Experts at the Royal Meteorological Society are now attempting to make it official by naming it ‘Asperatus’ after the Latin word for ‘rough’.
For the technical details from the meterologists in the Uk Click Here
Filed under General by Roger
Have you every wondered why you never see any meaningful pictures of the wall that Israel is building around Palestinian communites and across the West Bank? Watch the video from an Australian group and you’ll see just what a truly horrendous monstrosity this wall is. No wonder the main stream media, newspapers and TV don’t show it in any significant way. Take a look at the video on the video page, click the tap at the top of the page. What if the town of Qalqllya was your town?
Filed under Education by Roger
Found on "CounterPunch" 18 June, 2009
By JONATHAN COOK
in Canada Park.(But it’s not in Canada – it’s in the West Bank, on the remains of three Palestinian villages).
…
"Jon Allen, Canada’s ambassador to Israel, is among several hundred Canadian Jews who have been commemorated at a dedication site. A plaque bearing Mr Allen’s name is attached to a stone wall constructed from the rubble of Palestinian homes razed by the Israeli army."
…
Read the full article, click here
by Tom Whipple
Our peak oil crisis is morphing into a dollar crisis. Despite record
inventories, and millions of barrels sitting in anchored tankers, oil
prices continue to rise. Earlier this week the average price of gasoline
rose to $3 in California and many are predicting that the rest of us
will be seeing $3 gasoline later this year.
While analysts are moaning that $70 oil is not justified by supply and
demand, it seems that oil has become a favored store of value as massive
US deficits eat away at the value of the dollar. The dollar goes down;
oil goes up. For now there is so much excess capacity that geopolitical
developments, stockpile reports and run-of-the-mill oil news has only a
minor effect on oil prices.
Much of the recent run up in prices was based on this spring’s “green
shoots rally,” in which many professed to see signs that the recession
would soon be over, and that increased demand would send oil prices ever
higher. The rally, which had its origins in a change in accounting
standards allowing insolvent banks to pretend they were doing well for a
while longer, seems to be slowing and may be coming to a close.
While the psychology of the equity markets is in a world of its own,
most analysts, who don’t draw a paycheck from the financial services
industry, are saying that the tough times are only beginning. Some who
have studied the Great Depression are talking of a downturn lasting a
decade or more. Should this sentiment become widespread and the equity
markets start to move down again, it is an open question as to what
happens to oil prices. Can a falling dollar offset reduced prospects for
oil consumption from faltering economies?
The underlying cause for the dollar’s weakness is the massive deficit
the U.S. government is running, and the continuing sale of billions of
dollars worth of treasury securities. This in turn has left foreign
investors worried that the value of their U.S. treasury holdings will
one day be worth much less than they invested. For the foreseeable
future, these investors have nowhere else to turn, for the minute they
stop buying or try to sell significant quantities of U.S. obligations,
they would immediately crash the dollar and their worst fears would be
realized.
For now, China, Russia and other large holders of U.S. treasury
securities are trying to make the best of a bad situation. They are
talking among themselves about how they might transition to a new world
reserve currency and are slowly reducing purchases of additional U.S.
treasury securities.
For the immediate future, Washington has little choice other than to
issue unprecedented amounts of debt. Although the administration assures
us it will start cutting the deficit someday, this is tied to an
improved economic situation that seems problematic. Despite massive
intervention and purchase of treasury securities by the Federal Reserve,
U.S. interest rates are already moving up, with the rate on the average
30-year mortgage loan increasing from 4.86 to 5.59 percent in the last
few weeks, thereby choking off much refinancing and some new loans.
Another couple of jumps like this, and the U.S. real estate industry
will be having a lot more trouble.
If the U.S. dollar continues to fall, there is reason to believe that
increasing amounts of oil will be purchased as a hedge and that the
price of oil will continue to rise. The increase in oil prices does not
have to be as fast, nor go as high as it did last year to create serious
economic problems. The U.S. economy is in worse shape than it was 18
months ago, and is far more susceptible to the damage that would be
wrought by sustained exposure to $3 or $4 gasoline. Every 10-cent
increase in the price of gasoline takes $40 million dollars a day away
from other consumer purchases. The increase in gasoline prices over the
last six months is now draining an additional $400 million a day from
consumers’ pockets. For every cent gasoline prices increase, sales of
something else go down by $4 million dollars each day.
As strange as it may seem, the peak oil crisis, which has been focused
on geologic constraints to oil production, supply and demand,
geopolitical threats and inadequate investment, seems to be morphing
into an issue of how much debt the U.S. Treasury can sell and still keep
interest rates under control.
