Category Archives: Tyranny

Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Original, Tyranny

Obama Pursuing Global Corporate Welfare Climate Accord

AlternativeFreePress.com

The Obama administration is pushing for an international climate change agreement to funnel more tax dollars into the hands of large corporations. The New York Times reports that despite the fact that the Constitution requires a president obtain approval from a two-thirds majority of the Senate, Obama plans on sidestepping his oath with “some legal and political magic”.

The climate accord would legally require countries to enact domestic climate change policies as well as make voluntarily pledges to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money “to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change”.

That may sound nice, but there are several reasons why this is a problem…

1. Foreign Aid is Corporate Welfare.

In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins describes how he would convince the government leaders of underdeveloped countries to accept huge loans they could never pay off. He explains how those countries were then pressured politically so much that they were effectively neutralized and their economies crippled. Perkins describes the role of an Economic Hit Man as “a highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.”

Let’s look at an example of how nice sounding green initiatives are often just corporate welfare…

The BC’s Pacific Carbon Trust takes about $14 million dollars from taxpayers per year and transfers it to large corporations.

Jordan Bateman with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation explains that “taxpayer money flowed exclusively into the pockets of corporations, including some of the largest companies in the province. Lafarge, a $20 billion company, was paid by the Trust for 22,998 carbon credits. Encana, an $8.8 billion company, sold 84,276 credits. Canfor, a $2.5 billion company, sold 41,573 credits. Other sellers included TimberWest and Interfor.”

2. Binding Agreements & Loss Of Sovereignty.

While this climate agreement may not yet legally bind countries into the corporate welfare scheme, that is the endgame.

The New York Times reports that officials fear this type of agreement which will not will not bind countries to spend billions of dollars. They desperately want a binding agreement. Richard Muyungi, a climate negotiator for Tanzania is quoted “Without an international agreement that binds us, it’s impossible for us to address the threats of climate change… We are not as capable as the U.S. of facing this problem, and historically we don’t have as much responsibility. What we need is just one thing: Let the U.S. ratify the agreement. If they ratify the agreement, it will trigger action across the world.”

These international agreements seek to destroy nations sovereignty, they attempt to override laws of local, regional and national governments… and this has been planned for a long time.

The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 by David Rockefeller, it’s members include business leaders, Heads of State, UN bureaucrats, diplomats, politicians and government officials from all over the world.

In 1990 The Club of Rome published The First Global Revolution, where they outlined how they would create or exaggerate environmental threats with the intention of manipulating the public into giving up their sovereignty to one world government:

“The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

3. Debt.

This climate agreement is being presented under the guise of rich countries helping countries in need, but really it is countries already in debt, getting into more debt, in order to get other countries into debt.

The “rich” countries are not really rich when you consider their debt, every dollar of aid given is borrowed with interest owing and compounding. Increasing debt and devaluing the dollar.

The “developing” countries can certainly use help, but the strings attached to this type of help will leave them with more debt than they can handle. This will leave them vulnerable to exploitation and allow corporations to pillage resources.

Banksters (central banks) create fiat currency and loan it to the government, it is then given to banksters (world bank / IMF) who loan it to developing countries. Debt on top of debt, interest plus more interest.

Written by Alternative Free Press
Creative Commons License
Obama Pursuing Global Corporate Welfare Climate Accord by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/us/politics/obama-pursuing-climate-accord-in-lieu-of-treaty.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jordan-bateman/carbon-bc_b_1723907.html
http://www.green-agenda.com/globalrevolution.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man

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Privacy, Tyranny

The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

Ryan Gallagher
The Intercept: August 25, 2014

The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.

The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.

ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Earlier revelations sourced to the Snowden documents have exposed a multitude of NSA programs for collecting large volumes of communications. The NSA has acknowledged that it shares some of its collected data with domestic agencies like the FBI, but details about the method and scope of its sharing have remained shrouded in secrecy.

ICREACH has been accessible to more than 1,000 analysts at 23 U.S. government agencies that perform intelligence work, according to a 2010 memo. A planning document from 2007 lists the DEA, FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency as core members. Information shared through ICREACH can be used to track people’s movements, map out their networks of associates, help predict future actions, and potentially reveal religious affiliations or political beliefs.

