Category Archives: Corporate Welfare

Quebec students are fighting for you

Jon Parsons
theindependent.ca : March 27, 2015

It seems like only yesterday the 2012 Quebec student movement rocked the streets of Montreal, and now they’re at it again.

The basis for the current strike is the same as its predecessor: opposition to austerity and neoliberalism. Over the last few years student groups in Quebec have consistently organized massive demonstrations in an impressive show of strength and commitment, and so it seems correct to understand the present student strike more as an intensification of a protracted struggle.

At the same time, there has been a proliferation of militant student protest throughout the global West. Occupations and demonstrations are continuing on a number of campuses, such as the London School of Economics, and University of Amsterdam, and University of Arts London, and University of Melbourne, to name a few. The grievances are strikingly similar to those expressed in Quebec – austerity, tuition fees, neoliberalism.

Outside the global West, significant and ongoing student movements are taking a stand in Honduras, Mexico, Hong Kong, and Myanmar, to name a few.

There has arguably not been such widespread student unrest since the famous student-led protests of 1968, and, at least in the West, Quebec students have been on the frontlines of the fight, enduring police brutality, subversion, and constant obfuscation in the mainstream press.

The student fight is your fight, too

The province of Newfoundland and Labrador has until recently weathered the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis, but with a significant deficit and growing debt, the provincial government has indicated that austerity measures will come into force in short order. Many things are “on the table,” including increased tuition at Memorial University, among other measures common to austerity economics.

At the same time, recent studies have shown that Newfoundland and Labrador is one of the least politically engaged provinces in Canada, in terms of both formal and informal politics. NL has one of the lowest overall voter turnouts (around 53 per cent) as well as the lowest youth voter turnout of any province (around 29 per cent).

The reasons for this are many and varied, and it is not my intention to assign blame. Nonetheless, there is an overwhelming sense of complacency, perhaps apathy, with regard to politics in the province, and especially so for youth.

In light of this, it is nothing of an exaggeration to say that Quebec students are fighting for us all, as they are the only significant force in the country opposing austerity and neoliberalism, and the only ones who seem to understand the importance of popular protest. Quebec students are showing us all how it’s done, both in terms of tenacity and in terms of organization, as Ethan Cox explains in Ricochet.

(read the full article at theindependent.ca)

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World turns blind eye to subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia; too much money selling arms to care

Sweden’s feminist foreign minister has dared to tell the truth about Saudi Arabia. What happens now concerns us all

Nick Cohen
Spectator: March 28, 2015

If the cries of ‘Je suis Charlie’ were sincere, the western world would be convulsed with worry and anger about the Wallström affair. It has all the ingredients for a clash-of-civilisations confrontation.

A few weeks ago Margot Wallström, the Swedish foreign minister, denounced the subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia. As the theocratic kingdom prevents women from travelling, conducting official business or marrying without the permission of male guardians, and as girls can be forced into child marriages where they are effectively raped by old men, she was telling no more than the truth. Wallström went on to condemn the Saudi courts for ordering that Raif Badawi receive ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for setting up a website that championed secularism and free speech. These were ‘mediaeval methods’, she said, and a ‘cruel attempt to silence modern forms of expression’. And once again, who can argue with that?

The backlash followed the pattern set by Rushdie, the Danish cartoons and Hebdo. Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador and stopped issuing visas to Swedish businessmen. The United Arab Emirates joined it. The Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, which represents 56 Muslim-majority states, accused Sweden of failing to respect the world’s ‘rich and varied ethical standards’ — standards so rich and varied, apparently, they include the flogging of bloggers and encouragement of paedophiles. Meanwhile, the Gulf Co-operation Council condemned her ‘unaccept-able interference in the internal affairs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’, and I wouldn’t bet against anti-Swedish riots following soon.

Yet there is no ‘Wallström affair’. Outside Sweden, the western media has barely covered the story, and Sweden’s EU allies have shown no inclination whatsoever to support her. A small Scandinavian nation faces sanctions, accusations of Islamophobia and maybe worse to come, and everyone stays silent. As so often, the scandal is that there isn’t a scandal.

[…] Margot Wallström is that modern rarity: a left-wing politician who goes where her principles take her.

She is foreign minister in Sweden’s weak coalition of Social Democrats and Greens, and took office promising a feminist foreign policy. She recognised Palestine in October last year — and, no, the Arab League and Organisation of Islamic Co-operation and Gulf Co-operation Council did not condemn her ‘unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of Israel’. I confess that her gesture struck me as counterproductive at the time. But after Benjamin Netanyahu ruled out a Palestinian state as he used every dirty trick he could think of to secure his re-election, she can claim with justice that history has vindicated her.

She moved on to the Saudi version of sharia law. Her criticism was not just rhetorical. She said that it was unethical for Sweden to continue with its military co-operation agreement with Saudi Arabia. In other words, she threatened Swedish arms companies’ ability to make money. Saudi Arabia’s denial of business visas to Swedes threatened to hurt other companies’ profits too. You might think of Swedes as upright social democrats, who have never let worries of appearing tedious stand in the way of their righteousness. But that has never been wholly true, and is certainly not true when there is money at stake.

