Not Much To Add

...as the stealth program to convert Canada into a banana republic continues apace. Our military command structure is now completely subsumed in the American one and the "War On Terror "continues to target North American citizens who speak about about the direction our lords and masters are taking us.
From The Tyee:

A top lawyer at the world's largest civil liberties organization warns that Canada's increasing participation in the so-called "War on Terror" has jeopardized democracy.
The unchecked political influence of "deep state" spy agencies -- whether the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or our own Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) -- is threatening citizens' ability to hold the state accountable, says Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
"The larger idea that we are engaged in a global war against terrorism (is) a very dangerous idea," Jaffer told the Tyee, where he addressed a BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) event on Monday. "It's a dangerous proposition that we are involved in this war that has no temporal boundary, no geographic boundary, and is against an enemy that is really difficult to identify.
"(It's) drastic and radical: it's to propose that we're in a forever war and in an everywhere war... In Canada, the Charter is a very useful tool for litigators and public interest advocates to use in articulating arguments against these kinds of counter-terrorism policies that are inconsistent with democratic values."

Hellhounds on your trail

"If only part of the things brought out prove true, These men have done the American people more damage than all the incidental operations of Al Capone. Capone had the merit of confining his robbery and the infliction of physical violence to the wicked.... [I]f these stories are true these men are not bankers , they are banksters who rob the poor, drive the innocent to poverty and suicide and do infinite injury to those who honestly work and strive. Worse than that, they are traitors to our institutions and national ideas."

        US president Herbert Hoover 1933.

    As 2010 closes out, we're two years into a Democratic administration in the US and at least two years into the worst speculative bubble since the Crash of '29. Praise must go to the Obama administration for their masterful work in preserving the international financial system without actually making any systemic changes to help prevent a recurrence of the same problems. That there is any confidence in the international financial system is testament to the loosely coordinated international effort to disguise the depth of the problems from the public at large while desperately injecting trillions of dollars into resuscitating the system.
    In the US, the administration is allowing millions of foreclosures to go forward under the same conditions that prevailed during the issuing of the original mortgages; that is, a system without protection for the consumer, with perverse incentives built in that breed casualness, incompetence, and outright fraud, and where the 91% of US citizens who consider themselves "middle class" are cheated, lied to, and exploited. (Personally, I love the stories of the people who have frozen the foreclosure proceedings on their homes by the simple act of asking the foreclosing bank to prove that they actually hold the mortgage on the property. With the extensive collateralization and re-collateralization of these debt obligations, the actual ownership of even a portion of a mortgage is often impossible to define).
    The only real difference between this crash and the Crash of '29 is that this time there isn't the panic of depositors trying to get their money out of the bank before the bank fails. The creation of federal deposit insurance has kept the banks, and the countries they do business in, liquid.  But after the Crash in '29, it took the US four years and a change in administration (from Hoover to Roosevelt) before the excesses and failures were recognized and corrective legislation was considered. It is depressing that the most important corrective, the Glass-Steagall act separating commercial from investment banking--repealed under Reagan, seems to be at the heart of the current series of speculative boom and bust cycles. And it is even more depressing that one of the same banks, Citigroup, is again at the epicentre of the crisis.
    There are differences between crashes; the last time it took years for the tricksterism, fraud, and near-criminality to be exposed. This time there are plenty of books and information being generated on the same topics, although they are being presented in formats that most people (particularly in the US) no longer access (books and newspapers, primarily). But the root causes of the crisis' are pretty much identical. Roosevelt intimate and (eventual) Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter wrote that:

    [I do] not believe that vice inheres in the rich and virtue in the poor. But for too long we have been largely operating on the assumption that the converse is the truth, and more particularly that the rich are the guardians of wisdom and should control affairs.... The crux of the business is not the wickedness of the Mitchells [head of City Bank in 1933] but the power which is wielded by concentration of financial  power which they are wholly unworthy--no matter who they are--to wield because of the obfuscations and the arrogances which power almost invariably generates. [sic]

       (quoted in Hellhound of Wall Street, Michael Perino, page 223)

    People are no smarter today than 80 years ago (in many respects, they're more ignorant), and although we have some experience with worldwide financial crisis', our governments are still allowing laws to be written by the same group of people the same laws are meant to regulate, we still fall under the spell of the same slogans ("Greed is Good") and economic theories (the Chicago School, neo-liberalism, laissez-faire). The same people selling CDOs knew that a crash was coming--which led them to re-double their efforts to sell more of them in order to get their money while the getting was good. All we've really changed is the degree to which our economies are interlinked. And we still persist in our view that crashes and speculative bubbles are aberrant, rather than the normal operation of the financial system we live under. Welcome to a new decade.

