All posts by alternativefreepress

Health/Environment

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

David Graeber
Strike! Magazine: August 17, 2013

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialize? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.

So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.

I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy.

Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: “who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’? What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.

[…]

There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.

(read the full article at Strike! Magazine)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Drugs, Tyranny

A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son

That’s right: Officers threw a flashbang grenade in my son’s crib — and left a hole in his chest. It gets worse

Alecia Phonesavanh
Salon : June 24, 2014

After our house burned down in Wisconsin a few months ago, my husband and I packed our four young kids and all our belongings into a gold minivan and drove to my sister-in-law’s place, just outside of Atlanta. On the back windshield, we pasted six stick figures: a dad, a mom, three young girls, and one baby boy.

That minivan was sitting in the front driveway of my sister-in-law’s place the night a SWAT team broke in, looking for a small amount of drugs they thought my husband’s nephew had. Some of my kids’ toys were in the front yard, but the officers claimed they had no way of knowing children might be present. Our whole family was sleeping in the same room, one bed for us, one for the girls, and a crib.

After the SWAT team broke down the door, they threw a flashbang grenade inside. It landed in my son’s crib.

Flashbang grenades were created for soldiers to use during battle. When they explode, the noise is so loud and the flash is so bright that anyone close by is temporarily blinded and deafened. It’s been three weeks since the flashbang exploded next to my sleeping baby, and he’s still covered in burns.

There’s still a hole in his chest that exposes his ribs. At least that’s what I’ve been told; I’m afraid to look.

My husband’s nephew, the one they were looking for, wasn’t there. He doesn’t even live in that house. After breaking down the door, throwing my husband to the ground, and screaming at my children, the officers – armed with M16s – filed through the house like they were playing war. They searched for drugs and never found any.

I heard my baby wailing and asked one of the officers to let me hold him. He screamed at me to sit down and shut up and blocked my view, so I couldn’t see my son. I could see a singed crib. And I could see a pool of blood. The officers yelled at me to calm down and told me my son was fine, that he’d just lost a tooth. It was only hours later when they finally let us drive to the hospital that we found out Bou Bou was in the intensive burn unit and that he’d been placed into a medically induced coma.

For the last three weeks, my husband and I have been sleeping at the hospital. We tell our son that we love him and we’ll never leave him behind. His car seat is still in the minivan, right where it’s always been, and we whisper to him that soon we’ll be taking him home with us.

Every morning, I have to face the reality that my son is fighting for his life. It’s not clear whether he’ll live or die. All of this to find a small amount of drugs?

The only silver lining I can possibly see is that my baby Bou Bou’s story might make us angry enough that we stop accepting brutal SWAT raids as a normal way to fight the “war on drugs.” I know that this has happened to other families, here in Georgia and across the country. I know that SWAT teams are breaking into homes in the middle of the night, more often than not just to serve search warrants in drug cases. I know that too many local cops have stockpiled weapons that were made for soldiers to take to war. And as is usually the case with aggressive policing, I know that people of color and poor people are more likely to be targeted. I know these things because of the American Civil Liberties Union’s new report, and because I’m working with them to push for restraints on the use of SWAT.

A few nights ago, my 8-year-old woke up in the middle of the night screaming, “No, don’t kill him! You’re hurting my brother! Don’t kill him.” How can I ever make that go away? I used to tell my kids that if they were ever in trouble, they should go to the police for help. Now my kids don’t want to go to sleep at night because they’re afraid the cops will kill them or their family. It’s time to remind the cops that they should be serving and protecting our neighborhoods, not waging war on the people in them.

(read the full article at Salon)

Corporate Welfare

Federal government has done no temporary foreign worker inspections

While the Conservative government announces new rules for the temporary foreign worker program, a major part of the existing rules has not yet been applied.

Steve Rennie
The Canadian Press : June 20, 2014

OTTAWA—There has not been a single inspection done of a workplace that employs temporary foreign workers — even though the Conservative government promised to do so last year when it overhauled the controversial program for the first time.

Now, with further reforms set to be announced Friday afternoon, questions are being raised about why Ottawa has been so slow to act on a major part of changes announced last December.

