Friday, November 20, 2015

EMPIRE

according to Hardt and Negri's Empire, the rise of Empire is the end of national conflict, the "enemy" now, whoever he is, can no longer be ideological or national. The enemy now must be understood as a kind of criminal, as someone who represents a threat not to a political system or a nation but to the law. This is the enemy as a terrorist....In the "new order that envelops the entire space of... civilization", where conflict between nations has been made irrelevant, the "enemy" is simultaneously "banalized" (reduced to an object of routine police repression) and absolutized (as the Enemy, an absolute threat to the ethical order"


Friday, October 16, 2015

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESTON MANNING 

ON THE EVE OF CANADA'S 42ND ELECTION

19, OCTOBER 2015


Dear Mr. Manning;

Sir, I am writing you to appeal to you in these last days of this election, before voting day, to speak out about the undemocratic and downright Un Reform Party and actually Anti Reform Party principles and ethics on democratic governance  by the Prime Minister, your student and apprentice, Stephen Harper.

I know the old days were full of idealism like the West Wants In and that would change things for the good, like ending MP’s pensions.  Oops that’s perhaps not the best example since you and your MP’s did take them.

Ok how about Senate Reform, the triple EEE Senate, the PMO not appointing Senators but they be elected by the provinces. Sheesh sorry another Oops; how did that work out to become the PMO appoints Senators, 56  in all, the largest by any PMO which means larger than any Liberal Government ever appointed.

Recall, remember recall, if you didn’t like you MP you could get a petition together and kick em out between elections. Remember Recall the very core principle of the Reform Party, the Reform in the Reform Party.  How’s that going under Harper. Ahh come on I know, don’t blame Stevie you dumped that one yourself when you became Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

About Stornaway, that was of course foolish youthful braggadocio on your part as a green Party Leader, boasting that as leader of the Reform Party in Opposition you would never live there, so really this is not all on Stevie. The Reform Party of Preston Manning. reformed once in power as the Official Opposition you just became another parliamentary party.

 Heck you guys on the right split again, like an amoeba into three conservative parties and so the whole focus of Stephen Harpers campaign was to win power by bringing you all back together under the strong leadership of one man him.

Oh dear perhaps this is a bit farfetched to ask of you, to opine on how Stephen Harper is BAD FOR DEMOCRACY but you have since retirement from parliamentary politics set up a foundation  Manning Centre for Building Democracy  for the promotion of Edmund Burke’s and John Locke’s classical liberal interpretation of governance and democracy, the two not necessarily being synonymous.

I know like many in the old Reform Wing of the party, you harbor secret dreams of being a libertarian like those of your ideological counterparts south of the border. Even here you must admit that your libertarian shadow self must surely cringe at Harper’s draconian police state law Bill C51.

Of course you have had some victories with Steve in power  you and your Reform Party base did manage to undemocratically reform the Canadian Wheat Board out of existence as promised by you way way back when. However I am sure like many Albertans and Canadians who believe in a fair deal not a fixed one no effort was put into reforming the wheat board to become a democratically run producer cooperative.

 So congratulations your privatization ideology succeeded in destroying the farmers cooperative and having it sold , no pardon me, given away for free to a Saudi Arabian corporation owned by the Sovereign Wealth Fund of the Saudi Arabian Government.  This then is the free market principle in practice not in theory.  Another failure that began under you.

Perhaps you really can’t criticize Stephen Harper, because you like him have a fuehrer complex, the need to be the alpha male, the big man on campus, the boss.  Unfortunately for you you truly do love the ideal of reform, as with most conservative thinkers, it is an ideal, when it comes to political practice democracy is abandoned for power, and as we know from at least one other conservative thinker absolute power corrupts absolutely.

In this I think we can both agree that Stephen Harper has abandoned all principles except that of staying in power, and changing the country to fit his ideology, not yours, mine or anyone elses and certainly not the Conservative Party. And he learned that ideology at the feet of Barry Cooper, Tom Flanagan, and the right wing political think tank at the University of Calgary. That once hot bed of neo conservative braggadocio about how it was all new, an alternative to the failure of the government welfare state and the socialist economics of Keynes.

Add in a dash of prairie populist Reformism the spirit of recall, reform of the senate, and the right to vote on legislation by petition; Referendum, the three R’s of your Reform Party . All old Alberta ideas from even before they were adopted by you, the son of the Socred Premier of Alberta. The reform agenda was and is prairie populism spread by socialists and social creditors.
In fact in Alberta it was socialist labour and the United Farmers of Alberta that attempted to implement these practices, years before Social Credit.

