Canada « Tikkunista!

3. Living in Lockuptown

Jan-27-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Slavery is alive and well in Lockuptown, the city of prisoners in the US, and now the second largest American city. Adam Gopnik’s stunning article from this week’s New Yorker looks at the number and way that millions are imprisoned, and at the CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America, the company that makes money from them. This is an unforgettable article. We follow this with a close examination of how the CCA shapes the law to create more prisoners, and end with Jane Jacobs, who presciently highlighted the precise moral problem with this.

* The Caging of America Adam Gopnik The New Yorker

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

…..No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

* Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law NPR

Last year, two men showed up in Benson, Ariz., a small desert town 60 miles from the Mexico border, offering a deal.

Glenn Nichols, the Benson city manager, remembers the pitch….What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants. “They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community,” Nichols said, “the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate…They talked like they didn’t have any doubt they could fill it.” That’s because prison companies like this one had a plan — a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants. And the plan became Arizona’s immigration law….The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.

* Jane Jacobs and the Problem of Monstrous Hybrids Forbes

Delegating a coercive government functions like operating a prison to a private company is dangerous because the prison company has divided loyalty. The people in charge of a prison ought to be completely devoted to serving the public and the rule of law. But a private company also has an obligation to generate profits for shareholders, which can lead them to cut corners in ways that damage the rights of others. In this case, the profit motive drove a prison company to lobby for laws that would swell the prison population, harming both immigrants and taxpayers.

Jacobs calls combinations of the two syndromes—and the institutions that operate on such hybrid moral systems—”monstrous hybrids.”

6. Enemies of the (Canadian) State

Jan-27-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Two examples of how the Canadian Government™ (a registered trade-mark of the Conservative Party of Canada) is demonizing anyone who opposes their policies. This is wrong on so many levels… but you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t agree. There are two links through which you can share your views with the government on this policy.

* The Man Who Crushed the Keystone XL Pipeline Boston Globe

He certainly has impeccable timing. From “stop coal” protests to the Occupy encampments, something stirred in America late last year, and McKibben sensed it. “He has caught the wind of the environmental movement and will help the movement regain its footing,” says John Adams, cofounder of the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council and recipient of the 2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom. “He is soon to be known – if he isn’t already – as one of the top environmental leaders in the country.” Or, as Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune puts it: “He hasn’t quite broken through to the world of US Weekly and Teen Beat, but give him time. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few years from now my daughter has posters of Bill McKibben up on the wall.”

It might not even take that long. Four days after the Keystone protest, Barack Obama postponed a decision on the pipeline until 2013. McKibben promptly declared the pipeline dead, tweeting, “a done deal has come spectacularly undone!”..McKibben and his Keystone protests put a finger in this one particular dike, at least temporarily, and got an environmental cause on the Colbert Report. And that was just the beginning. America, it seems, is about to have a McKibben Moment.

* Why I’m Worried about my trip to Canada. Bill McKibbon 350.org

I’ve been visiting Canada all my life, but I’m a little worried about my upcoming trip.

In late March I’m supposed to come to Vancouver to give a couple of talks. But now I read that Joe Oliver, your country’s Minister of Natural Resources, is condemning “environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block” Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta to the Pacific.

I think he’s talking about people like me.

So I’m pushing back a bit, and I need your help. Let’s tell Joe Oliver that preventing the combustion of the second-largest pool of carbon on the planet isn’t “radical” — it’s exactly the opposite. It’s rational. It’s responsible. And it’s just plain right.

Click here to sign the petition to Prime Minister Harper and Joe Oliver, and help show that Canadians everywhere are committed to stopping the oil sands.

* Prime Minister’s Office Tried to Silence Enbridge Gateway Pipeline Critic (Thanks Kyla)

The Prime Minister’s Office tried to cut funding of a registered intervenor in the Enbridge Pipeline Review, calling ForestEthics Canada an, “Enemy of the Government of Canada” and an, “Enemy of the People of Canada”, according to allegations detailed in a sworn affidavit, dated January 23, 2012.

