Carbon pricing blames ordinary people with little say ( Comment Whitehorse Star, Dec.24 2015 )

Carbon pricing blames ordinary people with little say ( Comment Whitehorse Star, Dec.24 2015 )

This is a rebuttal to Sally Wright’s letter (Star, Dec. 21).

The “price on carbon” gave everything away.

The second-last line – “This will mean a price on carbon and a regulatory framework which integrates it” – diminished her well-intentioned thoughts on energy planning.

As if there was no price on carbon, as if there was no oil and gas subsidy framework that implements it. Beware of platitudes in the spin zone.

Transportation is not everything, but it is the one sector that Big Oil has a stranglehold on and their spin doctors and greenwasher front groups fight hardest there.

Emissions are not retail or market-driven when it costs close to 10 times more to fuel up a gas or diesel truck than an equivalent electric truck.

Greenhouse gas emissions are largely not a broad, diffuse and consumer-controlled issue but a narrow, precise infrastructure initiative task.

The carbon price doesn’t go there except for locking in the status quo, and instead blames ordinary people with little say on infrastructures available to them.

Ms. Wright’s opinion deflects attention from this fact, which provides comfort to the oil and gas industries trying to wreck Yukon.

To fight Jimmy Carter’s energy reform attempts, 30 years ago, Big Oil PR came up with the ideological carbon price strategy to falsely dress up in a market-responsive image with the option to become greenwashing solution providers as a fox in the henhouse.

It became their successful tool to disguise the infrastructure and oil cartel nature of the problem and to advance protectionism, militarism, polluter permits and rights against energy markets, against renewable economies and agricultures, against capping extraction and emissions, against science-based carbon accounting and against reducing fossil energy subsidies.

In B.C., carbon trading caps emission reductions not emissions, and offset rewards are paid to Encana. The supposedly revenue-neutral carbon tax subsidizes gas fracking and corrupts carbon accounting.

Even after the B.C. Auditor General investigated and exposed the mess in 2013, which is not fixable but simple certainty on a grade two math level, the Pembina Institute continues to herald it as a successful model.

Corporations’ powers to legislate under certain free trade provisions protect oil subsidies similarly to carbon pricing mechanisms.

Different political parties highlight a different focus of protectionism for over-mature fossil resource cartels and run a very effective good cop/bad cop routine.

Ms. Wright overlooks carbon pricers and climate deniers in unison reject the core fact of accumulated greenhouse gas emissions as the climate impact.

As in Copenhagen before, in Paris, the OECD carbon pricers insisted only current emission levels are relevant and fought the renewables-oriented and science-based G77 position (poor countries) tooth and nail. Because by killing climate science, along with it, one gets to kill climate justice.

There are more similarities.

Naomi Oreskes, who co-wrote the political self-defence guide, Merchants of Doubt, observed there are scientists who are so-called climate skeptics.

However, after reviewing close to 1,000 studies, she could not find even a single climate skeptic academic who had examined the issue.

I recommend to make use of this piece of wisdom from atmospheric and oceanic science review.

Let us not focus on mere policy opinions, be it from climate science or economics actors who, with support from corporate media bias, tend to get parroted by many of the environmental NGOs.

In order to find an evidence base for energy and climate policy, it might be more helpful to pay attention to economists as well as climate scientists who have produced a peer-reviewed and respectable body of work on the issue such as Vandana Shiva, Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, Hermann Scheer, Patrick Bond and others.

Ms. Wright’s letters bring up the counterproductive carbon price frequently, and just as regularly ignore renewable energy source legislations which actually achieve impacts on emissions.

As the late Hermann Scheer observed brilliantly, carbon pricing mechanisms, together with talk thereof and renewable market frameworks, are in zero sum opposition everywhere (referenced and sourced by yukonblogger).

Renewable infrastructure priorities ahead of even conservation and efficiency, together with feed-in tariffs, zero emission transportation fast charge points and local industrial content requirements, re-created vibrant energy markets in Denmark, China, Germany, Spain, Ontario and other places.

Keep an eye on some of the smaller regions like around Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., with an independent local power utility where renewable economies, jobs, profits as well public finances are healthy and electrical rates are competitive, characterized by a situation that is shielded from the now carbon price-talking Ontario government and its subservient Ontario Hydro.

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.

By Peter Becker

A fracking sell-out by MLAs and NGOs (Whitehorse Star Oped on December 18, 2015)

 

A fracking sell-out by MLAs and NGOs, 

Whitehorse Star Oped on December 18, 2015

They claim the Yukon government (YG) does not follow its own adopted 21 frack while talk recommendations of the legislature’s select committee report, signed by all parties and lobbied for by the NGOs, and in deed fully complied with by YG in all its oil and gas measures.

Yes, the opposition Liberal and NDP caucuses together with Yukoners Concerned about Oil and Gas Exploration and Development and the Yukon Conservation Society (YCS) are selling us out to the master plan of YG.

Betrayal and structural complicity by opinion leaders, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, has degraded their no-frack sentiment to a softheaded notion, hanging by a thread at best. Northern B.C. and Synergy Alberta copycat strategies have been used.

Let’s follow the chronological order, while touching on a range of formulaic phrases by which Merchants of Doubt and Synergy Alberta (Synergy) talk has permeated and co-opted the message tracks of Yukon friendlies among officials.

First part of unpacking the 21 points and their endorsements is a look at where the advice originally came from. Evidently, it was much derived from the tobacco industry’s PR expertise on regulating crime versus outlawing it.

Everything and everybody are sucked into a vortex of misleading language frames onto a one-way frack track. B.C. Tap Water Alliance (http://goo.gl/w3XEwS) and Public Accountability Initiative (http://goo.gl/iC6RoI ) uncovered tricks and networks.

Yukoners resist, but some have been gulled from no-frack into go-slow signs.

In May 1994, 4,000 pages of internal tobacco industry documents were sent to the office of Prof. Stanton Glantz, University of California, who had been after Big Tobacco for 16 years before successfully exposing their criminal conspiracy suppressing science information.

In the 2014 documentary Merchants of Doubt, Glantz explains that you generally can’t get away with saying that smoking doesn’t cause cancer, or that oil and gas expansion is environmentally clean.

The Merchants of Doubt method is not at all about raising doubt to the benefit of research, as anybody might expect, but pseudo skepticism that attacks facts with green little lies.

Glantz cites, quotes and summarizes from the tobacco industry trove of documents:

“And Hill & Knowlton [H + K PR consultancy, now the frack brain of Big Oil] said to the heads [of Big Tobacco], you can’t deny the evidence. But what you can do is cast doubt. Doubt is our product.”

Infiltrating the local scene are the Environmental Defense Fund, Pembina Institute, Synergy Alberta, Resource Works and other outside front groups orbiting a black hole of false doubter words.

Glantz again: “The only way these guys are actually effective is if the public thinks they’re an independent voice.”

How about the 21 frack while talk recommendations from the all-party select committee?

“The committee did agree that the following [21] recommendations should be addressed before hydraulic fracturing is considered.”

6, full text: “THAT baseline ground and surface water data be collected for an appropriate period of time, in order to ensure that comprehensive data is available.”

It’s B.C.-style soft legalese, but no trust building, as in complete baseline work must be carried out beforehand and completed.

This inevitably brings on best practices, as announced often by YG.

Those nowhere and never have included comprehensively concluded baseline water testing before fracking started.

There is reason and logic to it. Alberta, Pennsylvania, British Columbia are examples, which will include the Yukon with frack procedures already permitted and initiated.

Industry-controlled regulators claim especially high levels of methane toxicity in the water of fracked regions are supposedly naturally occurring and pre-existing.

10 recommends to require to make public the frack chemicals. The entire 25-page frack report hides Fracfocus by making no single mention of this centrepiece of best practice regulations.

There is no excuse. Duty of care aside, on several occasions I had made sure all committee members are aware.

It is almost certain that the Fracfocus chemical disclosure registry will in time be implemented, as it is in place across North America, including in B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Fracfocus is a Kafkaesk masterpiece of deception and nihilism.

It requires disclosure reports, but not until 30 days after frack operations have ended and all specific individual compound disclosures are voluntary.

Medical associations complain that Fracfocus pushes back even those patients’ rights, disclosure obligations, legal remedies and liabilities that existed before Fracfocus.

Herding everybody into establishing a single-issue regulatory focus of water management really manages control of community.

It disallows effective resistance against destroying the fullness of natural and economic life support systems.

Yukoners Concerned accommodates this government strategy by overplaying the message track : “It’s all about the water.”

11, full text: “THAT research be conducted to demonstrate whether well integrity can prevent migration of liquids or gases in the long term.”

Such research is not available. Supporting these recommendations retells government’s misleading statements, which can only get us fracked.

During the January 2014 Yukon legislature presentations/hearings, U of A. Prof. Bernhard Mayer had expressed doubt on industry claims regarding well integrity.

