Shock Doctrined Through Think Tanks

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

I've been reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, and what I find interesting, is that American Imperialism over the past half century or so, has followed a pattern.

One laid out by the Chicago school and Milton Friedman. And it was done under the guise of fighting Socialism/Communism, but was really about taking over the economics of other nations, for corporate interests.

Chile provides an excellent example of how the system works.

In an attempt to combat the socialist principles of leading Latin American economist Raul Prebisch, the Chicago School offered free market courses at a Chilean university.

This was the brainchild of Albion Patterson, director of the U.S. International Cooperation Administration in Chile, and Theodore W. Schultz, chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, who called on Friedman to work his magic.

The two men came up with a plan that would eventually turn Santiago, a hotbed of state-centred economics, into its opposite—a laboratory for cutting-edge free-market experiments, giving Milton Friedman what he had longed for: a country in which to test his cherished theories. The original plan was simple: the U.S. government would pay to send Chilean students to study economics at what pretty much everyone recognized was the most rabidly anti-"pink" school in the world—the University of Chicago. Schultz and his colleagues at the university would also be paid to travel to Santiago to conduct research into the Chilean economy and to train students and professors in Chicago School fundamentals. (1)

Friedman and his gang would also bring the media on board, and not surprisingly, the president of their largest newspaper, El Mercurio, would become Augustus Pinochet's economic minister after the U.S. led coup.

However, another important step in trying to turn the Southern Cone , and indeed the rest of the free world, to the right, came from another faculty member at the Chicago School, Friedrich von Hayek.

Hayek had come up with the notion of the corporate funded free market think tank, that he suggested should "present themselves as civil society". They churn out report after report, poll after poll, all to promote corporate interests.

And Chile was no exception. The most prominent are Libertad y Desarrollo (now the Latin American institute) and Centro de Estudios Públicos , both heralded as the saviour of Chile (next to Milton Friedman, bombs, guns and assassins).

Alejandro Chafuen wrote a piece in April of 2010: Think Tanks and the Transformation of the Chilean Economy

In it he not only praises Libertad y Desarrollo and Centro de Estudios Públicos , but also Canada's own Fraser Institute.

... the Fraser Institute in Canada, ranked today as the best market oriented institute outside the United States. Fraser has a huge influence in a Canada which is overcoming the US in economic freedoms, transparency, and several other areas.

But who is this Alejandro Chafuen?

He is the past President of the Atlas Foundation and a Senior Fellow at the Acton Institute. In fact the Acton Institute was started with funds provided by the Atlas Foundation, and is an extension of the Religious Right.

Atlas was, and is, a major sponsor of the Acton Institute run by former faith healer, evangelical, gay community organizer, and now Catholic priest, Bob Sirico. Sirico ran fundamentalist faith healing meetings until he came out as gay. Then he moved on to the Metropolitan Community Churches and started running the Gay Community Center in Hollywood ... Acton officials got heavily involved in the debate on gay marriage. With Sirico back in the closet (though some conservatives don’t think so) the position they have been taking has been to pander to bigots on the Religious Right.

The Atlas Foundation also helps to finance the Canadian Constitution Foundation, which was started in 2002, by Conservative MP John Weston. The CCF has ties to the Harper government and Canada's Neoconservative movement.

They were also behind attack ads run in the U.S. to oppose Obama's healthcare plan.

Donald Gutstein wrote an excellent book: Not a Conspiracy Theory, in which he exposes the myriad of think tanks and foundations propping up the Harper government. Gutstein tells us to follow the money, and the few connections I provided above, are only a tip of the iceberg.

If we are going to engage in non-violent civil disobedience, it's important to know what we're up against. The media is constantly quoting polls and reports from these groups, to defend or explain this government's policies.

We have to do what Gutstein suggests and follow the money. Google the name of the group or the person quoted. It won't take long to find they belong to some corporate funded think tank or "advocacy" group, many with planted MPs.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (Jason Kenney)
The Fraser Institute (Jason Kenney, Rob Anders)
The Montreal Institute (Maxime Bernier)
The Civitas Society (Jason Kenney)
The National Citizens Coalition (Stephen Harper and Rob Anders)

The list is endless.

Once you trace the origin, email the columnist or own the comments section. Our best weapon is education, including the education of the media. Maybe if we become enough of a pain, they may start providing some balance.

Brigette DePape started something here, putting her job on the line to make a statement. But it's not enough to simply "stop" Stephen Harper. We must fight against the entire movement, before it destroys us.

Sources:

1. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, By Naomi Klein, Vintage Canada, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-676-97801-8

On Being Shock Doctrined by the Media

While reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, it occurs to me that Canada, like many other nations, had become the science lab for Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.

Stephen Harper's strong connections with the Republican neoconservative movement, are not random or isolated. We fit a template, though it didn't take a coup for the final victory.

It was more of a hostile takeover. And it began with the media and the Fraser Institute.

The Fraser was opened by Michael Walker in 1973, in response to an NDP government being elected in British Columbia.

In the fall of 1973, Michael Walker ...got a call from an old college friend, Csaba Hajdu. Hajdu's boss, MacMillan Bloedel's T. Patrick Boyle, and other business executives in B.C. were greatly agitated by the NDP government of Dave Barrett and wanted advice on how to bring about its demise. In the spring, Walker met with Boyle, who twenty-three years later is still a Fraser Institute trustee. While a think-tank was not an ideal way to deal with the immediate problem of getting rid of the NDP government, Boyle and his mining-executive friends were apparently willing to take the long view. Walker's pitch was good enough to persuade fifteen of them to hand over a total of $200,000 to get the project started." It was the seed money for the Fraser Institute. (1)

And from the beginning, the Fraser was helped along by the American neocons:

The Fraser Institute also boasts impressive conservative credentials. The institute's authors include Milton Friedman [Ronald Reagan's economic adviser] and Herbert Grubel, while its editorial board includes Sir Alan Walters, former personal economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher. Finally, William F. Buckley Jr, brother-in-law of BC Socred bagman Austin Taylor, is a favourite guest speaker of the institute. In short, the Fraser Institute is a conservative think-tank heavily funded by the corporate sector. (2)

Conrad Black, the man who gobbled up the Canadian media and turned it into a vehicle for the right, was also an early supporter of the Fraser. He no doubt used his influence to bring many prominent media personalities on board.

Murray Dobbin discusses this in his 2003 book, The Myth of the Corporate Citizen:

... as the Fraser Institute's annual reports highlight, there is a cosy relationship between prominent Canadian journalists and the Fraser. The Financial Post co-sponsors the institute's Economy in Government prize, which has rewarded such ideas as creating publicly funded private schools. Diane Francis, editor of the Financial Post, is pictured in an annual report photo addressing a Fraser Institute fundraising luncheon. Financial Post editor-at-large Neville Nankivell and Globe and Mail columnist "Terry" Corcoran are shown "sharing a joke" and "taking part in a discussion" with staff at the institute's offices.

The Fraser Institute seems to have a particularly cosy relationship with CTV news. In 1994, chief anchor and senior news editor Lloyd Robertson lent his support to the institute by serving as guest speaker at one of its fundraising luncheons. Mike Duffy, host of CTV's public-affairs program Sunday Edition, also helped the institute fundraise by being a guest speaker in 1995.(3)

Mike Duffy is now a senator, a reward for his complicity in the 2008 election victory of Harper. He didn't bring in Conservative voters, but his machinations, resulted in many Liberal voters choosing to stay home.

