Thursday, September 8, 2011

Losing civil liberties, plus billions in hard power will not make us safe in Canada

By Jane Taber, Globe and Mail, September 8, 2011
The Prime Minister (of Canada, Stephen Harper) told CBC’s Peter Mansbridge on Tuesday night that in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the major threat to Canada “is still Islamicism.”

“Unfortunately, Stephen Harper continues to use divisive language for political purposes,” Mr. Dewar charged.
The Prime Minister also vowed in the CBC interview, which will be broadcast in full on Thursday night, to bring back two controversial clauses in the Antiterrorism Act, parts of which expired in 2007. One clause allowed police to arrest suspects without a warrant and hold them for three days without charges if they believed a terrorist act had been committed; the other clause allowed a judge to compel a witness to testify in secret under penalty of jail if the witness refused.
From the CBC website, September 8, 2011
There are other threats out there, but that is the one that I can tell you occupies the security apparatus most regularly in terms of actual terrorist threats," Harper said.

Harper cautioned that terrorist threats can "come out of the blue" from a different source, such as the recent Norway attacks, where a lone gunman who hated Muslims killed 77 people.
But Harper said terrorism by Islamic radicals is still the top threat, though a "diffuse" one.
"When people think of Islamic terrorism, they think of Afghanistan, or maybe they think of some place in the Middle East, but the truth is that threat exists all over the world," he said, citing domestic terrorism in Nigeria.
The prime minister said home-grown Islamic radicals in Canada are "also something that we keep an eye on."
If the most serious threat to Canada is "Islamicism" according to the Prime Minister, and he is privy to much more classified information than the rest of us so he should "know" then how can he reconcile the
two largest political and fiscally weighty decisions to spend some $60-$70 billion on Fighter Jets and armed ships...along with other unarmed ships?
The two positions are not congruent, nor are they reconcileable. The story of the threat of Islamicism, if it is true, prompts very different responses, such as enhanced study and intelligence work, not heavy military hardware....this is little more than a return to the long-ago changed past of the cold war mentality that seems to be governing the prime minister's so-called 'big thinking'. It is not, even with the recent interventions in both Afghanistan and Libya, primarily a future of threats from other states will large military establishments.
And even if we took the recent testing of fighter jets by China into the equation, we know that their intelligence and techno-savy far outstrips that of most, if not all, of the western countries, and their holding a significant portion of U.S. treasury bonds, leaves them with far greater leverage in geopolitical terms than a couple of hundred fighter jets and even a couple of hundreds nuclear submarines.
It is not reasonable to shove more fingers in the eye of the prime minister for "divisive comments" about Islamicism, but it certainly is reasonable to ask him to "square the circle" of his illogic.
This is a man and a government whose single ambition, while politically assassinating all democratic opposition, to mount a campaign of "hard power, return-to-the-past symbols and cold-war mentality" much like the Soviet Union, which, itself, has even moved on and into recognition and adaption to the new realities of the potential of non-state terrorism, of danger at the micro-level (not that 3000 victims on 9/11 can be reduced in significance nor in strategic planning) but that military and governmental thinking and planning must be recognizing how past strategies have not, do not and will not adequately fit current and future threats.
Here we have another "half-truth" resulting in many missed opportunities to bring Canada face-to-face with the realpolitik of the 21st century...and we get giant purchases of hard power, linked to giant gaps in very squishy thought and therefore not credible political leadership.
Plus, the removal of civil liberties, a significant part of the new anti-terrorism legislation, will be passed by the government majority, along with the major purchases of "hard power" and will lead to reduced safety and security, and another ruse on the part of the government on semi-sleeping Canadian voters.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

National Security costs, duplications and secrecy depict U.S. paranoia after 9/11

From the NPR website, September 7, 2011
On today's (September 6th) Fresh Air, Washington Post national security reporter Dana Priest, the co-author of both the Post's investigative series and the book Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, joins Terry Gross for a discussion about how the "terrorism industrial complex" created in response to the Sept. 11 attacks grew to be so big.

