Dec. 11: Check your mail carefully...

In recent days, I have had delivered to my house an expensive brochure (our taxes at work) giving me information I need for this winter. For example, as a form of entertainment, I can go for walks in the snow. Who would have guessed it?  And it has the rules for Christmas tree disposal.

This is all stuff that could have been put very cheaply into the newspaper and on the air.

But it needed an expensive brochure format for it's main pictures - head shots of the councillors, and a full length, collectible photo of Mayor Leblanc.

I also got a calendar, free of charge (except in taxes) of our loved MP, Robert Goguen. Better still, every month has a photo (all the same) of Robert Goguen with that dreadful smirk that must be a birth defect.

It's s full life.
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I now return for just a moment to yesterday's report of Alward's speech to the Chamber of Commerce. People often use words in ways that give away their prejudices.

In his speech, Alward thanked SWN for its "perseverance" in searching for shale gas at Rexton. Strictly speading, that's a correct use of the word.  But preserverance, like many words, is one that carries warm and fuzzy feelings that have nothing to do with its real meaning.

For example, a bully who beats a man until he kills him is showing perseverance. But we would rarely use the word in such a sense. The way we use it usually carries some idea of an admirable quality of sticking to the job. Perseverance, not in what it really means, but in its warm, fuzzy associations,  is what we hear.

Similarly, outsider simply means someone from out of the province. Stephen Harper is an outsider. But I can't imagine Robert Goguen would ever call him that because as we hear the word, we associate it with "hostile", "trouble-making". And that was how Alward meant them.

Now, SWN perservered only in the sense that a man beating a person to death perseveres. As for outsiders, where does he think SWN is from? Berry Mills? And those nice men in camouflage suits and carrying rifles - were they all local people? In fact, isn't much of our police force made up of outsiders?

Mind you, I do not accuse Mr. Alward of deliberately using words to manipulate. I have seen no evidence he is bright enough to do that. I think he was just revealing his own prejudices. People who bully others to death for something he wants have perseverance. Outsiders who don't agree with him are bad.

P. A1 has the story that the RCMP will investigate some shale gas protesters. P.A 3 has the story about the New Brunswick Anti-shale Gas Alliance wanting an investigation of the police behaviour at the protest.

That makes eminently good sense. There are questions about those police cars that were burned, about the massive police assault that discovered three guns and some knives, leading Mr. Alward to say this was an armed camp.

Will the police investigate the protestors? You bet.

Will there be an investigation of the police? Dream on.
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The circus that is Mandella's funeral goes on, with Canadian news sources all eager to claim that Canada was a leader with Mendella in putting an end to official racism in South Africa. In fact,the world leaders who actually helped Mandella were ones  like Fidel Castro - whom our news doesn't mention.

Our side was more notable for labelling him a terrorist, and sending help to the white rulers of  South Africa. The one, Canadian prime minister who did help the South African blacks never gets mentioned in our news reports. He was John Diefenbaker.

The rest of them labelled him a terrorist because in his early days he led an armed rebellion. How terrible! People who lead armed rebellions are terrorists - like George Washington.

There is also a story that Putin is reacting to Canada's claim to the North Pole by "sabre rattling" and threatening to militarize the north.

Uh, well, Canada has been talking of militarizing the north for decades. In fact, it is now putting an ice breaker fleet in the Northwest passage to assert Canada's claim to it. But I have never seen a Canadian newspaper refer to that as "saber rattling".

In fact, Canada has no claim whatever to the North Pole. And it is unimaginable that any international court would recognize it.

We do have some claim to the Northwest Passage. And we have often attempted to enforce it. But the US has consistently refused to recognize our claim, and has openly defied it. Our new ice-breakers won't change that.

What is more likely is that Canada and the US will quietly settle their part of the quarrel when Harper gives US companies full permission to do whatever they like in the North - which means mostly giving a free hand to the US oil industry. (The oil industry isn't much interested in polar bears.)
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Editorial and op ed has a good column by Alec Bruce. Nothinig else.

But, oh, the Letter to the Editor bless us with another letter from George Wallin, the seer who invariably knows better than all the world's scientists and all the doctors in New Brunswick. Next time you have a heart attack, send for George Wallin.

He admits, though, that Harper has relaxed "some" environmental regulations. Yeah. Like eliminating almost all of them, and killing all environmental research.

I've occasionally wondered whether Mr. Wallin is a pro spin doctor working for the gas industry. But I don't think he is. His style is cute, but too heavy-handed for a pro.
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Is there any news the TandT missed? Well, yeah. Most of Africa, except for much the same story over and over about the Mandella funeral and the Canadian politicians at it. It's been, I think, some five days now. Give it a rest.

Meanwhile, the whole continent is on the edge of an explosion - thanks to western interference. We might want to look at that.

Then there's a little bitty story about a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere that we didn't know about, and that is seven thousand times as powerful as the ones we know of, and that lasts some 500 years. But this story comes from Toronto, so we won't pay any attention. Toronto people are outsiders.

And, as you know, Harper is working on plans to get tough on crime and create longer jail sentences.  The US has been there, done that.

Today, 25% of ALL PRISONERS IN THE WORLD are in US prisons. Many are there for life with no parole. That includes children as young as fifteen who are in for non-violent crimes. Can you imagine that? A fifteen year old in prison for the rest of his life for shoplifting?

The cost, of course, is enormous. Per year, it costs more to keep a person in prison than to attend the most expensive universities in the US. But that's okay because many of the prisons are privately-owned, with owners who live well off the tax payer. They also use the prisoners as cheap, even free, labour to be leased out to corporations with factories inside the prison. That's one reason a lot of Americans can't find jobs.

