Showing posts with label Green. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Green. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Blogging Green Day

Bloggers Unite - Blog Action Day

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

Blog Action Day is about MASS participation. That means we need you! Here are 3 ways to participate:


blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , ,

, , , ,
, , ,
, , , , , , , , ,
, , ,, , , ,
, , ,

Monday, September 03, 2007

Industrial Ecology

Another conservative climate change denier attempts to paint left wing ideas and environmentalism as reactionary.



The concept of "nature" is a romantic invention. It was spun by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century as a confabulated utopian contrast to the dystopia of urbanization and materialism. The traces of this dewy-eyed conception of the "savage" and his unmolested, unadulterated surroundings can be found in the more malignant forms of fundamentalist environmentalism.

At the other extreme are religious literalists who regard Man as the crown of creation with complete dominion over nature and the right to exploit its resources unreservedly. Similar, veiled, sentiments can be found among scientists. The Anthropic Principle, for instance, promoted by many outstanding physicists, claims that the nature of the Universe is preordained to accommodate sentient beings - namely, us humans.

Industrialists, politicians and economists have only recently begun paying lip service to sustainable development and to the environmental costs of their policies. Thus, in a way, they bridge the abyss - at least verbally - between these two diametrically opposed forms of fundamentalism. Still, essential dissimilarities between the schools notwithstanding, the dualism of Man vs. Nature is universally acknowledged.


Quoted by The Economist, Daniel Esty of Yale, the leader of an environmental project sponsored by World Economic Forum, exclaimed:

"Why hasn't anyone done careful environmental measurement before? Businessmen always say, 'what matters gets measured'. Social scientists started quantitative measurement 30 years ago, and even political science turned to hard numbers 15 years ago. Yet look at environmental policy, and the data are lousy."


However we do know how to measure environmental impacts of capitalism, and we can reduce them through Industrial Ecology. In fact that was how industrial capitalism boomed during WWII, it reduced, reused and recycled. The fact is that capitalism needs to adapt, or die. Thus IE is a closed loop system based on biology and ecology. While technology continues to adapt itself in an organic fashion as well. But in order to overcome these contradictions we need to move beyond Green Industrialism to social ecology.

Industrial ecology is the shifting of industrial process from linear (open loop) systems, in which resource and capital investments move through the system to become waste, to a closed loop system where wastes become inputs for new processes.

Industrial ecology proposes not to see industrial systems (for example a factory, an ecoregion, or national or global economy) as being separate from the biosphere, but to consider it as a particular case of an ecosystem - but based on infrastructural capital rather than on natural capital. It is the idea that if natural systems do not have waste in them, we should model our systems after natural ones if we want them to be sustainable.

Along with more general energy conservation and material conservation goals, and redefining commodity markets and product stewardship relations strictly as a service economy, industrial ecology is one of the four objectives of Natural Capitalism. This strategy discourages forms of amoral purchasing arising from ignorance of what goes on at a distance and implies a political economy that values natural capital highly and relies on more instructional capital to design and maintain each unique industrial ecology.

How does an industrial facility measure its impact on the surrounding community?

And with a voluntary commitment to sustainable practices, can it improve its environmental, economic and social "footprint" over time?

These are the questions the Washington Department of Ecology and Simpson Tacoma Kraft Company, LLC will explore under a new partnership called the "Industrial Footprint Project." The Tacoma pulp and paper mill has volunteered, along with three other pulp and paper mills in the state, to provide baseline data to Ecology on a range of environmental, economic and social indicators.

Working with a consultant, stakeholders and the participating mills, Ecology will use the data to create a scoring system to establish a "footprint" measurement for each facility. The footprint will serve as a baseline to help companies set targets for improving over time.

Environmental data to be collected includes waste streams, recycling, emissions, water consumption and purchase of raw materials. One part of the project will be an energy challenge-asking each facility to voluntarily reduce their energy usage. On the economic side, some data analyzed will include jobs provided and the costs of good and services. Social indicators may include community involvement, health and safety records or good neighbor efforts.

Simpson Tacoma Kraft Company is an integrated pulp and paper manufacturing mill located on the Commencement Bay waterfront in Tacoma, Washington. It produces upwards of 1300 tons per day of bleached and unbleached packaging-grade paper and unbleached kraft pulp. About one-third of the fiber used comes from recycling old corrugated containers.


SEE:

Capitalism Is Not Sustainable





Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , ,

, , ,
, , , , , ,
,
, , , , ,
, , , ,
, , , , , ,
, , , , , , , ,

Friday, July 06, 2007

Bio-Fuel B.S.

Another excellent post on the real story behind bio-fuels.