Sworn by Andrew Frank, former Senior Communications Manager with ForestEthics Canada, and an instructor in the Environmental Protection Technology program at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the affidavit cites three senior managers with Tides Canada and ForestEthics, as well as personal email correspondence.

“Today, I am taking the extraordinary step of risking my career, my reputation and my personal friendships, to act as a whistleblower and expose the undemocratic and potentially illegal pressure the Harper government has apparently applied to silence critics of the Enbridge Northern Gateway oil tanker/pipeline plan,” says Frank. “Canadian citizens will be shocked to learn that their own government is labelling critics of the Enbridge oil tanker/pipeline project, ‘Enemies of the Government of Canada’. When a government starts labelling its own citizens ‘enemies’, it has lost its moral authority to govern.”

* Are You An “Enemy Of The Government Of Canada”? Leadnow

This week, we learned that the Harper Government is using closed-door intimidation tactics against Canadian charities. They’re trying to silence groups that question our government’s plans to push the Enbridge western pipeline and supertankers project through overwhelming local opposition, and recklessly expand the tar sands at all costs.
According to the whistleblower, a former senior communications manager for ForestEthics named Andrew Frank, the Prime Minister’s Office told Tides Canada they consider ForestEthics to be an “enemy of the Government of Canada” because of the group’s opposition to the Enbridge pipeline and tar sands expansion

Click here to tell Prime Minister Harper to stop the threats and ensure fair hearings for Canadians,

4. Spot the Paranoids! The All-New Fun Game!

Jan-13-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Three world leaders make the paranoid claim that foreign radicals are trying to destabilize their countries. Two are lying; one is dead on. (“Even paranoids have real enemies.”) Further clues needed? Walkom exposes Canada’s real foreigner destroyers here (Hint: America’s Exxon Mobil, Britain’s BP, France’s Total E&P, China’s SinoCanada Petroleum Corp., Japan Canada Oil Sands Ltd,. and South Korean conglomerate Daewoo) and Richard (Tikun Olam) Silverstein shares a Mossad insider’s report here

* Oil Sands Pipeline Battle Turns Ugly Guardian (Thanks Gabe!)

Canada let loose an extraordinary rant against opponents of a controversial project to pump tar sands crude to Pacific Coast ports on Monday, accusing campaigners of colluding with foreign “radicals” and “jet-setting celebrities” to hijack the government.

The diatribe, which came as an open letter from the natural resources minister Joe Oliver, caused a furore in Canada.

It was seen as a sign of the conservative government’s frustration at growing opposition to its efforts to find global markets for its vast reserves of tar sands crude, a type of petroleum deposit found in large quantities in Canada….In his open letter, Oliver accused opponents of controversial pipeline projects of destroying Canada’s economy in pursuit of their “radical ideological agenda” by blocking the government’s efforts to find new markets for tar sands crude.

* Syria’s Assad Blames ‘Foreign Conspiracy’ BBC News

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has blamed a foreign conspiracy for trying to destabilise Syria. The “external conspiracy is clear to everybody”, he said in his first public remarks in months. Syria’s violent crackdown on 10 months of protests against his rule has drawn international condemnation.

* Iran Nuclear Scientist’s Death Followed Israeli Warning Of ‘Unnatural’ Events The Guardian

The assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan came less than 24 hours after Israel’s military chief warned that the Tehran regime could face “unnatural” events during the critical year ahead, fuelling speculation that the hand of the fabled Israeli intelligence service the Mossad was behind the latest attack.

Benny Gantz, the Israeli Defence Forces chief of staff, told a parliamentary committee: “For Iran, 2012 is a critical year in combining the continuation of its nuclearisation, internal changes in the Iranian leadership, continuing and growing pressure from the international community and things which take place in an unnatural manner.”…After the latest explosion, caused by magnetic bombs attached to the side of Roshan’s car by an assailant on a motorcycle, the Iranian regime was quick to blame Israel. “This terrorist act was carried out by agents of the Zionist regime, with the aim of stopping our scientists,” the vice-president, Mohammad Reza Rahimi, told state television.