"The government said, 'We're facing an enemy we don't understand, we don't have the tools to deal with it, here's billions ... of dollars and a blank check after that for anybody with a good idea to go and pursue it,' " she says. "Not only does the government find it difficult to get its arms around itself, [but now] it doesn't know what's inside, it doesn't know what works, it doesn't know what doesn't work. And nobody still, 10 years later, is really in charge of those questions."

Priest and fellow Post reporter William Arkin found that many security and intelligence agencies do the same work. For example, there are 51 federal organizations and military commands, she says, that track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
"So what you have are good-hearted people and companies and employees who are doing what they think they can get paid for and what might help but so much of it is reinventing the wheel that another organization has already reinvented five times," she says.
Because much of the counterterrorism work is classified, she says, there's no room for the public to have any kind of oversight into the process. That role falls largely (to) those with security clearances and the intelligence committees within Congress.
"So you and I cannot pressure government to do better," she says. "The interest groups that weigh in on every other subject matter in our governments cannot weigh in, in any public manner. So you get this cabal of people who have clearances and they weigh in — and that cabal, unfortunately, includes a profit motive because there are so many companies whose livelihoods depend on a continued flow of money to them — because [right after Sept. 11] the government relied on contractors to do the work ... [because] Congress and the White House didn't want it to appear like they were growing government while they were asking the government to do much more."
Many of the contractors that the government hired to do counterintelligence and security work are paid much more than their public counterparts in the CIA and Homeland Security.
"[The government] is willing to pay these companies money to get the bodies," she says. "It's created this unintended adverse consequence: [The private companies then] also drew from the agencies. It sucked away the very people that those agencies needed to keep. And it did it because it could attract them with relatively high salaries and less stressful work than when you're working in government. So in addition to costing more, it cost the government some of its best people — and then it sold those people back to them at two or three times as much money."
More than 800,000 people now hold top-secret security clearances. And now an entire industry has sprung up to provide those clearances, says Priest.
"The government is now contracting contractors to do the security clearances for other contractors," she says. "The contractors, in the beginning, were just supposed to be supplemental to the federal employees. ... But now, they are everywhere. And some agencies ... could not exist without them."
When we hear, as we often do this week prior to the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers at the Trade Centre in Lower Manhattan, that the terrorists have not won, that America is strong and has not become bowed or cowed, we must also reconcile those stories, albeit bearing their own truth, with the astonishing and somewhat incomprehensible information that the two Washington Post reporters, Priest and Arkin, have included in their shocking book.
Of course, it would be nothing short of political apostasy for a U.S. Senator to utter words like, "Why don't we take a serious look at the waste generated around national security and counter-terrorism "cabals" that have grown up with our consent and our overt approval since 2001, as part of our debt and deficit cutting efforts?"
And yet, it is nothing short of national paranoia that has gripped the country, and other countries hit by the terrorists in the last decade, and has grown a whole new industry: the joint public-private maga-corporations who could not spend all the money allocated by Congress if they had to. And all of that spending is now beyond the reach of public scrutiny.
So, dear reader, I ask you, "Has the United States fallen victim to both the threat of additional attacks from non-state terrorists and also to the threat that the national response is so fraught with fraud that the country cannot tolerate any public investigation of the mis-allocation and the mis-spending of the billions available, under the politically saleable umbrella, "national protection" or "homeland security?"
And the answer, sadly, even tragically, would seem to be, "Yes."
Everyone knows that there is a deep and tragic divide in the U.S. between the public and the private sector. It is virtually holy grail to support and enhance the private sector as the sector best able to provide efficient and effective action on any social problem. Also, the government, especially under Dubya (George W. Bush), sought to keep government spending, that is the part over which Congress has scrutiny, as low as possible, in order to protect and preserve their political asses. So, just as in Iraq and in Afghanistan, they hired private security firms to carry out much of the work previously conducted under the jurisdiction of the Pentagon and thereby open to public scrutiny.
Similarly with national security, the private firms are hiring from the staff already hired by the government and paying them more under their private contract with the government than they were earning while working for their government to do the same jobs, often while many others are doing exactly the same tasks.
Not only is the country paying dearly for its own paranoia, it is paying even more dearly for its complicity in this duplicity. And much of the duplicity, the fine print of dollars and cents, of overt redundancy and duplication, not to mention the covert reduncancies and duplications, is hidden from public view by statute. So the complicity is completely understandable.
But so is the significant decline in public trust of the government, as practiced by the Bush administration, and then left as an unwanted and undeserved legacy to the Obama administration.
These two reporters deserve the Medal of Honour for their difficult and somewhat unpopular reporting.
The country has become like the former Soviet "gulag" an expensive, secret and dangerous operation in both fact and in principle. And the only way out is to "bell the cat" which, in this case means, coming clean with the size, the scope and the full accountability and responsibility for the situation, prior to cleaning it up.
The savings to the treasury department, not to mention the restoration of confidence in government, would likely more than ensure the re-election of Obama as president in 2012.
For more go to: projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Men and Suicide: every day 10 suicides in Canada, 8 are men