And the conditions are harsh, including lots of brutality, torture, solitary confinement.

Amazingly, it doesn't cure criminals. In fact, it makes them worse. Go figure.

God bless you, Mr. Harper, for getting tough on crime to keep us safe. (It's also good to get votes from the village idiot section of the population.)
 

Dec. 10 Is Alward a liar?

The banner headline on p. 1 reads "Alward pleased SWN 'persevered' through protests". Yes, those are the words from the lips of the man who represents all the people of New Brunswick. And just imagine the ordeal those executives had to survive, standing out there in the rain and the cold with nothing but their briefcases to hold off raging native grandmothers defiantly kneeling on the road and holding up feathers.

Generally, it reads like an embarassing kiss-up speech - but that would have gone over big with his audience  (Greater Moncton Chamber of Commerce). However, there was something Alward forgot to mention)

In April of 1910, Alward and the Conservative party opposed shale gas. The Liberals were for it, but Alward said it was poisonous for the water table, and added that HE KNEW of many cases in which water supplies that had been ruined by fracking in the US.

Oh? So how comes  he doesn't know it any more? And why didn't the TandT mention this in its story? After all, it wasn't hard to find out. The CBC ran the story yesterday. (You'll notice that the CBC often has stories days ahead of the Irving press, and more often  has stories that the Irving press never mentions at all. Ever notice that, Norbert?)

Yesterday's CBC also had the story yesterday ( in plenty of time for Irving press) that the US spy agency, NSA, is joined at the hip to our Connections Security Establishment of Canada, even with interlaced work forces, and with Canada doing spying for the US in 20 countries - just like a puppy trained to bring in the newspaper.

And, since the NSA spies on Americans with no warrant, checking even what books they read and who their friends are, it's a safe bet CSEC is doing the same to us. The police state is here. But not in today's Irving press.

Also from CBC but not from Irving press, CBC has launched an aboriginal website and TV programming. Check it in google as " CBC aboriginal website". How's that Norbert? As an editor who constantly introduced new and challenging ideas through Irving press, does this impress your sense of innovation and creativity?

CBC also had a report yesterday of widespread rigging of the stock market so that, unless  you are an insider, you are likely to be a loser. Prices are rigged to funnel even more of the wealth of ordinary people into the pockets of the very rich. Check to see if it's on the TandT Business Page. (It isn't).

But the TandT, if it missed most of the news, does have a fascinating story of yet another person with too much money who decorates her house beyond our wildest imaginings for Christmas. I counted ten Christmas trees, lavishly decorated. Those were just some of the ones in the house - and it was so big even ten looked lost.

But, with the true spirit of Christmas she has a collection box for people who come to see it all. Last year, she collected $1,500 for the poor. Wow!

Of course, she could have given far more to the poor by not buying all those decorations in the first place.

By the way, take a close look at the photos (p. A3). See if you can find anything that might have any possible connection with the birth of a baby in a manger.

Can we have a break from these stories of rich people helping the poor?
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NewsToday the usual story of Canadian leaders and how much they loved and respected Mandella. There's no mention of how they gave White South Africans the information they needed to imprison him, no mention that we listed him as a terrorist until 2008, no mention we condemned him for his friendship with Castro, no mention of the Canadian who designed super-longe range artillery to kill people like Mandella who wanted to end apartheid. (I remember being in that man's office at McGill U shortly after his was killed - the same office where is designed thaose long-range guns.. But McGill doesn't brag about him much.)
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There's also a story on violence in Central African Republic where French troops are serving as "peacekeepers". It doesn't mention that France once ruled that area, and the reason it's back now is not to keep peace, but to finish ripping off the country's natural resources.

Amazing how these sects and and other groups lived in peace in Africa for centuries -  until the West interfered.
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There are a few kind of important stories that are missing.

1. The US and Afghanistan are working toward a peace deal which would keep US troops in Afghanistan for years to come, working with Karzai as a puppet leader, and paying him off by leaving him in control of Afghanistan's trade in heroin and morphine. (Afghanistan's trade in these commodities (with US protectin) is now the largest in the world.

2. Meanwhile, the US is busy working with Israel on a "peace" deal which would see Palestine lose even more land as 40,000 Palesinians would be "relocated", their homes torn down, and the land given to Israeli settlers.

Why?

The US has to make nice to Israel to make up for its refusal (so far) to destroy Iran.

3. The bush people of the Kalahari  Desert in southern Africa will be getting visitors coming fracking. That, of course, will demand huge quantities of water in a land that has almost none as it is. The home of the bush people will cease to exist.

They haven't been asked to agree. In fact, they haven't even been told it's going to happen. Hey!
That's Alward's kind of place.
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The editorial is ignorant, trivial and silly. I know it always is. But  this is more so. The writer wants to make protestors pay for the cost of the shale gas protests. If I were him (no. I'm not being sexist. No woman would write an editorial so ignorant),  I'd worry about a court taking a close look at how much Alward and the Irving press are responsible for the protest by their years of lying, misleading, misrespresenting.....)

Norbert writes yet another column about the province spending too much money - without once mentioning how much of that spending goes to big business in the form of "deals", low, low taxes, and favours.

It's okay Norbert. They know you're on their side. Give your pucker a rest.

Alec Bruce is excellent.

Alan Cochrane has nothing to say, but still disfigures half a page. He'll go far with the Irving Press.

Louise Gilbert has a very useful column on what seniors can do help others at Christmas.
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The is a letter to the editor that Canada was founded on Christian beliefs. I didn't know that. I taught Canadian history all my life, and I didn't know that.