The creation of ICREACH represented a landmark moment in the history of classified U.S. government surveillance, according to the NSA documents.

“The ICREACH team delivered the first-ever wholesale sharing of communications metadata within the U.S. Intelligence Community,” noted a top-secret memo dated December 2007. “This team began over two years ago with a basic concept compelled by the IC’s increasing need for communications metadata and NSA’s ability to collect, process and store vast amounts of communications metadata related to worldwide intelligence targets.”

The search tool was designed to be the largest system for internally sharing secret surveillance records in the United States, capable of handling two to five billion new records every day, including more than 30 different kinds of metadata on emails, phone calls, faxes, internet chats, and text messages, as well as location information collected from cellphones. Metadata reveals information about a communication—such as the “to” and “from” parts of an email, and the time and date it was sent, or the phone numbers someone called and when they called—but not the content of the message or audio of the call.

ICREACH does not appear to have a direct relationship to the large NSA database, previously reported by The Guardian, that stores information on millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Unlike the 215 database, which is accessible to a small number of NSA employees and can be searched only in terrorism-related investigations, ICREACH grants access to a vast pool of data that can be mined by analysts from across the intelligence community for “foreign intelligence”—a vague term that is far broader than counterterrorism.

Data available through ICREACH appears to be primarily derived from surveillance of foreigners’ communications, and planning documents show that it draws on a variety of different sources of data maintained by the NSA. Though one 2010 internal paper clearly calls it “the ICREACH database,” a U.S. official familiar with the system disputed that, telling The Intercept that while “it enables the sharing of certain foreign intelligence metadata,” ICREACH is “not a repository [and] does not store events or records.” Instead, it appears to provide analysts with the ability to perform a one-stop search of information from a wide variety of separate databases.

In a statement to The Intercept, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that the system shares data that is swept up by programs authorized under Executive Order 12333, a controversial Reagan-era presidential directive that underpins several NSA bulk surveillance operations that target foreign communications networks. The 12333 surveillance takes place with no court oversight and has received minimal Congressional scrutiny because it is targeted at foreign, not domestic, communication networks. The broad scale of 12333 surveillance means that some Americans’ communications get caught in the dragnet as they transit international cables or satellites—and documents contained in the Snowden archive indicate that ICREACH taps into some of that data.

Legal experts told The Intercept they were shocked to learn about the scale of the ICREACH system and are concerned that law enforcement authorities might use it for domestic investigations that are not related to terrorism.

“To me, this is extremely troublesome,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “The myth that metadata is just a bunch of numbers and is not as revealing as actual communications content was exploded long ago—this is a trove of incredibly sensitive information.”

Brian Owsley, a federal magistrate judge between 2005 and 2013, said he was alarmed that traditional law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and the DEA were among those with access to the NSA’s surveillance troves.

“This is not something that I think the government should be doing,” said Owsley, an assistant professor of law at Indiana Tech Law School. “Perhaps if information is useful in a specific case, they can get judicial authority to provide it to another agency. But there shouldn’t be this buddy-buddy system back-and-forth.”

Jeffrey Anchukaitis, an ODNI spokesman, declined to comment on a series of questions from The Intercept about the size and scope of ICREACH, but said that sharing information had become “a pillar of the post-9/11 intelligence community” as part of an effort to prevent valuable intelligence from being “stove-piped in any single office or agency.”

Using ICREACH to query the surveillance data, “analysts can develop vital intelligence leads without requiring access to raw intelligence collected by other IC [Intelligence Community] agencies,” Anchukaitis said. “In the case of NSA, access to raw signals intelligence is strictly limited to those with the training and authority to handle it appropriately. The highest priority of the intelligence community is to work within the constraints of law to collect, analyze and understand information related to potential threats to our national security.”

One-Stop Shopping

The mastermind behind ICREACH was recently retired NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander, who outlined his vision for the system in a classified 2006 letter to the then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. The search tool, Alexander wrote, would “allow unprecedented volumes of communications metadata to be shared and analyzed,” opening up a “vast, rich source of information” for other agencies to exploit. By late 2007 the NSA reported to its employees that the system had gone live as a pilot program.

