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STEVIE?

You let the dragon in Treasonous Stevenous!

Stevie Harper should feel proud and happy tonight. Already the Chinese are making trouble on multiple fronts, threatening legal action against HarperCon Cabinet Ministers who had the temerity to question the notion of importing Chinese miners when there is no shortage of experienced miners in Canada, some of whom might prefer to actually work in the same province in which they live. I live in a town full of miners both retired and working, though most of our guys wouldn't be that enthused about coal mining, being more the hard rock miner type - but there certainly used to be a lot of underground coal miners in the Maritimes, they didn't blow them all up.  Of course our Canadian coal miners are a bit lacking in their command of Mandarin or Cantonese. 

But you have to admit, the following headline looks good around the HarperCons' necks:

Chinese mining firm launches rights complaint, threatens feds with lawsuit

According to a Canadian Press report:

VANCOUVER - The Chinese mining firm at the centre of a controversial plan to use temporary foreign workers in a British Columbia coal mine has launched a two-pronged attack, threatening both a human rights complaint and legal action.

HD Mining distributed two separate letters to the media Thursday, one accusing the United Steelworkers Union of discrimination and the other putting the government on notice it may pursue claims for civil damages after federal ministers made public statements about the company.

A CBC news article states that:

A Chinese miner employed to work in a controversial northern British Columbia coal mine has launched a human rights complaint against the United Steelworkers Union.

Huizhi Li, who works at HD Mining's Murray River project in northern B.C., has sent a letter to the Canadian Human Rights Commission that says leaflets and the content on union's website are likely to create contempt for Chinese people.

This is almost laughable. I saw Mr. Huizhi Li, who can barely speak English, yet was supposed to have filed a seven page complaint, on HD Mining Company letterhead, to the Human Rights Commision, claiming his human rights have been abused or something because Canadian labor unions and workers think perhaps Canadians should have an opportunity to exploit our own resources. After all, the HarperCons are trying to make EI go the way of the dodo, so we can't just ski all winter and beach it all summer while collecting EI benefits.

Personally, I think Mr. Huizhi Li, if he is really concerned about human rights, should perhaps go back to where he is from. From what I understand there might be some human right abuses he could complain about there and I'm sure Canadians can dig their own coal out of the ground. Oh yeah, I forgot, it ain't our coal anymore - hell since Stevie got in the big chair it ain't our country anymore.

By the way, it has also come to light that these "temporary" Chinese miners are only going to be here for at least FOURTEEN effing years........pretty damn temporary, though somebody said they might hire an actual Canadian in four or five years (so start studying your Mandarin, boys) .

The Endless Lying
of Stephen Harper
 

Prime Sinister Treason Stephen Harper

submitted by Robin Mathews  

When a person lies and lies and lies, one outcome is completely predictable.  At a certain point nothing the person says is believed, ever again.  Remember “Lyin’ Brian Mulroney”?  That’s where Stephen Harper is now. At the end of the Oliphant Inquiry (2009) into the Airbus Affair, Justice Oliphant said he did not believe any of Brian Mulroney’s testimony under oath.

The Globe and Mail is fighting the truth.  Its December 10, 2012 issue wants readers to know … Oh! so much about Stephen Harper.  On foreign ownership, the Globe reports, Harper has drawn a line in the sand (though no one can see it).  Harper, moreover, hasn’t made a unilateral decision.  He has consulted with many top people, a “select group” (G and M, p. 1) Needless to say, the group is “select”, meaning none of them is a member of the House of Commons or of any legislative body in the country.

The private, corporate government of Canada goes on.

The Globe and Mail (a staunch Harper supporter) wants us to know that the Nexen Inc. sale to China (CNOOC) and the  Progress Energy sale to Malaysia’s Pretronas Oil are one-of-a –kind sales.

Industry minister Christian Paradis has stated that the China buyer of Nexen, CNOOC, provided “’significant undertakings’ for governance, transparency, disclosure, and compliance….”  We know that is a pack of lies, for two reasons.  (1) The Harper team only tells lies.  (2) Nothing, not a scratch on a piece of paper, has been presented to Canadians to consider in parliament or out of it.

