“The document also noted that government scientists voiced their displeasure to communications officials about the policy during meetings in June 2008. A few months later, a couple of requests for interviews with scientists in the midst of the 2008 federal election campaign were never answered, including one request that was ‘denied’ after it was forwarded to the office of former environment minister John Baird.”
“You just can’t become involved part-time in these things,” Chomsky says. “It’s either serious and you’re seriously involved, or you go to a demonstration and go home and forget about it and go back to work, and nothing happens. Things only happen by really dedicated, diligent work.”
“A report released [last Wednesday] by the Canadian Federation of Students–Ontario shows that rising tuition fees and student debt disproportionately affect visible minority students. The report concludes that this trend demonstrates the structural discrimination that is built into Ontario’s high fees, high debt system of post-secondary education.”
Straight from the horses mouth:
“Addressing Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, Benjamin Netanyahu said … “No [Israeli] government in the past 40 years has limited construction in neighbourhoods of [occupied] Jerusalem”"
“British PM promises to abolish appointed legislature, replace it with U.S.-style elected Senate, if re-elected”.
What does this mean for Canadians and our upper house. The BNA Act of 1867 says that Canada shall have a “Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom”. Most Canadians support and elected Senate. Will reform be far behind?
It is also strange that Brown is not proposing an upper house constituted on the federal principle – that each county would have the same number of seats, or that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would have a (more) equal number of seats. These are questions that the British people should be allowed to discuss and decide on.
By Murray Dobbin | On Thursday, a number of NDP MPs denied the unanimous consent of the House of Commons required to hear a motion from a Conservative back-bencher which would have condemned Israeli Apartheid Week.
“It is not easy to be an honest reporter in wartime, where sycophancy and blind patriotism are what is demanded. Sadly, the US media are taking the easy way out, accepting the rules of being embedded, which require them to submit articles for censorship, to avoid being critical and to play the game, in return for getting easy human interest stories to send back to the readers and viewers back home.” | Dave Lindorff
“We’re going to guarantee that these plants are operating in a way to ensure the supply of sugar for the Venezuelan people.” Canán said “We have the power to initiate expropriation processes of sugar mills or any type of plant where there are irregularities.”
This report from from TD bank is too fantastic and has to be shared. Below are some excerpts:
“Jobs are sorely lagging behind this rebound. The unemployment rate is understood to be a lagging indicator, but employment itself has tended to be more coincident. By historical standards, employment is nearly half a year behind ‘schedule’.”
“[Recovery] must eventually translate into a generalized household willingness and ability to use their plastic at the counter, and not indefinitely forestall paying it back.”
“Uncertainty about future income forced households to delay large purchases, while a tightening of standards (e.g. lower credit limits for credit cards) has translated to lower supply of revolving credit. The demand side has naturally lagged and seems well aligned with still weak employment prospects.”
To simplify – everyone is broke and everyone knows the party is over. No-one is interested in racking up credit card debt or “tapping their home equity” to buy cheap crap from china anymore.
“Here is where they shot my brother Ibrahim, God bless his soul. And here is the F16 plane that threw rockets into the house and trees, and here is the tank that started to shoot,”
–Socialist activists elected at the University of London Union.
Diana Johnstone is the author of ‘Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions’. She spoke to NLP on the wars in the former Yugoslavia, western involvement and the trial of Slobodan Milosevic.
“In 1983, there were 50 major corporations dominating the world’s media. By 2002, this had been reduced to nine. Rupert Murdoch says that eventually there will be three, including his own. If we accept this, media and information control will be the same, and we shall all be citizens of a murdochracy.”
–Page is under fire from the spin-doctors he tore a strip off a few days ago.
“If anyone was voting yes to Vale Inco’s offer to settle the 10-month strike by United Steelworkers, they were not admitting it out loud in the halls, the basement and the parking lot of Caruso Club on Thursday morning and early afternoon. “
“On the eve of the latest strike the European Trade Union Confederation expressed its “whole solidarity” with Greece… The ETUC roundly condemned unelected EU institutions for “giving an entirely wrong message – speculators are not to be touched while workers and governments are pressed to cut wages, social benefits and public services.”"
See also CBC’s coverage (with photos).
“Progressive US legislators have branded Washington’s military presence in Afghanistan an unconstitutional “foreign occupation” and warned that “history shows all empires end because they expand too far.”… The outcome of the vote, 356-65 against the resolution, was never in doubt – but the three-and-a-half-hour debate gave those who oppose President Barack Obama’s war policies a platform to vent their concerns.”
“Following a speech in German Bundestag by MP Christine Buchholz against sending more troops to Afghanistan the MPs of DIE LINKE held banners with the names of those Afghans killed in the Kundus bombing wich was orderd by the German army in September 2009. The president of parliament threw them all out of the room, because they were acting against the rule of parliament.”
“But this new promise “to move forward without preconditions” should be viewed in the wider context of continuous economic and military pressures on Iran and on the entire region of the Middle East. While the United States has convinced the international community to apply sanctions on Iran because of its nuclear program, the tool that the United States itself uses to apply pressure on Iran is sanctions on that country’s petroleum sector. Iran seems to be a case in point where U.S. concern for nuclear weapons proliferation in the Middle East is selective at best, while the preconditions of sanctions are applied yet again on another major oil exporter of the region.”
“As Greenspan details in his book, the reason for his nightmare is that the world was depleting its stock of hundreds of millions of unemployed people, including those of the former Soviet Union and also in rural China. In other words, “too many” of them had become employed, and this was allowing for wages of factory workers in China to rise…. Is there something wrong with this picture, that one of the world’s most powerful economic decision makers (at the time) dreads the decline of mass unemployment and rising wages among people making 80 cents an hour?”
“There’s no democracy under occupation.”
Malalai Joya in an interview with L’Humanité.