The NSA described ICREACH as a “one-stop shopping tool” for analyzing communications. The system would enable at least a 12-fold increase in the volume of metadata being shared between intelligence community agencies, the documents stated. Using ICREACH, the NSA planned to boost the amount of communications “events” it shared with other U.S. government agencies from 50 billion to more than 850 billion, bolstering an older top-secret data sharing system named CRISSCROSS/PROTON, which was launched in the 1990s and managed by the CIA.

To allow government agents to sift through the masses of records on ICREACH, engineers designed a simple “Google-like” search interface. This enabled analysts to run searches against particular “selectors” associated with a person of interest—such as an email address or phone number—and receive a page of results displaying, for instance, a list of phone calls made and received by a suspect over a month-long period. The documents suggest these results can be used reveal the “social network” of the person of interest—in other words, those that they communicate with, such as friends, family, and other associates.

(Read more at The Intercept, including source documents)

Tyranny

Conservatives Could Still Face Repercussions For Election Fraud

Why voter suppression case isn’t all wrapped up with a nice little bow for the Conservatives

PressProgress: August 14, 2014

So is the voter suppression case dating back to the 2011 federal election all wrapped up with a nice little bow for the Conservative Party of Canada?

On Thursday, former junior party staffer Michael Sona, 25, was convicted of one charge of electoral fraud under the Elections Canada for his part in placing misleading robocalls in Guelph riding — directing non-Conservative supporters to bogus polling stations.

But let’s review some things that makes the “Pierre Poutine” case a tad more complicated for the Conservatives.

  • According to Elections Canada, whoever orchestrated the illegal calls relied on information from the Conservative Party’s voter-tracking database, known as the Constituent Information Management System. CIMS is “tightly held by the party, with access password protected,” a National Post columnist has explained.
  • A source close to the robocalls investigation previously told Postmedia News and the Ottawa Citizen, which led the coverage on the file, said it was unlikely a junior Conservative staffer could have pulled off the scheme on his own. It involved recording a bilingual, professional-sounding message and covering all electronic tracks.
  • During the trial, crown witness Andrew Prescott, who served as deputy manager of the Conservative campaign in Guelph (and who was provided immunity in exchange for his evidence), acknowledged he had logged into an account with the company used to send out the calls. “Prescott told the court he was instructed to do so by Ken Morgan, the campaign manager, who supplied him with the password,” explains the Ottawa Citizen in its recap of the case.
  • Morgan refused to speak to investigators. Then he moved to Kuwait. “The evidence certainly strongly suggests that Mr. Morgan was involved,” Crown prosecutor Croft Michaelson told the court in closing arguments.” Judge Gary Hearn acknowledged this point on Thursday before rendering his verdict.
  • The “sole issue” before the court, though, was whether “Sona is one of the individuals involved, not about any political campaign or party.”
  • Jenni Byrne, the party’s 2011 national campaign manager and now deputy chief of staff in the Prime Minister’s Office, instructed a potential key witness in the investigation (Prescott) to push off an interview with an Elections Canada investigator so Byrne could confer with lawyers.
  • Elections Canada wasn’t been able to speak to everyone it wanted to as part of its investigation, despite requests for interviews; Elections Act does not grant the agency the power to compel testimony, so it’s hard when people (or a political party) are uncooperative.
  • The Conservative government had promised to give this power to Elections Canada before the next election, but failed to do so when it amended the act earlier this year.
  • Elections Canada had recommended that the government update this section of the act, but the Conservative government rejected the recommendation, despite this warning from Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand back in March: “The response of Canadians in the face of the robocall affair has been overwhelming. Canadians rightfully expect that such conduct, which threatens the very legitimacy of our democratic institution, be dealt with swiftly and effectively. Without the power to compel testimony, as exists in many provincial regimes, the commissioner’s ability to carry out this investigation will remain limited. All in all, when looking at the proposed changes in relation to enforcement, the bill does not address the most pressing expectations of Canadians for timely and effective investigations.”
  • If the Conservative Party conducted an internal investigation to get to the bottom of the robocalls scheme, it has not shared the results with the public.
  • In separate civil proceedings in Federal Court backed by the Council of Canadians, a judge upheld the results in six federal ridings in the 2011 election, but did conclude that fraud had occurred in the election beyond Guelph. Here are a few excerpts from the 2013 judgement: “there was an orchestrated effort to suppress votes during the 2011 election campaign by a person with access to the [Conservative Party of Canada] CIMS database”; “I am satisfied that it has been established that misleading calls about the locations of polling stations were made to electors in ridings across the country, including the subject ridings, and that the purpose of those calls was to suppress the votes of electors who had indicated their voting preference in response to earlier voter identification calls”; “I am satisfied … that the most likely source of the information used to make the misleading calls was the CIMS database maintained and controlled by the CPC, accessed for that purpose by a person or persons currently unknown to this Court. …  The evidence points to elaborate efforts to conceal the identity of those accessing the database and arranging for the calls to be made”; “I find that the threshold to establish that fraud occurred has been met by the applicants.”