Biofuels: The Five Myths of the Agro-fuels Transition

The agro-fuel transition closes a 200-year chapter in the relation between agriculture and industry that began with the Industrial Revolution. Then, the invention of the steam engine promised an end to drudgery. However, industry’s take-off lagged until governments privatized common lands, driving the poorest peasants out of agriculture and into urban factories. Peasant agriculture effectively subsidized industry with both cheap food and cheap labor. Over the next 100 years, as industry grew, so did the urban percentage of the world’s population: from 3% to 13%. Cheap oil and petroleum-based fertilizers opened up agriculture itself to industrial capital. Mechanization intensified production, keeping food prices low and industry booming. The next hundred years saw a three-fold global shift to urban living. Today, the world has as many people living in cities as in the countryside. [10] The massive transfer of wealth from agriculture to industry, the industrialization of agriculture, and the rural-urban shift are all part of the “Agrarian Transition,” the lesser-known twin of the Industrial Revolution. The Agrarian/Industrial twins transformed most of the world’s fuel and food systems and established non-renewable petroleum as the foundation of today’s multi-trillion dollar agri-foods complex.

The pillars of the agri-foods industry are the great grain corporations, e.g., ADM, Cargill and Bunge. They are surrounded by an equally formidable phalanx of food processors, distributors, and supermarket chains on one hand, and agro-chemical, seed, and machinery companies on the other. Together, these industries consume four of every five food dollars. For some time, the production side of the agri-foods complex has suffered from agricultural “involution” in which increasing rates of investment (chemical inputs, genetic engineering, and machinery) have not increased the rates of agricultural productivity—the agri-foods complex is paying more and reaping less.

Agro-fuels are the perfect answer to involution because they’re subsidized, grow as oil shrinks, and facilitate the concentration of market power in the hands of the most powerful players in the food and fuel industries. Like the original Agrarian Transition, the present Agro-fuels Transition will “enclose the commons” by industrializing the remaining forests and prairies of the world. It will drive the planet’s remaining smallholders, family farmers, and indigenous peoples to the cities. It will funnel rural resources to urban centers in the form of fuel, and will generate massive amounts of industrial wealth.

See

Real Costs of Bio-Fuels

Conrad Black and ADM

Bio Fuels = Eco Disaster

GMO News Roundup

Lost and Found

Boreno is Burning

Agribusiness

Desertification

BioFuel and The Wheat Board

The Ethanol Scam: ADM and Brian Mulroney

ADM

Wheat Board

Farmers



ind blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday, July 05, 2007

The Carbon Market Myth

Once again capitalism tries to make a buck off the environmental crisis it created. In this case it is carbon markets.

In Canada the dispute over a domestic carbon exchange, linked to the stock exchange, is between Quebec which supports Kyoto in order to get the carbon exchange to locate in Montreal, while the Conservatives refuse to play in the carbon market, disadvantaging the TSX.


While the Tories talk about Carbon credits going to Russia, the reality is that the carbon market is housed in the Chicago commodity exchange. It is a non starter when it comes to actually reducing green house gases.
Instead of being some futuristic market it is a return to the state monopoly mercantilism of the 17th Century.

The carbon market is unique in that the commodity traded derives its value primarily from its ability to meet the requirements set by an environmental regulator. There is also a market for voluntary offsets to emissions, but this market is small and unlikely to ever represent a significant piece of the total carbon trading pie (the World Bank estimates (PDF document) that the EU ETS, the only regulations-based emissions trading market in the world, accounted for 99% of total market value in 2006).

The problem with this is that governments have a long history of messing things up when they get involved in any industry. For instance, in Europe, the market for phase one emission allowances took a massive hit after it became clear that EU governments had over-allocated emissions to shield their national industries from the full effects of strict emissions caps. Besides effectively neutralizing the economic incentive to innovate and reduce emissions, this seriously shook the market's confidence in the ability of governments to uphold the necessary conditions for an effective and efficient carbon market to develop.



See:

Corporate America Greener Than Harper


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

, , ,

, , , , , ,
,
, , , , ,
, , , ,
, , , , , ,
, , , , , , , ,

Monday, May 14, 2007

Rex, Greg and Jeff

Compare and contrast. I am including both columns on Jeff the Anarchist Civil Servant arrest. Rex Murphy's from the Globe and Mail is behind a subscription wall, and Greg Westons from the Sun, will disappear eventually into the Canoe Archives.

What is interesting is that they take two polar opposite positions, which reflects the conflict between opposing view's of what the political arrest of Jeff means.

As the Globe and Mail online Poll of its readers show;

Globe poll: Is it acceptable to leak?

Is it acceptable for a bureaucrat or employee to leak sensitive internal documents?

