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February 26, 2004
Virginia Tilly
The Deeper Meaning of the Wall
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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February
26, 2004
Plutocracy in the
Great White North
As
Canadian as Corruption
By NORMAN MADARASZ
The year 2003 was a truly outstanding one for
Canadian self-assertion. In a completely unexpected encounter
of fates, Prime Minister Jean Chretien proved there to be no
contradiction in running a democracy within the confines of a
G7 nation. Tyrannical mood swinging still paved the way, despite
the clement winds of a third term meant to be his last.
Although the scent of inner-party coups
for and against Canada's most cynical of politicians had filled
the halls of Parliament for years, democracy did end up prevailing.
Amidst what had become a one-party system, Chretien stepped over
industry big leaguers to ratify Canada's Kyoto Protocol commitment,
ever so meekly part the waters toward decriminalizing pot, legalize
same-sex marriage, and implement a gun registry. Last but not
least, the man yelled out a big NO to the US over Iraq, even
while military contracts had forced some Canadian soldiers to
fight along with the Coalition invaders. On the humane level,
his team did the best it could to warn foreign-born Canadian
Muslims of the risks of visiting the US. Where it failed, was
on Quebec.
The year 2003 was meant to be Jean Chretien's
swan song. He would finally be leaving the field to his arch-rival
Paul Martin. For years Martin had waged a heady palace showdown
that found respite only in the Prime Minister's announcement
of a retirement date. Even then the incumbent could hardly sit
out the wait. The message was that Chretien had to leave three
months ahead of schedule, an inverse type of Saddam-Hussein Christmas
present. In the nineties, the sharp-witted blue-eyed fox had
parodied the image of a protégé while providing
his boss, Chretien, with balanced budgets that led ultimately
to surpluses. On February 2 Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson
read out Martin's long-willed first Throne Speech in Parliament.
In his Prime Minister's declarations,
Martin tried to play the media as fools. His speech read through
a list of gifts long requested by the Canadian public-even among
Liberal Party electors. Its objective was to further highlight
Chretien's dab with dictatorial decorum. The media gobbled the
feed as if filet mignon were being given as bait. A host of "left-leaning"
initiatives on health, education and governance marked the new
Prime Minister's tenure with grace. And why not? After all, the
public had been expecting Martin to repeal every policy move
Chretien had ever embraced.
The fact is that beyond his reputation for hating institutional
politicians, Martin has proved to be the shrewdest of media manipulators.
Who apart from Howard Richler, the Montreal Gazette's linguistic
decoder (February 21, 2004), could stretch mind and memory to
recall how Martin's people had brushed off a computational understatement
about government contracts as "administrative errors"?
As former head of Canadian Steamship Lines (CSL), Martin was
one of Canada's most powerful businessmen. Dribbling past journalists
is child's play when you manage to spin the taxman into performing
endless logs and exponentiations the sum of which in taxation
terms always leans toward zero.
It's unclear whether in his new proposals
for education the Prime Minister has earmarked funds toward improving
the arithmetical skills of Canadians. For CSL had initially claimed
government contracts for its numerous companies, Groupe CSL inc.,
Canada Steamship Lines inc. (Canada) and Canada Steamship Lines
(international), as totaling $137 000. Over 11 years it seemed
like a paltry sum for a corporation owning some 37 ships and
citing annuals revenues of $280 million.
A simple recalculation found out the
"administrative error". On January 28 Liberal House
Leader Jacques Saada provided the adjusted sum of $161 million,
the initial tally thus being a mere eleven times under-appraised.
You won't hear Martin calling for the abolition of tax havens
either. Understandably with so many investments spread through
Liberia, Bermuda and the Bahamas, accounting is bound to provide
mixed-up figures, "errors". But when it comes down
to dollars and cents, aren't tax havens beneficial even to middle-income
earners, and not just to the wealthiest of Canadians?
When you think about it, what does falsifying
figures to the highest public authorities matter when you're
getting the job done? One can only surmise that the way Martin
got Bono, U2's worldly singer, to chant at his leadership party
last fall was subsequent to statements made toward the end of
his tenure as Finance Minister. Martin had hinted at dropping
the debt of the most downtrodden of nations with the international
community. (Liberia may have been one he had in mind.) He never
mentioned how Canada could at least have forgotten its own debt
demands, especially as its economy was performing the best within
the G7 sphere.
In the end, the real show was not the
entertainment extravaganza meant to honor Canada's Camelot. The
spectacle was what happened in the backrooms of Parliament afterward.
Upon ditching Chretien loyalists from power positions, Martin
was expected to veer hard-right. He was Canada's balanced budget
burgermeister. Anyone forgetting that was in denial. The man
himself said it in the fine print: "with the economy permitting",
his Throne Speech promises would be fulfilled.
