May 21: If you tell a lie, make it a big one..

...people are too smart to fall for the small ones.

New Brunswick's Liberal government wants to privatize more of our government services, like health care. The reason is the old one, privatization will make it cheaper and more efficient. Sure. That's why the US has such a wonderfully cheap and efficient health system. Our Florence Nightingale will, I suppose be one or more of the Irvings. Oh, those Irvings. They just give and give....

Just about all the developed world long ago came to the conclusion that government operation of medicare is the cheapest and most effective way to go. Private business is expensive; It's been proven expensive long, long ago. But the Irvings of this world keep trying - and they have a submissive government and a passive population to help them. Business does not exist to serve. It does not exist to save lives. It does not exist to prevent illness. It exists to make profit. Nothing else. And if it can make even more profit by spreading disease - that's good business.

Oh? Big business wouldn't hurt people? Tell that to the millions murdered in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Latin America, murdered to further the interests of big business.

And let's hear no more of this idiot talk about business and government being partners. We do not elect government to be partners with anybody. We elect them to govern as we want to be governed. Big business, despite Mr. Irving's foolish statement of several years ago, is in no sense a partner to government. He is subject to government, just all us peasants are. Democracy means we are governed by the people we vote for, not by people who think their wealth gives them special powers or abilities.

Now, watch for the Irving press to be beating the drums for more privatization of health care.

Oh, yeah, and I wish the Irving press would stop quoting phony experts who use misleading statistics.
The gem in here is that we have more doctors per capita than other provinces. Well, yeah. We also have more lobster fishermen than Manitoba has. So should we cut back on lobster fishermen?

The Gallant expert says we have more doctors that other provinces. Well, we also have more older people. And we have among the worst outcomes? Another phony statistic. How much  worse? - or how little.  We have less business investment than other provinces. So? What does that have to do with health care?

And why did nobody at the Irving press have the brains to ask some of those questions? A reporter is not just a stenographer. If that were true, we wouldn't need reporters. Recording machines would do just fine. (Now, I've given Jamie Irving an idea of how to make bigger profits.)

The only other news page worth looking at is A6. It's about the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. But skip the story. The real feature is three photos of assembled leaders of the province. The bottom photo is a veritable smorgasbord of Irvings. And, for no extra charge, each of the three photos features Jamie Irving who had a meteoric rise from cub reporter to top dog at Brunswick New;, to the best of my knowledge, the fastest such rise in the history of journalism. But, you know. He's an Irving. So he works longer and harder than us.
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The editorial uses the anger of seniors at a tax grab on their savings. It's solution, which is brief and almost at the end, it a pitch for privatization of more services. That, it says, would create a buoyant economy.(Wisely, it doesn't even attempt to show how taking money from government and handing over government jobs would boost the economy and save us all - especially in light of our knowledge that Canadian private corporations are escaping income tax by banking their money in tax havens.) The pitch for privatization of health care is on.

After having a great column yesterday, the Norbert we love is back. Largely, it's a bitter attack on the provincial government for talking about raising taxes on our oppressed and hungry corporation bosses. Save your tears, Norbie. They are currently getting some of the lowest tax rates in the world - and like other corporation bosses, they don't pay anywhere close to even those rates.

OO, OO says Norbert. If we tax them, they'll go away. Great. We could use a break from supporting them. And that's a serious statement I can defend.

Then he cites a hoary, old tale  that is quite untrue. He says that Henry Ford, back in the 1920s paid more than the minimum to his workers because he understood the value of good  pay that would benefit the economy and help him sell more cars.
1. Henry Ford knew nothing about economics. He was a good mechanic. And he knew how to sell. And he was obsessed with getting personally rich. But none of those give any insight into a national economy.
2. He hated unions because they would raise wages and cut his profits. So he did two things. He hired gangsters to beat up union leaders, and any employees who were heard talking about unions. AND HE RAISED WAGES JUST ENOUGH TO KEEP DOWN THE PRESSURE TO FORM A UNION.. His reasoning had nothing to do with the economy.
3. He hated the very idea of weakening any part of his distorted view of what capitalism is. That, plus the fact that he had an insane hatred of Jews, is why he was a major financial supporter for Hitler and a supplier for the German war machine right to the end of 1941. That's why Hitler kept a huge photo of Ford in his office. Fords factories in Germany, to the end of the war, were major producers of tanks and other vehicles for the Nazi armies.
You sure know how to pick your heroes, Norbert.

As well, cutting the taxes of the very rich in order to encourage investment in the economy is pure hogwash. It doesn't work, and it never has. If it did work, all of Latin America and Haiti (one of the poorest countries in the world) would be rolling in prosperity. If it were true, we would be rolling in prosperity after these recession years of the rich making their biggest profits in history.

Norbert, please forget your cancerous ideology. Look around you. Look at the real world.

And get a real job.

There's a good letter to the editor about how our government intends to make it illegal to criticize Israel. The letter says such criticism is spreading hate and anti-Semitism. So - I'd like to lay the first charge under that heading - against the Conservative government of Canada.

All arabs are semites. Semitism is not a race. (That was Hitler's idea, Stevie.) Semites are a group who claim descent from Adam and Eve. (Christian fundamentalists would say we're all descended from Adam and Eve; if that's true, then we can't criticize anybody.)

Anyway, Arab Muslims are semites under the meaning of that word. And our government, therefore, has been spreading anti-Semitism with its anti-terror bill. Some Israelis are semites under that definition. Most European and North American Jews, though, have no connection with Israel. They are descended from European converts to Judaism many centuries ago.

And many of those, who are old friends of mine, are VERY critical of Israel. So am I. So there it is, baby. Charge me.

Harper's idea of charging people for being what he calls anti-Semitic, is not only profoundly anti-democratic, but stunningly ignorant of what Judaism is and what a Semite is.

Come to think of it - if Norbert praises Henry Ford who was not only anti-Jewish, but financed Hitler, and owned a profoundly anti-Jewish newspaper, Wouldn't that make Norbert an anti-Semite?.

Ted Allen again has a personal story. But this time it has a point to it. It's about the importance and relative cheapness of bookmobile service in rural New Brunswick - and as he listed the books he had read (and implied, without saying) how they had changed his life, I actually warmed to this column.
I grew up in a pretty shabby district of Montreal where anyone who read a book, any book, was creepy.  My father helped me through that because he was a avid reader. Every weekend he hit the used book stores to bring me books from the Bobbsey Twins to pirate stories to westerns and the poems of Robert Service and Rudyard Kipling and "With Morgan on the Main". Then, in high school, I met kids who came from areas where everybody read, and I was introduced to Decline and Fall of the Roman American, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O'Casey, Churchill's History of the English-speaking People....

I would later learn that there were criticisms  to made of all of these. But, I am eternally grateful to all those books that opened my eyes to the possibilities in life.

I liked this column. It's one worth taking very seriously. (I also like it because I knew Andy MacDonald. I liked him, too.)

Then there's a column on pipelines as the safest way to transport oil. This comes, from The Fraser Institute, a propaganda scam to benefit billionaires. But the Irving press doesn't tell us that part.
For a balanced view, go to the story hidden on that back of section B. It's about an oil pipeline in California. It spilled. In the biggest pipeline spill in twenty years. It destroyed not only a beach, but also a wide spread of Pacific Ocean with lots of endangered species.

There's an excellent column by Alec Bruce on the growing potential of tides to provide energy. Alas! No New Brunswick government I have seen would encourage such development unless it were used purely to produce oil for Irving.

B5 has quite a good story  on President Obama's warning that climate change is real. And that it brings with it a high probability of violence all over the world - including in the US itself. But the oil barons are still pumping out propaganda that it's not happening. That means the Republican party is opposed to doing anything. Nope. Can't disturb profits. That's why we're still planning pipelines and oil exploration projects in sensitive areas - like the Arctic. And these are projects which will take decades to complete, and decades more to make money out of. And then it will be too late.

Nor would I expect any better from the Democrats. Hillary Clinton's run for leadership - just for the party leadership, not for the presidency - will cost 2.5 billion dollars. The same is true for other candidates of both parties  You don't get that kind of money from church yard sales, not even with the attraction of a gospel hootenanny. No, it comes from the very wealthy, and largely from the oil and arms industry wealthy.

