Category Archives: Tyranny

Corporate Welfare, Health/Environment, Tyranny

Fukushima radiation killing our children, government hides truth

Fukushima radiation killing our children, govt hides truth – former mayor

RT: April 21, 2014

Katsutaka Idogawa, former mayor of Futaba, a town near the disabled Fukushima nuclear plant, is warning his country that radiation contamination is affecting Japan’s greatest treasure – its children. government

Asked about government plans to relocate the people of Fatuba to the city of Iwaki, inside the Fukushima prefecture, Idogawa criticized the move as a “violation of human rights.”

Compared with Chernobyl, radiation levels around Fukushima “are four times higher,” he told RT’s Sophie Shevardnadze, adding that “it’s too early for people to come back to Fukushima prefecture.”

“It is by no means safe, no matter what the government says.”

Idogawa alleges that the government has started programs to return people to their towns despite the danger of radiation.

“Fukushima Prefecture has launched the Come Home campaign. In many cases, evacuees are forced to return. [the former mayor produced a map of Fukushima Prefecture that showed that air contamination decreased a little, but soil contamination remains the same.]”

According to Idogawa there are about two million people residing in the prefecture who are reporting “all sorts of medical issues,” but the government insists these conditions are unrelated to the Fukushima accident. Idogawa wants their denial in writing.

“I demanded that the authorities substantiate their claim in writing but they ignored my request.”

Once again, Idogawa alludes to the nuclear tragedy that hit Ukraine on April 26, 1986, pleading that the Japanese people “never forget Chernobyl.” Yet few people seem to be heeding the former government official’s warning.

“They believe what the government says, while in reality radiation is still there. This is killing children. They die of heart conditions, asthma, leukemia, thyroiditis… Lots of kids are extremely exhausted after school; others are simply unable to attend PE classes. But the authorities still hide the truth from us, and I don’t know why. Don’t they have children of their own? It hurts so much to know they can’t protect our children.

“They say Fukushima Prefecture is safe, and that’s why nobody’s working to evacuate children, move them elsewhere. We’re not even allowed to discuss this.”

The former mayor found it ironic that when discussing the Tokyo Olympics, scheduled for 2020, Prime Minister Abe frequently mentions the Japanese word, “omotenashi,” which literally means that you should “treat people with an open heart.”

In Idogawa’s opinion, the same treatment does not apply equally to the people most intimately connected with Fukushima: the workers involved in the cleanup operations.

“Their equipment was getting worse; preparation was getting worse. So people had to think about their safety first. That’s why those who understood the real danger of radiation began to quit. Now we have unprofessional people working there.

They don’t really understand what they’re doing. That’s the kind of people who use the wrong pump, who make mistakes like that.

“I’m really ashamed for my country, but I have to speak the truth for the sake of keeping our planet clean in the future.

Idogawa then made some parallels with one of the most tragic events in the history of Japan: the use of atomic bombs on the industrial cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States at the end of World War II.

“The authorities lied to everyone (about the effects of the atomic bombings)…They hid the truth. That’s the situation we are living in. It’s not just Fukushima. Japan has some dark history. This is a sort of a sacrifice to the past.”

When pressed on the details of a United Nations report that says there have been no radiation-related deaths or acute diseases observed among the workers and general public, Idogawa dismisses it as “completely false,” before providing some of his own experiences at the height of the crisis.

“When I was mayor, I knew many people who died from heart attacks, and then there were many people in Fukushima who died suddenly, even among young people. It’s a real shame that the authorities hide the truth from the whole world, from the UN. We need to admit that actually many people are dying. We are not allowed to say that but TEPCO employees also are dying. But they keep mum about it.”

When asked to provide solid figures on the actual number of people who died under such circumstances, Idogawa refrained, saying “it’s not just one or two people. We’re talking about ten to twenty people who died this way.”

Asked about other options that Japan has for providing energy sources to its 126 million people, he responded that despite having many rivers, the government neglects to promote hydro energy.

Why? Because it’s not “profitable for big companies!”

(read the full article at RT)

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Corporate Welfare, Health/Environment, Tyranny

The World Bank & Nestlé : Depopulating The World Through Water Privatization

There is no greater natural resource on this earth than water. As the sustenance of all life, water keeps every living and breathing organism, every plant, every animal and every human being on this planet alive. In the same way that without air to breathe, without water we humans cannot sustain life for more than a few days.

Privatization of Water as an Owned Commodity Rather Than a Universal Human Right

By Joachim Hagopian
Global Research: April 20, 2014

Due to global warming, widespread drought and increasingly polluted water systems, the projected availability of clean freshwater in years to come to meet the rising demands of a growing global population is among the most daunting human challenges of this century. By 2015 a 17% increase in global water demand is projected just for increasing agriculturally produced food. By the same year 2025, the growing global population will increase water consumption needs by a whopping 40%. While oil played the keenly critical role during the twentieth century, water is being deemed the most valued precious natural resource of the twenty-first century.

As such, several years ago the United Nations declared access to clean drinking water a universal human right. Conversely, willfully denying it is considered a serious human rights violation that denies life itself. And any calculated decision denying people their universal right to life is nothing short of a murderous, shameful crime against humanity.

Despite the human air pollution that has long been dirtying our lungs, while also causing global warming, climate change and increasing catastrophic natural disasters, not to mention the growing global health hazard for us humans, the very thought of making clean air a precious commodity that can opportunistically be packaged and sold by the same corporations that have been ruining our air, that very notion would instantly be criticized, scorned and ridiculed.

Yet that is exactly what has been happening for the last thirty years now all over this planet with the earth’s preciously dwindling freshwater drinking supply. The World Bank has been financing global privatization of the earth’s water supply making clean water that is so necessary for survival an unaffordable private commodity for the poorest people on earth to even access. They are literally dying of thirst and disease because of greedy psychopathic corporate profiteers once again placing theft and greed over human welfare and life itself.