By Andre Picard, Globe and Mail, September 6, 2011
Take a close look at the statistics and a trend becomes clear: The No. 1 risk factor for suicide is being male.

Of the 10 people who die by suicide daily in this country, about eight are men and two are women.

There are libraries full of research examining this phenomenon, which is not unique to Canada. There are many possible explanations but few easy answers.
We know that suicide is a vast societal problem that affects all age groups – in Canada, suicides have been recorded in children as young as 8 and in seniors over the age of 90 – and all socioeconomic groups....
The vast majority of suicides result from underlying mental illness coupled with profound emotional pain, and they are often triggered by some external event, such as a job loss, failing an exam, the breakup of a relationship or the death of a loved one. In other words, stress is the big trigger.

Yet, only a tiny proportion of those who suffer from depression die by suicide. (On the other hand, close to half of people with untreated schizophrenia will take their own lives.) There are also factors that increase the risk of depression and suicide, including a history of head injuries and alcohol/drug abuse.
Women are about twice as likely as men to suffer from depression. They are also far more likely to attempt suicide but tend to be less “successful” (and, yes, that is a horrific notion of “success.”) Still, the stats tell us that, in women, there are 20 attempts for every completed suicide while, in men, the ratio is 4:1.
One reason is that men use far more violent means to kill themselves, principally hanging and firearms, while women generally use poisoning (drug overdoses). Death though is just the tip of the iceberg: Another 48 people daily are hospitalized with self-inflicted injuries, most of them women.

The principal reason more men than women die by suicide is that men do not seek help and spiral into despair, hopelessness and self-harm.
Men also self-medicate, largely with alcohol, which tends to make their symptoms worse. When they are depressed, they don’t retreat into a shell, but act out, often violently. (Perhaps we should consider that the depressed are drawn to being hockey enforcers rather than the reverse?) Women, on the other hand, tend to self-medicate with food and sleep; they also cry out for help – literally and figuratively. They talk to friends, they talk to counsellors and they talk to physicians about their depression and suicidal thoughts.

One of the main enduring stigmas about mental illness, particularly for men, is that it is a sign of weakness. From an early age, boys are taught – or socialized – to be tough, to not cry. They internalize their pain. They repress their feelings and their fears.

This silence can be fatal. Yet the continuing carnage that results – more men die by suicide than in motor vehicle collisions – is largely hidden away and invisible.
When we have a rare glimpse of this grim reality, as we have had with the death of Mr.(Wade) Belak (formerly of the Toronto Maple Leafs of the NHL), we owe it to ourselves to not be distracted by peripheral concerns like fighting in hockey and zero in on big issues like how to treat depression and prevent suicide in males. Obviously our current approach is not working.
When the black dogs of depression come growling, when the suicidal thoughts become overwhelming, boys need not be boys and men need not be men.