We can be certain that the U.S. Congress and government will not stand
by and watch oil price increases driven by a falling dollar wreck the
economy. As we saw last summer, there will be calls to break the
dollar’s link to oil by restricting or even banning speculation. How
well this will work in a globalized world is anybody’s guess. Unless
there is worldwide agreement, activities banned in the U.S. could
continue in Europe, the Middle East or Asia.
The more traditional constraints on world oil production – geologic,
geopolitical and inadequate investment – are likely to come into play
within the next three or four years, no matter the course of the current
recession. Right now there is a surplus of production capacity, and
indeed, already produced oil which is sitting around looking for
consumers. If for one reason or another the recession deepens over the
next year or so, then these surpluses are likely to grow.
It would be a great irony if oil prices were to continue increasing in
the midst of substantial surpluses and falling demand.
/Tom Whipple is a retired government analyst and has been following the
peak oil issue for several years./
Ezra Nawi, one of Israel’s most courageous human rights activists is to be put in jail. His crime? He tried to stop a military a front-end loader from destroying the homes of Palestinian Bedouins in the South Hebron region. Nawi, a Jewish Israeli of Iraqi descent, is a threat to the Jewish settlers and the Israeli government because he has brought international attention to efforts to illegally remove Palestinians from the Hebron region. He will be sentenced in July.
(Watch the remarkable video of Nawi trying to stop the home demolition and his subsequent arrest.)
More details on Ezra click here
The New York Times has an interesting slide show and article on a development in the USA. Below is just one of the pictures in the 14 slide set of the diversity of training activities these young people are engaged in . Here is the link:
www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/05/13/us/0000EXPLORERS_index.html
In the United States, the Explorers, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts, have long prepared teenage members (14 and up, but they’ll take children at 13) to become police officers and firefighters. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many Explorer posts, working with local and federal law enforcement agencies, have added programs to train members in confronting terrorism, illegal immigration and border violence.
Photo: Todd Krainin for The New York Times
Brings up memories of the mid to late 1930’s in another country.
Ellen Brown, Global Research.ca April 9, 2009
Excerpt:
Lincoln’s Monetary Breakthrough
The bankers had Lincoln’s government over a barrel, just as Wall Street has Congress in its vice-like grip today. The North needed money to fund a war, and the bankers were willing to lend it only under circumstances that amounted to extortion, involving staggering interest rates of 24 to 36 percent. Lincoln saw that this would bankrupt the North and asked a trusted colleague to research the matter and find a solution. In what may be the best piece of advice ever given to a sitting President, Colonel Dick Taylor of Illinois reported back that the Union had the power under the Constitution to solve its financing problem by printing its money as a sovereign government. Taylor said:
“Just get Congress to pass a bill authorizing the printing of full legal tender treasury notes . . . and pay your soldiers with them and go ahead and win your war with them also. If you make them full legal tender . . . they will have the full sanction of the government and be just as good as any money; as Congress is given that express right by the Constitution.”
The Greenbacks actually were just as good as the bankers’ banknotes. Both were created on a printing press, but the banknotes had the veneer of legitimacy because they were “backed” by gold. The catch was that this backing was based on “fractional reserves,” meaning the bankers held only a small fraction of the gold necessary to support all the loans represented by their banknotes. The “fractional reserve” ruse is still used today to create the impression that bankers are lending something other than mere debt created with accounting entries on their books.1
Lincoln took Col. Taylor’s advice and funded the war by printing paper notes backed by the credit of the government. These legal-tender U.S. Notes or “Greenbacks” represented receipts for labor and goods delivered to the United States. They were paid to soldiers and suppliers and were tradeable for goods and services of a value equivalent to their service to the community. The Greenbacks aided the Union not only in winning the war but in funding a period of unprecedented economic expansion. Lincoln’s government created the greatest industrial giant the world had yet seen. The steel industry was launched, a continental railroad system was created, a new era of farm machinery and cheap tools was promoted, free higher education was established, government support was provided to all branches of science, the Bureau of Mines was organized, and labor productivity was increased by 50 to 75 percent. The Greenback was not the only currency used to fund these achievements; but they could not have been accomplished without it, and they could not have been accomplished on money borrowed at the usurious rates the bankers were attempting to extort from the North.
