joe posts

It’s that time of year again. The upside of being poor is that you get a nice refund from the government. Hopefully. It’s the rich that have to pay! Or is it?

In 1990, Canada’s overall tax system was more progressive, meaning families with higher income contributed relatively more through higher tax rates, to help pay for the things that benefit all of us: health care, education, roads, buses and subways.

Truth be told, things flattened out from the middle of the income distribution to the top – families at the top paid about the same share of their income in taxes as families in the middle.

But by 2005, the system has become far less progressive at the bottom of the distribution, and at the very top it has become regressive. Staggeringly, the top 1% pay total tax rates as much as six percentage points of income lower than families in the middle.

As a number of studies have found, the richest 1% of Canadians are getting the lion’s share of market income gains from a decade of remarkable economic growth. Yet, astonishingly, the richest 1% of families also now pay a lower tax rate than the poorest 10%. – Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

Something to think about next time the boss bitches about taxes, and drives home in his Porsche.

Ah, John Baird. You tried hard with this one:

“Our government believes that the cost should be borne by those who use the service, not by Canadian taxpayers.”

That’s our minister of transportation explaining how the fifty percent increase in security fees (which we need to buy X-ray specs) are definitely not taxes. So it’s not a tax, because taxpayers won’t be paying it, ergo, people who fly aren’t taxpayers. Simple logic. Or did I get that wrong? It might just be some slimy fake-logic to trick us into thinking Canada’s New Government™ hasn’t broken yet another election promise.

True, not everyone flies. But Canada is a huge country and it’s a popular way of getting around. I guess they could use this same reasoning to introduce non-tax fees for anything – health fees are only paid by sick people, not taxpayers! Road maintenance fees for anyone who leaves their home, not the taxpayers! Policing fees for anyone who expects police help, not taxpayers! Income tax filing fees are only paid by people who file income taxes, not taxpayers! The great thing about flat fees to neoconservatives is that they are inherently regressive.

Maybe if we wanted a safer country we could stop spending billions following Americans around on their crusade against Islam. The fact is we’re at war; we should have no expectation for security. We’re killing people in Afghanistan, our government supports the Iraq war. It doesn’t matter if we’re polite people who only accidentally kill civilians. People will still fight back. That’s just a reality of war.

I thought this was a refreshing article on the ongoing Vale Inco strike up in Sudbury.

Pathetic or powerful: Can politicians put an end to the Vale Inco strike?

excerpt:

[Professor David Leadbeater]  said he thinks major mining companies donate to the governing Liberals, which makes them hesitant to intervene.

“They basically agree with what the mining companies are doing. They think this is the way to have development. They think that communities and working people are a secondary consideration,” Leadbeater said.

“This has to be challenged. They have to take a position that’s more based on democratic needs of communities, of unions and the majority of the population. I don’t think it will happen, though, without a lot of protest.”

The province’s official line is that they are ready to intervene and that they have to be impartial – not favouring the striking workers or the foreign corporations demanding concessions – because of legislation that requires MPPs not take sides between employers and employees in labour disputes. Which makes government as useful as a wet paper machete when it comes to labour disputes. No matter what party is at fault, or how wrong they are, politicians can’t do or say anything about it. No wonder neither side wants their help, Bartolucci can barely say ‘boo’ about the scabs they’ve brought in to keep the mines running without real workers. The company benefits from provincial impartiality, and mediation would almost certainly mean significant concessions on the part of the workers – something they went on strike to avoid. Meanwhile the strike gets uglier and uglier.

I’m guessing Vale will win this one – nobody can stop them. They made over five billion in 2009, even with the strike and the global economic crisis. And they make money even though they’re spending more on running the mines now (scab and security costs) than if they had just kept the same old contract with the union. At this point it looks like they just don’t want the workers to come back without severe punishment.

A strike can’t stop Vale, because they can use scabs. Violence won’t stop the scabs, because anti-scab violence is hard to defend and the province and police will protect them. Vale’s HQ is on another continent, which makes it impossible to protest against, and the distance means the corporation has no reason to care about the people of Northern Ontario. The province brags to the world that it can’t do anything but mediate, meaning it will try to hammer out a centre position between a foreign company that doesn’t give a shit about Canadians and actual Canadians who depend on the work to keep them off of welfare rolls and out of food banks.

The Libs and Tories encouraged this kind of development through tax breaks, relaxed ownership rules, regressive taxation, cuts to government agencies and their hands-off approach to labour disputes. This dispute, I think, is just ‘globalization’ coming to Northern Ontario. And globalization is not about making it easier for people to live, it’s about making it easier for the wealthy to make money and it’s about making sure power is out of reach for the working class and the poor, because they’d probably do things differently. They might be more concerned with community.