Sean Bruyea

So Sean Bruyea is an Canadian retired intelligence officer and (currently)an advocate for soldiers rights. When he was testifying against the new Veterans Charter about five years back, he ran into problems getting treatment for his PTSD.
Over on Sympatico, there's an article about his appearance on Question Period this week. Last Thursday, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart acknowledged that his files were indeed accessed and shared among Department of Veteran's Affairs staffers.From the article:
Stoddart's year-long investigation stemmed from a complaint made by Bruyea that his personal and medical information was contained in briefing notes prepared for then-veterans affairs minister Greg Thompson in 2006. The notes covered Bruyea's participation in a press conference in which he was critical of the department.
"What we found in this case was alarming," Stoddart said Thursday in a news release.
"The veteran's sensitive medical and personal information was shared -- seemingly with no controls -- among departmental officials who had no legitimate need to see it. This personal information subsequently made its way into a ministerial briefing note about the veteran's advocacy activities. This was entirely inappropriate."
So Bruyea is understandably upset. Then he saw a memo in which " in which a department official suggested bureaucrats get tough on him for his criticism."
"When I received that memo I was stunned that I suddenly became subversive, I became a dissident, I became an enemy of the state for the very department that I was trying to help so that it can improve the treatment of veterans," Bruyea said. "I didn't get that. For me, it was mind-boggling."

So let me state for the record that what happened to Sean Bruyea was unconscionable. It was wrong. Both the current and previous governments deserve to be slapped around for their actions and Mr. Bruyea deserves apologies, compensation, whatever.
But, to be foul-mouthed and crude about it, exactly what part of this is fucking surprising? Has he been living with his head up his ass for his entire life? Has he never read a book? A newspaper? Watched a news program? Of fucking course he became subversive, a dissident, an enemy of the state. Did he not hear of Nixon keeping an enemies list? Or watch the actions of the Canadian government over the last fifty years?
I just want to slap this guy upside the head (not that I would, but the feeling is there). He was a part of the apparatus that maintains state power. The left has been yelling about this for decades. Hell, they even get it when the right complains about the same thing.
It's this fucking blindness to anyone who isn't us that drives me insane. CSIS recruits spies to infiltrate the union movement in Canada, who cares? That's them unionists. They're all probably commies anyway. That's YOU you fucking eejit! How fucking hard is it to understand that if one of us is a slave, NONE of us is free. Maybe it''s just because I would walk away from Omelas, but this shouldn't be that hard to get.
Every time a Communist, a gay man, an accused serial killer, is treated with fairness, justice, compassion, THAT'S YOU. This veneer of rights and democracy is thin enough. We have to do what we can to strengthen it, because when we do, it keeps us a little safer. It's not that fucking hard to understand.