So much for transparency and disclosure. 

Canadians may safely assume Christian Paradis is lying, as his master lies … almost always.

The private, corporate government of Canada goes on.

We don’t believe Stephen Harper.  We don’t believe the Globe and Mail.  Stephen Harper doesn’t tell the truth.  Period.  At almost every point that the Parliamentary Budget Officer requests reasonable information from ‘the corporate government of Canada’ Stephen Harper and his Roboclones refuse, deny, contradict, obstruct. Canadians – at every level of process – (the Parliamentary Budget Officer included) are forced to take the Government of Canada to the courts in an attempt to salvage shreds of democracy.

For five years the Harper forces lied about their financial wrongdoing in the 2006 election.  The five years of court fight cost  millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.  Then the Harperites admitted guilt … before being hit harder.  Admitted guilt to their attempt to destroy the election process. Canadians paid expensively for five years of Harper lies – an attempt to cover up their guilt. 

Remember the hardline statements of Stephen Harper, Peter MacKay, and others about the cost of the proposed F35 fighter jet.  The costs changed every time an outside, honest assessment was made.  Every time that happened the Harper lies were exposed.  The dollar cost to Canadians of the Harper endless deception is huge and growing.  (You won’t read it in the Globe and Mail.)

Remember the 2009 formal Inquiry into Brian Mulroney, Karlheinz Schreiber/Airbus and the $21 million bribery money that went missing?  Remember millions of taxpayers’ dollars were spent on Justice Jeffrey Oiphant’s Inquiry work.  Remember the whole operation has been judged a giant deception, set up by Stephen Harper through (later, governor general) David Johnson to prevent the Inquiry from approaching any of the evidence that mattered.  Millions spent for an elaborate cover-up, “for a pack of lies”.

Remember the recent Omnibus Bills, undemocratic, draconian, hated by the Opposition.  Every one of Stephen Harper’s puppets claimed nothing new would be slipped into the omnibus legislation.  Lies. The Omnibus bills were used to cram in unannounced, reactionary legislation by a method of lying and faking around the huge number of bills.

Look at the fake Temporary Migrant Workers scam.  Exposed in the coal mining industry by major unions, Human Resources minister Diane Finley announced a full review of the whole process.  Okay, where is the review? It’s a lie.  How do we know?  The Harperite lawyers are eating up taxpayers’ money fighting the unions in court.  If Diane Finley is conducting a review, why is Harper doing everything he can to prevent the unions from gaining justice in the matter of a flood of fake, low-wage, non-union, wage-cutting scabs coming into Canada from outside? Why? Because, I suggest, Harper wants low-wage scabs in Canada to destroy Canadian wage standards as well as health and safety standards and any others he can’t legislate out of existence.

He won’t tell you that.  He will live the lie.  Watch him.

It is no coincidence that (a) Canada’s unemployment rate is near 8%, and (b) the number of “migrant” workers has tripled since 2000 in Canada, and that (3) we now have between 300,000 and 450,000 so-called temporary migrant/underpaid/non-unionized/exploited workers here to attack Canadian wage standards.  All that is brought to you by Stephen Harper, liar.

The private, corporate government of Canada goes on.

Concerning the Robocalls of the 2011 election, Stephen Harper tells Canadians – through his Roboclones – over and over, that they had nothing to do with the corrupt Robocalls.

 Canadians don’t even blink.  They know Harper and his clones are doing what they do best: lying. Lying.

There are many more similar violations of the truth.  But let’s turn to a much, much bigger lie.  It involves the whole world of the Tar Sands, of China, the U.S., Norway, Malaysia … and more … all with their arms sunk into Canadian resources of all kinds.  The lie is repeated by Harper, the media, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, the Fraser Institute, The National Post, The Globe and Mail, the C.D. Howe Institute.  Etcetera.  Etcetera.

It is the biggest lie of Brian Mulroney, who is famous for lying.  It is the lie that claims Free Trade is good for Canada. 

How soon our memories fade.

How soon they are buried under the brainwash and lies about Free Trade.