“You can only push people so far. When you can’t feed your kids, you can’t put food on the table, you can’t put clothing on them, they come home from school and they can’t participate in what’s going on, you think that’s good for a community?” Steelworker Pat Digby

I’ve read about the huge prison industry in the United States, but I was surprised to hear that now the judges have gotten in on the action.

Two US judges charged with taking more than $2m (£1.4m) in kickbacks from a privately-run detention centre have pleaded guilty to fraud.

Prosecutors say Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took the money in return for giving young offenders long sentences to serve in the centre. – BBC

Fraud?! That’s just product promotion! This wise investor had a captive audience. Poor kids:

A spokeswoman for the non-profit Juvenile Law Center said 1,000-2,000 juveniles who came before the judge between 2003 and 2006 received excessively harsh sentences.

Many of the children were first-time offenders and had no lawyers to defend them.

Get Tough on Crime! Make Millions!

“To me it looks like they’ve invented a perfect propaganda machine, one that chews up bodies and churns out justifications for everything the Bush administration desires.” – Me

When I wrote that blog back in February, it was because the little information that I could find about prisoner interrogation in “The War Against Terror” reminded me of the techniques used by repressive regimes like the Soviet Union during the cold war to elicit false confessions from anti-Soviet or anti-communist captives. It just seemed like the purpose of “enhanced interrogation” or torture wasn’t to get information, good or bad. Some seem to think the problem with torture is simply that it doesn’t elicit the truth. But it’s not necessarily a problem if the false confession matches the story the interrogator expects to hear, because that makes for some convenient propaganda. “See? He confessed. He can now be convicted. The war on terror works.” Still, I never really expected that there would be hard evidence of a program to elicit false confessions on purpose.

This morning I hit the good old StumbleUpon button and the first ’stumble’ was a telegraph.co.uk article, entitled “Guantanamo Bay interrogations based on faulty Chinese communist methods.” That’s a misleading title. The methods weren’t necessarily faulty, they were just completely evil, but useful for breaking down a human being. Here’s a short excerpt:

American military trainers gave a class to camp interrogators in 2002 on how to use “sleep deprivation”, “exposure” and other “torture” methods to reduce captives to “animals” and obtain information.

But it has emerged that the techniques presented in the class were copied word-for-word from a 1957 US Air Force study which focused on Chinese techniques – that did not work.

The study by sociologist Alfred Biderman, Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War, commented on methods that led to false confessions and “brainwashing”. – Telegraph

The Telegraph is a pretty right-wing newspaper, so it’s not like this is some wild fringe conspiracy theory. Even the centre-right U.S. Democratic Party has clued in and mentioned this scary tidbit of info. Senator Levin was quoted in the article as saying, “What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions. People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

No? I think that perhaps they DO need it. How else can a state justify the curbing of civil liberties, the expansion of military powers, the insidious government propaganda, endless war, the suspension of habeas corpus… etc?

People have to be scared into allowing the authorities to play us like suckers.

One way to do that, apparently, is to take a tip from the Commies and torture some brown folks until they say what the U.S. government wants to hear. I’m a little freaked out by this kind of democracy.

This is why I don’t have much faith in Barack Obama, or really any of the nominees or candidates. Can anyone resist this kind of power? You know, the unlimited kind? Already Obama’s going with the Republicans on telecom immunity (see Glenn Greenwald’s excellent reporting), which legitimizes government spying on law-abiding citizens. He has vague plans to end the Iraq war, which isn’t a good sign. Obama calls himself a “uniter” which I naively used to think meant he’d unite the fractured Democratic Party. But now I think it just means he’ll play ball with whatever lunatic fascist sits across from him. What will he do with a bunch of damaged prisoners who’ve been brainwashed into confessing acts of terrorism? Repair and release them? Or make use of them?

Of course I say that, but if I lived there, I’d vote for him. Forget all that stuff, actually.

Americans, (please) Vote Obama..

heheh.. Barack Obama: Better than Dementia.

This is just weird.

A mother of a student with autism down in Barrie, Ontario, was called into her daughter’s school and told that a child abuse investigation had been launched after a ‘psychic’ claimed that an unnamed young man was molesting her daughter. The ‘psychic’ didn’t even know the girl – an educational assistant (and ESP fan) was told by this ‘psychic’ (the scare quotes mean I don’t believe in ‘psychics,’ btw) that a student with a name starting with the letter “V” was being assaulted. Apparently that’s enough to cause a major freakout.