There's just a tiny story at the bottom of the page about the Vatican giving a similar warning about climate change.  Pope France is, all by himself, a revolution in the church. I have read from him more thoughtful, compassionate, intelligent and honest attitudes than I have of any leading world politician, and certainly more than any leading businessman. I wonder why the news media so seldom mentions him.

(No. I'm not a Roman Catholic.)
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The CBC has a story about the CEO of a mill in Nickawak, NB, who got tried in the US dodging taxes.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/ex-nackawic-mill-ceo-gets-2-months-in-jail-for-hiding-8-4m-from-irs-1.3080276

Yep. George Landegger got two months in jail (probably with time off), has to pay tax on the 8,4 million, and a whopping, 75 thousand dollar fine. So he'll probably only have five million or so left.
Well, maybe more. The employees' pension fund of some 46,000,000 seems to have vanished, too. But no government seems to give a damn about that.

This reminds me of Brian Mulroney who admitted (some of) his acceptance of bribes, and got no penalty at all.

So, Landegger got two months and a fine of 75,.000. Heck. I knew people who got more than that for car theft. And will our government raise the issue of the 46,000.000 in pension funds. Don't bet on it.
By the way, the much respected government of Bernard Lord gave this man 10 million in loans and guarantees in 2009. Hey, Norbert. Way to keep the economy growing!

Funny the editors at Irving press missed this story.

Another "missed" story is that four, major world banks have been cheating their customers by artificially rigging the foreign exchange market. And they are big ones - Citygroup, JPMorgan and Chase, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland - and couple of smaller ones.

They got fined six billion. Sounds like a lot but
 1.We don't know how much they stole.
 2. It's certainly in the many billions since that market deals with over a trillion a day.
 3. If you stole billions of dollars, do you think you would get off with a fine? I met plenty of guys in my prison visit days who were in there for many, many years for stealing much, much less.

 Such international banks are the ones who are now bleeding Ukraine and Greece dry, with no thought of the human suffering they're causing.

Some of these were also among the banks who couldn't be allowed to fail at the start of the recession - even though they were major causes of the recession. So they got huge bail-outs, with billions in bonuses for their top execs.

I'm so glad to live in a province where this sort of thing never happens.

And watch for Norbert's column tomorrow when he tell us how bank profits help to build our economy.


http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/20/us-banks-forex-settlement-idUSKBN0O50CQ20150520

Sorry to neglect foreign affairs. I just had too much stuff. Watch for big news about the US, China, Russia and, just possibly, India. The US is building a major air base for bombers in Australia. Why? Are they planning a war with New Zealand? Or is it possible that it has something to do with the US dispute with China over who has rights to the South China Sea?

Watch for trouble as Iran is sending shipments of food and medicine to Yemen. There's a reason the US has so many powerful warships in those waters. And the king of all the Saudis is not likely to appreciate food and medicine in Yemen, especially coming from Iran.

Watch for action by the Saudis or Israelis against Iran. They don't want any peace with Iran. They want it destroyed.

Chinese and Russian warship are preparing for war games in the Mediterranean. How strange they should be in those waters at this time! There is also another, small aid ship heading to challenge the Israeli blockade of Israel.

And why watch India? It's a rapidly growing power that suffered centuries of poverty and exploitation under the British. It may very well feel some discomfort at the US trying to be the British Empire of our time. And it may also decide that the future lies not with a declining US, but with a rising Asia.

And forget what you hear about some nations being friends with each other. There are no such things as friends between nations. (I might write a bit about this on Sunday.) The people of nations might like each other. I have known and liked many Americans; I have relatives there; my father was born in Oregon. But me and my friends don't make the big decisions. Those are made by governments who are commonly controlled by big money. And there is no room for friendship where big money is involved.













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May20: The big push is on...

Today, the front page headline is that Premier Gallant has called a meeting with mayor of Moncton and ta-da. ,member of parliament Goguen to have "sit-down" meeting (as opposed to a  hanging from tree branches meeting) to get the events centre under way.

And,ta-da. in case you missed the front page banner headline, there's another story on it by, ta-da. Brent Mazerolle on page A4.

And in case you miss both, there's an editorial about it, Wisely, it advises our politicians to set smart targets. True. Good targets are so much better than dumb ones.

 So much for news in section A. Unless you really, really care that there's a cat looking for a home.
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Norbert has a very good column "Are we watching the U.S.A. consume itself from within?" He deals with the hundred or so gang members in Waco, Texas who fought a gang war killing nine. He points to Hollywood as a factor through its worship of violence, but wisely adds it's more than that. He concludes "Terrorists in far off lands are not the biggest threat in the U.S.A. today."

Indeed, they aren't. We are watching the disintegration of American society. It's encouraged by Hollywood, but rooted in hopelessness for most, a failing belief in democracy because most people realize now that their government is not really the one they elect, and they know the people who really rule are greedy and indifferent to them.  All that  is reflected in very low voter turnouts and in the fear and hatred of others generated by the news media and the government....

Putting people in jail won't work. The US already has more people in jail than any other country - and its crime rate is still soaring. No. This is a society that is collapsing because its real rulers are a ruling class of the very wealthy, and very, very greedy and with no moral values whatever.

Sort of like Canada under Harper.

Best column by Norbert I've ever seen.
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Hump Cormier's column----well----he describes himself as a communications specialist. That's a person who has nothing to say, but has special training in saying nothing.

Below him is an article on health care by a man who has much to say - but really doesn't know how to communicate it. The column seems sensible and well-informed - but vague, and most unlikely to be read by most readers. This one comes from Troy Media, a source of very varied quality. But it does have the virtue of being cheap. Gotta run the Irving press like a business - even if its news isn't worth a damn. The important thing is to be cheap.

And another excellent column by Alec Bruce on how Harper keeps important information out of our reach.  This case particularly involves scientists doing research for the the government. Though it's done with our tax dollars, the scientists are not allowed to reveal anything to the public - or even to the scientific world. Why? Well, for a start, Harper does not want information about climate change or environmental damage from oil to get out to us common people. In effect, these scientists are being paid our money to do private research for Mr. Harper. That's like the case of Mike Duffy, only far more damaging to us.

Bruce is not optimistic that Canadians will do much about how Harper has made this into a police state with the whole public just puppets on his strings. And I'm afraid Bruce is right. Canadians are sleep-walking. Our voter turnout has been declining for years, It's quite possible it will dip below 50% in the next election - and will almost certainly be even worse in the US.

The news story Bruce's column is based on is at the bottom of p. B1.
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B1 also has a story on how Saudi Arabia is continuing its aerial bombing of Yemen, And has yet to send in ground troops.It's possible to defeat a country only by bombing it. But it's a long way to do the job, and extremely indiscriminate in who it kills and how many.

It's hard to get a clear idea of what this is about. Saudi Arabia and Israel appear to be working together in the Middle East. They are also working together in defiance of Obama. It seems that the US has lost control of those two, but cannot afford to be seen as being in opposition to them. So it continues to supply Israel and Saudi Arabia with the weapons and munitions to do what the US doesn't want them to do. It's as though Israel and Saudi Arabia were the world super-powers, and the US their colony.

Their ultimate target is almost certainly Iran. Nuclear weapons have nothing to do with it. In fact, it's likely that Saudi Arabia with have nuclear weapons before Iran does - and Israel already has a couple of hundred of them.  Judging from the reaction of the American government, Israel and Saudi Arabia are the only two countries in the region allowed to have nuclear weapons.

Obama wants control of Iran. It's a control the US has wanted for sixty years. But he doesn't want a war because he knows that a war with Iran could trigger a nuclear war with Russia, China, and maybe India. Obama has been a diasppointingly ineffectual president. But unlike Netanyahu and the "King"
of Saudi Arabia, he is not insanely murderous. However, he's not in control of Saudi Arabia and Israel either - or even of his own government. And he most certainly is not in control of American oil billionaires.

And that's really about it for Canada&World news.
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Did the Irving press miss anything? Well, yeah - for a start, I still haven't seen its big story about how Canadian corporations have $200 billion dollars in tax havens. Nor have we been told how many of those billions might be Irving billions. C'mon, I'm sure people would be proud to know that a New Brunswick corporation really knows how to save money on taxes. Ya gotta thank
 them. That's what makes it possible for us to close schools and cut back on medicare.