CTV's Pamela Wallin is also a Harper appointed senator, and Canwest Global's Peter Kent, a Harper cabinet minister.

The use of the media to promote a neoconservative/neoliberal agenda is not new, though I was surprised to learn that it had been used in Chile, before the coup, by the Edwards Family publishing empire, and their newspaper El Mercurio.

The Chicago School had first become interested in Latin America, when it was being influenced by Raul Prebisch, and his developmentalist theories.

They opened a branch of their school in Chile, hoping to churn out disciples who could turn the region into a hotbed for their own theories, but it didn't work. The people were simply not ready to take a sharp right turn.

But when Savadore Allende, a known Marxist, was elected President, they went into panic mode, first attacking him in the press, who for ...

.... three years [carried] on an energetic campaign against the elected government, sustained by a subsidy of $1.5 million from the government of the United States. The principal shareholders of El Mercurio were the Edwards family, the descendants of early 19th century immigrants from Britain who had founded a banking empire, the Banco de A. Edwards, and further increased their wealth as the salesmen of a popular brand of American carbonated drinks. (4)

And when that didn't work, they launched their coup, and who became the first economy minister under the planted dictator Augustus Pinochet? Fernando Leniz, president of the El Mercurio newspaper.

What happened next is an almost carbon copy of what has been happening across the free world when the neocons gain control.

Leniz and his associates pushed through an immediate programme to favour richer Chileans by cutting taxes and public spending, a strategy which undid much of the progress which the Allende government had achieved in making Chile into a fairer society with opportunity for all. Leniz abolished taxes on wealth and capital gains tax, giving the wealthy a chance further to enrich themselves and widening the already enormous gulf between rich and poor in Chile. At the same time the privatisation of much of the economy provided golden opportunities for those who were able to take part in that process, notably, as we shall see, the Pinochet family itself.

Allende's price controls, which had kept basic items within the reach of poorer people, were abolished by the dictatorship at a stroke. Trade union activity was hampered where it was not totally outlawed, and stripped increasingly vulnerable workers of protection.

Land reforms pursued by Allende were reversed and land returned to its former owners, causing rural workers to suffer. The free daily ration of milk which Allende had set up for children was abolished, and health services and the state school system deteriorated. Unemployment, which in the Allende years had been around 4 per cent of the workforce, touched 14.5 per cent by 1975. In the same year the gross national product dropped by 12.9 per cent and the average Chilean grew 20 per cent poorer ... (4)

And just as Margaret Thatcher's reforms were devastating for Britain, and Ronald Reagan created the most homeless people in American history, Chile witnessed a new phenomenon: The birth of the soup kitchen.

In the mid-1970s Pinochet's policies produced a striking image for the times, the soup kitchen. These informal food banks filled a great need for poor Chileans. It was common in the poor neighbourhoods that surrounded many cities to see long queues of people lining up for dollops of food among their leaking wooden shacks and unmade roads.

In 1975 Milton Friedman visited Chile in the company of another right-wing economist, Arnold Harberger. Both proclaimed themselves satisfied with the state of the Chilean economy. Meanwhile, the bankers who had so cannily smelt good times coming in September 1973 made hay. In her study for the Economist Intelligence Unit in 1987, Stephany Griffith-Jones, the eminent Chilean economist, pointed to how the bankers were making enormous profits on their loans. In the second half of 1975 they paid depositors 19 per cent a year in real terms while they charged borrowers on average 115 per cent for loans, a margin of 96 per cent. (4)

The Edwards Family newspapers helped to reap enormous profits for the Edwards Family banks.

It's no wonder Friedman was so elated.

He should have tried the "soup".

Sources:

1. The Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen: Canada and Democracy in the Age of Globalization, By Murray Dobbin, James Lorimer & Company, 2003, ISBN: 1-55028-785-0, Pg. 188

2. Of Passionate Intensity: Right-Wing Populism and the Reform Party of Canada, By Trevor Harrison, University of Toronto Press, 1995. ISBN: 0-8020-7204-6, Pg. 48-49

3. Dobbin, 2003, Pg. 209

4. Pinochet: The Politics of Torture, By Hugo "'Shaughnessy, New York University Press, 2000, ISBN: 0-8147-6201-8, Pg. 137-139

Stephen Harper's Perfect Crisis

“Pulling their children from ‘union-run’ schools should be a viable option for all parents.” Stephen Harper

I just started reading Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine and from the introduction, it sets the stage for what a Harper majority might look like.

She begins by discussing Katrina and the horrible devastation the storm caused. But in the midst of the chaos, were the smiling faces of the neoconservative interlopers. They failed to see the human misery, but instead saw an opportunity for profit. Levelled land on which to build a free market empire.

The news racing around the shelter that day was that Richard Baker, a prominent Republican Congressman from this city, had told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans' wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: "I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities." All that week the Louisiana State Legislature in Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a "smaller, safer city"—which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects and replace them with condos. Hearing all the talk of "fresh starts" and "clean sheets," you could almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains just a few miles down the highway. (1)

Leading the charge for God's chosen people, the corporatists, was the late Milton Friedman, a man who has played an integral role in the neoconservative/neoliberal/free market movement.

And he began in an area near and dear to his heart. Privatizing eduction.

One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was Milton Friedman, grand guru of the movement for unfettered capitalism and the man credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, "Uncle Miltie," as he was known to his followers, nonetheless found the strength to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. "Most New Orleans schools are in ruins," Friedman observed, "as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system."

Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans' existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions, many run at a profit, that would be subidized by the state. It was crucial, Friedman wrote, that this fundamental change not be a stopgap but rather "a permanent reform." (1)

Friedman had been a regular speaker at the Fraser Institute and has been following Canada's own right-wing revolution.

And Canada's right-wing revolution, includes the desire to 'radically reform the educational system'.

The Reform Party had public education in their cross hairs:

The Reformers gathered in Saskatoon saved perhaps the loudest cheers, whistles, and applause for [founding member William] Gairdner's last shot: 'And my favourite proposal, by the way, is returning choice to education by privatizing every school in the country'. (2)

When Jim Flaherty was finance minister in Ontario, he did "Uncle Miltie" proud. From the National Review:

We don't often look to Canada for inspiring leadership. But Jim Flaherty — the finance minister of Ontario, its largest and wealthiest province — is poised to make his constituency a model of smaller government and respect for individual freedom.

Flaherty is running to succeed premier Mike Harris at the helm of Ontario's governing Progressive Conservative party in the party's leadership election on March 23. His full-bodied, conservative platform of tax cuts, privatization, and school choice has set the agenda for the contest ... Flaherty first caught the attention of grassroots conservatives with his unexpected announcement in last year's budget of a $3,500 ($2,300 USD) per-child tax credit for parents who send their children to independent schools. The measure, according to Laura Swartley of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for School Choice, is the most generous education tax credit in North America. It alone has won Flaherty the support of social conservatives and minority religious groups. (3)

The quote at the top of the page from Stephen Harper, was in response to Flaherty's private school subsidy. (Hill Times, 2001)

In his 2007 federal budget, he provided "bursaries" for elementary school students.

