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Australia, Canada, Corruption, Crime, Detention, Economic, Energy, Foreign Policy, Ideology, Intel, Justice, Media, Military, Misc, New Zealand, Political, Sovereignty, Telecom, Torture, UK, Uncategorized, US

#Harper’s War(s): #C51 and the 5-Eyes Spy vs Spy Paradigm, Cui bono? #cdnpoli #pnpcbc #ctvpp #cbcnn

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For this installment of the #Harper’s War(s) series, we would like to propose a couple of points to ponder about the broader implications of Bill C-51 as it relates to our “Allies” and especially the citizens of the other 5-Eyes intelligence alliance members, Australia, New Zealand, U.K and U.S., not to mention the jurisdictions of the NSA and the broad array of other international alphabet intelligence agencies within the expanded 9-Eyes and 14-Eyes intelligence community. Considering how creeped out the majority of Canadians are by being johnny-spied and infringed upon by the predatory Harper Regime, our “allies” should feel creeped out even more.

Dominion of Harper's All Seeing Eye
Dominion of Harper’s All Seeing Eye

There must be something more sinister, colonist and imperialist “invisible hand” behind this mad rush to declare more opaque enemies and terrorists located on various blurry battlefields concentrated around trade corridors, energy sources while opening new markets and investment opportunities with military force. Since the pre-World War Next, or at least pre-Cold War 2.0, conditions are being sown, fertilized and fermented on multiple fronts, does Harper seek to be the supreme intelligence overlord and ultimately the overseer of ECHELON 2.0?

Since many of Canada’s Allies have various information and intelligence gathering operations, most of them have some level of real time oversight, not after the fact reviews and unchallenged secret tribunals. The fact that Harper’s Bill C-51 provides no additional oversight to watch over the watchers that share data with other watchers abroad. We can only presume that other “agencies” with arterial motives will attempt to infiltrate our own intelligence apparatuses through vulnerable Ministry/Department backdoors in order to circumvent their own restrictive domestic data and intelligence sharing regulations on mass surveillance and data collection of citizens.

In many ways it seems as if the Harper Regime has decided to be the grand all-seeing-eye, spymaster and records keeper within the right-wing utopian Global Governance Era. In these glorious propaganda filled globalization days where “governments” have embraced tax-cutting and war-mongering at the same time, while downplaying the decline of the domestic economy and outsourcing in order to nickle and dime away solutions in order to create more costly problems, we’ll pose a few questions worth pondering, if anything else…

  1. Who will be watching the Government?
  2. What prevention measures are in place to assure that our intelligence apparatuses are not infiltrated and hijacked by another, group, cabal, cartel, agency or government?
  3. What measures are in place to assure undue search and unwarranted seizure of Canadians data by foreign agencies?
  4. What happens when there is a conflict of interest or competing interests?
  5. What happens when one partner agencies “terrorist” is another partner agencies “freedom fighter”?
  6. What happens “if” another partner agency is found to be committing illegal activities within Canada that go against Canadian interests or violates the civil liberties and freedoms of Canadians?
  7. What prevents multiple agencies from getting bogged down and wasting valuable resources and time engaged in overlapping operations, dis-information campaigns, psyops, spooks, stooges, honeypots, grooming, etc.?
  8. What are the surveillance and preventative counter-measures that address blackmail and/or corruption, rouge advisors, agent provocateurs and/or compromised public officials?
  9. When will robust cyber-security measures be implemented within Canada’s own National IT infrastructure to assure no exploits, vulnerabilities, data leakage or unauthorized access are available between the various Ministry’s portals?How will our personal and private data be protected from potential misuse and/or abuse by external intelligence agencies abroad?
  10. How much will all of this secured infrastructure initially cost and how much will the annual maintenance costs be?
  11. How will the national infrastructure that Canadians need to transact their daily affairs be fortified and secured from the blowback from this unprecedented expansion of secretive intelligence powers?
  12. How will other intelligence agencies data be protected?
  13. Will 5-9-14-Eyes and NATO members or our Allies be contributing to the costs of this shared infrastructure or will they just reap the rewards?
  14. Who assures that all international laws are enforced?
  15. Is the ultimate intent to create a “clearinghouse” for illegal covert supra-national co-intel operations?

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Economic, Ideology, UK, Uncategorized

British police clash with anti-greed protesters in London

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Sat Oct 20, 2012 10:56PM

British police have made several arrests as officers clashed with anti-capitalist protesters during a huge demonstration against the coalition governments austerity policies in central London.
British police have made several arrests as officers clashed with anti-capitalist protesters during a huge demonstration against the coalition government’s austerity policies in central London.

The demonstration dubbed “A Future That Works” was organized by Trade Union Congress (TUC) and attracted hundreds of thousands of people across Britain, local media reported.