Lincoln succeeded in restoring the government’s power to issue the national currency, but his revolutionary monetary policy was opposed by powerful forces. The threat to established interests was captured in an editorial of unknown authorship, said to have been published in The London Times in 1865:
“If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic during the late war in that country, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.”
Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. According to historian W. Cleon Skousen:
“Right after the Civil War there was considerable talk about reviving Lincoln’s brief experiment with the Constitutional monetary system. Had not the European money-trust intervened, it would have no doubt become an established institution.”
The institution that became established instead was the Federal Reserve, a privately-owned central bank given the power in 1913 to print Federal Reserve Notes (or dollar bills) and lend them to the government. The government was submerged in a debt that has grown exponentially since, until it is now an unrepayable $11 trillion. For nearly a century, Lincoln’s statue at the Lincoln Memorial has gazed out pensively across the reflecting pool toward the Federal Reserve building, as if pondering what the bankers had wrought since his death and how to remedy it.
Read the complete essay, click here
Filed under Politics by Roger
Muzzled MPs. A powerless cabinet. Politicized senior bureaucrats. Unaccountable parties. Canada’s democracy is in trouble. To fix it we have to connect the dots
James Travers, Toronto Star, Apr 04, 2009
http://www.thestar.com/News/Insight/article/613535
Excerpt: Good for prime ministers, that’s not nearly good enough for the rest of us. It fuels an inexorable power drift to the opaque political centre, creating what Donald Savoie, Canada’s eminent chronicler of Westminster parliaments, calls "court government." It’s his clear and credible view that between elections, prime ministers now operate in the omnipotent manner of kings. Surrounded by subservient cabinet barons, fawning unelected courtiers and answerable to no one, they manage the affairs of state more or less as they please.
Prime ministers are freeing themselves from the chains that once bound them to voters, Parliament, cabinet and party. From bottom to top, from citizen to head of state, every link in those chains is stressed, fractured or broken.
Excerpt: Appealing as it sounds, advocacy requires effort. It’s so much easier to go with the flow, to let situational democracy evolve with each reflex, stopgap, jerry-rigged response to every new policy demand and political threat. But that leads away from accountability and toward the Big Man culture that Africa is finally throwing off and has no place in Canada.
If war is too serious to leave to generals, then surely democracy is too important to delegate to politicians.
Filed under Politics by Roger
Maybe Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is just trying to make the many thousands of people who have lost their jobs feel better. Comparing the current global collaspe to recessions in the past is a bit of a stretch. The economic policies implemented by previous US governments over the past 8 years, based on the phoney "Chicago" school of economics theory, to which Mr. Flahety and Harper subscribe cannot be compared to any historical recession.
…
"Liberal finance critic John McCallum, a former Royal Bank chief economist, said the comparison has little utility.
"I don’t see the point … we’re lucky because we’re not starving?" Mr. McCallum said. "Next he will be telling us that Canadians are fortunate because they are better off than during the 19th-century Irish potato famine."
Read the full article at the Globe and Mail
Irish film makers got behind the scenes of a CIA-organized coup attempt in Venezuela in 2002. The film is 1hr 14 minutes long, but well worth watching.
It’s on the "Video" page, so click it on the menu above
Watch the video on how GM lost a 2-3 year lead in electric vehicles, and more incompetent decisions by their high paid executives. Their opinion was Toyota would lose a bundle on the hybrid.
It’s on the "Videos" page. Click the link above.
Makes one wonder if GM should really be getting those massive bailout funds.
An interesting viewpoint.
World Beat
by JOHN FEFFER | Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Vol. 4, No. 5
Here’s the plot of Pirates of the Caribbean 4. The film opens with Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow dropping anchor in New York harbor. He descends on Wall Street with his mates and, after a quick costume change at Brooks Brothers, storms the boardrooms of Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and other major firms. They don’t need sabers to rake in the haul. Jack’s a clever pirate. He takes advantage of the tools at hand. Applying mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, Jack seizes billions of dollars in booty. He distributes huge bonuses to his crew for a job well done. And just before the government steps in to clean up the mess, the pirates scramble back to their ship and set sail.
Quick question: Why are more than a dozen of the world’s navies converging on Somalia to battle pirates there instead of sailing into New York to capture the Wall Street pirates? After all, CEOs benefited from over $20 billion in taxpayer money using tax loopholes, according to an IPS study. Surely the global economy would be made more secure by forcing former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, who doled out $4 billion in executive bonuses even as his company was collapsing, to walk the gangplank than by cracking down on the bands of privateers in the Horn of Africa.