The Harper government is giving a tax break to families who send their kids to elite private schools, raising the ire of public education advocates. Under a little-noticed measure in last month's budget, scholarships and bursaries to attend elementary and secondary school will now be fully tax exempt. Finance officials estimate the new exemption will mean "significant tax savings" for about 1,000 students – or, by extension, their parents.

Officials insisted that the exemption applies to scholarships for either public or private schools. But they couldn't supply any examples of public schools – which are funded from the public purse and don't charge tuition fees – awarding scholarships or bursaries.

Entering into his majority, Harper has his Katrina; the "global economic crisis", and a record deficit and debt.

His clean sheet that will provide those very big opportunities that Friedman envisioned. And with Mike Harris lap dog, Tim Hudak, poised to become premier in Ontario, and former student of Tom Flanagan, Danielle Smith in Alberta, it will create the perfect storm.

Education, however, will only be one area, where taxpayer money will build, and the corporate sector will profit.

In New Orleans they laid off all 4,700 unionized teachers, with only a handful hired back, but at greatly reduced wages. And the savings of course were not given back to the taxpayers but into the pockets of the already wealthy.

Milton Friedman is giddy in his grave.

Continuation

Milton Friedman and the Chilean Experiment

Milton Friedman and the Destruction of Argentina

Milton Friedman, the Southern Cone and "Authoritarian Democracy"

Raul Prebisch and Developmentalism

Sources:

1. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, By Naomi Klein, Vintage Canada, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-676-97801-8, Pg. 4-7

2. Preston Manning and the Reform Party, By Murray Dobbin, Goodread Biographies/Formac Publishing, 1992, ISBN: 0-88780-161-7, pg. 165-166

3. Looking North: Election time in Canada, By David Curtin, March 18, 2002

The End of Public Healthcare. Are we Really Ready For This?

On May 8th, 2005, then leader of the Opposition, Stephen Harper, made a bold announcement. He promised that if he was elected Prime Minister of Canada, one of the first things on his agenda would be to privatize the Canadian Healthcare System. (1)

This was just a week after he gave a lecture at the Fraser Institute, where he was in fact introduced as Canada's next PM.

He doesn't speak about that now, but then he doesn't really speak about anything of substance. Have his views changed since 2005? Hardly. On a visit to the United States during the debates over Obama's healthcare plan, he was asked by CBS about Canada's healthcare system, which is the envy of many other nations. He told the reporter that he really didn't know much about it, because it was a provincial issue.

The CANADA Health Act and the country's leader claimed not to know much about it? Given that he once headed up the National Citizens Coalition, a group founded to abolish public healthcare in this country, I contend that he probably knows the Canada Health Act better than most.

Then and Now

In the Spring of 2005, many were worried about the direction of our medicare. Preston Manning and Mike Harris had just released a Fraser Institute report calling for more healthcare privatization. The report said that those who could afford it, should have the "freedom" to choose their own healthcare – whether it is for-profit or non-profit.



The report failed to recognize the demise of the non-profit healthcare system for everyone, once for-profit health care is allowed to escalate.

Why should we care? I can give you an example.

When Mike Harris was premier of Ontario he began to introduce user fees. My daughter, who is disabled and on the Ontario Disability Support Program, injured her knee when at a soccer tournament for the Special Olympics. The injury required surgery, and the surgeon recommended physical therapy, during the healing process. But there was a catch. We were told that if she wanted to use the public healthcare system, she would have to go on a waiting list, and it could be months before she was called.

Or, she could attend a private clinic, partially subsidized, which would cost her $15.00 per visit. I know that doesn't sound like much, but the doctor recommended three visits a week. ODSP wouldn't cover it since there was a public option available.

$45.00 per week for someone on a pension, or who is a member of the "working poor", is a fortune. It means roughly $200.00 out of the monthly budget. She couldn't afford it so we paid for her therapy sessions. I was later told by her worker that if we gave her money for this, she was supposed to claim it, to be deducted from her benefit.

I don't think that worker ever recovered from the strip I tore off her. I was livid. She never pursued it further. (they have since laxed the rules but only slightly) Of course what this means, is that only the wealthy will get top rate care, while everyone else is at the mercy of what will eventually be a virtually bankrupt public system.

And in the spring of 2005, the hot topic at Canadian water coolers was the future of something, that we by then took for granted (2). That the letter and spirit of the Canada Health Act guaranteed the same level of medicare for everyone, and that this was now being threatened.

It didn't help the Neocons that the Alberta premier at the time, Ralph Klein, was traversing about praising the fact that there would be lots of money to be made in the industry (3). And now Stephen Harper had come out publicly with his pledge. And while Harper retracted his statement six years ago, what has he done since becoming prime minister to strengthen, or at least not further weaken, our medicare?

Our health minister has snubbed important medical conferences, prompting the question: "Does Canada still have a federal health minister? And, more important, does it have a government with the slightest interest in maintaining the national health-insurance program called medicare? For all practical purposes, the answer to both of those questions is a resounding “No.”

Erroll Mendes, lawyer, author and Professor of law at the University of Ottawa, was interviewed recently about the Contempt of Parliament charges against the Harper government, and he brought up another important point. Renegotiation with the provinces and the Canada Health Act, is scheduled for 2014.

With Stephen Harper refusing to provide the costs of big ticket items like the fighter jets, corporate tax cuts and his new law and order agenda, how will Parliamentarians know whether or not there is any money to sustain medicare?

Which brings us to another concern. Instead of allowing Parliament to examine the issue, Harper has handed it over to the unelected senate. A senate that he now controls.

Healthcare vs Sickcare

Another issue with the corporate sector taking over the industry, is that the focus will be on what Liberal health critic, Carolyn Bennett, calls "sickcare". An auto mechanic doesn't care what kind of car you buy or its gas mileage. Their only interest is fixing it when it breaks down.

With health becoming a for-profit industry, again the focus will only be on fixing you when you break down. We will be reduced to a series of pay scales, based on the plan that we or our employer has purchased. There will be free plans for the poor, but what quality of care will they receive?

But healthcare is about more than just tending the sick. It's also about prevention of illness, and under corporate care, prevention is a word to avoid at all costs.

Those in the medical profession understand the need to eat healthy and maintain a healthy lifestyle. But poverty is one of the root causes of illness. So healthcare must also address feeding and housing the poor, if we want to keep everyone as healthy as possible.

The working poor or those engaged in precarious employment, often have no sick leave plan, so they go to work when they shouldn't, not able to lose even a day's pay. Under a corporate system none of these things will be factored in. The more sick people, the more profit.

Healthcare should not only be an election issue, but it should be the election issue. And remember, just because Stephen Harper no longer discusses it, does not mean that he has changed his plans.

We need to start listening to what's not being said.


Sources:

1. Stephen Harper Promises To Privatize Canadian Healthcare, Lilith News, May 17th 2005

2. What separates a wrestling match from a health care, Globe and Mail, April 28, 2005

3. "Tories to Klein: keep your mouth shut", cupe.ca, April 28, 2005

Cold Case Solved. The Murder of Canada's Media Was Both Bloody and Premeditated

The case always had a prime suspect, Conrad Black; and accomplices, the majority of Canadian journalists and news personalities.

But several clues that were held back, have now been made public and we may finally be able to take this to trial.