You know that and so do I because I am a historian of the labour movement in this province.

Doesn’t Stephen remind you of someone?

Dare I say your father; Ernest Manning  and before him Bible Bill Aberhart the creators of the Social Credit movement and Party here in Alberta. Bible Bill despite his name was more  Fuhrer than Premier, he is actually Steve’s ideal, for after only being in power for a short time Aberhart brought in a draconian censorship law prohibiting criticism of his regime, which to its credit to this day the Edmonton Journal challenged to the Supreme Court and won in having it overturned.

Sounds familiar, ignore the charter and constitution and the principles of law, while declaring yourself a law and order government. These of course are the classical principles and practices of what we now call fascism. Harper declares himself a democrat a libertarian free marketer, but in reality as Tom Flanagan now admits to the ‘horror of'’ having created a Prime Minister who considers himself  The Great Leader, and it does not help that 9/11 Truthers believe he shares a birthday with the Fuhrer.

 One does not need to invoke Hitler, to remember that fascism arose following failed revolutions in the Twentieth Century, Aberhart’s Social Credit suffered as much from being a socialized credit system and a National Socialist ideology.

This ideology is still with us within the right wing around the world, at its base it has never changed, it is anti-parliamentary, anti-democratic, but you can vote, as you are told, because all this just gets in the way of the great leaders will.

Unfortunately now that I think of it perhaps it is too much to ask you the founder of the  Manning Centre » Preston Manning, President and CEO, to speak out for defence of our democratic freedoms, of speech, assembly, protest, etc. Principles now challenged by Harpers bill C51.
Or his bill C24 which strip Canadians of their citizenship in violation of UN principles and the principles of the Magna Carta

Or the bills to demand Unions provide financial information to the public, while political parties and corporations don’t have too. We have an identical bill used against First Nations when they receive government funds

We have the total destruction of Science and Research done by the Federal Government. Including libraries and research document holdings being destroyed, the only thing missing is the mass public bonfires. Perfect for Halloween or Guy Fawkes day.

Of course among conservatives there are those proponents of individual freedom and personal choice  that call themselves democratic or libertarian, as in civil libertarian, civil liberties do not conflict with conservative principles based on English jurisprudence.

On the other hand there is the right wing school of thought that embraces Pharaonism, Caesarism, the  Fuhrer Principle, the Strong Man theory of history. In this case the writings and teachings of two University of Chicago professors, Leo Strauss, and Carl Schmitt both idealized the leader of the nation ruling over and uninhibited by the peoples tribunes their parliament, judiciary, senate, all bodies of the state. The strong man simply walks over, tramples, or ignores, all such laws as he does not need or approve of. This of course was one of the schools of thought in the think tank that bred Harper at the University of Calgary.

It is time that those conservatives like yourself decide which side of history you are on those of civil libertarian democrat or those of the strong man Stephen Harper school.

Since you have not spoken out opposing his actions at the time, perhaps now in the final days of this historic election you can once again dig deep into your democratic morals and ethics to really see  Steve in that light how can you remain unmoved to speak out against him.

Mr. Manning you have a chance to make a real difference this election, one that says principles are more important than the party or the man running it. But rather the will of the people, and the people themselves rule, and are not ruled by the party or the leader.

This election we have seen quite clearly it is about one man, not his party, or the Conservative MP’s or Senators, it is about Stephen Harper, as much as he says its not about him. Of course it is.

You once believed that our MP’s were responsible to the voters, and to their constituents, not that they were party men and women who simply transmit the will of the PMO down to the peons.

Sir; as a conscientious compassionate conservative democrat and civil libertarian how can you sit by and remain silent.