The anti-greed protesters called on the government to adopt an alternative economic strategy that puts jobs and growth first.

The TUC chief, Brendan Barber said the message of the Saturday’s protest was that “austerity is simply failing”.

“The government is making life desperately hard for millions of people because of pay cuts for workers, while the rich are given tax cuts,” he said.

Unions, anti-war campaigners, left-wing leaders, community groups and other activists joined the demonstration against reductions to public sector spending in London’s streets.

The cuts are claimed to be aimed at reining in the UK’s huge debt, which stands at more than one trillion pounds. Britain borrowed 13 billion pounds in September alone.

The UK government was also accused of leaning towards rich people, when earlier this year, it reduced income taxes for the country’s wealthiest citizens.

The coalition is said to be cutting taxes for millionaires and raising them for everyone else in the country.

“It is one rule for those at the top and one rule for everyone else”, said Labour Party chief Ed Miliband, who addressed the demonstrators at London’s Hyde Park.

MOL/HE

continue reading source: http://www.presstv.com/detail/2012/10/20/267864/march/

Remember, politics is a contact sport, like hockey, so please feel free to add quick contributions, observations and relevant information as a comment below!

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Ideology, UK, Uncategorized

The ‘plebs’ row is a mere sideshow to destructive Tory incompetence

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Nothing will divert David Cameron and George Osborne from their great enterprise – an austerity to wither the state

By
guardian.co.uk
Saturday 20 October 2012 12.17 BST

Former chief whip Andrew Mitchell
Whether the former chief whip Andrew Mitchell called police plebs or not doesn’t matter – people believe he did. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Did Andrew Mitchell say the dread word “plebs”? After a long month of failing to deny it, it hardly matters. Today a full set of monster headlines shriek David Cameron‘s class calamity. The police wrote it in their official log and that’s who people believe. Plebs never sounded like a word police officers would invent in a stitch-up.

According to the Daily Telegraph deputy editor, Benedict Brogan, Mitchell’s fellow MPs believed it because they often heard him use the word in everyday conversation. That’s all we need to know – and everyone knows it already. That’s how they think and how they talk. We all know it’s true because that’s how they govern – not for “the other half”.

There are truths and myths – and sometimes the myth wins because it represents a truth. Margaret Thatcher never quite said “there is no such thing as society”, but she nearly did, she might have done and she acted as if she thought it. So, to her enemies, it came to symbolise all she stood for.

Cameron so badly lacks social antennae to warn him how his class looks to most voters that he failed to know by gut instinct what most people saw: the moment “plebs” was out, Mitchell was Ebola to be cast out before he contaminated the whole tribe. Those around Cameron who called it a gaffe or a faux pas utterly failed to understand that most people say “fucking” when angry, only this tiny cadre of upper-class yahoos ever say or think “plebs”. With that one word Mitchell, the silver-spooned Lazard’s investment banker, let slip the dogs of class war.

The curious incident of George Osborne’s first-class train ride only matters because it plays on the same story board. “We’re all in this together” doesn’t travel with plebs, but pays £189.50 to avoid hoi polloi. If chancellors rarely go second class, that’s beside the point. For the added luxury of parking his bottom on an exclusive seat, he spent more than two and a half times what he makes unemployed people live on for a whole week, for food, heating, travel, everything.

After Osborne’s benefit cuts, which the Institute for Fiscal Studies says are almost without international precedent, he plans to take yet another £10bn from those with the least. Disability benefits are next, worse cuts to the poorest households, while he eases top taxes for the people like him and Cameron in the world of mega-wealth. That insouciance is what makes them unfit to govern, unfit to decide who suffers most in these hard times.

Beside that imagery of class conflict, their comical ineptitude is only a sideshow. Born to rule? Whatever happened to the playing fields of Eton? Far from winning the battle of Waterloo, these scions turn government into Napoleonic defeat, with no enemy more dangerous than their own incompetence. They trip over their own shoelaces before they reach the battlefield, double fault all their own serves, knock themselves senseless before they leave the blue corner.

Learning nothing, they get worse with every passing month: Cameron’s energy price bungle defies explanation, beyond carelessness, ruled by an indolent arrogance that can’t be bothered to consult anyone. From badgers , buzzards and forests to pasties and caravans, details bore them. The NHS will sink them.

In the grand pile-up, it only added a hint of tabasco that Osborne was travelling on the west coast mainline, the contracts for which were mangled partly due to his Whitehall cuts in senior staff. Resurrecting (Etonian) Sir George Young as chief whip reminds us it was he who dashed to privatise rail chaotically in the first place. Surely no scriptwriter would dare add in that 1982 British Rail poster of Young and his children with BBC presenter Jimmy Savile?

