NO BS NEWS: 03/02/13

If people no longer expect objectivity from their political and legal systems, then all justice will be reduced to a power struggle between conflicting and irreconcilable perspectives, a struggle in which the most dominant and pervasive bias will replace fair and impartial process as the character of justice. But if objectivity in law and politics is everywhere supplanted by conflict between subjective interests, then the side of economic privilege and established authority will always retain dominance. A society in which people no longer expect representatives of its major institutions even to attempt to render objectivity in their professional demeanours is a society whose major institutions are in a crisis of ethical legitimacy. In such a society, there is wide spread cynicism regarding the possibility of fair political process because it seems impossible that impartial, unbiased dispositions could exist to enact such processes.

Robert Nicholls

Language and Logic

Saturday, March 2, 2013

CBC - Secret document details new Canadian foreign policy

Stephen Harper Trades Canada Away

Secret document details new Canadian foreign policy

" Draft policy calls for closer economic ties 'even where political interests or values may not align' "

Respect for Human Rights Better plan for Trade and Investment: MP Irwin Cotler

12 Reasons Why Globalization Is A Major Problem: Gail Tverberg

Globalization levels the playing field, in a way that makes it hard for developed countries to compete. A country with a lower cost structure (lower wages and benefits for workers, more inexpensive coal in its energy mix, and more lenient rules on pollution) is able to out-compete a typical OECD country. In the United States, the percentage of US citizen with jobs started dropping about the time China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. - See more at: http://www.economywatch.com/economy-business-and-finance-news/12-reasons-why-globalisation-is-a-major-problem-gail-tverberg.26-02.html#sthash.kewzAwZz.V7JoIdKS.dpuf

The failure of one country has the potential to pull many others down, and with it much of the system. - See more at: http://www.economywatch.com/economy-business-and-finance-news/12-reasons-why-globalisation-is-a-major-problem-gail-tverberg.26-02.html#sthash.kewzAwZz.V7JoIdKS.dpuf

CNOOC completes $15.1-billion takeover of Calgary oil and gas producer Nexen

Investigation into massive data breach widens to Justice Department

CHINA'S 'SOFT POWER' AND A REAL 'RED DAWN'

" Beijing is now a major financial partner in Hollywood, a place where money has always trumped art, let alone truth. Communist China will now take a direct hand in the manufacturing of what American audiences see. "

" The main goal is to desensitize the American people to Communist China's growing military power, outright aggression against its neighbors, and the continuing brutal oppression of its own people. "

" These are also developments which China's smiling Communist elite do not want Americans to think about. We are to think of the Peoples Republic in terms of valuable business partners and graceful practitioners of Tai Chi. "

The Coming Water Wars

Dear Stephen Harper: Tibet is Burning

105th Tibetan Self-Immolates Inside China

"illegal" Student Protests in Montreal

Climate change, urban growth, agriculture driving water study need: report

BC Liberals planned to use gov't resources to win "ethnic" vote

The 17-page document is a "Multicultural Strategic Outreach Plan" aimed at co-ordinating party, caucus and government resources to "re-engage with ethnic voters and media." It includes plans to work on a media strategy, build a database of contacts and find "quick wins" such as apologizing for past injustices. - See more at: http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/2013/02/27/BC-Libs-Outreach/#sthash.UJh00ypO.dpuf

White House says it will seek "fast-track" trade authority

Ex-security officials press Obama to cancel cuts to nuclear arsenal

Deterrence Works, Argues Top Air Force Official

Big cuts spur calls to Congress from irate constituents

" "They want to kill us all," Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, said of his constituents. "

Obama Officials Refuse to Say if Assassination Power Extends to US Soil

" Since then, the administration – including the president himself and his nominee to lead the CIA, John Brennan – has been repeatedly asked whether this authority extends to US soil, i.e., whether the president has the right to execute US citizens on US soil without charges. In each instance, they have refused to answer. "

The Missing Recovery

" Foreign hires are not additions to the work force, but replacements. The corporations force their American employees to train the foreigners, and then the American employees are discharged. Obviously, if skilled employees were in short supply, they would not be laid off. Moreover, if the skills were in short supply, salaries would be bid up, not down, and the 36% of those who graduated in 2011 with a doctorate degree in engineering would not have been left unemployed. The National Science Foundation’s report, “Doctorate Recipients From U.S. Universities,” says that only 64% of the Ph.D. engineering graduates found a pay check. "

" By focusing on the bottom line at all costs, corporations are destroying the US consumer market. Offshoring jobs reduces labor costs and raises profits, but it also reduces domestic consumer income, thus reducing the domestic market for the corporation’s products. For awhile the reduction in consumer income can be filled by the expansion of consumer debt, but when consumers reach their debt limit sales cannot continue to rise. The consequence of jobs offshoring is the ruination of the domestic consumer market. "

" To sum up, the corporations’ focus on the bottom line has disconnected US incomes from the production of the goods and services that the American people consume, thus weakening and ultimately destroying the domestic consumer market. The Fed’s focus on saving banks, which mindless deregulation allowed to become “too big to fail,” has created a bond market bubble of negative real interest rates and a dollar bubble in which the dollar’s exchange rate has not declined in keeping with the large increase in its supply. Both the corporations and the Fed have created a stock market bubble based on profits obtained from labor arbitrage (the substitution of cheaper foreign labor for US labor) and from banks speculating with the money that the Fed is providing to them.

