As we search the globe for any shred of information on our role in Afghanistan, we have just learned something else that should give all Canadians pause and demand that we pull out of there immediately.
Knowing that Stephen Harper has gotten himself mixed up with the Afghan underworld and that the women of Afghanistan claim they will never be happy until every last foreign soldier has left the country, news from Germany is that the Taliban has now infiltrated the Afghan army and are starting to turn on those training them.
You'd never know it from Canadian mainstream media coverage of the war in Afghanistan, of course, but Spiegel Online International reported yesterday that German troops in that country are in a state of near revolt against their commanders. The reason? The danger they face training Afghan soldiers who, in the words of one German trooper quoted by the magazine, "consider us to be infidels who don't belong in their country."
Said another Bundeswehr soldier quoted by the English-language online edition of the German newsmagazine: "One doesn't know anymore if they will suddenly turn their weapons on you." The reason for this angst is the attack last Friday by an Afghan soldier being trained by the Germans that killed three Bundeswehr soldiers and injured six others, some of them critically. The 26-year-old Afghan attacker, who Spiegel reported is believed to be a Taliban sympathizer, was killed in a hail of return fire from the Germans' comrades. With German morale at "rock bottom," the publication said, many Germans soldiers are "now refusing to go on further patrols or missions with Afghan troops."
With the rising sentiment and cries for freedom from corporate rule and viscous dictators, it's not surprising that the Afghan people are also fighting back. We are just not listening to them. Instead we buy into the hype, wear our yellow ribbons, "support the troops" and then go about our daily business.
George Bush and Stephen Harper have always stuck to the line that those we're fighting hate our freedoms. They don't hate our freedoms so much as the fact that we are denying them theirs.
In Lawrence Martin's book Harperland, he says that Stephen Harper ascribes to the neoconservative theory of a Clash of Civilizations. But is that how you view Canada's role?
The wonderful Reverend Curt Anderson of Wisconsin has an op-ed piece in the Huffington Post, that should put all members of the Religious Right/Conservative/Tea Party group to shame.
Because they have joined the ranks of the corporate world, labelling workers as "greedy" and the unemployed as "lazy", when they should go back to the roots of their faith and remember that the Bible and other religious texts, are critical of the wealthy and business elite who wear their riches and power as a cloak of privilege.
Reverend Anderson explains why he is in support of the workers in Wisconsin, because it's what the Bible tells him to do.
My name is Curt Anderson. I am the Senior Minister at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Madison, Wisconsin; and I am on the Board of the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice of South Central Wisconsin. There is one theme that is constant throughout the Bible. In Deuteronomy, we read: "You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether your own people or aliens who reside in your land." In Jeremiah: "Woe to him who makes his neighbors work and does not give them their wages."
There is nothing fair about the governor of Wisconsin's proposal to virtually eliminate collective bargaining for public workers and unilaterally force public employees to start paying for health insurance and contributing to their pensions. This has been proposed without consultation, without bargaining, without even any concept of shared sacrifice.
There are no provisions to close tax loopholes that benefit corporations. There are no proposals to consider even minor tax increases for the wealthiest members of our state. There are no proposals to restructure Wisconsin's income tax system, where the wealthiest sometimes pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than middle-class working families.
Interfaith groups like KAIROS, Anderson's group, Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice, and others, demand social justice. The Religious Right that Stephen Harper has camped out on Parliament Hill represent the very worst in religion, and the reason why so many end up rejecting the Church. They advocate for greed and you don't have to be religious to know that that is just wrong.
Jim Flaherty recently announced that he will be spending $6.5 million to advertise his government's tax policies as helping Canadians. What won't be included in this taxpayer funded blitz, is the fact that taxes only went down for the wealthy, while Canada's working class have seen an increase.
And in Indiana where the Republican government is also trying to push through a union busting agenda, the Democrats have left the state, to avoid having it passed. This is the people fighting back and it's about damn time.