Then, for those who still think that police brutality in the US is a myth, and that blacks get equal treatment, enjoy the video below:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41889.htm

And whatever happened to the story about the airline that was shot down in Ukraine? It must be at least a year since it was put into the hands of experts to find out how it had been shot down - and that would give us a strong clue to who did it. Why has there been no announcement all this time?  I mean, President Obama, who isn't an expert and was thousands of miles away, was able to announce within a hour of the shooting that the Russians did it. How come the experts still haven't figured it out? And how come our news media haven't been asking these questions?

Then there's the case of the U.S. selling cluster bombs to the Saudis to slaughter Yemenis. These are an extreme and long term threat, especially to children. That's why they're  banned under international law. That's why Canada voted in favour of that ban. So how come Harper hasn't said anything? And how come no reporter has asked him?

Harper has announced that he will use the anti-terrorism legislation to charge people who criticize Israel? What counts as a criticism? Well. anything that Harper or Netanyahu doesn't like. It becomes a hate crime. Want to hate Muslims? No problem. You can probably even get a government grant for it. But, in the whole, wide world, Israel will be the only country in the world that it is a crime to criticize.  The news media, in general, gave it a line or two -and forgot it.

Hey! Where does Harper get the right to tell us what we're allowed to say? It's certainly contrary to the constitution. And it's a hate act in itself since it encourages hatred of Muslims. This is not the act of a democratic leader. It is the act of a dictator. And it's not just this law alone. It's also the many acts of repression and denial of rights this leads to.

Doesn't anybody in the Irving press have the intellectual capacity or honesty to write about this?

And as for the Canadian people, they're the ones who have Harper leading in the polls. This is not the Canada I was born into.

Incidentally, if Harper gets this through, the United Church of Canada becomes criminal. At its higher levels, it has been very critical of Israeli treatment of Palestinians. Pope Francis, too, would certainly have to avoid Canada.  Under Harper law, he would be a criminal for recognizing the state of Palestine.

I also have an important article on what is happening to American universities as they become schools for the rich only. Already, a term of just a little over three months can cost $30,000. That means a four year degree could be close to a quarter million - and it's going up.

Odd. Cuba can do it free as a public service. So can Finland. So could The Netherlands when I taught there. So can Mexico, Norway, Austria, Sweden, Germany.

(There are also free, on line courses offered by many universities. There is some value to these, but not much. Real learning demands interaction between teachers and students.  It's also important to have interaction between students. And video can't do that.)


 But the richest country in the world which can afford more weapons than any nation in history can't educate its own people.Even now, there are Americans who retire, still owing money on their student loans. I don't see a future ahead for that sort of country.

And Canada is going in the same direction. But this is a pretty long article. So I'll save it for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, keep an eye on voter turnout in the next Canadian and American elections. Both have been sagging for years. US voter turnout last time was in the 40% to 50% range. Canada's was a little over 50%. For comparison, Vietnam (which the US made a dictatorship) has fought off the US and has a turnout of 99%. And, no, it's not compulsory to vote in Vietnam. In Haiti's brief life as a democracy, voting turnout about 60%. However, the US put a stop to that when it invaded and installed a new, more American government. Voter turnout, now that Haiti is back under American control, has been below 30%.

Is that an election issue? You bet it is.  A low turnout is a danger signal of either a fit of national stupor or a sign of declining belief in government. And, if it's the latter, you're going to see serious social disorder.

May 19: Let's get serious

First, a well-deserved acknowledgement that I forgot to make. Saturday's Faith page had a sermonette by Brett Annington who is chaplain at University of New Brunswick. This is what a Faith column should be.  No fairies in the sky. No God's great plan malarkey. It is religion as it should be - applied to our behaviour in daily life on earth - before we get to walking on clouds or burning in hell. It's called "Here's what The Bible really says about sex".
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The editorial is actually quite decent on the subject of dress codes in schools. Below it, Norbert starts well in supporting an investigation into the failure of RCMP officials at the top level to give adequate support to the police in the field. Alas! He can't help going into a rant about how this is typical of politicians and civil servants. That may well be so. But Norbert would never have the guts to make such a criticism - or any criticism - of big business.

Alan Cochrane has a commentary on "Moncton Firefighters Historical Society Seeks Departmental Relics". The trouble is that it's not a commentary.  Commentary - derived from comment. You take a topic, and you offer a reasoned opinion about it. But this, like many that appear on this page, is not a commentary at all. Well, it does have a paragraph at the end that this is a "good thing". That, vaguely, is an opinion. But it's very vague.

Louise Gilbert does a good job on how important it is for seniors to be active. And Alec Bruce is solid with a column that is an opinion backed by sound reasoning.

Canada&World has just over one page of world news. It looks as though the Irving press is definitely running this paper purely as a business and propaganda machine. It's really being run on the cheap. And none of the stories tells us much about anything, anywhere. One gem tells us that a man named Noriega, now in prison and formerly a dictator, had an accident and hurt his shoulder.

So bloody what? For more exciting news turn to section C for a list of today's celebrity birthdays.

Or, let's talk about news that escaped the eagle eyes of Irving editors.
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The big story, perhaps, is that leading Republicans and Democrats now agree that the US invasion of Iraq was a big mistake. And those who have now admitted it include Jeb Bush and George Bush Jr.
They now claim they had faulty intelligence.

No, they didn't. Jeb Bush, for example, was advocating that war a good five years before it happened. You can find it on the web under Project for the New American Century. It's a plan for US domination, military and economic, of the whole world - and Iraq  was one of the prime topics. And Jeb Bush signed that.

At the time Bush and Tony Blair announced the war, they were obviously lying. They said Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Why so vague? If intelligence had information convincing enough to cause a war that killed over a million people, it must have known exactly what kind of WMD was involved. Nuclear bomb? (It's pretty hard to hide the production of nuclear bombs). Poison gas? Sure, he had some. It was given to him by the US to use against Iran.

At the time, I had never heard the term WMD being used. Why did it suddenly make an appearance? Why didn't the American and British people and all others ask exactly what WMD meant? And were all the news media so thick it never occurred to them to ask that question?

Bush and Blair knew all the above. They knew there were no WMDs. Bush and Blair worked on public emotions and hatreds to kill all those people for their good friends in the oil industry. Bush and Blair are war criminals.

Neither Bush nor Blair apologized for their "mistake". And neither has said what the "mistake" was.
Do they mean it was a mistake to kill men, women and children by the million? To destroy schools and hospitals? To impoverish a whole nation? To send millions into refugee camps? To begin the horror that has sent at least tens of thousands to this day to flee the middle east for Europe, thousands dying on the way?

Why was it a mistake? Why don't reporters ask them?

Obviously, it was a mistake to launch a military strike that would make the US one of this world's most hated nations. It was a mistake, as well, because it created extremism all over the middle east.

Bush and Blair admit ---but admit what?

That 'mistake' was the beginning of the biggest foreign policy and military blunder in modern history. And it raises the possibility of becoming the biggest mistake in human history.

And,really, who was it that really wanted that war? For the answer, check out the the people who signed "Project for the New American Century". (Why hasn't the Irving press published this? It's in the public domain.) Also check out Dick Cheney, the real president under Bush, and the poster boy for oil billionaires.

I know the Irving press likes to go cheap. And it's obvious by now it has nobody, including the news editors, who knows a poop about foreign affairs. But couldn't the whole chain hire one person to write a weekly column that would make some sense out of the news?

(No. They don't want readers to make sense out of the news.)
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Then, there's some good news for the unemployed. All you need is a good arm.  Saudi Arabia will provide the sword.      http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/18/saudi-arabia-advertises-eight-new-executioners-beheadings-soar    

Boy! This could be as good as the oil sands were. Saudi Arabia uses beheading as a sort of rehabilitation for evil people -like witches, women who drive cars, that sort of thing. Lesser criminals get their hands cut off. But, oh, it's hard to get good beheaders these days.

Saudi Arabia. That's the one on our side for democracy and freedom, the one that's now bringing civilization to Yemen with cluster bombs that are really, really good for killing children - and are supplied by America which, as we all know, God blesses.
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The site below ( way below), from the Stockholm Peace Institute, discusses the world arms trade. In fact, any google of' arms trade' turns up a fascinating list. The money involved runs into billions and even trillions. Any figure, though, is largely a guess because so much of the money is listed under other budgets.  Most of the weaponry goes to poor countries all over Latin American, Africa and Asia. In fact, it is easier for poor countries to get tanks than it is to get food or medical care.