Always

405 votes (2%) 405 votes

Only if it's in the public interest

4246 votes (23%) 4246 votes

Never

13810 votes (75%) 13810 votes

Total votes: 18461



Rex joins the Blogging Tories in supporting Statism, and Greg joins the Progressive Bloggers in denouncing the arrest as the actions of an authoritarian regime in Ottawa and a political police force that is up to its neck in its own scandals. See: Busted

Rex works for CBC that creature the Blogging Tories hate with a passion only to be matched with their hatred for the CRTC and Wheat Board.

Greg was their boy for many years when he wrote about the Liberal government, and the Sun Chain is the right wings original newspaper voice before the creation of the National Post.

How times have changed, Rex of course is Latin for King, and so his sympathies lie with King Harper and his autocracy.

Greg is consistent in his criticism of the powers that be, whether Liberals or Conservatives, the government must be scrutinized by the fourth estate, especially when it is as secretive and autocratic as the Harpocrites.

Ironically this is what happens when you contract out public sector jobs, you lose control over whom you hire, and how the official secrets act affects them as a third party. But the media has paid less attention to the fact that this temporary worker had spent five years on the job, with no union protection, no rights, and yet is expected to abide by the rules applied to full time, permanent employees of the state.

Instead the media and folks like Rex and others focus on the fact Jeff is in an anarchist punk band called the Suicide Pilots and their DIY CD depicts a plane crashing into parliament. Now punk bands will be next on the Governments new anti-terrorism campaign list, look out Warren Kinsella.

Rex in many ways echo's the Globe editorial published the same day. The Globe Editors seem to equate the faxing of the Conservatives Kyoto musings as the equivalent of leaking the Budget or plans on Income Trusts, which of course it was not.

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Jeffrey Monaghan thinks the authorities went too far when they slapped handcuffs on him in front of his co-workers, on allegations he had leaked the federal government's green plan to the media. Maybe he has a point. But so does the government.

To be sure, the dramatic and highly visible arrest of the 27-year-old contract worker at Environment Canada smacked of grandstanding. Perhaps they did want to make a very public example of Mr. Monaghan, as a warning to any other low-level civil servants who might have loose lips.

But Mr. Monaghan's protestations in his own public show Thursday - he held a press conference on Parliament Hill - had a hollow ring to them.

Though he admitted to nothing, he took the government to task for developing an environmental plan that undermines Canada's commitments under the Kyoto accord, and insinuated that the green plan is a deceitful public-relations ploy. His statement suggested that - in the abstract - anyone who might have leaked this document was doing so as a public service and an act of conscience, and that a government pursuing legal recourse against such a leak was engaging in partisan bullying.

Hogwash.

Certainly there is a problem with any government using strong-arm tactics to prevent potential whistleblowers from going public with discoveries of improprieties on the part of government officials. But despite Mr. Monaghan's arguments regarding Canada's Kyoto commitments, this was hardly a case of blowing any whistles. The government had made it clear that Canada wouldn't be able to live up to the letter of Kyoto long before the green plan was released.

What the leak did was put potentially financial-market-sensitive information in the hands of a select group of recipients ahead of its broader public dissemination, and that's a serious act. The plan could potentially have a significant impact on the future profits of companies in several industries, and it could have been controversial enough to potentially bring down the government, something that would have shaken the Canadian stock and bond markets and the country's currency. The government has an obligation to ensure that such market-sensitive policy documents be disseminated in a timely, fair and appropriate manner to all potential market participants. The leak seriously undermined this.

It is not overkill to investigate and arrest people allegedly involved in such an illegal leak. Regardless of whether they felt their acts served a greater good, there are consequences to such acts of conscience, and anyone committing them should be prepared to pay the price. Mr. Monaghan said in his statement that he believes "very strongly" in Canada's founding principles of peace, order and good governance. If so, he must also understand that potentially criminal acts must be investigated and, as appropriate, punished regardless of the motivation of the perpetrators.




Blow the whistle on this punk

Headshot of Rex Murphy

Jeff Monaghan. Anarchist or civil servant? At work, he's Clark Kent, a white-shirt and tie-wearing, clean-shaven civil servant.

Off-hours he's Superman, an anarchist drummer in a punk band that's known by the delightfully endearing name of The Suicide Pilots. The white shirt is forsaken, and I dare say wearing a tie in any venue likely to showcase the Suicide Pilots might be grounds for ostracism or worse.

You can see from the website of his band a cartoon of a small plane hovering above the Parliament buildings -- an image that, in these post-9/11 days, attached to a band called Suicide Pilots, loses any Disneyesque flavour it might otherwise be said to claim.

