https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/greta-thunberg-nordic-prize-1.5340672
Oh, Greta, if only you were old enough to be prime minister....
________________________________________________________________
http://rabble.ca/columnists/2019/10/canadas-conservatives-republicans-or-tories
The Conservatives have long taken a position that the CBC news network (owned by all of us) should be destroyed.
Of course. The CBC is by far the best news service in Canada. At that, it's more than a little hobbled by government friends of the very rich - and even others.
I learned that after a few years of being on a talk show on CBC. It seems that Quebec separatists demanded I be taken off the air because I was on the board of an anti-separatist group called Alliance Quebec. In fact, my show was NEVER about separatism at all. But top CBC management had some separatists on it - and they wanted me gone. So I was fired.
The interference with CBC is bad news. But CBC is still far the best news service in Canada. (which is why the oil people and the Conservatives want to destroy it.)
Canada's newspapers are almost all trash. They are heavily biased, and they obey their wealthy owners. In short, most of them are as bad as the U.S. newspapers. Perhaps the worst of them is the Irving Press of New Brunswick, but the Last Post chain has brought propaganda and ignorance all over this country.
The origin of that press was a man I met many times because he was on my CBC radio show just before me. He was, and is, Conrad Black who was and is an arrogant bundle of ignorance and lies and thievery - for which he would serve prison time. But Trump forgave him. (Birds of a feather.)
Most of our news media work on the principle of our side as good guys and the other side as bad guys. So the killing of the ISIS leader is good. (Clap hands for Jesus.) But the killing of an American ruler would be bad.
If you study world wars One and Two, it is obvious that Britain was as much as Germany responsible for them. All the non-stop wars of the U.S. have been illegal wars since 1945 and the many millions of dead were caused to stuff the wallets of very wealthy Americans, with wealthy Canadians sliding in. The conquest of Latin America is very similar to Hitler's wars - but on a smaller scale.
We were horrified at Hitler's holocaust that killed over 4,000,000 Jews. (And I guess we just forget how much we helped Hitler to do it. Of course, today's holocaust is the Israeli one inflicted on Muslims.
Radio Station news? Very unreliable. Most radio stations have only one reporter - if that. And that reporter can only briefly look at even local news. Much of their news is simply copied from the lying newspapers.
TV news? Again, it has it's faults. But again, CBC leads the pack. Ditto for radio CBC.
_________________________________________________________________
It's important to read the whole of this article to see what's going on.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/30/rex-tillerson-denies-exxon-misled-investors-over-climate-crisis
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-values-test-immigration-1.5340652
This is what is called racism.
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https://www.rt.com/news/472197-israeli-soldier-convicted-gaza/
Wow! A whole month in jail just for killing a person.
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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/school-violence-racism-bullying-1.5328735
Get used to it. Canada is a very racist country. It always has been. There was slavery in Canada, slavery of both Blacks and native peoples. (The French settlers, for example, tried to enslave the native peoples. Luckily, it didn't work very well, because they could too easily escape into the forests.) Nor did Canada end slavery. That was done by a British act of 1834 that banned slavery throughout the colonial empire. (Mind you, a racist like Winston Churchill happily enslaved millions. He had nothing but contempt for all non-white people, and he happily bombed and starved millions of them to death.)
But that wasn't the end of the racism.
Most Canadian cities permitted Blacks to live only in the "Black" district. Halifax forced them to live in the foulest area of the city. Until recently, they were commonly banned from movie theatres and restaurants. Montreal forced almost all Blacks to live in a shabby district. And in Montreal's heyday as a night club centre (from the 1930s to the 1950s and more, they were not permitted to enter the clubs except as entertainers. And then they were not permitted to sit at the tables or to talk to white customers. For Black women, the only jobs available were as entertainers or as the lowest of household servants. For men, almost the only jobs were as railway porters. Indeed, the living area was deliberately set to be close to the railway station.
My uncle was a boxing coach who often travelled with his boxers. The Black ones were not permitted - in any Canadian city - to stay at hotels or to eat in restaurants.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Chinese were allowed to come to Canada. Of course. They were wanted only as the cheapest possible labour to built the CPR railway. They were also assigned the most dangerous jobs - such as exploding tunnels. And many died of that.
With the railway built, they were forced to live in Chinatowns. Only in Chinatowns. (In most cities - and probably still so today - places for rent commonly had signs that said "Select clientele only". That meant no Blacks, no orientals
When I was fourteen or fifteen, my father was the scoutmaster in Chinatown, and I helped him. The shocker came when we went to the scout camp for two weeks.
The white boys at camp worked every minute to humiliate and bully the Chinese. I had never seen anything like that at the camp before.