Sweden is the world’s 12th largest arms exporter — quite an achievement for a country of just nine million people. Its exports to Saudi Arabia total $1.3 billion. Business leaders and civil servants are also aware that other Muslim-majority countries may follow Saudi Arabia’s lead. During the ‘cartoon crisis’ — a phrase I still can’t write without snorting with incredulity — Danish companies faced global attacks and the French supermarket chain Carrefour took Danish goods off the shelves to appease Muslim customers. A co-ordinated campaign by Muslim nations against Sweden is not a fanciful notion. There is talk that Sweden may lose its chance to gain a seat on the UN Security Council in 2017 because of Wallström.

To put it as mildly as I can, the Swedish establishment has gone wild. Thirty chief executives signed a letter saying that breaking the arms trade agreement ‘would jeopardise Sweden’s reputation as a trade and co-operation partner’. No less a figure than His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf himself hauled Wallström in at the weekend to tell her that he wanted a compromise. Saudi Arabia has successfully turned criticism of its brutal version of Islam into an attack on all Muslims, regardless of whether they are Wahhabis or not, and Wallström and her colleagues are clearly unnerved by accusations of Islamophobia. The signs are that she will fold under the pressure, particularly when the rest of liberal Europe shows no interest in supporting her.

Sins of omission are as telling as sins of commission. The Wallström non-affair tells us three things. It is easier to instruct small countries such as Sweden and Israel on what they can and cannot do than America, China or a Saudi Arabia that can call on global Muslim support when criticised. Second, a Europe that is getting older and poorer is starting to find that moral stands in foreign policy are luxuries it can no longer afford. Saudi Arabia has been confident throughout that Sweden needs its money more than it needs Swedish imports.

Finally, and most revealingly in my opinion, the non-affair shows us that the rights of women always come last.

(read thr full article at Spectator)


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TPP Leak Reveals Extraordinary New Powers for Corporations to Sue Government and Demand Taxpayer Compensation

TPP Leak Reveals Extraordinary New Powers for Thousands of Foreign Firms to Challenge U.S. Policies and Demand Taxpayer Compensation

Unveiling of Parallel Legal System for Foreign Corporations Will Fuel TPP Controversy, Further Complicate Obama’s Push for Fast Track

WASHINGTON, D.C.– The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s (TPP) Investment Chapter, leaked today, reveals how the pact would make it easier for U.S. firms to offshore American jobs to low-wage countries while newly empowering thousands of foreign firms to seek cash compensation from U.S. taxpayers by challenging U.S. government actions, laws and court rulings before unaccountable foreign tribunals. After five years of secretive TPP negotiations, the text – leaked by WikiLeaks –proves that growing concerns about the controversial “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) system that the TPP would extend are well justified, Public Citizen said.
 
Enactment of the leaked chapter would increase U.S. ISDS liability to an unprecedented degree by newly empowering about 9,000 foreign-owned firms from Japan and other TPP nations operating in the United States to launch cases against the government over policies that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms. To date, the United States has faced few ISDS attacks because past ISDS-enforced pacts have almost exclusively been with developing nations whose firms have few investments here.
 
The leak reveals that the TPP would replicate the ISDS language found in past U.S. agreements under which tribunals have ordered more than $3.6 billion in compensation to foreign investors attacking land use rules; water, energy and timber policies; health, safety and environmental protections; financial stability policies and more. And while the Obama administration has sought to quell growing concerns about the ISDS threat with claims that past pacts’ problems would be remedied in the TPP, the leaked text does not include new safeguards relative to past U.S. ISDS-enforced pacts. Indeed, this version of the text, which shows very few remaining areas of disagreement [among negotiating partner countries], eliminates various safeguard proposals that were included in a 2012 leaked TPP Investment Chapter text.
 
“With the veil of secrecy ripped back, finally everyone can see for themselves that the TPP would give multinational corporations extraordinary new powers that undermine our sovereignty, expose U.S. taxpayers to billions in new liability and privilege foreign firms operating here with special rights not available to U.S. firms under U.S. law,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “This leak is a disaster for the corporate lobbyists and administration officials trying to persuade Congress to delegate Fast Track authority to railroad the TPP through Congress.”
 
Even before today’s leak, U.S. law professors and those in other TPP nations, the U.S. National Conference of State Legislatures, the Cato Institute and numerous members of Congress and civil society groups have announced opposition to the ISDS system, which would elevate individual foreign firms to the same status as sovereign governments and empower them to privately enforce a public treaty by skirting domestic courts and “suing” governments before extrajudicial tribunals. The tribunals are staffed by private lawyers who are not accountable to any electorate, system of legal precedent or meaningful conflict of interest rules. Their rulings cannot be appealed on the merits. Many ISDS lawyers rotate between roles – serving both as “judges” and suing governments for corporations, creating an inherent conflict of interest.
 