The Merchants of Doubt chutzpah by which his talk hid reality and statistics of the rate of well failures was remarkable.

The author of Sustainable Fossil Fuel Mark Jaccard, a former advisor to former prime minister Stephen Harper, together with Royal Dutch Shell's face for leaky carbon storage drilling, Rick Chalaturnyk, led the Merchants of Doubt charge during the hearings.

Guaranteed frack harms were hidden consistently behind fixable or to be regulated “risks” by silver-tongued charmers with mediocre science credentials throughout the hearing.

They received frequent affirmation from all MLAs and the NGO crowd.

Synergizer methods were explained and anticipated by short video docs on world-leading fracture engineer Tony Ingraffea that I had made and also embedded into a PPT (http://goo.gl/Oy8CtZ ).

During this Yukoners Concerned PPT presentation to the committee, I had alerted the fracking committee members specifically to the Mayer/Jaccard type sleight-of-hand by carefully unpacking it.

In the PPT video material, Ingraffea strongly emphasized that engineers never use the word “prevent” when it comes to well failures.

His professional and poignant advice was critical, yet was totally suppressed and censored out from the report.

12 deals with air quality baseline testing as fraudulently as # 6 does to water.

Merchants of Doubtpiece #13 recommends research on greenhouse gases’ impact but ignores the U of Colorado report with total mass measurement data of fugitive emissions of about nine per cent in a Utah frack field, I had referred to and linked to in the Yukoners Concerned PPT.

The remaining 16 frack implementations are mostly filler and fluff that provide a false sense of security while being screwed, diverting attention from the killer portion that has holes big enough for 210 points to fall through.

The Merchants of Doubt advice details the committee put in its frack report come from somewhere.

In 2012, the China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC), which own most of Northern Cross Yukon hired the PR consultancy H + K, based on expertise lying about cigarette harms.

Following in the footsteps of Stanton Glantz and Patricia Callahan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning muckraking reporter, the Scientific American online from Feb. 17, 2015 quoted former tobacco industry executive Peter Sparber: “If you can do tobacco, you can do just about anything in public relations.”

Yukoners didn’t have much time to find out for themselves.

Like other oil and frack outfits before, in May 2012, CNOOC/NCY hired H + K.

YCS and NCY sign a consultation agreement on Oct. 5, 2012 offering improved government access for YCS in exchange for sidelining community voices against fracking (https://goo.gl/hTEHC8).

It’s divisive and full of template recruiter language that also introduced the image of a “polarized spectrum” to Yukon. It smears frack critics as extreme and ignorant, when really their concerns are typically well-informed and middle of the road.

Triumphantly, the premier waved a copy of the YCS-NCY deal in the legislature’s question period.

On Nov. 22, 2013 the YCS, in the conclusion of its PPT presentation, advised to the frack committee “ … regulations to reduce the chances of negative [frack] impacts …” against even their own presented and valuable enviro science (http://goo.gl/ZW8Pn7 ).

In their second conclusion, YCS is hoping that fracking would not be viable in Yukon. YCS defied their own sources again by falsely suggesting that the industry has economic viability elsewhere.

During those winter months of 2013/14, Yukoners Concerned came under sustained pressure, mostly behind the scenes, to give up their resolute stance against frack implementing regulations. The Yukoners Concerned executive buckled; I didn’t.

Yukoners Concerned never reprimanded the unfair representation in the report of the Yukoners Concerned presentation, as if happy to see their once evidence-based positions gone.

Yukoners Concerned spokespeople forgot Oct. 9, 2013, when we had highlighted to the committee substantial data sets.

We had never noted a relevant lack of data, as the report put in our mouth.

Generally, enviro science had been appreciated but not predetermined outcome science.

The Yukoners Concerned website recommends the frack report without a word of criticism on it.

Yukoners Concerned hides an almost complete censorship of the committee against the peer-reviewed evidence context of jurisdictions with moratoria, contained in the Yukoners Concerned PPT.

In short, the report edits Merchants of Doubt spin into the Yukoners Concerned presentation which it did not have.

Yukoners Concerned is fine with that now. Their latest endorsement for the 21 frack invitations came in a media release in the Star from Oct. 30, 2015.

With the Yukon Party government discredited for some time, the NDP caucus plays a lead role introducing preconceived bias by replacing clean language with validations for false language.

They claim YG doesn’t have a “social licence” for fracking.

Paradoxically, this gives it to them as political operatives, and consulting firms had already printed the social licence during their fracking dog and pony shows. I expect one can get a fishing licence and a social licence in North Korea.

Why does it work that way? It is the kind of thing one receives from Miss Manners who is less so concerned with the democratic mandate.

The “social licence” term is a control group-tested think tank mockery of people’s will that anesthetizes democratic imagery of “consent by people”, “public support" or “approval”.

Social licence arrives by obedience to the term and process it stands for, stating yay or nay to having one is meant to be irrelevant.

The NDP caucus discouraged any discussion on a committee title less ideological, more evidence-based and in balance with firm enviro-science and economics data, such as “Select Committee On Harms and Costs of Hydro Fracking”.

Another of their Merchants of Doubt specialties is abusing the venerable “Precautionary Principle”, away from its meaning in the dictionary of dealing with risk.

The NDP caucus has infected others with this bastardization of language use that deflects from the evidence for certainty.

Frack Merchants of Doubt show conniving silence on the April 22, 2014 letter from the City of Whitehorse to the frack committee that expresses a time-limited concern against fracking into the Whitehorse aquifer, only until a well protection plan is in place (https://goo.gl/YVr5oa).

Secular Nationalism makes ISIS Tick, Whitehorse Star Oped Dec. 2 2015

Secular Nationalism makes ISIS Tick Whitehorse Star Oped Dec. 2 2015

Glimpses into conventional Arab nationalism, non-religious military command as well as secular administrative leadership under the Islamic State recruiter veneer are not new, but a trove of documents acquired by Der Spiegel consolidates a transformative understanding (http://goo.gl/mtjcG4 ).

All the while, the mistakes of 9-11 are repeated, skipping grief and pain of what must be immeasurable loss and jumping into unwise action. Solidarity with the French people means to get especially the French government out of Syria. Here is why.

To get a grip on where the now fast-expanding situation is headed, we need to backtrack and employ the most human of qualities: think a little.

Syria is where the French army was defeated after 14 murderous years of anti-colonial fighting from 1920 to 1934, foreshadowing France’s downfall in the Land of a Million Martyrs, Algeria 1962 after eight years of an imperial bloodbath.

Britain was thrown out of Iraq in 1932 after 12 years of killing and maiming from 1920 to 1932. It still echoed when ex-U.S. president George W. Bush’s and former British prime minister Tony Blair’s coalition of the willing went into Bagdad and stayed 12 years ago.

Of course, France got started in Syria, signing the secret Sykes-Picot agreement with Britain in 1916 that carved out a colonial post First World War Arabia ruled by them.

Particularly French governments have a history of fanatical colonial aspirations in the Middle East and North Africa.

At the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919, to satisfy those ambitions, French prime minister Georges Clemenceau asked David Lloyd George in earnest out for a duel with a choice of pistols or swords, which Lloyd George declined. It wasn’t 1914, which saved his honour and perhaps his life too.

What Arabs typically remember better than the Brits and French is that their promised freedom was stabbed in the back, while as brothers in arms of the allied powers, they were dying in battles against the Ottomans.

History may not condemn a serious rescue mission or military expedition authorized by the UN in response to unspeakable or genocidal ISIS massacres on Muslim communities, Parisians, Kurds and Yazidis.

But a UN Charter, Chapter 7 intervention cannot carry at the same time a second badge of neo-colonial domination and gunboat diplomacy.

More than fear of casualties, this is the real reason of the air war obsession. In the air, one would not have to account for illegal acts of war.

The Arabs are not buying the distinction; neither does international law.

It may sound a bit like a contradiction on terms because without continued Western colonialism, there would be no ISIS political fascism, as they couldn’t care less about distant Western liberties one way or the other.

But going forward on practical terms, there are a few items that would remove the colonizer badge.

However incomplete, a good effort may set a different tone and perhaps open surprising and useful future options by addressing:

Drone warfare-terrorized Muslim populations from Nigeria to the Philippines experience a very common but strange notion. They name a feeling of being dehumanized to the level of bugs that are attacked by crop dusters, particularly by this technology.

The Trudeau government plans to up the military trainer scheme. It is a famously stupid exercise of expediency to sneak neo-colonial occupational forces into countries that don’t want them. The method escalated the Vietnam war, but the Vietnamese caught on pretty quickly. So do the Afghans in a war, with body counts still climbing.

Our women and men in uniform are prepared to die for us, but the very real possibility of once again being murdered execution-style on the military training ground by extremists posing as recruits is a different matter. It is just not right to put Canadian soldiers into this type of hopeless position.