    • Source : Press Progress Used under a Creative Commons BY 2.0 licence.

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    Alternative Free Press

Banksters, Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Health/Environment, Privacy, Tyranny

Canada Sacrifices Citizens For Corporations ; “Highly Problematic” Trade Deal Leaked

Canada-EU Trade Deal Text Leaked By German TV

Daniel Tencer
The Huffington Post: August 13, 2014

A German news show has published what it says is the text of the Canada-EU free trade deal.

More than 520 pages of the 1,500-page document were posted to the website of German TV network ARD’s news show Tagesschau on Wednesday.

According to some experts now poring through the document, it appears Canada caved on the issue of patent protection for drugs.

The EU had been pushing Canada to lengthen patent protections for drugs, a move that was estimated to cost Canadians $900 million to $1.65 billion annually. The Conservative government in Ottawa has promised to compensate provinces for added drug costs, but no word yet on whether individuals will be compensated as well.

Council for Canadians political director Brent Patterson called the document “highly problematic,” adding the language specifically in the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) chapter is “undemocratic.”

“It’s the same provision that we’ve seen in NAFTA that has been so disastrous,” Patterson told HuffPost Canada.

“In terms of procurement, there is nothing that we can see about cities being excepted as so many had asked to have done.”

Patterson said several municipal governments including Toronto, Victoria, Hamilton and Red Deer asked to be exempted from CETA rules that banned “buy local” policies and other tools to support local jobs and development through public spending.

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities declined to discuss the text.

“Municipal interests in CETA and in all future trade agreements must be protected. FCM will not comment at this time on the leaked document,” said FCM President Brad Woodside.

Though Patterson thinks the documents should have been released earlier, he said the leak would allow groups like his own to start talking to Canadians and build opposition momentum – with possible support from the Liberals party and NDP.

“If the Germans are not satisfied with this, we can see a rocky road ahead,” Patterson said.

Several industry groups contacted by HuffPost Canada said they were not commenting on the leaked text. The Canadian Construction Association, the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association and the Fédération des producteurs de lait du Québec all declined to discuss the document.

Scott Sinclair with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives called the procurement provisions in the document “the most extensive set of commitments that Canada has ever made” – reaching down to the municipal level.

“It will interfere with, and potentially end, the use of procurement as an economic development policy tool and interfere with municipal governments, universities or hospitals who, for example, want to implement buy-local food purchasing policies,” he told HuffPost Canada.

It’s “overkill,” he added.

According to University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, the leaked text addresses concerns many activists have about ISDS.

Critics argued that the trade deal would create an international body through which corporations would be able to sue governments if those companies felt a country’s laws violated its rights under the trade deal. They say these sorts of dispute mechanisms essentially usurp a country’s sovereignty.

The leaked deal includes a clause that allows Canada to review the dispute mechanism after three years. Geist described the clause as “weak.”

A spokesman for International Trade Minister Ed Fast refused to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents, but insisted that negotiators have already gone to great lengths to reassure the public that the deal is good for both sides.

(read the full article at The Huffington Post)

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Privacy, Tyranny

Snowden Reveals MonsterMind : the ultimate threat to privacy

James Bamford’s profile of Edward Snowden in Wired magazine reveals MonsterMind

MonsterMind requires analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows. That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.

The massive surveillance effort was bad enough, but Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the country—a “kill” in cyber terminology.

Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That’s a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”

In addition to the possibility of accidentally starting a war, Snowden views MonsterMind as the ultimate threat to privacy because, in order for the system to work, the NSA first would have to secretly get access to virtually all private communications coming in from overseas to people in the US. “The argument is that the only way we can identify these malicious traffic flows and respond to them is if we’re analyzing all traffic flows,” he says. “And if we’re analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows. That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.”