Then came one of those burgeoning moments,
a springtime for collective events. The public can thank the
stars that its chaotic aftermath brings sense to asymmetrically
distributed information. For the past two years, Canada's Auditor-General,
Sheila Fraser, had been hashing through the way government spends
the taxation money collected from Canadians, with a special focus
lain on the Public Works Department. As a particularly taxed
society, Canadian leaders have had it in their career interests
to service these monies well. We're hardly a country that can
afford to promise our citizens the moon while economic indicators
suggest we've fuelled a rocket toward the hell of an imploding
budget deficit. In other words, Canada does have some limits,
and its leaders respect them, too.
Or so Canadians had liked to believe.
For Ms Fraser has revealed boundless mismanagement of $250 million
destined for internal "cultural" needs. This kind of
jargon really means making sure Quebec remains within Confederation.
The Auditor-General went on to expose even more. Roughly $100
million of that dough is completely unaccounted for in the books.
Having to remind foreign readers of a country's history with
such a minute population is not always a thrilling prospect.
But how else can foreigners understand that "federalist"
French Canadians have used the federal government to block the
initiatives of a provincial government of "nationalist"
French-speaking Quebec from leaving Confederation? Aren't the
"Brits", i.e. English-Canadians, supposed to be taking
care of repressing the "French"? Who conquered this
iceland in 1763? The Brits or some French Canadians preferring
to live in the slightly warmer and largely more lavish settings
of the neighboring province of Ontario?
Once the fiefdom of Anglo-protestant
loyalists to the British crown, the Canadian capital, Ottawa,
nowadays is virtually as French as Quebec City. A logical principle
does exist to explain the phenomenon. In political terms, it
runs as follows: in order to subdue your rival, it is vital for
you to become your rival. Loss as a possibility is literally
abolished.
This is a fate to have befallen to Ottawa.
The city grew to encompass a type of federal district, engulfing
the city of Hull in Quebec in the process. Four of Canada's last
seven Prime Ministers were either French Canadian or born in
Quebec. It's a fairly balanced trade-off until you consider their
terms in office, basically covering 30 out of 36 years of that
time scale. If the late doyen of those leaders, Trudeau, was
brought into the federal leadership by Canada's WASP power brokers
in the nineteen-sixties, the issue of Quebec has been among the
most strategic by which Prime Ministers have accumulated powers
on their own ever since.
This is what has led to the slush funds
and pilfering off of tens of millions of dollars in exchange
for cronyist support-and very little sweat while doing it. Over-billing,
commission for transfer funds, untendered and unfulfilled contracts
are the alleged acts of fraud for which the owners of a host
of Quebec ad agencies, former cabinet ministers and civil servants,
as well as Canada's federal police, the RCMP, are currently under
investigation.
All events were played out in the name
of keeping Quebec within Constitution, aka Branding Canada.
As newly released documents show (Globe and Mail, February
26), former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien "personally
signed off on increased budgets for federal communications after
the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty, with a clear description
of which events would receive the funding. The lists detailed
millions in spending on car races, tennis tournaments, professional
sports teams and cultural events - most of them in Quebec - where
Ottawa provided funding in exchange for the placement of Canadian
flags and banners."
Looking back to 1995, most Canadians
would agree their country was on a slippery slope. A referendum
held in the province of Quebec in October of that year had come
to within one-percent of receiving its population's majority
assent to make moves to separate from Canada. When a country's
in crisis, its leadership often pleads with the citizenry to
just trust them, persuading it that the Big Office and the Big
One alone have the master plan in the pocket. A perfect benchmark
for appraisal was aped in Jean Chretien's recent immortal words:
"Well, didn't we manage to keep Quebec in Confederation?"
It would be childish to accuse Chretien
of overlooking how a fallacious form of reasoning, such as rhetorical
questions, appeals only to authority for assent. But while a
lot of Canadians in the other parts of the country were feeling
the brunt of Chretien's budget slashing, a policy ambition far
too characteristic of his first two terms, perhaps the question
of lavish spending is a reason for which his party could be thrown
out of government-if not, like his predecessor Brian Mulroney,
ejected from existence.
And lavish spending, as all may now observe,
there has been. Amidst the belt tightening and increasing social
and economic disparity being experienced in the country there
was money flowing which seemed to have no limits. In fact, the
baleful booty is so great that the business sector has fought
tooth and nail with institutional politicians to exert power
directly. Paul Martin is its voice.
Plutocracy is the rule of the rich by
the rich. It is aiming for yet another split with the political
class, as it now seeks to portray even MBA-formatted politicians
as flawed essentially due to their political desires. It evokes
Godard's immortal question in "1+1": can one be both
an intellectual and a revolutionary? No, in Martin's eyes, one
cannot be both a politician and a manager. One can only succeed
as a businessman-king.
Plutocracy has thus returned to Canada.