The Canadian Press made a request under the Access to Information Act for all inspection reports of workplaces that employ temporary foreign workers. But in a letter dated June 2, Employment and Social Development Canada replied that no inspections have been carried out.

“Department officials have informed our office that workplace inspections are expected to occur beginning in fall 2014,” wrote Jackie Holden, the department’s director of access to information and privacy.

“As a result, ESDC does not have the information you requested.”

New regulations announced last December gave the government the power to inspect workplaces to make sure employers were following the rules of the temporary worker program.

[…]

Both opposition parties are concerned that the government is meddling with the job market without having reliable information to base policy on.

“Here we are using a lot of guess work to fix a program that even the Conservatives have admitted — right up to the prime minister — is fundamentally broken,” said the NDP’s Jinny Sims.

She wants to see specific provisions that would require employers to hire Canadians first and boost wages as a first step to finding the right workers if they don’t come forward immediately.

The program has become a hot potato for the Harper government ever since stories of abuses came to light in the news media, including one case where Royal Bank employees were asked to train foreign workers to take over their jobs.

In February, 65 Alberta ironworkers alleged they were let go so that foreign workers could replace them.

Canadian firms are using the program more and more to fill both high- and low-skilled positions, despite relatively high levels of unemployment and data showing that the ratio of unemployed to job vacancies is rising.

A recent government calculation estimated there were 386,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada, or about two per cent of the labour force, up from about 100,000 in 2002.

(read the full article at The Star)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Privacy, Tyranny

The government spied on me without a warrant

Cindy Blackstock : June 21, 2014

Earlier this month Canadians joined with the international community to honour the sacrifice made by Second World War veterans to preserve our freedom. At the same time, headlines in Canadian newspapers warned of government surveillance of citizens engaged in peaceful protests. It made me wonder — why would we allow our own government to trample on the freedoms that many Canadians died protecting?

Until it happened to me I thought domestic government surveillance could only be carried out with a warrant. In my case there was no warrant and yet in 2011, I received hundreds of pages of government documents revealing that 189 federal government officials from the departments of Justice and Aboriginal Affairs were routinely spying on my personal Facebook page, collecting information about my family, friends and me, and distributing it to other government officials.

They even collected Facebook addresses of other users and circulated postings made by children, without the consent of their parents. My domestic and international movements were monitored and my personal and private government records were accessed. Government email correspondence suggested the surveillance was undertaken to try to prove I had “other motives” for filing a historic human rights case in 2007 alleging the federal government’s provision of First Nations child welfare was discriminatory.

I was stunned and afraid — it felt like I was being stalked. I remember thinking this cannot possibly be legal, but I had no idea where to file a report about the Canadian departments of Justice and Aboriginal Affairs, and what would happen to me and the people I cared about if I did report it?

Amidst the fear and confusion I thought that if this was happening to me — a law-abiding social worker who does not even have a parking ticket — then how many other Canadians are subject to government surveillance and what does it mean for our freedom? In fact I had good reason to believe others were affected, as the Department of Aboriginal Affairs had a form for bureaucrats to access restricted websites.

As a taxpayer I was equally appalled — why was the government wasting all this money following me around while cutting services to Canadians? I decided to share the government documents with the media. Some people say I was courageous but I was simply less afraid of standing up for freedom than of living without it.

The privacy commissioner found the federal government’s access of my personal Facebook page violated the Privacy Act and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal is currently deliberating on whether the government’s conduct amounts to retaliation under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Meanwhile, three United Nations Special Rapporteurs are conducting an inquiry to determine if Canada is meeting its international human rights obligations to respect and protect human rights defenders, freedom of association and Indigenous peoples.

[…]

Some say that people with nothing to hide should not be afraid of government surveillance. I believe that governments with nothing to hide should not be spying on citizens without a court order. It should frighten us all when our own government takes away the freedoms that our veterans fought so hard for us to enjoy.

(read the full article at The Star)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Drugs

The war on drugs killed my daughter

Mark Townsend : June 22, 2014

On 17 July 1971 the US president, Richard Nixon, announced what has become known as the war on drugs, instigating an unrelenting campaign that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars.

