Stephen Harper Trades Canada Away
" 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
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
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
" 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. "
Dear Stephen Harper: Tibet is Burning
"illegal" Student Protests in Montreal
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
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
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.rPEMcv2B.dpuf
" 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. "
" 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. "
" 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. "
"Find a best friend at a competing bank or hedge fund and take opposite sides of the same large bet."
" 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.” "
" 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. "
" 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. "
" 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. "
" 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. "
" 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 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. "
" 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. "
" 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. "
" It’s been a long time coming, but the copyright surveillance machine
known as the Copyright Alert System (CAS) is finally launching. "
" Maine’s state legislature is stepping out to confront a problem
Washington has been avoiding, taking action to guard the electrical grid
system in the state against a natural or man-made electromagnetic pulse
attack. "