Well, yes, there was the case of the Jewish scouts from the YMHA troop. Among other things, there was a daily supper routine of humiliating them. At supper in the dining hall, the scouts of the various troops gave their troop cheers.
So did the Jewish boys, ending with 'YMHA, ra, ra, ra'.
All the other troops would then yell ha, ha, ha.
Of course, we were also the good Christians who refused to allow European Jews to escape from Hitler's Germany. (I knew a couple who did escape. But they were rich enough to bribe Canadian officials.) Just before the war - and at a time when we knew what Hitler was doing to them, a shipload of German Jews got to
Britain - then Canada - then the U.S. All three of us sent them back to die.
We were a part of the holocaust.
During the war, over a hundred Jewish children escaped the death camps and got to Spain. Spain would not let them stay. Canada, Britain and the U.S. refused to accept them. So Spain sent them back to the death camps.
In fact, Canada would still not accept Jews, even for some years after the war.
In 1962, I was the director of a Jewish camp, so I wore a YMHA T-shirt with a great Star of David on it. So attired, I was one day invited to a nearby lake that was the summer resort of Montreal's wealthiest families. And I joined into a game of soft ball.
That night, I later learned, there was an emergency meeting of Montreal's elite to find out who had 'invited the Jew'.
Canada is and always has been profoundly racist. Yes it still is. Check out Quebec's recent racist laws.
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/quarterly-fundraising-2019q3-1.5342383
Most of the Liberals and Conservative money comes from very wealthy individuals and corporations. So guess who really runs this country?
No, the big money doesn't come from us. It comes from the people who have piles of money to spare - partly because they don't have any income tax to pay.
Why on earth do we allow that? And, as long as we allow that, we won't ever have a government that represents us.
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/hrt-ruling-1.5312191
Well, if it was a request for $40 million for Mr. Irving in New Brunswick, I could understand it. But $40,000 for kids who suffer from terrible treatment? Hey! Get real.
_______________________________________________________________
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/david-suzuki/2019/10/youth-lawsuit-draws-attention-climate-crisis
Hey! Kids! Listen to your billionaires. They need the money.
________________________________________________________________
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/alberta-diary/2019/10/plan-roll-back-alberta-public-employees-pay-no-surprise-seems
To the people of Alberta - Ottawa is not your enemy. The Conservative Party is. That's why it teaches you to hate Ottawa.
________________________________________________________________
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/views-expressed/2019/10/open-letter-calls-canada-stop-supporting-corrupt-haitian
Canada has to support a corrupt government in Haiti. We are the ones who helped to bring that corrupt government to power. We did it at the request of the American government - that we bend the knee to.
In the old days, we did favours like this for Britain. That's why we sent Canadians to die in the Boer War in South Africa over a hundred years ago. That was an illegal war. And it had nothing to do with Canada. Now, we kiss the ass of Donald Trump. (as does Britain in its fading years.)
________________________________________________________________
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/judy-rebicks-blog/2019/10/will-neoliberalism-die-chile
The U.S. has created an empire of Latin America. The purpose of it is to give American billionaires (and Canadian ones) cheap labour, dreadful poverty, lots and lots of dictators and a seemingly hopeless future. Thus the line-ups of the hungry and hopeless at the U.S. border. And thus increasing rebellion in the cities.
And the craziest thing is the American people get little out of this. The monster profits go to American and Canadian billionaires. And they don't even pay taxes to us. We have to pay for their wars.
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http://rabble.ca/babble/international-news-and-politics/trade-unions-join-pharma-attack-democrats-over-bill-lower
I printed just the headline of this story because that's all we need.
Until the 1960s the CCF was a Canadian political party committed to the needs of the Canadian people. That was the party that gave us medicare (or forced the government to do it.) It was a party based on Christian principles of treating all people as equals and on meeting human needs - of whatever religion - or even no religion.
But, surprise, surprise, it had no money from Canada's wealthy. It was desperate. So it had to look to the union movement to get enough money for even a weak campaign. And it could get union support only by letting it set the rules. So they trimmed their policies, got union support, and called the result the NDP.
Alas! The NDP came to be a party with a union movement that had a lot of big business values in it. The prices of drugs are a scandal but ---the employees of drug companies belong to unions. The prices of drugs are a scandal for you and me. But they're quite nice for union employees.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/31/human-rights-watch-report-links-cia-backed-units-to-afghanistan-abuses
The U.S. makes considerable U.S. of hired thugs in most of its wars (and even it's non-wars). So it's no surprise it's using them in Afghanistan. The interesting thing is that western news media very seldom admit that such gang-thugs exist. In fact, there's a thriving market for hired killers. They were the ones who murdered 200,000 innocent people (including priests and nuns) in Guatemala. But never a word appeared in our news media. And they don't march in American parades with a Trump calling them 'our gallant lads'.