(Read the full profile at Wired)
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Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Drugs, Health/Environment, Original, Privacy, Tyranny

Herr Harper’s Canada

“You won’t recognize Canada when I’m through with it” -Stephen Harper

Here are just 4 of the many ways Stephen Harper is drastically changing Canada in 2014:

1. Corporate for-profit health care

The barely hidden agenda is to unravel Canada’s signature public health care model in favour of an aggregate of more expensive, more fragmented, and less universal corporate models.

Just as the Harper government corrupted the environmental file (in the name of “streamlining”), by drastically removing federal oversight and involvement (vacating jurisdiction), so too is it “vacating jurisdiction” of health care.

The agenda is being achieved by starving the provinces of required funding. Once the 2014 Health Accord is expired, the Harper government will reduce its Canada Health Transfers (CHT’s), — monies transferred from the federal government to the provinces – by$36 billion, up to the end of 2024.

The void of insufficient funding will be filled by corporate health care.

Once this is achieved, Canadians’ access to health care will be restricted, user fees will increase, insurance coverage will cost more, and patient fatalities will rise in number.

Here are some numbers.

According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, public health care costs less than $180 per month per Canadian, while a private insurer in the U.S. charges three times that amount for comparable service.

Even worse, according to a study by Dr. P.J. Devereaux, and published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, if we switch to for-profit hospitals, over 2,000 more Canadians will die needlessly each year.

What are the drivers behind this agenda which is contrary to the wishes of about 86 per cent of Canadians?

According to the Council Of Canadians (who must surely be on Harper’s “enemy list”) there are three drivers:

– Private investors, many based in the U.S, who want to cash in on Canadian health care (NAFTA guarantees equal treatment to U.S companies competing against our public system.)

– Canadian for-profit providers and insurers.

– Cash-starved provincial governments.

rabble.ca (2013)

That is the long term plan, but there is unfortunately also a shortcut:

We’re at risk of losing our public health care system in 2014.

Right now, there’s a legal challenge in motion that could erase Canadian Medicare as we know it – resulting in a two-tier, US-style health care system.

Dr. Brian Day, owner of Vancouver’s for-profit Cambie Surgery Centre and the leading proponent of privatized health care, launched a constitutional challenge in 2008 that is going to court in September of 2014. This challenge aims to break Medicare in Canada by striking down provincial health legislation that limits the for-profit delivery of medically necessary services, claiming that these rules violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Parties in the case, including the BC government, are calling this the most significant constitutional challenge in Canadian history. Although this case is being heard in British Columbia, experts agree that the case will be appealed and end up in the Supreme Court of Canada – that’s why it’s important to everyone in Canada.

If Dr. Day wins, he’ll open the floodgates to a US-style system that relies on private insurance, and allows providers to set any price on care that the market will allow.

BC health coalition (2014)

2. Festivals Without Freedom

RCMP are out in force and more than 500 security guards are on hand checking every bag for drugs and alcohol as the Squamish Music Festival gets underway today.

cbc.ca (2014)

Police enforcement at festivals has been increasing steadily since 2009, shortly after Harper took power:

There was a much stronger uniform presence this year, after the event was identified as requiring higher-than-normal levels of policing, with members being drawn from across the region from the Drug Canine Units, the Integrated Road Safety Unit, the Kootenay Boundary Regional RCMP detachment, and more.

boundary sentinel (2010)

3. Strictly Controlled Internet

Bill C-13 offers service providers immunity for disclosing sensitive information to police and other authorities without a warrant. This isn’t just hypothetical, either—Canadian authorities have been making millions of these requests each year for quite some time.
[…]
With Parliament off for its summer vacation, Bill C-13 is sitting in a strange limbo. Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, it’s likely that at least parts of C-13 are unconstitutional. This includes the provisions giving legal immunity to service providers who disclose customer information to authorities without a warrant and without the customer’s knowledge.

Despite the court case, the Harper government has shown no intention of going back to the drawing board, or even at least splitting Bill C-13 in two to allow for more debate and input from privacy advocates. This is troubling, since the government is refusing to listen to the privacy expert they just appointed by not even splitting the bill.