They need to learn – from an early age and regardless of how macho their profession – that they can seek help, they can be vulnerable, they can be sick and get better.
The hoary myths we cling to about toughness and manhood too often leave us with young men dangling by a rope.
Sadly, I recall the names of several males who took their own lives when I was a young boy growing up in a small Ontario town. A pharmacist, a wholesale, a men's clothing retailer, a retired gentleman, all come to mind, and all of them I knew personally, without even suspecting their outcome. Guns and a hose attached to the exhaust of the car in an enclosed garage were the methods I recall. I also recall,  when I was twelve, one night being wakened around 3:00 a.m. by my mother and told to to the basement "right away!" I had no idea why, and did not bother to inquire.
When I arrived in the basement, I found my own father behind the charcoal-fired jacket heater used to generate hot water, holding a .22 calibre rifle to his head.
"Give me the gun!" I recall saying as calmly as I could.
He handed it to me and I took it upstairs, although I have no recollection where I placed it, or even whether or not it was loaded. I never checked. That was in 1954; he died in 1996, some forty-two years later, and in that time I never heard a word uttered about the incident from either my mother or my father.
What I did hear about many times, however, were allegations that my father's father, my grandfather, in my mother's words, "was crazy" because he attempted to take his own life, a story recounted by one of his adult daughters in a letter to me in the mid 1990's, yet when I attempted to confirm its veracity through my own father, he denied it ever happened.
While studying theology, I took a course entitled, "Death and Dying" from an outstanding pastoral counsellor. During that course, I inquired from the partner of another male suicide what follow-up support seemed to work for her. She confirmed that her deceased partner had returned to excessive alcohol consumption about which she had no idea. I also wrote a thesis on the liturgical suicide of a priest who was clearly depressed and wounded by many pains in his life a most recent rejection for a professional position to which he aspired.
Clearly, the culture of masculinity, not only the expectations of being male (including silence and resilience in the midst of pain, refusal to "talk" about pain to anyone, medicating the pain with whatever the choice of medicine: alcohol, work, drugs both prescription and non-prescription, sex, gambling etc. is more conducive to male suicide, especially to the much lower ratio of attempts to completions (4:1 as compared with women, 20:1)
Some men and women organized a conference on reasons why men do not seek professional help, in Kingston, ON. When I met one of the key-note speakers, I was moved to respond that men are men, are must not apologize for being men, just as a rose need not apologize for being a rose, and not a Lily.
A clinical, psychological approach to men, in my view, is not the answer to depression, nor is it the answer to mental illness, exclusively. Clinical approaches frequently involve one-on-one interactions although group interactions are also part of the available menu.
The clinical approach is to employ the medical model of treatment, as if there were a disease that needs to be made well, less toxic and less influential in a man's life. If he is too aggressive, he must be made to act out less, to repress his emotions and in order to achieve this result, both "talk therapy" and medications are prescribed. If he is too withdrawn, a similar chemical-talk duality is often prescribed.
Our society has become dependent on the medical model of treating most aberrant conditions.
I question the quality of "aberrant" that is allegedly found in many men. Have we not erred much too far in the direction of the "disease" model of defining what is wrong with a person whose attitudes, actions, speech and general demeanour do not conform to our "definition" of what is appropriate.
Using the DSM-IV, for example, the definition of "depression" in that "psychiatric bible" is derived from female patients, not from a cross section of both male and female patients. Consequently, the treatment modalities are also based on their relative success among women patients.
There is considerable evidence that North American society has made men the "scape-goats" for many of our social ills.
Men commit far more acts of violence that do women.
Men drop out of school at higher rates than women.
Men suffer from learning difficulties at a rate higher than women.
Men are considered "dummies," and/or "stupid" and/or "socially maladjusted" much more often than women.
Men do not adapt to a school curriculum that points them toward reading, writing and emotional identification nearly as effectively as do female students.
Men "hide" their shyness in their "tech" gadgets, and in their macho mask, and in their physical prowess whereas women seek out other women who are also shy and find comfort and solace with a comparable peer.
Men do not have a vocabulary for their emotions nearly as early nor as completely as do women, in fact many men consider such a vocabulary to be "effeminate" and therefore to be avoided at all costs.
Men are not taught, either formally or informally, the complexities of human relationships, especially with the opposite gender, when the need is measured in the number of divorces, reaching at least 40% by some studies and as high as 50% in other studies.
The male model of gathering and writing the daily news reports easily trumps the perspective of women: for example, it is the "horse race" of all political competitions that trumps the nuances of policy and their underpinning thought or philosophy. Consequently, a good idea will be far less likely to reach a headline than the score of the most recent poll.
The male model of measuring success in most organizations is seen in the inordinately high use of numbers, size, increased production and profits and dividends, not the drop in absenteeism, nor the rise in philanthropy by the company, nor the decline in frequency of personal conflict. This includes, tragically, the christian church, where, in my experience, a bishop's vision has been touted in corporate vernacular: 10% more people and 15% more money in the coffers. This example, a true story, demonstrates the abandonment of the principles of the gospel, and any attempt at removing gender from the calculations. It also engenders the opposite behaviours from clergy to those needed to grow integrated, and effective community circles when both men and women could and would learn from each other to talk about their spiritual lives, without fearing the embarrassment that often accompanies such a discourse involving both genders.
As our society moves to less and less authentic human contact, and more and more hiding our deepest feelings, including our deepest fears, anxieties and disappointments, men will "fit" into the model being created by both men and women, unconsciously, that not only permits, but actually encourages the cover-up of real pain, and real discomfort. It is as if we are addicted to the "story with the happy ending" as the one we are all pursuing....and look at the death-denying culture we have on our hands, our minds and our spirits.
A small sliver of hope might be seen peeking through the cracks around these three male suicides, as they stories prompt both more stories and more talk around the water cooler.
With profound thanks and encouragement for his insightful piece, to Andre Picard.