Jan. 6th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 1

Jan-06-2012 | Comments (0)

1. 2011 Retrospective (text)

Bird’s Eye: Janus is the Roman God of beginnings and transitions, the God for whom January is named. He has two faces, one to look forward, one to look back. We start with looking back at some of the high/low lights of the year. The first story is about the Occupy movement, which gave so many of us hope. A huge mashup of lists follows – everything from best Jewish Twitters of the year to 9 funniest autocorrects – as well as books, films, TV shows, etc etc etc. We single out Canada’s environmental failure, aptly delineated by Maude Barlow, and end with Neil Gaiman’s good wishes, (formatted exceedingly badly, imho.)

* Compassion Is Our New Currency Rebecca Solnit Tom Dispatch (Thanks, Amy!)

Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed — and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.

The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas. The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”

* The Best And Worst Of Everything In 2011: A Mega, Meta MashupAdam Penenberg

We hacked through dozens of year-end lists–and, yes, checked them twice–to bring you our curated best and worst of 2011. Here’s the mother of all roundups that you will find online, offline, and everywhere else. Each line is taken from those other year-end lists.

* The biggest story of 2011 for me? Canada’s failure on climate change Maude Barlow, Rabble

The biggest story of 2011 for me was the national and international attention given to the environmental dangers of Canada’s tar sands, and the failure of the Harper government to meet our obligations to combat climate change. Until this year, most criticism of Canada’s climate policy was restricted to Canadian and some international environmentalists. But three events of 2011 caused Canada’s energy and climate policies to come under intense scrutiny here in Canada and around the world.

* Neil Gaiman’s New Year Wishes

2. Followups: Durban, Ron Paul, Canada’s Kyoto Cut

Dec-23-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: A trio of followups to last week: Monbiot contrasts governments swift action to save banks as opposed to their reluctance to save the planet. Curious, that. Ron Paul, currently leading Iowa polls, was omitted last week from our GOP smackdown. While the good doctor is rational, he is no less insane than his partners in grime, and Monbiot explores where his policies lead us. And while we covered Canada’s flight from Kyoto, we didn’t fully dissect Harpo’s claim that this would save Canada money. Well, it won’t.

* Why Is It So Easy to Save the Banks – but So Hard to Save the Biosphere? George Monbiot Common Dreams

They bailed out the banks in days. But even deciding to bail out the planet is taking decades.

Nicholas Stern estimated that capping climate change would cost around 1% of global GDP, while sitting back and letting it hit us would cost between 5 and 20%. One per cent of GDP is, at the moment, $630bn. By March 2009, Bloomberg has revealed, the US Federal Reserve had committed $7.77 trillion to the banks. That is just one government’s contribution: yet it amounts to 12 times the annual global climate change bill. Add the bailouts in other countries, and it rises several more times.

This support was issued on demand: as soon as the banks said they wanted help, they got it. On just one day the Federal Reserve made $1.2tr available – more than the world has committed to tackling climate change in 20 years.

* This Bastardised Libertarianism Makes ‘Freedom’ An Instrument Of Oppression George Monbiot The Guardian

Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?

In the name of freedom – freedom from regulation – the banks were permitted to wreck the economy. In the name of freedom, taxes for the super-rich are cut. In the name of freedom, companies lobby to drop the minimum wage and raise working hours. In the same cause, US insurers lobby Congress to thwart effective public healthcare; the government rips up our planning laws; big business trashes the biosphere. This is the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak, the rich to exploit the poor.

* Canada’s Kyoto Math Doesn’t Add Up Pembina Institute (Thanks, Dave!)

It wasn’t particularly surprising to hear that Canada is withdrawing. Minister Kent’s painful efforts to neither confirm nor deny rumours of Canada’s intentions made it perfectly clear what those intentions were. Nor was it news that Canada will miss its Kyoto commitments to reduce emissions by a wide margin: a complete lack of effort on the part of Liberal and Conservative governments alike gave our country no chance of meeting them.