Or at least it should go to trial because what happened is criminal. Canadians have been robbed of their voice and history it's story.

The perpetrators of this heinous act must be prosecuted.

The Anatomy of a Crime

Crimes may vary in gravity, complexity, the kind of harm done, the state of mind required to commit a crime and the excuses used to validate the act. Traditionally, however, they are broken down into two parts: the physical called the ‘actus reus’ (Latin for criminal act) and the mental ‘mens rea’ (criminal mind).

I intend to prove that the murder of Canadian media was premeditated and fits all of the criteria of a criminal act, carried out by an organized gang of criminal minds.

The Physical Act: An attempt to change the ideological fabric of the country formerly known as Canada, through genocide and cannibalism.

In 1970, Keith Davey's senate committee on mass media sounded a warning about the increasing concentration of [media] ownership. Eleven years later, with the disappearance of even more newspapers, another federal investigation, this one headed up by Tom Kent, raised the alarm again. Not only were independent newspapers being bought out by such major chains as Southam and Thomson but chains were now swallowing up other chains. (1)

Conrad Black's Hollinger spent half a billion dollars in 1996 alone, gorging itself on Canadian newspapers.

A failure to act: Harm may occur because a suspect does not prevent it. In this way, the Government of Canada became a willing accomplice, by standing by while a criminal act was in progress.

Government remained complicit in this steady erosion of democracy by declining to act on the key recommendations coming out of these [senate] reviews, a press ownership review board, and a Canadian newspaper act. (1)

As a result Black's influence extended to 425 radio stations, 76 TV outlets, and 142 cable stations, and though he eventually sold off his holdings, the trend continued.

Between 1990 and 2005 there were a number of media corporate mergers and takeovers in Canada. For example, in 1990, 17.3% of daily newspapers were independently owned; whereas in 2005, 1% were. These changes, among others, caused the Senate Standing Committee on Transport and Communications to launch a study of Canadian news media in March 2003. (This topic had been examined twice in the past, by the Davey Commission (1970) and the Kent Commission (1981), both of which produced recommendations that were never implemented in any meaningful way.)

The Senate Committee’s final report, released in June 2006, expressed concern about the effects of the current levels of news media ownership in Canada. Specifically, the Committee discussed their concerns regarding the following trends: the potential of media ownership concentration to limit news diversity and reduce news quality. (2)

The victim’s state of mind: Sometimes a person’s guilt will depend on the state of mind of the alleged victim. Some actions are criminal only when performed without consent. In the media's murder, consent was given by our government and our own complacency. But then, murder is murder.

With successive takeovers, more and more Canadian newspaper staff lost their jobs — 1,550 over three years in the Southam chain after Hollinger took over. Hollinger president David Radler, a.k.a. "The Human Chainsaw," radically cuts staff at small-circulation papers to create cash flow for new acquisitions. With fewer journalists on staff, news editors increasingly turn to the copy provided by organizations like the Fraser Institute to fill the "news holes" between advertisements in their papers.

The preference for right-wing copy starts at the top of Hollinger, with CEO Conrad Black and vice-president of editorial Barbara Amiel, whose neo-conservative views are documented in Maude Barlow and James Winter's The Big Black Book: The Essential Views of Conrad and Barbara Amiel Black. As well as running Amiel's weekly column, Black hired his cousin Andrew Coyne and Amiel's ex-husband, George Jonas, to flog their conservative views in Southam papers. David Radler, who has said it is important to have his employees fear him, states flatly that Hollinger papers, on principle, will endorse only free-enterprise parties, explicitly ruling out any paper's support for the NDP. (1)

This is why we get so many reports from bogus groups like the Fraser, the Frontier Centre, The Canadian Taxpayers Federation and the Manning Centre for Destroying Democracy. Not enough staff so we allow them to fill in the blanks.

And this is why many in the media are now simply using copy and photos, produced by the PMO. It's often the only way they can meet their deadlines. It worked well for Mike Harris.

The Criminal State of Mind (Mens Rea): In describing the mental element required for such crimes against democracy, we can see that there was a definite intent and a desired goal, in the murder of Canadian media. Case in point is one victim Saturday Night.

The transformation of Saturday Night magazine after Black bought it has also been a factor in the prevalence of right-wing opinion in the Canadian print media. With former Alberta Report staffer Kenneth Whyte as the magazine's editor, Saturday Night has been serving up a steady diet of Whyte's "advice for the right" columns, mean-spirited critiques of such Canadian heroes as anti—child labour activist Craig Kielburger and Farley Mowat, and articles on why women should be in the home rather than the workforce. Saturday Night gives yet another platform for Southam columnists Andrew Coyne and George Jonas to air their views, as well as to neo-conservative journalists from the Sun newspaper chain, such as David Frum, Michael Coren, and Peter Worthington.

In his biography of Conrad Black, The Establishment Man, published in 1982, Peter C. Newman provided an insight into the fate that would inevitably befall Saturday Night once Black took it over. Newman's book contains the following excerpt from a letter Black wrote to American arch-conservative William F. Buckley on how to change a magazine the way Buckley had transformed National Review:

"I take the liberty of writing to you on behalf of many members of the journalistic, academic and business communities of this country who wish to convert an existing Canadian magazine into a conveyance for views at some variance with the tired porridge of ideological normalcy in vogue here as in the U.S.A. [during the 1970s]. We are aware of the lack in Canada of serious editorial talent of an appropriate political coloration .. . We are, however, people of some means as well as of some conviction, and unless faced by an insuperable economic barrier, intend to persevere with our plans, to execution."

As though the rightward turn of Canada's self-described "most influential magazine" was not enough, the Donner Foundation financed two new right-wing magazines. Next City, established in 1994 with a $1.4-million commitment from the foundation, seems to specialize in eroding compassion for the poor. (1)

Crime Accelerated to Bio-Terrorism: After getting away with murder, the criminals at large are now plotting an even more devious act. They are engaged in bio-terrorism, and it appears that they will be allowed to do so without interference.

A viral strain known as Haemophilus Ruperta Murdochus influenza, or more commonly referred to as the Rupert Murdoch Flu, has been transported from the U.S. in a petri dish and has been allowed to mutate. It will be released on society through Fox News North.

The first stage of contact will be constant attacks on Muslims, women, gays and minorities.

Symptoms will include the desensitizing of those formerly known as Canadians, so that they will be more accepting of constant attacks on Muslims, women, gays and minorities.

The final stages of this virus, before the imminent death of democracy, will be a political atmosphere so toxic that it will not be safe to leave your home without a gas mask.

But all is not lost. There may be an antidote.

A Russian scientist, Ivhad Enoff, has been working on a cure, and is patenting it under the name TurnTheDamnedThingOff.

Sources:

1. The Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen: Canada and Democracy in the Age of Globalization, By Murray Dobbin, James Lorimer & Company, 2003, ISBN: 1-55028-785-0, Pg. 209-211

2. Wikipedia

Redefining Populism: Think Tanks, Foundations and Institutes, Oh My!

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

The Tea Party in the United States is being called a grassroots movement. The voices of the people.

But like the Reform movement, this is just another vehicle for the corporate world, who risked losing their scheduled "Bush tax cuts".

So working through the Republican Party, they have managed to shift the United States even further to the right. To a spot just right of sanity.