Yours for Democracy,

Eugene Plawiuk





Notes and References

Manning Centre for Building Democracy - Facebook


Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat Or Corrective for Democracy? Populism and Democracy in Canada's Reform Party  


Preston Manning Wikipedia Bio



Thursday, October 01, 2015




I AM FROM ALBERTA WE KNOW COAL 
A hundred years ago my grandfather a Ukrainian immigrant worked in the coal mines in Wayne Alberta.
Forty years ago I went to University in Lethbridge, Alberta, the home of coal mining in southern Alberta.
Alberta exports more coal than oil by rail.
Alberta' now strip mines coal next to power plants, Genesee Plant lake Wabamum owned by EPCOR
For sixty years even after the discovery of oil in Leduc Alberta remains a coal province.
Most of our GHG comes from the emissions from coal fired power plants.
Rachel Notely and the NDP government wll now transfer coal fired power plants to natural gas, another fuel we have plenty of.
Former Premier Lougheed was never an oil man he worked for Mannix Corporation which owns Luscar Coal Mining. They wanted to open up an
open pit mine just outside Jasper National Park.
But that project became fiscally and socially unfeasible..
Alberta was home to the United Mineworkers, the Western Miners Union, IWW and OBU, the first western coal mining strike was in Medicine Hat, later the miners organized in Southern Alberta, building a base along with the Communist Party in the Crowsnest Pass Blairmore area of the Rockies in Southern Alberta.
Edmonton at the turn of last century was a mining city, with coal mines criss crossing underneath the riverbank. Ukrainian mining families dug into the riverbank 1912-15 to live in caves.
So while we are known now for oil, oil sands, we were once like Pennsylvania in the USA a coal mining region. with a large Ukrainian population and with oil which is why we both survived unlike West Virginia .
Today both Alberta and Pennsylvania also have shale oil. we have long histories of fracking.
The myth of clean coal comes from the experimental and not yet proven Carbon Capture and Sequestration CCS. This has nothing to do with being green or reducing the use of one form of fossil fuel, coal. Instead CCS takes coal gas (methane) by making it into a liquid by putting it under pressure and injecting it into existing played out oil fields, including shale oil, to extract residual oil. In other words CCS is just another form of fracking  
Coal was and is our dirtiest energy

Posted on Facebook

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

TOM MULCAIR, THE NDP, THE FTQ, AND THE OVERLOOKED STORY OF THE WEEK

Eugene Plawiuk
August 14, 2015

The second week of the election saw lots of news around the various parties and leaders. The  most important story of the week involved the NDP but it was quickly lost in the other news stories that swirl around Tom Mulcair and the NDP. The story and the political impact of most news stories from this week will disappear in the distance as we get closer to October 19 voting day.  But this news will have an impact far beyond its one day news story in the press.

The press is English you see, and it represents English Canada, the events and politics of Quebec get little coverage in the Postmedia Monopoly. And when they do get covered it is with little depth, as there are few reporters versed in the politics of Quebec that write in English or for the English Press in Canada.

The news event that was of greater importance than all the others was that the second largest labour federation in Canada had  endorsed the NDP and Tom Mulcair for PM.  The FTQ or Quebec Labour Federation is larger than the Ontario Federation of Labour, as a provincial body and for affiliations it rivals the CLC, the Canadian Labour Congress. In fact it is a National Labour Federation that is as important as the CLC. Yet you hear little about it in the Canadian press.

This week the federation did the unexpected and surprised the nations of Quebec and Canada by endorsing a Federalist Party for the first time in forty years and that Federal party was the Social Democratic  NDP and its Quebec born leader Tom Mulcair. This is no small thing, because for those last forty years the FTQ has been the backbone of Quebec Inc. as much as it has been the base in both the PQ and the BQ. It was and is the left wing of the established Quebec Nationalist movement, until this week that is.

This week the FTQ announced it had abandoned the Bloc Quebecois (BQ) formed by Brian Mulroney Conservatives from Quebec, as well as liberal and social democratic Quebecois. It came about with the fall of the Mulroney Government, resulting in a Liberal government and the official opposition being a Quebec  Nationalist party the BQ. The Bloc as it was called in the English language press was an unholy alliance that scared the bejesus out of English Canada.


Mulcair 'proud' to see FTQ unions support NDP instead of Bloc
GIUSEPPE VALIANTE, THE CANADIAN PRESS
More from Giuseppe Valiante, The Canadian Press
Published on: August 11, 2015 | MASCOUCHE — A major and sovereignist-leaning labour federation in Quebec has dropped its long-standing endorsement of the BlocQuebecois and some of its member unions are supporting the NDP, making party leader Tom Mulcair “extremely proud.”
Mulcair said New Democrats will work hard to maintain support from Quebec’s unions — who have traditionally supported sovereignist parties at the federal and provincial levels — in order to “expand our traditional base and rally progressives across Quebec and Canada.”Quebec’s FTQ federation is heavily involved in politics; it covers 37 labour unions and counts 600,000 members.Its secretary-general, Serge Cadieux, said Tuesday the FTQ is not officially endorsing any political party, but that two of its unions have so far come out in support of the NDP.
The federation has officially endorsed the Bloc in almost every federal election since the early ’90s and it favours the sovereignist Parti Québécois provincially.
This time, however, Cadieux said the Bloc is not best-placed to beat the Conservatives, whom he called “catastrophic” for working people.
Cadieux said the FTQ has targeted 10 ridings in Quebec where support for the Conservatives is relatively strong and where it will “focus its energies.”