"Pirate," like "terrorist," has always been a slippery term to define. Just as the British considered George Washington a terrorist rather than a freedom fighter, they portrayed John Paul Jones as a pirate rather than a naval hero. After the Revolutionary War, the shoe was on the other foot when the United States fought several pitched battles with the "Barbary pirates." These fearsome vessels, however, were not really pirate ships. Rather, they worked on behalf of several Barbary states that were part of the Ottoman empire. As Frank Lambert writes in The Barbary Wars, Algeria, Tripoli, and Morocco preferred traditional commerce and resorted to piracy largely because European powers refused to open their markets. If terrorism is the weapon of those on the political margins, piracy is the weapon of those on the economic margins.
Fast forward to the latest piracy news. The newspapers have been full of stories about gangs preying on vessels passing through the Suez Canal and near the Somali coast. They seized dozens of ships last year – including a Saudi tanker with $100 million worth of crude oil that yielded a $3 million ransom – with the help of fast boats, GPS, and submachine guns. The pirates are currently negotiating for a comparable ransom before releasing a Ukrainian vessel that has 33 Russian tanks, heavy artillery, and grenade launchers.
As Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Rubrick Biegon points out, the Somali pirates did not start out as Jack Sparrows. "Piracy in Somalia began because traditional coastal fishing became difficult after foreign fishing trawlers depleted local fish stocks," he writes in Somalia Piracy and the International Response. "Desperate fishermen started attacking trawlers until the trawler crews fought back with heavy weapons, leading the local fishermen to turn to other types of commercial vessels. The pirates prefer to call themselves the Somali ‘coast guard,’ noting that, prior to the recent spate of hijackings, they organized themselves to defend their communities from overfishing and, according to several accounts, to protect Somalia’s coastline from toxic dumping by foreign vessels."
Piracy blossomed in Somalia after Ethiopia invaded in 2006 with U.S. support and deposed the Islamic Courts Union. "Under the Courts, there was literally no piracy," observes one maritime security expert. "While many Somalis disapproved of some of the more fundamentalist ways of the original courts, most felt that they were well organized, disciplined, and effective civil administrators who had certainly provided Somalia with its first semblance of order and leadership since 1991," write FPIF contributors Gerald LeMelle and Michael Stulman in Africa Policy Outlook 2009.
The anti-piracy campaign, argues FPIF contributor Francis Njubi Nesbitt, is a giant red herring. "Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in December 2006, backed by the United States, sparked an Islamist resistance that led to thousands of civilian deaths, displaced over a million people, and depopulated the capital, Mogadishu," he writes in Somalia: Waiting for Obama. "But instead of focusing on the aftermath of this crisis and helping foster a peace process, the United States, European Union, and other international actors are engaged in the more dramatic and media-friendly anti-piracy campaign."
Hussein Yusuf disagrees. "Somalia poses a grave danger to the United States and the Horn of Africa today," the FPIF contributor writes in What’s Next for Somalia. "Despite the U.S. ‘Global War on Terror,’ piracy in the Gulf of Aden threatens the supply of oil and commercial trade to the West. Islamic extremists threaten the stability of this region more than ever." Yusuf and Nesbitt offer contrasting interpretations in their strategic dialogue on this topic.
Everyone agrees, however, that the pirates of the Somali coast have raked in quite a lot of money, somewhere around $30 million in 2008. That’s more than a few pearls and pieces of eight. But compare that to the bonuses that Wall Street employees took home last year: $18.4 billion.
At least the Somali pirates were good at their jobs.
Filed under General by Roger
This video was created for the AARP U@50 video contest and placed second.
It is based on the Argentinian Political Advertisement “The Truth” by RECREAR
The two songs are
Mind things
Our Lifes, Our Destinies
If this placed 2nd, 1st must really be something!
BRIAN LAGHI
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
January 30, 2009 at 9:00 PM EST
OTTAWA — Canadians say Stephen Harper was motivated by political survival and would never have unveiled this week’s multibillion-dollar stimulus budget were it not for opposition pressure.
A new Globe and Mail-CTV poll also found that, despite moderate support for the budget, most Canadians continue to hold Mr. Harper responsible for the crisis atmosphere that prompted it and believe he hasn’t fundamentally changed.
“Canadians think Harper has done this with a gun to his head,” said Peter Donolo, a partner with the Strategic Counsel, the firm that conducted the poll. “They feel this wouldn’t have happened had the opposition not held his feet to the fire.”
Is anyone surprised?