But don’t be fooled: on the big things, they care. Follow the money, follow the dogma. Nothing has diverted Cameron and Osborne from their great enterprise – an austerity to wither the state and harrow the ground where it once stood. Anarchic creative destruction is not collateral damage, it’s part of the purpose. That louche, laid-back lackadaisical air is only the affectation of Flashman politics. The “Thrasher” Mitchell interlude reminds us that however badly their government ends, havoc for others is an experiment without personal risk to them.

continue reading source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/20/plebs-sideshow-destructive-tory-incompetence

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Canada, Ideology, Political, Uncategorized

Has Harper disappointed his supporters and grassroots conservatives?

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Has Harper disappointed his supporters and grassroots conservatives?

After many years of trying, Stephen Harper finally ousted the Liberals from government in early 2006. Even though he won a minority only, it was a good start.

Small-c conservatives, and anyone subscribing to common sense, were thrilled: the corrupt and wasteful Liberals, as well as their social-engineering apparatus, were gone.

But not long into Harper’s first term, critical voices started to be heard. “Where are the conservative policies?” they’d say, and just as quickly Harper came to be known as a “Liberal Lite”.

Easy does it, was the party’s response. In a minority government that could be brought down any moment by the opposition, or the left-wing media and elites, conservative thinking had to be inserted incrementally.

When Harper won a bigger minority two years later, there was more of the “Liberal Lite” stuff. Fair enough, he’d managed to face down the left-wing opposition parties that had attempted a coup d’état, but surely more could be done – or so small-c conservatives thought.

At the height of the global economic crisis, Harper managed to disappoint many, if not most, small-c conservatives and common-sense thinkers in Canada when he decided to base his economic policy on flawed, leftist, Keynesianism. Thus, Canadians, although they didn’t need it at all, because the Canadian economy was really fine for the most part, were treated to the same ill-conceived “stimulus spending” that has wrecked the American economy for generations to come.

Harper, who’d already shown himself to be a big spender, having driven up public spending to unprecedented levels even during his first term, kept expanding the federal deficit by emulating his counterpart in the US, Barack Obama.

In 2011, Harper finally won his long-sought majority, and small-c conservatives and common-sense thinkers were hoping that he was finally finished with his “incremental” approach to conservatism.

Yet, here we are, a year later, and the general consensus is that the first full year of Harper’s majority wasn’t all that conservative either. In fact, most analysts agree, except for one or two policies (tough on crime, abolition of the federal gun registry), anything “Majority Harper” has done could have easily been done by a Liberal government.

If a solid majority government isn’t enough for Harper to turn deep-conservative-blue, so the thinking goes, especially in a country where the overwhelming majority of people see the world through conservative glasses (including majority support for bringing back capital punishment), then there’s no chance whatsoever that Harper will ever be anything but a “wannabe Liberal”.

This explains why “Majority Harper” has been declining in popularity and support faster and more substantially than “Minority Harper” ever did, because now even his support among conservative voters is eroding. During his two minority governments, it would have been unthinkable for the Conservative Party to find itself in a statistical tie with the NDP, of all parties.

Light-blue, or pinko, Tories have never fared well – witness UK prime minister David Cameron’s troubles. But true-blue conservative leaders who weren’t afraid to show their true colours – Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher – were not only extremely popular, but have also been elevated to the realm of legend in later years.

Unless Harper changes his approach drastically between now and 2015, he will go down in history as nothing but a footnote, despite some of his, admittedly remarkable accomplishments.

 

continue reading source: http://www.wernerpatels.ca/column/column/2012/05/has-harper-disappointed-his-supporters-and-grassroots-conservatives/

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Afghanistan, Canada, Economic, Foreign Policy, Ideology, Iraq, Middle East, Military, Sovereignty, Syria, UK, Uncategorized, US

Cameron and Obama ended the neocon era. But the era of Assad goes on

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David Cameron and Barack Obama buried the neocons in Washington. But the west will pay a price for the quiet life

By
The Guardian
Wednesday 14 March 2012 21.20 GMT

Barack Obama welcomes David Cameron
Barack Obama welcomes David Cameron during an official arrival ceremony on the south lawn of the White House in Washington today. Photograph: Mark Wilson / POOL/EPA

It is as easy to be distracted by the outward glamour of a prime ministerial visit to Washington as it is to fail to discern its occasional real inner substance. Both things apply in the case of David Cameron’s White House talks with Barack Obama. On one level they were the very embodiment of the self-indulgent vacuity of which Simon Jenkins wrote here. On another, they marked the end of a chapter in modern history.

On Wednesday in the White House they buried the neocons. Or, to put it rather more carefully, since neoconservatism has been through many contrasting incarnations and the term is widely misused, Cameron and Obama marked the imminent close of the phase of US-UK foreign policy that began after 9/11 with the coming together of American imperial power and British support for the active promotion of democracy and liberal institutions, particularly in the Muslim world.