I thought Canada was founded by native peoples. We didn't discover it or any part of it. Native peoples showed us around because they already knew where everything was. They also taught us how to move around with the three essentials of travel in Canada in those days - the birchbark canoe, snowshoes, and the toboggan.

And  the Europeans who came were really not all that Christian. Settlers in New France were short of priests - and they liked it that way. They didn't become hyper-religious until after the British conquest.

And if you take  the starting date as 1867, things were even worse. John A. Macdonald was a drunk with the most flexible moral standards you ever saw.  He was hand in glove with big business - and did very well out of it.

And he quite happily and deliberately starved thousands of plains Indians to death so he could hasten the European settling of the West..

Then there was the Amherst boy, Sir Charles Tupper, who was as crooked as a slinky toy on a curving staircase, and made himself a very, very rich man for his retirement (no, not in Amherst. in England). Nor was he interested only in money. No, no. He had  much broader thoughts.  That's why his nickname was "the Cumberland Ram".

Christianity has had perhaps its greatest impact in Canadian politics. ( No, I don't mean in the Liberals or Conservativess.)  It was a Christian movement of a century ago, the social gospel, that gave rise to the CCF (now the NDP).

It's not a coincidence that Tommy Douglas, leader of the CCF, was a Baptist clergyman and the founder of medicare.



 

Dec. 9: Mandella would be so pleased....

...at the plane load of official mourners from Canadian government circles going to his funeral. And the Irving Press has nothing but wonderful things to say about him.

There is no mention that Canadian intelligence gave South African racists the information to put Mandella in jail for 27 years. Nor does the TandT mention that Mandella was on the official terrorist list of Canada through the years that planeload of mourners was in power. In fact, officially, he was a terrorist until 2008.

He was also on the terrorist list for George Bush and for Obama who will be there to express their lifelong support for Mandella.

And mourner Mulroney is also the only Canadian prime minister to admit to accepting very large bribes while in office (and suffering no penalty).  Ah, Mandella would be so honoured to know he is there.

Oh, Mandella also supported Fidel Castro, a man most hated by most of those hypocrite mourners.

There is no word I've seen on Israeli participation. But it Netanyahu of some such go, remember that Israel is the country that provided weaponry  to those South African whites who put Mandella in prison. And that weaponry was specifially for the whites to keep the blacks as inferiors.

On the Canadian side, the only welcome face among the mourners will be Irwin Cotler (a Liberal from Montreal) who acted for years as a legal adviser to get Mr. Mandella out of prison. That was in  the good, old days when Montreal's Jewish community acted as a powerful social conscience to confront evil wherever it appeared. Alas! It was some years ago panicked into supporting everything Israel did, right or wrong. That's what made it easy pickings for Stephen Harper to suck it into his Conservative support with his stance of "Israel is always right."

There are Jews in Montreal with social conscience. Their organization is Jews for Peace. But they're not a minority.

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The paper gets off to a slow start with 7 pages that would stun a moose in heat. But then it has, on A8, an astonishing, full page story on how Christmas tree lots get busy at this time of year.

That is followed on A10 by a story that could change  your life. "Crandall chapel enjoys new light, sound system". The story is accompanied, for a reason not clear to me, by a rather messy looking picture of a man holding a guitar.

The section is saved by a more useful story on A11 "Province needs to examine education problems: expert". The expert is associate dean of education at UNB - and it's important to note his advice that New Brunswick has different socio-economic conditions than other provinces do. And that, as I learned in fifty years of teaching - and in my own life - makes one, tremendous difference.

He also touches a problem the NB schools and other schools across Canada (but not the universities) are taking seriously. We simply forget information we have no use for.

I had to take trigonometry in grade eleven. I've never in my life had an occasion to use it. The result is I remember only four words from it - sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent. And I have no idea what they mean. So much for hours in the class and in homework.

Similarly, in my BA I had courses in science, literature (and, yes, Canadian history) of which I remember not a thing.

Luckily, our public schools have the realism and intelligence to work on the problem. (Don't hold your breath waiting for the universities.)
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Your Investments (C2) has (surprise! surprise!) a story worth reading. Canada is booming in weapons sales to other countries. In fact, they have doubled over the past year. Most of them are not hunting weapons, not unless you're hunting people. They run all the way from pistols to heavy weapons.

Of course, Canada is pledged not to sell weapons to countries with a record of human rights abuse or of violence. So we sell them only to countries in which nobody would dream of using weapons improperly, countries like Pakistan, Mexico, and Egypt.

Foreign Affairs is careful to ensure that these weapons are not used to commit human rights violations. I'm not sure how they do that. I suppose what whenever a Canadian gun is sold to, say, an Al-Quaeda  fighter in Egypt or a drug dealer in Mexico, they make him sign a pledge he will not use it to violate human   rights.

The sales will be going up more because Harper has recently made investment the main purpose of our foreign policy. So good luck on human rights. That's what's called entrepreneurship - soon to be taught in your schools.And it's much more important than human rights.

There's also a big story on how the wine industry is using high-tech to track down copies of really expensive wines. (Apparently, nobody can taste the difference.)
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The editorial and Alec Bruce both talk about the need to balance the provincial budget. But they both follow the Irving press rule - we are not allowed to mention the cost to us of big business, notably the Irvings. Fortunes have been made out of this province; and it still goes on. How is it possible to discuess the provincial budget without mentioning that?

But not mentioning that is what the Irving press has been doing since it was founded.

Craig Babstock tells us that an airline connection to Newfoundland is being cut because nobody is using it. Okay. But why tell us? I mean, if nobody is using it, who cares?