The Washington Post published an article on HFCS in foods on Wednesday, Jan. 28. There is also some video’s on YouTube showing the effect of mercury in the body. One of them is below. Some of the research was done at the U of Calgary Medical school.
Exercepts from the article:
Almost half of tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contained mercury, which was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient, according to two new U.S. studies
…
"Mercury is toxic in all its forms…"
And in the second study, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), a non-profit watchdog group, found that nearly one in three of 55 brand-name foods contained mercury. The chemical was found most commonly in HFCS-containing dairy products, dressings and condiments.
To read the entire article click here
Here’s one of the video’s on YouTube
It’s been viewed 190,726 times! Keywords: HIGH- FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP
Looks like a lot more smoke and mirrors from Mr. Harper and Mr. Flaherty, at least for the average middle-class homeowner.
Home renovations
Purchases of new appliances, furniture and home electronics don’t qualify for tax credits. Nor do routine repairs and maintenance.
Spend the money in 2008. You won’t get any tax relief until after filing your 2009 tax return.
Personal Income Tax
The budget also delivers personal income tax relief by increasing the basic personal amount to $10,320. However, The basic personal amount was set to go up to $10,100 in 2009, even before the budget boost.
This means a 2.2 % increase – not 7.5 % from the 2008 level, as the government says.
Similar story with personal income tax brackets.
The 15% tax bracket is topped at $40,726 in 2009. But, because of inflation indexing this upper limit would have been $38,832 in 2009 anyway.
The second personal income tax bracket will max at $81,452 in 2009, allowing more income to be taxed at the 22 per cent rate (rather than the 26 per cent rate).
But this limit would have gone to $77,664 through inflation indexing. The benefit is overstated, since it’s calculated from 2008 levels, not the scheduled 2009 levels.
There’s $317 in tax savings, at most, with changes to the basic personal amount and income tax brackets. And only taxpayers earning $81,452 or more can take full advantage of them
For more details on the budget as it affects seniors, first time home buyers, EI deductions, click here.
Probably not. Here’s some of his comments regarding the proposed EFCA bill in the USA, which he is vehemently against.
Not much of a guy for ordinary American citizens.
Bernie Marcus, the charismatic co-founder of Home Depot, led the call along with Rick Berman, an aggressive EFCA opponent and founder of the Center for Union Facts. Over the course of an hour, the two framed the legislation as an existential threat to American capitalism, or worse.
"This is the demise of a civilization," said Marcus. "This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I’m watching this happen and I don’t believe it."
Allowing people a fair way to chose to form a union, or not, will cause the "demise of civilization"? Really?
Read the entire article, and listen to the audio of the telephone conference call.
It does seem that the demise of American capitalism has been very well orchastrated by some of their very largest corporations and financial institutions, not the working people in them who may, or may not, want to form a union.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
White phosphorus (WP) is a flare- and smoke-producing incendiary device or smoke-screening agent that is made from a common allotrope of the chemical element phosphorus. White phosphorus bombs and shells are incendiary weapons, but can also be used as offensive anti-personnel flame compounds capable of causing serious burns or death. The agent is used in bombs, artillery, and mortars, short-range missiles which burst into burning flakes of phosphorus upon impact. White phosphorus is commonly referred to in military jargon as "WP". The slang term "Willy(ie) Pete" or "Willy(ie) Peter", dating from World War I and common at least through the Vietnam War, is still occasionally heard.
White phosphorus weapons are controversial today because of their potential use against civilians. While the Chemical Weapons Convention does not designate WP as a chemical weapon, various groups consider it to be one. In recent years, the United States, Israel, and Russia have used white phosphorus in combat.
CNN Confirms Israel Use Of White Phosphorus
The website "The Young Turks" has posted a video on YouTube with the CNN video report included.
Watch the full video report – click here.
A worm, known as Conficker, Downadup, or Kidothat, spreads through low security networks, memory sticks, and PCs without the latest security updates is posing a growing threat to users. Although Microsoft released a patch, the worm has gone on to infect 3.5m machines. Experts warn this figure could be far higher and say users should have up-to-date anti-virus software and install Microsoft’s MS08-067 patch.
According to Microsoft, the worm works by searching for a Windows executable file called "services.exe" and then becomes part of that code. It then copies itself into the Windows system folder as a random file of a type known as a "dll". It gives itself a 5-8 character name, such as piftoc.dll, and then modifies the Registry, which lists key Windows settings, to run the infected dll file as a service.
Once the worm is up and running, it creates an HTTP server, resets a machine’s System Restore point (making it far harder to recover the infected system) and then downloads files from the hacker’s web site.
