Category Archives: Tyranny

Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

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

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

Nick Cohen
Spectator: March 28, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(read thr full article at Spectator)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Privacy, Tyranny

Leaked Documents Reveal False Flags Used By The Canadian Communications Security Establishment

Press For Truth : March 25, 2015

Leaked documents have revealed that the Communications Security Establishment has been “creating unrest by using false-flags” This could include using ‘honeypot’ or ‘watering hole’ techniques as well as disrupting online traffic by such techniques as deleting emails, freezing internet connections, blocking websites and redirecting wire money transfers.

(Source: Press For Truth)
***

Communication Security Establishment’s cyberwarfare toolbox revealed

By Amber Hildebrandt, Michael Pereira and Dave Seglins
CBC News: March 23, 2015

Top-secret documents obtained by the CBC show Canada’s electronic spy agency has developed a vast arsenal of cyberwarfare tools alongside its U.S. and British counterparts to hack into computers and phones in many parts of the world, including in friendly trade countries like Mexico and hotspots like the Middle East.

The little known Communications Security Establishment wanted to become more aggressive by 2015, the documents also said.

Revelations about the agency’s prowess should serve as a “major wakeup call for all Canadians,” particularly in the context of the current parliamentary debate over whether to give intelligence officials the power to disrupt national security threats, says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, the respected internet research group at University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

“These are awesome powers that should only be granted to the government with enormous trepidation and only with a correspondingly massive investment in equally powerful systems of oversight, review and public accountability,” says Deibert.

Details of the CSE’s capabilities are revealed in several top-secret documents analyzed by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, a U.S. news website co-founded by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who obtained the documents from U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The CSE toolbox includes the ability to redirect someone to a fake website, create unrest by pretending to be another government or hacker, and siphon classified information out of computer networks, according to experts who viewed the documents.

The agency refused to answer questions about whether it’s using all the tools listed, citing the Security of Information Act as preventing it from commenting on such classified matters.

In a written statement, though, it did say that some of the documents obtained by CBC News were dated and do “not necessarily reflect current CSE practices or programs.”

Canada’s electronic spy agency and the U.S. National Security Agency “cooperate closely” in “computer network access and exploitation” of certain targets, according to an April 2013 briefing note for the NSA.

(read the full article at CBC)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Corporate Welfare, Tyranny

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

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

Thinkpol: March 21, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

(read the full article at Thinkpol)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Banksters, Corporate Welfare, Tyranny

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

Matthew Little
Epoch Times : March 19, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Money Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(read the full article at Epoch Times)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Privacy, Tyranny

Chris Hedges on Bill C-51 and the corporate state

H.G. Watson
rabble: March 15, 2015

[…]Why did you want to travel all the way to Toronto to be a part of the protests against Bill C-51?

Chris Hedges: I’ve been fighting you know the [erosion] of civil liberties in the United States for a long time. I sued president Obama over section 1021 of the National Defence Authorization Act, which permits the U.S. military overturning over 150 years of law to carry out domestic policing on American city streets, to seize American citizens who “substantially support” the Taliban, Al Qaeda or something called associated forces — another kind of nebulous phrase — strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military facilities.

I was also part of the lawsuit that worked its way up to the Supreme Court on warrantless wire-tapping. I covered the Stasi state in East Germany, I spent 20 years in some of the most despotic regimes around the globe as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and I think because of that, understand that this is not the kind of power that you ever want to give to a government. 

We can’t talk about free citizens in the state where everyone has all of their electronic forms of communication not only monitored, but stored in perpetuity in government computers. It doesn’t matter if they’re not using it. History has shown that if the government feels threatened or they seek greater control — and I think that is the trajectory of the corporate state — they will use it. The goal of wholesale surveillance, and something that Hannah Arendt wrote about in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is not to discover crimes but to give information to the government that it can use if it decides to arrest a certain category of the population. I think this is extremely grave.

What I find disturbing is that although the revelations of Edward Snowden are known, we’re not reacting. We don’t understand the danger that’s in front of it, when you talk about a population that is watched and tracked 24 hours a day. The relationship between a population that is monitored on that level and knows that [the government watches] them is a relationship between masters and slaves — you can’t even use the word liberty anymore and we’re already at that point.

I want to go back to the point you mentioned, that we’re not reacting. Why do you think that is?

People are politically passive because they have kind of given up on the system. That’s certainly true — more true — in the United States where Congress has a nine per cent approval rating. Only 38 per cent of the population even bothers to cast a ballot anymore. I think the other thing is that they don’t quite understand how incredibly dangerous handing any government this kind of power is.

So I think it’s those two factors, coupled with the fact [that] our mass radical movements — more so again in the United States, but Canada is not immune to this — have been largely broken. Labour unions are under assault, and I find that frightening. 

That’s why I was willing to fly up here because if we don’t react in a sustained way then we will see cemented into place one of the most frightening dystopias in human history — something that dwarfs anything ever dreamed of by the communist Stasi state in East Germany.

In terms of this particular bill, do you think that this fits into a wider trend of similar legislation in the western world?