But then that is the globalist agenda – thinning the human herd down from near seven billion currently to as low as just half a billion. That means 13 out of 14 of us alive today according to their diabolical oligarch plan simply must die within the next few years. And what better way to rapidly kill off the human population than taking full ownership and control over the earth’s limited diminishing water supply.

More people on this planet are dying presently from waterborne disease from dirty water than are dying from all wars and violence worldwide combined. Every hour 240 babies die from unsafe water. 1.5 million children under five years of age die every year from cholera and typhoid fever due to unsanitary water conditions. These incredibly sad, alarming facts illustrate just how significant and critical a clean freshwater supply is to staying alive on this planet. Taking control over the earth’s clean water supply is achieved by turning water into a privately owned commodity that only the largest corporations and banks control. Simply making water unaffordable and thereby inaccessible to the poorest people on the planet is one extremely effective, albeit most sinister way to reduce the so called overpopulation problem.

Three primary ways that the human population decreases significantly every year is death caused by starvation and malnutrition (including lack of drinkable water) at between seven to eight millionpeople, diseases that kill between two to three million (with mounting threats of infectious diseases becoming pandemics) and upwards of near a half million dying each year from war.

Behind closed doors oligarchic globalists periodically meet and discuss what is best for humanity and the planet according to them and their megalomaniacal self-interests. For many years now this all important topic of water privatization and control as a convenient and most effective means of addressing the overpopulation problem has been regularly tabled for discussion… along with related topics like geo-engineering, GMO’s, vaccines, overuse of antibiotics, planned wars over oil and water, devising global policies designed to increase political destabilization, poverty and undermine economies, nuclear radiation and a host of other means for culling the human population.

Time Magazine reported how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been financing research at the University of North Carolina among 78 others to develop ultrasound infertility contraception techniques to sterilize male sperm. At a 2010 TED conference Bill Gates spoke openly of depopulating the total of 6.8 billion people living on earth by up to “10 to 15%” using both of his heavily funded vaccine and contraception programs that will render much of the global population infertile. Meanwhile, billionaire Ted Turner went even further, offering his public opinion to decrease the world population by 70% down to “two billion.” It too is on tape.

Calls to begin sterilizing the human population began surfacing back in the mid-1970’s with Henry Kissinger as former Secretary of State and high ranking Bilderberg member in his declassified National Security Council document (1974) entitled “The Implications of World-wide PopulationGrowth on the Security and External Interests of the United States.” This document emphasized highest priority given to implementing birth control programs targeting thirteen Third World nations mostly in South America. Extraordinary resources were allocated through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) pushing the carrot stick of additional financial aid to countries willing to enact sterilization and depopulation programs.

More overt evidence of the callous contempt that globalist oligarchs have toward us 99%-ers is captured in a statement written by Prince Phillip, Queen Elizabeth II’s husband in the forward of his book, “I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus” to reduce the human population. It seems readily discernable that an explicit globalist agenda for a New World Order openly propagated with repeated references by President Goerge Bush senior includes depopulation through various means, water control through privatization just one of many in the power elite’s arsenal.

Humans have been dying from lack of clean water for a long time now and will only continue dying at an even greater frequency if the plan to privatize water continues to unfold unchecked and without opposition. Fortunately forces have been mobilizing to combat water privatization. Just last week on the heels of the World Bank annual convening in Washington DC for several days ofconferencing, an international coalition of anti-privatization water rights groups from India and America sent a formal message calling on the World Bank to end its destructive practice of privatizing water around the world under the guise of developmental progress. The Bank’s DC meetings had been touting lies and disinformation in an attempt to paint a glowing report showcasing the so called efficacy and successes that turning water rights over to the private sector have accomplished in recent years. The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) as the planet’s largest funding source for water privatization provides loans and financing to Third World nations for private water management companies to take charge of municipal, regional and national water rights.

The director of a global advocacy group called Corporate Accountability International, Shayda Naficy, pointed out that 75% of expenses for running a water utility company should go to infrastructure. In nation after nation private companies have placed the priority of making a profit over the need to invest in necessary infrastructure to connect and adequately service water customers. In efforts to maximize cost efficiency as well as profits, water prices invariably go up and fast become out of reach for poorest customers. Cutting off the water supply to thousands of low income families unable to pay for their rising costs has become the all too frequent inevitable result. The World Bank’s 34 percent failure rate for all private water and sewerage contracts between 2000 and 2010 far surpasses its single digit failure rates in the telecommunications, energy and transportation industries.

Critics maintain that the public sector is far more accountable to its public constituents than private sector businesses that only answer to its board of directors to show sufficient profits. Corruption becomes commonplace. Additionally, a conflict of interest exists when the IFC acts as both a money lender and consultant to foreign municipalities in assigning no bid contracts to favored private water utility companies.

To best illustrate typical scenarios where water privatization is either not working or already proved a failure deserve close examination. The good news is that in recent years people in various parts of the world have been mobilizing successful efforts and campaigns to stop water privatization in their own backyards. Presently in a number of regions in India, citizens are banding together to confront and fight the myriad of problems with water privatization in their country.

Recently in Nagpur, central India’s largest city where the country’s first municipal partnership with a private utility company is being played out, major tensions have erupted. Three years ago the city signed a 25-year contract with Veolia Water to supply the city of 2.7 million residents with 24 hour-7-days a week water service. Instead unforeseen delays driving up prices manyfold along with unfair water distribution and frequent service breakdowns have led to widespread angry protests in the streets and charges of corruption. City officials point to a series of serious contract violations. Again cutting corners by refusing to invest in the needed infrastructure appears to be the primary cause for this failed project. The Corporate Accountability International’s 2012 report called “Shutting the Spigot on Private Water: The Case for the World Bank to Divest” cites a number of similar cases where privatization has proven ineffective.