The TPP’s expansion of the ISDS system would come amid a surge in ISDS cases against public interest policies that has led other countries, such as South Africa and Indonesia, to begin to revoke their ISDS-enforced treaties. While ISDS agreements have existed since the 1960s, just 50 known ISDS cases were launched worldwide in the regime’s first three decades combined. In contrast, foreign investors launched at least 50 ISDS claims each year from 2011 through 2013. Recent cases include Eli Lilly’s attack on Canada’s cost-saving medicine patent system, Philip Morris’ attack on Australia’s public health policies regulating tobacco, Lone Pine’s attack on a fracking moratorium in Canada, Chevron’s attack on an Ecuadorian court ruling ordering payment for mass toxic contamination in the Amazon and Vattenfall’s attack on Germany’s phase-out of nuclear power.
 
“By definition, only multinational corporations could benefit from this parallel legal system, which empowers them to skirt domestic courts and laws, and go to tribunals staffed by highly paid corporate lawyers, where they grab unlimited payments of our tax dollars because they don’t want to comply with the same laws our domestic firms follow,” Wallach said.
 
Public Citizen’s analysis of the leaked text is available here. It shows: 
 
 The TPP would grant foreign investors and firms operating here expansive new substantive and procedural rights and privileges not available to U.S. firms under U.S. law, allowing foreign firms to demand compensation for the costs of complying with U.S. policies, court orders and government actions that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms. This includes: 
§ Foreign investors would be empowered to challenge new policies that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms on the basis that they undermine foreign investors’  “expectations” of how they should be treated. This includes a right to claim damages for government actions (such as new environmental, health or financial policies) that reduce the value of a foreign firm’s investment (what the leaked text calls “indirect expropriation”) or that change the level of regulation a foreign investor experienced under a previous government (a violation of what the text calls a “minimum standard of treatment” for foreign investors).
 
§ The leaked TPP text largely replicates the “minimum standard of treatment” language found in previous U.S. pacts that tribunals have used to issue some of the most alarming ISDS rulings. Tribunals often have broadly interpreted this vague “right” to fabricate new obligations for governments that do not actually exist in the texts of ISDS-enforced pacts, such as “not to alter the legal and business environment in which the investment has been made.” Due to such expansive interpretations, the “minimum standard of treatment” obligation has been the basis for three of every four ISDS cases “won” by the foreign investor under U.S. pacts.
 

  • The text allows foreign investors to demand compensation for claims of “indirect expropriation” that apply to much wider categories of property than those to which similar rights apply in U.S. law. To the limited extent that “indirect expropriation” compensation is permitted in U.S. law, it is generally available only for government actions affecting real property (i.e. land). But the leaked text would allow foreign investors to claim “indirect expropriation” if government regulations implicate their personal property, intellectual property rights, financial instruments, government permits, money, minority shareholdings or other forms of non-real-estate property.  

 
·       Foreign corporations could demand compensation for capital controls and other macro-prudential financial regulations that promote financial stability. This obligation restricts the use of capital controls or financial transaction taxes, even as the International Monetary Fund has shifted from opposing capital controls to officially endorsing them as legitimate policy tools for preventing or mitigating financial crises. Proposed provisions touted as “temporary safeguards” for capital controls would fail to protect many standard forms of capital controls, including those successfully used by TPP governments in the past to ward off financial crises.
 
·       The leaked text could newly allow pharmaceutical firms to use TPP ISDS tribunals to demand cash compensation for claimed violations of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) rules regarding the creation, limitation or revocation of intellectual property rights. Currently, WTO rules are not privately enforceable by investors. But the leaked TPP investment text could empower individual foreign investors to directly challenge governments over policies to ensure access to affordable medicines, claiming that they constitute TPP-prohibited “expropriations” of intellectual property rights if ISDS tribunals deem them to violate WTO rules.
 
·       There are no new safeguards that limit ISDS tribunals’ discretion to create ever-expanding interpretations of governments’ obligations to foreign investors and order compensation on that basis. The leaked text reveals the same “safeguard” terms that have been included in U.S. pacts since the 2005 Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). CAFTA tribunals have simply ignored the “safeguard” provisions that the leaked text replicates for the TPP, and have continued to rule against governments based on concocted obligations to which governments never agreed. The leaked text also abandons a safeguard proposed in the 2012 leaked TPP investment text, which excluded public interest regulations from indirect expropriation claims, stating, “non-discriminatory regulatory actions … that are designed and applied to achieve legitimate public welfare objectives, such as the protection of public health, safety and the environment do not constitute indirect expropriation.” Today’s leaked text eviscerates that clause by adding a fatal loophole that has been found in past U.S. pacts.
 
·       Most TPP countries, including the United States, have decided to expose decisions regarding the approval of foreign investments to ISDS challenge. Australia, Canada, Mexico and New Zealand have reserved the right to pre-approve foreign investors. But the United States took no exception for reviews by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States of planned foreign investments to determine whether they pose threats to national security.
 
·       The amount that an ISDS tribunal would order a government to pay to a foreign investor as compensation would be based on the “expected future profits” the tribunal surmises that the investor would have earned in the absence of the public policy it is attacking as violating the substantive investor rights granted by the TPP.
 