Kurdish, Shia as well as Sunni militias are famous for their cunning and toughness and for their sophisticated artillery and battle-hardened infantry skills – if, and this is a big if, they fight for their own national causes and not a foreign-dictated one.

General Izzat Ibrahim al-Douiri and his assortment of all secular veterans, from the Iraqi officer corps, are doing a phenomenal job training and guiding the ISIS battle units.

Ibrahim had been the one that got away in the U.S. command’s famous deck of cards of Saddam’s Ba’athist villains following the illegal 2003 invasion.

Not since the Russian Red Army defeated the German Wehrmacht, or 90 per cent of it, have conventional ground forces been as successful in set piece battles against superior airpower.

All of these are well-recognized indicators by independent observers that Iraqis and Syrians don’t need foreign military instructors.

U.S. President Barack Obama never made good on the Bush promise and his own promise to withdraw all occupation forces from Iraq by 2011. Thousands of military contractor troops and the U.S. military never left Bagdad’s Green Zone and other strongholds.

Obama could stop his efforts toward implementing the original Bush/Cheney plan of attacking a dozen or so Muslim countries beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa and the Horn of Africa.

Obama could stop his efforts to steal Iraqi oil by not any longer pushing the Iraq oil law, which even the most corrupt puppet governments in Bagdad, after years of being pressured, won’t sign.

Obama and the U.S. Congress could initiate serious reparations starting in stable corners of destroyed Iraq.

It also requires moral and legal reparations by prosecuting war criminals of the Bush presidency but also from within his own administration.

Efforts are slowly underway in Great Britain to prosecute Blair for war crimes, but justice delayed is justice denied.

Unfortunately, there is no indication yet from the Trudeau government that Canada will return to the world community of nations that follows the UN Child Soldier Conventions signed by Canada in 1949, 1977 and 2000.

Under the law, prosecution and punishment of child soldiers or combatants under 18, including the cover-up, facilitation or aiding thereof, is a war crime (no ifs and buts).

Justice and compensation for Omar Khadr, who was also psychologically tortured with attention to sadistic detail by Canada’s CSIS in Guantanamo (CBC video: https://goo.gl/8cTgn4 ), is overdue, and has to be the measure of that.

Aggravating injustice occurred on Feb. 4, 2008, when the U.S. military commissions, in Guantanamo, accidentally released and later suppressed an eyewitness report OC-1 CITF of March 17, 2004.

It contains sworn, legal testimony by the U.S. army personnel who captured Khadr in Afghanistan on July 27, 2002, that Khadr, then 15, did not kill U.S. army medic Christopher Speer.

Some decent women and men stood up for the law and Khadr’s rights.

Among them were UN officials, RCMP Chief Supt. Mike Cabana, who resigned in protest from the RCMP anti-terrorism unit Project O Canada, the former senator and general Romeo Dallaire, Michelle Shepard from the Toronto Star, American military lawyer Bill C. Kuebler and Dennis Edney from Edmonton.

It is widely agreed that the Guantanamo concentration camp continues to be a first-rate recruiting tool transforming young Muslim women and men toward the extreme.

One way to put a little more distance between Canada and Guantanamo would be to avoid the usual decades-long foot-dragging for victim rehabilitation in the justice system and clear the air quickly for all Canadians and now upstanding, loyal citizen Khadr.

Obama could prove that his interest in Syria is about more than increasing arms industry revenue. Maher Arar is a dual Canadian/Syrian citizen who also has family ties to Syria. For a start, he and his family need to be removed from the U.S. no-fly list.

In September of 2002, he was wrongfully framed and smeared by the RCMP as Muslim terrorist. As a result, under the illegal U.S. Extraordinary Rendition program, Arar was kidnapped at JFK International Airport and deported to Syria for contract torture by the Assad regime. Canada made amends exonerating and compensating the innocent Arar, but not the U.S.

Fact is, a lot of difficult processing we do by language, which can be a good and creative force or a bad and obediently dull tool, and some amends are in order.

Toning down terrorism and radicalization of Muslims rhetoric and re-introducing intellectual and mental hygiene to the conversation would help a lot.

To qualify as a terrorist, it seems, one has to be a Muslim first. How often do we hear about Christian terrorists?

When last were Genocidaires with a Christian background, and there are a few of those around from Germany, Rwanda and Serbia, referred to in the context of radicalized Christianity?

When were Christian community groups and churches asked to denounce crimes they have nothing to do with by forcing such demagogic obligations on them?

Perhaps Hannah Arend, the late philosopher and educator remembered for coining some hard-won, transformative truths of our time, can help to break destructive stereotypes?

As a foreign Jew in 1940, she was interned in Camp Gurs in southwest France and narrowly escaped deportation by the French Vichy Regime to a Nazi death camp in Poland.

In 1961, she went on to report for the New Yorker on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, receiving serious flak for it, at the time.

One reason was that in Eichmann, quasi the transportation agent of the Shoa, she observed mainly an unremarkable bureaucrat who was obediently following orders, not personal hate, even after questions had crossed his mind.

The second reason that got Arendt into equally hot water was that she reported what had come up in the survivor statements of the trial.

Perhaps some of the Jewish community leaders could have risked a little wiggle room and daring towards underhanded resistance rather than submit?

This work later evolved into the household words “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

“And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.” (Quote from the 2012 movie Hannah Arendt.) Presence of mind and guts sound useful to me.

Justin Trudeau, Obama, French President Francois Hollande, Russian President Vladimir Putin, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and company: bury your inner Cheney and remember Lester Pearson, who de-escalated the extremely dangerous Suez crisis after Britain, France and Israel had attacked Arab Egypt!

In 1956, the so-called Tripartite Aggression aimed at stealing the Suez Canal from the Egyptian people and at regime change against president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had exercised the radical impertinence of nationalizing the canal.

In popular radio and television interviews, Hannah Arendt had learned and taught to carefully and succinctly distinguish “Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme.”

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.

By Peter Becker

Loyalty and resistance beat strategic voting

Loyalty and resistance beat strategic voting ( Comment Whitehorse Star October 14, 2015 )

Those families who resisted and hid children from being kidnapped into residential schools across North America have survived better against cultural genocide.

That is one lesson I learned from those who will vote for Melissa Atkinson, the Yukon’s NDP candidate in Monday’s federal election.

Primal things matter, loyalties matter, land and countrymen matter, survival matters.

Wilfrid Laurier, the first francophone PM of Canada, understood that.

Justice for the Métis, Red River land titles and rehabilitation for Louis Riel, he powerfully stated that loyalty goes both ways.

Laurier said government can only ask loyalty in response to the loyalty it is giving to people.

Continuing predecessor Brian Mulroney’s work in the Métis Federation vs. Canada case, prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin got busy undoing Laurier’s legacy.

When attacking Métis land claims in court, they had retained none other as legal history consultant than Tom Flanagan, the poster boy for manifest destiny in Canada.

Flanagan fudges evidence and asks openly to erase aboriginal rights, land titles and for an American style of breaking agreements and treaties.

In his 2008 book First Nations? Second Thoughts, Flanagan’s diatribes remind one of 1830s Georgia, brimming with land-hungry speculators lobbying the Cherokee Removal (Trail of Tears death march) at fever pitch.

He writes: “In much of Canada, their (the First Nations) present place of habitation postdates the arrival of European settlers.”

And Liberal candidate Larry Bagnell said nothing. Since, we get to see Flanagan as a regular guest of the likes of the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge.

How can one claim in court, fronting Flanagan, that indigenous people don’t exist in Canada, then keep a straight face when talking a good First Nations line on the public stage?

From 2003 to 2006, Bagnell was involved as parliamentary secretary to the minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development and Federal Interlocutor for Métis and Non-Status Indians before becoming parliamentary secretary to the minister of natural resources.

During those years, Stephen Harper was also helped by Flanagan but on top of that was assisted by the U.S. Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. government arm’s-length operation that specializes in international political “party renovation” towards the U.S. model of voter suppression, attack ads etc.

The Conservative Party of Canada never declared receiving assistance from a foreign power in taking and consolidating government control.

It became public only in 2014 Wikileaks cables. Veteran diplomat and journalist Peter Dale Scott fished it out from there, and deserves recognition as a Canadian:

“12. In addition to the campaign schools, IRI (International Republican Institute, a subsection of the Endowment for Democracy) will be bringing in consultants (here to Venezuela) who specialize in party renovation to discuss case studies of political parties in Germany, Spain, and Canada, which successfully carried out the process of party renovation.”

It was widely reported in international media, several times in the Huffington Post, and again on its Politics page by Mark Taliano from Niagara on Oct. 8, 2015 (http://goo.gl/OpUe14).

Bad news for Canada including for things like medicare and aboriginal rights, jobs, the environment, wealth, climate justice and international solidarity that are all tied into Canadian sovereignty.