Recently, Saudi Arabia has been a leading buyer, largely from the US. I wonder what that tells us about the future of the middle east.

The arms industry might well be the biggest industry in the world. And that might help to explain why we need so many wars. It's also perhaps the most corrupt industry in the world, buying politicians, buying whole governments. It's also corrupt in that it gets billions of dollars from its native countries in inflated contracts, sort of a government welfare for big business. My, it would be interesting to see an in-depth study of Irving Shipyards' contracts for naval vessels.

As well, the industry ignores even the few regulations that exist for their sales. That means that anybody can get them. That's why whole Muslim armies, like ISIS, can spring up overnight with tank battalions, missiles, machine guns - and many made in the USA. Hey. A sale is a sale.

That's why the US has decided to cut spending for things like feeding the hungry in the US..

The biggest players are Russia and the US, with the UK, France, and China as small players.

That's why Kim's North Korea has a submarine armed with nuclear missiles (The Irving press could have learned that on Google news. But that might require an extra person on staff.)

Oh, and another little item about arms and about foreign affairs that the Irving press didn't have room for. The Times of India, The Guardian, and even the National Post have reported that Saudi Arabia is making deals to buy nuclear missiles.. In fact, the deal may already have been reached with Pakistan. And there has been no reaction, so far, from the US.

Funny. The US put sanctions on Iran for developing nuclear weapons when it wasn't. And it's been carrying out farcical talks to make Iran stop development that it hasn't been carrying on. But, hey, a nice guy like the king of Saudi Arabia? No sweat. And Israel? We won't even talk about that. But, oh, we gotta nail down them there Eye-ranians.

Yes. Invading Iraq was a huge mistake. Invading Iraq to satisfy Dick Cheney and his oil friends has set up mass destruction throughout the middle east and with more, much more to come. And with crises it has set up all over the world.
                                                                                                                                                                    http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/transfers/measuring/financial_values
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http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/05/16/corporate-tax-havens-canada_n_7293410.html?utm_hp_ref=canada 

 This one is about how Canadian corporations hide $200 billion from taxation, even though their corporate tax rates are among the lowest in the world.

I'm surprised the Irving press didn't publish this. After all, I'm sure no wealthy philanthopist in New Brunswick's philanthropy hall of fame would dream of avoiding taxes. So this would be a good opportunity to show up those other, thieving billionaires.
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However, the Irving press had a scoop with the story that George Clooney is happy that his wife is more intelligent than he is.

May 18: Apologies

A few days ago, my computer passed on and went to a better place. So I missed a few days. So let's just take a quick look in the Times and Transcript. for Saturday and Monday. There isn't much to look at, and I'd like to have time for another topic.

Saturday - banner headline. "Province sets major projects funding policy". Skip it. The policy is so vague and general, it means nothing."

Editorial and Commentary - the editorial is about policing costs. So is Brent Mazerolle's commentary. Both say pretty much the same thing. Why? Lazy editing? People on that staff don't talk to each other?

Good column by Norbert. I wish I could agree that good economic conditions will ease language bigotry in the province. But I doubt it. The Quebec separatist movement rose in good economic times.

Bill Belliveau is excellent on Harper, especially on Harper's proposal to treat any criticism of Israel as a hate crime. We've fallen a hell of a long way to have a prime minister who gives himself the right to tell us what we're allowed to think and say. We are quickly becoming a country in which I would be ashamed not to be in jail.

Canada&World has the usual story about Victoria, and what a wonderful person Queen Victoria was. Actually,and just ahead of Edward VIII, she was probably the most useless monarch in British history. Interested only in herself, she never showed the slightest interest in the British people, never did anything for them and, in fact, never even appeared in public for fifty years. Devastated by the death of her beloved consort, Prince Albert, she found comfort in two spiritual companions with whom she seems to have been enamoured - a drunken and foul-mouthed Scotsman who was her groundskeeper, and a Hindu secretary.

Over the last several hundred years, the royal family has been noted primarily for the astounding cost of their upkeep and their extremely low level of IQ,  with occasional insanity - and one - Edward VIII - who was not only brainless but probably a traitor.

The family has been fortunate in more recent times in producing a George VI and an Elizabeth II. But the cost of maintaining them plus their thousands of servants is phenomenal. Prince Charles and Camilla, alone, require an expensive home with some 200 servants.
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The Opinion page has an editorial - and Norbert's column ---BOTH ON THE SAME TOPIC AND GIVING THE SAME OPINION. Worse. It's a silly opinion about a pretentious apartment building in Moncton called The Castle.

That ghastly pile of grey rock is not historic. There are many houses in the area around Church St. that are of more historic value. And it's not beautiful. It's a very unimaginative, rectangular pile of rock with quite unhistoric and unimaginative windows, all identical and identically spaced. A few spare blocks of stone have been put on the roof as a very bad imitation of a castle.

And a note for Norbert, bureaucracy exists in all organizations - including private business. In fact, the only difference between those in government and those in business is that the government ones are seldom personally greedy.

There is also a distasteful letter to the editor attacking a column by student columnist, Isabelle Agnew.  Miss Agnew had written about standing with the oppressed. The writer agreed, but had a different list of oppressed. Because his list was different, he made his letter a personal attack on the columnist. (And it's not as though Agnew had claimed her list was the only possibly one.)

The letter was also weak on facts. Yes, same gender marriages are now legal in many places. But that doesn't mean that such people don't still face abuse. And the Baltimore riots don't count because White policemen in the US sometimes shoot whites as well as blacks? Well, kid, take a look at the stats. Police killings in the US are about a thousand a year. And the proportion of blacks killed is far, far above what it should be. Yes, Virginia, racism is a powerful force in the US. (And in Canada. Luckily, Canadian police aren't trigger-happy).

Two good columns on Commentary - but both on the same topic and offering much the same opinion. What's going on in that zoo?

Alec Bruce notes that the Gallant Liberals look much like the Alward Conservatives. Of course.  They both have the same boss.

The only story worth reading is on the last page of Canada&World. "U.S. politicians say Iraq war was a mistake". This reaction is spreading among both Democrats and Republicans. George Bush and Dick Cheney, of course, disagree. They say that Saddam Hussein was a "bad man" who was a threat to the world.

Well, killing over a million people and impoverishing the rest seems to me to an expensive way to get a "bad" man. Nor do I see how he was a threat to the world. In fact, the "bad' men who were a threat to the world were George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Tony Blair. And if anyone deserves hanging, it's those three.  It's because of those three that what we like to call terrorism has spread so widely and so rapidly. Why on earth did we listen to those people? And why have we now joined in making things worse?

Partly, of course, we act as we do because of propaganda fed to us by news media owned by billionaires who make money out of these wars. But that's not the whole reason. It's also a sense we have of history.

In part, it's because of history as taught in the public schools, a history in which we are always nice and go to war only when we're forced to (against people who are "bad"). But even more pervasively, it comes to us through movies and TV.

Ask most people which country was most important in winning WW2, and they'll say, "The US".
And that's not even close.

In Europe, some 90% of the German army and air force was tied down by the Russians. If Hitler had not invaded Russia, D Day could not have happened. Britain, Canada and the US never faced more that 10% of the German army and air force.

The Russians inflicted far the greater damage on Hitler, and suffered far the greatest damage with perhaps as many as 30 million (or more) killed. (Indeed, I have never understood how a Russia, after a disastrous WW1, a revolution, and Stalin's dictatorship, could possibly have come up with weaponry and determination of such high quality.)

But, surely, it was the US that accomplished the defeat of Japan...? Not really. Britain and India had a large army that stopped the Japanese on the Asia mainland, and was rapidly pushing them back. As well, hundreds of thousands of Japanese were tied down in China, inflicting heavy casualties, but also suffering them. The US share of the fighting involved the island-hopping that depended on naval and air superiority.

Now, think of all the Hollywood movies produced about that war. How many are about the British, Indian, Chinese and Russian forces? In how many are Americans the "bad" guys?

And, more important,what do the movies and TV shows (and the Nov. 11) speeches say about the causes of our wars?