On the same date, 42 years later, in north Oxford, Martha Fernback, 15, and a friend bought a plastic sachet holding a crystallised gram of MDMA for £40 from a dealer. It was no impulse buy. Martha’s online history revealed she had meticulously researched the risks of the drug and opted to buy its most expensive variant, assuming the better quality it was, the safer it would be.

One of the myriad ramifications of Nixon’s hardline stance has meant buying drugs is a fraught and risk-laden business: users do not know what they are taking. In Martha’s case better quality meant greater purity. She had no idea that her batch was 91% pure compared with an average street level of 58%. Around lunchtime on 20 July last year Martha swallowed her 0.5 gram and within two hours was dead, the MDMA inducing cardiac failure.

The response of her mother, Anne-Marie Cockburn, 42, was unusual. She refused to blame her daughter, her friends, or the dealer or the manufacturer. Cockburn, a single mother, focused on a greater target: the government.

“It quickly became obvious that prohibition had had its chance but failed,” she said. “Martha is a sacrificial lamb under prohibition. The question is: how many more Marthas have to die before we change our approach? It’s not acceptable to allow the risks to remain.”

The risks of drug use under prohibition were articulated again last weekend when another 15-year-old, Rio Andrew, died, apparently oblivious to the strength of the drug he had taken. Witnesses saw Rio, from Notting Hill, west London, drinking beer laced with the so-called party drug ketamine. Another partygoer, aged 19, who drank from the same bottle at a rave in Croydon, south London, reportedly ended up in hospital. The death comes months after ministers reclassified ketamine from Class C to B because of its physical and psychological dangers amid its enduring popularity.

As the anniversary of Martha’s death nears, Anne-Marie Cockburn is emerging as the face of the campaign to expose the flaws of prohibition and push for the legalisation and regulation of drugs. Her efforts have touched a nerve; hundreds of mothers who have also had to bury a child because of drugs have been in touch, many from South America – in particular Mexico and Colombia where the war on drugs has wreaked most havoc. In Mexico more than 80,000 people have died in the last five years, with another 20,000 “disappeared” while drugs are cheaper and more plentiful than ever.

Cockburn has also been contacted by police, nurses and doctors who have all privately backed her calls to legalise Britain’s drug trade. “It’s like I’ve thrown a pebble into the ocean, it’s rippling everywhere,” she said, noting that a number of countries have recently begun to deviate from the prohibition line. On Thursday 6 June thousands of people worldwide are expected to march in more than 80 cities, including London, to protest against the decades-long impact of Nixon’s strategy which they blame for compromising health, triggering instability and mass incarceration.

Among the parents supporting Cockburn’s campaign are those of 18-year-old Leah Betts, who died after taking ecstasy in 1995, prompting her parents to launch a campaign to promote drug awareness among teenagers. Days before the tenth anniversary of her death, however, Leah’s parents decided to wind up their initiative, declaring that they had been betrayed by the government.

Cockburn remains undeterred by the prospect of political inertia. She is drafting a letter to the home secretary, Theresa May, and her opposition counterpart, Yvette Cooper, stressing the case for an urgent appraisal of the drug laws. She appreciates that in the runup to a general election such a move requires deep reserves of political courage although she takes succour from the fact that David Cameron, as a young MP, endorsed more lenient penalties for ecstasy possession and sat on a parliamentary committee that called for an international debate on the legalisation of drugs.

Unfortunately for reformers, his tenure as prime minister so far has seen him accept the existing orthodoxy. Similarly, the latest noises from inside Labour are depressing for those convinced a new look at drugs is required; the party is apparently intent on avoiding the issue.

“The timing is not ideal, but the timing was not right for me, I was not ready to bury my daughter,” said Cockburn, an engaging and articulate presence who is adept at mixing the personal and political. The scale of her challenge is neatly emphasised by the fact that the stimulant plant khat will become a class C drug on Tuesday after 60 years of being legally imported into the UK, almost solely by Kenyans and Somalis.

Already she has had a taste of how detached modern politicians can appear. A handwritten letter from her Tory MP, Nicola Blackwood, arrived recently at Cockburn’s Oxford home; it was the response to a letter Martha had sent almost a year ago detailing her concerns about mental health provision for young people in the city.

“The MP had sent a handwritten letter to a dead teenager. She lives about a mile from here. Had she not heard of my daughter?” she said.