The Truth Doesn't Always Show Up

I recently read Harvey Cashore's book The Truth Shows Up, and was fascinated by the amount of attention he'd given the story of Karlheinz Schreiber and Brian Mulroney. So when I came across the Executive Summary of the Oliphant Report (the handier version of Commission of Inquiry into Certain Allegations Respecting Business and Financial Dealings Between Karlheinz Schreiber and the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney: Report Volume 1: Executive Summary (opens a pdf of the executive summary)) I had a little bit of background to make some sense of the book.
    Back in the day, Airbus Industries was desperately trying to break into national markets held almost exclusively by Boeing Aerospace, and one of those markets was Canada. Specifically, Airbus wanted a chance to provide AC with the new aircraft it required. This would give them some legitimacy in the North American marketplace. In order to get to Air Canada, Airbus first cut a deal with Max Ward's Ward-Air. Max Ward wouldn't have purchased the aircraft on offer from Airbus, but for a sweetheart of a deal they offered him, making it impossible to turn down. This led to Airbus being able to approach Air Canada and pursue a deal. Air Canada ended up buying from Airbus a number of unsuitable aircraft, which were eventually sold to the Canadian military who neither needed nor wanted them, but the deal allowed AC to get out with a minimum of financial loss. But the poor old Canadian taxpayer ended up being stuck with the bill, as usual. And Airbus, having broken into the market, has since gone on to great success.
    In order to cut the deal, Airbus relied on Karlheinz Schreiber, who developed significant relations with members of the Conservative Party establishment in Alberta and, ultimately, across Canada. Schreiber dispensed large amounts of cash to various and sundry war-chests (both to individuals and to the parties) in order to curry influence and favour. And it worked. Eventually he became tight with the lawyer from Baie-Comeau; Brian Mulroney.
    During Brian's rise to power, it was reported by various sources that his win against Joe Clark at the PC leadership convention in 1983 had been managed by flying and/or busing in large numbers of "instant delegates"; people who had never been members of the Progressive Conservatives, but had their memberships paid for just in time for them to vote at the convention. Karlheinz Schreiber has since claimed  that it was his $50,000 contribution that paid for those" instant delegates" and their transportation to Winnipeg. Whether this happened or not has never really been investigated (Clark actually came out against anyone following up on these reports, feeling, I would suppose, that confirming the rumours would tar the Progressive Conservative Party as a very sleazy operation). Oliphant, in the Report, actually addresses this story, remarking that he was "struck by [Schreiber's] proclivity for exaggeration as he described the nature of his relationships with people, particularly those in positions of influence and power. Furthermore, with respect to Mr Schreiber's testimony regarding the leadership review, there is no evidence on which I was able to rely to support this testimony. Because his evidence is self-contradictory, I found Mr. Schreiber's evidence respecting the leadership review to be unreliable." (page 8, Report). Mr. Cashore, in The Truth Shows Up, suggests that there might be a bit more to this story, and at the very least it should be pursued. After all, the suggestion that a foreign national (as Mr. Schreiber was) may have influenced the outcome of the Canadian political process might be something to look into. But I do understand the reluctance of the Canadian political establishment to pursue the issue, as it might actually expose the tremendous influence wielded by the US political right since, well, forever, but particularly the last thirty or so years. In particular, the seed capital for the Alberta (later Western) Report and the impetus behind the birth of the Reform Party.
    But even more interesting is Oliphant's commentary on the source of the $1000 bills Schreiber passed to Brian Mulroney on three separate occasions.
    The issue of where the money came from is important. Airbus has acknowledged that they did use schmiergeld (slush or bribe monies) when dealing with foreign governments around the time of the sale of aircraft to Air Canada. There still remain questions around the AC sale--was anyone paid off, if so, how much, and who received the schmiergeld. This is the question that has been haunting Brian Mulroney since his time in office. Did a sitting Prime Minister take a bribe from a sleazy representative of a foreign firm--something we might expect from a banana republic, but surely not in a nice developed-world liberal democracy like our own.
    Both Mulroney and Schreiber agree that yes, Brian was paid significant cash money to do something. But they don't agree on how much or just what services were rendered for the money. Both agree that Brian was doing work hyping the "Bear Head" project for Thyssen (a German arms manufacturer looking to establish a manufacturing facility in Canada in order to be able to export weapons to countries off-limits to German based companies). But it is clear in the Oliphant Report that Brian did nothing on the Bear Head file to earn somewhere between $225,000 and $300,000.
    Oliphant's Report agrees that Mulroney was paid out of an account coded "Britan," but is very clear that it is impossible for this account to have funds from Thyssen in it. Rather, the Report concludes that the "funds that made up the Britan account can be traced back to commission payments made to IAL by Airbus Industries in connection with sales of aircraft to Air Canada." (page 23, Report) Harvey Cashore's book on the topic delves a lot deeper into the question of Schreiber's accounts and the source of the funds in them--and where those funds eventually went. Such as how much went to Frank Moores and Mulroney confidant Fred Doucet as well as to Brian.
    But Oliphant could not pursue the question of Airbus during the Inquiry. The mandate of the Inquiry made it clear that Airbus was off the table, so seeing Brian paid out of the "Britan" account, and clear evidence from the forensic accountants that the money in the "Britan" account came from Airbus made no never mind. Oliphant couldn't pursue the question.
    But what does it matter anyway? In Germany, very connected and powerful people have ended up in jail over Airbus' actions. In Canada, a former Prime Minister has had his reputation tarnished (and honestly, could it be any blacker than it already was?). And as far as the public is concerned, the story is about over. We paid Lyin' Brian just over two million dollars for damage done to his reputation--even though he's admitted that he did take money from Schreiber after all. Questions of undue influence in Canadian politics by foreign nationals have been tabled. And whether government officials were bribed or not are to be ignored. the status quo, after all, is sacrosanct in Canada.

Commission of Inquiry into Certain Allegations Respecting Business and Financial Dealings Between Karlheinz Schreiber and the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney: Report Volume 1: Executive Summary
The Honourable Jeffery J. Oliphant: © Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada 2010

The truth shows up : a reporter's fifteen-year odyssey on the trail of Brian Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber
Harvey Cashore Toronto : Key Porter Books, ©2010.