·       The text would submit the U.S. government to the jurisdiction of World Bank and United Nations tribunals. All TPP nations have agreed to be so bound with the potential exception of Australia, which has indicated that it might do the same, “subject to certain conditions.”
 
·       None of the structural biases or conflicts of interest inherent in the ISDS system would be remedied. TPP ISDS tribunals would be staffed by highly paid corporate lawyers unaccountable to any electorate or system of legal precedent. They still would be allowed to rotate between acting as “judges” and advocates for the investors launching cases against governments. Corporations launching cases would still directly select one of the “judges.” The text includes no requirements for tribunal members to be impartial, reveal conflicts of interest or recuse themselves in instances of direct conflict. There is no internal or external mechanism to appeal the tribunal members’ decisions on the merits, and claims of procedural errors would be decided by another tribunal of corporate lawyers. The leaked text provides tribunals with discretion to determine the amount of compensation governments must pay investors and the allocation of costs, such as the tribunal members’ fees. A proposal that appeared in the 2012 leak of the text to standardize hourly fees for tribunal members at the lower end of the range of fees currently paid (about $375 per hour, compared to the $700 per hour that some tribunal members receive) has been eliminated.
·       An overreaching definition of “investment” would extend the coverage of the TPP’s expansive substantive investor rights far beyond “real property,” permitting ISDS attacks over government actions and policies related to financial instruments, intellectual property, regulatory permits and more. Proposals in the 2012 leak of the text that would have narrowed the definition of “investment,” and thus the scope of policies subject to challenge, have been eliminated. Also omitted is a proposal from the earlier leaked version that would not have allowed ISDS cases related to government procurement, subsidies or government grants.
 
·        An overreaching definition of “investor” would allow firms from non-TPP countries and firms with no real investments to exploit the extraordinary privileges the TPP would establish for foreign investors. Thus, for instance, one of the many Chinese state-owned corporations in Vietnam could “sue” the U.S. government in a foreign tribunal to demand compensation under this text.
 
·       The leaked text reveals that U.S. negotiators are still pushing, over the objection of most other TPP nations, to empower foreign investors to bring to TPP ISDS tribunals their contract disputes with TPP signatory governments relating to natural resource concessions on federal lands, government procurement of construction for infrastructure projects, as well as contracts relating to the operation of utilities. (In the leaked chapter, text that is not yet agreed upon appears in square brackets; Public Citizen has seen a version of the text that lists which countries support various proposals.)
 
The goal of the ISDS system was ostensibly to provide a means for foreign investors to obtain compensation if a government expropriated their factory or land and the domestic court system did not provide for compensation. Over time, both the rules and their interpretation have been dramatically expanded – a problem that the leaked text shows the TPP would exacerbate. Rather than being an option of last resort, corporations’ use of the ISDS regime is surging, with an ever-expanding range of policies and government actions coming under attack, with few claims involving actual expropriation.
 
Foreign corporations have used these claims to attack tobacco, climate, financial, mining, medicine, energy, pollution, water, labor, toxins, development and other non-trade domestic policies. Even when governments win cases, they often are ordered to pay for a share of the tribunal’s costs. With costs just for defending a challenged policy in an ISDS case totaling $8 million on average, the mere filing of a case can create a chilling effect on government policymaking, even if the government expects to win.
 
Trade officials from the United States and 11 Pacific Rim nations – Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam – are in intensive, closed-door negotiations to finish the TPP in the next few months.
 

https://www.citizen.org/documents/tpp-investment-leak-2015-release.pdf

Public Citizen Contact :
Symone Sanders (202) 454-5108
Lori Wallach (202) 454-5107, lwallach@citizen.org

Government determined to keep Canadians wages low by importing 230,000 more cheap foreign workers

Government to allow 230,000 LMIA-exempt TFWs to come to Canada under IMP annually

Thinkpol: March 21, 2015

The government plans to allow 230,000 temporary foreign workers (TFWs) to enter Canada annually under the International Mobility Program(IMP), which allows employers to bring in workers from abroad without proving the need for imported labour, according to a Gazette notification by Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

This is in addition to the more than 120,000 mostly low-skilled workers who come to Canada each year under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), where employers are required to obtain a positive Labour Market Impact Assessment(LMIA) by proving that there are no suitable Canadians to fill the vacancies.

The IMP has come under heavy criticism following a report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer(PBO) show that the government has no knowledge about what jobs many of the IMP foreign workers do after they come to Canada.

“Since 2002, their number has grown at a faster pace than workers requiring an LMIA,” Jean-Denis Frechette wrote in the report. “Moreover, in 45 per cent of the cases in 2012, the government was not aware of the occupational skill level of foreign workers, up from 22 per cent in 2002.”

“[…] most domestic workers, whether employed or not, would possess the required skill set to fill these positions,” Frechette said.

Even when employers are struggling to fill vacancies, offering a higher salary would attract Canadians from areas with lower employment to take those jobs, the PBO reported.

[…]

“As job losses mount in Alberta, the Conservatives are busy making it easier for employers to hire temporary foreign workers,” NDP MP Jinny Sims, the official opposition critic for employment, said in Parliament. “We learned that they secretly made a deal with Alberta to allow employers there to exceed the 30% cap.”