But while the Tea Party may be steeped in Orange Pekoe, those funding and benefiting from the clinking teaspoons, prefer champagne and caviar.

According to Linda McQuaig:

Back in 1980, when Ronald Reagan launched his campaign for a right-wing revolution in America, David Koch was a disgruntled billionaire who thought Reagan wasn’t far enough to the right. Today, Koch is still a disgruntled billionaire and still convinced the Reagan revolution hasn’t gone nearly far enough in cutting taxes on the rich, dismantling the welfare state and gutting government controls on business.

But today, as Americans vote in their mid-term elections, Koch is no longer in the political wilderness. After pumping more than $100 million into arch-conservative political organizations over the past 30 years, he (and billionaire brother Charles) now appear close to pushing U.S. politics significantly further to the right — even though the wealthy elite is already richer and more powerful today than it’s been since the 1920s. Through their Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the Koch brothers have micromanaged the rise of the purportedly grassroots Tea Party movement. (1)

And that's not all the Koch brothers have been behind. When an organization founded by one of Harper's MPs, John Weston, and former Stockwell Day supporter, John Carpay, launched attack ads in the US against Obama's healthcare plan, the Koch Foundation, through their Americans for Prosperity, helped to pay the bills. You can read all about it here.

These so-called grassroots movements have been called astroturf, but fake or not, the Tea Party is here to stay.

And using foundations to fund these movements is clever, because it means that while they warble against "taxes" the donations these foundations contribute is tax deductible, so those warbling taxpayers are funding their own demise.

We have the same thing in Canada. The Griffith Foundation for starters, donated $ 100,000.00 tax deductible dollars to the Fraser Institute. (2) The same Fraser Institute that helped to launch the Reform party. Jason Kenney and Rob Anders are both alumni.

And when Stephen Harper came to power he immediately changed the rules to make it even easier for these groups to benefit from our tax dollars.

Just a year after the Fraser's anniversary, Harper was prime minister and it was payback time. Buried in his first budget was a provision to exempt from capital gains tax donations of stock to charity. Adding this new exemption to the existing tax credit for donations to charities means that the donor pays only 40 percent of the dollars he donates. Taxpayers pick up the rest. (3)

In his book Of Passionate Intensity: Right-Wing Populism and the Reform Party of Canada, Trevor Harrison speaks of the assorted think-tanks that helped to advance neoconservatism in Canada. When we were still allowed to call it neoconservatism.

The Fraser Institute was founded in British Columbia in November 1974 by Michael Walker, the son of a Newfoundland miner. Walker, holder of a doctorate in economics from the University of Western Ontario, started the institute with the monetary support of BC's business community, which was still reeling from the NDP's election in 1972. By 1984 the institute was operating on an annual budget of $900,000, funded by some of Canada's largest business interests, including Sam Belzberg of First City Trust, Sonja Bata of Bata Limited, A.J. de Grandpre of Bell Canada, and Lorne Lodge of IBM Canada.

The Fraser Institute also boasts impressive conservative credentials. The institute's authors include Milton Friedman [Ronald Reagan's economic adviser] and Herbert Grubel, while its editorial board includes Sir Alan Walters, former personal economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher. Finally, William F. Buckley Jr, brother-in-law of BC Socred bagman Austin Taylor, is a favourite guest speaker of the institute.

In short, the Fraser Institute is a conservative think-tank heavily funded by the corporate sector. Like the National Citizens' Coalition [Stephen Harper was president of the NCC when he left to run for leadership of the Alliance Party] , the Fraser Institute has steadfastly used its position to advance the neo-conservative agenda, an agenda liberally sprinkled with such Reaganite buzzwords as fiscal restraint, downsizing, and privatization. (4)

We are funding our own demise.

And these "think-tank" "astroturf" groups are growing. Dennis Gruending revealed several new ones, all with ties to Stephen Harper.

· the Manning Centre, created by Preston and his wife Sandra to train people how to succeed at conservative politics;

· the Ottawa-based Institute for Canadian Values, which has as its executive director Joseph Ben-Ami, a former political organizer for Stockwell Day.; and

· the Ottawa-based Institute for Marriage and Family, created by Dr James Dobson’s powerful US Focus on the Family (Canada), to provide socially conservative research and advice.

. the Hamilton-based Work Research Foundation (WRF), vice-president of research, Ray Pennings, was an unsuccessful Canadian Alliance candidate in the
2000 federal election.

The emergence of all these organizations might indicate that Canada is now seen as fertile territory for the think tank industry. If so, we all (and unions especially) should brace for an onslaught of “free market” propaganda. The challenge for progressive groups is provide better information and to distribute it widely within the community. (5)

And then there's the Frontier Centre, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Montreal Economic Institute (Maxime Bernier), the Civitas Society, the Canadian Constitution Foundation. The list is endless.

Yes Folks. We are funding our own demise.

Sources:

1. Fortunes fertilize grassroots, By Linda McQuaig, Toronto Star, November 2, 2010

2. Behind Closed Doors: How the Rich Won Control of Canada's Tax System, By Linda McQuaig, Viking Press, 1987, ISBN: 0-670-81578-7, Pg. 57

3. Harperstein, Straight.com, By Donald Gutstein, July 6, 2006

4. Of Passionate Intensity: Right-Wing Populism and the Reform Party of Canada, By Trevor Harrison, University of Toronto Press, 1995. ISBN: 0-8020-7204-6, Pg. 48-49

5. Conservative think tanks multiply in Canada, By Dennis Gruending, Pulpit and Politics, November 10, 2007

Fraser Institute Paper Reveals That Stephen Harper is Not a Tory

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

Throughout history there are a great many myths, and of course those myths then become facts and those facts become history. But for our time, one of the biggest myths is the labelling of Stephen Harper as a Tory, and his party as conservatives.

Anyone who has ever voted Progressive Conservative in the past, must know in their gut that this party is absolutely nothing like the Progressive Conservative Party that we are familiar with.

Can you imagine the wonderful Dalton Camp, former conservative strategist, ever working with someone like Stephen Harper? When he first learned that there was a movement to unite the Alliance Party (formerly Reform Party) with his conservatives, he was adamantly opposed, suggesting that the two parties had no common ground and that then leader of the Alliance Party, Stockwell Day, was "viewed by most Tories as embedded in the lunatic fringe." (1)

Lawrence Martin recently asked: Is there an old-style Tory in the House?

Is there a moderate Tory left in this land? There are many, of course. It’s just that they have no voice. They might as well be in cement shoes at the bottom of Lake Nipigon. This year, in particular, it has become evident just how much the old Tories of Robert Stanfield and Dalton Camp and Brian Mulroney and Joe Clark have been vanquished.

During their first years of governance, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives paid heed to the views of that progressive breed. But the party’s hard right now appears, with a few policy exceptions, to have assumed control of the agenda. And that agenda is about keeping out boat people, letting in Fox News, building new jails, reviewing affirmative action, killing the gun registry, playing down climate change, revamping the census and giving more voice to social conservatives.

However, I came across a decade old article published for the Fraser Institute, that lays it all out succinctly. Written by Laurence Putnam, it was entitled: An Analysis On The Differences Between the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada & The Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance.

I was a bit confused at first, because the Fraser Institute, with people like Jason Kenney, David Frum and Ezra Levant, worked very hard to unite these parties, and yet clearly this report detailed why such a union was wrong.