Steve Malloy, for the first time, does a Rod Allen column - all about himself. But on the basis of past performances I can forgive him - once.
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Finally, a plea to reporters of the Irving press. Will you please learn to ask questions at press conferences?  I've been to many a press conference, sometimes as a journalist, sometimes as the victim; and questons were always asked.  Alward held a press conference at which he announced that a business group will install and operate a thirteen year (K to 12) programme on entrepreneurship.

Now, this is a feature not introduced in schools since Hitler incoporated courses on Naziism in the German schools. So it's kind of unusual.

Could one of you hot reporters has him exactly who it is that is sponsoring this? Why did the government accept it? Will it accept similar offers from the Baptist church? Jehovah Witnesses? The Liberal Party?

Will Alward explain where he got the information that entrepreneurs build communities and have happy homes?

Then, would you ask the associate dean of Education at UNB what he thinks of the scheme?

(And if you have doubts, ask any professor at any school of Journalism whether reporters are supposed to ask questions.)

And, by the way, did you notice your own story on A 11 about how teaching students information they will never use is a  waste of time because they will forget it? That came from an associate dean of education who probably knows even more about the subject than your  group of businessmen does.

Now, think hard. Doesn't all this mean we are going to waste time and money and, necessarily, neglect some important subjects in order to teach a programme that is a waste of time?

 Or you might ask whether Mr. Alward has reason to expect an explosion of New Brunswickers becoming entrepreneurs.

 And if there is such an explosion, then why are we still seeing the spread of Walmarts and Targets and Costcos that have been destroying entrepreneurs for decades?

And, most of all, will you please ask Mr. Alward for the names of these people whom  we are now allowing to stick their noses into our schools. These are our children. Surely we have a right to know who they are who are pushing their way into the lives of our children.

Then ask where - where the hell are our school boards on this issue?

And, oh, yeah, where are Home and School and Parent teachers groups? Oh, I know. Too busy being busy.

Dec. 8:My life is in ashes....

... I forgot to buy a lotto 6/49 yesterday. I mean, what is Sunday without a chance to look up my losing ticket?

Mr. Mandella spent 27 years in prison, a period that did nothing to weaken his sense of compassion for people  ( including  his white enemies who treated Mandella's people with contempt and brutality.) Then he used his political skills to drive hatred and bigotry out of South Africa.

Alas! The common people of South Africa will get little chance to be close to the body of the man who was their saint. The best seats are reserved  for people like George Bush and Tony Blair, people whom Mandella despised as mass murderers in wars like Iraq. Bush, indeed was a special case in the eyes of  Mandella/ A brainless twit born into a rich family. long a drunk and a pothead, Bush nonetheless regarded himself, as most of the very rich do, entitled to go to universities he didn't have the grades for, and to pass courses he had nowhere near close to the brains to pass. Then he decided to be president. Hey! Why not? He was entitled.

Blair and Bush never lifted a finger for anybody else. They were as opposite to Mandella as can be imagined. Mandella told them in plain language the contempt he had for both of them. Now, both of them pretend to be men of his spirit as they take up room at his funeral.

Get used to it. The very rich don't give a damn about you. All they understand is their own greed. Their only purpose is to make thsmelves rich. And they, who accuse the poor of feeling entitled to have a living wage, they feel entitled to be rich, to get fet richer, and to poison the land and the people to do it.

The very rich are your enemy. They know it. Don't ever make the mistake of thinking you are buddies, or that they are there to create jobs for you. (And definitely don't ever expect an Irving to go to jail for 27 years for you.)

That's how New Brunswick has put itself in an unspeakably dangerous situation.

The rich know the dangers of fossil fuels. They may finance campaigns to deny what is happening. But they know.But they don't give a damn. If you suffer, tough on you. They will use their money to get to some place safer.

But won't such damage get to them no matter where they go? Sure. But taken as a group, the privileged classes have never been a brainy lot, not anywhere in the world, not at any time in history. They've been greedy, short-sighted, selfish, uncaring of others. But rarely intelligent. And we have at least a few thousand years of history to prove that.

All of that is reality. That's why it matters that the Irvings had the arrogance to hold a conference a few years ago on the conomic future of New Brunswick - right after we had just elected a government to decided that sort of thing. The conference was mostly unqualified, and assuming control over something it had no right to control in a democracy.

Then, an Irving had the gall to say he was a member of the government  ( without anybody electing him. talk about a sense of entitlement). And then he appointed his own hacks to be financial advisors to the government. The premier, who should have told him to mind his own business, was too soft and squiggly to do that.

Then we had the case of the Atlantic Insitute of Market Studies interfering by taking over grading of the schools. Then, the case of the Irvings interfering with the operation of the hospitals. Now we have a mysterious group imposing a compulsory programme on the schools - to teach children all about entrepreneurial skills.

Why the hell are these outsiders - with no educational training - being allowed into the schools? And are they gong to be teaching the sort of crap that Alward burbled - about enterpreneurs creating communities and happy homes?

As nearly as I can gather, those clowns have no idea what the words enterpreneur or capitalism mean. And they're being allowed into our schools for a compulsory programme that will run all the way through school so they can preach their ideological propaganda?

You don't like our deficit? Well, it's Irving's advisors who created it.But don't expect the Times and Transcript to report that. No. It will blame the poor. Yeah. That's why we have deficits. It's all them lazy poor people. It has nothing to do with the Irvings walking off with a bigger chunk of our wealth each year.

The Times and Transcript is designed deliberately to make you dumb, even dumber than the rich, to hide the truth, to lie.

If the TandT were any kind of a newspaper at all, it would tell you about conditions in the US which are even worse than ours, abour massive hunger, about crime as a matter of survival, about children denied basic necessities so the money can go to soaring profits for the defence industry. You cannot go year after year taking money from everybody else and giving it to the very rich. That's why the US is crashing as a nation and as an empire.