What was surprising was the Minister’s attempt to spin this withdrawal as a positive step for Canada’s economy. While taking action on climate change does come with costs, they are entirely manageable. The costs of inaction — in Canada, let alone on a global scale — are not….“Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment avoided before 2020, an additional $4.3 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”

2. Durban, Canada, Shame

Dec-16-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: As the planet heats up, to levels that will force over a hundred million to become refugees, Canada behaves like the CEO in the classic New Yorker cartoon. Yes there was progress in Durban, but whether it was enough (Magic 8-Ball says ‘no way’) it will happen with Canada dragging their feet. We look at what happened, and at world reaction to Canada’s copout, from countries from the UK to China. And we end with a fine interview with Naomi Klein, who makes it clear where the real Canadian government objection lies.

* What Really Happened in Durban–and Will It Be Enough to Combat Climate Change? Scientific American

But for those countries that face an economic threat from combating climate change, such as fossil fuel titans like Saudi Arabia and Canada, working to reduce emissions remains all pain with little gain. Canada’s emissions of greenhouse gas emissions, for example, have risen by more than 30 percent above 1990 levels during a period when they were supposed to decline by 6 percent, largely due to the development of oil from tar sands in Alberta. As a result, Canada walked away from the Kyoto Protocol on December 12, abandoning its commitment. “They are willing to change the chemical composition of the atmosphere in order to make money,” says Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, an organization working to promote urgent action to combat climate change.

There is also nothing in the Durban deal that will prevent it from meeting the same fate as the “Bali Action Plan” that imploded at the Copenhagen climate talks in 2007. But even if it does result in a global treaty, it remains to be seen whether that treaty will be able to restrain the economic self-interest of major polluters such as Canada.

* Canada Condemned At Home And Abroad For Pulling Out Of Kyoto Treaty The Guardian

Canada has been condemned at home and abroad as “irresponsible” and “reckless” for pulling out of the Kyoto climate treaty, just a day after committing to a future legally binding deal at a major UN climate summit.

“I regret Canada’s withdrawal and am surprised over its timing,” said the UN climate chief Christiana Figueres. “Canada has a moral obligation to itself and future generations to lead in the global effort.” China, which agreed for the first time to legal limits on its emissions at the summit in Durban, denounced Canada’s decision as “preposterous” in its state media and called it “an excuse to shirk responsibility” in tackling global warming.

The domestic reaction was equally fierce with the announcement by Canada’s environment minister, Peter Kent, described as “shameful” and “a total abdication of our responsibilities”. Under the Kyoto protocol, Canada was committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 6% by 2012, compared to its 1990 levels. But its actual emissions have risen by over 30%, making failure inevitable. Canada’s inaction was blamed by some on its desire to protect the lucrative but highly polluting exploitation of tar sands, the second biggest oil reserve in the world.

* Why Canada Shuns Its Green CommitmentXinhua (Official Chinese News Agency)

Countries including India expressed their worry that Canada’s quit from the binding Kyoto agreement would jeopardize the future conferences. France’s foreign ministry called the move “bad news for the fight against climate change”, a sentiment echoed by some other countries. A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry told reporters that the decision was “regrettable and flies in the face of the efforts of the international community”.

Japan’s environment minister, Goshi Hosono, also urged Canada to stay in the protocol. Kent, however, claimed that Canada would have to pay billions to meet its Kyoto protocol target.Canada was meant to cut emissions by 6% by 2012 on 1990 levels, but instead they have risen by around a third. “To meet the targets under Kyoto for 2012 would be the equivalent of … the transfer of $14bn (£8.7bn) from Canadian taxpayers to other countries – the equivalent of $1,600 from every Canadian family – with no impact on emissions or the environment,” Kent was cited as saying.

* Naomi Klein’s Inconvenient Climate Conclusions New York Times

Naomi Klein, the author of a string of provocative and popular books including “The Shock Doctrine,” recently took on global warming policy and campaigns in “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” a much-discussed cover story for The Nation that has been mentioned by readers here more than once in the last few weeks. The piece begins with Klein’s conclusion, reached after she spent time at a conclave on climate sponsored by the libertarian Heartland Institute, that passionate corporate and conservative foes of curbs on greenhouse gases are right in asserting that a meaningful response to global warming would be a fatal blow to free markets and capitalism. She challenges the environmental left to embrace this reality instead of implying that modest changes in lifestyle and shopping habits and the like can decarbonize human endeavors on a crowding planet.