This analysis has been prepared in answer to pleas from various political personalities in Canada to unite the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance. It is the goal of this paper to illustrate, with evidence of past elections, voter migration patterns, an examination of each party's culture and historical evidence to prove that any such unity between these two parties would alienate the moderate support base the Progressive Conservative Party enjoys and which must be captured to form a government.

It is the intention of this paper to successfully show how the Reform Party rose to prominence ... and how the Conservatives can work to ensure that movements such as the Canadian Alliance are not allowed to grow in the future.

What Putnam showed was that this would not be about "uniting the right", because the PC Party was not a right-wing party. I had mentioned this before, that in most ways there was little difference between the Liberals and PCs on policy, so elections were always about platform and personality. But the divide between the Reform/Alliance and the PC was a veritable chasm.

And they knew that.

So why did they do it, and why was it so successful?

I remember years ago reading an article in a May, 1939 issue of Liberty Magazine: Why Germany Will Not Go to War. In it the columnist laid out all the reasons why Adolf Hitler would not declare war in Europe. And what I found interesting was that everything predicted came true, and they lost as a result. And that's because what wasn't factored into the prediction was profiteering.

A lot of people stood to become very rich off that war, and they in fact did, including many American corporations. (George Bush's grandfather made his fortune financing the Nazis)

And this union of the right, as erroneously as it was labelled, was poised to make a lot of wealthy people wealthier. That's what neoconservatism is all about. And it's why they plucked Stephen Harper from the National Citizens Coalition, a group financed and run by multi-national corporations.

Stephen Harper himself has said that he got back into politics because he felt that the NCC no longer had any allies in government, with Brian Mulroney gone. And the NCC held his job open for four years, before naming another president. He was now working for them on the inside.

I'm going to break down Putnam's paper into several posts, because there are many startling revelations. I then intend to edit it down for a chapter in my E-Book, but for now the important thing is that Stephen Harper and his people deliberately perpetrated a fraud on Canadians, when they engineered a hostile takeover of the PC Party.

It puts so many past quotes and stories into perspective.

What was revealed to the Fraser Institute was that there were no grounds for a union. So instead they changed their strategy. And for that they went to Tom Flanagan, the Calgary School and founding member of both the Reform Party and Civitas Society, Ted Byfield.

Ted Byfield, the unabashed voice of the West since the Calgary School’s professors were pups, sees it another way – in terms Leo Strauss might have approved. “All these positions which Harper cherishes are there because of a group of people in Calgary – Flanagan most prominent among them,” Byfield says. “I don’t think he knows how to compromise. It’s not in his genes. The issue now is: how do we fool the world into thinking we’re moving to the left when we’re not?” (2)

I guess "you can fool some of the people some of the time", but who are they really fooling now? Harper's base has been reduced to those who know and relish in the fact that he is not a Tory.

The Reform Movement Was Populism, Not Conservatism

Sources:

1. Hard Right Turn: The New Face of Neo-Conservatism in Canada, Brooke Jeffrey, Harper-Collins, 1999, ISBN: 0-00 255762-2, Pg. 381

2. The Man Behind Stephen Harper, by Marci McDonald, From the October 2004 issue of The Walrus

Redefining Populism as Fraser Institute Drafts Policy

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

On August 23, 1971, Lewis F. Powell, then a corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations, wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (1) Outlining the need for a business-financed propaganda infrastructure, he stated:

"Success in defending capitalism lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations”. Over time, this machine would hobble activist governments, undo the social and economic advances of the 1950s and '60s, and put business back in the driver's seat, Powell predicted. (2)

Two months later, President Richard Nixon, endorsed his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration's "hands-off business" philosophy. (1)

The memo would also make news north of the border. The corporate sector in British Columbia became alarmed when an NDP government was elected in 1972, and sprang into action:

In the fall of 1973, Michael Walker was working for the federal finance department when he got a call from an old college friend, Csaba Hajdu. Hajdu's boss, MacMillan Bloedel's T. Patrick Boyle, and other business executives in B.C. were greatly agitated by the NDP government of Dave Barrett and wanted advice on how to bring about its demise. In the spring, Walker met with Boyle, who twenty-three years later is still a Fraser Institute trustee. While a think-tank was not an ideal way to deal with the immediate problem of getting rid of the NDP government, Boyle and his mining-executive friends were apparently willing to take the long view. Walker's pitch was good enough to persuade fifteen of them to hand over a total of $200,000 to get the project started." It was the seed money for the Fraser Institute. (3)

And according to Trevor Harrison:

The Fraser Institute was founded in British Columbia in November 1974 by Michael Walker, the son of a Newfoundland miner. Walker, holder of a doctorate in economics from the University of Western Ontario, started the institute with the monetary support of BC's business community, which was still reeling from the NDP's election in 1972. By 1984 the institute was operating on an annual budget of $900,000, funded by some of Canada's largest business interests, including Sam Belzberg of First City Trust, Sonja Bata of Bata Limited, A.J. de Grandpre of Bell Canada, and Lorne Lodge of IBM Canada.

The Fraser Institute also boasts impressive conservative credentials. The institute's authors include Milton Friedman [Ronald Reagan's economic adviser] and Herbert Grubel, while its editorial board includes Sir Alan Walters, former personal economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher. Finally, William F. Buckley Jr, brother-in-law of BC Socred bagman Austin Taylor, is a favourite guest speaker of the institute. In short, the Fraser Institute is a conservative think-tank heavily funded by the corporate sector. (4)

Canada's neoconservative movement had it's first "think-tank", though certainly not it's last. And it wouldn't be long before they would start moving into government circles:

By 1975, B.C.'s right-wing had once more coalesced, this time under W.A.C. Bennett's forty-four-year-old son, Bill Bennett. Barrett's NDP was defeated by the Socreds. (5)

They stayed in power for several years with the help of the corporate funded Fraser Institute:

As Socred fortunes began to wane, Bennett's political advisers decided upon a marketing strategy that would present Bill Bennett as the 'tough guy' who would straighten out BC's economic problems. The result was his announcement in 1982 of a curb on public sector wages and a freeze on government spending. The economy, however, continued to crumble.

An election was set for 5 May 1983, during which Bennett promised that, if elected, he would continue the policies of moderate restraint practised in 1982. On election night, Bennett's Social Credit party took thirty-five seats (49.8 per cent of the vote) to the NDP'S twenty-two seats (44.9 per cent of the vote).

Before the opening of the new legislature, the Socred cabinet was advised by the Fraser Institute's Michael Walker of the policies it should take to turn the economy around. Guided by Walker's advice, the Socreds set about making British Columbia the 'testing ground for neoconservative ideology.'

On 7 July 1983, Bennett's government introduced both a budget and an astonishing twenty-six bills. Among other things, the bills removed government employees' rights to negotiate job security, promotion, job reclassification, transfer, hours of work and other working conditions; enabled public sector employers to fire employees without cause; extended public sector wage controls; repealed the Human Rights Code; abolished the Human Rights Branch and Commission, the Rentalsman's Office, and rent controls; enabled doctors to opt out of medicare; removed the right of school boards to levy certain taxes; and dissolved the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission."' (5)

They were on a roll, and would continue their mission, guiding both Ralph Klein and Mike Harris, through their steamrolling of social services, and promotion of the corporate sector. Stephen Harper would also seek out the Fraser when he was helping to create the Reform Party, and they continue to guide his policy.