The guy who showed up at the press conference Thursday, raging against the Harper machine, and sputtering on about the vengeful government, a witch hunt, intimidation and centralization (this last a bit of a puzzle) could have walked out of a Canadian Tire commercial (the pen-in-a-shirt-pocket nine-to-fiver who cheers the busy customers on their way). He could have been what the Clark Kent guise was meant to suggest, just another bland, innocuous, politically neutral civil servant -- who had been set upon most outrageously by the stern fascists of the Harper government.

But, as his remarks and tone at the press conference emphatically declared, he was anything but. He may have been a temp civil servant but, very plainly, he was not neutral or non-political as, so many seem to have forgotten, all civil servants are supposed to be. Mr. Monaghan was the very cliché of that dreary type -- the self-appointed angry activist.

He seemed under the delusion that his views on the Kyoto accord, for example, carry the same -- or rather, superior -- weight to those of the minister and the government he is presumed, civilly, to serve. And, by implication at least, that he as the temporary employee of the government clipping service, has both the qualifications to make judgments on the judgments of his elected masters.

I'd make a guess too because the subject of the leak was Kyoto, and because Kyoto is the very blessed Eucharist of all that is politically correct these days, he probably feels the issue would give him moral leverage for the deed he is alleged to have performed.

Well, it doesn't. Gushy feelings about the planet confer no moral authority whatsoever. It's the elected crowd who get to decide things. It's voters who decide who's elected. The civil service is there to administer what is decided. Confound these roles and you have . . . well, anarchy.

The press conference showed him offended, outraged and angry at the Harper government because of their environmental policies. Well, so what? Is there a new code in play in the public service? Do civil servants get to choose which policies to serve or confound based on their emotional temperature each day they show up at work?

Contrary to Mr. Monaghan, the public service isn't a freelance association of self-proclaimed Gandhi's, who get to go all-crusader, when one of their pet peeves doesn't show up formulated as they would like to see it in cabinet papers. If Mr. Monaghan leaked -- let's not call it whistle-blowing -- it is callow self-indulgence of the political kind.

The cops had come earlier in the week and walked him out in handcuffs. A very punk thing, in this context, it strikes me for the cops to do. Cops have humour too. Perhaps it was more irony than an attempt to intimidate. But if intimidation was the goal, it surely had a short shelf life, because in 24 hours Mr. Monaghan had the mother of all press conferences on Parliament Hill.

We have civil servants who are NDP, Tory, Liberal, Green and, yes, anarchist. In the life of every government it is axiomatic that there will be thousands and thousands of civil servants who disagree, as intensely as Mr. Monaghan, with the policies they are called upon to execute. Their disagreement with those policies, in our system, is precisely irrelevant. They may vote how they wish. But they cannot, should not, must not assume their disagreement, their judgments on policy, give them any authority whatsoever to contest those policies -- as civil servants.

There are many options for civil servants who find themselves, however insignificantly, serving the interest of government policies they dislike. Quit and run against the government. Join the Greens. Canvass in the next election. Write a protest song.

But as long as you're wearing the drab white shirt and tie, getting paid to clip newspapers, clip newspapers. That's your pay grade. That's your job. That's your duty.

The moral of this story, if it has one, is simple: Play punk in your own band.

REX MURPHY

Commentator with The National and host of CBC Radio's Cross-Country Checkup

Greg Weston

Sun, May 13, 2007

Civil servant put on parade

n the latest chapter of Stevie in Wonderland, the Conservative promise of open and accountable government is fulfilled by RCMP goons slapping handcuffs on a young federal temp and hauling him off in front of his co-workers, all over a leaked piece of Tory propaganda.

If nothing else, the incident befitting any friendly police state should certainly help Stephen Harper convince voters that the Conservatives have no hidden agenda.

The supposed crime that demanded the use of police restraints on 27-year-old Jeffrey Monaghan was faxing a reporter a couple pages of draft bumpf from the Conservatives’ latest environmental plan several weeks before the official announcement.

At worst, this had the effect of lessening the incredible national suspense that had been mounting in anticipation of the all-important government press release and ministerial photo op, in case you missed them.

So odious was this alleged act of felonious faxing, so damaging was it to the state, Monaghan was questioned and released without being charged.

All of which is almost funny: For months, we have been hearing horror stories involving the highest levels of the RCMP, revelations of lies, coverups and missing millions from the Mounties’ pension fund.

Did any of the country’s top cops responsible get yanked off their high horses in handcuffs? No way. They all got promoted with performance bonuses.

Sponsorship scandal

And how about all those great Canadians responsible for the sponsorship scandal? Did the RCMP march into their government offices and slap the cuffs on even one of them? Nope. For a long time, the Mounties wouldn’t even investigate.

So why all the handcuffs and Hollywood high drama over a media leak of some public relations poop, little more than a sneak peek at the Harper government’s environmental plan to save the planet and Conservative votes?

Monaghan is certainly no dark operative out to subvert Harper’s government and spousal cat collection.