Just remember … try to ….  Pierre Trudeau and his Liberals created PetroCanada and began seriously thinking about an Industrial Strategy for Canada – a way to win back Canadian ownership and control of Canadian wealth.  They were serious about controlling foreign (mostly U.S.) takeover of the Canadian economy.  They had behind them the battles fought by Walter Gordon to show Canadians how much they were being fleeced by foreign ownership.  That was up until the 1980s.

That was when the U.S. ambassador to Canada, Paul Robinson, and private corporate friends met (the story is that they ‘secretly’ met) in Ottawa to stop the independence movement.  They wanted to make sure that nothing like it could ever happen again in Canada.  That was the word on the street in Ottawa then.  What could they come up with to stop Canadians from trying to own and control and profit from their own wealth?

They came up with Free Trade.

Free Trade was established and has been elaborated upon.  It’s job is (a) to rob national and sub-national governments of sovereign powers (b) to replace them with (in fact) government by private (mostly foreign) corporations, and (c) to provide for an unchallengeable flow of cheap labour into Canada, (d) to disable any effective internal opposition, and (d) bit by bit, to render Canadians impotent against the destruction of their democracy and the pauperization of their lives … on behalf of foreign owners of Canadian wealth.

 But … you will say … Norway’s Statoil is an excellent organization, benefitting the Norwegian people.  Malaysia’s Petronas is the same, benefitting Malaysians.  Both countries are democratic, affluent, distributing their oil wealth honestly among the people.  Both are State-owned corporations.

Pause.  Think.  Why is there a Norwegian benefactor, the people-owned Statoil which has enriched Norway and has stored nearly $600 billion for rainy days?  Why is there a Malaysian Petronas, the people-owned oil corporation which has enriched Malaysia and provided significant benefit to the whole population?

Why is Canada the only major oil producer in the world which does not have a significant State-owned corporation at work and influential in the industry? 

The governments in both Norway and Malaysia, unlike governments in Canada, were determined that foreign looters would not carry off the wealth of their people. CNOOC (China) is different because – a China State corporation – it is found in a country where the majority of its dynastic, appointed rulers are grossly wealthy from corruption in an undemocratic, lawless, and openly physically repressive country.  CNOOC is different, and it is not racist to say so.

We know that the U.S. (the first to manipulate Canada into Free Trade) has bled Canada of wealth – as our “closest friend and ally” for decades upon decades. 

Free Trade with the U.S. opened the door that turned seduction into full-scale rape.  The Stephen Harper forces are willing whore-masters, urging more and more strangers into their House of Ill Repute.

If Malaysia and Norway can own, control, manage, and operate their State-owned oil-plus corporations with significant profit – then Canada could (and can) too.  Malaysians even faced the terrible Asia Financial Crisis of 1997.  Told to submit to the IMF, the World Bank, and all the other blood-suckers, Malaysia (like Iceland later) said NO.  To do so would doubtless have ended Petronas as a State-owned corporation!

Managing their economy well, Malaysians bounded back – ahead of the rest of Asia. 

Canada, meanwhile, has sold out, and sold out, and sold out its own wealth and its own people.

The story this far is good for Norwegians, Malaysians, the corrupt holders of China, and for, of course, the viability of the biggest imperial weapons arsenal in the world – the U.S.A. 

The story is not good for Canada.  Statoil would not be permitted to participate in Norway in anything like the disgrace of the Canadian Tar Sands.  But if the Canadians are willing to have Statoil in Canada, okay.  The same with Petronas, and Malaysia.

Why do they come to Canada?  For profit. Canada’s a garbage dump.  Anything goes in Canada.

What’s more, foreign exploiters are welcomed and protected in Canada. Canada has a prime minister who lies about almost everything.  He can be depended upon to lie about the Tar Sands, to lie about foreign participation, to lie about the sell-out of Canada and Canadians.

“’What is truth?’ said jesting Stephen Harper; and would not stay for an answer.”