And can we get less of this crap about how western armies fight for their country? That's what we're told and what Americans are told. But that's seldom true. They're sent to murder innocent people so that billionaires can plunder their countries. That's why Canadian troops were sent to Korea in the 1950's, to Afghanistan, to train locals in Syria, to crush freedom in Haiti....
Our soldiers deserve respect. They are not the evil ones. Those are our politicians and our billionaires who lie to them..
The U.S. was selling weapons and other war materials to Hitler until the Japanese attack at the very end of 1941. Britain came very close to becoming a dead duck. American billionaires didn't care. All they wanted was to steal Britain's middle east oil fields. And they did it.
Over some 300 years, the British murdered some 400,000,000 people to get control of their economies. And that was entirely to please the very wealthy. Soldiers and sailors got pennies for their killing, and were simply dumped in the streets when they were no longer useful.
In the nineteenth century, the Irish had to live on potatoes. The good food that they grew went to British landowners. Then the potato crops collapsed. The Irish were starving. The British wealthy knew that. The British wealthy had food supplies in England and all over the world. But they preferred to let the Irish die.
Most British were the cheapest of labour with cities like Glasgow having the most vile slums in Europe. British children, most of them, went to work 15 hours a day, six days a week. And that happened at the age of six. It was also common practice in Canada and the U.S. And it was even worse for the children of the more foreign empire.
Capitalism has a vile record. In 1812 and again in 1865-6,the U.S. invaded Canada. Why? The American wealthy wanted to steal Canadian land and other resources. In fact, the U.S. still maintains an invasion plan of Canada. And I don't think it's because we're a threat to it.
Almost every war of the last hundreds of years was caused by the greed of the wealthy. Thus the Boer War. Thus the American empire of Latin America. Thus the rise of Hitler. He built his rise on hatred of the British wealthy who had destroyed the German economy.
Thus the American ambition in the 1950's to conquer China to plunder it as Britain had; thus the middle east wars; thus the Vietnam war; thus the Afghanistan war.......
The great threat to our survival is our own super-wealthy. And that's why I regret that the CCF was killed by the NDP unions connection.
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Oh, my! I'm getting talkative.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/30/chile-protests-portraits-protesters-sebastian-pinera
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/31/death-toll-in-yemen-war-reaches-100000
God bless America and Saudi Arabia.
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https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/dyer-worldwide-wave-of-protests-heralds-emerging-global-society
In my CBC days, I knew Dyer as well as I knew Conrad Black. We were all on the same morning show. It was obvious even then that Dyer was a brilliant commentator.
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Oh, I haven't mentioned the U.S. joy at the killing of the leader of ISIS. You have to understand. The man they killed has not been an active leader for some time. I don't know whether it's illness, but the sense is he is not a leader of anything, and he hasn't been for some time.
So why that elaborate effort to kill him?
Well, Trump needed some good news. And most of our press took care not to tell us that our sons of Jesus killed a man who no longer had any role anywhere.
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https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/31/if-these-miners-were-bankers-congress-would-have-bailed-them-out-already-says
Too true.
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https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/30/horrifying-new-research-shows-rising-sea-levels-could-wipe-out-major-cities-displace
Not to worry. The expert scientists (like Ontario's Doug Ford) in the Conservative party say those other scientists don't know what they're talking about. And Doug Ford graduated from high school. So there.
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https://www.https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/30/climate-crisis-fueled-fires-rage-fears-grow-uninhabitable-
Yes, /climate change is happening. And we have damn little time to deal with it over the whole world.
And what is the Canadian oil industry doing about it? Hey! It pays the Conservative party of Alberta to hate the rest of Canada. Hatred of other people always works. That's why Donald Trump can get away with building a hideously expensive border wall. The suckers go for hatred every time.
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https://countercurrents.org/2019/10/how-the-u-s-regime-justifies-the-theft-of-syrias-oil
Most American killing in the middle east has been to help American oil billionaires (who don't pay income tax to anybody) steal the oil.
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https://countercurrents.org/2019/10/chile-and-her-history-of-western-interference
It's quite possible that Latin America is at last rising against our plunderers.
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U.S.and Canadian billionaires have plundered and destroyed almost every country in Latin America.
https://countercurrents.org/2019/10/why-i-weep-while-i-work
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https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/10/31/Postmedia-Torstar-Taxpayer-Cash/
Almost all Canadian and American newspapers are trash. They have to be. If they were honest, nobody would vote Liberal or Conservative.