Let's hope we can inspire the same kind of movement in Canada. Where religious organizations, unions, advocacy groups and all Canadians not in support of the Corporate Welfare State, will march together. We are in a unique situation now with an election on the horizon.
They've sent a letter to their supporters claiming to need about a quarter of a million dollars for pre-election advertising (attacks on Michael Ignatieff), while using our money for TV ads and pork.
So here's what you can do. If a Harper MP is in your riding make a little noise. A non-violent protest.
Ask them why they don't get the money from the corporations for that, and instead are using OUR money to buy Harper's re-election.
The way that Goldman Sachs set up the American people, and eventually Canadians, was both clever and sinister. Matt Taibbi likened the scheme to the popular insurance scam known as the "swoop and squat". This is where there is a "mark" driver cut off by one perpetrator, while a second crashes into him. Then both of them collect on the insurance.
By now, most people who have followed the financial crisis know that the bailout of AIG was actually a bailout of AIG's "counterparties" — the big banks like Goldman to whom the insurance giant owed billions when it went belly up. What is less understood is that the bailout of AIG counter-parties like Goldman and Société Générale, a French bank, actually began before the collapse of AIG, before the Federal Reserve paid them so much as a dollar. Nor is it understood that these counterparties actually accelerated the wreck of AIG in what was, ironically, something very like the old insurance scam known as "Swoop and Squat," in which a target car is trapped between two perpetrator vehicles and wrecked, with the mark in the game being the target's insurance company — in this case, the government. (1)
At the height of the housing boom, Goldman Sachs was selling billions in bundled mortgage-backed securities, while also betting against those same securities. In other words they were going to have their cake and eat it too. Cashing in on one end and cashing out on the another, under a deregulation gold mine called the credit default swap.
The video below explains them better than I could, but basically what they were doing was buying insurance on your car and then hoping that you had an accident.
Goldman often "insured" some of this garbage with AIG, using a virtually unregulated form of pseudo-insurance called credit-default swaps. Thanks in large part to deregulation pushed by Bob Rubin, former chairman of Goldman, and Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, AIG wasn't required to actually have the capital to pay off the deals. As a result, banks like Goldman bought more than $440 billion worth of this bogus insurance from AIG, a huge blind bet that the taxpayer ended up having to eat. Thus, when the housing bubble went crazy, Goldman made money coming and going. They made money selling the crap mortgages, and they made money by collecting on the bogus insurance from AIG when the crap mortgages flopped. (1)
But Goldman and others were losing patience. There just weren't enough accidents, so they needed to find a way to accelerate the demise of the unsuspecting victims of a head on crash. Enter John Paulson:
Paulson had been looking for an opportunity to bet that the housing bubble would burst. There was enough information around about the shoddy nature of many of the subprime mortgage deals—with clients who had little in the way of assets, income, or employment—that a number of close observers realized a lot of homeowners" would soon be in dire straits, unable to meet their monthly payments. In the betting parlours of Wall Street, this represented a chance to make some serious money.The best vehicle for betting against the housing market,as Paulson and a few other Wall Streeters had figured out, was to take out "insurance" on packages of mortgages that had been bundled together and sold as a stock.
.... This "insurance"—known as a credit default swap (CDS)—was simply a bet. One frustration for Paulson was that there just weren't enough of these stocks, known as collateral debt obligations (CDO), to bet against. So he decided to become proactive. He approached a number of investment banks with the request that they create more CDOs to sell to clients, so that he could then take out insurance betting these would fail. The arrangement Paulson had in mind was rife with potential conflicts of interest. He clearly wanted to help pick the mortgages that would make up the new CDOs. And he would obviously favour particularly risky subprime mortgages, thereby increasing the likelihood that the CDOs would become worthless and he would be able to collect on the "insurance" he had taken out.