Martin's problem is that there are a few financial matters to
be cleaned up first. As public polling for the Liberals has slid
by 15 points since the outbreak of the "sponsorship scandal",
his claims are veering to sweep politics right out. How interesting
for a Prime Minister to make it his individual mission to keep
the books clean. More power to him! All of which equates, in
another step towards check mate, with more power for him.
The theater and parody of good governance
aside, Mr Martin knew full well that the Auditor-General's report
was on its way. He may even have known of its content (and if
not, we come around to that familiar moment of stupid astonishment
with a glazed look, then what was he doing as a Minister in the
first place?). Early February's bag of goodies then starts making
even more sense. His Throne Speech was meant to fail in the end,
irrespective of economic performance. Its purpose was that of
a thrown speech.
As the fury of Canadians was bound to
build in the upcoming weeks, they would reminisce of the purity
of Martin's initial mood in the mid-winter days when the snow
was white and the sky blue. Realizing then that money has been
lost voters would comply with further cuts in social spending.
The plot is still thickening. A public
inquiry will be unfolding. Some truth perhaps will make it into
a clearing. In the meantime, guilt lies heavy on consciences.
The public has taken to damning lavish spending on promoting
Canada's arts and culture around the northern polar region (Scandinavia
and Russia). The journey exceeded an already unpopular $1 million
budget fourfold. But let's be fair here. Shipping a squad of
artists and intellectuals on an intercultural exchange already
pales in comparison with the previous scandal of job-creation
incentives and grants at the Human Resources Department that
swallowed a mismanaged $1 billion. And no matter how smartly
dressed Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson is prone to be, and
how large a party she enjoys as company, she has run an open
house compared to the handful of Liberal Party embezzlers who
filled friends' pockets on the back of the Federalist ideal.
In the meantime, major scandals are wont
to reveal others. A provincial government has used Andersen-style
accounting gimmickry in a budget surplus claim. Hundreds of millions
have been misspent on the country's gun-registry. In the below-the-belt
league, a special incentive grant to help Toronto get back on
its feet after the SARS outbreak was spent on an Ivy-League lowlife
who went on a racist rampage against French Canadians on the
streets of Quebec's capital. The audience who died laughing over
his libelous jokes was the same crowd to have barked in rage
at Quebec's inherent corruption apparently proved by the sponsorship
scandal. Until February 25, that is, when the Globe and Mail
revealed that the WASP province's former diehard free-market
ideology skimmed the cream off the attempted privatization of
Hydro-One to give top government advisors and strategists fat
deals.
A deep freeze winter is not conducive
to the expression of passionate emotions, but Canadians are pissed
off to high hell. For over ten long years, politics hasn't been
an estimable mental activity for Canucks. Now the fun might just
be on its way back.
The irony is that ever misguided temptation
for the powerful, i.e. stifling the claims of minority populations
to achieve autonomy or independence. There's a historical repetition
pattern building up here. The sum of $250 million was set to
promote Canadian culture in Quebec from 1997 to 2001. The results
of the October 1995 referendum on independence held in Quebec
also contained some arithmetic truth. The then-provincial government,
le Parti Quebecois, was convinced that within a few years those
who voted against independence would emigrate to (English) Canada.
The discrepancy of a few thousand votes by which they had lost
their bid would vanish according to subtraction.
The Federal government did everything
in its power to curb Quebec's drive toward independence, the
latter of which, it must be said, was performed in due democratic
and legal process. Now the rest of the country accuses the French-Canadians
in Ottawa and Quebec as basically being a corrupt bunch intent
on ripping off Canada. Residents of Quebec will not take lightly
to the fiery accusations filling the airwaves nationwide. At
a time when desires for independence have been hibernating, the
thaw is set to be boisterous.
And so dear American friends, as much
as media manipulation has wanted to set us at odds, as much as
your political and industrial power brokers have wantonly condemned
the unusual democratic response of the Chretien government to
the social justice ideals of Canadians at a time when that system
was faltering in the US, our battle remains identical. It's a
struggle not only against business takeovers of our countries
or capitalist economics. It's a fight against the highest
spheres of business, the uppermost crust of the elite,
who have twisted the political system to their advantage by acts
of crony capitalism and buying favors. This isn't even lobbying,
it's merely illegal. And the public will damn legislation from
being drafted in order to make such practices lawful, ordinary.
Scandal is justifying urgent measures.
Canada's era of plutocracy is catching up to your own, as our
political institutions are taken over by oligarchic rule. It
will be done under the heading of fighting against corruption
and tax evasion, while those in office who fight remain the doubles
of those who benefit. For the time being, it is quite unclear
whether our battery of corporate laws can make it from enactment
to enforcement.
Norman Madarasz
is a Canadian philosopher and journalist. He welcomes comments
at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca
Weekend
Edition Features for February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
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