By his own account, he comes into work at 5 a.m. every day to assemble a package of press clippings for the bosses at Environment Canada, a job he describes as “the lowest ranking temp employee in the department, possibly in the entire government.”

The information that got leaked was hardly spilling national security secrets to the terrorists, nor even the stuff of insider-trading on the stock markets.

In effect, the story was that the Conservatives’ new plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions would be tougher than their first kick at the smokestack last fall, but not as stringent as environmental groups would like. Stop the presses.

For his part, Monaghan has no doubt why he was led off in handcuffs: “The spectacle of my arrest, the subsequent RCMP press release and the prepared statements from Environment Canada, including minister (John) Baird, have been crafted to bully public servants whom they, in a paranoid fit, believe are partisan and embittered.”

It other words, the Harper government is engaging in good old-fashioned intimidation of public servants — open your mouth to the media, and the Mounties will haul you off to jail.

This type of attempted message control, of course, is everything the prime minister and his press office have been striving for, save perhaps one additional detail — they would really like if the Mounties would throw the cuffs on reporters, too.

It is also possible Monaghan was bitten by environment minister Baird, who may well be one of the government’s most rabid anti-leak freaks.

Last year, when Baird was still in charge of Treasury Board, we gave our readers an advance preview of a federal report to parliament that he was scheduled to release a few days later. It’s what we do.

The report had next to nothing to do with Baird or his department, but he went ballistic about the apparent leak anyway.

The day after our story ran, the minister buttonholed me at a social function, and told me he had already torn a strip off the official Baird was (wrongly) convinced had been the leaker. “I told him he would pay.”

The whole episode struck me as inappropriate at the time, all the more so when the official he had supposedly berated on the phone denied even talking to Baird.

Whatever the reasons the government and RCMP went beyond reason this week, whoever leaked bits of Baird’s beloved green plan was asking for trouble.

Was it worth internal discipline? Definitely. A firing offence? Perhaps.

But an RCMP raid, handcuffs, and the threat of prison time are, as Monghan said, “without precedent in their disproportionality; they are vengeful; and they are an extension of a government-wide communications strategy pinned on secrecy, intimidation and centralization.”



Thursday, May 10, 2007

Busting A Green Anarchist

Temporary worker; Jeff Monaghan , who was publicly arrested and taken out in handcuffs from his workplace, for leaking a draft of the Governments green plan, is an anarchist.

Clearly someone in the PMO knew this and ordered the arrest in order to smear the Environmental movement as being 'anarchists'.
Government defends arrest of public servant

We are after all dealing with a government of so called self professed Libertarians who know well the political mileu they exist in, which includes anarchists. They know it far better than their Liberal predecessors in fact.

And as such being our new Conservative Law and Order government are shamelessly using the bugaboo of the apprehended threat of 'anarchism' to justify this overkill on a leak of a government draft of their environmental plan.

I would suggest that they pinpointed
Jeff Monaghan deliberately to send a chill not only through the Ministry of the Environment but all government departments. And now they will use his being an anarchist to further the smear job they plan. After all originally the media reported that John Baird issued a fax saying they released the plan by mistake.

After all his arrest by the RCMP is not a usual bust, nor one that the State Police Force would initiate themselves. They had to have been informed as to who had leaked the governments green plan . Ask yourselves this, why did they not arrest a predominant journalist instead, as they have done in the past when it came to leaks. That is they were informed as to whom the government had suspicions had leaked the document.

In his press conference today
Jeff Monaghan said as much, while not saying he was the source of the leaked information. It is interesting that the MSM refers to hims as a "a federal bureaucrat", a "civil servant", when in fact these are political appointments and jobs covered by the Federal Labour Relations Act.

He is in fact none of these, he is but a lowly temporary worker, whose position may or may not carry the weight of being a civil servant or bureaucrat, since he is dispensable.

His is a job that can be easily replaced day by day, which was the point of introducing temporary workers into the civil service, to reduce costs. It is part of the Neo-Con Reinventing Government scheme, ironically introduced by the Liberals, which sees the reduction of the civil service from career occupations to contract jobs, in order to save the government money on paying less in benefits ( they still pay the same in wages except that the wages go to a Padrone not the worker).

He is neither a civil servant nor a bureaucrat nor even one who may have been covered by the governments own secrecy code applied to the civil service, he is a Temporary or Contract worker. A worker hired by a third party that contracts out workers to fill government jobs. Ironically he worked in this position for four years, which should have made him a public servant, but he was denied his rights to that job description, which would have made him federal employees subject to the rules and regulations of the state and to the right to belong to the federal Public Service Union.

As such he was not granted these rights, since the State decided to contract out his job to save money. So did they have any right to arrest him? Apparently not, since they let him go and he held a press conference exposing them.