In refreshing contrast, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair appears to be a patriot who worries at least about our jobs but so far makes a big mistake to be quiet on what the TPP is all about, handing undemocratic legislative powers that override Parliament to foreign corporations.

The Canadian government continues to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars under frivolous NAFTA chapter 11, investment arbitration rulings.

The U.S. government has not paid a single penny. The world’s free trade sucker (Canada) is the most sued country and has ponied up more than anyone, not population adjusted, growing debt.

Mr. Mulcair overlooks people who vote for values, not programs, a weakness he compensates into rotten compromises. Corporatism or corporate feudalism-elitism is out of of character and phoney for social democrats.

And as polls unreliably indicate, the NDP would once again be dearly punished in the election when disillusioned NDP voters stay home.

Remember Adrian Dix, the former B.C. NDP leader? He betrayed his support base with green-washing and LNG interest-serving carbon tax talk even before a corrupt carbon pricing ideology led him to become a frack turncoat.

I recommend the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation and B.C. Auditor General reports on carbon taxing and trading, which incentivize greenhouse gas emission increases, subsidize oil and gas fracking, corrupt carbon accounting and push hard to sneakily patronize renewable infrastructure initiative down to the cosmetic levels.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, a carbon tax is not a fuel tax that can be put to ecological use. It is by design and name harnessed to hide, prolong and spin annual 5.3 trillion fossil resource subsidies as a false market that supposedly responds to nudging it around a little.

Nowhere and never has it worked for the environment, but always to increase big emitter rights.

If you were in touch with people, you would know about the June 2013 protest letter (energyjustice.net) signed by 86 grassroots groups from 11 countries against the revenue-neutral deception of the carbon tax message by the citizen’s climate lobby.

Mr. Mulcair, emissions can be capped but carbon trading caps emission reductions; you are dead wrong about the acid rain and ozone hole lessons.

As indicated by him since 2009, Mr. Harper is sure to be not far behind on the U.S. carbon price bandwagon, but his timing outfoxes the opposition parties.

Many of the environmental NGOs also hand the advantage to him on a silver platter.

For example, Yukoners Concerned about Oil and Gas Exploration/Development, in a recent group email (https://goo.gl/LiavDq), has moved closer to the oil and gas front group twins Center for Sustainable Shale Development – Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).

Like Pembina, with their shameful presentation backing up the Yukon government and Yukon Energy on fracking/LNG at the Mt. Mcintyre Recreation Centre, July 2013, and Synergy Alberta; they are big on carbon pricing.

False front groups are not straight shooters, and use the cigarette industry’s method as merchants of doubt.

Turning frack harms into “risks” is typical for EDF-sponsored studies.

An EDF-controlled and funded study by Chip Groat that claimed fracking is safe for groundwater was disowned by the University of Texas as corrupt in 2012.

Carbon pricing talk is EDF’s number one recruiting tool to, over time, convert environmental groups into supporters of extreme oil and gas expansion.

(Anatomy of an Industry Front Group by the watchdog group Public-Accountability.org, a non-profit, non-partisan research project mostly used by academics and journalists, provides analysis on how EDF and CSSD work: http://goo.gl/4FOFLl.)

The Yukon Conservation Society (YCS) maintains a carbon trading proposal on its website that has all the markers to incentivize greenhouse gas emission increases that are listed in the Dag Hammarskjold report How carbon trading works and why it fails, and more. The gas frack-subsidizing Pacific Carbon Trust is listed as one desirable design.

It is hard to see this greenwashing document outside the context of a Synergy Alberta-type backroom contract the YCS had signed with Northern Cross Yukon on Oct. 5, 2012: https://goo.gl/9JUmx9 .

I blew the whistle on it soon after. The contract aims at step-by-step frack implementation at Eagle Plains.

It secured privileged access to the Yukon government for the YCS and Northern Cross Yukon that marginalized, not streamlined, community voices.

Back to carbon pricing: Dix outright self-combusted in the 2013 B.C. election with a 20-point lead in the polls.

OK; suddenly becoming a pro-fracking promoter during the leadership race in the summer of 2013 might have accounted for a part of those losses.

Social democrats seeking majorities on the right and losing them on the left is how honest crooks get elected, freely paraphrasing after the American political linguist George Lakoff. Left-right traditionally plays less of a role in Canada.

The TPP is not a trade deal like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade or once the Auto Pact (destroyed by the World Trade Organization with NAFTA chapter 11 as weapon), but an agreement of protectionism for pharma price-gouging, competition law violators and anti-capitalist speculators.

Trade is good, but free trade ruins export profits, increases Canadian debt and trade deficit levels while destroying quality jobs; the economics data are clear.

The so-called investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) corrupts corporations with the power to override Parliament and legislate medicare, aboriginal rights and renewable economic development out of Canada.

Trade lawyer Gus Van Harten, who already blew the whistle on FIPA in 2012, alerted Canadians that TPP ISDS aims squarely at abolishing aboriginal rights.

I might add before we saw Premier Darrell Pasloski and Prime Minister Stephen Harper acting it out for real, then-Yukon premier Tony Penikett had raised the pressure that NAFTA chapter 11 (ISDS) exerts against aboriginal rights with Chretien, previously author of the infamous white paper, his colonizer blueprint.

On March 25, 2015, Wikileaks released the all-important centrepiece of the TPP that Van Harten talks about “Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty: Advanced Investment Chapter working document for all 12 nations (January 20, 2015 draft)”, ISDS.

On page 12, a really striking “Annex on Health” has just four short lines and only excludes Australian health care from privatization and pharma price-gouging attacks. Go to: TPP investor leak, or : https://goo.gl/SW4IXY.

I had a recent conversation on so-called ISDS in the TPP with Tony Negus, Australia’s High Commissioner to Canada.

I came away with the impression that the Aussie government is bought off with its medicare handshake and further exemptions, not to blow the whistle on free trade gangsterism.

The context: Ever since NAFTA chapter 11 hit home, ISDS is a really dirty word in Australia, and its free trade agreements with the U.S., Korea, China and Japan have excluded ISDS.

Not to be overly skeptical, the one moderating aspect I noticed reading the TPP draft, which can be expected almost final, is that Section B of the Investment Chapter exempts Canadian cultural industries from attacks.

Van Harten may have overlooked that one. But then, who can trust such a toxic document on anything?

Thomas Mulcair is more critical than other party leaders on the TPP impact of job losses in Canada while being quiet on the anti-democratic nature of ISDS, which is to be almost complicit in it.

Mulcair correctly puts his finger on the secretive nature but has no excuse for not knowing what is going on. This needs to change.

Along with coming unstuck from election planners and advisors who are a bunch of Big Oil compliant carbon free traders and losers from a two-decades string of continuous Yukon NDP campaign failures, most importantly, Ms. Atkinson is picking up winning momentum, within recently experienced wide margins of polling errors, as the right candidate for the strategic advantage Yukoners and Canadians need in Ottawa.

It's blood and oil, not Saudis against fracking

It’s blood and oil, not Saudis against fracking ( Comment Whitehorse Star August 28, 2015 )

Gwynne Dyer’s thesis of a contest between Saudi oil and North American frack interests is popular in Wall Street gazettes and the mainstream media, but without weight in the real world for two reasons.

His Aug. 20 column syndicated by the Star, “Face up to it, folks: fracking is winning”, overlooks that subsidized shale oil fracking was losing money when a barrel of oil traded for more than $100. Plain math.

Secondly, he mischaracterized the Saudi-U.S. relation of political economy as one in which market regulations dominate, when in reality it is almost pure protectionism and resource colonialism. Neoliberal pseudo economics hide dangerous problems.

With a crude price around $100 per barrel until mid-2014, the super majors, such as Exxon, Shell and BP, published for 2013 a drop in profits of around 25 - 50 per cent.

This was also the year that unconventional reserves, by about 60 per cent, took over reserve replacement in their financial statements. Unconventional stands for burning the oil candle at both ends.

Access by tar steam extraction and new style brute force fracking is expensive beyond transparency and inflates false production figures because useful net energy output is questionable to non-existent.

Unprecedented and discounted quantities of conventional energy and other resources are blown up in smoke for a new and extremely ideological fossil extractivism.

The data fallout of this 2013 financial tipping point of overall oil profits is overwhelming but has not yet quite sunk into general awareness.

Among the big fossil resource consultancies, EY (Ernst & Young) Oil and Gas Services is one more that observed a steep increase of cost in accessing crude and nat gas reserves.

Since fracking became relevant around 2009 and into the mid-term future, their 2014 U.S. Oil and Gas Reserves Study marks a fluctuating but steep cost increase per new BOE (Barrel of Oil equivalents describing combined quantities of O and G) capacities to come on line.