Formed in the 1990’s it was victorious in the federal election of 1996 after the defeat of the provincial Parti Quebecois sponsored referendum on Soviergnty Association with Canada. It’s leader was the charismatic former Mulroney Conservative Minister Lucien Bouchard. With the narrowest of votes the referendum (like those later in Catalonia, and Scotland) for separation was defeated. In that defeat the then Premier of Quebec exposed the nationalist agenda as one of racism and exclusionism, with the dark tinge of Duplesis’s racism and anti-Semitism. He denounced the loss as being the result of foreigners and immigrants and those of Upper Westmount, the historic Jewish enclave in Montreal.


With the failure of the referendum there was an immediate leadership race for the PQ and then leader of the BQ in a controversial opportunistic decision went from leader of the BQ to the Leader of the PQ and provincial premier in the following election.
In 1997 the BQ elected a new leader, a left wing leader, Gilles Duceppe, who was a former union leader and Marxist-Leninist. He remained leader till 2011 when he lost his seat in the Orange Wave that swept Quebec during that federal election.

Duceppe is back now as leader of the BQ, a decimated party that is a skeletal ghost of itself.
From its once lofty position, ironically, as Her Majesty’s Official Opposition, the BQ has had a massive decline in power and seats,  last election left the party with four sitting MP’s, two of which abandoned the party half way through their terms to sit as independents. The BQ ended its days with as many seats as the fledgling elected Green Party in the House of Commons.

Duceppe was brought out of mothballs this spring to take over the leadership once again of the BQ for the upcoming October 19 election.  The hope was that his charm and charisma could cobble together some kind of opposition to the NDP this election. And key to that ability was not just Duceppe but the support of social movements, cooperatives, and the labour movement. All of whom had abandoned the BQ after the NDP overwhelmingly swept through Quebec last election.

To have lost the FTQ support means that Duceppe and the BQ, which once had the most powerful political organization in the province, have to run cap in hand with little or no base of support.

Even the BQ’s provincial counterpart the PQ can do little for the party or Duceppe, despite a recent photo op of him and the leader of the PQ riding bicycles together. For unlike Mssr. Duceppe a former Marxist Leninist and trade unionist, Karl Pierre Palideau the PQ leader is  a captain of industry, a union busting boss of the Quebecor empire, virtually synonymous with Quebec Inc.

Peladeau suddenly became a nationalist in the last provincial election which saw the defeat of the PQ, in part thanks to Mssr. Peladeau’s nationalist exhortations,  resulting in a majority Liberal government in Quebec and Mssr. Peladeau now leader of the Party Quebecor.  Mssr Peladeau as a politician is a stick in the mud, a one trick pony. Duceppe can expect little of the old communal support from the PQ if only because the party is a shadow of its former self.

When Duceppe was rolled out as the savior of the BQ for this election English Canadian pundits ruminated about the possibility that this would dent the NDP majority in the province. Yes two seats and a defeated Duceppe were going to be a real threat to the NDP.

And as it has turned out no such thing occurred, indeed the opposite did the FTQ and its financial cooperative the Fond Solidare, or the Solidarity Fund, the largest single source of workers investment capital. the only successful labour fund in either Canada’s. The FTQ manages this investment fund for its members, and public investors, making it the thirds largest investor in Quebec Inc after the Casse Populair;  the Quebec Pension Fund, and the Desjardin Funds. As far as private capital goes the Power corporation sontinues its historic domination of that sector while Peladeau’s Quebecor follows not far behind, Old Capital meet New Capital.

The Solidarity Fund invests its member’s money into Quebec infrastructure for instance Rona, and Hydro Quebec, if there is a chocolate factory that needs funding Fonds Solidaire is there. It has been criticized by those in the business press, as both being an investment monopoly with undue influence in Quebec Inc. and a dangerous investment vehicle, which means it is successful and a model to follow, which had not been done in English Canada where the closest labour would come is the BC Construction Unions Labour Fund, which CLC Ken Georgetti helped set up.