In order to get around the conditions of work under the Canada Labour Act, which covers federal employees, the government contracts out work to temporary labour agencies. This means their workers get lower wages than PSAC employees, are not covered by the Labour Relations Act, and are not subject to the same security and secrecy provisions of other public sector workers.

You can't have it both ways, which is what the Conservatives forgot in this case. And thinking they actually had a federal employee who leaked their Green Plan mistakenly sent the RCMP after a temporary worker. And they identified him as an Anarchist, which means this was a political arrest. He was arrested only days after he was profiled in the Ottawa Citizen for his role in Ottawa's Anarchist Bookstore.

Ottawa's anarchist bookshop a spot for 'fringe' thinkers to gather

Exile Infoshop opens on Bank Street to offer alternative media, resources

Garrett Zehr, with files from Bruce Ward, The Ottawa Citizen

Published: Thursday, May 03, 2007

But Jeff Monaghan, a member of the group's organizing collective, said the project is much more than just another bookstore.

"This is a community space," he said. "Infoshops are part of a much larger social movement, putting complex theories of social equality into practice and identifying with related movements and struggles demanding freedom and dignity."




What makes Jeff admirable is that he understands this, and in his press conference today exposed this hypocrisy. The fact temporary workers are being used to replace long term public service positions, he worked in his position for four years, that the government selectively uses secrecy to repress information available to the public.

Clearly the government of Stephen Harper is far more Stalinist than Libertarian and for exposing that again, post Garth Turner, we have Jeff to thank .

Unfortunately his arrest shows that Anarchism is still considered a threat to the State by statists.

Government worker Jeff Monaghan, an employee at Environment Canada, was arrested and led away in handcuffs from his office early Wednesday as co-workers looked on. At a news conference in Ottawa on Thursday, Monaghan called it a "politically engineered raid of my workplace."

"The spectacle of my arrest, the subsequent RCMP press release and the prepared statements from Environment Canada, including [Environment Minister John] Baird, have been crafted to bully public servants," he said.

Monaghan, 27, also called the proposed charges "vengeful" and an "extension of a government-wide communication strategy pinned on secrecy, intimidation and centralization."

Baird said the arrest was a signal to other government employees that leaks of information wouldn't be tolerated.

But Monaghan, whose job was to monitor news reports about the government, said Thursday the proposed charges are "without precedent" in the extent to which they are disproportionate to the alleged offence.

On Thursday, he fired back at his accusers, calling the proposed charges a "profound threat to the public interest." He said they're part of a Tory communications strategy "pinned on secrecy, intimidation and centralization."

"The spectacle of my arrest, the subsequent RCMP press release, and the prepared statements from Environment Canada, including minister Baird, have been crafted to bully public servants whom they, in a paranoid fit, believe are partisan and embittered," Monaghan told a news conference.

He never admitted to the leak, but made it clear that he was profoundly opposed to the government's handling of the climate-change file. For four years he had worked on contract at Environment Canada, reading media articles and writing analyses of what they contained.

At the same time, Monaghan was helping to open an anarchist bookstore in downtown Ottawa that lists as its beliefs ``egalitarianism, co-operation and a collective struggle against abuses of power."

He said the government has undermined its legal commitment under the Kyoto agreement on climate change, and tried to "fool the public" into thinking otherwise through a carefully crafted public relations strategy. He said Environment Canada officials he worked with dutifully went along with the strategy even when it crossed the line into partisan activities.

"Our society knows the threat presented by the changing climate, global warming, and the rapidly increasing growth of industrial emissions," Monaghan said. "We deserve real action, not cynically calculated PR campaigns and witch-hunts on public servants."

Depending on who you talk to, the 27-year-old anarchist is either a victimized whistleblower or an alleged criminal who leaked sensitive government information.

Worker by day, anarchist book store operator... also by day

The unidentified Environment Canada employee who was escorted out of his office in handcuffs yesterday for allegedly leaking documents to the press came forward Thursday, accusing the Harper government of using bully tactics to discourage whistleblowers from coming forward.

In a brief news conference on Parliament Hill, 27-year-old Jeffrey Monaghan, a temporary government employee of four years — oh, and also a member of an Ottawa-based anarchist collective that opened a book store just over a week ago — announced he has not been charged with a crime.

"What I can tell you is that the proposed charges against me pose a profound threat to the public interest," said Mr. Monaghan, who did not take any questions.

"They are without precedent in their disproportionality, they are vengeful and they are an extension of a government-wide communications strategy pinned on secrecy, intimidation and centralization."

For more on Mr. Monaghan's comments and the document he allegedly leaked, read the story here.



Then Jeff shaved....