Never kid yourself. The very rich are your enemy. They will cheat and starve and work you to the death. These are not Nelson Manellas. They don't give a damn about you. And they don't have enough brains to realize that what they are doing will eventually destroy them, too.

We do not have a capitalist economy. Nor, at the corporation level, do we have entrepreneurs. All we have is a cluster of greedy and selfish people whose greed and selfishness make them stupid - too stupid know what the words capialist and entrepreneur mean.

These are our enemies. New Brunswick has to learn that fast. It doesn't have much time.

Dec. 7:

Well, let's start with Jana Giles on p. F3. That's in Whatever, the high school section. She wonders how sports have become so important in high school and university, and there's little interest in the arts. There's a story in that.

Going back to the 1700s - at least - the British upper classes had money and power. Their weakness was in brains to justify that money and power. Now, in those days, organized sports (games with standard rules) could be played only by those who had the money and time to organize them - the upper classes. Out of that developed the myth that the upper classes didn't need brains. What was required was something vague called leadership and character. A pioneer in this was one of the leading schools of the upper class - Rugby.   And, yes, that's the school that invented the game of rugby which, with modifications, became football.

The children of these upper class schools became the ones to go to university. So Rugby, like cricket, became enshrined as the game that prepared these special children to become leaders in the House of Lords, in the army, in just about everything.

Of course, none of this was available to their sisters. Women, after all, were not going to be leaders or to have power, not if men could prevent it. So women were kept at home where they could study things that were still upper class, but would not make them leaders - music, art, literature.

The result? The upper classes produced large numbers of male dunces, most of whom would be sent to the army to become generals - a practice that continued up to (and including) World War 1. Others would become incompetent politicians.

Women were the ones who developed brains - but little chance to use them.

A survivor of those days is the belief that football, for example, develops character and leadership and has class status. Thus its continuing importance in our universities.
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The first section of today's TandT would h ave been popular reading among the old, British upper classes. There's nothing in it that requires or encourages any brain whatever.

There's the story that SWN has packed up and gone home - and a rumour that it isn't coming back.

Finance Minister Higgs says the province must cut its spending. That's a theme that runs over to the editorial page as well. It's quite a frequent theme, and the tune is always the same. The province is spending too much money. And the cause of the problem is social services, EI, the flinging of money at the poor. I have never, not even once, seen a hint that there are some very rich people in this province - and that maybe they're part of the problem. How much does it cost to keep those people's bellies filled? They are getting richer daily. Most of us aren't. Where's their money coming from?

What taxes, in real money, do the rich and the corporations pay? How much have they wiggled into doing jobs that government used to do (Public/Private/Partnerships)? How much to do we give them on the sly, as city council did for Robert Irving?

How come the newspaper is always keen on cutting down on spending for those who need it - but openly propagandizes to go deeper in debt for  something the rich want - like the events centre?

A newspaper is supposed to give us information - like how much to the rich cost us? How much do we give away to them? How little do they pay us back? Their incomes are going up. Our incomes are going down. How can we be the only cause of the province's budget problems?

But we don't get information. All we get is propaganda and ads.
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The big story in NewsToday, "N.B.'s unemployment rate goes down", tells us nothing. One can play all sorts of games with statistics so that, if you torture them enough, they say whatever you want them to say. Bruce Northrup flaps his wings and crows with joy that the rate has dropped below ten percent to 9.7. That's a figure that doesn't mean poop.  The drop is less that a half of one percent - and that includes an unstated number of part time jobs.

There's a story I couldn't find but that should have been there. Alberta, despite severe warnings from its own Environment minister that it is going to cause severe environmental damage has approved an expansion of the oil sands. Why this rush to expand oil production on all sides?

It's because the oil companies know that their selling days are numbered. Even if extracting oil were as harmless as rubbing skin cream on a baby's bum, we won't be doing it much longer because, as demand rises, the price is going to go up. It will very soon be impossible to operate millions of gasoline-engined cars or to heat homes with oil. It's bad enough now. It can only get worse, and in a hurry. The oil fields have to make money NOW because they won't be able to within a very short time.

And that's not even counting climate change.

Big business thinks three months at a time. Our survival depends on extending the attention span of big business. Ot elect a government that thinks? Business thinks three months at a time. We need a leadership that think ahead by twenty uears or more.

And that's most of NewsToday.
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As always, the sports section has more news than the news section does. And they're still using that corny headline "Wildtown Catfight". Isnt' that a tad juvenile for adult readers?

And, look, even on a sports page, a  headline should be a news statement, not an ad for the team. Similarly, one of the biggest stories "Wildcats Tigres clash" isn't a story. It's really an ad for a game that hasn't been played yet.
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The editorial page is entirely on the province's finances. Read it carefully. Underline the word Irving wherever it appears. (No. Don't bother to get up. You won't need a pen.)

The editorialist says "We're maxed out".  This is, I presume, the same editorialist who routinely harangues us to borrow 125 milliion (or more) for an events centre.

Norbert Cunningham's column is the very silly result of an appalling ignorance. He doesn't, for example, appear to know what the word capitalism means.

Norbert, look up. The world is in a profound economic crisis. That crisis was caused by the greed, shortsightedness, and criminality of the people you (wrongly) call capitalists. Other people you think are capitalists (but are not) are stealing all the world's wealth, creating poverty all over the world  (especially in the west and Africa). As well as being ignorant of the meaning of the world capitalist, you seem not to notice the enormous damage these people have done.

Then you babble about leftists - a word that seems to mean anyone who doesn't agree with you. You accuse "leftists" of wanting to give more of other people's money to (presumably) poor people. In fact, much of what "leftists" advocate is legislation to make capitalists act like real capitalists.

