statism watch

CBC News
Saturday, June 7, 2008

Canada has reached a free-trade agreement with Colombia that Ottawa says will improve market access for both nations’ agricultural products, as well as industrial goods and services.

The deal “will expand Canada-Colombia trade and investment, and will help solidify ongoing efforts by the Government of Colombia to create a more prosperous, equitable and secure democracy,” David Emerson, Canada’s foreign affairs and international trade minister, said in a news release on Saturday.

The minister had previously acknowledged that negotiations with Colombia had met with an outcry from human rights groups concerned about the country’s history of narcotics trafficking and political death squads.

But Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn said in the release Canada’s increased involvement in Colombia will ensure that progress is made in the area of workers’ rights.

“This agreement, like the one that was signed by our government in Peru last week, contains some of the most comprehensive labour provisions to be found in any agreement anywhere in the world,” he said. “As the Colombian government moves forward to strengthen labour rights after a difficult past, Canada will be there to help.”

Full Story | See Also: South American union is created | Continental Business Lobby Releases List of Priorities for Government to Address at SPP Talks

Peter Barber, Financial Times
Saturday, June 7, 2008

When Cynthia McKinney speaks the words of Martin Luther King Jr, they resound through the church with some of King’s cadence. “A time comes,” declares the former US congresswoman from Georgia, “when silence is betrayal.” The congregation answers with whoops and calls of “That’s right!” King was talking about America’s war in Vietnam. More than 40 years later, before the packed pews of the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, McKinney is speaking of the American government’s war on its own people. The shock and awe phase of this conflict, we had been told earlier, began on September 11 2001, when the Bush administration launched attacks on New York and Washington, or at least waved them through.

According to a show of hands that February afternoon, several hundred people in the immaculate church believe this to be true. Some came in T-shirts bearing the words “9/11 was an inside job”. One wore a badge demanding that you “Examine your assumptions”. Quite a few bought the DVDs on sale in the foyer, most of which bore photographs of the Twin Towers spewing smoke. They had all come to hear the message of Architects, Engineers & Scientists for 9/11 Truth, one of the dozens of groups across the US which campaign to persuade us that everything we think we know about 9/11 is wrong.

Last winter, “Investigate 9/11” banners seemed to be popping up all over the place. Bill Clinton was heckled by “truthers” in Denver while campaigning for his wife. Truthers picketed the Academy Awards in LA – despite this year’s winner of the best actress Oscar, Marion Cotillard, reportedly being one of them. But then, she’s French. Literature lovers in that country pushed Thierry Meyssan’s L’Effroyable imposture (The Appalling Fraud) – which asserts that 9/11 was a government plot to justify invading Iraq and Afghanistan and increase military spending – to the top of the bestseller list in 2002.

Country music star Willie Nelson is assuredly not French, but a week or so before the Oscars he described as naive the notion that the “implosion” of the Twin Towers was caused by crashing jets. Meanwhile the European Parliament screened the Italian documentary Zero, in which Gore Vidal, Italian playwright Dario Fo, and Italian MEP Giulietto Chiesa blame the US government, not al-Qaeda, for 9/11. The following month, Japanese MP Yukihisa Fujita raised his own doubts about the official story at a seminar in Sydney. A busy season for the “9/11 Truth” movement.

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