3. RIP: Civil Liberties

Dec-16-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Maybe the bird’s just in touch with its inner curmudgeon, chirping how it’s getting so much worse. But in Canada, Immigration Minister Kenney arbitrarily ruled that Muslim women can either wear a niqab or become Canadian, but not both. In the US, the rain that falls on your house is not yours, so don’t collect it. And the US has now passed a law saying they can legally arrest and hold – without trial – anyone, forever. Or at least until the end of the war on terror.

* Citizenship Veil Ban Coerces Women To Fit Into The ‘Mainstream’ Toronto Star

Is the Canadian citizenship ceremony a place where Muslim women should show up with their faces covered to take the oath? Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government thinks not. And it’s a fair bet that a lot of Canadians would agree…. As Immigration Minister Jason Kenney sees it, the veil “reflects a certain view about women that we don’t accept in Canada. We want women to be full and equal members of Canadian society and certainly when they’re taking the citizenship oath, that’s the right place to start.” Again, most people would probably agree.

All that said, should Canada be coercing women to fit into the “mainstream,” whatever that may be in our pluralistic society, by withholding citizenship, along with the right to vote, run for public office and hold some jobs? Is the citizenship ceremony the place to demand that newcomers give up deeply held religious or cultural practices that are perfectly legal and don’t hurt anyone else? Is it the place to be telling newcomers to behave and look just like us, or pay the price?

…Where does the Conservative government get off by denying otherwise qualified people citizenship without benefit of a debate in Parliament and the appropriate legislation? It’s one thing to expect newcomers to speak English or French, to grasp something of our history and to respect our laws. It’s quite another to demand that they pay obeisance to mainstream cultural preferences. Where could this leave any minority?

* Collecting Rainwater Now Illegal in Many StatesNatural News

Many Western states, including Utah, Washington and Colorado, have long outlawed individuals from collecting rainwater on their own properties because, according to officials, that rain belongs to someone else. As bizarre as it sounds, laws restricting property owners from “diverting” water that falls on their own homes and land have been on the books for quite some time in many Western states. Only recently, as droughts and renewed interest in water conservation methods have become more common, have individuals and business owners started butting heads with law enforcement over the practice of collecting rainwater for personal use.

It’s illegal in Utah to divert rainwater without a valid water right, and Mark Miller of Mark Miller Toyota, found this out the hard way. After constructing a large rainwater collection system at his new dealership to use for washing new cars, Miller found out that the project was actually an “unlawful diversion of rainwater.” Even though it makes logical conservation sense to collect rainwater for this type of use since rain is scarce in Utah, it’s still considered a violation of water rights which apparently belong exclusively to Utah’s various government bodies.

* The US Declares The World A Battlefield, Making Anyone Vulnerable To Indefinite Military Detention Al Jazeera

While it’s known that the US has used indefinite detention of suspects in its “war on terror”, the House and Senate are just a vote away from making the same treatment legal for US citizens apprehended within the US. The Senate already passed one version of the 2012 National Defence Authorisation Act (or NDAA) on December 1, with 93 votes in favour of and seven against – a remarkable margin.
…. Provisions in the bill codify an approach that allows for endless detention of US citizens and non-citizens picked up anywhere in the world. They also gives the US military the option to detain US citizens suspected of participating or aiding in terrorist activities without a trial, indefinitely. A person can be detained “under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities”, the bill states. The hostility in question here is the “war on terror”, and at the moment, it seems to have no end.

2. Crime Does Pay

Dec-09-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Crime doesn’t pay for the criminals, (unless they’re the Wall Street 1%) but it pays very well for the prison corporations. Alternet explains how the US system makes money, and the stunning video on Serco shows the international reach of such companies. You won’t forget this film. Meanwhile, in Canada, crime and fear of crime are down, but the Harper government is putting new laws and prisons in place. We have a place for you to protest this absurd waste of money and lives.

* Meet the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest private prison company Alternet

Last year the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison company, received $74 million of taxpayers’ money to run immigration detention centers. Their largest facility in Lumpkin, Georgia, receives $200 a night for each of the 2,000 detainees it holds, and rakes in yearly profits between $35 million and $50 million.