So where the hell were you when we found out the city government was giving  other people's money to Robert Irving?  I must have missed the abuse and rant you poured on him.

Norbert, grow up. We are living through a crisis that began with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. They shovelled national wealth into the pockets of the rich. The result is that we now live in a western world that is in serious decline  caused by selfishness and greed.

The rich have also used their new wealth to seize control of governments. They have used that control to steer even more money to themselves, to increase development in areas our world cannot handle, to effectively destroy democracy (espeically in the US), and to destroy individual privacy with spy systerms which are as much for big business as they are for any national interest.

As a result, we not only face economic uncertainty and severe environmenal crisis, but decades of wars - all of them fought to make the rich richer.

In your own, miserable paper,  two years ago, you published an op ed piece by an Irving in which he actually said he was a member (without being elected) of the government. That statement was illegal under the Canadian consitution.

He then appointed his boys to be advisors to the Minister of Finance. (a real Minister of Finance would immediately have resigned on that. Who the hell was Mr. Irving to give himself that right?)

In other words Norbert, since Irving's hoods were  advising the minister, that means they set the budgets. So where is your column giving  hell to Irving for having made a mess of the budgets? Was it greed? Was it incompetence? Is it possible he did himself favours with his control of the budget?

Come on, Norbert. Let's hear you call Mr. Irving names.
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Brent Mazerolle has a column on op ed. The point seems to be that we need to prepare for terrible accidents like the Halifex explosion of World War 1, and the more recent deaths of 47 people in Lac Megantic.

Brent, where have you and your paper been since the Lac Megantic tragedy? Where were your questions? Where was  you investigative journalism? Boy, talk about pious.. How do we prevent these things when we get no information on what caused them?.

Gwynne Dyer has an interesting column on how big powers bully lesser ones with, in this case, Russians bullying the Ukraine. There aren't any of them big powers nice guys, not to anybody.
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The Faith Page sermonette is the usual wimpy and close to irrelevant stuff. Are there other possible topics?

Well, ever heard of cluster bombs? These are small bombs dropped in a bigger casing that opens up widely to cause indiscriminate slaughter. (They spread so widely, there really  can  be no such thing as a target). There they lie, perhaps for decaades, until some child picks one up out of curiosity - and then loses an arm - or a life.

They were dropped in the millions in Vietnam; and to this day children are still picking them up. They were also used in Iraq, with similar results. Indeed, cluster bombs are so vile, that most of the world, including Canada, signed a treaty never to use them.

If I remember correctly, it was Harper who signed that treaty. Now, unnoticed by our  press, he has said that Canada is still opposed to cluster bombs and supports the treaty. However, Canada will use them if allied with another country that feels them necessary. (The US did not sign the treaty, and still feels cluster bombs are necessary.)

Perhaps Jesus might have touched on such an issue?

Then there's Norbert's opinion that the poor cause recessions. And he has only praise for the rich.

Well, Jesus was poor and unemployed. And his country was being run by those nice, rich people who have all the brains.

These might be good topics for a sermon.

 

Dec. 6: Just briefly on the TandT - and then....

What's to say? It's the usual TandT. On the death of Nelson Mandela, Stephen Harper says, "World has lost one of 'its great moral leaders'..." So it has. But the irony is it's hard to imagine a man with less moral leadership than Stephen Harper. I'll be talking more about that later.)

Then there's page of page of an ad disguised as a news story, the Mazerolle thing on New York. Save the price of a TandT, and pick up a free brochure at any travel agency.

Except for Mandela, the rest of the world doesn't exist in the news section. I mean, who cares that the US and China are gearing up for a new cold war that could get very hot? Who cares that French troops have invaded yet another African country in the pretence of bringing law and order when they're really there to rip off its minerals?

The editorial writer says that civil service pension reforms are fair. Sure. It's not his pension that got reformed.

Alec Bruce has an interesting piece on New Brunswick's financial problems, and whether these are caused by a fear of failure. I rather think they're cause by lack of fear of failure. Capitalist is supposed to involve risk; that is supposed to be what makes it innovative. But not in the New Brunswick version. Here,  the Irvings and others can open projects with guaranteed success thanks to government loans and grants, tax breaks, etc. If fear of failure is a good thing, maybe we should give a shot of it to the Irvings.

Norbert is off on another anti-CBC rant. Someday, very soon, I'll have to do a long column on his towering ignorance of broadcasting both public and private. He also reveals a complete ignorance of how radio and TV work, and the effect they have. He also has a line that in news, the CBC just picks up and repackages what others have reported. Norbert, you can't be that ignorant on the state of news-gathering in Canada. CBC has far the best news-gathering in Canada. Private radio can't do it because its news staffs are too small and inexpert. Private radio and newspapers won't because they are owned by people who don't want us to know what's going on. This whole column is just ignorant, ranting crap.

Suzuki, as always,  has a good column.  There's also a good letter to the editor "Climate change warning to all" about Suzuki's talk in Moncton (which I don't remember seeing reported in the TandT) Finally, the Letter of the Day is an excellent one by the assistant commissioner for the RCMP in Fredericton.

Now.......

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Back in the days when I was doing some volunteer work with convicts, I met one fellow with an extraordinary background. He was a young and handsome guy, so he had several girlfriends - all at the same time - and all of them knew about it. And they all worked for him - on the streets, in bars...

One day, he killed one of the girls, a teenager. Then, with the help of another of the girls, he cut up the body and put it in garbage bags.

We used to talk about all sorts of things, him and me and the other 25 or so. Once, morality came up. They all had strong feelings on the subject, and all pronounced at some length. As the young and handsome guy listened, I could  see his eyes getting hard and angry. At last, he interrupted a speaker.