This situation is untenable. Sooner or later something will pop these bubbles, and the consequences will be horrendous. "

Growth, Debt and Trade

" The current economic model assumes that perpetual growth is possible on our fragile and finite planet. This economic model is dependent on consumption and the waste that accompanies consumption means that most of what we buy is cheap and ends up in our waste streams within six month of purchase. The economy is financed by debt and debt levels are unsustainable and growing. Virtually all levels of government, individuals and families carry too much debt compared to their income.

The globalized economy was made possible by cheap fossil fuels and globalized trade. Fossil fuels are no longer cheap and most countries’ economies are contracting.

BC Greens will work with British Columbians to plan for and transition to an economy based in place and community where trade is local and based in durable goods and services. "

Why It’s Smart to Be Reckless on Wall Street

"Find a best friend at a competing bank or hedge fund and take opposite sides of the same large bet."

China moves mobile missiles near coast amid tensions with Japan over islands

China to intensify Sea patrols

Buchanan: World turns to Nationalism

" How does the Chinese Communist Party justify control of all of China’s institutions today — economic, political, military and cultural?

If Marxism is mocked behind closed doors by a new economic elite and tens of millions of Chinese young, what can cause the nation to continue to respect and obey a Communist Party and its leaders, besides the gun?

The answer of Europe in the 1930s is China’s answer today.

Nationalism, tribalism, patriotic war if necessary, will bring the masses back. If the Chinese nation is being insulted, if ancestral lands are occupied by foreigners as in olden times, the people will rally around a regime that stands up for China. Nationalism will keep Chinese society “under control while you go forward.” "

Tensions rapidly escalating around South China Sea

" China’s assertion that almost all of the South China Sea and adjacent waters are part of its territory seems to be growing more dangerous with each passing week. "

Revanchist China

" Having dominated East and Southeast Asia for all but the last two centuries of the past two millennia, China is chafing at the current US-led regional order of sovereign states, in which even the smallest enjoys the same rights, privileges, and protection as the largest. Modern China has benefited enormously from this arrangement; nonetheless, there is keen resentment that the Chinese civilization-state’s vast achievements over several thousand years offer China no special status.

To a people imbued with a deep sense of superior moral worth, historical achievement, and victimization by foreign powers, this state of affairs is unjust and unnatural. It follows that pulling back from any territorial dispute with smaller and inferior states would be seen as a humiliating defeat, rather than a step toward ensuring long-term regional stability. "

Internet Sleuths Add Evidence to Chinese Military Hacking Accusations

The cacophony of the world

" The information revolution has created a more global, interdependent, and transparent world than ever. But this has led, in turn, to an anxious, Balkan-ising quest for identity. "

China tests Japanese and US patience

" According to Abe, relations between China and Japan have been suffering due to unintended consequences of moves by the Communist Party of China to retain its legitimacy. China’s economic opening led to unequal prosperity, eliminating the Party’s main pillar of support, equality. To counter that, the Chinese government pursued a two-prong strategy of economic growth and patriotism. Economic growth required Beijing to expand its sourcing of commodities, moving China naturally onto the sea. Meanwhile, patriotism, tinged with anti-Japanese teaching, has come to pervade the educational system and society.

Abe argued that China is pursuing a path of coercion or intimidation, particularly in the East and South China seas, as part of its resource-acquisition strategy. Anti-Japanese undercurrents in Chinese society due to the inculcation of patriotism have won domestic support for the assertive Chinese actions. "

Taiwanese Groups Condemn Organ Harvesting in China

" The statement calls for the Chinese regime to release all prisoners of conscience, and requests that the Taiwanese government and other governments implement legislation to prohibit organ transplantation using organs from illicit sources. "

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

" The existence of many individual camps and ghettos was previously known only on a fragmented, region-by-region basis. But the researchers, using data from some 400 contributors, have been documenting the entire scale for the first time, studying where they were located, how they were run, and what their purpose was. "

Censoring the Internet a Lucrative Industry in China

" Coming across the message “this page cannot be displayed” while browsing the Internet is a common experience for Chinese netizens, and is often a sign the content was removed by Internet censors. "

Exclusive: China plans bond overhaul to fund $6 trillion urbanization - sources

" The Party aims to bring 400 million people to cities over the next decade as the new leadership of president-in-waiting Xi Jinping and premier-designate Li Keqiang seek to turn China into a wealthy world power with economic growth generated by an affluent consumer class. "

You have a right to privacy.

Your privacy is under attack! The only search engine that does not record your IP address.