The International Energy Agency’s 2013 World Energy Outlook downgraded frack reserves and optimism and put it more succinctly:

“The Middle East, the only large source of low-cost oil, remains at the centre of the longer-term oil outlook.”

So how does short-lived fracking create continued exposure to energy insecurity, economic decline, ecological and financial debts?

Nobody earns profit with it, but the oil majors have bought all the smalltime frack ops they could find to work them into their reserve portfolios.

Audited by the U.S. Geological Survey as shale reserves that run out after a handful of years, yes. But it is useful for an energy security illusion the public is made to pay the wealth of nations in subsidies.

On the basis of energy security promises, governments defer taxes and provide many handouts to the big oil outfits such as with carbon pricing schemes.

But behind the reserve smokescreen, many frack subsidies are hidden. From there, money is laundered into corporation internal tar and frack subsidies.

More so than Dyer, I see socialized fracking and tar steam extraction continuing even when oil drops once again to $20 a barrel. (Of course, the North American natural gas price hasn’t been near crude level for a while.)

In 1973, then-U.S. president Richard Nixon and then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger struck the iron clad petrodollar deal guaranteeing the House of Saud to stay in power, no matter what, in exchange for locking in OPEC crude trade in U.S. dollars only.

We owe some gratitude for this illustration of how free trade works.

During the onset of the Arab spring, many in the region believed the Saudi people, perhaps even ahead of Tunisians and Moroccans, would be first to establish democratic rights, if not for the petrodollar deal.

The agreement is a geo political corner stone and intact today.

It is responsible for propping up the Saudi dictatorship with its spreading of Wahhabism and violence throughout Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other places.

Also, the petrodollar platform reinforces the U.S. ability to borrow money for American elite interests and their penchant for military adventurism.

Pegging crude oil to the dollar is clearly protectionist of oil majors’ interests and influence in the wider region, such as Saudi Aramco and Exxon Mobil. It is also protectionist of arms industry interests and electoral as well as political war on terror profiteers.

Iran and Iraq have been on the forefront of attempts to open oil to market trading and international currencies.

Notably, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein but more so the democratic Iranian government of the aristocrat Mohammad Mossadegh and later the Mullah regime played a role.

In Operation Ajax, Mossadegh was overthrown by Britain and the U.S. in 1953 after nationalizing oil production, events that cast a long shadow defining many Middle East troubles today.

Twelve years after an illegal coalition of the willing, with Saudi participation, conquered Iraq in 2003, consecutive parliaments (Iraq Council of Representatives) continue to refuse to pass the American-sponsored Iraq oil law (Iraq Hydrocarbon Law).

It attempts to rubber-stamp the illegal post-invasion takeover of oil resources by American companies.

On June 29, 2014, the Politics page of Al Jazeera English News posted a video, The ‘Sykes-Picot’ borders ISIL wants gone.

It explains a festering Arab wound far beyond the minds of Daesh fanatics and attempts to build bridges to overcome the limitations of Western naval-gazing.

Daesh is a term commonly used in Arabic with layers of meaning that are less accommodating or friendly to the jihadi fiefdom than Isis or ISIL.

There was a secret drawing-up of boundaries for a colonial Middle East by French and British diplomats Francois Georges-Picot and British and Sir Mark Sykes already in 1915/16.

The world learned about the backstabbing of Arab independence by their French and British brothers in arms when the Soviets later exposed the deal.

Imperial Russia, as a junior partner, had been privy to these negotiations that were without Arab participation or knowledge.

Marty Callaghan’s 2006 documentary film Blood and Oil: The Middle East in World War 1, employing a star cast of international historians concludes:

“But it is really Great Britain and France, two Western countries, trying to impose their rule on a predominantly muslim world,” and,

“In redrawing the map of the Middle East for the benefit of Western political and economic aims and in selecting pro-Western leaders to rule Muslims of various cultures and religious beliefs, Europe guarantees that the future of the Middle East will be plagued by civil strife, regional wars and foreign occupation.

“The key ingredient for political stability, legitimacy, has been largely destroyed by a Western fabrication that has virtually destroyed the history and traditions of the Middle East,” and “Among the Muslim people from Istanbul to Tehran, anti-Western sentiment has never been greater. And terrorist attacks on the West have become more deadly. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 turned out to be a hollow victory for the West.

“The seeds of discontent sown at the end of World War 1 have grown into a fearful harvest. As the author David Fromkin has written: The treaty (Sykes-Picot and by extension Versailles/Paris 1919) forced upon the Muslim world was indeed a peace to end all peace.”

Hindsight is 20-20 but cannot correct wrongs that should not continue.

I have no doubt, were Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, around today, they would draw a straight line in the sand from Sykes-Picot to Kissinger’s petrodollar deal.

Unfortunately, Canada adds false legitimacy and war on terror obfuscation to a terrifying interplay and expansion of destruction.

It will be crucial to rethink before a current situation of a dozen or so of regional shooting wars, driven by anti-colonial underpinnings, will engulf into the firestorm of a déjà-vu Mahdist War (1881-1898).

The centennial of the 1915/16 Sykes-Picot betrayal of Arab freedom is good timing to end the petrodollar deal and pull back even now escalating Western occupations and interventions, by public education and pressure. The petrodollar protection racket against the region will come down eventually, but proactively will be less disruptive.

I found a helpful quote in a bad book, Samuel Huntington’s 1996 Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non- Westerners never do.”

As discussed, major oil and gas cartels are not elements of functional markets as many understand potatoes, books and hammers to be bought and sold.

However, it is a highly efficient and sensitive supply system with super-tiny storage buffers, such as gas stations, oil tankers and so-called strategic reserves.

Sensitive does not have to mean lack of adjustment to big overproduction.

A point or half a point of error in anticipation causes problems. One such energy demand factor that escapes the status quo oil mentality are an often underestimated but now explosive growth of industrial-scale renewable energies in India and China.

Much of Gwynne Dyer’s detail contemplation on “swing producer” characteristics, etc., evaporates in too narrow a scope that, surprisingly for him, misses basics such military history, geo-politics, energy economics and petroleum geology.

Bloodbaths dislocating and antagonizing millions of people are worsening, the Saudi princes heading OPEC are still in the oil business and the frackers are on the dole for good.

Journalist Robert Fisk introduced the last chapter of his The Great War For Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East, with Rudyard Kipling’s appropriately melancholic lines:

“Far-called our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”

Columnist has hidden the B.C. carbon tax scandal

 Columnist has hidden the B.C. carbon tax scandal (COMMENT, Whitehorse Star August 14, 2015

In British Columbia, the carbon tax generates incentives to greenhouse gas emission increases and cash handouts for gas fracking, local columnist Keith Halliday’s second pet project for two years running. He aligned with elite financial interests in his July 6 Yukon News column, promoting a Yukon carbon tax without fact-checking or journalistic balance.

The optical illusion of carbon pricing hides and expands the prohibitive carbon price economies and communities pay now.

It comes in the form of absurd subsidies for fossil resources to the tune of $ 5.3 trillion annually, according to 2015 International Monetary Fund figures.

Fossil resource oligarchies are known among every day people to continuously fix prices, break competition laws, environmental laws and human rights laws.

Halliday’s carbon tax talk attempts to greenwash anti-democratic monopolies into friendly neighbourhood market players.

This entrenches and expands emitter rights, siphons investment and focus away from renewables while working against rolling back Big Oil subsidies.

Carbon pricing measures, not by incremental fault but by the fossil industry’s spin doctors who designed them, incentivize greenhouse gas emission increases.

Halliday is eating it up, a language of uncompetitive old empire entitlements.

In its preface of the study, Carbon Trading —How it Works and Why it Fails, published by the widely respected Swedish Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, we read:

“At a time when carbon trading is still being promoted as the central solution to climate change, we continue that it is, instead, part of the problem.”

And, under the headline Taxation:

“As a means for altering behaviour, carbon taxes have many of the same problems as carbon (off-set) trading.”

Let’s test the carbon pricing in a real world example, say, for the driver of a Chevy Volt, an electric car that by way of an onboard gen set can generate its own electricity.

EVs drive at about 20 cents to the fuel dollar for a gas-powered car, and the Volt has both in one.

That makes fuelling up electricity about five times cheaper than gas or diesel, without a carbon tax.

But the Yukon lags behind without a single fast charge point. Halliday never once gave a chance to any such infrastructure basics of energy security, affordability and environmental responsibility.

What remains, then, is a carbon tax/trade nickel and diming scheme in the style of a Thatcher flat tax that could not be more cynical.

From the B.C Auditor General’s investigations, the carbon tax/trade scandal made its way through the whole spectrum of B.C. media.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives B.C. section Policy Note reported in January 2015 under the title: The case against a revenue-neutral carbon tax:

“Revenue neutral is the idea that all carbon tax revenues must flow back out the door as other tax cuts (typically income tax) but also could be in the form of tax credits or a fixed dividend. In some cases, people do not trust that this is going to happen as promised.