Cockburn hopes Martha will become known to many in the years ahead as she promotes her message of a safety-first approach to drugs. Her vision sees the schoolchildren of the future able to buy clearly labelled drugs from regulated sources; future users will know whether a batch is 91% pure.

Alongside the introduction of drugs education into schools, the system would allow the government to seize control of a trade now the preserve of organised gangs. “Surely it’s better than criminals running it? It’s about safety. At the moment young people are buying drugs with a blank label. You’re not going to stop young people taking risks, experimenting. It’s about harm reduction. You want to live in a safe society? This is about safety,” said Cockburn.

The latest Home Office figures show that nearly one in 10 adults had used an illegal drug in the previous 12 months and more than a third of adults had taken an illicit drug in their lifetime.

Campaigners point to the fact that half the prison population is serving a sentence for drug-related offences with half of all property crime committed by drug users requiring cash. About £1.5bn of the £2.5bn spent on the UK’s drug strategy goes on enforcement.

Danny Kushlick of the drug campaign group Transform, which says that two-thirds of the UK public supports a review of drug policy, said: “A political vacuum has been created by the non-engagement of Labour and Conservatives in the drug policy reform debate. Parliament is effectively denying the UK public the opportunity to see the evidence for and against drug policy reform being laid out,” he said.

“Anne-Marie [Cockburn], in her measured and sombre way, has occupied that space, bringing a much needed honesty and pragmatism to the issue. But change is urgently required and sadly many more will die before parliament collectively grabs the opportunity for change,” said Kushlick.

Cockburn’s campaign embraces the principles of restorative justice to replace the punitive system of putting users and small-time dealers in jail from where they are likely to reoffend. Recently she visited Parc prison in Bridgend, south Wales, and told Martha’s story to 22 inmates, many serving sentences for drug offences. All were reduced to tears. One has since written a song in tribute to Martha. “If you trust people, treat them like humans, they will repay you,” she said. Cockburn is also planning to write to Alex Williams, 17, the Oxford dealer who sold Martha the “exceptionally” pure MDMA – for which he received a three-month curfew and 18-month youth rehabilitation order – believing that he is also a victim of the approach to drugs.

(read the full article at The Guardian)

—-
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Corporate Welfare, Health/Environment

The Rockefeller Files: Harper and the Canadian petro-state

Joyce Nelson
Rabble : June 16, 2014

By 2012, the U.S. was awash in light sweet crude from (fracked) shale oil deposits in Texas, North Dakota and elsewhere. With Midwest and Gulf Coast refineries configured to take heavy oil, that light crude has been looking for a refining home.

Just months after the 2012 Bilderberg meeting, media reports revealed that Royal Dutch Shell and BP (whose executives were at the secret conclave), trading firm Vitol and three other (unidentified) shale oil producers in the U.S., had applied to tanker their fracked light crude from the U.S. Gulf Coast up to Eastern Canada for refining — replacing conventional imported oil.

With those shipments now underway, the next stage in the plan is for the tankers to be refilled with piped tar sands dilbit (from Enbridge’s Line 9 and TransCanada Corp.’s Energy East pipe) for shipment to Gulf Coast refineries and to Europe.*

A March 2014 report, “TransCanada’s Energy East Pipeline: For Export, Not Domestic Gain,” released by the Council of Canadians, Ecology Action Centre, Equiterre and Environmental Defence states that nearly all of the 1.1 million barrels per day of tar sands crude to be carried by the pipeline would be exported unrefined.

The Council of Canadians also stated that the pipeline “would help spur an up to 40 per cent increase in tar sands production at a time when First Nations downstream are calling for an end to further expansion.”

The Globe and Mail has noted that tar sands producers “can recoup costs before paying money [royalties] to the government” — a major reason why tar sands expansion is ongoing. The tar sands industry is about 70 percent foreign-owned, with Rockefeller a controlling shareholder in several of the key companies.

The opening line of the environmentalists’ report reads: “TransCanada’s proposed Energy East pipeline is not a made-in-Canada energy solution.” That seems to have prompted some revisionist spin.