Of course, like most attempts to draw a line in the sand of history, this one is approximate and inconclusive in many ways. The Afghanistan campaign which, along with the jihadist threat, is one of the few constants of the past decade, is not over yet. There will still be nearly 70,000 US troops in Afghanistan at the turn of this year and 9,000 British until late next, with an “enduring commitment” beyond that. The interventionist reflex, the wish to nurture liberal institutions as a counterweight to jihadism, and the sheer ability to act with greater military effectiveness than most rivals will all continue to shape US and UK foreign policy in the Muslim world and elsewhere for as far ahead as the eye can see.

Meanwhile, for all the buddiness of the US visit and the Churchillian rhetoric of their Washington Post op-ed piece this week, the two leaders do not march in lockstep anyway. Obama put it with utter clarity in Wednesday’s White House press conference. Britain and America are different economies in different places. The one nation is an indisputable first-rank world power. The other is a leading second-rank one that cannot act unilaterally even if it wanted to. The US is bound into the Middle East, in particular in relations with Israel, in ways that do not apply to Britain to the same degree. Cameron was more committed to intervention in Libya and is keener on intervention in Syria than Obama.

Yet, even when all these and many other provisos are taken into account, Wednesday was still the end of an era. Over Afghanistan – despite all the talk about the upcoming Nato summit, the handover to Afghan security forces and Obama’s claim that there will be “no steep cliff” of rapid pullout at the end of 2014 – the aim is withdrawal. Recent killings of Brits and by Americans and Wednesday’s audacious attack inside Camp Bastion are all harbingers of that. “People get weary,” said Obama, in a moment of frankness. The pullout will happen because the voters have lost the will to fight.

The similar surface noise over Iran and Syria also conceals a deeper current, a long withdrawing roar of disengagement. Cameron and Obama dwelt less on Iran and Syria than they did on Afghanistan. That’s partly because there is less they can do there, even the Americans, certainly the British. The Washington Post joint article emphasised that there is time and space to pursue a diplomatic solution in Iran, buttressed by stronger sanctions. There is not an iota of ambiguity in the toughness of the language, but the unspoken reality is that Obama would do almost anything to avoid getting trapped into a military strike against Iran. That doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. But it does mean that he thinks, rightly, that it would be a mark of failure if it did.

In Syria the limits of engagement are even more stark. At the White House press conference, Obama spoke about aid to the opposition, about pressure on the regime, about mobilising the nations and tightening the sanctions. Cameron threatened the Assad dynasty with the international criminal court. It all sounds like action, and it is all useful incremental stuff. But it is action at a distance, with strict limits. It is not intervention, because the international order has a collective interest in inaction and because the costs – not least the political costs at home – are deemed too high.

All this is, in very large part, the politics of where we are now. Faced with all three of these grim situations at once – a decade-long losing struggle against a feudal patriarchal narco-state, the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of a paranoid revolutionary theocracy, and the readiness of a corrupt Arab socialist autocrat to kill his own people for the sake of the revolution – it is hardly surprising that Obama and Cameron hold back. Who’s to blame them for doing so? The historic failure in Iraq leaves them little choice. But so does the fragility of the global economy. Even if the US and the UK were faced with only one of the three problems, Iraq and the recession would make them think twice.

A large part of all of us breathes a huge sigh of relief at this. The post-George Bush era finally beckons. Withdrawal from Afghanistan means no more pointless deaths of young soldiers, no more massacres, insults and acts of desecration against Afghans – at least by Americans. Western nations think in instant gratification terms and short timescales and this has all gone on too long. The west has had enough of fear and shame and hard times, of making enemies out of strangers and realising that getting people to change their ways is harder than it first seemed. People get weary, just like Obama said.

Another part of us, though, ought to reflect on what is being lost by this overwhelming collective disengagement. The disengagement is happening because the mistakes – crimes if you prefer – of the past have created a collective war-weariness that has now become a collective war-wariness. It is natural to want the conflict to end.

Who wouldn’t? It’s not wrong to want a quiet life, but how right is it when it comes at a price that someone else will inevitably have to pay? That wasn’t acceptable to earlier generations who scorned non-intervention in Spain or Abyssinia. Obama and Cameron closed the door on the George Bush era on Wednesday, to the general relief of the world. But the era of Mullah Omar, Ayatollah Khamenei and Bashar al-Assad goes on, posing questions that will one day have to be answered.

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continue reading source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/14/cameron-obama-ended-neocon-era

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Remember, politics is a contact sport, like hockey, so please feel free to add quick contributions, observations and relevant information as a comment below!

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