In B.C., they would be right, as two-thirds (very cautious reading) of carbon tax revenues have been used to support corporate income tax cuts.”

Those are new(!) tax cuts significantly to Encana and other gas frack operators.

It is cash funding for the climate bomb of fracking directly from the carbon tax!

The B.C. government and the assertions Halliday brought forward are false on both accounts:

“During this period, the (carbon) taxes reduced emissions and provided a net benefit to taxpayers of 300 million Canadian dollars in personal and business tax cuts.”

No and no. People as well as small- and medium-size business are being fracked into structural unemployment and robbed by the carbon tax. But it is a windfall for Encana.

At one point, even B.C. Premier Christy Clark had admitted that the carbon tax is burdening ordinary people and announced a plan to freeze hikes for five years.

The Globe and Mail’s Ian Bailey reported on Apr. 3, 2013: “B.C.’s Clark vows to freeze carbon tax for five years.”

The carbon tax-linked and leveraged Pacific Carbon Trust, as cap and trade agency, acts as a slush fund operation for cash handouts to especially gas fracking.

The B.C. government, in damage control mode after the Auditor General’s report, renamed it the Climate Action Secretariat in 2013.

It would be bad enough if Encana’s gas fracking in B.C. would be justified on the basis of them buying carbon off-sets.

But no. I was seriously shocked to read in B.C. General Auditor (outgoing) John Doyle’s 2013 report the B.C. government purchases carbon off-set papers from Encana.

You heard right: the worst and biggest polluters get to sell carbon credit derivatives.

Privileged polluters earn direct rewards and get to extract funds from the taxpayer to open the door to escalate pollution to new heights.

“Polluter pays”?

Watch out, NDP – there is no bottom in the cap and trade barrel!

Halliday’s claims of supposed emission reductions are as false as non-existing finance benefits to people.

B.C. carbon pricing policy corrupted carbon accounting by specifically excluding major frack gas facilities’ emissions, according to the Auditor General’s report, which named Encana.

Further, significant gas and diesel purchases during hugely popular cross-border shopping trips were neither factored in by the B.C. government nor Halliday.

CCPA senior economist Marc Lee followed up and posted a comprehensive data analysis on Policy Note, May 8, 2015: “B.C.’s Carbon Emissions on the Rise”.

As an industrial inventor and energy analyst, I have no intention of bashing corporations.

They can only rob us as far as governments corporatize the climate.

Corporate rights are increasingly legislated that incentivize emissions by way of the deceptive carbon tax and carbon-free trade mechanisms.

In short, Halliday writes like a courtier, a lobbyist who enables an anti-capitalist resource colonialism and protectionism that sabotage industrial progress.

He seems not alone in seeing carbon pricing and extreme oil and gas expansion in a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship.

Christy Clark agrees.

So do I.

Beleaguered Greece writes down its massive debt 2/3

Beleaguered Greece writes down its massive debt 2/3 ( Comment Whitehorse Star July 13, 2015 )

It is not a secret that the 2008 financial melt down and banking bail outs, their worsening destabilizing impacts and the suffering from it are far from over. 

There is no meaningful conversation about resolution for the Greek crisis without the question for the lessons of 2008. 

Among important figures, Angela Merkel unfortunately gives the sense she was not around, like a character that appears on stage from outside of the plot.

The big rotting corpse that was publicly unearthed since 2008 is the culprit of banking deregulation. 

We can tell by media and radio interviews, the Greek public at this point is much better informed on this one than many Canadians or Germans.

A lack of public banking control is the problem inside the problem and it had been understood and corrected during the Great Depression. 

At its centre is the crucial separation of commercial banking where people make deposits and carry out legitimate business transactions, protected from investment banking for speculator activities.

FDR broke ground for fiscal responsibility with the Glass-Steagall Act from 1932 which in variations of its responsible banking mandate was adopted around the world.

Before we look at who revoked it lets see how it works.

There may be those who feel that counterfeit money should be illegal also as electronic money. 

It turns out in a liberal society, it should be good enough if it's honestly labelled as such, just as GMO in food should be. 

Counterfeit money that is labelled, off course, is toy money that kids can play with. 

Carbon offset trade, inflated energy futures, electronic betting and gambling products and and other derivatives are not even stock. And all of it has no place in commercial banks to dilute regular, boring money that people and economy depend on.

The whole idea of going big with huge quantities of counterfeit money is, of course, to steal lots of valid money by mixing the two. 

And that is where our epic prototype of a neoliberal finance figure enters the scene -- Bill Clinton.

Other neoliberals like Reagan, Kohl and Thatcher had done their part and Mulroney’s financial services deregulation had already come in 1987.

Yes, 1999 Bill Clinton tabled and pushed through Congress the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which abolished the Glass-Steagall Act. 

He did it against the direct and dire warning of the brilliant banking expert Brooksley Born, then chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.

Michael Greenberger, an official who had worked for her at the CFTC, recalled later what happened when Born finally realized that Clinton’s massive finance deregulation was going ahead in ‘damn the torpedoes’ fashion. 

"I walk into Brooksley's office one day; the blood has drained from her face, …”

On a little side note, I hope those who blame Jews for excesses in the field of banking take note that Bill Clinton is not Jewish. 

On second thought, we might not be able to rescue the hard antiSemites from the dustbin of history. 

However, it is not necessary for Angela Merkel to herd ordinary Frenchmen, Italians and others into fascist extremist camps by blaming the Greek people, when it is rentiers and banks out of control she fattens up.

The Greek finance disaster serves as a reminder that a big policy deficit eventually leads to real debt trouble, especially useful here in Canada. 

Here is another odious debt biggie from the Greek audit report which investigated the crime of “shifting private debt onto the public sector”. 

Some day we might read this line in a Canadian debt audit report.

CBC News/Business reported on April 30, 2012 with the headline 

“Support for banks 'more substantial than Canadians were led to believe': CCPA [Canadian Centre forPolicy Alternatives]report”

The 2009 CMHC securities bail out of hundreds of billions for Canadian banks is mentioned with lowball figures. Canadian bank bail out funds under the 2008 American TARP are not mentioned nor is the 2007 Asset Backed Paper scandal, with a $ 40 billion bail out for the big Canadian banks by our government.

Note, Asset Backed Papers are not asset backed in the real world but nevertheless were purchased by former premier Dennis Fentie's government to the tune of squandering and risking about $ 36 million of Yukon taxpayers' funds. The decision was reprimanded by the Auditor General as an illegal act.

Another finance gun powder keg Canadians and Americans share with Europeans is the stealth appearance of privately owned and controlled central banks. 

Interestingly to this day many in the public eye perceive central banks still as state-owned and government-directed national banks.

The Bank of Canada is a special case because it is at least partly owned by the public, but unfortunately has picked up the habit of acting mostly in accordance with the privately owned central banks' agendas. 

The European Central Bank, ECB, representing the individual EU member countries central banks in negotiations with the Greek government of course has a huge legitimacy issue.

There was a big change that had come in 1974, but it seems forgotten.

Starting with the so called Group of Ten countries in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision process, national banks were flat-out privatized. 

Typically this change was reflected in specific and general language solutions involving the term, central bank. 

The incredible daily strain of presenting a public image while acting on a private mandate shows in the sagging face of poor ECB president Mario Draghi these days.

Had today's privately owned central bank world been around then, Canada and other countries would still service interest payments on WW2 debt. Ellen Brown explains it really well in "Web of Debt".

FDR and his economic advisor, Henry Wallace, had it right: Band-aids for serious trouble make only sense together with structural reform. 

I am not making all this up, there are much smarter people to learn from like public banking advocate and educator Ellen Brown.

And then there is the state owned Bank of North Dakota where people's money is very save because it is not mixed with counterfeit money.

Will cooler heads prevail, such as, perhaps, that of IMF chair Christine Lagarde? 

The IMF position on Greece has evolved and now substantially agrees with the Greek government. 

Honesty needs to return to the table also from the other two Troika members' side. One way or the other, debt is written down as we watch.

Will Merkel blow up the table with more make believe politics, and will Greece pick up its old Drachma currency? Nobody knows. 

We do know the world owes a debt of gratitude to the hardworking and courageous Greek people whose life on the brink had not started with the amazing democratic referendum. 

Greece is helping Canada with a reminder to timely put public banking and finance safeguards back in order. 

It is frustrating and disturbing to see how much the CBC and others have distorted the context of the referendum towards their neoliberal elitist biases.

Lets act as Canadians with international solidarity and perhaps remember the wits and gumption of a Lester B. Pearson. 

Greek farmers just started large-scale direct actions and are trucking potatoes straight to market squares where they are sold at about 25 cents/kg.  