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https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2019/10/28/Jason-Kenney-Budget-Buzzwords/
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/syrian-woman-ivanka-how-shameless-proud-father-murders/5693624
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/albert-einsteins-letter-warning-of-zionist-facism-in-israel/5438170
The creation of Israel was a terrible mistake - and was done by the western powers to give them a foothold in the Middle East. What we should have done was to accept European Jews in Britain, Canada, and the U.S. But we were too much Jew-haters to do that.
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52464.htm
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http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52467.htm
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I was an elementary and high school teacher with hopelessly oversized classes here in Canada. We still have them - and they are likely to get worse - as in Alberta. In university, I taught classes of 90 or so - which was small by Canadian standards. Some universities have classes of hundreds.
Well, it doesn't matter in the universities. Professors almost always have no education training at all. And they don't want any. There's no prestige in teaching. That's not enough for academic egos.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52460.htm
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52456.htm
What Trump is doing is called illegal plundering.
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https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/10/30/news/alberta-wants-cut-public-service-wages-it-will-hit-everyone-teachers-hospital
But that's okay. It won't hit the oil bosses.
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https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/10/31/news/newcomers-quebec-will-have-pass-values-test
And what are Quebec values? Well, I lived as a Quebecker born into a family of the earliest French settlers. But I don't have Quebec values; my first language is English. Religion? That's not a Quebec value any more. There was a time when one could get beaten up for not being French and Catholic. Today, you can get fired for being French Catholic - or Muslim.
Going further back, it was a Quebec value to have a Black or indigenous slave. And any of those were commonly torn apart by horses cheered on by spectators.
It's an old Quebec value to deny housing to people of colour and orientals - and Muslims.
In fact, the outstanding value feature of the current Quebec government is its racism. It'll be a tough go for immigrants who will have to learn to have contempt for themselves.
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https://truthout.org/articles/from-california-to-el-salvador-climate-driven-displacement-is-on-the-rise/
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https://truthout.org/articles/we-are-the-zombies-of-our-capitalist-apocalypse/
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https://theintercept.com/2019/10/30/afghanistan-health-clinics-airstrikes-taliban/
Of course. Killing doctors and nurses and patients - and children and babies - is what modern warfare is about. It began, perhaps, with Churchill's order in 1920 to bomb undefended towns and villages. It was picked up Hitler, and then by us in the bombing of Dresden in WW2. (Hitler was not unusual. He was typical of all the major powers.) And remember, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki was a military target. So the dead were almost all civilians right down to babies.
And so God blesses America.
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https://theintercept.com/2019/10/31/exxon-mobil-massachusetts-climate-change-lawsuit-greenwashing/
_________________________________________________________________
And a note to Albertans.
Canadians have no desire to destroy your jobs. In fact, if you check, you'll find us Canadians have not destroyed a single job in Alberta. All the firing has been done by your fading oil industry. And this is almost certain to continue. Canada has not done enough for Alberta; that's true. But it certainly has not been the killer of Alberta jobs. The oil industry is doing that. And it soon might dump you big time.
Corporations and governments get away with this by pointing fingers and building hatreds - and all the time they're really covering up what they're doing.
What the Canadian government should be doing is a huge programme to create jobs in Alberta. It's not doing that. It's letting the oil companies and the Alberta government take a lead in lies and hatred. And that will do no good to either side.
There is, for example, a huge job of cleaning up the oil fields. That could take a century or more, and it would require many thousands of workers. (No. The oil industry is not going to spend a penny to clean the oil mess it will leave.)
Ottawa should also take the lead in drawing more employment industries into Alberta.
It's quite right to criticize Ottawa for its inaction. But it's a big mistake to put any faith in oil corporations or the Conservatives who are their puppets. You can be sure they won't do a damn thing for you. Right now, you're following a sucker's game. And, oh, that will cost you.
______________________________________________________________
Meanwhile we all face an immediate danger. Capitalism has a long history of greed, mass murder, and plunder. In fact, that goes back before the term 'capitalism' was even invented. In the western world, it is now rising to the greatest levels of murder and plunder the world has ever known. Capitalists own the Liberals, the Conservatives, the Republicans, and much, too much of the Democrats.
We live in a world in which Canadians and Americans and British and others are being impoverished. Yes, that's true. They are. And we're becoming impoverished because the super wealthy are robbing us blind. That's why our world is such a disordered place. That's why we spend money on wars to kill countries that object to our rule by billionaires.
Inevitably, we have created a world that exists only to plunder and murder for the super rich. And even more inevitably, that will lead to the most dreadful crash this world has ever seen.
It's time to wake up.
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It's getting very late for this blog I began 10 hours ago. I'm sorry. I lost my head and did far, far more commment of my own than I usually do for this blog. I guess I just got carried away.