“Just like they have so many times before, the Conservatives made a big splashy announcement about cracking down, and now they are quietly creating loopholes,” she added.

(read the full article at Thinkpol)


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Genetically Modified Apple Approved For Sale In USA & Now Canada

Arctic apple developed in B.C. approved for sale in Canada

CBC News: March 20, 2015

A genetically modified non-browning Arctic apple, developed in B.C., has been approved for sale in Canada, just weeks after it received similar approval in the U.S.

The success of the fruit, developed by Okanagan Specialty Fruits (OSF), has led to a multi-million dollar sales deal with Intrexon Corporation, an American company involved in synthetic biology.

Intrexon will buy OSF in an deal worth $31 million in stock and $10 million in cash to OSF’s shareholders.

“Over the next couple of years, we will be working hard with our grower partners to get as many Arctic trees in the ground as we can,” OSF president Neal Carter wrote on his company blog Friday.

(read the full article at CBC)


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Bank of Canada, Finance Minister, and Others Face Lawsuit for Alleged IMF Conspiracy

Matthew Little
Epoch Times : March 19, 2015

[…] despite the government’s best efforts to have this case thrown out, it’s going ahead after winning an appeal that overturned a lower court’s ruling to have it tossed and surviving a follow-up motion to have it tossed again.

The government has one more chance to have it thrown out through an appeal at the Supreme Court, but that has to be filed by Mar. 29 and that looks unlikely.

That means the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER) is going to have its day in federal court.

This little think-tank alleges that the Bank of Canada, the Queen, the attorney general, the finance minister, and minister of national revenue are engaging in a conspiracy with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Financial Stability Board (FSB), and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to undermine Canada’s financial and monetary sovereignty.

No major media have covered this story. That could be because of the powerful vested interests the suit targets, as Rocco Galati, the lawyer trying the case, suggests. Or it could be because portions of the statement of claim read like something one might have pulled out of the dark corners of some Internet conspiracy forum.

It wasn’t. These are serious people with wide, factual knowledge of the financial and monetary system. And their lawyer is no slouch.

Galati has a reputation for winning unlikely lawsuits. The Globe and Mail’s justice writer Sean Fine once called Galati Canada’s “unofficial opposition” for his propensity to have the government’s edicts tossed out in court.

One recent high-profile win saw Galati block the Conservative’s appointment of Justice Marc Nadon to the Supreme Court with a suit he won in March last year.

Toronto-based COMER and its fellow plaintiffs Ann Emmett and William Krehm are suing over fundamental changes to the Bank of Canada’s role that were made in 1974 when the bank stopped making loans to the government.

The Bank of Canada (BoC) was founded in the Great Depression and played a major role loaning money to the government. It helped finance Canada’s war effort during World War II and could loan money to the government, without interest, if it chose to do so. Any profits the BoC made were returned to the government minus the Bank’s operating expenses. That last point remains the case today, with $1.7 billion sent to the Receiver General annually.
No National Debt?

COMER alleges that by no longer providing these loans, the Bank and others named in the suit have forced the government to finance budget deficits by borrowing from private markets and paying hundreds of billions of dollars in interest. Last year, $28 billion—over 10 percent of the federal government’s $277 billion in expenditures—went to servicing the debt.

That’s more than what was spent on National Defence ($21.5 billion) and nearly as much as the Canada health transfer ($30.5 billion).

The Bank of Canada Act allows, or as COMER alleges—requires—the BoC to give the federal government loans up to a total value of one-third of the government’s predicted annual revenues. For provincial governments it is a quarter of those revenues. The loans have to be repaid within the first quarter of the next fiscal year. At that point, the government just needs to pay back the loan with incoming revenues, and take out another loan to make up any deficit.

The benefit of that is no national debt, according to Galati. However, there is a risk of inflation if too much money is poured into the economy. Some economists argue that any arrangement where central banks loan money directly to their national governments invariably leads to runaway inflation.

Galati disagrees, pointing out that the government can borrow as much as it wants from private markets and inflation is manageable.

The suit alleges that the BoC stopped providing these loans at the behest of the IMF, BIS, and FSB so private interests could benefit, presumably from interest paid on the national debt.

Galati predicts the government will try to delay the suit, but if it goes ahead, he said the facts will be borne out.

“A lot of the facts are not in dispute, believe it or not. They just don’t want this case heard.”

Galati plans to call the BoC governor, the finance minister, and others to testify if the case goes ahead.

The Bank can’t comment on the case directly because it is before the courts, said a spokesperson, though it did provide background materials on the Bank’s history.

How Money Works

The nature of money and debt is at the heart of the lawsuit COMER has filed. Representatives from the group told the Epoch Times that few people understand how money is created.

One might wonder, therefore, how much money the Bank of Canada has, and how the government can borrow from the country’s own central bank.

This is where conspiracy theory meets the cold hard facts—that the vast majority of the money in Canada’s economy was created by bankers with the push of a button. The BoC can do that also.