Non partisan greecesolidarity.org was founded by the late, legendary British MP Tony Benn. It provides trustworthy information and takes online donations for Medical Aid for Greece (MAfG).

Beleaguered Greece writes down its massive debt 3/3

Beleaguered Greece writes down its massive debt 3/3 (Comment Whitehorse Star July 14, 2015)

Germany's agenda to strangle a trustworthy Greek government to extract pounds of flesh from Greece is not based on economics but on political domination. 

Alongside, the Greek people become collateral damage and their country is to be divided and divvied up into shreds. 

Alexis Tsipras and his colleagues fought with honour but lost this round. The involved EU countries’ people and their representatives have the next word on new ESM (European Stability Mechanism meaning bail out) conditions.

Not all is lost. A Grexit in unity may keep Greece in better shape than a Grexit in chaos or into serfdom. The resigned finance minister Yanis Varoufakis who so far had best anticipated this turn of events is still around as MP.

The core of the final dictate titled “Comments on the latest Greek proposals” was leaked already Saturday night, July 11, leaving as much negotiating space as an incoming cannon ball with a kidnapper’s ransom note tied to it. John Cassidy from the New Yorker traced the anonymous one page slip to the German finance ministry.

It already listed the two core points that appear certain as the shame summit conclusion is not yet published:

1. Expropriation and removal beyond Greek sovereignty of infrastructure assets worth 50 billion Euros. 

2. Politically, economically and inhumanely debilitating privatization so severe it would send disciplinary shockwaves throughout Europe.

The incredible speed of the Sunday night extortion operation is a deja vu of the 2008 trillion dollar handout to American, Canadian and British banks and the 480 billion euro bail out to German banks. 

This speed of another bank bail out crime is to shock people everywhere into obedience, and faster than a thought of fighting back. It is the opposite of any democratically paced process. A violation to be paid for of the EU foundation as a peace union.

It is hyper-aggressive towards the current Greek government, which is not even six months in power and very different to the previous EU Yes Man operations, of Samaras, Pikrammenos, Papademos, Papandreou and Karamanlis ruling during the trouble period since 2008. 

Contrary to Chancellor's Merkel’s and Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel’s claims Alexis Tsipras’ government never broke any trust and never negotiated a bail out.

Then, last Sunday afternoon European time, the Guardian and a few independent journalists obtained another anonymous leak.  A dog eared and hand annotated four page scribble surfaced, this time talking about in detail what the “eurogroup” wants. 

More than a deal it set down in stone a crime, ahead of Sunday Night’s summit outcome. 

The popular and well respected German weekly Der Spiegel online Sunday uses words to describe it like, "Humiliation for Greece" and "The Catalogue of Cruelties". 

On the paper slips drafted in the fashion of an unconditional surrender on the field of battle, one of the bullets on page 2 reads: 

“ • adopt more ambitious product market reforms with a clear timetable for implementation of all OECD toolkit 1 recommendations, …”

The OECD toolkit 1 is a neoliberal handbook with false free trade language that advises  for legislating powers to shift from parliaments to corporations and entrenches protectionism such as patent extensions in favour of Big Pharma. 

Under its point “9. Product Market” the Greek compromise proposal had already surrendered to the OECD toolkit 1 with the exception of retaining market based and vital pharmaceuticals affordability. 

Pharma profiteering is obviously one more German carpet bagger provision that harms the Greek people and economy, and is sure to drive up a poor country’s debt. Austerity is duplicity.

Next bullet on page 2 of the gangster deal:

“ • on energy markets, proceed with the privatisation of the electricity transmission network operator…” 

It is another direct stoppage or gutting out of the development oriented Greek proposal which had followed the very successful German industrial growth model of its 1999 Renewable Energy Source Law, also under point “9. Product Market”: 

”The [Greek] authorities will also continue the implementation of the roadmap to the EU target model, prepare a new framework for the support of renewable energies and for the implementation of energy efficiencies and review energy taxation; the authorities will strengthen the electricity regulator’s financial and operational independence.”

In fact, spearheaded by energy minister Panayotis Lafazanis feed in tariffs, community based wind and solar initiatives and other renewable energy cornerstones are or were on the move. 

Like the policy in Germany, the Tsipras government stays away from green washing carbon pricing systems because they incentivize emission increases.

Ironically, cynically the German proposal is quite intentional in opening Greece to the British government’s as well as oil corporations’ emphasis of corporatizing the climate crisis with carbon tax and trade finance derivatives. 

The now likely crushed renewable energy planning had been an area where last week’s Greek proposal had shown intelligent use of very small wiggle space.

Next bullet on page 2 of the draft attacks human rights U.S. Republican style:

“ • on labour markets, undertake rigorous reviews of collective bargaining.…”

It continues on page 2 with sloppy capitalization, overuse of parentheses and the rough typing and formatting speed of robbery:

“On top of that the Greek authorities shall take the following actions:

• to develop a significantly scaled up privatisation programme with improved governance….

OR

(Moreover, valuable Greek assets of (EUR 50 bn) shall be transferred to an existing external and independent fund like the Institution for Growth in Luxembourg to be privatized over time and decrease debt. …)”

German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble stands to personally benefit as a paid board member of this outfit that in the past was heavily involved with derivative speculators like Lehman Brothers.

The end of the robber document on page 4 reads:

“(In case no agreement could be reached, Greece should be offered swift negotiations on a time-out from the euro area, with possible debt restructuring.)”

John Cassidy titles his New Yorker online piece from July 12:

“Grexit: An Indecent Proposal From Germany”

Gwynne Dyer had explained well the red line of the Greek people for Greek government compromises. This is how economist Mark Weisbrot understands the unfolding events in a July 10 interview with Democracy Now host Juan González: 

“Well, the proposal is similar to what they had rejected previously. And, you know, you have to take into account that this is kind of a hostage situation.” 

Weisbrot about closing the banks: “And that’s very important because a lot of people don’t know that. You know, they think the government closed down the banking system, but it really was the European Central Bank doing something that probably no central bank has ever done before, which is to create a financial crisis in a country that’s under their jurisdiction.”

Weisbrot peers down deeper into the neoliberal rabbit hole:

“You know, this is the ironic thing about it, is that the European authorities have made this mess. The reason they need all this debt relief is because the economy has shrunk by more than 25 percent and greatly reduced their ability to pay. And now, the IMF is already saying—or the IMF has already acknowledged that the debt is unsustainable.”

Weisbrot further indicates the US want generally a more neoliberal Europe with less social dignity but certainly no trouble in Greece. I would add the US has strategic motivations to protect the Southern flank of NATO. 

A brutal humiliation or Grexit transformation could bring on memories of a big mistake in cutting the lifeline to the Cuban people after Castro and Guevara overthrew the U.S. puppet dictator Batista in 1959. 

Cuba’s trade had been part of the Americas. Naturally for Castro the Russian connection had been second choice, but the Cubans needed food and oil imports. Russian pipeline projects through Greece are at least being proposed. 

US concerns are understandable as a remotely potential NATO Grexit down the road would diminish total control of the Bosporus which bottles up Russia’s ice-free, year round shipping and naval operations.

The real dark underside Greek and German press, Dyer, Weisbrot and Cassidy don’t talk about, or don’t know how to talk about, is the role the Social Democratic Party leadership plays in Germany’s governing coalition, or in Brussels, for that matter.

One might think they would have tried to loosen up the square-headed deadlock. To the contrary, Germany’s vice-chancellor, foreign minister and Social Democratic Party leader Sigmar Gabriel is talking tougher than Merkel to oust or colonize Greece.     

This makes no sense, and it doesn’t to a lot of Germans and to a lot of international folks, until we do dig a little deeper. The divisiveness he and his executive colleagues  are living and breathing they have not invented.

Historic structures one is not aware of or in denial of can be very dominating.

The division in the German social democracy of 2015 is the one of 1915, of imperialism against realism, and it is relevant to us now as then.

I think Sahra Wagenknecht and others in the Left Party leadership correctly and refreshingly trace the split of the German social democratic movement to the First World War era. Then, in 1913, August Bebel died; as leader of the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany), he had stood for the iron-clad commitment of the party base and a majority of Germans overall, to general political strike against war.

The Left Party (Die Linke) was originally formed by East Germans, after the wall came down, who basically were disillusioned by West German robber economics during re-unification in which also parts of the SPD played a negative role. The long lasting wounds it cut really are quite reminiscent of Greece’s treatment now.

Since, prominent West German SPD figures also joined; like Oskar Lafontaine, former leader of the SPD and super popular former Minister President (Premier) of the Saarland. Die Linke has been or is successful in provincial coalition governments.

In divisive betrayal, after Bebel's death 1913, the SPD executive had gotten openly behind military escalation and also enforcing party discipline and votes in favour of financing war measures. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were forced to respond during the war by founding the USPD (Unabhängige, meaning independent, SPD).