Bold and empowered citizens in Bolivia in the year 2000 made headlines around the globe when they were victorious in kicking out privatized water there in the form of the Bechtel, the fifth largest private corporation on the planet. Impassioned protestors in Bolivia’s third-largest city managed to oppose Bechtel’s increasing prices and demanded that the company abandon its hold on their city’s municipal water supply, eventually driving the powerful scandalous giant out of the country. Though big business efforts to buy and control water rights in many Latin American nations have each had their turn in nations like Equator and Brazil, only Chile water services are privatized. Ultimately local residents virtually everywhere privatization has attempted to take hold has been met with such strong resistance from consumers who realize their private utility company has failed miserably in delivering quality service at affordable prices.

The story is always the same. That is why advocacy groups like Corporate Accountability International is proactively working toward educating governments and citizens worldwide to ensure water remains under the public domain. The exhaustive and expensive legal process of ending long term contracts and successfully removing privatized foreign corporations once established in a city, state or country is formidable. It is obviously in the best interests of people around the world to ensure privatization of their water supply never gets a local foothold in the first place.

Nestlé corporation’s marketing campaign targeted wealthy Pakistanis in Lahore, and its brand of bottled water ‘Pure Life’ became a status symbol for the rich. To bottle its product, Nestlé busily dried up local underground springs that subsequently caused the village poor unable to buy the bottled water stolen from their springs to end up consuming contaminated water. Nestlé went on to extracting water from two deep wells in Bhati Dilwan village, forcing them to turn to bottled water. A similar story emerged from Nigeria where a single bottled water exceeds the average daily income of a Nigerian citizen. Nestlé is notorious for draining local water supplies used to bottle its water brands, then charge unaffordable prices to the local population whose clean water supply was stolen from them.

Corporate Watch released a report exposing some of the unethical and illegal practices that Nestlé has long been committing around the globe, completely disregarding public health concerns while destroying natural environments to ensure huge annual profits of $35 billion just from water bottle sales alone. In Brazil’s Serra da Mantiqueira region where the groundwater is rich in mineral content containing medicinal properties, over-pumping has depleted its valuable water resources and caused permanent damage to the natural environment. and long-term damage.

Nestlé has also allegedly been involved in human trafficking of child slave labor. A BBC investigative report claimed that “hundreds of thousands of children in Mali, Burkina Faso and Togo were being purchased from their destitute parents and shipped to the Ivory Coast to be sold as slaves to cocoa farms.” Yet Nestlé likely bought the cocoa from the Ivory Coast and Ghana knowing it was produced using child slaves.

Finally, Nestlé owns or leases fifty spring sites throughout America. Nestlé controls a third of the domestic market for bottled water in the US. The company is notorious for unlawful extraction of spring water while engaging in price-gouging and reeking havoc in numerous communities. An example of the trouble Nestlé typically causes is Colorado where 80% of the citizens of Aurora were opposed to Nestlé’s presence, fully aware of the company’s terrible reputation for damaging communities and natural environments. Yet the city council voted in favor 7 to 4 to let the devastation begin and over the next decade Nestlé extracted 650 million gallons of precious Arkansas River valley water that went into its Arrowhead Springs brand of bottled water. For years the embattled townspeople of Aurora fought to rid the company predator from destroying their precious aquifers. Additionally, the plastic non-biodegradable bottles are major pollutants that stay toxically intact for a full millennium.

The cumulative grave effects of privatizing water as a global commodity are appalling. The underprivileged residents of Jakarta, Manila and Nairobi pay 5 to 10 times more for water than those living in high-income areas of those same cities. People living in the Third World slums even pay more for water than upscale New Yorkers and Londoners. This kind of unfairness and inequity is obscene. Women in places in Africa where privatized water is beyond their limit walk miles to obtain dirty water from rivers and then too often die along with their children from contamination and disease. Asian farmers are losing their livelihoods if they are unable to receive state funded irrigation. The human suffering caused globally by wealthy private corporations from North America and Europe exploiting people from Third World nations for pure profit is nothing less than pure psychopathic evil.

Taking on global privatization of water for the well being and greater good of the people is but an example of the monumental work that needs to be done. Only if informed, caring and committed human beings collectively come together worldwide to take a global stand against this gravest of life and death issues facing humanity can this oligarch agenda be stopped dead in its tracks. As global human rights activists it is up to us to end the global corporate malevolence and malfeasance from further damaging and afflicting our planet like never before. With the recent formal finding that Americans no longer live in a democracy but an oligarchy, as if we did not already painfully know, it becomes even more “formally” imperative now that we as ordinary citizens of the world take the vested interest in preserving life on our only planet before it becomes too late. It is high time we take back our planet once and for all from the oligarchic corporatocracy bent on insidiously making our earthly home increasingly uninhabitable for all life forms.

(Read the full article at Global Research)

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Tyranny

Conservative Mockery of the Charter of Rights: Let’s Count the Ways

Irwin Cotler
Huffington Post: April 17, 2014

This month marks the 32nd anniversary of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a landmark achievement in the promotion and protection of human rights, and which has served as a model for other countries drafting constitutions of their own. While Canadians have occasion and cause to celebrate this transformative constitutional document, silence is to be expected from Canada’s Conservative government.

The government’s consistent refusal to fully acknowledge the Charter’s importance is regrettable not only as a matter of symbolism, but as one of substance as well. The repeated enactment of Charter-infringing laws and policies results not only in the infringement of rights, but in the use of taxpayer dollars to defend occasionally indefensible positions.

As a recent example, on the day before the Supreme Court disallowed the government’s appointment of Justice Marc Nadon — on grounds that involved the constitution, but not the Charter — it unanimously struck down part of the Conservatives’ so-called “tough on crime” agenda. The court ruled that a law retroactively abolishing the possibility of early parole for offenders who had already been sentenced violated the Charter’s Section 11 protection against being punished a second time for a single offence. According to Justice Richard Wagner — as it happens, a Conservative appointee — this law “represents one of the clearest cases of retrospective double punishment.” In other words, the government should have known better.

