statism watch

Canada… so ‘notorious’. We’re, like, superbad. That should put a spur in Harper’s saddle to jam the international ACTA treaty (or a home-cloned version of the US’s Digital Millenium Act) through the parliament and into law. I don’t know why Obama would be so hard on him though – it’s not as though the Conservatives haven’t been trying. Isn’t it a bit disturbing to think guards are going to be pawing over or imaging the contents of your USB memory sticks and iPods at the border to make sure you’re being good if they succeed? At the command of a consortium of media companies? Seems like Noam Chomsky’s analysis of the role of centralized media was right after all.They’ve put us on their blacklist because Canada isn’t controlling the flow of information as effectively as, say, Sweden.

Flashback: Obama Administration Claims Copyright Treaty Involves State Secrets | Latest Round of Closed-Door ACTA Copyright Negotiations Wrap Up | Digital rights groups sue for access to secret ACTA treaty | Transparency needed on ACTA

Paul Koring, Globe and Mail
April 30, 2009

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration added Canada Thursday to a notorious blacklist of countries where Internet piracy flourishes, reflecting a new, tougher line in Washington over the Harper government’s chronic failure to deliver on promises of new copyright laws.

“Canada has never been put on the priority watch list before,” said Stanford McCoy, assistant U.S. trade representative for intellectual property and innovation as he released Washington’s annual report or offenders.

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Running a country? Experiencing trouble in your fiat derivatives markets? Such a shame, but we’re here to help with a wide array of new financial services. Why not simply buy up the troubled assets and re-securitize them, but on a larger scale! At least you’ll be keeping your primary constituency – that’s us – happy, and we’ll gladly provide you with the expertise of our top insiders to get the ball rolling again. With the taxpayers as security against any risk, naturally.

Flashback: Governments to back ABCP deal with $4.45B | Canada may backstop ABCP rescue: Flaherty | Regulator says brokers failed on ABCP, sets new guidelines | Canadian Supreme Court refuses to hear appeal in ABCP case | Court Grants Big Banks Immunity from Lawsuits over Derivatives Losses

Tara Perkins, Kevin Carmichael, The Globe and Mail
April 30, 2009

TORONTO and OTTAWA – The Harper government’s plan to boost auto sales by purchasing assets linked to vehicle loans is being led by a long-time Bay Street banker who was at the heart of the initial credit crisis that shocked Canadian markets two years ago.

The federally owned Business Development Bank of Canada has hired David Allan, a 20-year veteran of asset-backed securities markets, to advise it on the handling of a $12-billion credit facility designed primarily to stimulate auto loans and leases.

Created in January, the Canadian Secured Lending Facility is coming under increasing criticism from the auto industry for taking too long to develop the transactions needed to pump capital into the stagnant auto finance business. But the BDC — a Crown corporation created to help small and medium-sized businesses — has no experience in that end of the financial world.

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Flashback: Swine Flu: In Mexico, an outbreak of police-state opportunism | Health officials confirm 6 cases of swine flu in Canada, ‘makings’ of pandemic | Illinois-based Baxter working on vaccine to stop swine flu outbreak in Mexico | ‘We have to assume’ swine flu is in Ontario, health official warns | Mexico cancels public events because of deadly flu outbreak | Canadians returning from Mexico urged to be on alert for flu-like symptoms | Army: 3 vials of virus samples missing from Maryland facility | ‘Accidental’ Contamination Of Vaccine With Live Avian Flu Virus Virtually Impossible | Officials investigate how bird flu contaminated vaccines in Europe | Researchers unlock secrets of 1918 flu pandemic

CBC News
April 30, 2009

Agency slow to react to the outbreak, says Mexico’s top epidemiologist

The World Health Organization said Thursday it has begun distributing a stockpile of antiviral drugs to a number of countries, as Mexico’s top health official said the number of new cases of swine flu in the country is stabilizing.

Dr. Keiji Fukuda, WHO’s acting assistant director-general for health security and environment, told reporters the drugs would be distributed to countries “in most need,” especially developing countries that are least prepared to contend with a potential pandemic.

Fukuda added there was no evidence as of Thursday to suggest the UN health agency should raise its pandemic alert to the highest level.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s top epidemiologist said the WHO was slow to react to the outbreak, and he wants an investigation.

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Flashback: Wall Street’s Big Takeover | Goldman-Sachs Alumni Hold Reins of Financial System

Glen Greenwald, Salon.com
April 30, 2009

Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely spoken: “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.” The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis “own” the U.S. Congress — according to one of that institution’s most powerful members — demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is.

The ownership of the federal government by banks and other large corporations is effectuated in literally countless ways, none more effective than the endless and increasingly sleazy overlap between government and corporate officials. Here is just one random item this week announcing a couple of standard personnel moves:

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For further stories and commentary from this journal on the dangers of debt monetization, click here or explore the links at the bottom of this story. (For commentary on the perils of Keynesian economics, visit mises.org). The largest debt holders in the world – and not just the American banks and the IMF, but lesser known, secretive international institutions like the bank of banks, the BIS – are looting the middle class right out in the open, and blowing out the economy in order to institute a new global system. This is a coup. There should be a word for it – coups under monarchical systems are kicked off by regicide, so perhaps ‘econocide’ fits the bill.

