You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2006.
Feb. 17, 2006
Jim Trautman
Toronto Star
As Canada increases its troop commitment in Afghanistan, there is one question no one in Ottawa wants to ask: What happens to prisoners under Canadian control who are turned over to U.S. military forces? Since Canadian policy has been to treat prisoners humanely, maybe it is time to look at how its U.S. coalition partner treats detainees.
Believe it or not, the scandal brewing under Dick Cheney’s feet goes way, way beyond shooting a septagenarian lawyer in the face. The Executive Intelligence Review lays it all bare here…
by Edward Spannaus
Executive Intelligence Review
Vice President Dick Cheney, visibly and increasingly in the target zone in the criminal investigation of the Valerie Plame obstruction-of-justice case, is desperately trying to orchestrate the coverup around the National Security Agency domestic spying scandal. Informed sources indicate that it was Cheney, not President Bush, who was behind the illegal surveillance of Americans, and thus it is Cheney who is also most vulnerable in this case, if and when the true scope of the spying operation becomes known.
What started as the war against terror, proclaimed by the president to Congress in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, has undergone a metamorphosis.”
by William Pfaff
International Herald Tribune
Paris — The U.S. Defense Department and the White House have decided that the United States is now conducting “the Long War” rather than what previously was known as the War against Terror, then as the Global Struggle against Violent Extremism, and briefly - as one revealing Pentagon study described it - a war against “the Universal Adversary.”
If you had to date it, you could say that our permanent energy crisis began, appropriately enough, on New Year’s Day, 2006.”
Michael T. Clare
TomDispatch
President Bush’s State of the Union comment that the United States is “addicted to oil” can be read as pure political opportunism. With ever more Americans expressing anxiety about high oil prices, freakish weather patterns, and abiding American ties to unsavory foreign oil potentates, it is hardly surprising that Bush sought to portray himself as an advocate of the development of alternative energy systems. But there is another, more ominous way to read his comments: that top officials have come to realize that the United States and the rest of the world face a new and growing danger — a permanent energy crisis that imperils the health and well-being of every society on earth.
by John F. Conway
prairie dog
Democracy: Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people, and is exercised either directly by them or by officers elected by them.”
–Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.”
–Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891
The whining about the “democratic deficit” of the new Harper government began on its first day in office. His sins against democracy? Why, my goodness, he is behaving just like that old corrupt Liberal Paul Martin. He inveigled recently elected Vancouver Liberal MP David Emerson to bolt and become the Tory Minister of International Trade. Just days before the election Emerson denounced the Harper Tories as a bunch of dangerous social Darwinists who would benefit the rich and let the poor die. But Harper’s sins against democracy went further. He also instantly elevated Montreal Tory bagman and organizer Michael Fortier to the Senate and appointed him Minister of Public Works. On my, my, Tweedledum is out and Tweedledee is in.
Our intuition, which we now know to have been correct, was that there were people like us, who not only refused to conform to existing options, but felt it was their duty to build something else. And we can
Erin Morrison
prairie dog
From now on, your favourite foamy caffeine-filled delight from Starbucks in Regina will be served by a unionized barista
by William Hughes
Saturday, Feb. 04, 2006
Back in the late 19th century, the political cartoonist, Thomas Nast, in NYC
By JOHN RYAN
Counterpunch
The 2006 federal election has set the stage for a possible dismantling of Canada’s distinctive social and economic fabric. The newly evolved Conservative Party, in many respects a chilling echo of the USA’s Republican Party, is poised for a two-stage attack to reshape Canada in line with its Canadian version of America’s neoconservative ideology.
by Judy Rebick
Rabble.ca
February 3, 2006
It is a sign of the devastation that neo-liberalism has wrought on our movements that the only visible criticism of the NDP from the social movements was over electoral tactics rather than policy and in the case of some from the right instead of from the left.
Jim Stanford and I are friends and comrades. We thought up the idea for the New Politics Initiative one day while marching in an anti-poverty march. So it is with a deep sense of solidarity that I beg to differ with his analysis of the recent Canadian election.