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___________________________________
________________________________________________________________
Oh, Greta, if only you were old enough to be prime minister....
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http://rabble.ca/columnists/2019/10/canadas-conservatives-republicans-or-tories
The Conservatives have long taken a position that the CBC news network (owned by all of us) should be destroyed.
Of course. The CBC is by far the best news service in Canada. At that, it's more than a little hobbled by government friends of the very rich - and even others.
I learned that after a few years of being on a talk show on CBC. It seems that Quebec separatists demanded I be taken off the air because I was on the board of an anti-separatist group called Alliance Quebec. In fact, my show was NEVER about separatism at all. But top CBC management had some separatists on it - and they wanted me gone. So I was fired.
The interference with CBC is bad news. But CBC is still far the best news service in Canada. (which is why the oil people and the Conservatives want to destroy it.)
Canada's newspapers are almost all trash. They are heavily biased, and they obey their wealthy owners. In short, most of them are as bad as the U.S. newspapers. Perhaps the worst of them is the Irving Press of New Brunswick, but the Last Post chain has brought propaganda and ignorance all over this country.
The origin of that press was a man I met many times because he was on my CBC radio show just before me. He was, and is, Conrad Black who was and is an arrogant bundle of ignorance and lies and thievery - for which he would serve prison time. But Trump forgave him. (Birds of a feather.)
Most of our news media work on the principle of our side as good guys and the other side as bad guys. So the killing of the ISIS leader is good. (Clap hands for Jesus.) But the killing of an American ruler would be bad.
If you study world wars One and Two, it is obvious that Britain was as much as Germany responsible for them. All the non-stop wars of the U.S. have been illegal wars since 1945 and the many millions of dead were caused to stuff the wallets of very wealthy Americans, with wealthy Canadians sliding in. The conquest of Latin America is very similar to Hitler's wars - but on a smaller scale.
We were horrified at Hitler's holocaust that killed over 4,000,000 Jews. (And I guess we just forget how much we helped Hitler to do it. Of course, today's holocaust is the Israeli one inflicted on Muslims.
Radio Station news? Very unreliable. Most radio stations have only one reporter - if that. And that reporter can only briefly look at even local news. Much of their news is simply copied from the lying newspapers.
TV news? Again, it has it's faults. But again, CBC leads the pack. Ditto for radio CBC.
_________________________________________________________________
It's important to read the whole of this article to see what's going on.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/30/rex-tillerson-denies-exxon-misled-investors-over-climate-crisis
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-values-test-immigration-1.5340652
This is what is called racism.
________________________________________________________________
https://www.rt.com/news/472197-israeli-soldier-convicted-gaza/
Wow! A whole month in jail just for killing a person.
________________________________________________________________
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/school-violence-racism-bullying-1.5328735
Get used to it. Canada is a very racist country. It always has been. There was slavery in Canada, slavery of both Blacks and native peoples. (The French settlers, for example, tried to enslave the native peoples. Luckily, it didn't work very well, because they could too easily escape into the forests.) Nor did Canada end slavery. That was done by a British act of 1834 that banned slavery throughout the colonial empire. (Mind you, a racist like Winston Churchill happily enslaved millions. He had nothing but contempt for all non-white people, and he happily bombed and starved millions of them to death.)
But that wasn't the end of the racism.
Most Canadian cities permitted Blacks to live only in the "Black" district. Halifax forced them to live in the foulest area of the city. Until recently, they were commonly banned from movie theatres and restaurants. Montreal forced almost all Blacks to live in a shabby district. And in Montreal's heyday as a night club centre (from the 1930s to the 1950s and more, they were not permitted to enter the clubs except as entertainers. And then they were not permitted to sit at the tables or to talk to white customers. For Black women, the only jobs available were as entertainers or as the lowest of household servants. For men, almost the only jobs were as railway porters. Indeed, the living area was deliberately set to be close to the railway station.
My uncle was a boxing coach who often travelled with his boxers. The Black ones were not permitted - in any Canadian city - to stay at hotels or to eat in restaurants.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Chinese were allowed to come to Canada. Of course. They were wanted only as the cheapest possible labour to built the CPR railway. They were also assigned the most dangerous jobs - such as exploding tunnels. And many died of that.
With the railway built, they were forced to live in Chinatowns. Only in Chinatowns. (In most cities - and probably still so today - places for rent commonly had signs that said "Select clientele only". That meant no Blacks, no orientals
When I was fourteen or fifteen, my father was the scoutmaster in Chinatown, and I helped him. The shocker came when we went to the scout camp for two weeks.
The white boys at camp worked every minute to humiliate and bully the Chinese. I had never seen anything like that at the camp before.