Well, us Canadians don't get very much in the way of movies and TV shows about Canada. though we do get lots of speeches.  So, what caused World War 1?

Well - an archduke was assassinated. That's not much of a reason for a war that killed millions, is it? Anyway, he was killed by a young man who had no connection with any government. So what's the point of a war over that?

Oh, oh,I know, teacher. Look at my hand. I know. It's because we had to help Britain.

No. We didn't. In fact, it was Britain, in the days of empire, that had the obligation to protect us, not the other way around.  As well, Britain had no such sentiment for us. It had been trying to get rid of us for at least forty years, terrified at the strong possibility it might have to defend us against an invasion by the US. (and that was no pipe dream. American presidents had many times threatened it, the last time just a decade before 1914.)

Nor did freedom and democracy have anything to do with it. President Wilson talked a good game about freedom and democracy - But neither he nor Britain nor France lifted a finger to free anybody.

It was about money. When Germany united (shortly after Canada's confederation), it also industrialized at a rapid pace. That made it a serious economic challenge to  British and French industries. That would not only cramp the style of the very rich; it might, in company with a larger, united German state, pose a threat to the colonies and Britain and France drew their wealth from.

Canadians were not united about going to war. But big business in Canada was. It depended heavily on its trade with the British Empire. So the newspapers owned by the wealthy played up the theme of Britain as our homeland, and our love of the monarchy. That, with a large population just migrated from Britain and unable to find work in Canada, is what took us into war.

(Oh, I know. Some people say that after WW1, Canada got the right to declare war on its own. Big deal.  Under the old rules, we were technically at war whenever Britain was but, with the exception of the Boer War, we never did it. It was pure technicality. The British government was quite happy to see us go. It relieved Britain which had been REQUIRED to defend Canada against an attack.)

WW2 was very similar. It certainly had nothing to do with persecution of Jews. Canadians and Americans happily persecuted them, too, and wanted nothing to do with them. Big business in Canada and the US rather admired Hitler as a barrier against communism which was gathering support in Europe in the depression years.

British business felt much the same way at first.  But it could not afford to tolerate an expansionist Germany which would overrun Britain's major European ally - France. That's why Britain went to war - long, long before it was ready for war.

Canada joined this one more enthusiastically than it had WW1 - perhaps because WW2 had established the Germans as 'evil' people. The US joined much later but, again, for economic reasons.

Of course, one has to give reasons for going to war. So, even before the US joined in, Churchill and Roosevelt met to produce The Atlantic Charter, the statement that we were at war to bring equality and freedom to the world.

It was a lie.Not a single US colony got freedom and equality after the war. Not one in Latin America. The Phillipines, long under an American colonial governor, got a sort of election for an American puppet. The only British colony that got freedom was India. But that was because India was big, and Britain was in no condition to fight it.

So why did US president Roosevelt go to war? To help Britain? No. The time to do that would have been 1939, not the end of 1941. Because of Pearl Harbour? No. This was the chance for American big business to get control of remunerative British, French, and Dutch colonies, especially in Asia and, very especially, China. But Roosevelt needed an excuse. So he cut off oil supplies to Japan, knowing Japan would have to take some action. I'm sure he wasn't expecting Pearl Harbor. But he should have. It should have been obvious that Japan's only chance was to cripple the US - a long chance, but the only one.

But, in 1945 and for some years after, the great plan failed. Britain defied Roosevelt, and re-took Hong Kong for the China trade. Roosevelt's puppet ruler in China, Chiang Kai Shek, got kicked out by Mao. The French, in the end, got Indo-China back, but couldn't hold it. Nor could the US when it became Vietnam.

Then, even little Cuba took itself back from an American dictator. That's why it became, in the view of US news media, 'a threat to world peace'. That's why the US will never really accept Cuba as an independent country. It's a bad example to the rest of Latin America.

Now the walls are crashing around the American business empire in the Middle East. Americans and Canadians, relying on history as taught in the movies, TV and print news media, believe we are fighting against evil, fighting for democracy and equality, just as in all our wars.

There is little mention that Morsi, the elected president of Egypt, has been sentenced to death. His crime? He was elected president. But US business decided that the Egyptian voters made the wrong choice, so the American government helped the Egyptian army to overthrow him, and put a general in his place. So much for democracy and equality.

Notice there are no calls for justice and equality or any sort of 'arab spring' in Saudi Arabia which is one of the world's most extreme dictatorships, ruled by an Islamist at least as extreme as ISIS. But he's on good term with American and European big business.

Notice there was no questioning when Haiti, after decades of American rule and poverty, got an elected president who was immediately warned not to do anything for the people of Haiti - but who introduced public education and other measures which US big business disapproved of. So the US invaded, exiled him, and to make it look legit, Canada sent 'peacekeepers'. Then they held a nice, rigged election that very few showed up for.

Most wars are fought for money. A great many governments in the 'democratic' world are owned by big, big money.  And big, big money will not tolerate people who want to run their own country, to set the rules for digging minerals, to charge taxes to the rich. That's why the middle east is collapsing. And we can't fix it because the very rich now don't not want it fixed. Let whole nations collapse; let millions die; make the region into a living hell. All big business is interested in is keeping control of the oil.

Similarly, we're all het up about Ukraine, a country that is now being stripped bare not by the Russians but by international banks. Big money also needs Ukraine as a staging point for war on Russia and China. The idea that we would risk such a war for a small and impoverished country being pillaged by its own government in Kiev is ridiculous.

But, what the hell, we believed that we fought World War 1 because somebody killed an archduke.

(Pause for reality. China has opened talk with India. And  India is not crazy about being ruled by and for western big money. It's been there. Done that.)
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On November 11, should we remember those who served? Certainly we should. They believed, as we believed, what they were told.  They believed and they paid the price with their lives, with crippling, with mental illness. They paid one hell of a price -as did the wives they left behind, as did the millions of civilians on both sides who were killed.

We should remember them on Nov. 11. We should thank them with our love. We should also remember them before we send others to risk their lives - as we did in Afghanistan and Libya and as we are doing in Iraq and Syria. Remember those who paid the price. And especially, remember the price before we send others in the future.
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As a sort of p.s., I have just been looking for a piece of information in a coffee table book I wrote for Reader's Digest. It was a history of the US in the twentieth century. My assignment was to edit the book, taking out 20% of the US material and fitting in of blending in Canadian material to replace it.
It fell open just now at a page devoted to movies. And, gee, they're just full of history lessons.

The first one was Sergeant York - about a US soldier in WW1 who became a hero by capturing a hundred German soldiers all by himself. ( Fact -The Germans surrendered because they knew the war was due to end. It was well known that an armistice had been agreed to. So they surrendered to stay alive.Of course, the movie doesn't tell it that way. So now, Hollywood's Sergeant York is a great figure of history.)

Then there's Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart as a club owner in French North Africa. There's a big scene in which German soldiers sing Deutschland, Deutschland.... but are drowned out by loyal French colonials who sing La Marsellaise. (In fact, many French were pro-Nazi. That was especially true in Casablanca.)

Then there was PT-109 about John F. Kennedy and his heroism in the sinking of his torpedo boat by a Japanese destroyer. (In fact, his torpedo boat was a good deal faster than the destroyer. There was plenty of time to spot the destroyer, and get away. But - John F was a pretty casual captain.)

And there's Patton - real hero. Well, he was also a Jew-hater who despised the Jews he saw in death camps, and admired the Nazi officers. He was a good tank-commander, but quite unfitted for promotion to a higher rank. He was also helped in his spectacular advances by the fact that most of the German armour (most of it superior to his own) was tied up fighting the Russian armour - also superior to Patton's tanks.

And all of the above became history so far as the general public was concerned.

I cut out an American film to substitute an excellent Canadian series called "The Valour and the Horror".
Alas! Few Canadians ever saw it because influential legionnaires objected to it. What they wanted was a Canadian version of "Patton" or "PT109".

May 15: Blah!

It's hard to write about a paper that keeps sliding downhill. I understand the need to cut costs in print journalism as the competition for advertising gets more difficult. But the Irving press, with its near monopoly of print news in New Brunswick, Does not appear to be suffering from lack of advertising. In fact, its thick inserts of advertising supplements is a substantial part of my garbage.