Prisoners held in this remote facility depend on the prison’s phones to communicate with their lawyers and loved ones. Exploiting inmates’ need, CCA charges detainees here $5 per minute to make phone calls. Yet the prison only pays inmates who work at the facility $1 a day. At that rate, it would take five days to pay for just one minute.

* Serco: The Most Powerfullest Company You’ve Probably Never Heard Of YouTube

* Statscan: 9 In 10 Canadians Feel Safe From CrimeHuffPo

On the eve of dramatic Conservative efforts to toughen up the justice system, a new Statistics Canada survey suggests a vast majority of Canadians don’t see crime as an imminent threat. The study, conducted in 2009 and released Thursday, found 93 per cent of those surveyed said they feel safe from crime — a similar result to a similar survey in 2004, before Stephen Harper’s Conservatives began their tough-on-crime campaign. Crime rates overall have been falling for a decade.

“The numbers seem to hold, despite a lot of rhetoric which you would think would drive them in another direction. I think that’s a pretty interesting thing,” said Vincent Sacco, a Queen’s University sociology professor who has studied perceptions of crime in Canada since the 1970s.

* Tell the Senate: don’t rubber-stamp the Crime Bill

Now, the struggle for Canadian justice moves to the Senate. The Senate’s job is to provide a “sober second thought.” Senators are appointed for life, and free to make their own choices. They can review the evidence, change the bill, and force another vote. Every day, opposition grows as Canadians learn more about the Crime Bill, but Prime Minister Harper is putting enormous pressure on Senators to rubber-stamp the bill quickly so it can pass before Christmas. There is only one thing that can balance the scales: a massive public outcry from Canadians like you, right now.

Click here to send an urgent message to the Senators that represent your province, asking them to rise above partisan politics, look at the evidence, and make Canada safer, not meaner!

4. People versus Corporations

Dec-02-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: We start big scale, looking at the overthrow of democratically elected leaders and the policies their people voted for in favour of the economic policies banks want. Two medium shots look at fights between people and corporations, the first by by Zellers’ employees, (targeted by Target); the second by New Hampshire residents. And we end with a heart-cheering video of something we’ve all always wanted to do: turn a slew of venomous snakes loose in the office of a bureaucrat who wouldn’t listen. (Not herpetophobic safe!)

* The Markets Distrust Democracy. Jonathan Freedland The Guardian

Democracy’s humbling has been most dramatically visible in Greece and Italy, where elected leaders have been pushed aside in favour of technocrats and fixers, elevated without so much as shaking a single voter’s hand. Their mission will include the surrender of much economic sovereignty, putting those decisions further out of the reach of their own citizens. What Greeks and Italians endure today, other eurozone nations might well face tomorrow as they are told to make similar sacrifices of autonomy to save their economic skin.

Whether in Europe or beyond, democratic leaders have seemed powerless to beat back the engulfing global crisis, the failure of the G20 at Cannes exposing their weakness for all to see. And yet, according to one who was there, the leaders of the world’s authoritarian states – China, Russia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia – had a spring in their step in Cannes, confident that they could face down whatever the economic meltdown threw at them.

… 2011 has punctured the sense of easy supremacy democratic societies used to enjoy. To reassert themselves they might have to break from the rules now choking them, and insist that it is people, not markets, that are sovereign.

* Target Canada Is Going To Fire Zellers Employees At 135 Stores, To Break The Union At 15 Stores. Globe & Mail

Target Corporation is locked in a fight to prevent Zellers employees from maintaining their union status, as the discount giant pushes to keep its costs down for its foray into the competitive Canadian retail field. Target’s blueprint for Canada entails converting about 135 Zellers stores to the Target name by 2013 after letting go all the Zellers employees and starting fresh with newly hired staff – and no union. Currently about 15 of the Zellers stores are unionized. But now, in a test case, the union has applied to the B.C. Labour Relations Board to declare Target as the “successor employer” to Zellers at an outlet in Burnaby, B.C., and keep the employees unionized.