Of course it fits into a wider trend — not only into the western world but in Canada. Canadians are monitored as closely as U.S. citizens are as closely as British citizens or any other. This is a global phenomenon and the corporate state — and Harper is representative of the corporate power and the corporate state — seeks this kind of control because they know what is coming with climate change and the inevitable financial collapse that is looming now that global speculators are back on a spree as they were before 2008. With a flick of a switch essentially we have both the legal and physical mechanisms through the creation of massive security forces — militarized police forces — to in essence declare a militarized state both in Canada and the United States. Or should we have another catastrophic act of domestic terrorism anything like that, all the mechanisms are there… we have to fight it now.

So do you think that this bill will actually will do anything towards its stated goal of combatting terrorism?

None of these bills are about terrorism. Terrorism is the excuse. That’s what 9/11 was and that’s what this gunman who carried out this attack on Parliament Hill — they seize on that the same way, for instance, the Nazi party seized on the Reichstag fire to strip away civil liberties in Germany. What people forget is that the next day, after the Nazis essentially eviscerated all civil liberties for the German population, everything appeared normal. Everyone went to work; came home; had dinner. They had ceded to themselves this kind of power in the name of fighting terrorism.

But for most people there’s a kind of normalcy and they don’t quite yet understand what a sea change this has been, and how dramatic this change is, and of course how terrifying it is. Totalitarian systems, they creep forward because they have to break any kind of obstacles or opposition that lie in their path. By the time people grasp what has happened to them, its kind of too late. There are no mechanisms left by which they can fight back. That’s kind of where we’re headed; that’s what is going on.

In what ways can we combat this kind of surveillance?

Well I’ve spent a lot of time with Julian Assange, who believes in encryption up to a point. Even Assange says finally the best encryptors — and he is one of them — will finally not be able to keep channels of privacy open. So he’s kind of optimistic in the short term but not in the long term.

I don’t encrypt. Rather than trying to build a parallel encryption mechanism I think what we have to do is carry out sustained and long term acts of civil disobedience in order to try and force the state to back down. I think that’s the only hope we have left. I think that we have to build radical mass movements and radical alternatives. Political parties I don’t trust. I see with the Democrats, they will, under the bush administration, decry the assault on civil liberties, but Obama’s assault on civil liberties has been far more egregious than that carried out by Bush. I don’t think the traditional political establishment has any intention — I can’t speak for Canada, I’m not Canadian, but that is certainly true in the United States that neither the Republican nor the Democrats have any intention of rolling any of this back 

You’ve written a little bit about radicalization and how it really stems from alienation from society. Do you think Bill C-51 that can contribute to radicalization in Canada?

Of course it does because what you do is you target a certain segment of the population and Muslims have already been targeted in the United States and Canada for harassment and abuse and discrimination even though they haven’t done anything. This breeds a kind of rage, especially among the young who feel caught between two cultures already and then feel alienated from two cultures. This feeds into exactly the propaganda that jihadists hand out, which is why you have roughly 20,000 foreign fighters with ISIS, 3,000 or 4,000 of them from Europe and Canada.

What would you propose as a way of them making sure people don’t feel like they are alienated or isolated?

Don’t take away their rights. Don’t take away their right to privacy; don’t take away their right to dissent.

Don’t take away — you know, a functioning democracy is a mechanism by which reform: incremental and peaceful reform can be carried out. When you [shut down] that mechanism you inevitably radicalize, especially your disenfranchised.

You know, if we don’t win this fight, then we are going to cement into place a species of corporate totalitarianism which will usher in a dystopia of terrifying proportions.

(Read the full article and listen to the interview at rabble)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

Torture of Palestinian detainees by Israel soared in 2014 – report

RT: March 8, 2015

The instances of torture of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli services soared sharply in the second half of 2014, after the killings of three Jewish teenagers in June, says data from military courts and anti-torture bodies, collected by Haaretz.

All in all, 51 cases of torture were reported in the second half of last year, according to an attorney representing those accused of security offences. The data was obtained by Haaretz from military courts, and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.

“In years past there were a few rare cases. But something has changed,” the attorney said.

Twenty-three Palestinians sent a number of complaints of torture they had suffered in 2014 by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. Each of the plaintiffs said they experienced several methods of torture.

In the first part of 2014, eight instances of torture were reported. They included beatings and sleep deprivations. However, the second half of the year saw ‘darker’ methods of interrogation, which included tying up suspects in what is called “banana” and the “frog” positions.

Of fifty-one instances of torture, there were 19 complaints of sleep deprivation, 18 of tying, 12 of beatings and 2 of shaking.

2014 saw 59 torture complaints, which is a rise, compared to 2013 (16 instances of violent means), 2012 (30), and 2011 (27).

Thousands of Palestinian detainees were tortured by Israelis up to 1999, a year when the High Court of Justice prohibited the systematic use of torture. However, it left a small ‘window’ for Israeli services: an interrogator could claim that there was an urgent need to flout the law. The rules when this “need” can be implemented are not open to the public.