The banner headine "Mounties face labour charges in June 4 Moncton shootings" sounds impressive, saying each charge could result in fines of a million dollars and prison sentences. However, available information is so limited that it is impossible to understand what this is all about. The story mentions lack of firepower, lack of armoured vests, and unclear radio instructions. That's bad, and the lack of firepower was obvious at the time. But it doesn't sound like a million dollars and a prison sentence. It's also misleading in saying "mounties" face charges when it's not all the mounties but, probably, certain ones at the administrative level.

In short, this isn't yet a front page story because there isn't enough information available. And it's a sloppy headline. Indeed, the story smells of cheap sensationalism.

Also on the front page, the project to turn Castle Manor into condos is in trouble.  Good. It's an ugly, pretentious, and tasteless imitation of a medieval castle, something quite common in the world of  a pretentious. faux-aristocratic, tasteless, and posturing upper middle class of the late nineteenth century.

A3 has the story "New APEC head confident in overcoming region's demographic and fiscal issues". APEC is referred to as an independent think tank. But there is no such thing as an independent think tank. All think-tanks are dependent on somebody or somebodies for revenue. After all, somebody has to pay what I'm sure is the large salary of Finn Poschmann, the new CEO of Atlantic Provinces  Economic Council which is dedicated to "economic progress" in Atlantics Canada.

Actually, APEC is funded by the very rich, and it's dedicated to making them even richer by spewing out their lies and propaganda - and calling it "research". That's what most (not all) "think-tanks" are about.

Poschmann was working at the C.D.Howe Institute which, the story tells us, is non-partisan. That's true in that it does not support the policies of the Liberals or the Conservatives. What it does is to support both of them by doing 'research' as propaganda for parties friendly to big business.  The C.D.Howe Institutes is, in fact, a propaganda house for big business.

We are told that Mr. Poschmann has written more than 50 peer-reviewed articles. Peer-reviewed is an academic term meaning his articles were read and approved by independent experts in the field. However, most think tanks do not have independent experts in any field. This means that his articles were "reviewed" by other propaganda hacks at the C.D.Howe Institute.

In short, Mr. Poschmann is a hired hand of the Irvings and their friends to give an air of academic respectability to help the push to satisfy their self-interest and greed. And this news story is based on either ignorance or deliberate lying.  That's the price of holding a job at the Irving press.
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Good editorial!  As a person who lived in Quebec, and was, for many years, a leader of the anglo rights movement in that province, I can assure you that New Brunswick's language legislation is excellent, and the relations between the two groups mutually rewarding. English still dominates, and anglos are much less likely to become bilingual; but that's a natural result of being in the majority group. It also has something to do with gender. My sister was fluently bilingual by the age of seven because her playmates were French.

Boys, though, were commonly unilingual because they fought, often in gang wars. Both sides were the losers for that.

Norbert has a column on the hospitals. To save you reading time, what he does is to say Harrumph a couple of hundred times, then close with a Something Must be Done About It line.

The City Views commentary column doesn't have any comment or views.

The bottom commentary is by a policy professor at UBC, and it's on taxation policy, I really don't trust Troy Media; and I don't trust this article. It has the false logic of comparing spending on youth and the retirees without the slightest glance at what the needs are.

Alec Bruce is excellent on climate change, and how big business is beginning to wake up to what it means. The oil industry will, of course, the the last to wake up. (I don't think the boss will like this column.)
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In Canada&World, only one story is worth reading. It's on B5, Free Trade bill back on track in U.S. Congress. In short, it means the U.S.government is driving hard to get a fast passage for the Trans-Pacific Trade as soon as the terms are settled.  There are, essentially, (though the TandT doesn't say so) two purposes to this deal.

1. To isolate China until it agrees to let US big business control its economy.
2. For business, it's to get a deal that will allow big business to operate over much of the world under terms that free if from any obligation to give a damn about the environment, and free it to hire the cheapest labour in the world, thereby driving down wages and killing the ability to offer social programmes in their home countries.

That's been the purpose of free trade deals from the start. And this one is being written almost entirely by big business. It's short-sighted. It's greedy. It's going to cause severe suffering. So what else is new?  Good thing we have Harper to protect the people of Canada.

There is little but trivia in the rest of B section - and almost nothing of the world in general. I don't know whether that's because the Irving press is designed to keep us ignorant and trivial, or because it's cheaper to do it that way, or because the news editors just don't have a clue.
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So, very quickly, here's what's happening in the Middle East and Africa. For well over a century, (well over three centuries if you count the slave trade)  the western imperial powers - mainly Britain, France, Belgium and now the US have been pillaging those regions, murdering on a wide scale, exploiting, abusing.

Most of its "nations" are quite artificial, created by the imperial powers by drawing lines on maps. Typically, they were then put under dictators bought by the imperial powers. That's where Saddam Hussein came from. That's where the "royal family' of Saudi Arabia came from.

In the last century or so, in particular, an old world was destroyed with no opportunity for the people in that world to learn how to participate in the new one. So it is that we have nations that really aren't nations fighting internally, and identifying the enemy in religious terms. The enemy becomes anyone who belongs to any variant of the "true" faith. European Christians went through a spell like that centuries ago.

They also identify an enemy as Christianity - which is really unfair because there is nothing Christian about the western imperial countries.

U.S. policy ( like British and French policy before it) was to force submission by military conquest. But that's not working.  It has simply increased all the fears and hatreds.It is what really created Al Quaeda and ISIS.  It will never work. I think the American government now realizes that. And Obama has adjusted accordingly. After all, western big business doesn't care about establishing democracy or more modern states. All it cares about is the oil and other minerals it can steal.

So, taking a page from the British book, American policy is to let them fight each other. In fact, encourage them to fight each other. It's good for the US arms industry, and it destroys the chance of any of those "nations' ever becoming a real nation with a modern government and a capacity to function in the interest of its own people.
The word now seems to be to let them kill each other. Let them create millions of refugees. Let them create chaos and horror and poverty and starvation. It saves us the trouble of doing that. As long as we get the oil and the other resources and out stockholders do well - then what the hell, let these people destroy themselves.

Okay. But that game isn't as easy as it looks. It is creating hatreds and fears in Europe; and those will have their own consequences. It has already made police states of many countries - including the US and Canada.  It also provides openings in those regions for China and Russia, both of whom know they're next on the list for the American economic empire.

And that takes us to the next crisis. The US military record, for all its huge cost, has not been impressive since 1945. Little Vietnam stopped it. Little Afghanistan stopped it. I should think it very unlikely it could beat China and Russia without going nuclear.

And the pressure is on to move fast because the American empire is in a dangerous, economic condition. And that could well be matched by a dangerous domestic condition.

That's the big picture that the news stories don't even hint at.

May 24:

A1 has a story about the valiant defence of a high school girl and her father, part of the struggle against those who deny female rights by refusing to allow girls to dress as they wish. Three cheers for them for raising this valiant cause. I know exactly how they feel.

When I was teaching high school, I wanted to go topless with my pants slung so low you could see - well, you could see. And they wouldn't let me do it. I felt discriminated against. Oh, if only I'd had the courage of that girl and her father. The school wouldn't even let me wear a short T-shirt simply because it exposed my belly button.

Women teachers suffered the same abuse.  I knew one what had a staggering bust (I think. I never actually saw it.) But she could not wear a low, low neckline because it might unnecessarily arouse a boy whose desk she was leaning over to help. And she had to wear a dress from the Victorian age, something that reached almost to her knees.

Look, I have delivered and picked up my children at two high schools. Even on cold days, some of the girls were dressed like pole dancers. The more modest ones were dressed like bargain hookers. The boys were just messy and sloppy. Obviously, parents are not teaching their children how to dress. So the schools have to pick up where the parents have abandoned their responsibilities. That's one of the curses of being a teacher.

Let all the schools agree on a dress code.  There's nothing old-fashioned or sexist about it. Education is about disciplines, many kinds of them. There are the scholarly disciplines of the arts and sciences - learning how to read AND understand, learning how to criticize, how to make decisions. There are the basic disciplines of learning to get things done within the time they are required to be done. There's the discipline of controlling one's temper and behaviour. Nobody gets far without those disciplines.

And there's the discipline of of how to appear in public. You don't think that's necessary? Okay. Let us know next time you plan to walk naked down main street looking for a coffee shop.