Flashback: Bank of Canada poised to print money to buy bonds | A Bigger, Bolder Role Is Imagined For the IMF | Barclays, Lloyd’s, RBS join Goldman-Sachs in the black | IMF poised to print billions of dollars in ‘global quantitative easing’ | UK Central Bank begins using ‘new’ money | IMF may need to “print money”, act as “world’s central bank” as crisis spreads | Bilderberg Seeks Bank Centralization Agenda

Boyd Erman, Brian Milner, Globe and Mail
April 29, 2009 at 1:11 AM EDT

Can U.S. interest rates effectively fall below zero?

Economists and traders expect the Federal Reserve to signal just that on Wednesday when it makes its first policy announcement since lowering its benchmark target to between zero and 0.25 per cent, a move that left it no room to cut interest rates the conventional way.

Now, there are signs the central bank is about to become much more aggressive in its unorthodox efforts to drive rates effectively below zero.

The Fed has already been intervening in the debt market — or at least promising to do so — as part of its effort to bring down long-term rates. But economists expect even more of the kinds of measures known as quantitative easing as the Fed works to get the lending wheels turning again in the U.S. economy.

The central bank’s target rate cannot actually fall below zero. So its measures are aimed at bringing long-term rates to where they would be if short-term rates could go negative, given the traditional spread between the two.

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Flashback: 9/11 Commission Counsel: Government Agreed to Lie About 9/11 | FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report | 9/11 widows call for new investigation after revelations of White House, commission ties | Director of 9/11 commission “secretly spoke with Rove, White House”

Steve Watson, Infowars.net
April 29, 2009

More evidence of whitewash emerges

Somewhat lost within the flu pandemic media hype this week is an important new revelation concerning the cover up of the events of 9/11.

A recently uncovered 9/11 Commission memo dating from October 2003, half way through the panel’s investigation, addresses concerns that government “minders” were intimidating witnesses and shaping their testimonies.

The document was drafted by Kevin Scheid, a senior staffer who led the commission’s Team 2, which was responsible for reviewing the overarching structure of the US intelligence community.

Names also appearing on the memo are those of staffers Lorry Fenner, an air force intelligence officer, and lawyer Gordon Lederman.

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The Canadian Press
April 29, 2009

Nearly 100,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared since October, Statistics Canada reports

OTTAWA — Non-farm payrolls lost 79,600 jobs in February, with manufacturing taking the worst hit, Statistics Canada reported Wednesday.

The agency said those losses continue a slump that began last October and which has cost 296,000 jobs.

The agency’s survey of non-farm, payroll employment found the biggest February drop was in manufacturing, where 19,300 jobs were lost. Since October, 99,700 manufacturing jobs have disappeared, a loss of 6.1 per cent. That figure is three times the rate of decline of total payroll employment.

Nearly a quarter of the manufacturing job losses came in the auto industry.

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Jeannine Aversa, The Associated Press
April 29, 2009

WASHINGTON – The U.S. economy shrank at a worse-than-expected 6.1 per cent pace at the start of this year as sharp cutbacks by businesses and the biggest drop in U.S. exports in 40 years overwhelmed a rebound in consumer spending.

The U.S. Commerce Department’s report, released Wednesday, dashed hopes that the recession’s grip on the country loosened in the first quarter. Economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters expected a five per cent annualized decline.

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Considering the calls for global taxes and micromanagement of our lives based on the Earth’s carbon cycle – meaning that nothing will be exempt from the purview of the taxman – the only thing to say is may the best science win.

Flashback: Revealed: Antarctic ice growing, not shrinking | Scientists warn global warming accelerating | Top Japanese Scientists: Warming Is Not Caused By Human Activity | IPCC caught with false figures, doubt cast on accuracy of global temperature record

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
April 29, 2009

IT’S snowing in April. Ice is spreading in Antarctica. The Great Barrier Reef is as healthy as ever.

And that’s just the news of the past week. Truly, it never rains but it pours – and all over our global warming alarmists.

Time’s up for this absurd scaremongering. The fears are being contradicted by the facts, and more so by the week.

Doubt it? Then here’s a test.

Name just three clear signs the planet is warming as the alarmists claim it should. Just three. Chances are your “proofs” are in fact on my list of 10 Top Myths about global warming.

And if your “proofs” indeed turn out to be false, don’t get angry with me.

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Oh, well, ok then. Let’s just forget the whole thing ever happened.

Flashback: Chicago study calls Taser’s safety claims into question

Canadian Press
April 28, 2009

A cardiology expert paid by the company that makes Tasers told a public inquiry Tuesday he doesn’t think Robert Dziekanski’s death was at all related to the controversial stun guns.

Dziekanski died on the floor of Vancouver’s airport in the early morning of Oct. 14, 2007, minutes after four RCMP officers confronted him and stunned him several times with a Taser.

Dr. Charles Swerdlow, a cardiac electrophysiologist who receives compensation for sitting on Taser International’s medical advisory board, appeared at the inquiry by video conference from California.

Swerdlow said if the Taser negatively affected Dziekanski’s heart, it would happen almost immediately after he was stunned.

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