Indeed, this Government’s record on respecting and upholding the Charter is dismal, at best — something I have been asserting as a statement of fact, and that courts have concluded as matters of law. In recent months, courts in Ontario and B.C. have struck down various mandatory minimum penalties enacted by the Conservative government.

It is not as though the government was unaware of the issue; indeed, various Members of Parliament — myself included — have raised the question at committee hearings, and witnesses from the bench, bar, and academe have all offered their contributions suggesting such sentencing schemes are ill-advised from a constitutional perspective, as they may infringe protections against cruel and unusual punishment. Such was the case two years ago, when an Ontario court ruled that a mandatory minimum sentence imposed on a first-time offender was “fundamentally unfair, outrageous, abhorrent, and intolerable.”

Yet, as is all too often the case, pleas for ensuring the constitutional compliance of legislation prior to its passage — as mandated by law — fall on deaf ears. The result is that the legislation is challenged in court — at great expense to the taxpayer — and many provisions are subsequently struck down.

Courts have ruled that Conservative laws and policies violate the Charter in areas as diverse as the treatment of Canadians detained abroad, evidence obtained with malfunctioning breathalyzers, and safe injection sites for drug addicts, to name but a few. In the latter instance, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin found that the Government’s attempt to close the Insite facility in Vancouver “contravened the principles of fundamental justice” and, with respect to Canadians with drug addictions, “(threatened) their health and indeed their lives.”

In the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian denied the government’s protection while he was wrongfully imprisoned and stranded for six years in Sudan, the Federal Court ultimately ordered his return to Canada, concluding that the government had violated his rights under the Charter. In Goulet v Canada, another case concerning a Canadian imprisoned abroad, the court chided the Harper government for ignoring the law, acting as if it were above the law, while showing disrespect for the rule of law as a whole.

Moreover, since the fall, a showdown has been underway between judges and the Government regarding the victim surcharge, a supplementary fee paid by offenders at sentencing. The government eliminated the possibility of waiving the surcharge for impoverished offenders, and judges have responded with creative solutions, such as allowing many years for payment. This is another matter that may well find its way to the Supreme Court before long.

While a healthy dialogue between Parliament and the courts should be encouraged — and the two can work harmoniously together, through things like reference questions, to achieve clarity on the state of the law — the government’s pattern has been to adopt constitutionally suspect legislation, indifferent to the possibility that it may be struck down. Indeed, this has happened again and again.

As the courts have repeatedly sought to remind the government, it is not above the law and cannot act with impunity — or immunity — for its actions.

Irwin Cotler is the former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. He is a Professor of Law (Emeritus) at McGill University.

(Read the full article at Huffington Post)

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Corporate Welfare, Tyranny

Political Lying: It’s Legal. Obama’s First-Amendment Defense of Political Liars

By Eric Zuesse
Global Research: April 18, 2014

President Obama, through his U.S. Solicitor General, arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court, has now stated that lying in political campaigns isn’t merely protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, but that it is an especially protected form of speech, which must not be hindered by any state government, such as by the state of Ohio. Ohio has outlawed such intentional deception of voters, and has established heavy criminal penalties against it, when it can be proven. The idea behind this law is that any democracy in which lying in political campaigns isn’t penalized by severe penalties, won’t remain a democracy much longer, but will instead descend into a kleptocracy: theft of elections themselves (via lies), so that they become just nominal “elections,” which are controlled by whatever aristocrats can put up the most money, to lie the most effectively, to the biggest number of voters: lying-contests.

It’s an important Supreme Court case. As Constitutional lawyer Lyle Denniston has noted, in his “Argument preview: Attack ads and the First Amendment“: “In all of the history of the First Amendment, the Court has never ruled that false statements are totally without protection under the Constitution.” However, this Supreme Court will have an opportunity to do that here, in the case SBA List v. Dreihaus; or else, to do the exact opposite — to open wide (even wider than they now are) the floodgates to political lies.

Public opinion (e.g., this), and the President of the United States (via his Solicitor General, to be discussed here below), seem to favor opening the floodgates. If that were to happen, then the recently unleashed outpouring of sheer corporate and billionaire cash (via the Citizens United decision, and the more recent McCutcheon decision) into political contests, will become even more unrestrained by (and disconnected from) any consideration of the truthfulness (or not) of this “free speech,” so that the U.S. public will naturally be inundated by torrents, not only of aristocratic money pouring over public opinions, but of outright and provable lies financed by the richest aristocrats, polluting and poisoning those torrents, which will drench voters’ minds, and will thus poison political outcomes (which is why that money is spent — to do precisely this).

U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verilli Jr., in this case, SBA List v. Dreihaus, wrote to the U.S. Supreme Court, defending political liars’ rights:

This case does not require the Court to determine precisely when an alleged chilling of speech [by the threat of being prosecuted for lying in a political campaign] constitutes hardship [being suffered by that liar], because it presents that issue in a unique election-related context that makes the hardship to petitioners [the liars] particularly clear. Petitioners [the liars] have sufficiently alleged that a credible threat of prosecution will chill them from engaging in [deceptive] speech relating to elections for public office, the very type of speech to which the First Amendment ‘has its fullest and most urgent application.’ Eu v. San Francisco Cnty. Democratic Cent. Comm., 489 U.S. 214, 223 (1989) (quoting Monitor Patriot Co. v. Roy, 401 U.S. 265, 272 (1971)). As petitioners explain (Br. 40), under Ohio law, candidates who are the subject of such [lying] speech can try to silence it by complaining to the [Electoral] Commission and thereby tying up the speaker [the liar] in administrative litigation during the short window of time in which the electoral speech [that person’s lie] would be most effective [at deceiving voters].4

The court of appeals largely disregarded these considerations in favor of focusing on evidence suggesting that the Commission proceedings [the investigation into the lie] did not actually deter [the liar] SBA List from disseminating its message [its lie]. Pet. App. 17a-18a. The court correctly recognized that evidence of how agency action [the investigation into that alleged lie] has affected a plaintiff’s conduct is an important factor in the hardship analysis. In this case, however, SBA List’s particular reaction to the Commission proceedings during the 2010 election cycle does not eliminate the objectively credible threat of prosecution that petitioners [SBA List] face if they engage in similar [lying] speech in future election cycles.