* Unions Beat GOP Candidates as New Hampshire Blocks Anti-Labor Law NationofChange

On Wednesday, after months of wrangling over the issue, the New Hampshire House of Representatives killed a plan promoted by the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council to make New Hampshire a so-called “right-to-work” state. The law was blocked because not just Democrats but almost two dozen Republicans rejected the counsel of presidential candidate Perry — who addressed the legislature Wednesday morning — and voted with organized labor and community groups that rallied to defend collective-bargaining rights.

* Snake Charmer Releases Cobras In Tax Office 2 minute video, via Boing Boing

A snake charmer in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh was angry that the government did not grant him a plot of land to keep his reptiles. So he went into the state’s tax office and released a slew of snakes, including poisonous cobras.

2. Post-Occupied

Nov-25-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: It is impressive what the occupy movement has achieved: a change in the worldwide political agenda to focus on the problem of a corporate plutocracy. It is unprecedented to achieve that in three months. Proof? Paul Martin, Canada’s ex-Prime Minister, came out in support of OWS. But now what? Rolling Stone sums up the OWS history; the Toronto Star looks at the disbanding of the occupied parks as the best thing possible for the movement at this point, and it appears the 1% is very worried, indeed.

* Inside Occupy Wall Street Rolling Stone

It started with a Tweet – “Dear Americans, this July 4th, dream of insurrection against corporate rule” – and a hashtag: #occupywallstreet. It showed up again as a headline posted online on July 13th by Adbusters, a sleek, satirical Canadian magazine known for its mockery of consumer culture. Beneath it was a date, September 17th, along with a hard-to-say slogan that never took off, “Democracy, not corporatocracy,” and some advice that did: “Bring tent.”

….Even the instigators and architects present at the creation marvel at how things just happened. “It was a magic moment,” says Kalle Lasn, Adbusters’ 69-year-old co-founder. “After that, things took on a life of their own, and then it was out of our hands.”

Adbusters’ call to arms had been timid by the standards of the movement quickly taking form. The magazine had proposed a “worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics,” but their big ideas went no further than pressuring Obama to appoint a presidential commission on the role of money in politics. In Lasn’s imagination, though, that would be just the start…. They were still thinking in inches.

* Occupy Toronto: They Can’t Evict A Conversation Toronto Star

“Where are the actionable deliverables?” is the repeated objection right-wingers have used to dismiss the movement outright. But, in just a month, big things have come out of the conversation unfurling in St. James Park. To name a few:

1. People affected by decisions should be at the table making them. …This is a radical idea.

2. Tenet Number Two: No one gets left behind

3. The revival of volunteerism. Go down to St. James Park any day, and you will see people chopping wood, ladling soup, delivering water, picking up garbage. The motto here is: “Be the change you are asking for.”

4. The medium for discussion they’ve developed at the general assemblies: the speakers’ microphone. This is sharing personified – each person gathered repeats the words of the speaker, so others can hear them. Have you tried it? It’s amazing, once you get over the embarrassment of participating so heartily.

Over the past month, I’ve visited St. James Park a dozen times. I’ve always left inspired. So have other people.

* Memo Reveals How Seriously Powerful Interests Take Occupy Wall Street NationofChange

This morning, Up With Chris Hayes unveiled a major scoop: the show obtained a written pitch to the American Bankers Association from a prominent Washington lobbying firm, proposing a $850,000 smear campaign against Occupy Wall Street.

The memo, issued by Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford, described the danger presented by the burgeoning movement, saying that if Democrats embraced Occupy, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street.… It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.” Furthermore, it notes that “the bigger concern…should be that Republicans will no longer defend Wall Street companies.”

2. The Sticky Issue of the Tar Sands

Nov-18-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: An excellent article from MIT’s Technology Review explores the tar sands issue in intelligent and unbiased (ymmv) detail. Two key points it argues: the question is when and how the development will happen, not if; the Canadian government can control the amount of pollution and carbon released by setting penalties for doing that. At present, there is no penalty for pollution, so it doesn’t make economic sense to invest money in finding ways to reduce it. We follow up with an amusing etymological piece exploring why you may say “oil sands” and I say “tar sands”, and end with Peter Kent, Canada’s environment minister, accusing those who oppose the tar sands of being traitors to Canada.