Anti-virus firm F-Secure says that the worm uses a complicated algorithm to generate hundreds of different domain names every day, such as mphtfrxs.net, imctaef.cc, and hcweu.org. Only one of these will actually be the site used to download the hackers’ files. On the face of it, tracing this one site is almost impossible.
Microsoft says that the malware has infected computers in many different parts of the world, with machines in China, Brazil, Russia, and India having the highest number of victims.
Read the Full Article from the BBC site
Check for the update at Microsoft, click here
Jay Leno may have a ton of old cars that probably get four or five miles to the gallon, but at least he’s talking about wind power on television! Or. Hang on. At least he talks about wind power on NBC.com!
In the video , he’s staring at a MagLev wind turbine — that’s a turbine that works well because it’s levitating on a magnetic field. Less resistance means more conserved energy and less mechanical wear. Very cool stuff, and it’s the kind of toy that a mechanical geek like Leno can get into.
This baby’s going on Ed Begley’s house, but Leno brags that the one he’ll buy is bigger.
These wind turbines are manufactured by EnviroEnergy of Grimsby, ON!
Chinese selling cheap cars in Mexico
Nicolas Van Praet, Financial Post Published: Thursday, January 08, 2009
FAW Group Corp., one of China’s three largest domestic auto manufacturers, has begun selling new cars for as little as $6,550 in Mexico in what is believed to be the first foray by a Chinese automaker into North America.
So, we pour billions of tax-payer dollars into supporting the Big 3 Auto makers, and a couple of years down the road allow the Chinese to flood the market with cheap cars. I wonder if anyone in Ottawa has ever heard of an import tax to level the playing field?
OTTAWA—Today the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) released the Alternative Federal Budget (AFB) fiscal stimulus plan, a one-year package that would create 407,000 jobs, boost the economy by 3%, and help protect Canadians from the worst of a recession.
Consistent with recommendations by the IMF and OECD, the plan injects $32.9 billion (or 2.1% of GDP) into Canada’s economy to protect Canadians who experience loss of income, as well as strengthen and build hard and soft infrastructure to address the challenges of climate change, income inequality, and aging populations.
“We’ve laid out a bold and achievable set of initiatives that can protect Canada from the economic storm while building for future generations,” says CCPA Senior Economist Armine Yalnizyan. “Our plan creates jobs and gives the economy a jolt of life just when it needs it – now.”
The AFB Plan’s impact on job creation and GDP has been validated by Informetica Limited’s macro-economic model.
Key investments outlined in the plan include:
* $12.4 billion to protect the most vulnerable Canadians with investments in fixing EI so more out of work Canadians receive benefits, poverty reduction, and income supports for seniors, children, and the working poor;
* $14.7 billion to strengthen and build infrastructure with investments in municipal infrastructure, affordable housing, child care, and post-secondary education; it also honours the First Nations Kelowna Accord;
* $5.8 billion to prepare for the future by investing in green infrastructure, training and education, and energy retrofits.
“This stimulus package is good for Canadians and it’s smart economics,” says AFB Coordinator David MacDonald. “Simply put, government spending initiatives outlined in this Plan provide far more job creating stimulus than across-the-board tax cuts. People who have jobs spend; people who lose them do not.”
Click here to download a pdf copy of the full report
Who are the Shministim?
Shministim means “twelfth-graders” in Hebrew. Military service is mandatory after high school for young Jewish Israelis. The Shministim are Israeli youth who refuse to serve in the army because it enforces Israel’s 40-year occupation of the Palestinians.
While a number of Shministim letters have been written in the past (read about the first letter sent to Prime Minister Golda Meir here ), about one hundred youth have signed the current 2008 Shministim letter which articulates the basis for refusal.
Because of their principled refusal to serve in an occupying army, youth who sign the letter face jail terms in Israeli military prisons. Terms range from 21 to 28 days; those who refuse to wear a military uniform while in jail are sent to solitary confinement for the duration of their term.
After completing their sentence, they are then drafted again and if they refuse a second time, as most do, they face the same sentence. This can be a repeated process in which Shministim return home for a few days or longer and are then drafted and then imprisoned. Even through they refuse to serve, they still in a sense ‘belong’ to the military until they receive their discharge papers. A Shministi may never receive these papers, and although the Israeli military may tire of re-calling objectors into prison regularly, without these papers, an objector’s fate is always uncertain. There is literally no end to the number of times youth might be sent back to jail.