When Obama’s mouthpiece there, Verilli, quoted the phrase that’s quoted in “the First Amendment ‘has its fullest and most urgent application’,” in relation to this particular case and context, he was actually quoting from a case in which the court was saying in regard to “California’s prohibition on primary [party] endorsements by the official governing bodies of political parties,” that (as that ruling said), “Indeed, the First Amendment ‘has its fullest and most urgent application’ to speech uttered during a campaign for political office.” That statement didn’t refer at all to lying in political campaigns. However, this is the type of cheap shot that the President’s lawyer must take, in order to argue that lying is “the very type of speech to which the First Amendment ‘has its fullest and most urgent application.’’” He must lie in order to defend political lying as being protected by the U.S. Constitution.

I have earlier argued that President Obama lied with exceptional skill in order to win the White House – and I say this as a Democrat who is opposed to conservatives (supporters of lies) of all parties, including the Democratic Party. So: Obama is really defending here his own practices, which won him the White House. This conservative “Democrat” is so gifted a politician that he could probably have won it with no lies at all, but he took the easy path, and now he is defending it as a matter of alleged Constitutional principle.

He’s on the same side in this as the overt Republicans are. For example, the friend-of-court brief on behalf of the Koch brothers’ Cato Institute and their comedian P.J. O’Rourke, argued in this case that, “No one should be concerned that false political statements won’t be subjected to careful examination” (perhaps by historians, after the liar has been elected and long-since collected his reward, and the honest politician has sunk into obscurity). It’s a race to the bottom they want, and conservative Democrats want it just as much as Republicans do. Cato/O’Rourke then went on to say: “A prohibition on lying devalues the truth. ‘How can you develop a reputation as a straight shooter if lying is not an option?’” In other words: We must allow deception of voters, because otherwise all politics would be honest — and that would be bad (for crooks like them, because politics then wouldn’t continue to be a lying-contest: the type where any real ‘straight shooter’ can’t have even any realistic chance at all of winning). Champion liars want to continue maintaining their advantage, not to yield it; and any law that’s enforced against political liars will remove their existing huge political advantage. Conservatives would still have most aristocratic money on their side, but no longer an unrestrained freedom to spread lies financed by that cash-advantage that they naturally enjoy.

With Obama arguing on the Republican side, and the Republicans arguing on the Republican side, how will the Republican U.S. Supreme Court rule on this matter? Let’s guess.

It could be the final nail in the coffin of democracy in America: the official full implementation of aristocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy, crony capitalism, or whatever else one would call it. Maybe “fake democracy”? Oh, I forgot: we’re already there. But this would take us much farther there.

(Read the full article at Global Research)

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Corporate Welfare, Tyranny

Princeton Study Declares U.S. government an Oligarchy

By Derrick Broze
Ben Swann : April 19, 2014

A new study from Princeton and Northwestern Universities has found that the United States’ government more closely resembles an Oligarchy or a Corporatocracy than a Republic or Democracy. Researchers examined nearly 2,000 policy changes in the United States between 1981 and 2002 and compared the changes to the preferences of average Americans, wealthy citizens, and interest and lobbying groups.

The researchers sought to find the answers to who governs in America, who really rules, and to what extent are U.S. citizens sovereign or powerless. To do this they analyzed four theoretical traditions in American politics. These include Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic Elite Domination, and two types of interest group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism. The researchers write, “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

They found evidence to support the theories of Economic Elite Domination, and Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. The key difference in the theories is the power and influence that wealthy individuals yield versus the average, or median voter.

Despite past researchers suggesting that policy changes are the result of “collective preferences” or that liberalism and conservatism in policies is representative of the views of citizens, the Princeton study suggests “that reality is best captured by mixed theories in which both individual economic elites and organized interest groups (including corporations, largely owned and controlled by wealthy elites) play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.”

The researchers findings also indicate that even when a majority of citizens disagree with the economic elite, and call for policy change, they rarely get it. The researchers blame “the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system.”

The study concludes with the following statement:

“We believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

Although the researchers (and most of the media) refer to the idealized American government as a democracy it is important to remember that the original text of the Constitution called for a republican form of government, as seen in Article 4, section 4:

“The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government,”

(Read the full article at Ben Swann)

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Corporate Welfare, Tyranny

Canadians Face Lower Wages & Job Loses Due To Foreign “Slaves”

Both Canadian workers and temporarily imported workers say Canada’s Temporary Foreign Workers program is not working. Canadians are out of work and struggling to make ends meet, while their replacements are being misled and forced to pay over-priced rent to their employer.

McDonald’s foreign workers call it ‘slavery’

By Kathy Tomlinson
CBC: April 17, 2014

Foreign workers recruited from Belize are accusing McDonald’s Canada of treating them like “slaves,” by effectively forcing them to share an expensive apartment – then deducting almost half their take-home pay as rent.

“When we arrived at the airport, they said, ‘We already have an apartment for you,’ so at that point we already know we don’t have a choice of where to live,” said Jaime Montero, who came to Edmonton with four others in September to work at McDonald’s.

“We had to live there. We were told this is what we are doing,” said another worker who didn’t want to be named because he still works for McDonald’s.

The Belizeans said their dream of making good money in Canada to send to their families quickly shattered. Instead, they pocketed less than $800 per month – which they said was barely enough to live on.