The Brutal, Tireless Racism
of ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’

We are all like Geronimo's band now,
in the way,
but we lack their cojones!
Guest Column by Robin Mathews   

You are not intended to know….  Start there.  Brainwash from centres like the Fraser Institute; unceasing propaganda from the ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ organization; cover-up stories from the Mainstream Press and Media; and the refusal of Opposition parties ‘to oppose’ on critical matters keep Canadians from seeing the “Stephen Harper Inc.’ designs to destroy democratic society in Canada.

It keeps them from knowing, in short, that the racism of ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ is part of a global process to strip communities of democratic government and to replace existing populations, where convenient, with almost robot-human instruments of work. 

Necessary knowledge is denied Canadians because all of the forces named above have committed themselves to the racist strategy – in greater or lesser degree. Consciously or in ignorance.

The key is in the word ‘racism’ and its real meaning, and in the development of its meaning over time. Failure to recognize its essentially imperializing and oppressive nature – regardless of skin colour – will cost all those who choose to remain ignorant. To say that racism is not solely confined to people of different colours is not a contradiction.  It is a clarification. Because the project intending the dehumanization of peoples is not founded essentially upon differences in skin colour.

Skin colour racism exists, of course, but it is almost always built upon a previous process of economic oppression. Nations possessing imperial power are almost always racist of necessity. The brutalization of indigenous populations for economic advantage needs validation. What better validation than the claim that the oppressed are not really human, are a lower order of being, like beasts of burden, animals.

Surprisingly, the word “racism” is fairly new in dictionaries.  That is so despite the fact that the trade in black Africans swung into full operation in the sixteenth century.  The U.S. program of the extermination of native Indians went into operation at least in the eighteenth century.  Smallpox helped the Spaniards decimate the Inca civilization in the sixteenth century, but the destruction of the culture and its records was a program – what we would call a racist program now.

The word “racism” didn’t come into the English language until the nineteenth century, and not early in that century. The removal, the extirpation, the erasure, the decimation of indigenous peoples, however, is not new. It has always proceeded for two reasons.  To gain the natural resource riches upon which a population lives and to gain for settlement the area they occupy. And in slave-owning times - to gain the slaves necessary to build wealth.

When Hitler’s Nazi forces invaded eastward in the 1940s, he considered the Slavic peoples subhuman. That is partly why the slaughter of the Slavs was so intense. Hitler not only despised them, but he wanted their land for settlement. He wanted room for  the German empire to expand, and he wanted the available resource riches that would support expansion of the German population. The Slavs were ‘white’ and the German invaders were ‘white’. That made no difference.  Hitler intended to erase the Slavs.

In the decades since the Second World War the bases upon which racism flourishes have been expanded and strengthened.  Said very briefly, neo-liberalism - which is nothing more than the philosophy of rule by the One Per Cent – has increased its power.  Private corporations have taken over or integrated with governments so the two become increasingly indistinguishable. The One Per Cent has become a global club in which the resources of the planet, its productive organizations, much military might, and the natural environment itself are increasingly directed towards the power and the wealth of the One Per Cent.

In that circumstance – the one we inhabit today – there is not a superior population nor is there a “race” or races considered particularly despicable and inferior.  There are only resources available and obstacles to their exploitation. We are not in the Hobbesian condition of a war of all against all. We are in one  where the One Per Cent is in a war against all others who do not submit to it and join in its program for the planet.

The war is conducted with relentless brainwash, indoctrination, and propaganda cart-wheels.  It’s simplest manifestation is the intensifying claim that (so-called) Free Trade Agreements are undertaken for the good of the people. They are undertaken, rather, (a) to rob national and sub-national governments of sovereign powers, (b) to replace them with private corporate dictate, (c) to provide for an unchallengeable flow of labour across any and all borders, (d) to disable all internal opposition, (e) and to render resident populations impotent against their own pauperization and disenfranchisement.

All who do not submit and join the planetary program are treated as inferiors. They face the increasingly heavy and punitive force of the One Per Cent.  The first to be brutalized and brushed aside are the ‘ridiculous’ indigenous populations who want to hold on to “inefficient”, particularist, and unique social structures on relatively virgin territories. Among them, for instance, are the indigenous victims wrung out and murdered in mining locations across the globe. Or, as in Canada, they are the ones found to be standing in the way of government/foreign corporation plans for pipelines and ocean transportation systems that threaten Native ways of life and territory ... and threaten the health of the whole population.