What does the future hold, then, for C-13? If Minister MacKay presses forward as he’s indicated when Parliament resumes, it’s likely that the government could find itself in yet another high-level court case about privacy. With lawsuits from civil liberties watchdog groups already on the books over unaccountable spying at CSEC, we could see a legal action from players in the tech-activist privacy coalition against C-13.

As the government keeps silent about making any changes to Bill C-13, it’s stubbornly signaling that it doesn’t care much about Canadians’ privacy. Given its track record, we shouldn’t count ourselves as surprised. But we do know that the Harper government does care about its perception as pro-business. As mainstream outcry grows against this “cyberbullying” bill and businesses line up on the side of reasonable privacy protection, the government may finally change its tune.

vice.ca (2014)

Bill C-13 isn’t the only threat to internet privacy. The Trans-Pacific Partnership will end the open Internet as we know it by criminalizing our online activity, invading our privacy, and making our ability to access the Internet far more expensive.

Internet providers will be forced to block content for subscribers who are alleged to have engaged in small-scale downloading or sharing of copyrighted material. It could also kick individuals and even entire families off the Internet for allegations of copyright infringement alone.
Internet providers would be forced to act as ‘Internet cops’, actively monitoring websites for banned links and for any alleged copyright infringement. As costs would be passed on to customers, this would make your Internet more expensive and would result in a stifling Internet censorship regime.
A complete overhaul of Canadian copyright law and potential changes to privacy law that would undermine our digital rights.

rabble.ca (2013)

4. Dirty Water, Very Dirty Water

The recent disaster at the Mount Polley mine serves as just 1 recent example of water in Canada after a few years with Harper’s fraudulent majority.

A complete water ban affecting about 300 local residents is in effect after five million cubic metres of tailings pond wastewater from the Mount Polley copper and gold mine was released early Monday into Hazeltine Creek.

That’s an amount of water equivalent to about 2,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Local residents are calling it an environmental disaster.

The waterways affected by the ban, which earlier included Quesnel Lake, Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Cariboo Creek, now also include the entire Quesnel and Cariboo river systems right up to the salmon-bearing Fraser River.

cbc.ca (2014)

Reports of sickly salmon with skin that’s peeling off have prompted a First Nations fishing shutdown in British Columbia’s Cariboo region, which was hit by a mining waste spill this week.

“We are closing all fishing activities down the river immediately, fish are being found very sickly as we speak,” read a notice issued Thursday by the chiefs of the Xaxli’p, Sek’wel’was and Tsk’way’laxw First Nations near Lillooet.

The Secwepemc Fisheries Commission issued a similar advisory telling its members to “exercise caution and stop fishing until further notice.”

huffingtonpost.ca (2014)

The Harper government is waging war on Canada’s freshwater.

We didn’t start with a strong record. Our national water laws are out-dated, we don’t properly enforce the ones we have and we chronically underfund source water and watershed protection. And consecutive governments refuse to consider the effect on freshwater when creating economic, industrial, energy or trade policies.

Yet the Harper government appears intent on systematically dismantling the few protections that have been put in place at the federal level to protect our freshwater heritage.

In its 2011 budget, the Harper government announced a reduction of over $222 million from the budget of Environment Canada and the elimination of over 1,200 jobs in the department. Programs to protect water, such as the Action Plan on Clean Water, which funds water remediation in Lakes Winnipeg and Simcoe among others, were particularly hard hit. Others targeted for deep cuts include the Chemicals Management Plan and the Contaminated Sites Action Plan, both of which are crucial to source water protection.

These cuts followed the cancellation of a major B.C. coastal conservation project after lobbying by the energy industry and the weakening of key elements of the Navigable Waters Protection Act, which eliminated mandatory environmental assessments for major developments such as bridges and dams on Canadian rivers.

But the big guns have come out in the current Budget Implementation Bill. Parks Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans will lose over $100 million in funding and many hundreds of employees between them, which will have devastating impacts on water conservation and watershed protection. Fully cut are the urban wastewater research program and integrated monitoring of water and air quality.

The Fisheries Act, which made it a criminal offence to pollute or destroy fish and fish habitat in Canada and the only federal water protection law with teeth, is being gutted. Already, the Harper government allows the mining industry to apply to have healthy fish-bearing bodies of water to be renamed “tailings impoundment areas” and thus no longer subject to protection of the Act.