Well, yes, there was the case of the Jewish scouts from the YMHA troop. Among other things, there was a daily supper routine of humiliating them. At supper in the dining hall, the scouts of the various troops gave their troop cheers.
So did the Jewish boys, ending with 'YMHA, ra, ra, ra'.
All the other troops would then yell ha, ha, ha.
Of course, we were also the good Christians who refused to allow European Jews to escape from Hitler's Germany. (I knew a couple who did escape. But they were rich enough to bribe Canadian officials.) Just before the war - and at a time when we knew what Hitler was doing to them, a shipload of German Jews got to
Britain - then Canada - then the U.S. All three of us sent them back to die.
We were a part of the holocaust.
During the war, over a hundred Jewish children escaped the death camps and got to Spain. Spain would not let them stay. Canada, Britain and the U.S. refused to accept them. So Spain sent them back to the death camps.
In fact, Canada would still not accept Jews, even for some years after the war.
In 1962, I was the director of a Jewish camp, so I wore a YMHA T-shirt with a great Star of David on it. So attired, I was one day invited to a nearby lake that was the summer resort of Montreal's wealthiest families. And I joined into a game of soft ball.
That night, I later learned, there was an emergency meeting of Montreal's elite to find out who had 'invited the Jew'.
Canada is and always has been profoundly racist. Yes it still is. Check out Quebec's recent racist laws.
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/quarterly-fundraising-2019q3-1.5342383
Most of the Liberals and Conservative money comes from very wealthy individuals and corporations. So guess who really runs this country?
No, the big money doesn't come from us. It comes from the people who have piles of money to spare - partly because they don't have any income tax to pay.
Why on earth do we allow that? And, as long as we allow that, we won't ever have a government that represents us.
_________________________________________________________________
https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/hrt-ruling-1.5312191
Well, if it was a request for $40 million for Mr. Irving in New Brunswick, I could understand it. But $40,000 for kids who suffer from terrible treatment? Hey! Get real.
_______________________________________________________________
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/david-suzuki/2019/10/youth-lawsuit-draws-attention-climate-crisis
Hey! Kids! Listen to your billionaires. They need the money.
________________________________________________________________
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/alberta-diary/2019/10/plan-roll-back-alberta-public-employees-pay-no-surprise-seems
To the people of Alberta - Ottawa is not your enemy. The Conservative Party is. That's why it teaches you to hate Ottawa.
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http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/views-expressed/2019/10/open-letter-calls-canada-stop-supporting-corrupt-haitian
Canada has to support a corrupt government in Haiti. We are the ones who helped to bring that corrupt government to power. We did it at the request of the American government - that we bend the knee to.
In the old days, we did favours like this for Britain. That's why we sent Canadians to die in the Boer War in South Africa over a hundred years ago. That was an illegal war. And it had nothing to do with Canada. Now, we kiss the ass of Donald Trump. (as does Britain in its fading years.)
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http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/judy-rebicks-blog/2019/10/will-neoliberalism-die-chile
The U.S. has created an empire of Latin America. The purpose of it is to give American billionaires (and Canadian ones) cheap labour, dreadful poverty, lots and lots of dictators and a seemingly hopeless future. Thus the line-ups of the hungry and hopeless at the U.S. border. And thus increasing rebellion in the cities.
And the craziest thing is the American people get little out of this. The monster profits go to American and Canadian billionaires. And they don't even pay taxes to us. We have to pay for their wars.
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http://rabble.ca/babble/international-news-and-politics/trade-unions-join-pharma-attack-democrats-over-bill-lower
I printed just the headline of this story because that's all we need.
Until the 1960s the CCF was a Canadian political party committed to the needs of the Canadian people. That was the party that gave us medicare (or forced the government to do it.) It was a party based on Christian principles of treating all people as equals and on meeting human needs - of whatever religion - or even no religion.
But, surprise, surprise, it had no money from Canada's wealthy. It was desperate. So it had to look to the union movement to get enough money for even a weak campaign. And it could get union support only by letting it set the rules. So they trimmed their policies, got union support, and called the result the NDP.
Alas! The NDP came to be a party with a union movement that had a lot of big business values in it. The prices of drugs are a scandal but ---the employees of drug companies belong to unions. The prices of drugs are a scandal for you and me. But they're quite nice for union employees.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/31/human-rights-watch-report-links-cia-backed-units-to-afghanistan-abuses
The U.S. makes considerable U.S. of hired thugs in most of its wars (and even it's non-wars). So it's no surprise it's using them in Afghanistan. The interesting thing is that western news media very seldom admit that such gang-thugs exist. In fact, there's a thriving market for hired killers. They were the ones who murdered 200,000 innocent people (including priests and nuns) in Guatemala. But never a word appeared in our news media. And they don't march in American parades with a Trump calling them 'our gallant lads'.