When someone takes out a mortgage, the borrowed money does not come from someone else’s savings. Instead, the money is created in that instant through the trick of double entry bookkeeping. The bank records the loan on one side as a liability, and the debt owed to the bank as an asset.

Banks keep the system humming along smoothly by shuffling these balance sheets around each day. If they are short, they borrow from each other on the overnight market at the rate set by the BoC.

As long as everyone pays their loans, the systems works pretty well and basically creates wealth out of thin air. But if banks loan money to people who can’t repay it, the whole system falls apart. That is essentially what happened in the 2007 subprime mortgage debacle that brought on the global recession.

There is one problem with the system, according to its critics: interest. And if you are a government, that interest is significant.

Significant portions of COMER’s suit, including a tort portion seeking damages, were thrown out in those earlier rulings, though Galati said they could be amended and filed again. Both he and the government have until next week to file appeals of the previous ruling.

And even elements of his central argument were questioned in those earlier rulings which weighed, among other things, if the case had any chance of success. But courts are required to err on the side of permissiveness when deciding on motions to strike, as well as assume the facts claimed in the suit are true.

And so with the case set to move forward, Canadians could be in for a fascinating look at how our monetary system works and what role international financial bodies like the IMF play in Canada’s monetary and fiscal policy.

It’s not often a government has to defend itself against a conspiracy suit in court. This one promises to be interesting.

(read the full article at Epoch Times)


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Lobbyists Can Legally Screw Politicians in North Carolina, Says Ethics Commission

Elizabeth Nolan Brown
Reason: March 4, 2015

Sex acts provided to politicians “to lobby or to develop goodwill” do not violate state ethics policies, nor must this activity be disclosed, ruled the North Carolina Ethics Commission.

Under North Carolina law, lobbyists must report gifts and “things of value” worth more than $10 per day given to someone covered by the state ethics act or their family. But “consensual sexual relationships do not have monetary value and therefore are not reportable as gifts or ‘reportable expenditure made for lobbying,'” stated the commission in its opinion, a response to a formal inquiry from the state’s Lobbying Compliance Commission. The inquiry was made in a “largely hypothetical context,” the ethics commission notes.

“Opinions issued by the Ethics Commission are generally a good deal more banal, dealing with subjects such as under what circumstances it is legal for state officials to accept scholarships to conferences,” North Carolina’s WRAL.com reports.

Joal Broun, the Secretary of State’s lobbying compliance director, declined to comment on why she requested the ethics opinion, deferring questions to the Secretary of State’s spokeswoman Liz Proctor. Proctor said that a private attorney posed the question to the Secretary of State’s Office last in 2014. “We agreed that the question needed to be decided,” she said. Therefore, the office submitted the question to the Ethics Commission.

[…] WRAL News obtained a copy of the four-page request for an opinion from another source. Parts of it are graphic, describing specific sexual acts that might be at issue, but it does not implicate a particular set of people or specify a particular set of facts.

The request for an opinion asks five specific questions of the ethics commission, including (emphasis mine):

– Do sexual favors or sexual acts that a person provides to a designated individual to lobby or to develop goodwill or both on behalf of another, trigger the registration obligation?
– Are sexual favors or sexual acts that a lobbyist or a lobbyist principal provides not for the purpose of lobbying a gift as defined by the Ethics Act that must be reported?
– Is a designated individual who receives sexual favors or sexual acts that a lobbyist or a lobbyist principal provides outside North Carolina obligated to report such sexual favors or sexual acts as required by N.C.G.S. § 120C-800?

Note that the lobbying commission isn’t just asking about personal relationships that happen to develop between lobbyists and politicians but lobbyists providing sex to politicians as a form of lobbying. That’s A-OK, apparently. “However, a lobbyist or lobbyist principal’s provision of paid prostitution services by a third party to a designated individual could constitute a gift or thing of value, albeit an illegal one, depending on the particular facts,” the commission added.

Got that? Lobbyists paying for prostitution for politicians? Must be reported. Lobbyists secretly engaging in prostitution with politicians? No big thing.

(read the full article at Reason)

Kill the Messenger

Peggy O’Mara: February 17, 2015

I watched the movie, Kill the Messenger, recently. It’s the story of Gary Webb, an investigative journalist who wrote a series of stories in 1996 about the connections between the CIA and the Nicaraguan contras. The CIA denied his allegations and his story created a firestorm of criticism of both the government and the media, according to Don Wycliff of The Chicago Tribune. Wycliff goes on to say;

I think he got the treatment that always comes to those who dare to question aloud the bona fides of the establishment. First he got misrepresented…. Then he was ridiculed as a conspiracy-monger….In the end, Web was rendered untouchable.

In the film, Jeremy Renner, who plays Web, says, “When you are right above the target, they give you the most flack. They conceptualize you.” To conceptualize someone is a means of distracting from the original story by shifting the focus to the storyteller and raising doubts about his or her veracity and character. Effectively, it means to kill the messenger.