And it's not expensive to dress appropriately. I grew up in a district much poorer than any I have seen in New Brunswick. We were still able to dress adequately. And we were still expected to have our flies zipped up. And, please, no more about this babble about not being allowed to flash boobs and crotches in school as an infringement of personal freedom. That's not the freedom that anybody died for.

And that's the only news story  in section A even worth reading.
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Norbert starts his column well in criticizing the provincial government for it's decision to establish a treatment centre for troubled youth in remote Campbellton. But then  he flies into a rant about the unfairness of taxing the rich. He says, "Does anybody but the wildest radical really expect the wealthy to work for ever decreasing returns?"

Why not, Norbert? While I grieve for those who earn millions a year, Have you ever heard of those who work for minimum wage - and less? And you routinely expect them to work for ever decreasing returns. The rich have not been getting poorer; in fact, they've been getting ever richer since the recession began. It's the poor who have been getting poorer.

Then he adds that the rich work harder and longer and take financial risks. That's why they're richer. And that's a statement that is wrong, wrong in fact, wrong in reasoning and wrong morally.  I guess Norbert was never exposed to the discipline of thinking. Or he's been so long sucking on the Irving teat that he can't break the habit.

The rich work harder and longer? Oh? Do they work longer and harder than a labourer on minimum wage"
And what is their pay scale? You don't know,  Norbert. You don't know because it's not made public. Some of their subordinates, though, make millions in a year. Working 7 days a week, that would give even their subordinates over $3,000 an HOUR. Do they really work that much longer and harder, Norbert? There are lots of people who make less than that a month, less than the rich earn just while burping down  a beer at lunch.

And they take financial risks???? Oh? Are these the same people who can buy forests cheap? The same ones who own and control the government? The same people who get free trade agreements to hire close to slave labour and to hide their incomes?

And, Norbert, do you seriously believe a Liberal or Conservative government would actually put a 60% tax on the people who pay to get it elected?

And the Liberals are ideological leftists? Norbert, neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives can even spell ideology. They aren't leftist or rightists. They're Irvingists.

He also says the occupy movement was ideologically left. No, it wasn't, Norbert. That's why it failed. As for it being infamous, it's infamous only to prehistoric relics like you.

Oh, yeah. Besides feeding at the public trough, the very rich are rich not because they work a million times harder and longer than anybody else, but because they were born super rich. Indeed, that's also true of ordinary rich. Most grew up in a social setting that assumed they would be rich, and with financial support that removed any obstacles.

When taxes get too high, people like the Irvings will move? We should all be happy to help them move. We really can't afford to support them any more. In fact,  many such people have moved. That is what free trade was designed to do. It helps them to drive down wages in Canada.

Norbert, you can write a good column. But, oh, you can also write real stinkers, beneath contempt for their belittling of ordinary people, their ass-kissing of the rich, their ignorance of reality. And this one is really distasteful.

Rod Allen's column is overwritten, ponderous in its attempt to be funny (rather like a gorilla trying to thread a needle), and trivial.

The bottom commentary, again, is from a far, right-wing propaganda house - the Fraser Institute. It plays with numbers in a way that looks impressive but is statistically worthless. Its point is we have too many firemen. His statistics prove that we have more than we used to. But that's not the same as more than we need.  This guy is just another right-wing think tanker who uses statistics to tell lies.

To balance all the lying in this paper, read Alec Bruce's column, especially from paragraph 4 to the end. It's a brief but very realistic assessment of where our world is in terms of politics, war, climate change...all handled briefly, but very effectively.
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B7 has the story that the opposition in Ottawa has raised concerns that there is no legal agreement with Iraq on the role of our forces there. In fact, it's highly questionable whether our soldiers or our airmen have any right under international law to be there at all. Almost certainly, we have no right to be bombing Syria.

The decisions to go to war have long since ignored the law. The US has just decided to keep ifs forces in Afghanistan forever - though they never had any legal right to be there in the first place. Nor did the US have a legal right to create a rebellion in Syria, or to supply bombs to Saudi Arabia to kill Yemenis. It had no legal right to invade Iraq just as Canada had none to invade Libya.  All this dodging of the law has been inspired by the US government. That's what American Exceptionalism means. The US has the right to torture, to bomb, to invade, to assassinate without any regard for international law or American law. Yep. It's God's will.

And why are we in on this? Like Britain in its declining days, the US is calling in its colonies to give an air of imperial solidarity to its invading and looting. Canada is now a colony of the US as it once was of Britain. In the Boer War, Britain called on its colonies to help fight the Boer War. It really didn't need them. The purpose of it was to tell the world, "you fight me, you fight my gang". Canada had no reason to attack South Africa. And Britain didn't need the help. What it needed was a warning to Germany. That's why Canadians died in South Africa. In the same way, that's why Canadian lives are being put at risk now in Iraq and Syria - with more to come.

B7 has the story of a footwear factory in the Philippines where a disastrous fire killed dozens of employees.
It's really a story about the past, the present and the future. But the news story doesn't tell us that. That's why news stories aren't, as a rule, much help in understanding what's going on in the world.

Such fires, started by careless slips in factories not designed to guard against fire were common into the early twentieth century in Canada and the US. Factory owners were free to save money by sending workers into dangerous buildings. And there, many of them died.

In North America, laws were tightened, often as a result of pressure from labour unions. But economic bosses of the US, Britain, France happily went on operating unsafe factories,unsafe mines, etc. in their Empires in Latin America, Asia, Africa.  And so it was that unsafe factories were built in the Philippines.

But that's going out of style, now. The new jazz is signing free trade deals that exempt the parties involved  from any silly rules like safety or environmental protection. That's why Harper has been cutting away at environmental laws. Then, once he signs the Trans Pacific Trade Pact, any co-signer will have the right to ignore most environmental (or safety)  legislation. And we would be have to pay them billions to make them comply.

There's nothing on what's happening in most of the world. Russia and China are clearly preparing for an American attack. The king of Saudi Arabia, the most extreme Islamist and dictator in the world - and our good friend - is destroying Yemen in what seems to be his bid for regional dominance. But I suspect it's more than that.

Israel has alienated most of the world by turning into a racist and aggressive state. Now, for all the support it will get from the US and Harper, it is in danger of facing major charges at the UN. Some Israeli Defence Force veterans have combined to reveal how Israel deliberately selected civilian targets in its last Gaza war. It's getting hard to tell Israeli political leaders from the Naziis. And, no, that is not an overstatement.

For confirmation follow the Israeli paper, Haaaretz, surely one of the two or three most honest and courageous newspapers in the world- even better than Brunswick News.

Google Pope Francis - adding words like arms industries, responsibility for peace, recognition of Palestine...
He makes our Faith page stand out as the irrelevent trivia it is. Pope Francis is a quite remarkable person in a world generally led by Harpers, Obamas, and Saudi kings. (and, oh, it's hard for a Protestant to say that.)

As the excitement over the Alberta election dies down I should say that I'm sure we can expect honest government from the NDP.  But----

It won power partly by moving to the middle, becoming, perhaps, an honest version of the Liberal Party. That has severe dangers. Remember Tony Blair. That's how he won power for the Labour party in Britain. But, having moved to the middle, he couldn't do the things that needed to be done. As a result, he dealt the Labour Party a blow from which it has never recovered. One of the marks of that was the low, election turnout in Britain - heading down to the kind of lows we see in Canada and the US.

Alberta's NDP is already going the Tony Blair path. The New Brunswick NDP might think about that. It's not about winning elections. There is no point in winning election if all you have to offer is honesty. You also have to convince people of what their problems are, then how you intend to address them. There's a huge education job to be done in this province. Otherwise, you can't do anything useful, and you won't survive as much of a party.
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Aurelie Pare has her usual, excellent "student" column on health on C2. She's good. And she's ready for the big time. But, just a hint,- start scouting a wide range of newspaper publishers. You're too good to be wasted on Brunswick News.
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In closing, I have to return to Norbert. Norbert, your column was not only a display of ignorance and rant. It was a gutter insult to most of the population of this province. The very rich deserve their money because they work long and hard? Norbert, you have accused just about everyone in this province of being lazy.