Different types of torture are mentioned in the Shin Bet documents, officials in the military court who saw them told Haaretz. They include blindfolding, beating, slapping, forcing a suspect to stand for hours with hands at his sides and tying people up in the “banana” position. All these methods are less brutal than covering the head with a sack, tying in the “frog” position and sleep deprivation, say the documents.

(Read the full article at RT)

Tyranny, WTF

The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site’

Spencer Ackerman
The Guardian : February 24, 2015

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:

Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
Shackling for prolonged periods.
Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.

“Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”

The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.

Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.

“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.

Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.

“This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”

(read the full article at The Guardian)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Privacy, Tyranny

Canadian anti-terror bill opens door for human rights abuses, law scholars argue

John Barber
The Guardian : February 27, 2015

More than 100 Canadian law professors have warned the prime minister, Stephen Harper, that a sweeping new anti-terror law introduced by his Conservative government is a “dangerous piece of legislation” that threatens to undermine the rule of law, human rights and democracy itself.

Although one poll showed that four out of five Canadians supported the proposed law shortly after it was tabled last month, criticisms that originated with scattered human-rights groups have since been amplified by a growing chorus of the nation’s leading jurists, academics, editorial-writers and opinion-makers.

The latest open letter follows an earlier plea to scrap the bill signed by four former Canadian prime ministers, five former supreme court justices and several cabinet ministers.

“Protecting human rights and protecting public safety are complementary objectives, but experience has shown that serious human rights abuses can occur in the name of maintaining national security,” the former prime ministers and supreme court jurists wrote. “Given the secrecy around national security activities, abuses can go undetected and without remedy. This results not only in devastating personal consequences for the individuals, but a profoundly negative impact on Canada’s reputation as a rights-respecting nation.”

The law professors present a close legal analysis of the proposed law, concluding with a sharp criticism of the government’s attempt to speed it through parliament.

“It is sadly ironic that democratic debate is being curtailed on a bill that vastly expands the scope of covert state activity when that activity will be subject to poor or even non-existent democratic oversight or review,” the experts wrote.

Amid growing criticism and a filibuster in parliament, the Conservatives reluctantly agreed late in the week to extend the previously abbreviated schedule for committee hearings on the bill, impeding what had hitherto been its fast track into law.

The move raised hope among opponents that the Harper government will ultimately be forced to accept amendments to curtail the sweeping new police and spy powers contained in the bill.

Drafted in response to two attacks by lone terrorists this year, including one that ended with a hail of bullets in the corridor of the House of Commons in Ottawa, Bill C-51 significantly loosens current restrictions on police and spies seeking to disrupt terrorist activity. But critics claim that it also opens the way for the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) to target legitimate dissent, making criminals of environmentalists, native people and other protesters hostile to the government.

Previously, the prime minister has derided the criticisms as “ridiculous” and critics as members of a conspiracy-addled “black helicopter fleet”. But the latest fusillade from some of the country’s leading legal scholars is the most forceful attack so far levelled against the increasingly controversial new bill.
‘Neither extremists, nor dismissive of threats’

In a letter running more than 4,000 words and covering “some (and only some)” of the terror bill’s alleged defects, the professors warn that the new law would not only do little to fight terrorism, it could actually set back the cause.

“In this respect,” they wrote, “we wish it to be clear that we are neither ‘extremists’ (as the Prime Minister has recently labelled the Official Opposition for its resistance to Bill C-51) nor dismissive of the real threats to Canadians’ security that government and Parliament have a duty to protect.

“Rather, we believe that terrorism must be countered in ways that are fully consistent with core values (that include liberty, non-discrimination, and the rule of law), that are evidence-based, and that are likely to be effective.”

The growing resistance to the new measures has eclipsed the popular approval that greeted the bill when the prime minister introduced it in January, vowing revenge against “violent jihadists” who “want to harm us because they hate our society and the values it represents”.

(read the full article at The Guardian)

—
Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Geopolitics/War, Tyranny, WTF

Gazans flee floods caused by Israel’s dams opening

Palestinians were evacuated from their homes after Israeli authorities opened a number of dams flooding the Gaza Valley.

Al Jazeera : February 22, 2015

At least 80 Palestinian homes have been flooded after water levels in the Gaza Valley (Wadi Gaza) rose to almost three meters, forcing families to evacuate after Israeli authorities opened several dams.

The Gaza Ministry of Interior said in a statement on Sunday that civil defence services had worked alongside teams from the Minsitry of Public Works to evacuate families to shelters in al-Bureij refugee camp and in al-Zahra neighbourhood sponsored by UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency.

Brigadier Gerneral Said Al-Saudi, chief of the civil defence agency in Gaza, told Al Jazeera: “Israel opened water dams, without warning, last night, causing serious damage to Gazan villages near the border. More than 40 homes were flooded and 80 families are currently in shelters as a result.”

He added that the dam opening would adversely affect local agriculture as the flooded area included Israel poultry and animal farms.

“We are appealing to human rights organisations and international rights organisations to intervene to prevent further such action.”

(read the full article at Al Jazeera)