Revisionist spin

On March 27, both The Globe and Mail and the Financial Post carried a lengthy Reuters article claiming that TransCanada Corp.’s Energy East pipeline project is the October 2012 brainchild of the New Brunswick government and Irving Oil — a “Plan B” in the face of U.S. opposition to TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline.

The article states:

In October 2012, representatives from Irving Oil and New Brunswick’s government traveled to the western Canadian oil hub of Calgary to present their alternative: a west-east oil pipeline that would go all the way to the Atlantic. Irving Oil had asked for the meeting, according to a person who attended. Waiting from them in a conference room were Canadian provincial energy officials, executives from TransCanada, and representatives from industry heavyweights Canadian Natural Resources [Ltd.], Imperial Oil, Suncor, and Shell Canada. Representatives of all the companies involved declined to comment on the record about the meeting. Alberta’s oil minister, Ken Hughes, whispered into the ear of his counterpart from New Brunswick, Craig Leonard. Never before, Leonard remembers Hughes saying, had he seen so many of the major oil sands players together in a single room. And they were listening keenly.

Despite the breathless prose, it’s likely that 2012 Bilderberg participants (including Shell and BP executives) had tacitly approved the pipeline five months earlier.

Indeed, the May 2012 Bilderberg conclave seems to have been focussed on pipelines.

“Top headache”

Daniel Estulin, the foremost (non-member) expert on Bilderberg, reported that the “top headache” for the Bilderberg participants at that May 2012 meeting was Russian President Valdimir Putin because of his “opposition to war in Syria and Iran,” his “belligerence with respect to U.S. bases encircling Russia” and his plans for another natural gas pipeline to Europe that “could turn into a major victory for Russia” at the expense of competing plans backed by Bilderberg members.

Some 30 per cent of Western Europe’s natural gas has been coming from Russia, with most of it provided by a pipeline network centred in Ukraine.**

Estulin reported a Bilderberg “campaign to delegitimize Putin,” financed by “some very angry and powerful Anglo-American elites.” Present at that 2012 conclave was then-Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, now U.S. Secretary of State.

The 33-member Bilderberg Steering Committee includes Richard Perle, Project for the New American Century member and one of the key architects of the 2003 U.S. War on Iraq. In 2004, Perle and David Frum (co-authors of the book An End To Evil) were advocating for “regime change” in so many countries that they were said to have an “agenda for a Hundred Years’ War.”***

The February 2014 ouster of Ukraine’s democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych is now seen by many observers to have been a coup orchestrated by Anglo-American interests hoping for a new Cold War. Calling Ukraine “a CIA theme park,” John Pilger wrote for UK’s The Guardian that Ukraine “is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the U.S. and the EU. We in the West are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.”

That’s not how the crisis is being portrayed in much of Western corporate media, but as Bilderberg member Henry Kissinger has said, “It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but what is perceived to be true.” 

With no official parliamentary debate, Harper in May sent Canadian troops to Ukraine-related NATO exercises. The EU, worried about meeting long-term fuel needs, is now considering backing away from a proposed Fuel Quality Directive (FQD) which would curtail the import of tarsands crude. Simultaneously, TransCanada Corp. is “accelerating efforts” on its regulatory filing for the Energy East export pipeline extension.

Canadian petro-state

While Indiana’s Mitch Daniels was speaking at Bilderberg 2012, Indianapolis-based indystar.com reported that “the meeting this year will cover topics as diverse as energy, cyber security and the future of democracy.”

On that third topic, Harper was clear when he spoke last year at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) — another Rockefeller founded/funded organization (for U.S. members only). On May 16, 2013, when asked by CFR’s Robert Rubin about risks to Canada, Harper mentioned “household debt,” “security risks” and then he said, “There’s always the risk of people picking the wrong government, but my primary job is to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

He got a laugh with that line, but less than a year later, the grossly misnamed “Fair Elections Act” has just been rammed through Parliament. Its terms will prevent any real investigation of future electoral “dirty tricks.”

(read the full article at Rabble)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Corporate Welfare

Canada clears path for more temporary foreign workers to replace skilled workers

Kenney’s reforms make it easier to hire TFWs in skilled trades

NTFW : June 21, 2014

Employment Minister Jason Kenney has made it easier for businesses to hire temporary foreign workers in skilled trades by reactivating the controversial accelerated labour market opinion (LMO) program, according to NTFW.CA analysis of the reforms package announced by the government today.

Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) applications for skilled trades where the wage offered is at or above the regional median wage will now be approved within a 10-business-days.

The new fast-track LMIA stream is very similar to the controversial accelerated LMO scheme which Minister Kenney suspended last year after it emerged that about half of the approvals were rushed through with little or no review.

Canadians in the skilled trades have been one of the groups hardest hit by the TFW program, with numerous documented cases of hundreds of Canadian workers being replaced by foreign workers.

“Positions in the skilled trades are essential to the development of major infrastructure and natural resource extraction projects, which are vital to Canada’s economic growth,” Minister Kenney’s department Employment and Social Development Canada claims. “Over time, other occupations may be added based on evidence from more and better labour market information.”

However, NTFW.CA advisor and journeyman electrician Michael Thomas disagrees, highlighting numerous studies, including the governments own, that have concluded that there is no general labour shortage in Canada.

“There is no shortage of labour. There is only a shortage of cheap labour. Even non-union Canadians expect some degree of fairness and a decent wage,” Thomas said. “TFWs are ripe for abuse and they directly reduce the numbers of tax paying employed citizens working“

Minister Kenney and Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander announced an overhaul of the temporary foreign worker program and lifting of the moratorium on approving foodservice sector TFWs.

(read the full article at NTFW)

Geopolitics/War

Maybe listening to Dick Cheney on Iraq isn’t a good idea

Paul Waldman
Washington Post : June 18, 2014

Today, on the Senate floor, Harry Reid said: “Being on the wrong side of Dick Cheney is being on the right side of history.”

Reid was responding to Cheney’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with his daughter Liz attacking the Obama administration’s policies in the Middle East and elsewhere, a piece that has already generated much discussion. The Cheneys have also formed an organization, the Alliance for a Strong America, to advocate Cheneyite policies (you can tell it’ll be strong and resolute, because in the announcement video, Dick is wearing a cowboy hat).

[…]

The Cheneys offer no discussion of the disastrous decision to invade Iraq in the first place (though they still surely believe the war was a great idea, they apparently realize most Americans don’t agree). But anything that happened afterward can only be Obama’s fault. They write, “Mr. Obama had only to negotiate an agreement to leave behind some residual American forces, training and intelligence capabilities to help secure the peace. Instead, he abandoned Iraq and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.”

Yes, he “had only” to do that, and everything would have turned out fine. But who was it who signed the agreement mandating the removal of all American forces from Iraq by the end of 2011? It was George W. Bush. When the time arrived, the Maliki government was determined to get all American troops out, and refused to negotiate a new agreement without putting American troops at the mercy of the Iraqi justice system — something no American president would ever have accepted.

[…]

Maybe that’s why the Cheneys’ op ed is silent on what they would do differently in Iraq today. The op-ed contains nothing even approaching a specific suggestion for what , other than to say that defeating terrorists “will require a strategy — not a fantasy. It will require sustained difficult military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts — not empty misleading rhetoric. It will require rebuilding America’s military capacity — reversing the Obama policies that have weakened our armed forces and reduced our ability to influence events around the world.”

So to recap: we need a strategy, and though they won’t tell us what that strategy might be, it should involve military, intelligence, and diplomatic efforts, and rebuilding the military. Apart from the absurd claim that the armed forces have been “weakened” (we’re still spending over $600 billion a year on the military even with the war in Iraq behind us and Afghanistan winding down), the Cheneys are about as clear on what we should do now as they were on how invading Iraq was supposed to spread peace and democracy across the Middle East.

Watch closely as Republicans troop to the TV studios in the coming days, because they’ll be saying much the same thing. They won’t bring up what a disaster the war was; they’ll hope you forget that they supported it, and they won’t mention that it was Bush who signed the agreement to remove all the troops from Iraq. They will say almost nothing about what they would do differently now, other than to say we have to be “strong” and “send the right message” to the terrorists.

When it comes to being wrong about Iraq, Dick Cheney has been in a class by himself. It was Cheney who said, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

It was Cheney who said: “it’s been pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta “did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service.”