I know it's common for the very rich to see themselves deserving and the rest of us as lazy scum. But it's an ignorant and arrogant insult.  Tell you what Norbert - give us some facts on exactly how long and how hard the very rich work. Get pictures of their calloused hands. Tell us exactly how working so long and hard has been carried on through the generations as each, miraculously, has risen to executive status.

Let us in on their stunning intellectual powers that the rest of us lazy slobs don't have. Perhaps a list of their academic achievements, of their towering IQs.

As I read that column, I thought of my father when I first was old enough to remember him. He worked for his father (who lived comfortably), but he worked at a salary that could barely cover the rent on our tiny flat. So in winter he worked nights and Saaturdays shoveling snow for the city so he could buy what still wasn't enough food. I can remember him putting on his old, snowboots, lined with newsprint to cover the holes.. And at that, he still had to walk a long distance each day to get charity milk for me.

He wasn't lazy. And he was at least as intelligent as most of the very rich I have met. And he would trudge out into the snow after a day of factory work to make maybe a dollar, maybe less.

So tell me all about how he was lazy and stupid, and how intelligent the Irvings are, and how they work so long and hard, pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Norbert, I have never read a column that made me so angry. It's a contemptible piece of work.

May 13: Let's skip most of today's Irving press.

There really isn't much there. A full half of A8, for example, is a story about a Moncton man who will be cheering for Mexico (because he was born there) in the FIFA World Cup this summer. So bloody what?

The editorial page has a good cartoon. Norbert has a really excellent column on Harper's disregard for citizen rights. It's informed. It's logical. It's clearly written. This is first rate stuff.

All of the letters to the editor are worth reading.

And Alec Bruce has an excellent column on our understanding of science. The only problem with his column is us. New Brunswick has a shamefully low standard literacy. The writing of this column, though certainly good, will be over the heads of most readers.

Canada&World section ranges from trivia, to stories that explain little, to bad editing. For the latter, take a look at the lead story on B4. "At least 220 Russian soldiers killed in Ukrainian war." Editors write headlines. The headline is supposed to reflect what the story is about. But you learn in the first paragraph that it is NOT about 220 Russian soldiers being killed. It is that Putin's opponents have CLAIMED that 220 Russian soldiers were killed.

Nit-picking? Not at all. I'm certainly opposed to Harper. So, let's say I write a report claiming that Harper is addicted to heroin. Would the Irving press have a headline, "Harper addicted to heroin"? or would it read "Harper opponent CLAIMS....."?  There's a difference - especially when you remember that many readers read ONLY the headlines.
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So let's talk about Christopher Columbus and Russia. It's the kind of general story that never makes the news. But it's a story that explains far more than the news does. Let's look at the big picture.

The story, as you know, is that Christopher Columbus discovered the world was round; and he discovered America. The story is wrong on both counts. It is not true that most people thought the world was flat. For thousands of years, all over the world, it was commonly known that the world is round.

And he didn't discover America.

It had already been discovered over 70,000 years earlier by Siberians who crossed to Alaska, then spread south and east. It was also settled by Pacific islanders who were quite accustomed to ocean travel long before Europeans were. It is quite possible it was also discovered by Phoenicians and by African blacks, both of whom may have settled here.  That would have been a couple of thousand years before Columbus was born. And, as Columbus well knew, it had been discovered (and, briefly, settled) five hundred years before him by Vikings

So why all the fuss about Columbus? There are three reasons.

1. Columbus discovered wealth in the form of gold. That, combined with greater realization of the seagoing potential of sailing ships of the time, was what set the western world off on its "discovery" and conquest of everywhere there was wealth to be found. That's what led to the development of Empires, first to benefit kings, then to benefit capitalists. (Sorry. Entrepreneurs.)

That wealth came in the form of cheap labour, looting of mineral wealth, factory farming, the cultivation of like opium, and then forcing China to make the sale of heroin legal, and forcing it, every year, to buy a specified quantity of it - right up to 1914. Many a British capitalist's fortune came from the opium trade.Later, they would add things like clothing factories offering dangerous conditions and extremely low pay. (Such factories still exist, and they still collapse or burst into flames, killing dozens and up to thousands of  workers.) The empires also were created to loot resources, using cheap, local labour to take gold from South Africa,, diamonds from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a variety of minerals mined under brutal conditions in Congo and Central America.

In other words, imperialism worked exactly as free trade does. It gives capitalists access to whole nations it can victimize.

2. The human cost of that started with Columbus.

On his first landing, he saw a man wearing a gold ornament. So he assigned tags to be worn on the chest of each native. Each tag listed the gold quota to be delivered by that person, and a date for delivery. For the native to lose or get rid of that tag, or should a native be late in delivery or lower that the quota, the native's hands were cut off, and he or she was left to bleed to death. Protests were kept down by guns and by dogs trained to kill.

Nobody knows how many people Columbus killed over the years. Some put it in the millions. His followers killed many millions more, and also destroyed much of the land with slave labour for plantations which exhausted the soil. It still goes on in much of Central America. There are no longer any slaves, though. After all, when you can pay people two or three dollars a day, it's cheaper than having slaves.

So it was with all the empires. All of them murdered and starved their victims by the tens of millions, then imposed on them a brutal economic system that made death preferable. In the process, it destroyed cultures and societies, customs and religion that were the bedrock of whole civilizations. People could not adjust to the new conditions, but had nothing to replace them.

Columbus began the centuries of western imperialism that were centuries of horror unmatched in the history of world, and certainly far, far beyond what even Hitler did and envisaged. It's a horror that still goes on, though often under the name of free trade.

The ordinary westerner got relatively little from this. Throughout the great days of Empire, most British lived in vile conditions with, like other Imperial peoples, very short life expectancies. Their major role was to beat down the victims of imperialism, and to do it at such a cheap rate that few could ever hope to marry, and none could hope to retire to anything but begging. Pay was a shilling a day - but they rarely saw a full day's pay because fines for minor offences were deducted. As well, soldiers in many regiments had to pay for their own muskets ( to a company of which the regimental colonel was a member).

The chances of marriage for a soldier, by the way, were so slim that military expeditions normally included very large numbers of prostitutes.

The use of national armies to make the rich richer continues, of course, to this day. But, with the US in particular, mercenaries are making it possible to fight wars without using your own people -and using them against your own people if necessary. It's a sort of free trade system for war.

3. That is why it is so important for us to believe that Columbus discovered America. It had to be a white man. It couldn't be a black or an arab or a pacific islander or an oriental or even the native peoples. If any of those had discovered it, then they would be just a good as whites, maybe better. Couldn't have that.

All those other people had to be inferior to us. Us whites had to be a superior race. That's why they called the native peoples savages - just like animals. In fact, native people had civilizations; they had social structures and social order. But no, they and African blacks and middle easterners had to be savages.

It was their savagery that defined them as an inferior race -and that justified five hundred years of  mass murder and looting and barbarous treatment of them. Much of our racism is a product of the years of imperialism (which still goes on, and still done to benefit the very, very wealthy; but is now called free trade agreements.)

But we now have a variation on racism, one which draws on the Christian concept of evil. Racism is quite out of fashion. So we define those we fight as being evil - which is really just a variation of racism. So it is that Putin is evil, Muslims are evil. And the leaders of China will soon be evil. Hatred of evil keeps us in line in the same way racial hatred did.

And maybe Putin and Muslims are evil. And maybe Chinese leaders will be. But Bush and Obama have both been murderously evil. So have Tony Blair and the current British premier.

But the word 'evil' is now what the word 'race' used to be - the justification for our own cruel and murderous behaviour. And the message is daily pounded into us by film and by news media. We must hate the people we are abusing in order to justify the abuse we have been dealing out for over 500 years.

.This didn't begin on 9/11. Five hundred years of the destruction of societies, of cultures, of civilizations, of values has left us a world in which peoples thrash about fighting even within their own societies. And on all sides they are taught to hate.

And that's the broad picture of what the news is about.
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41820.htm

The story above is an important one for Canadian readers. It's about one of Harper's proposed uses for his secret police to destroy freedom of speech. (And that is not an exaggeration.)

The story is denied by David Frum, a far, far, far right commentator, who is slightly to the left of his sister, Senator Linda Frum who, lacking distinction as a broadcaster, was given a free ticket for life as a senator.
Both them are not just far right. It's much worse than that. Their mother raised them to actively hate and have contempt for anyone who isn't rich.

Yes, I have inside information on that.