Jeff Monaghan, at the news conference Thursday, called the proposed charges an 'extension of a government-wide communication strategy pinned on secrecy intimidation and centralization.'

Jeff Monaghan, at the news conference Thursday, called the proposed charges an 'extension of a government-wide communication strategy pinned on secrecy intimidation and centralization.'
(CBC)


And here is the real irony of it all; this was the Conservative Governments much lauded democratic reform week.

This week, in its much-heralded “Week of Democratic Reform”, the federal government has delivered PR – public relations.

“It would be laughable if it wasn’t so worrying,” said Green Party leader Elizabeth May. “What we are seeing is a government so deeply committed to deflection and avoiding the real issues that they are starting to believe their own spin.”

Ms. May said that the so-called Week of Democratic Reform was really a week of gimmickry and housekeeping: new rules on loans to political parties; more seats in parliament for growing provinces and an extra day of voting.


SEE:

Harpers Fascism

Leo Strauss and the Calgary School

Post Modern Conservatives.

Why The Conservatives Are Not Libertarians

Trotsky on Harper

The Great Dismantler

Man O Steel

More PMO Censorship


log posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, ,, , ,
, ,, , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Global Farmers Fight Back


My comrades who are Free Market Libertarians and mutualists who oppose capitalism in favour of a cooperative marketplace, will find much to praise in this new farmers movement. It poses a real alternative to capitalist globalization and corporatist free trade. None other than creation of a new movement for a cooperative commonwealth.

The latest attempt to destroy the Wheat Board in Canada is an example of the attack by the State on small farmers in favour of the Agribusiness cartels in the developed world. The Green Revolution, the push for GMO crops and patents on crops as well as using arable land for production for export; palm oil, are examples of non sustainable agribusiness versus the sustainable production of local farmers.

The recent Fraser Institute report by Preston Manning and Mike Harris calling for the end of supply management, the Wheat Board , and subsidies in the market place for farmers, does nothing but open up the farm marketplace to the agribusiness oligopolies. Ironic since Manning's daddy ran a party; Social Credit, made up of farmers that saw these same oligopolies as enemies of a producer run economy.


The fact is that the majority of farmers in the world are family farmers, not far removed from their peasant roots. It is the peasantry that provides the basis for the survival of the food economy. But with the advent of capitalist globalization the peasantry has become a new force in the world economy as Warren Bellow points out.

It is agricultural reform, the privatization of the inherent collectivism of peasant farming, the enclosure of common lands that led to the creation of capitalism in Britain. Forced off the land the peasants move to the cities to look for work becoming the proletariat.

But not all have done so, since it is the farmers who support the cities with their food production. And forced by globalization to collectivize farmers are reforming cooperatives to deal with the new demands of the marketplace.

Thai pig farmers protest at CPF headquarters

S. Korea may allow farmers to export locally grown rice: gov't source

Farmers Cooperative Extends Rollout Of SOA Tool

Connecting Coffee Growers and Drinkers

Cameroon: Coffee - Reasons Behind Poor Performance

Phoenixville Farmer's Market returns to town for sixth season

Innovations in rural financial system inPunjab


What began in England over 400 hundred years ago is now writ wide across the globe. It is not Free Trade nor Free Markets but the concentration of capital and its power to monopolize the market. It is the transformation of agriculture from sustainable economics to the economics of unrestrained growth. Thus the land, people and environment suffer as we see in Indonesia as the islands there burn for the sake of the agribusiness palm oil industry.

Whereas export crops like organic and fair trade coffee have become a basis for sustainable export farming, which can support sustainable agriculture as well as meet the farmers need to be part of a global market place.


Free Trade vs. Small Farmers

Walden Bello is Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute, and a Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman.

The main battle cry of Via Campesina, whose coordinating center is located in Indonesia, is “WTO Out of Agriculture” and its alternative program is food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate adoption of policies that favor small producers. This would include, according to Indonesian farmer Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad Ya'kub, Deputy for Policy Studies of the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation (FSPI), “the protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.”

Via's program, however, goes beyond the adoption of pro-smallholder trade policies. It also calls for an end to the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds, thus appropriating for private profit what has evolved through the creative interaction of the natural world with human communities over eons. Seeds and all other plant genetic resources should be considered part of the common heritage of humanity, the group believes, and not be subject to privatization.

Agrarian reform, long avoided by landed elites in countries like the Philippines, is a central element in Via's platform, as is sustainable, ecologically sensitive organic or biodynamic farming by small peasant producers. The organization has set itself apart from both the First Green Revolution based on chemical-intensive agriculture and the Second Green Revolution driven by genetic engineering (GE). The disastrous environmental side effects of the first are well known, says Via, which means all the more that the precautionary principle must be rigorously applied to the second, to avoid negative health and environmental outcomes.