MEDIA MANIPULATION

Conceptualizing is one of the techniques used today to manipulate the media and is often achieved through astrosurfing. According to Source Watch, “astroturf refers to apparently grassroots-based citizen groups or coalitions that are primarily conceived, created and/or funded by corporations, industry trade associations, political interests or public relations firms.”

Campaigns & Elections magazine defines astroturf as a “grassroots program that involves the instant manufacturing of public support for a point of view in which either uninformed activists are recruited or means of deception are used to recruit them.”

Astroturf is a perversion of the grassroots for the purpose of manipulating others into changing their opinions for fear of being “outliers.” In “Vaccines, PR and the News Cycle,” Kristen Michaelis says,

In the large firms that tend to represent corporate, political, or celebrity interests, there are entire divisions of hundreds of interns dedicated to monitoring and influencing online media — doing everything from leaving comments on blogs and news sites to harassing users on Twitter, from leaving a string of hostile anonymous asks on Tumblr blogs to charging headlong into Facebook discussions.

SIGNS OF PROPAGANDA AND ASTROTURFING

In her Ted Talk, veteran journalist, Sharyl Attkisson, identifies the signs of propoganda and astroturfing:

  •  Use of inflammatory language such as crank, quack, nutty, lies, pseudo, paranoid and conspiracy.
  • Claims to be debunking myths that aren’t myths at all.
  • Attack an issue by conceptualizing or attacking the people, personalities and organizations surrounding it rather than addressing the facts.
  • Most of all, astrosurfers tend to reserve all of their public skepticism for those exposing wrong doing rather than the wrong doer. Instead of questioning authority, they question those who question authority.

Watch Attikson’s Ted Talk.

THE VACCINE INDUSTRY AND PR

One of the most notorious astroturf companies is Bonner & Associates. According to Source Watch, “Bonner & Associates is a lobbying/public relations firm that specializes in “grassroots” and third party campaigns. Its website says it “locate[s], educate[s], and mobilize[s] … [o]rganizations and constituencies that matter politically … to support our clients’ positions credibly and effectively.” In 1995, Campaigns and Elections magazine estimated that astrosurf lobbying had become an $800 million industry.

Bonner & Associates has used pretend grass roots campaigns to loosen fuel-efficiency standards, support clear cutting of forests, defeat the Clinton administration’s proposed health care reform, and oppose the Kyoto Agreement on climate change. In 2002 O’Dwyers PR Daily reported that Bonner & Associates “has done work for Boeing, Ford Motor, Merck, Proctor & Gamble and Northrop Grumman, among others.”

Merck is the sole manufacturer of the MMR vaccine. Headquartered in Kenilworth, New Jersey, Merck has 70,000 employees and reported $18.2 billion in US revenues in 2014 and $42.2 billion worldwide.

An article, “The Expanding Vaccine Market” on the Pharmaceutical Processing website outlines the growth picture for vaccines worldwide:

Vaccines continue to be one of the brighter spots for  pharmaceutical companies in the current market, and revenues for vaccine products are expected to continue their double-digit growth in the future..

The Market for Vaccines

The vaccine market is generally separated into two segments: pediatric and adult. Pediatric is larger but adult vaccine revenues have grown faster….World sales of pediatric vaccines exceeded $12.7B in 2010, increasing 10.1% over 2009 sales of $11.5B on rising sales of combination, varicella and other products. Sales of pediatric vaccines are projected to increase at a compound annual rate of 8.4% from 2010 to 2015.

Most vaccine revenues are earned by five companies: Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Pfizer, and Novartis. They held nearly 80% of the market as of 2010.

THE CDC AND PR

Pharmaceutical companies are not the only ones who engage in public relations to support their point of view. So does the US government and in particular, the CDC. On Tuesday, February 10th, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee held a Hearing on Vaccine-Preventable Diseases at which pediatricians and CDC officials stressed the need for mandatory vaccines. In the powerful article “Top 10 Lies Told During the Vaccine-Preventable Diseases Hearing“ one critic says, “The hearing was one long propaganda session devoted to getting those who are questioning vaccines to stop doing so.”

Glen Nowak is a Professor of Advertising and Public Relations and director of the Grady College’s Center for Health and Risk Communication. He spent six years as director of media relations at CDC and six years as communications director for CDC’s National Immunization Program. While at the CDC, Nowak prepared a power point entitled “Increased Awareness and Uptake of Influenza Immunization” to help increase the rate of flu vaccine. In the power point, Nowak makes several recommendations regarding effective communication and vaccines. They include the following:

  • Associate the disease with severe illness and/or outcomes.
  • Associate the disease with cities and communities that have significant media outlets.
  • Associate the disease with people not generally perceived to get serious complications from it.
  • Use medical experts and public health authorities to publicly state concern and alarm and to urge vaccination.
  • Frame the risk as “very severe,” “more severe than last or past years,” and “deadly.”
  • Publish continued reports from health officials and the media that the disease is causing severe illness and/or affecting lots of people—helping to foster the perception that many people are susceptible to a bad case of the disease.
  • Show visible/tangible examples of the seriousness of the illness (e.g. pictures of children, and people getting vaccinated)
  • Continually reference the importance of vaccination.