But the new rules remove legal protection of fish habitat, allowing harm to fish and habitat based on the “on-going productivity” of commercial fisheries. In essence, the new rules legalize activity that destroys wetlands, lakes and rivers unless these habitats can be proven to have a defined economic value.

Industry will now have unprecedented influence over water protection policy and the Harper cabinet will make decisions about which watersheds deserve protection based on political, not scientific, grounds.

The 2012 federal budget also repeals the Canadian Environment Assessment Act and replaces it with a new law that limits the length of time the assessment process can take, sets strict limits on who can appear before a panel and allows Cabinet to opt out of projects it does not want assessed.

With the plethora of pipelines planned to carry Alberta tar sands bitumen — the dirtiest oil on earth — over fragile watersheds all across Canada, the politicization of the environmental assessment process poses an irreversible threat to our freshwater systems. The Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline to the B.C coast alone would pass over at least 1,000 waterways.

In a mean spirited move, the Harper government is killing the Global Environmental Monitoring System, an inexpensive project that monitors over 3,000 freshwater sites around the world for a U.N. database that Canada has proudly hosted for decades.

Cut too is the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, which recently published an important paper calling for an end to free or cheap water to resource extractive industries. Perhaps this report was unpopular with the energy and mining companies soon to benefit from the new environmental regime.

This, just months after the Harper government cut funding for the Canadian Environmental Network, a 34-year-old network that acted as a link between 640 small environmental groups and the federal government and which has been a fierce defender of local watersheds.

rabble.ca (2012)

This list is far from complete, in fact, it just scratches the surface.

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Banksters, Corporate Welfare, Tyranny

Feds Transparency Website Can’t Account for $619 Billion

Rachel Blevins
Ben Swann : August 7, 2014

In the midst of the Obama administration’s attempt to implement the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, a recent government audit shows that $619 billion is missing from 302 federal programs.

The Transparency Act was passed by Congress last year to “expand the amount of federal spending data available to the public.”

USASpending.gov was originally created as a way to make government spending more transparent. However, a report from the Government Accountability Office revealed that only 2% to 7% of the recorded spending data in 2012 is “fully consistent with agencies’ records.”

The report stated that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) should implement more oversight of the spending data from federal agencies, and that until it does, “any effort to use the data will be hampered by uncertainties about accuracy.”
[…]

According to USA Today, The Department of Health and Human Services was one of the 302 federal agencies, which failed to report money it had spent. This agency “failed to report nearly $544 billion, mostly in direct assistance programs like Medicare.”

The Department of the Interior neglected to report $5.3 billion it had spent, due to the fact that it claimed its accounting systems “were not compatible with the data formats required by USASpending.gov.”

USA Today also reported that for more than 22% of federal awards, “the spending website literally doesn’t know where the money went.”

(read the full article at Ben Swann)

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Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Health/Environment, Privacy, Tyranny

The Toronto Police Videotaped Strip Search Chambers During the G20

By Patrick McGuire
Vice: August 7, 2014

The past couple of weeks have been chock full of bad press for the Toronto Police (TPS). First there was the independent report conducted by former Supreme Court judge Frank Iacobucci that suggested, in the wake of Sammy Yatim’s killing, Toronto cops start wearing body-worn cameras, while also beefing up their taser supply, so that police can hopefully resist the urge to fire their guns into “people in crisis.”

Then, shortly after, news broke that police chief Bill Blair did not have his contract renewed by the police services board. Many credit the board’s choice of not renewing Blair’s contract to two major scandals: one, his inconclusive surveillance of the city’s crack smoking mayor, and two, TPS’s handling of the G20 protests in Toronto. Blair spun the G20 as best as he could, given that he was personally open to discussing it in public (after, of course, refusing to provide an apology) and willing to pursue disciplinary action against his most aggressive officers. But the lasting scars of the TPS’s illegal, mass arrests have not fully healed.

As revealed by a new, independent documentary called What World Do You Live In?—and as first reported by sometimes VICE Canada contributor Rachel Browne for Maclean’s in late July—surveillance footage of the temporary detention centre erected by the Toronto Police to house the G20 detainees “confirms security cameras were filming the rooms where people were strip-searched.”

(read the full article at Vice)

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