The Belizians worked at McDonald’s locations in south Edmonton and said it took them more than an hour to get to work by public transit.

“You work for us now, so we are your owners. It’s like that, you know,” said Montero. “We felt like slaves. They just brought us and threw us on the side.”

Records from three employees show they made $11 an hour working at various McDonald’s locations and the company took $280 from their pay for rent, bi-weekly. Their remaining take-home pay for the same pay periods was roughly $350.

“[The apartment lease] contracts are signed by McDonald’s. All of our bills – utility bills – were billed [to us] under the name of McDonald’s,” said Montero.

“They brought us here and they are this big huge corporation. We felt that we didn’t have a chance to even voice our opinion to them because they had brought us here so they could ship us back whenever they wanted to,” said Montero. “It was like modern day slavery.”

McDonald’s housed them in a penthouse apartment in downtown Edmonton, even though they worked on the southern outskirts of the city. The corporation signed a six-month lease, which the workers said they were expected to honour as tenants.

“It was too far from work and it was very expensive,” said Montero, who said it took him an hour and a half to get to work by public transit.

“They actually said even if we leave the apartment and go rent another apartment, that McDonald’s would still deduct the rent from our salary,” said the other worker.

Since recent Go Public reports about McDonald’s practices with foreign workers, they said the corporation required all staff to sign an agreement, stipulating they would not speak to the media.

McDonald’s fired Montero in November, after he said managers accused him of complaining online about the company and intimidating other workers, which he and the other Belizeans insisted is not true.

“It was very unfair the way they did it…this was such a blow to me,” said Montero. He was also evicted from the apartment. He still has a work permit, but hasn’t been able to find another job.

“I even slept once outside in the cold. Then I found out about homeless shelters and I stayed out at the homeless shelters,” he said.

“Instead of making money here in Canada my family have had to send money.”

The rental contracts show McDonald’s paid $2,359 per month to rent the suite in the Boardwalk building. The corporation didn’t pay utilities or other extra costs.

Five workers paying $280 bi-weekly works out to $3,030 per month. That suggests McDonald’s charged them $600 more for rent than what it paid. Go Public pointed out that discrepancy to McDonald’s, but received no explanation.

The lease expired at the end of February and the Belizeans have since found a more affordable apartment.

“It’s not easy and it’s not cheap to be here,” said Montero.

(read the full article at CBC)

McDonald’s foreign worker practices face growing investigation

By Kathy Tomlinson
CBC: April 14, 2014

The federal investigation into McDonald’s use of temporary foreign workers has widened to several other locations, as more local workers speak out about feeling sidelined and shortchanged.

“I feel it’s definitely discrimination against Canadians,” said Chris Eldridge, from Lethbridge, Alta.

Eldridge just quit his managerial job for six McDonald’s locations in Alberta, because he said he could no longer stomach denying local employees much-needed shifts to accommodate temporary foreign workers.

“Honestly, some days I wonder, is this still Canada? Everyone is supposed to have equal rights.”

Eldridge was a manager who did the worker scheduling for McDonald’s franchisee Dan Brown. He’s also upset about differences in pay. Many foreign workers started at $10.80 an hour, he said, while local employees doing the same job made less.

Federal rules stipulate that foreign workers coming in to Lethbridge as food service attendants must make at least the “prevailing wage” of $10.41. However, immigration lawyers told Go Public local employees doing the same job are not supposed to be paid less or lose hours as a result.

“I was instructed to ensure, based on the contracts the foreign workers had signed, that they would be guaranteed full-time hours, no questions asked,” said Eldridge, who said that meant he had to shortchange Canadian employees.

[…]

Eldridge said the foreign workers were recruited from Belize, the Philippines and Jamaica by Actyl Group, an international recruiter used by McDonald’s Canada. It charges employers up to $2,000 per worker it recruits.

Actyl’s job website is designed to attract foreign workers. It lists numerous ads for full-time jobs at McDonald’s.

Canadians can apply, but many of the open jobs currently on the Actyl site are not advertised on popular Canadian jobs sites like Kijiji. Linda West of Actyl said that is because those McDonald’s locations already have government approvals to hire foreign workers.

“We never give up on trying to recruit Canadians,” West said. “We have had adverts up for over a year without Canadians applying.”

Eldridge said Brown houses the foreign workers in an apartment building with six to eight employees per unit, and deducts approximately $400 a month from each worker’s pay for rent.

“It’s a big apartment complex, but everyone calls it ‘the compound.’ It’s so enclosed and overpacked in a lot of ways,” said Eldridge.

Go Public asked Brown if he is also the foreign workers’ landlord, but he didn’t answer.

Emily Bryce, who still works at one of his outlets, said she believes the foreigners are exploited because many are professionals by trade and leave their children behind for a chance to live in Canada.

“My Canada isn’t one where you force people to choose between their job and their family. They should be taking full families in and giving them citizenship,” said Bryce.

The whole [foreign worker] program is unjust and it has too many loopholes in it for franchisee owners to exploit them.”
Locals feel marginalized nationwide

Go Public received complaints from McDonald’s workers in other B.C. and Alberta locations, too, as well as Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland.

“The whole time I have worked at the local McDonald’s there has been nothing but favouritism towards the Filipinos,” said a worker in New Brunswick. “Any Canadian that works here feels that if they were to complain it would be viewed racist, but it is a serious problem.”

“I’ve seen countless [local] people turned down [for] the chance to even submit resumes, or have the chance of their resumes to be looked at, before they enter the trash,” said an employee from a B.C. location.

An insider from Edmonton wrote, “Being a former general manager for McDonald’s, I can tell you on the franchisee side of the business this is the preferred hiring method…There are numerous other franchisees in the system that will exclude hiring Canadians first.”

[…]

A former assistant manager from a McDonald’s in Parksville, B.C., who was there for 24 years, said she was effectively pushed out the door in favour of workers from the Philippines.