Bear Stearns, the giant investment bank where Paulson had once served as managing director, said no to his scheme. But Goldman Sachs agreed to the arrangement, providing Paulson with his dream opportunity: a chance to bet on toxic CDOs worth about $5 billion. (2)
In other words, Paulson was driving one of the perp cars, while Goldman Sachs steered the other into the path of the victim vehicle, AIG. You can see it coming, can't you?
So what does this have to do with us?
Well when they were trying to create a tidy bundle of toxic paper, they came knocking on our door, and we were ripe for the picking. Jim Flaherty was now our minister of finance and his deputy minister was Goldman Sachs employee, Mark Carney.
In the first half of this year [2008], as the sub-prime mortgage crisis was exploding in the United States, a contagion of U.S.-style lending practices quietly crossed the border and infected Canada's previously prudent mortgage regime. New mortgage borrowers signed up for an estimated $56-billion of risky 40-year mortgages, more than half of the total new mortgages approved by banks, trust companies and other lenders during that time ....
The doors had been opened wide two years before, when on May 1, 2006, AIG registered as a lobbyist and:
On May 2, 2006, in his first budget, Mr. Flaherty announced that not only would Ottawa guarantee the business of U.S. insurers, it was doubling the guarantee to $200-billion.
$200 billion dollars ripe for the picking and backed by the Canadian taxpayer. And not long after, Jim Flaherty allowed derivatives (credit default swaps) to infiltrate our sound financial system, starting with our Canada Pension Plan.
... the announcement this week that the CPP Investment Board, the team that manages Canadian Pension Plan investments, has been freed from restrictions that limited its use of derivatives gives us pause. The rule that has been repealed required that the board use derivatives only for purposes of hedging risk and that it hold other assets to back any derivative investment.
Warren Buffet, whose remarkable record as an investor made him the world's second-richest man and earned him the moniker Oracle of Omaha, once described derivatives as time bombs and "financial weapons of mass destruction."
"Ticking time bombs" and "financial weapons of mass destruction".
Can you see it coming? The Canadian taxpayer driving merrily along, with Mark Carney and Goldman Sachs in the car behind, and Jim Flaherty with AIG ready to cut us off?
This is the third in a series of how Jim Flaherty and Goldman Sachs have all but destroyed our banking system. Only taxpayer funded advertising is keeping Canadians in the dark, as they are led to believe that this government has had a steady hand on the wheel.
What they don't tell you is that the hand is on the wheel of the car about to crash into us.
When Guy Giorno resigned as Harper's chief of staff, so that a Bay street lobbyist could move in and ram the F-35's down our throats, he said it was because he wanted to "spend more time with family".
I laughed and laughed.
Almost immediately it was announced that he had taken a position with the university of Toronto and will be heading up Stephen Harper's ugly re-election campaign. (Giorno can only do ugly. He has even made nuns cry) Part of the neocon movement is to shift universities to the right.
“It’s an ethical duty to refrain from legitimizing military at a time when it’s been about 10 years now that Canadian military has been occupying Afghanistan,” said Jacob Nerenberg. Nerenberg, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, was one of the organizers of a Feb. 2 protest against military recruitment on the institution’s campus.
Another story we should be paying close attention to, as Stephen Harper is trying to make Canada the country of manly things. And yes I know women are in the military too, but we're all about guns and killing now.
It will take all of us to move this country back to the way it was before the five years of Steve.
I haven't seen anything like this since the civil rights movement of the 1960's.
A change is gonna' come.
Stephen Harper is urging the Libyan government to stop attacking the demonstrators. How hypocritical. Does he forget his G-20 fiasco? He needs to just sit down and shut up.
This is a people's movement and he is not people.
We are lucky in Canada that we won't have to resort to bloodshed to oust our dictator. We will do it with an election.
The UK Guardian is wondering where Gaddafi will be exiled. With all of the peoples' movement across the globe, there will be fewer friendly nations.
This is the Wiki generation, tired of media spin and corrupt governments. Tired of being told that corporations come before citizens. The Social Welfare State against the Corporate Welfare State.
