statism watch

A ‘leftist’ publication, criticizing the Democratic president? We are aghast. Aghast. Perhaps the false left-right paradigm is breaking down after all.

Flashback: Cybersecurity law would give feds unprecedented net control | Munk Centre researchers discover botnet, call for international cyberspace ‘legal regime’ | NSA Dominance of Cybersecurity Would Lead to ‘Grave Peril’, Ex-Cyber Chief Tells Congress | Do We Need a New Internet? | Defense Contractors See $$$ in Cyber Security | John Manley, committed globalist, to chair Munk Centre’s School of International Studies | RCMP to helm a Canadian “cyber-security strategy” | Law Professor tells tech conference: plans to shut down Internet already on deck

Steve Aquino, Mother Jones
April 2, 2009

A new bill would give the President emergency authority to halt web traffic and access private data.

Should President Obama have the power to shut down domestic Internet traffic during a state of emergency?

Senators John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) think so. On Wednesday they introduced a bill to establish the Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor—an arm of the executive branch that would have vast power to monitor and control Internet traffic to protect against threats to critical cyber infrastructure. That broad power is rattling some civil libertarians.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (PDF) gives the president the ability to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical” information network “in the interest of national security.” The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president.

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Here’s something else it seems neither ‘conservatives’ nor ‘liberals’ can get right these days… let us pretend, for a moment, that this war in the middle east is in some way legitimate, and Iraq is a legal war zone. The one crucial thing, the only thing the government must have a monopoly of force on is the function of protecting individual rights, whether it be through the courts, the police, or the military: whose sole job it is to protect the citizens of a nation from external enemies. You cannot contract these functions out to non-state actors. It is contrary to the health of a republic to privatize any military or policing functions: private armies, as history has shown time and time again, are anathema to freedom.

Flashback: Blackwater, mired in Iraq controversy, changes its name to ‘Xe’ | Official: Blackwater contract for Iraq not renewed | Blackwater Guards facing Charges in Case of 17 Dead Iraqi Citizens | Blackwater-linked firm to train Canadian troops | Canadian troops continue gearing up, to receive US counter-insurgency training | Blackwater Worldwide, Wal-Mart of modern war

Jeremy Scahill, Alternet.org
April 2, 2009

Federal records obtained by AlterNet reveal a multi-million dollar contract for a private U.S. paramilitary force operating out of Jerusalem.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama’s advisers said he “can’t rule out [and] won’t rule out” using mercenary forces, like Blackwater. Now, it appears that the Obama administration has decided on its hired guns of choice: Triple Canopy, a Chicago company now based in Virginia. It may not have Blackwater’s thuggish reputation, but Triple Canopy has its own bloody history in Iraq and a record of hiring mercenaries from countries with atrocious human rights records. What’s more, Obama is not just using the company in Iraq, but also as a U.S.-government funded private security force in Israel/Palestine, operating out of Jerusalem.

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Okay, let’s get this through our heads… at some point, the people we trust to take care of boring rubbish like economics, philosophy, law, culture – you know, the framework of a civil polity, the stuff we tuned out in favour of watching Canadian Idol – those people looked around and realized they run things. One doesn’t even have to get into speculating about shadowy cabals or the like, because humanity is self-sorting, we all know ‘birds of a feather’ form their own cliques, and these things are done in the light of day and published – albeit in academic journals we never read. The experts, public intellectuals and captains of industry to whom the doors of international conferences and economic symposia swing wide hold particular ideologies as we all do, implicitly or explicitly, and if those ideas are incorrect, then there is no check on their implementation if we default on our own place in this dialogue and decide that they know best. Do they?

The report below is a prime example. The Bilderberg group, which is a meeting of the top tiers of government and industry held every year under tight security, vehemently denies setting policy. They have avoided public scrutiny for so long because they bring media media owners into the fold, swearing them to secrecy on their proceedings. And yet here is Etienne Davignon, admitting that the idea of a trans-European currency was an object of debate at the meeting.

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What right does the province have to tell farmers they can’t organize? This is, first and foremost, an attack on the individual’s right of free association. Unions are not inherently bad, despite the fulminations of various ‘conservative’ commentators. This journal would dispense with the idea of a closed shop and insist that membership be voluntary, since it is the employer’s right to set the terms of employment within reason, but the employees have an inalienable right as human beings to negotiate – the term implies an absence of force or fraud – with their employers in whatever numbers they choose. And they should be able to strike as well, just as their employers should be able to weigh the pros and cons of firing them outright as a result.

Colin Perkel, The Canadian Press
April 2, 2009

Another chapter in a long-running and bitter battle between Ontario and some of its most vulnerable workers was opened today when the Supreme Court of Canada agreed to hear the province’s case against farm-worker unions.

The decision by the country’s top court to grant the province leave to appeal was greeted with disappointment and anger by the union that has been pressing what it sees as a human-rights fight.

“We’re disappointed that the justice delayed to Ontario farm workers will be further delayed,” said Wayne Hanley, national president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Canada.

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CBC News
April 2, 2009

Protectionism ‘the greatest risk to the economy’

Prime Minister Stephen Harper spoke out against protectionism Thursday and said the agreement reached at the conclusion of the G20 summit in London was a “remarkable statement” that should give financial markets “an awful lot of confidence.”

Harper’s comments came after British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that G20 nations will be injecting $1 trillion into the world economy in an effort to curb the global financial crisis.