And can we get less of this crap about how western armies fight for their country? That's what we're told and what Americans are told. But that's seldom true. They're sent to murder innocent people so that billionaires can plunder their countries. That's why Canadian troops were sent to Korea in the 1950's, to Afghanistan, to train locals in Syria, to crush freedom in Haiti....
Our soldiers deserve respect. They are not the evil ones. Those are our politicians and our billionaires who lie to them..
The U.S. was selling weapons and other war materials to Hitler until the Japanese attack at the very end of 1941. Britain came very close to becoming a dead duck. American billionaires didn't care. All they wanted was to steal Britain's middle east oil fields. And they did it.
Over some 300 years, the British murdered some 400,000,000 people to get control of their economies. And that was entirely to please the very wealthy. Soldiers and sailors got pennies for their killing, and were simply dumped in the streets when they were no longer useful.
In the nineteenth century, the Irish had to live on potatoes. The good food that they grew went to British landowners. Then the potato crops collapsed. The Irish were starving. The British wealthy knew that. The British wealthy had food supplies in England and all over the world. But they preferred to let the Irish die.
Most British were the cheapest of labour with cities like Glasgow having the most vile slums in Europe. British children, most of them, went to work 15 hours a day, six days a week. And that happened at the age of six. It was also common practice in Canada and the U.S. And it was even worse for the children of the more foreign empire.
Capitalism has a vile record. In 1812 and again in 1865-6,the U.S. invaded Canada. Why? The American wealthy wanted to steal Canadian land and other resources. In fact, the U.S. still maintains an invasion plan of Canada. And I don't think it's because we're a threat to it.
Almost every war of the last hundreds of years was caused by the greed of the wealthy. Thus the Boer War. Thus the American empire of Latin America. Thus the rise of Hitler. He built his rise on hatred of the British wealthy who had destroyed the German economy.
Thus the American ambition in the 1950's to conquer China to plunder it as Britain had; thus the middle east wars; thus the Vietnam war; thus the Afghanistan war.......
The great threat to our survival is our own super-wealthy. And that's why I regret that the CCF was killed by the NDP unions connection.
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Oh, my! I'm getting talkative.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/30/chile-protests-portraits-protesters-sebastian-pinera
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/31/death-toll-in-yemen-war-reaches-100000
God bless America and Saudi Arabia.
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https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/dyer-worldwide-wave-of-protests-heralds-emerging-global-society
In my CBC days, I knew Dyer as well as I knew Conrad Black. We were all on the same morning show. It was obvious even then that Dyer was a brilliant commentator.
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Oh, I haven't mentioned the U.S. joy at the killing of the leader of ISIS. You have to understand. The man they killed has not been an active leader for some time. I don't know whether it's illness, but the sense is he is not a leader of anything, and he hasn't been for some time.
So why that elaborate effort to kill him?
Well, Trump needed some good news. And most of our press took care not to tell us that our sons of Jesus killed a man who no longer had any role anywhere.
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https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/31/if-these-miners-were-bankers-congress-would-have-bailed-them-out-already-says
Too true.
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https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/30/horrifying-new-research-shows-rising-sea-levels-could-wipe-out-major-cities-displace
Not to worry. The expert scientists (like Ontario's Doug Ford) in the Conservative party say those other scientists don't know what they're talking about. And Doug Ford graduated from high school. So there.
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https://www.https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/30/climate-crisis-fueled-fires-rage-fears-grow-uninhabitable-
Yes, /climate change is happening. And we have damn little time to deal with it over the whole world.
And what is the Canadian oil industry doing about it? Hey! It pays the Conservative party of Alberta to hate the rest of Canada. Hatred of other people always works. That's why Donald Trump can get away with building a hideously expensive border wall. The suckers go for hatred every time.
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https://countercurrents.org/2019/10/how-the-u-s-regime-justifies-the-theft-of-syrias-oil
Most American killing in the middle east has been to help American oil billionaires (who don't pay income tax to anybody) steal the oil.
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https://countercurrents.org/2019/10/chile-and-her-history-of-western-interference
It's quite possible that Latin America is at last rising against our plunderers.
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U.S.and Canadian billionaires have plundered and destroyed almost every country in Latin America.
https://countercurrents.org/2019/10/why-i-weep-while-i-work
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https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/10/31/Postmedia-Torstar-Taxpayer-Cash/
Almost all Canadian and American newspapers are trash. They have to be. If they were honest, nobody would vote Liberal or Conservative.