Saturday, September 3, 2011

Chinese offers weapons to Gadhafi, while abstaining from UN Resolution

By Graeme Smith, Globe and Mail, Septemerb 2, 2011
China offered huge stockpiles of weapons to Colonel Moammar Gadhafi during the final months of his regime, according to papers that describe secret talks about shipments via Algeria and South Africa.

Documents obtained by The Globe and Mail show that state-controlled Chinese arms manufacturers were prepared to sell weapons and ammunition worth at least $200-million to the embattled Col. Gadhafi in late July, a violation of United Nations sanctions.
The documents suggest that Beijing and other governments may have played a double game in the Libyan war, claiming neutrality but covertly helping the dictator. The papers do not confirm whether any military assistance was delivered, but senior leaders of the new transitional government in Tripoli say the documents reinforce their suspicions about the recent actions of China, Algeria and South Africa. Those countries may now suffer a disadvantage as Libya’s new rulers divide the spoils from their vast energy resources, and select foreign firms for the country’s reconstruction.
Omar Hariri, chief of the transitional council’s military committee, reviewed the documents and concluded that they explain the presence of brand-new weapons his men encountered on the battlefield. He expressed outrage that the Chinese were negotiating an arms deal even while his forces suffered heavy casualties in the slow grind toward Tripoli.

“I’m almost certain that these guns arrived and were used against our people,” Mr. Hariri said.
Senior rebel officials confirmed the authenticity of the four-page memo, written in formal style on the green eagle letterhead used by a government department known as the Supply Authority, which deals with procurement. The Globe and Mail found identical letterhead in the Tripoli offices of that department. The memo was discovered in a pile of trash sitting at the curb in a neighbourhood known as Bab Akkarah, where several of Col. Gadhafi’s most loyal supporters had lavish homes....
Now that Col. Gadhafi has lost power, the Chinese appear to fear, with some justification, that they could lose their foothold in the Libyan oil fields.