Then come all the modern structures that stand in the way of the unfettered exploitation of resource wealth by the One Per Cent – unions, provincial powers (in Canada), the courts, structures of social security, democratic constitutions, impediments to the planetary flow of capital, of cheap labour, and of swift product delivery.  The “obstructionist” forces are undermined, attacked, erased (where possible), or transformed into cooperating institutions.

The First Nations peoples in Canada have set up resistance to the Northern Gateway Pipeline and to tanker traffic on the Pacific Coast.  And so ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ has initiated legislation to strip the First Nations of Canada of fundamental, constitutionally assured powers.

Unions in Canada have fought and are challenging in court so-called temporary migrant laws being used to displace resident Canadians and to undermine living wages in Canada.  And so ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ is initiating legislation to erase reasonable financial integrity and privacy of unions.

The higher courts are permitting legitimate challenges to perceived attempts by ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ to destroy the integrity of our hard-won universal suffrage (the right of all to vote for representatives in government). With the twisted judgement by four of seven Supreme Court of Canada judges on the Etobicoke Centre (2011) election challenge, the suspicion is shaping that ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ has been able to interfere with and influence decisions of the highest Canadian court.

Spokespersons for the general population outside organizations of the indigenous people of Canada have expressed increasing suspicion of “international” agreements to strip Canada of industrial capacity and to unite foreign and (so-called) Canadian corporations in extraction of resources and infrastructure development.  As a result ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ has openly attacked popular organizations with charitable status.  And it has been elaborating ‘continental’ ties with the U.S. to permit borderless police practice and investigative activities.  And it has been eroding health care structures and other social securities.

Policy of ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ outside Canada is equally repressive and anti-democratic. In response to reports of Canadian mining operations violating human rights in foreign countries, no legislation is even envisioned.

In response to reports of flagrant abuse offshore of Canadian temporary migrant legislation, no action is taken or foreseen by ‘Stephen Harper Inc’.

In response to offshore tax-haven use by Canadians among the One Per Cent - to the score of billions of dollars, ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ will not even comment.

As I write, Canada’s governor general is visiting Guatemala, a U.S. sponsored poster-country for internal ‘slave economies’.  Half the population lives below the poverty line.  Her Majesty’s Representative in Canada is being used as an errand-boy and lackey for ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’, discussing “trade, security, and other issues” there.  Johnson should be nowhere near Guatemala.  He is not a diplomat.  He does not represent Stephen Harper or ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ Remember he is alleged to have received the position of governor general for his odious role in preventing Justice Jeffrey Oliphant from pursuing the facts in the (2009) Brian Mulroney/Karlheinz Schreiber/Airbus bribery scandal.

In response to the Palestinian authority’s move at the United nations to provide some correction of the status of the Palestinian people – with especial reference to the Gaza Strip – “Stephen Harper Inc.’ responded with absurd and melodramatic posturing on behalf of continued oppression and brutality.

More and more of the world sees the Gaza Strip as “the world’s largest open-air Concentration Camp.”

Even the English right-leaning Economist writes (Nov. 27.12) of Israel leaving the Palestinians “ever-shrinking patches of parched land, sealing their borders, crippling their economy, stunting their political aspirations, jailing or killing their heroes, and blasting apart whatever chance they might have had at a prosperous well-governed state….” But ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ sent the sycophant bully John Baird to the United Nations to announce ‘Loud and Clear’ that the manipulators of Canadian policy back the most famous, continuous, unrelenting repressive action in the world.

Astonishing.  Except the treatment of the Palestinians is in complete accord with a murderous One Per Cent securing large territories as resource and geopolitically secure areas. With the absurd and ghoulish position taken by John Baird for all the world to stare at in astonishment, Canadians, it might seem, don’t need any other example as evidence that ‘Stephen Harper Inc.’ is a racist operation, brutal, tireless … and morally repugnant.