“All those of us who have left, you know, for sure have all felt pushed out,” said 52-year-old Christina Morrow. “It was reverse discrimination.”

Her former boss, Jamie Johannesen, owns four area franchises. Morrow said he brought in 20 foreign workers when he bought the Parksville location three years ago.

“He said they were better workers…so I would have to cut [local employee] hours to give these people 40 hours.”

Morrow said her work was criticized for the first time in two decades and her pay was cut from $18 to $11 an hour.

“It felt like a knife in my heart, she said. I’d been there 24 years…a lifetime to devote your flesh and blood to a position like that but obviously I wasn’t wanted anymore.”

She quit a year ago, because she says she couldn’t handle the pay cut.

“I would say the foreign workers were definitely favoured in almost every aspect,” said 19-year-old Brayden Chamberlain, who worked at the same McDonald’s for three years.

He quit last spring, because he said his hours had been cut so much it wasn’t worth working there anymore. He said some of the Filipinos had management roles, which made local workers feel marginalized.

“They treat you a lot differently. You’re the minority of the company and you almost end up
feeling exiled, which is why I ended up quitting,” he said. “If you are not Filipino, you have no place there.”

The owner, Johannesen, did not respond to requests for comment.

Go Public asked McDonald’s Canada for comment on this story, but the company said it needed more time to investigate.

[…]

The company said earlier it has 3,400 temporary foreign workers in its 1,400 locations and it abides by all the rules of the federal program.

NDP employment critic Jinny Sims is calling for an emergency debate in Parliament and said the government should now suspend all temporary foreign worker permits for fast-food outlets.

“I believe this is an emergency,” said Sims. “This is creating unnecessary tension and the minister cannot wash his hands of this…his government is allowing this program to be abused.”

(read the full article at CBC)

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Tyranny

Senior Mountie charged with sexual assault of 12-year-old girl

Senior Mountie charged with historical sexual assault of 12-year-old girl

By Shawn Knox
Global News: April 15, 2014

RCMP in Saskatchewan have arrested and charged a senior Mountie and one other person in connection with the sexual assault of a minor in the community of Carlyle in the summer of 1982.

In April of 2013 RCMP received information from an adult female relating to the assault, and then in December of 2013 the victim provided a detailed statement of the assault alleging that she had been assaulted by a male member of the RCMP.

The victim was 12-years-old at the time of the alleged assault.

“As soon as we became aware of the allegations we began a comprehensive criminal investigation which has resulted in charges against the two identified suspects,” said Supt. Alfredo Bangloy, Assistant Criminal Operations Officer In Charge of Provincial Policing.

54-year-old Inspector Ronald Patrick Makar was arrested on Tuesday, April 15 at his workplace – the Wood Buffalo RCMP detachment in Fort McMurray, AB. Makar was charged with one count of having sexual intercourse with a female person without her consent and one count of having sexual intercourse with a female person under the age of 14.

Makar has been an RCMP member for 34 years, and until Tuesday was serving as Operations Officer in Charge of the Wood Buffalo detachment. He has been suspended with pay pending further consideration.

Makar also served in Carlyle, Kyle, Fond du Lac, Regina, Milestone and ‘F’ Division Headquarters in Regina.

Additionally, on April 10, RCMP arrested 56-year-old Constance Haduik of Kyle, SK and charged her with one count of indecent assault of a female person.

(Read the full article at Global News)

Privacy, Tyranny

FBI Abruptly Walks Out On Senate Briefing After Being Asked How ‘Insider Threat’ Program Avoids Whistleblowers

Mike Masnick
Tech Dirt: April 14, 2014

While we’ve been disappointed that Senator Chuck Grassley appears to have a bit of a double standard with his staunch support for whistleblowers when it comes to Ed Snowden, it is true that he has fought for real whistleblower protections for quite some time. Lately, he’s been quite concerned that the White House’s “Insider Threat Program” (ITP) is really just a cover to crack down on whistleblowers. As we’ve noted, despite early promises from the Obama administration to support and protect whistleblowers, the administration has led the largest crackdown against whistleblowers, and the ITP suggests that the attack on whistleblowers is a calculated response. The program documentation argues that any leak can be seen as “aiding the enemy” and encourages government employees to snitch on each other if they appear too concerned about government wrong-doing. Despite all his high minded talk of supporting whistleblowers, President Obama has used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers twice as many times as all other Presidents combined. Also, he has never — not once — praised someone for blowing the whistle in the federal government.

Given all of that, Senator Grassley expressed some concern about this Insider Threat Program and how it distinguished whistleblowers from actual threats. He asked the FBI for copies of its training manual on the program, which it refused to give him. Instead, it said it could better answer any questions at a hearing. However, as Grassley explains, when questioned about this just 10 minutes into the hearing, the FBI abruptly got up and left:

Meanwhile, the FBI fiercely resists any efforts at Congressional oversight, especially on whistleblower matters. For example, four months ago I sent a letter to the FBI requesting its training materials on the Insider Threat Program. This program was announced by the Obama Administration in October 2011. It was intended to train federal employees to watch out for insider threats among their colleagues. Public news reports indicated that this program might not do enough to distinguish between true insider threats and legitimate whistleblowers. I relayed these concerns in my letter. I also asked for copies of the training materials. I said I wanted to examine whether they adequately distinguished between insider threats and whistleblowers.

In response, an FBI legislative affairs official told my staff that a briefing might be the best way to answer my questions. It was scheduled for last week. Staff for both Chairman Leahy and I attended, and the FBI brought the head of their Insider Threat Program. Yet the FBI didn’t bring the Insider Threat training materials as we had requested. However, the head of the Insider Threat Program told the staff that there was no need to worry about whistleblower communications. He said whistleblowers had to register in order to be protected, and the Insider Threat Program would know to just avoid those people.