It’s important to take abuse allegations seriously, even if it comes from kooks. But it’s also important to…. look at the facts?!?!?!?! The student was equipped with a GPS and audio recording device, and there was absolutely no evidence of any kind of abuse!

Now the mother (understandably) won’t send her kid back to school, and the school board won’t foot the bill to get the kid into a more appropriate special education program. She’s a single mom and she can no longer work to support her family and her child can’t go back to school, all because some overzealous twits believed a dumbass EA who put her faith in some sick and twisted charlatan. You couldn’t make this up. You wouldn’t want to.

The frightened mother rushed back to the campus and was stunned by what she heard – the principal, vice-principal and her daughter’s teacher were all waiting for her in the office, telling her they’d received allegations that Victoria had been the victim of sexual abuse – and that the CAS had been notified.

How did they come by such startling knowledge? Leduc was incredulous as they poured out their story.

“The teacher looked and me and said: ‘We have to tell you something. The educational assistant who works with Victoria went to see a psychic last night, and the psychic asked the educational assistant at that particular time if she works with a little girl by the name of “V.” And she said ‘yes, I do.’ And she said, ‘well, you need to know that that child is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.’” – CityNews (Found via boingboing)

If people want a “zero-tolerance” policy when it comes to abuse allegations it has to work both ways. If the authorities are obliged to take all allegations seriously, people who make false allegations of abuse for personal gain, like this ‘psychic,’ really should be punished. Harshly. Like maybe tattoo the story of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” to their forehead.

A Chinese farmer managed to get himself 5 years in jail for passing around a petition arguing that human rights were more important that sporting events (pshaw – won’t someone PLEASE think of the corporate sponsors???):

A Chinese dissident who dared to claim that human rights were more important than the Olympic games was sentenced to five years in prison yesterday after being found guilty of subversion.

Yang Chunlin, an unemployed former factory worker from Jiamusi, Heilongjiang province, was accused of accepting money from hostile foreign organisations, writing critical articles, and organising a petition on behalf of farmers who lost their land to developers. The petition, which was circulated last year, declared: “We don’t want the Olympics, we want human rights.” According to Yang’s family, it was signed by 7,000 to 8,000 people. – guardian.co.uk

He’s not the only person being harassed and jailed for speaking out against the Chinese authorities during the run-up to the Olympics.  Think about that when your country wins a gold medal.

UPDATE: The IOC is really taking the battle for basic rights and dignity seriously. Their Olympic broadcaster will ensure dissenting voices aren’t heard – everything will look pure and good to world audiences.

Beijing Olympic Broadcasting (BOB), a joint venture between the Games organisers and the IOC’s Olympic Broadcasting Services, is responsible for producing the images from all Olympic-related venues and feeding them to broadcast rights holders.

“The Olympic broadcaster must protect the Olympics and we are being told that at every Games,” a cameraman who has covered several recent Olympics for the host broadcasters told Reuters on condition of anonymity on Monday.

“There is no way a protest will be shown live from Beijing wherever the BOB is in charge,” the man said. – Reuters

I guess sports fans just wouldn’t want to have their countries’ athletes moment of glory interrupted by a bunch of people who JUST want their freedom.

I guess it took the Olympics to make our leaders realize there’s not much being independently produced by Canadians these days. Some MPs are upset that Canadian athletes aren’t wearing Canadian-made uniforms for the Summer Olympics. That doesn’t surprise me at all, but it sounds like it surprised a lot of people who are supposed to be in charge of trade policies and such…

Like the 2008 Olympic Games, most of the Canadian Olympic team’s uniforms are made in China — and that has some MPs crying foul.

“This is a no-brainer,” New Democrat MP Paul Dewar said Friday.

“This is our Olympic team. We should be ensuring that all of our Olympic athletes are proudly wearing Canadian-made textiles and all of their uniforms should be made in Canada.”

Liberal MP Denis Coderre said Canada is missing a golden opportunity to promote its textile industry on the world stage. He said it’s particularly unfortunate that the “unacceptable” snub to Canada’s homegrown clothing-makers should occur at a time when the industry is struggling.

Bloc Quebecois MP Pierre Paquette said the snub reflects the “laissez-faire” attitude of the Conservative government, which he asserted is not interested in boosting the prospects of the primarily Quebec-based textile industry.

…

Where possible, Rudge said, the COC tries to use Canadian suppliers. But he said it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find Canadian manufacturers who can supply the volume of clothing required to dress the athletes and provide the replicas sold to the public.

“Times have changed considerably,” Rudge said.

“The reality is that there’s no longer manufacturing capacity in Canada that can meet the volume needs that are necessary to manufacture particularly the replica clothing that is sold to the public.”