Even Disneyland got in the act. As the measles outbreak spread last month, Disneyland executives sent a series of emails to California health officials asking them to emphasize that the theme park was not responsible for the illnesses and was safe to visit.

In one of the email exchanges, Disneyland’s chief medical officer, Dr. Pamela Hymel, forwarded to California’s top epidemiologist, Dr. Gil Chavez, a statement from Disneyland’s public relations arm with “some points,” including: “It is absolutely safe to visit these places, including the Disneyland Resort, if you are vaccinated.”

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE

All this reminds me of a lyric from “Ballad of a Thin Man” by Bob Dylan.

Because something is happening here

But you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mister Jones?

Many have commented on the extreme vitrol and the viscious hyberbole that has accompanied the public discourse about the recent measles epidemic. It is now clear to me that the discourse is more than public. It is bought and paid for.

(read the full article at peggyomara.com)


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Winnipeg Outlines Historic Corporate Welfare Plan

AlternativeFreePress.com

Winnipeg has announced a corporate welfare scheme for transit, a bus lane, which is the largest municipal infrastructure project in the city’s history. The project is eligible to receive up to $587.3 million from Ottawa, the province of Manitoba, and the City of Winnipeg.

The city will be going into further debt to cover it’s portion, suggesting the loan payments could be generated by raising transit fares, property taxes or both. Obviously since the feds and province are already in obscene amounts of debt, they will also be using debt to finance the project. The money will be borrowed from private banks, given to a private company for maintenance, and the interest owing will compound.

The Harper con-government supports the project and is clear that corporate welfare transit projects should be a top priority.

Winnipeg will pay a private company to maintain the corridor until 2049. This redistribution of public dollars to private corporate interests is similar to the corporate welfare schemes used by the city for the Chief Peguis Trail extension & Disraeli Bridges Project, but is the first time such a scheme has been used for transit in Canada

Written by Alternative Free Press
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Winnipeg Outlines Historic Corporate Welfare Plan by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Source: Winnipeg Free Press

Letter: High School students offer opinion on Temporary Foreign Workers program

We are grade 12 students currently enrolled in Social Studies 30-1 at Morinville Community High School in Morinville, Alberta. Our studies so far have led us to examine basic economic principles and theories. During a class discussion the topic of Temporary Foreign Workers was raised. Most of us have already entered the workforce and some of us have worked alongside TFWs, so we believe that our observations and concerns regarding the TFW program are valid and should be acknowledged.

Every student in the class who has worked with TFWs empathizes with their situation and agrees that the TFWs have a very strong work ethic. There is concern too; that certain employers could take advantage of a labour force that is desperate to earn the money that is being sent “back home” and this makes for workers who will accept whatever conditions to keep their jobs. We strongly believe that TFWs should be paid the same as their Canadian counterparts. If there is such a demand for fast-food workers then why haven’t wages risen to meet the demand? Why, in fact have profits risen with the major franchises while wages have remained stagnant? Do we really need restaurants and stores to be open 24/7? Nowadays graveyard shifts are manned with TFWs because companies “couldn’t hire local”. It’s as if these jobs are created specifically for TFWs.

We students recognize that TFWs fill the “mundane” jobs that some Canadians regard as beneath them. However, as teenagers, we need these entry-level jobs to gain experience. We do not view this as “entitlement”. Priority should be given to Canadian workers because we live here our entire lives and have, and will, continually contribute to society. The money we earn from part-time jobs goes straight back to our local economy. We worry about losing not just these “starter” jobs but also jobs for which we have to earn a university degree or obtain a ticket such as in the trades. Who will speak up for the loss of jobs for middle-class Canadians?

A few of us have already had negative experiences with the TFW program. At [a St. Albert business] one of our classmates had his hours cut back drastically when TFWs were hired. It reached a point when it was no longer feasible to work for a few paltry hours and so he quit. Another student works for a St. Albert restaurant where five TFWs were brought in and he had to train them. Today he is the only Canadian left in the kitchen and one of the TFWs he trained is the kitchen manager while he remains in the same position.

We believe that the TFW program has become a quick fix to hiring cheap labour and that it has not been monitored for abuses. How many Canadians have lost their jobs to TFWs or have had their work outsourced? What will be left for ordinary Canadians? Now we are advised by Stephen Poloz, the Bank of Canada Governor, to make ourselves more marketable when we graduate from post-secondary studies by interning for free. If there is such a labour shortage then why are so many Canadians unable to find work? How much advertising is actually done by companies to hire Canadians before they apply for TFWs or consider shipping the work out of Canada?

Canadian corporations are reaping respectable profits. It is time they invested in the labour force of the country that has enabled them to build their businesses in a stable and democratic environment.

Our studies have now moved on to democratic institutions and citizen participation. We may or may not be anarchists, socialists, conservatives, liberals, or even reactionaries but we are all fiercely loyal to Canada and its democratic institutions. That is why it is so vital that our voices, and the voices of all Canadians, be raised in unison.
Feel free to share your story or comment on the concerns we’ve expressed.

(originally printed in Morinville News)

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