Now I have never heard of whistleblowers being required to “register” in order to be protected. The idea of such a requirement should be pretty alarming to all Americans. Sometimes confidentiality is the best protection a whistleblower has. Unfortunately, neither my staff nor Chairman Leahy’s staff was able to learn more, because only about ten minutes into the briefing, the FBI abruptly walked out. FBI officials simply refused to discuss any whistleblower implications in its Insider Threat Program and left the room. These are clearly not the actions of an agency that is genuinely open to whistleblowers or whistleblower protection.

And yes, it’s equally troubling that the FBI insists that as long as someone “registers” as a whistleblower, the FBI will suddenly, magically agree to stop investigating them as a “threat.” We already know that’s almost certainly bullshit. The stories of Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou are both clear examples of whistleblowers, who then had the DOJ search through basically everything they’d ever done to try to concoct some sort of Espionage Act case against them. In both cases, the eventual charges were totally ridiculous and unrelated to the whistleblowing they had done, but clearly the only reason they had been investigated was because of their status as whistleblowers. Drake was charged with having a classified document, which was just a meeting agenda and was both improperly classified and then declassified soon after. Kiriakou was charged with revealing the name of a CIA operative to a reporter, where the person in question was already widely known to journalists as working for the CIA.

(Read the full article at Tech Dirt)

Privacy, Tyranny

NSA Said to Exploit Heartbleed Bug for Intelligence for Years

By Michael Riley
Bloomberg: April 11, 2014

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said.

The agency’s reported decision to keep the bug secret in pursuit of national security interests threatens to renew the rancorous debate over the role of the government’s top computer experts. The NSA, after declining to comment on the report, subsequently denied that it was aware of Heartbleed until the vulnerability was made public by a private security report earlier this month.

“Reports that NSA or any other part of the government were aware of the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability before 2014 are wrong,” according to an e-mailed statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Heartbleed appears to be one of the biggest flaws in the Internet’s history, affecting the basic security of as many as two-thirds of the world’s websites. Its discovery and the creation of a fix by researchers five days ago prompted consumers to change their passwords, the Canadian government to suspend electronic tax filing and computer companies including Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) to Juniper Networks Inc. to provide patches for their systems.

Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers

(Read the full article at Bloomberg)

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Tyranny

Canadians are morons … Assumes Their Fraudulently Elected Government

Harper Tories undermining democracy, to their own peril

The Globe and Mail: April 12, 2014

Canadians might be under the impression that a parliamentary committee reviewing legislation, and holding hearings, would use said hearings to listen, and even hear. Sometimes that’s how it goes. On a bill that remakes the electoral system, the heart of our democratic process, the government should be relying on experts, seeking all-party support, and generally taking a non-partisan approach to what is supposed to be a non-partisan matter. But this is not a normal government. The point of these parliamentary hearings for the government has been to hear nothing, to learn nothing – and to say just about anything.

To wit, Democratic Reform Minister Pierre Poilievre this week told senators that Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand has been so critical of the Fair Elections Act because “he wants more power, a bigger budget and less accountability.” Yes, that is surely the reason.

It cannot be because the bill’s change to voter-identification rules threatens to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Canadians. Or that the bill introduces a campaign-spending loophole that eviscerates spending limits, and benefits the Conservative Party. It could not be because the bill gives the winning party in each riding the power to name some of the officials who will oversee the next election. It must not be the way the bill meddles with Elections Canada’s role in investigating or reporting on electoral irregularities. It cannot be because, as a group of academics put it last month, the bill will “undermine the integrity of the Canadian electoral process, diminish the effectiveness of Elections Canada, reduce voting rights, expand the role of money in politics and foster partisan bias in election administration.” No, the criticism must derive from the fact that the man charged with running fair and free elections is as partial, biased and self-interested as Mr. Poilievre.

Conservative senators didn’t just accommodate the government’s rush-rush schedule. At last week’s hearings, they one-upped each other with offers of rhetorical support for the bill.

At the head of the class was Senator Thomas McInnis. On Tuesday, he said he’d seen the type of voting fraud that Mr. Poilievre’s bill aims to stamp out. The Fair Elections Act would end the practice of vouching, a process by which a voter without proper ID, especially ID indicating a current address, can be vouched for by another elector. There is no evidence that this process has led to voter fraud, but now here was a distinguished lawyer and senator saying, hang on, I’ve got evidence.

“I can tell you that vouching is a problem,” said Mr. McInnis. “It’s not just vouching. I’ve witnessed it personally on the streets of Halifax and Dartmouth. It is a problem. Many of these people, first of all, don’t even know who the candidates are and haven’t been involved. That doesn’t absolve them from the right to vote; I realize that. I’ve seen people take them in and almost mark their ballot. That’s how serious this is, and it’s thousands and thousands.”

But the next day, his office issued a clarification. When the senator said he had “witnessed it personally”? What he really meant was that he had not witnessed it personally. He hadn’t meant to say that he’d seen thousands of cases of voter fraud. He hadn’t meant to say that he’d seen even one case of voter fraud.

It sounded a lot like what we’d heard earlier this year from Conservative MP Brad Butt, who said he’d personally seen widespread voter fraud in his riding. He later rose in the House of Commons to abruptly retract his words, saying that none of what he’d said was true.

Mr. McInnis, in his day-after statement, said that the “thousands and thousands” he’d referred to came from Elections Canada’s Neufeld report. But that report, according to the Chief Electoral Officer, the experts, the author of the report, and anyone able to read either of Canada’s official languages, does not contain evidence of widespread voting fraud. It does not even contain evidence of rare and unusual voting fraud. Mr. Poilievre, Mr. McInnis and some of their Conservative colleagues have nevertheless decided to quote parts of the report out of context, and to pretend that the report says the exact opposite of what it says. They are operating on the assumption that Canadians are morons.

(Read the full article at The Globe & Mail)

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