants, the effects are seen much faster.

How technologically difficult would the reduction of those two pollutants be?

The measures we look at all use proven, existing technologies that have been applied at large scale somewhere in the world already. That doesn’t mean it’s trivial – it requires some effort to actually implement them. But it doesn’t require us inventing anything new, or even learning how to apply anything at commercial scale. It’s all stuff we know how to do and have been doing – we just haven’t been doing it around the world.

The innovation challenge – and the misallocation of capital

Stephen Harper’s Davos manifesto is the Throne Speech he never delivered at home.

Better late than never. Best to know what’s coming.

It’s now clear that innovation – or more precisely, the dearth of it – has rocketed to the top of the Harper government’s agenda.

The Prime Minister is not happy about the return the country is getting on the roughly $7-billion a year Ottawa pours into research and development.

“We believe that Canada’s less than optimal results for those investments is a significant problem for our country,” Mr. Harper said last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

He vowed to act “soon” on the recommendations of an October task force report chaired by Tom Jenkins, chairman of software maker Open Text Corp.

The report’s central finding is that Canadian companies are investing less in R&D than they did nearly a decade ago, falling worryingly behind foreign rivals in spite of one of the most generous tax regimes in the world.

ORNGE’s travel medical plan targeted ‘elite of the elite’

Dr. Chris Mazza and other top ORNGE executives were trying to sell international medical insurance to people with $20 million net worth at a time when the publicly funded air ambulance service was struggling at home with critical safety problems.

It started early last year. Paramedics and pilots were filing serious complaints with ORNGE and its provincial masters, saying a poorly designed helicopter interior and improper staffing of air ambulances were making the service unsafe.

But Mazza and fellow executives were far from the home front — sometimes literally — focusing on several get-rich quick schemes, chief among them an international travel insurance plan for the “elite of the elite,” documents show.

Florida, Brazil and Saudi Arabia were all places to which ORNGE executives travelled, trying to drum up international business. Three per cent of the gross revenue from these schemes was to go to Ontario — and the lion’s share to companies they owned. Provincial investigators are trying to see how many public dollars were spent on these schemes.

Documents obtained by the Star dated April 2011 detail the “ORNGE Global Memberships Program.” The Star has not been able to determine if any memberships were sold.