*Alberta’s Oil Sands Heat Up Technology Review

The question for oil-sands innovators is whether the financial risk of developing new types of in situ technologies will pay off. Cenovus needs a global oil price of just $45 to $50 per barrel to turn a profit on its Christina Lake investments; with prices now above $75 per barrel, it is making good money. In an era of cheap natural gas and pricey oil, Canada’s bitumen producers will need an extra push before they commit billions of dollars to alternatives to mining and SAGD…. Says Heather MacLean, a professor of engineering and public policy at the University of Toronto, “There has to be some type of a policy push … to really motivate the most efficient production and reduction of greenhouse gases and other environmental impacts.” What is needed, she says, is a price on carbon. Two years ago, Alberta introduced a carbon tax of $15 per ton, but that covers only a portion of industrial emissions, and even oil executives dismiss its impact on investments. “It’s in the tens of cents per barrel,” says Zieglgansberger.

* You Say Oil Sands, I Say Tar Sands… OpenFile

Type in “Alberta tar sands” into Google, and you get 852,000 results. Perform a search for “Alberta oil sands” instead, and you end up with 334,000 results—not even half that. And if you change “Alberta” to “Alberta’s,” the gap widens even further.

So why do most media outlets tend to default to the phrase “oil sands”? Is “tar sands” pejorative? Or do both terms carry their own bias?

* Oil Sands Opponents Treacherous: Canadian Environment Minister Reuters

In a sign of the strain the Canadian government is feeling over development of the tar sands, Environment Minister Peter Kent said on Wednesday that opposition legislators who campaigned in Washington against the idea were treacherous…. Much to Kent’s anger, two members of Parliament from the opposition New Democrats went to Washington this week to argue the pipeline should not go ahead until Canada has come up with a better plan to combat climate change. “One of the opposition parties has taken the treacherous course of leaving the domestic debate and heading abroad to attack a legitimate Canadian resource which is being responsibly developed and regulated,” Kent told reporters.

2. Why Occupy Wall Street, Bay Street, Main Street, Sesame Street?

Oct-21-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Despite a clear and cogent message, the media still claim the OWS movement don’t have a message. Our first cartoon suggests why they might be saying that. Chris Hedges (to whom CBC has now publicly apologized) once again spells out the reasons for the movement, and Jim Hightower points out the utter inability of corporations to see that they are the problem. Stephen Walt looks for commonalities world-wide, and finds them. And why occupy Sesame Street? Same answer here.

* OWS Toon

* A Movement Too Big to Fail Chris Hedges Truthdig

What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?

“America,” Langston Hughes wrote, “never was America to me.”

*Wall Street Is Dazed and ConfusedJim Hightower NationofChange

Astonishingly, some Wall Streeters continue to be clueless about what the Occupy Wall Street movement is protesting…. Perhaps an example would help you grasp the obvious. Even as the protest was spreading in mid-October to hundreds of cities, tone-deaf executives at Bank of America announced three moves:

One, to goose up their own extravagant pay, they’re socking financially stressed debit-card users with a new $5 a month fee. Second, they’re dumping 30,000 of the bank’s worker bees onto America’s already swollen unemployment rolls. Goodbye, and good luck finding another job. Third, two top executives who are departing the bank are being handed golden parachutes totaling $11 million.

* What Is Causing All These Demonstrations? Stephen M. Walt

Perhaps the single most remarkable development in 2011 is the wave of political protests that have occurred in widely-varying political contexts. …What is going on here? Is there a common set of causes at work, or at least a common thread to otherwise diverse phenomena? I think so, because I see these upheavals as fueled by three important global developments.

The first factor is economic globalization, which has made many states both sensitive and vulnerable to events in far-away places, and led to rising inequality both between and within countries. Yet most governments have failed to enact remedial measures to soften the consequences of economic change and to restore a more level distribution of income, thereby ensuring some degree of economic pain and political discontent.

The second development is the globalization of information, which allows events and ideas to spread much more quickly.

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