It was Cheney who said: “we do know, with absolute certainty, that [Saddam Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon”

It was Cheney who said in 2005: “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”

All those things, and many more, were false. There is not a single person in America — not Bill Kristol, not Paul Wolfowitz, not Don Rumsfeld, no pundit, not even President Bush himself — who has been more wrong and more shamelessly dishonest on the topic of Iraq than Dick Cheney.

And now, as the cascade of misery and death and chaos he did so much to unleash rages anew, Cheney has the unadulterated gall to come before the country and tell us that it’s all someone else’s fault, and if we would only listen to him then we could keep America safe forever. How dumb would we have to be to listen?

(read the full article at Washington Post)

—-
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Geopolitics/War

The totality of the Bush administration’s failure in Iraq is stunning

Ezra Klein
Vox : June 17, 2014

The news that the US and Iran might cooperate to save Iraq’s government is a measure of just how badly the Iraq war failed to achieve its aims.

“Unlike Saddam Hussein, we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty,” President George W. Bush said on March 17th, 2003. “And when the dictator has departed, they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation.”

After 9/11, there was a struggle to define what the attacks actually were. There were some who saw them as a crime: a mass homicide, carried out in spectacular fashion. But there were others who saw them an inevitable collision between the values and the armies of the liberal, democratic west, and the autocratic, theocratic Islamic world. “A clash of civilizations.” They actually used that term.

This is crucial context for the Iraq War. The Bush administration didn’t just want to invade Iraq because of Saddam Hussein’s (nonexistent) stockpile of illegal weapons. They wanted to invade Iraq to create a liberal, democratic counterweight to radical Islam. They wanted to create a country that would, through its glittering example, erode the foundations of Iran’s theocratic regime and al Qaeda’s deadly ideology.

It was called the Democratic Domino Theory. First Iraq would become a beacon of political freedom and economic success. Then, one by one, the populations across the rest of the Middle East would rise up and force their countries to follow. The war on terror wouldn’t end with a fight. It would end with a vote.

A decade later Iraq is becoming the things it was meant to destroy. It could become a Shiite dominated state dependent on Iran for its security. It could become a weak or broken state that serves partly as a haven for the Sunni terror organization ISIS. It could end up as both.

The one thing it will not be is the liberal, democratic counterweight to radical Islam that the Bush administration sought. There is no one in the Middle East who looks to the Iraqi state and sees a better life for them and their children.

The totality of the Bush administration’s failure in Iraq is stunning. It is not simply that they failed to build the liberal democracy they wanted. It’s that they ended up strengthening theocracies they feared.

(read the full article at Vox)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use

Banksters, Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

LEAKED : Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA)

Today, WikiLeaks released the secret draft text for the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) Financial Services Annex, which covers 50 countries and 68.2% of world trade in services. The US and the EU are the main proponents of the agreement, and the authors of most joint changes, which also covers cross-border data flow. In a significant anti-transparency manoeuvre by the parties, the draft has been classified to keep it secret not just during the negotiations but for five years after the TISA enters into force.

Despite the failures in financial regulation evident during the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and calls for improvement of relevant regulatory structures, proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets. The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt – into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. The leaked draft also shows that the US is particularly keen on boosting cross-border data flow, which would allow uninhibited exchange of personal and financial data.

TISA negotiations are currently taking place outside of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) framework. However, the Agreement is being crafted to be compatible with GATS so that a critical mass of participants will be able to pressure remaining WTO members to sign on in the future. Conspicuously absent from the 50 countries covered by the negotiations are the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The exclusive nature of TISA will weaken their position in future services negotiations.

The draft text comes from the April 2014 negotiation round – the sixth round since the first held in April 2013. The next round of negotiations will take place on 23-27 June in Geneva, Switzerland.

Current WTO parties negotiating TISA are: Australia, Canada, Chile, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), Colombia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey, the United States, and the European Union, which includes its 28 member states Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

China and Uruguay have expressed interest in joining the negotiations but so far are not included.

The only avenue TISA negotiators offer for public input is via public submissions. Each country has their own method for handling submissions. Below are the public submissions from the biggest proponents of TISA.

Read the Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) – Financial Services Annex

Read the Analysis Article – Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) – Financial Services Annex

(Source : Wikileaks)

—-
Alternative Free Press -fair use-