The opposition to GE-based agriculture has created a powerful link between farmers and consumers who are angry at corporations for marketing genetically modified commodities without proper labeling, thus denying consumers a choice. In the European Union, a solid alliance of farmers, consumers, and environmentalists prevented the import of GE-modified products from the United States for several years. Although the EU has cautiously allowed in a few GE imports since 2004, 54% of European consumers continue to think GE food is ”dangerous.” Opposition to other harmful processes such as food irradiation has also contributed to the tightening of ties between farmers and consumers, large numbers of whom now think that public health and environmental impact should be more important determinants of consumer behavior than price.

More and more people are beginning to realize that local production and culinary traditions are intimately related, and that this relationship is threatened by corporate control of food production, processing, marketing, and consumption. This is why Jose Bove's justification for dismantling a MacDonald's resonated widely in Asia: “When we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built McDonald's in our town, everybody understood why -- the symbolism was so strong. It was for proper food against malbouffe [awful standardized food], agricultural workers against multinationals. The extreme right and other nationalists tried to make out it was anti-Americanism, but the vast majority knew it was no such thing. It was a protest against a form of production that wants to dominate the world.”

Many economists, technocrats, policymakers, and urban intellectuals have long viewed small farmers as a doomed class. Once regarded as passive objects to be manipulated by elites, they are now resisting the capitalist, socialist, and developmentalist paradigms that would consign them to ruin. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class-for-itself.” And even as peasants refuse to “go gently into that good night,” to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, developments in the 21st century are revealing traditional pro-development visions to be deeply flawed. The escalating protests of peasant groups such as Via Campesina, are not a return to the past. As environmental crises multiply and the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life pile up, the farmers' movement has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone who is threatened by the catastrophic consequences of obsolete modernist paradigms for organizing production, community, and life.

Farmers hungry for change


At this week's intergovernmental meeting in Rome to assess progress towards the pledge to halve hunger by 2015, the mood was sombre. Figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) show not a reduction but an increase of more than 25 million chronically undernourished people since 1996. The figure, now at more than 850 million, is testament to how current global policies are consigning the hungry to stay hungry.

So what is going wrong? In 2002, when the UN World Food Summit pledge was last reviewed, the parallel Forum for Food Sovereignty, organised by non-governmental groups representing small farmers and those who feel the sharp end of hunger directly, concluded that the problem was not a lack of political will, as the FAO asserted, but the opposite. Trade liberalisation, industrial agriculture, genetic engineering and military dominance, it said, were now the main causes of hunger.

The farmers, from 30 countries, who participated in the conference were eloquent about how farming for small producers is more than just a food production system. Edgar Gonzales Castro, from Peru, said his vision of the future was "traditional" agriculture aimed at satisfying the needs of farmers, rather than generating profit. "What matters is that, on the family plot of land, farmers and their families have a range of crops to fill the cooking pot," he said.

"When governments decide to hold public consultations to help guide their decisions, policy experts as well as representatives of large farmers and agrifood corporations are usually centre stage, not small-scale producers, consumers and their organisations," says Pimbert.

The message of the report is that small-scale farmers - the majority of growers in the world - want radically different policies from those being promoted by their governments. The call is for policies to start from the perspectives of food producers and consumers rather than the demand for profit.

If "one-planet farming" means that western governments will only support farming practices that provide healthy, local food, maintain livelihoods for local producers and conserve resilient landscapes, then there is common ground with small-scale farmers. But if it means a uniform system for all, this will accelerate the hunt to source food globally and as cheaply as possible.

This will result in a continuing decline in food quality, with ever higher social and environmental costs, and be lorded over by fewer and fewer transnational agribusinesses. It would lead both to greater obesity and greater starvation, and see the eradication of more farmers and further loss of farmland.

Farmers' Views on the Future of Food and Small Scale Producers is at http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdf/full/14503IIED.pdf

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen is a Non Profit local community organisation formed by local women and men who are farmers and fishermen. Due to increasing poverty in the area, the local people formed this organisation of Volunteers to help themselves. Due to lack of money and machinery for farming and fishing, wish to appeal for donations of Farm Machinery ie, tractors, irrigation equipment etc. Donations for our Agricultural and development projects in Volta Region of Ghana. To help women and children to have food to eat.Train the young women and youth to acquire the needed skills. To also help farmers with farming machinery and fishing equipment. This would generate income for the local people.Non Profit Organisation.

SEE:

Free Trade Not Aid

Free Trade and Africa

The War For Chocolate

IWD Economic Freedom for Women

Water War

Development Versus Population Growth


WTO: Privatization of Water

Is There a Silver Lining to the WTO Talks? No





Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , ,, , ,