Also included in the summit’s communiqué are commitments to bring hedge funds within a global regulatory net, to end bank secrecy, to maintain expansionist policies and to inject $250 billion in trade finance into the global economy over next two years.

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Is that a fissure in The Great Consensus? Where’s the IPCC party whip?

Flashback: Obama, Gore, tied to Chicago carbon exchange | U.N. ‘Climate Change’ Plan Would Likely Shift Trillions to Form New World Economy | U.N. Environment Head Wants Global Warming Tax | Scientists warn global warming accelerating | Top Japanese Scientists: Warming Is Not Caused By Human Activity | EU calls for global carbon trading system to fight climate change | IPCC caught with false figures, doubt cast on accuracy of global temperature record | B.C. carbon tax kicks in on Canada Day | Every adult in Britain should be forced to carry ‘carbon ration cards’, say MPs | CEOs call for ‘aggressive’ action on climate change

Tom Spears, The Ottawa Citizen
April 2, 2009

It’s wrong to blame our warming climate on human pollution alone, says a major analysis by U.S. climate scientists who say North America’s warming and drying trend also has important natural causes.

Natural shifts in ocean currents have caused much of the warming in recent decades, and almost all of the droughts, says the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Most climate researchers today deal exclusively with man-made “greenhouse” gases, and often dismiss suggestions of naturally caused warming as unscientific.

Yet NOAA says western Canada has warmed by two degrees and eastern Canada hasn’t warmed at all because flows of air from naturally shifting Pacific currents have affected the west most.

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Andrew Sparrow, Katherine Baldwin and Heather Stewart, The Guardian
April 2, 2009

‘This is the day that the world came together to fight back against the global recession,’ claims PM as G20 agrees plan for economic recovery

Gordon Brown today claimed that the end of the global recession was now achievable as he unveiled an agreement from the G20 summit that will pump an additional $1tn (£748bn) into the world economy.

Announcing the conclusions of the London summit, the prime minister also unveiled a surprise move on tax havens, saying that a list of countries that do not comply with anti-secrecy rules would be published today.

“This is the day that the world came together to fight back against the global recession, not with words but with a plan for global recovery and reform and with a clear timetable,” Brown told a news conference at the ExCel centre in London’s Docklands, after several days of frantic diplomacy and political posturing.

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Markets used to be based on production. These days, they’re based on confidence. As in ‘confidence job’.

Louise Watt, The Associated Press
April 2, 2009

LONDON — World stock markets soared Thursday, with Hong Kong’s benchmark vaulting more than 7 per cent, as stronger-than-expected U.S. economic figures boosted confidence that the world’s largest economy is on the mend.

A mood of optimism also pervaded the markets as leaders of the world’s 20 biggest developed and developing countries met to find a way out of the economic crisis.

Huge gains in Asia and a strong open in Europe followed an overnight surge on Wall Street and extended last month’s rebound amid tentative signs of stabilization in the hard-hit global economy and banking industry.

In European morning trading, Britain’s FTSE 100 rose three per cent to 4,072.46, Germany’s DAX surged 4.6 per cent to 4,310.82 and France’s CAC 40 jumped four per cent to 2,951.75.

“There’s some renewed optimism around the G-20 meeting today and the possibility there might be something structured coming out of it,” said Richard Hunter, analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers.

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In the Globe and Mail’s coverage of this issue, a Liberal MP made the following ascerbic observation:

“This strikes me as remarkable,” said Liberal MP Mark Holland during the committee meeting. “This is a gentleman [Mr. O'Brian] who has been a manager with CSIS since its inception in 1984. He has enough authority that CSIS sent him to come before this committee to testify for two hours. Now I feel like we’re being told, you know, ‘Just pretend he wasn’t here. Ignore what he said.’”

Flashback: CSIS won’t rule out tips derived from torture

The Canadian Press
April 2, 2009

OTTAWA – The head of Canada’s spy agency says CSIS does not rely on information extracted through torture – disowning the previous testimony of a senior employee.

Jim Judd, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told a Commons public safety committee Thursday that a CSIS official misspoke on the subject earlier this week.

Geoffrey O’Brian, a CSIS lawyer and adviser, said Tuesday the agency will use statements collected through force when lives are at stake.

O’Brian told the committee the spy service would overlook the origin of the information if it could prevent another 9/11 terrorist attack or Air India jetliner bombing.

Judd said Thursday that O’Brian “may have been confused” and will send the committee a letter clarifying his testimony.

“My supposition is that he was venturing into a hypothetical.”

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What do you do in a kettle? You bring a substance to its boiling point.

And isn’t it rather interesting that everywhere around the penned in area was boarded up – other than the Bank of Scotland, as Mr. Campbell points out below. That would be the bank that is having its windows smashed out in the picture accompanying this story – the one with more photographers than protesters. It looks a lot like a media scrum, in fact.

Flashback: G20 protests: Riot police, or rioting police?

Duncan Campbell, The Guardian
April 2, 2009

Peaceful demonstrators of all ages trapped for hours next to prime targets for ire – RBS, Bank of England left unprotected

For more than seven hours yesterday, police prevented people from leaving the area of the London G20 demonstrations near the Bank of England.

Protesters who had wanted to demonstrate against the British banking system and capitalism in general, but who had also wanted to protest about climate change or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan elsewhere in the capital, were hemmed in.

Officers forming a wall of fluorescent yellow told those who wanted to leave the area and were puzzled that they could not: “Don’t ask us, ask the gaffer.”

The area became a public lavatory as people unable to move away used the entrances to Bank underground station as a urinal.

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