Canada’s manufacturing industry has been decimated by cheap foreign imports — especially from China — and the rising Canadian dollar. – CBC

Imagine languishing in legal limbo for years and years, held by a nation that purports to represent all that is good and free in this world. From alternet.org:

One of the detainees being considered for release was Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Turkish citizen who had been pulled off a bus in Pakistan the year before and turned over to U.S. forces. Since then, American security agencies hadn’t turned up any evidence that he belonged to a terrorist group or posed a threat to the United States. But before clearing his release, the CIA wanted the Germans to interrogate him and offer their stamp of approval.

After they arrived, the agents were led out to a trailer near the dusty sprawl of cell blocks known as Camp Delta. Inside, the air conditioner was on full blast, and Kurnaz, a stocky young man with blunt features and a thick red beard, was seated on one side of a long table, his hands and feet shackled to a ring in the floor. The men took turns questioning him–about the nightclubs he frequented in his wilder years, about his reasons for embracing Islam, about his journey to Pakistan and the heavy boots he bought before leaving–while a hidden camera rolled in the background.

All told, they spent 12 hours with him over two days, concluding by the end that he simply found himself “in the wrong place at the wrong time” and “had nothing to do with terrorism and al-Qaida,” according to German intelligence reports.

They discussed their findings with CIA and Pentagon officials, then boarded a plane back to Germany. During a stopover in Washington, D.C., one of the agents visited the local branch of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, and reported back to headquarters via a secure phone line, saying: “USA considers Murat Kurnaz’s innocence to be proven. He should be released in approximately six to eight weeks.” A few days later, a Pentagon release form for the detainee was printed and awaiting signature.

“At that point, the picture was clear,” says Lothar Jachmann, a retired spy who headed the intelligence-gathering operation on Kurnaz for Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, and was briefed on the Guantánamo visit by one of the agents. “We had nothing on him, and we had gotten feedback that the Americans had nothing on him either. The plan was to let him go.”

But Kurnaz was not set free. Instead, he spent another four years languishing at Guantánamo, where he was repeatedly designated an “enemy combatant,” despite evidence showing he had no known links to terrorist groups. – Alternet

Here in Canada we’re a bit nicer. We just stick our non-terrorist Muslims in solitary confinement for over a year before setting them free:

Nearly two years ago, when police busted an alleged homegrown terror cell, Qayyum Abdul Jamal was portrayed as the firebrand ringleader seeking recruits for jihad.

Today, he says, he hopes to piece together a reputation left in tatters after being accused of belonging to the so-called Toronto 18, a group of men and teens who allegedly plotted to bomb sites around Toronto.

And he hopes to repair a life changed forever when he spent 17 months in jail, 13 of them in solitary confinement.

That’s why the Crown’s surprise move yesterday to stay terrorism-related charges against Jamal and three of his co-accused is somewhat bittersweet for the 45-year-old.

“If I didn’t have my faith while I was in jail, I would’ve been suicidal,” said Jamal, who says he was beaten, pushed and kicked by jail guards.

“I am innocent,” he told reporters yesterday outside a Brampton courthouse as his wife and sons looked on. “I have nothing to do with this terrorism thing.” – Toronto Star

There’s really enough internet stuff on the upcoming American election (is it here yet?!??!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!??!!??!!) so I haven’t been interested in writing about it.. I can barely bring myself to read about it. Thank god for The Daily Show.

But this was funny.. Barack Obama made a ‘private comment’ at a fundraiser, saying that many American voters are so disenchanted with Washington that they don’t believe politicians can actually help them – so instead they decide their votes based on single issues like gun control or gay marriage or illegal immigration. I was surprised to hear actual intellectual commentary coming out of a presidential candidates face. Which means he made a mistake – now he’s an “elitist” who “looks down” on voters! LOL. Uh huh.

I wouldn’t call that elitist, personally. I’d call it the Republican Campaign Strategy. “We can’t actually help ya, but we’ll punish those liberal fag mexicans if it’ll make you feel better.” Boom! – Votes roll in; wars are launched, taxes are cut for the rich, social services are gutted, New Orleans drowns. But oh no, Barack Obama’s the elitist – not the ones who have fucked over the poor time and time and time again.

Too bad he couldn’t be completely honest, but I guess a “Obama says ‘American voters are pussified suckers!’” headline wouldn’t play well on right-wing pussified sucker radio. Limbaugh would have a hissy fit and break a nail – necessitating an oxycondone binge… for the pain, of course…

The Nation: Obama is Right. People are Angry.

Vote Nader!

Vote for the corpse of Bill Hicks!