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https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2019/10/28/Jason-Kenney-Budget-Buzzwords/
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/syrian-woman-ivanka-how-shameless-proud-father-murders/5693624
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/albert-einsteins-letter-warning-of-zionist-facism-in-israel/5438170
The creation of Israel was a terrible mistake - and was done by the western powers to give them a foothold in the Middle East. What we should have done was to accept European Jews in Britain, Canada, and the U.S. But we were too much Jew-haters to do that.
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52464.htm
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http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52467.htm
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I was an elementary and high school teacher with hopelessly oversized classes here in Canada. We still have them - and they are likely to get worse - as in Alberta. In university, I taught classes of 90 or so - which was small by Canadian standards. Some universities have classes of hundreds.
Well, it doesn't matter in the universities. Professors almost always have no education training at all. And they don't want any. There's no prestige in teaching. That's not enough for academic egos.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52460.htm
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52456.htm
What Trump is doing is called illegal plundering.
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https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/10/30/news/alberta-wants-cut-public-service-wages-it-will-hit-everyone-teachers-hospital
But that's okay. It won't hit the oil bosses.
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https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/10/31/news/newcomers-quebec-will-have-pass-values-test
And what are Quebec values? Well, I lived as a Quebecker born into a family of the earliest French settlers. But I don't have Quebec values; my first language is English. Religion? That's not a Quebec value any more. There was a time when one could get beaten up for not being French and Catholic. Today, you can get fired for being French Catholic - or Muslim.
Going further back, it was a Quebec value to have a Black or indigenous slave. And any of those were commonly torn apart by horses cheered on by spectators.
It's an old Quebec value to deny housing to people of colour and orientals - and Muslims.
In fact, the outstanding value feature of the current Quebec government is its racism. It'll be a tough go for immigrants who will have to learn to have contempt for themselves.
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https://truthout.org/articles/from-california-to-el-salvador-climate-driven-displacement-is-on-the-rise/
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https://truthout.org/articles/we-are-the-zombies-of-our-capitalist-apocalypse/
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https://theintercept.com/2019/10/30/afghanistan-health-clinics-airstrikes-taliban/
Of course. Killing doctors and nurses and patients - and children and babies - is what modern warfare is about. It began, perhaps, with Churchill's order in 1920 to bomb undefended towns and villages. It was picked up Hitler, and then by us in the bombing of Dresden in WW2. (Hitler was not unusual. He was typical of all the major powers.) And remember, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki was a military target. So the dead were almost all civilians right down to babies.
And so God blesses America.
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https://theintercept.com/2019/10/31/exxon-mobil-massachusetts-climate-change-lawsuit-greenwashing/
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And a note to Albertans.
Canadians have no desire to destroy your jobs. In fact, if you check, you'll find us Canadians have not destroyed a single job in Alberta. All the firing has been done by your fading oil industry. And this is almost certain to continue. Canada has not done enough for Alberta; that's true. But it certainly has not been the killer of Alberta jobs. The oil industry is doing that. And it soon might dump you big time.
Corporations and governments get away with this by pointing fingers and building hatreds - and all the time they're really covering up what they're doing.
What the Canadian government should be doing is a huge programme to create jobs in Alberta. It's not doing that. It's letting the oil companies and the Alberta government take a lead in lies and hatred. And that will do no good to either side.
There is, for example, a huge job of cleaning up the oil fields. That could take a century or more, and it would require many thousands of workers. (No. The oil industry is not going to spend a penny to clean the oil mess it will leave.)
Ottawa should also take the lead in drawing more employment industries into Alberta.
It's quite right to criticize Ottawa for its inaction. But it's a big mistake to put any faith in oil corporations or the Conservatives who are their puppets. You can be sure they won't do a damn thing for you. Right now, you're following a sucker's game. And, oh, that will cost you.
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Meanwhile we all face an immediate danger. Capitalism has a long history of greed, mass murder, and plunder. In fact, that goes back before the term 'capitalism' was even invented. In the western world, it is now rising to the greatest levels of murder and plunder the world has ever known. Capitalists own the Liberals, the Conservatives, the Republicans, and much, too much of the Democrats.
We live in a world in which Canadians and Americans and British and others are being impoverished. Yes, that's true. They are. And we're becoming impoverished because the super wealthy are robbing us blind. That's why our world is such a disordered place. That's why we spend money on wars to kill countries that object to our rule by billionaires.
Inevitably, we have created a world that exists only to plunder and murder for the super rich. And even more inevitably, that will lead to the most dreadful crash this world has ever seen.
It's time to wake up.
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It's getting very late for this blog I began 10 hours ago. I'm sorry. I lost my head and did far, far more commment of my own than I usually do for this blog. I guess I just got carried away.
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