Related:

Redefining Populism: Think Tanks, Foundations and Institutes, Oh My!

Fraser Institute Paper Reveals That Stephen Harper is Not a Conservative

The Fraser Institutes's Role

The Fraser Institute: From Chickens to Iron Ladies

The Fraser Institute, Roger Douglas and Revisionist History

National Citizens Coalition and Other Right-Wing Groups Help Mike Harris

Stockwell Day: Flat Head, Flat Tax, Flat Out Wrong

How to Create a Business-Financed Propaganda Infrastructure

Sources:

1. The Powell Memo: (also known as the Powell Manifesto), Reclaim Democracy, April 3, 2004

2. Harperstein, By Donald Gutstein, Straight.com, July 6, 2006

3. The Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen: Canada and Democracy in the Age of Globalization, By Murray Dobbin, James Lorimer & Company, 2003, ISBN: 1-55028-785-0, Pg

4. Of Passionate Intensity: Right-Wing Populism and the Reform Party of Canada, By Trevor Harrison, University of Toronto Press, 1995. ISBN: 0-8020-7204-6, Pg. 48-49

5. Harrison, 1995, Pg. 51-53

Bush and Harper Climate Change Denial Funded by Oil Companies

During the 2006 Canadian federal election campaign, ads began to flood the airwaves, paid for by a group called Friends of Science, denouncing global warming and slamming the Kyoto protocol. Since these ads aped statements made by Stephen Harper's Conservative Party, many began to wonder just who Friends of Science were.

David McGuinty was baffled when he first heard provocative advertising about global warming in the midst of the 2006 federal election.The radio spots criticized a consumer energy conservation program along with the climate change policies of the government of the day and appeared to come from nowhere, he said.

"I was having to explain an awful lot about climate change at the door, as a candidate," said McGuinty, the Liberal MP for Ottawa South, in an interview. "So when I heard this, I thought, 'Well, why would anybody even run these ads in Ottawa? Why are they going here? And I didn't know they were going across the province in five zones at the time."

The mysterious ads were part of a campaign launched by the Friends of Science - a group formed by retired academics and oil industry insiders... (1)

This group obviously wanted to get Stephen Harper elected, knowing that he had a weak, almost non-existent environmental platform. 'Made in Canada' with few details.

These mysterious ads would become part of a criminal investigation, prompting an internal audit about the anti-Kyoto group's elaborate funding system. An internal audit revealed how donations at a community charity organization flowed through trust accounts for research at the University of Calgary for advertising, lobbying and public relations activities.

Though sixteen pages of the report was blacked out, what we did learn was quite disturbing.

The audit revealed that Morten Paulsen, a veteran Reform and Conservative party strategist who was also a Tory spokesperson during the 2006 campaign, was simultaneously in charge of a consulting firm that received at least $25,000 from the Friends of Science to develop the radio ad campaign and select which cities would be targeted right before Canadians went to the polls. (1)

And from FOS themselves, who openly boasted to have impacted the election:

Before the 2006 election, the Friends of Science pledged in a newsletter to have a "major impact" on the vote through their ad campaign. After Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative party formed a minority government, the group boasted in another newsletter that its campaign "was working." The ads generated 300,000 hits to the group's website in the days leading up to polling day, the Friends of Science said in a January 2006 newsletter. (1)

When asked in the House of Commons about this possible violation of the Canada Elections Act , it garnered the usual response:

"Blah, blah, blah," Baird said in the Commons last week. "(McGuinty) puts on his tinfoil hat and develops these great theories." (1)

But David McGuinty wasn't the only one questioning this and in August of 2006, Charles Montgomery, wrote for the Globe and Mail, that.

Friends of Science has taken undisclosed sums from Alberta oil and gas interests. The money was funneled through the Calgary Foundation, to the University of Calgary and on to the FOS though something called the “Science Education Fund.” All this appears to be orchestrated by Stephen Harper’s long-time political confidante and fishing buddy, U. Calgary Prof Dr. Barry Cooper. It seems the FOS has taken a page right out of the US climate change attack group’s playbook: funnel money through foundations and third party groups to “wipe the oil” off the dollars they receive. (2)

The University of Calgary would break ties with Friends of Science after the scandal:

The University of Calgary has discontinued its relationship with the controversial Friends of Science organization and, after the results of an internal audit released Mon., Apr. 14, the U of C will revise policies related to research funding. But the audit did not determine whether funding from two trust funds at the university for an anti-Kyoto ad campaign was in violation of the Canada Elections Act. (3)

FOS is also connected to the Fraser Institute, through Dr. Timothy Ball.

George W. Bush and the Cato Institute

In the U.S. there are many AstroTurf groups attempting to block any attempt to reduce emissions. (4) A comprehensive Climate Change Denial network.

But perhaps the most influential during the Bush years was the Cato Institute, who while claiming to be non-partisan, are funded in large part by the Koch brothers. The same people behind the Tea Party. According to SourceWatch:

Cato was founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane and Charles Koch, [2] the billionaire co-owner of Koch Industries; the largest privately owned company in the United States. According to Jane Mayer, who authored an August, 2010 article about the Kochs in the New Yorker, "According to the Center for Public Integrity, between 1986 and 1993 the Koch family gave eleven million dollars to the [Cato] institute ... Patrick Michaels, a former Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and an outspoken global warming skeptic.

And Koch Industries did very well under George Bush:

Koch Industries is also a major polluter. During the 1990s, its faulty pipelines were responsible for more than 300 oil spills in five states, prompting a landmark penalty of $35 million from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In Minnesota, it was fined an additional $8 million for discharging oil into streams. During the months leading up to the 2000 presidential elections, the company faced even more liability, in the form of a 97-count federal indictment charging it with concealing illegal releases of 91 metric tons of benzene, a known carcinogen, from its refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas. Koch Industries was ranked number 10 on the list of Toxic 100 Air Polluters by the Political Economy Research Institute in March, 2010.

... After George W. Bush became president, however, the U.S. Justice Department dropped 88 of the charges. Two days before the trial, John Ashcroft settled for a plea bargain, in which Koch pled guilty to falsifying documents. All major charges were dropped, and Koch and Ashcroft settled the lawsuit for a fraction of that amount.

Koch had contributed $800,000 to the Bush election campaign and other Republican candidates. Alex Beehler, assistant deputy under secretary of defense for Environment, Safety and Occupational Health, previously served at Koch as director of environmental and regulatory affairs and concurrently served at the Charles G. Koch Foundation as vice president for environmental projects. Beehler was later nominated and re-nominated by the Bush White House, to become the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Inspector General.

These climate change denial groups are well funded by the oil and gas industry on both sides of the border. As quick as one is exposed, another springs up.

Friends of Science are still operating and Stephen Harper has yet to explain their involvement in his 2006 victory. "Blah, blah, blah" is not an answer.