"If there's one thing I can't stand, it's to see a woman paying for her own drink."

Some day, I should like to have a similar discussion with 25 corporation executives.


The corporation exists for no moral purpose at all. It doesn't exist to make people's lives better. It may do so by accident. But that's not its purpose. It doesn't exist to create jobs. Quite the contrary. The fewer the jobs it has, the better for its profit margin. It doesn't exist to maintain law and order. Indeed, the world's biggest killers and thieves are corporations. And it's all done not even for their countries - but for the corporation.

At the height of the British Empire,  as British corporations looted the farmlands of India, the gold of South Africa, the minerals of the rest of Africa, British workers lived in vile conditions. In the Scottish industrial cities of 1900, it was common for fifty people to share one bathroom, and for drinking water for hundreds to be available only at faucets on the streets. Even in London, it was common at that time for the homes of the poor to have no bathroom at all. Many places in London, up to the 1950s at least, had outhouses. Others just used whatever open space there was in the filth of the cities.

Corporations subjected China to a century of robbery, drug addiction and civil wars. The Canadian  government in the late nineteenth century deliberately starved thousands of native people to death in order the make railway execs and land sales agents happy.

I have pictures of unspeakably vile living conditions that were common in Canada. Readers might also be surprised by conditions in Canada ,(using Montreal as an example), in Terry Copp, The Anatomy of Poverty.

In the US, and it's coming here, private companies operate prisons (at very high cost). They bribe judges to deliver longer sentences, spend virtually nothing on rehabilitation,and often operate the prisons as compulsory factories at extremely low wages. Harper  has expressed interest.

Similarly, private corporation operate government-subsidized private schools that are in no way superior to the public schools they replace - except that they cost parents more money, thereby forcing the majority of children to remain in public schools which have been dstroyed by withdrawal of funds in order to subsidize the schools for richer kids.

And American education in general, has now dropped into the world's educational toilet.

Even the seemingly generous offer of business groups to establish and operate an entrepreneur programme in the schools is not the generous one it appears to be.

There is no possibility that entrepreneurship offers a future for most children. The proportion of entrepreneurs in our society has been declining for well over a century. It's declining even faster now as big and wealthy entrepreneurs (Walmart, Target, grocery and pharmacy chains, etc.) swallow up the small ones.

A compulsory, 13 year programme to teach entrepreneurship makes no sense at all - unless----unless these businessmen aren't doing it for the children at all, but for themselves...unless the real purpose of this programme is to indoctrinate childen into an almost religious belief that private ownershhip is always good and public ownership always bad.

That, certainly, is the message of Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, C.D.Howe Institute and a swarm of similar insects financed by wealthy individual and large corporations. This isn't being done for the children. It's being done for the benefit of the businessmen who set up this scam.

And I would be very surprised if the scheme was not begun farther up the food chain by very big business in this province.

Capitalism is entirely self-seeking, greedy, and indifferent to the needs of others. And that is what is called a lack of morality.

But there's a reason for morality. I'm not going to preach about this. I'm not going to suggest that morality comes from churches. (In fact, damn little comes out of churches these days.)

But us humans need a code of standards, of values, of morals to live by. Without that, no society can survive. We've seen it so many times. The self-serving, the greed, the indifference to the needs of others have been destroying societies and civilizations for millenia.

The western world imposed the immorality of its capitalism on Asia and Africa and Central America for centuries. The record of it was so terrible that Britain, for one, destroyed tons of government accounts of imperial brutalities and savageries as it got chased out of its empire about 1950.

Societies have been so damaged that in most of Africa, for example, no government by anybody is possible. (It takes people a long, long time to recover from the trauma of conquest and impoverization by a completely alien society.)

And we face decades of unending war, unending and often undeclared and unreported by our servile press.

Corporations have no standards for their behaviour toward others. They exist only for themselves, only to make profit, nothing else. And the people who own them can build chapels across New Brunswick and name all of them for themselves - and they will still have no standards, no values and no morals.

There are churches who seem to believe that morality is all about oneself, about keeping oneself pure so that one can go to heaven and spend eternity clapping hands for Jesus and shouting Halleluya for eternity. (on a personal note, I think I would find that pretty boring after the first million years or so.)

But that's not what morality is all about. It's not about us. It's about others. It's about how we treat others, how we care for them. And it's directly opposite to the big business creed of thinking only of profit and self-interest with no concern whatever for others.

Think of it as religious or think of it as common sense. The essential point is that a sense of moral values is the glue that holds a society together. And there is no sense of moral values in capitalism. That's why capitalism will work only if it is subject to control by us to make sure it stays within our moral values.

The Liberals and the Conservatives are a dead loss for this purpose. Both have long since become agents of big business. We have to turn to parties that are not owned by big business.

We also have to turn to ourselves to think through what our moral values are. And central to that is not whether we are pure or good or virtuous or something equally boring. We are not alone. We are part of a society. We need to think of things in terms of how we feel other people should be treated. And what we decide will also decide how long our society - and we - will survive.

An election is not about programmes or neat ideas. Essentially, an election is about our sense of morality. We need to think and to talk about that well before election day.
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As a footnote, I have always found it strange that a family should build a church, then name it after itself. It's a bit, well, self-centred, don't you think? Offhand, it's very hard to think of another church named after its builder. I mean, if you're moral, you think of others in society. You think of honouring others who have done great things, not just yourself.

Or, one could get cutesie as so many of our churches do with their billboards. For example, one could rename the Irving chapel as The Wee Kirk in the Dingle by the Dell: courtesy of the Philanthropic Irvngs.