Before Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered by early Nazi militias in 1919, of all politicians, Liebknecht had by far the strongest popular support throughout all sectors of German society, soldiers, workers, women, farmers.

An eerily identical situation exists today with a rift between SPD and the Left Party. The latter honourably with a strengthening voice supports the democratic Syriza and Podemos movements in Greece and Spain.

Beleaguered Greece writes down its massive debt 1/3

Beleaguered Greece writes down its massive debt ( Comment Whitehorse Star July 10, 2015 )

Ed. note: this is the first of a two-part commentary.

The status and eventual outcome of the financial crisis are not clear at this point, except for one thing.

Without any doubt, the odious debt is gone after the July 5 referendum.

What is odious debt?

It is the term economists, political and banking people use for debts or parts of a debt that are illegal.

It is no more enforceable than debt from a deal on street drugs or stolen goods could be legally collected.

Its not surprising the Star, as one of fewer than 10 independent and not corporate-controlled dailies in Canada, published some good syndicated coverage.

I am a Gwynne Dyer fan. He summarized well some of the complex stream of events, but a quote from an oil executive in the movie thriller Syriana comes to mind.

“You dig a six-foot hole and you’ll find three bodies. Dig 12 and maybe you’ll find 40.”

Let’s dig a little more and concentrate on the big ones.

Following the successful examples of Iceland and Ecuador from the 2008 financial meltdown, a Truth Committee on Public Debt is currently auditing the Greek debt.

The president of the Hellenic Parliament, Ms. Zoe Konstantopoulou, made the initial decision and set the work in motion April 4, 2015.

Why successful?

Under the participation of citizens and independent international finance experts on June 17, the parliamentary debt audit released its preliminary report with key findings and advice.

Cutting out, writing off the rotten parts of debt combined with democratic economic reforms, including towards public banking, have a good track record.

Not only in Ecuador and Iceland, but also Sweden, in 1992, rebuilt the economy, and restored credit worthiness and investor trust by clearing the air.

This is the exact opposite of the proven debt growing neoliberal restructuring and privatization that is well underway, expropriating Greek islands and gutting out heritage treasures, and to intensify new demands by an EU finance colonialism.

Further, the audit investigates criminal corruption and bribery through years, to the end of selling expensive German weaponry such as superfluous submarines and Leopard tanks to Greece.

Even now, forcing more German weapons deals on Greece, as a condition, is not off the negotiating table. Karlheinz Schreiber is everywhere.

A substantial debt write off within the euro currency poses the problem but also opportunity of novelty to set the right tone in an exercise for preventing events in the future.

The Troika, which is made up of the European Central Bank, the European Commission (essentially EU government), and the IMF, would be in a more credible negotiation position now, had they approached the situation in a more balanced way.

Instead, they had dug in on making an example of destruction of Greek people.

This was not very bright because a heavy-handed approach to make Greece obedient to rules makes no sense when these rules are shifting below people’s feet.

The Troika did one better than example setting, which was mostly left out in the Canadian mainstream media. It really interfered in Greece with a special interest political agenda.

They outright blocked proposals of the latest Greek plan to actually increase and restore tax revenue, which was brought forward before the referendum launch.

Tax evasion in Greece had increased sharply since 1999, a period that saw corporate income tax rate reductions from 40 to 25 per cent.

The drama of it can be understood a little better when adding to that four centuries of Ottoman rule which left behind a strong cultural sediment for social justice.

Poor people paying the taxes and debt the elites owe is much less acceptable in Islamic countries, which also means their banks came out clean in 2008.

Tax evasion is a problem in Greece and a business in Luxembourg, but it is caused and led by elite finance interests, not the ordinary people.

Before the referendum was launched, the EU negotiators had dug themselves into a bad hole when they insisted on their own neoliberal tax ideas even at the expense of some of the creditors they claimed to represent.

The preliminary audit report provides context to such conflicts of interest on page 13.

“The website LuxLeaks provides information on nine Greek firms which benefitted from ‘fiscal agreements’ with Luxemburg (shares with Holland EU tax hide outs as well as austerity speculation interests).

“These are Babcock & Brown, BAWAG, Bluehouse, Coca Cola HBC, Damma Holdings, Eurobank, Macquarie Group, Olayan Investments Company Establishment and Weather Investments.”

Especially the governments of Germany, Luxemburg and Holland, as the hardliners which are  lost most deeply in the austerity rabbit hole, overlook a simple human touch. The only example that counts now is one of integrity.

It’s not just Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece who are more than social democratic by name.

As official federal opposition and coalition partner in the government of several states (provinces), Die Linke (the left party) is gaining ground in Germany, and actually seems able to carry a conversation beyond worn-out platitudes, in Europe as well.

If there is an emerging social democratic shift in Greece, as in other European countries, we can understand it better when we look at what motivates and informs it and what doesn’t.

Certainly a comeback of McCarthyism does not intimidate it; other Cold War confusions or even echoes of Stalin’s charisma do not influence it.

The very last of those had already rung out during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939).

Part two, to be published Monday, will offer a glimpse into why public banking rules prevent debt runaway.

The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples’ grassroots tour

The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples’ grassroots tour (COMMENT)

By Whitehorse Star on February 19, 2015

A small First Nations/aboriginal/Metis crowd gathered around Betty Anne Lavallée, National Chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples (CAP), last Saturday afternoon at the Skky Hotel in Whitehorse. 

The city is one of 12 stops during the 2015 CAP Grassroots Engagement tour.

The format was one of conversation around a large table set up. 

Chief Lavallée provided context on the mandate and history of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples that had been founded in 1971 under the name Native Council of Canada (NNC).

Out of 1.4 million, one million aboriginal people in Canada live outside of reserve or settlement lands and in CAP, their interests have a voice, which is one of unity.

She is concerned about a “continuation of genocide by pen, not by sword.”

CAP has a long history and list of achievements fighting for the improvement of aboriginal survival and rights while carefully respecting existing rights.

One example was CAP involvement in the precedence of the 1999 Corbière case, based on which First Nation members, or band members, living outside settlement lands have achieved voting rights.

In the Daniels decision of the Supreme Court, Non-Status Indians and Metis were included in the terms of Section 91 (24) of the 1867 Constitution Act.

In 2013, the federal government’s appeal to reinstate the old division was rejected by the Canadian Supreme Court.

The case was named after the late Saskatchewan Metis elder Harry Daniels, who had initiated and carried the file and who had been national chief for many years.

Before and during 1982, Daniels had been responsible for another breakthrough.

From the 1982 Constitution Act, Part ll Section 35 (2), onward: “Aboriginal peoples of Canada” include the Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples.

In the spirit of Daniels, who is well remembered for fighting, in his words, “shrinking the definition of who is an Indian,” National Chief Lavallée poses the challenge, “How to unite when we are divided by government?”

Some of those gathered last Saturday have senior responsibilities in health, education and judicial community services and programs.

In the discussion, connections and findings of understanding surfaced of how political agendas operate on a nitty-gritty level trying to abolish aboriginal existence in Canada.

Deceptive and supposedly tough-on-crime policy designs aim at racializing and dulling Canada by unfairly, unequally over-policing and consequently over-incarcerating aboriginal people, and artificially undoing public safety structures such as:
• Test case funding towards direction finding of positive judicial precedence;
• Court justice workers;
• Access to legal council with traditional knowledge;
• Aboriginal community outreach workers and meaningful programs in penitentiaries; and
• Resources for families in need. 

Non-aboriginal people should also worry about being colonized by an increasingly totalitarian state and join aboriginal people in opposing the new anti-terror Bill C-51. 

National Chief Lavallée understands it as an out-of-control device to “put elders in jail because they peacefully protect their traplines,” which is already happening in central Canada and the Maritimes.

The chief and the participants alike felt that the current federal government is particularly destructive in its actions and aspirations, but previous governments have also taken attacks to the extreme. 

One such dark moment of complicity with extremism was brought up that had set tone and direction for things to come.

Paul Martin, as prime minister, had hired Tom Flanagan, the Calgary political science professor and then Stephen Harper mentor and operative, as history consultant in the feds’ drawn-out land dispute with the Metis.

Flanagan is spearheading the concept of a Canadian Manifest Destiny. He asks openly for the abolition of aboriginal rights, land titles and the disregard of agreements and treaties.

In his 2008 book First Nations? Second Thoughts, Flanagan’s diatribes remind one of 1830s Georgia, brimming with land-hungry speculators lobbying the Cherokee Removal at fever pitch. 

He writes: “In much of Canada, their (the First Nations) present place of habitation postdates the arrival of European settlers.”

Chief Lavallée said it’s a good thing a growing number of aboriginal candidates are coming forward across the country to run in the coming federal election.

There was interest in forming a Yukon territorial organization of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples.

It looked like a discussion that has the energy to go on.