Sources:

1. Liberals question Conservative link to anti-Kyoto group: David McGuinty was baffled when he first heard provocative advertising about global warming in the midst of the 2006 federal election, By Canwest News Service, April 20, 2008

2. Oil Companies Funding Friends of Science, Tim Ball takes the brunt, Jim Hoggan, DeSmog Blog, August 12, 2006

3. Friends of Science audit released: University looks into policies regarding research funding, By Jon Roe, Features Editor, The Gauntlet, April 17, 2008

4. The Book on Bush: How George W. (mis) Leads America, By Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Penguin Books, 2004, ISBN: 0-670-03273-5, Pg. 16

Under Stephen Harper we are No Longer the People we Think we Are

Canadian author, publisher and political activist, Mel Hurtig, has written a book The Truth About Canada, in which he outlines how the neo-conservative movement has pushed us to the right, and we don't even know it. The rest of the world knows it and they are just shaking their heads in disbelief. How did we let this happen?

"We are no longer the country we think we are, and no longer the people we think we are."

There are a series of lectures available on YouTube, entitled 'Who Killed Canada', which chronicle this movement, from it's beginning to the crisis stage under Stephen Harper.

The video above is part one, and gives an introduction to the infrastructure of the extreme right-wing movement, beginning with the hi-jacking of our media, to the many so-called think-tanks, that provide the 'facts' to that hi-jacked media.

Tasha Kheiriddin, co-author of Canada’s Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution, discusses at length this infrastructure. Kheiriddin was a member of Jason Kenney's Canadian Taxpayers Foundation, and writes for the Fraser Institute and several right-wing newspapers; including the National Post.

Media Ownership and the Radical Right in Canada

Controlling the Spin

Mr. Hurtig begins by discussing the Canadian media and how we now have the greatest concentration of media in the western world. In fact, he states that this would simply not be allowed in any other western democracy.

And since these same media outlets control newspaper, television and radio news; we are essentially only being given one voice. There are few or no alternative views. As stated in the video, a healthy democracy should foster a healthy and independent news media.

I had discussed this back in August, in a posting Conrad Black, Stephen Harper and Media Manipulation, where I provided several commentaries on this phenomenon.

One of my favourite journalists, Lawrence Martin spoke of this. The video quotes him as saying "... the press versus the people - that runs right to the heart of the debate over the future of our country and to the heart of politics."

In an article for the Winnipeg Free Press by Frances Russell, under the heading 'Right-Wing Media covering up political scandal', he also discusses Mr. Martin:

"Lawrence Martin has written several articles about the Canadian media's rightward migration. In a January 2003 column headlined It's not Canadians who've gone to the right, just their media, he quoted an unnamed European diplomat saying "You have a bit of a problem here. Your media are not representative of your people, your values." Too many political commentators are right of centre while the public is in the middle, the diplomat continued. There is a disconnect."

"Martin believes the disconnect began when Conrad Black converted the Financial Post into the National Post, hired a stable of conservative commentators like Mark Steyn, David Frum and George Jonas, bought the centrist Southam chain and turned the entire package into a vehicle to unite Canada's right and retool the country's values to U.S.-style conservatism."

Donald Gutstein , author of a new book called; Not a Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy, also wrote an article in 2005 on the subject, discussing talk shows: Fox News Format Infiltrates Canada

"CanWest's 'Global Sunday' bills itself as "Canada's number one current affairs talk show." But a lot of Canadians won't find their views reflected in the talk.

"Take the show that aired on February 20, featuring a panel discussion on equalization.

"The purpose of equalization is to ensure provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide "reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation."

"The left-wing perspective on equalization is that it helps fund programs that define who we are as Canadians, such as education, health care and social services. Canadians in every province should have roughly equal access to these programs, the left says.

"This perspective was not raised by the panel. Instead, all three panellists offered right-wing perspectives.

"The program's rightward tilt is not accidental. Indeed, Global Sunday's wider purpose may be to shift political discourse to the right. The model for this mission can be found on the Fox News channel and, in particular, the falsely balanced Hannity and Colmes debate show.

"This show pits the aggressive conservative Sean Hannity against the mildly liberal, often conciliatory Alan Colmes in a format "where conservatives outnumber, out-talk and out-interrupt their liberal opponents," as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting explains the strategy.

"Global Sunday follows the same formula, tilting sharply to the right. Progressive and left-wing perspectives on public policy issues are blanked out – they don't seem to exist in Global Sunday's world. (Conservative MP Peter Kent once worked for Global (I believe he is still on their board) and his father Parker Kent, was a long-time employee of the Southam Newspaper Group (Conrad Black), and associate editor of the Calgary Herald (another Conservative rag)) Host Danielle Smith has a long history of advocating for the libertarian right.

"She started her career as an intern at the Fraser Institute, then launched the Canadian Property Rights Research Institute. This short-lived organization was sponsored largely by Alberta ranchers and its goal was to promote private property rights, opposing endangered species legislation and bans on smoking in indoor publicly accessible places.Smith was a natural for this job, having written a turgid essay for the Fraser Institute titled "The Environment: More Markets, Less Government."

(Danielle Smith is now the leader of the Wildrose provincial party in Alberta, and has the backing of the same 'Calgary School' that brought Stephen Harper to power. Is this another Death by Decentralization move?)

The Neanderthal Right-Wing Think Tanks

In the next segment of the video, Mr. Hurtig discusses the so-called think tanks that now provide most of the dubious 'facts' to the media. But as Donald Gutstein , explains in his book called; Not a Conspiracy Theory: How Business Propaganda Hijacks Democracy; these so-called think-tanks are nothing more than PR firms. He suggests that we follow the money.

The Fraser Institute's largest donors come from the oil and gas sector. C.D. Howe is mostly financed by Bay Street and the Council for Chief Executives is pretty much self explanatory. (report prepared for the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, entitled: From Correct to Inspired: A Blueprint for Canada U.S. Engagement calls for annexation of Canada, with regard to the economy, energy resources and the military; and recommends "an integrated, whole of government approach that recognizes shared interests and the reality of deep integration.")

These groups send a press release to the media, that usually ends up on the front page the next day. And of course their priorities are always an end or reduction to social programs like health care, education and the environment; while promoting increased spending for the military and law and order; two areas where they can cash in, rather than spend out.

And of course, while some media reports will offer an alternative viewpoint, by providing sources from more democratic institutes; they will usually precede their name with 'left-leaning', while never using 'right-leaning' with the groups that in Hurtig's view "are so right-wing they are falling off the edge of the globe."

A Harper Majority and Death by Decentralization

In the final brief segment of this video, the lecturer discusses what a Harper majority would like. His statement are not hyperbole, but based on the many articles and interviews with Stephen Harper, before he decided it was prudent to stop revealing his agenda.

In a piece authored with Tom Flanagan, he discusses the fact that the federal government should not handle social programs. All social programs should be privatized, including health care and education; while the federal government should be responsible only for defense and foreign policy.

He has also stated that "Whether Canada ends up with one national government or two governments or 10 governments, the Canadian people will require less government no matter what the constitutional status or arrangement of any future country may be."'. Both of his groups; the National Citizens Coalition and the Northern Foundation, used the motto 'More Freedom Through Less Government'.

Harper has also promoted the Belgian model of decentralization, which is not even working in Belgium.

There was no secret agenda, at least in the fact that it was not really that secret. He wants to dismantle this country and divide the spoils. However, will a dissected country be so willing to go to war for his 'super power wannabe' nation, if they no longer feel they belong? Maybe he didn't think it through.