 

Dec. 5:

For many years now, I've been following a sort of blog called Information Clearing House. It's almost a one-man operation which must require intense work as it scans the world press for stories that don't make the news in a tightly-controlled US.  But, suddenly, it's disappeared.

That's happened before. Computer experts in the various domestic spying organizations have disabled his computer for days at a time. Though he's never broken a law, police routinely visit him to scare him out of business. Now, his blog has simply disappeared for close to a week.

There's no point in checking out the public press for some explanation. It plays from police state rules.

The Guardian in Britain, arguably the best newspaper in the English speaking world - and perhaps the best in all the world - is under severe pressure from the British government. It's so angry at The Guardian for printing the story about how Britain, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand have been spying on the rest of the world, it has been harrassing editorial staff and threatening criminal charges of aiding terrorism.

Yes, it's come to that. Telling the truth in Britain, that breeding place of democracy, makes you a terrorist.

I don't think New Brunswickers appreciate that we live in place with a free and honest press.
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Fortunately, a reader of this blog, who researches stories that don't made the mainstream press has sent me some stories.

In the US, for example, 40% of all employed Americans make less than $20,000 a year.

Almost 50 million Americans live in poverty. (That seems a generous figure. $20,000 a year sounds poverty level to me, and if 40% are are living at that or less, then that would be something more like 150 million Americans.)

But fear not, if many are poor, we still have 1% who have more wealth that all the rest combined.

And in the face of this, he US government (which is owned by the 1%) is cutting the budget for food stamps.

And, just in case the 99% get greedy and want more, US police forces have militarized (much like our "paramilitaries") to deal with the enemy within.
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Meanwhile, Phillip Morris (tobacco) is suing the Australian government for billions. It charges that the Australian government ran a campaign to reduce teenage smoking. And that's bad because Phillip Morris sales went down. So they're suing for billions.

That right to sue, incidentally, is a feature written in to trade agreements almost as a general rule. The trade agreements are commonly designed by company lawyers; and they make it possible for foreign companies in the deal to ignore Canadian law, and even to sue even when a law is made necessary.

For example, Harper's trade deal with Europe allows the ignoring of Candian laws on pollution (even on those that are left after Harper has destroyed most of them.) That same will be true of the terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Typically, such deals are framed on the basis that a government which in any way interferes with corporate profit can be sued in secret courts largely controlled by coporations. (This is for real.) And all the workings of these courts and their decisions will be kept secret.

This is the sort of deal we used to force on third-world countries from 1945 on. Now, in the eyes of the great corporations, we are all third-world countries.

Such agreements could, for example, put Canada in a position to allow its fresh water to be polluted - or even to be taken in such quantities that not nearly enough would be left for us. (One country which has already given indication it would like to do that is the US which faces severe water problems.)

Corporations were never organizations that felt any obligation to us common people. Now, they have no obligation to any country, either. They have no nationality, no society they belong to, nothing they owe obedience, respect, or allegiance to. Trade deals have liberated the corporation.

Obviously, this will eventually destroy not just countries, but also the corporations that feed on them. Common sense tells us that. But common sense is not often found in corporate head offices. Greed and the arrogance of power makes them short-sighted and - no exaggeration - stupid and destructive.

In Canada, we have the most deadly combination. We have corporations that are greedy and short-sighted combined with a prime minister who shares their views exactly.

The premiers are bad enough. They are amoral puppets. But Harper is more than that. He actually thinks like a corporate executive.

But none of this appears in the TandT.
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There's nothing much in the TandT. There's a front page story that policing protests will cost 4.3 million this year.

Way to dig for the truth all you news hounds. Now,.....

Could we also have a story some day about how much the Irvings of this world cost us? How much money a year do we give them? The story about Robert Irving sneaked out  (no thanks to the TandT), as did the story of fake professor (also no thanks to the TandT).

Now, how much do all our governments give away (of our money) to just that one family. How much to they make?  How much taxes do they pay? (After all, what they don't pay is our business, because we have to pay it - a point that Norbert never mentions when he rants about the provincial debt.)

How much of the wealth of New Brunswick does that one family hold?

You know, if that much money were being absorbed by the cost of the unemployed and the poor, we'd sure hear about from the Irving press. Well, the Irving press surely has the inside track on this story. How much do the Irvings cost this province every year?
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The big, local story is that the provincial Liberals are leading in polls. You remember the provincial Liberals. There the ones we were so mad at that we voted them out to bring in the Conservatives. Now, we're mad at the Conservatives, so in true, New Brunswick fashion, we'll show them. We'll vote in the Liberals that we voted out....etc.

Not that the corporations give a damn. They own both of them.

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On the editorial page, Alec Bruce is interesting on Quebec's approach to education. I don't know much about it because by the time it was introduced I was long out of the public schools. But it seems worth examining, particularly if one remembers that the Catholic (mostly French) schools of Quebec were probably the worst in North America only forty years ago - and even later.)

Norbert fusses about the deficit. As usual, And, as usual, he never mentions the corporate world as a possible cause. 

And, as always, his closing quotation makes no sense at all. He quotes Jane Jacobs (yes, I know who she was and how eminent) as she says "...poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes."

Bright scholar, Jane, but she had a terrible habit of making sweeping statements about things she really didn't know. Poverty has no causes? In fact, poverty is quite deliberately imposed on most of the world in places like Central America, Africa, and Asia so corporations can make money out of cheap labour. It was deliberately imposed on the US by allowing corporations to move their work and their jobs  out of the country.

The op ed page is for opinion. Alas the only opinion Rod Allen has is that he's funny. This time, he had so much wit to burn, that he was half way through his column before he got to the subject of it.

Beth Lyons has a real, opinion column; and it's well done.