Fonds de solidarité FTQ Applauds NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair's Commitment to Reinstate the Labour Fund Tax Credit   
http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/fonds-de-solidarite-ftq-applauds-ndp-leader-thomas-mulcairs-commitment-to-reinstate-the-labour-fund-tax-credit-517927341.html Record Year for Fonds de solidarité FTQ and its Shareholders: Profits of $992 Million 
http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/record-year-for-fonds-de-solidarite-ftq-and-its-shareholders-profits-of-992-million-518015071.html

So you have a base in a very activist and political labour federation and its investment fund, endorsing the NDP and Tom Mulcair, and this is no big thing in English Canada.  Lets understand what this means, the federation has officially abandoned the BQ. That means it is dead, let me repeat that dead. Duceppe was defeated by the NDP in a safe riding, and now he has been resurrected to lead a zombie party, in order to take votes away from the NDP, giving them to either Trudeau  Liberals, or Harper Cons. 

The hope was that this would be enough to halt the Orange wave spreading across Canada.
But this fifth column has collapsed into dust now that the FTQ has thrown its complete support behind the NDP, despite its protestations that it is only promoting ABC. This should be headline news, almost as important as the NDP winning government from Harper.  This is the final stake in the heart of this undead creature the BQ, what had begun under Jack Layton, has finally met its finale under Tom Mulcair.

Here is the headline if the media and pundits were honest, and even conceived its importance the NDP  a nominally federalist party wiped out the BQ. This is what has pissed off Trudeau Jr. and scared the bejesus out of Harper. Both also lost seats to the NDP wave last election and could lose again.

Four years after facing a scoffing political punditry in English Canada, the NDP wave in Quebec has not weakened but solidified and gotten stronger.  It also has now fully transitioned from Jack Layton to Tom Mulcair, different men, different political styles, both popular beyond what pundits expected. Tom Mulcair in both Canada’s is enormously popular for a leader that few knew little about even last December.  The NDP has a charismatic and talented leader who many can see as Prime Minister, after all his opponent the current PM Stephen Harper came from exactly the same position; an untried Leader of the Opposition.\

With the FTQ and the Solidarity Fund backing him in Quebec, this shifts the power dynamic in Federal politics forever. The BQ is gone, a Federalist party is surging in Quebec, and maintaining that hold, frustrating Trudeau Jr. who lashed out at Mulcair in the first debate over the NDP success with its Sherbrooke Accord, giving Quebecois the right to a simple majority 50 plus 1 if they were too hold another referendum, that is enough to satisfy the Nationalists in the FTQ and across the province.

Whether they use that option in the future is questionable, as we have seen in Scotland, even there the Nationalist sentiment did not deliver a simple majority in their recent referendum vote. Why would it be different in Quebec’s case. The NDP and Tom Mulcair are counting on that and the Sherbrooke accord to satisfy the nationalists who no longer trust the Bloc to speak for their values, which remain social democratic in nature, just like the NDP.


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Sunday, April 05, 2015

 AND NOW A WORLD LEADING INVESTMENT FUND FOR ‪#‎P3‬'S
THE ‪#‎CPPIB‬
 The guide is an output of the Focusing Capital on the Long Term initiative, which has input from 20 investment professionals from managers and asset owners including CPPIB, OTPP, PGGM, New Zealand Super and Washington State Investment Board, all of which contributed to the guide with case studies of long-term “ideas in action”.
For any asset owner wishing to put in place an effective set of implementation strategies and tools to help realise their aspiration to be long term, this is a must read.
The guide focuses on areas where asset owners and managers have the ability to act immediately, and outlines examples of that in practice through case studies of institutional investors.
The areas of focus in the guide are investment beliefs, risk appetite, benchmarking process, evaluations and incentives, and investment mandates.

The Long-Term Portfolio Guide is an output of the Focusing Capital on the Long Term (FCLT) initiative. Its development was led by Anuradha Gurung with co-editor Colin Carlton and a working group, co-led by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. The working group was comprised of more than 20 experienced investment professionals from BlackRock, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Capital Group, GIC, New Zealand Superannuation Fund, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, PGGM, and Washington State Investment Board.

To read the paper click below or go to www.fclt.org