“Oil is a basis for war, and oil was the fundamental interest behind the war,” wrote the Chinese media group Caixin in a recent commentary.
A senior official at the Arabian Gulf Oil Co., in Benghazi, told The Globe and Mail last month that he would be reluctant to do business with Chinese companies in future because of their government’s stand against the rebellion.
A reading of Kissinger's recent book, On China, reveals a historic tradition of playing off both the former Soviet Union and the U.S. in order to preserve China's security from a large military conflict. If they opened relations with the U.S., they believed, that would frighten the Russian bear, yet while they were in talks with the U.S., they were also shadow-boxing with the Russians on the borders. For a long time, prior to the opening of relations with the U.S. under Nixon, prepared by Kissinger, the Chinese rejected a build-up of their military arsenal, preferring to "seduce the barbarians" through several ploys all determined to break the patience of the 'barbarians' who might threaten China's independence and isolation, while the Chinese used their diplomatic skills to frustrate whatever claims the barbarians were making to, for example, establish diplomatic missions in China. After lengthy seductions from the Chinese, while merely resisting the overtures of the various western countries, the representatives from those countries would depart, empty-handed, to report 'no progress' on their respective missions to the Chinese Empire.
Kissinger uses the Chinese board game, wei qi (way chee), to depict the Chinese tradition. Over 19 rows of play, each player is allotted many tokens with which to "surround" the tokens of his competitor. There is never an outright "strike" and capture as in the western game of chess but rather when one players tokens have been more surrounded than his opponent, he is declared the winner, even if the degree of "being surrounded" is only slightly more than the reverse.
Playing a double game of supporting the UN resolution to protect the citizens of Libya against their long-term dictator, while at the same time selling arms through Algieria and/or South Africa to the dictator, if true, will serve as a red rocket to the rest of the world that China, who jus this week tested a new fighter jet, has abandoned its refusal to develop a military arsenal and has jumped headlong into the hard power game of advanced weaponry, to complement its long tradition of duplicity....making the world even more dangerous.











Men and their cars...a most intimate and revealing relationship

By Robert Cribb, Toronto Star, September 3, 2011
Women, it seems, are more attracted to men with nice cars.

Among the evidence: A 2009 British study that had women aged 21 to 40 view pictures of the same man sitting in two cars — a $100,000 Bentley Continental and then a battered Ford Fiesta. They drew an overwhelming conclusion: Men appear magically more intriguing when associated with nice wheels.
Calling the problem "carcissism," Cribb good-humouredly divides men into two categories, the one who obsesses about the condition of his car, maintains it as if it were he "royal jewel" and reaps the benefits of attracting the opposite sex, and then
the other whose wheels are models of careless abandon, filled with Tim Horton wrappings, chunks of food and generally covered with scratches and dents, under the pounds of dirt that hasn't seen a car-wash since it was driven off the car lot on day one.
Of course, the first group considers a clean, spotless car the logical extension to normal daily grooming like showering, and shaving and a fresh suit, shirt and tie...merely natural. The second group, well, they are among the anti-heroes whose "natural" leaves a lot of room for improvement.
The question we want answers for is: "Can you really tell a book from its cover?"
Can you really tell if a man is comfortable in his own skin if his car is either spotless or ready for the trash heap?
There is this "putting on a face to meet the faces that we meet" (T.S. Eliot) aspect of our lives that somehow is ingrained with the pablum in the high-chair very early. We learn that when "visitors" are coming, somehow there is a flurry of cleaning at least in those areas of the house where visitors "will see." And there used to be "going-to-church-Sunday-best-clothes" that we brought out of the closet and the chest of drawers when we attended church, synagogue or mosque. God, after all, wanted to see only our best, as if somehow that God was completely in the dark about the condition of our hygiene, our pocketbook,  our wardrobe, and our self-esteem. And then, remember that first date, the Christmas dance in grade nine, when we wore our "Sunday best" to impress our dates, although the temperature hovered around 30 degrees below Fahrenheit, and walking her home took at least an hour, plus the same hour back home, after midnight.
Men, it would seem, if we are to observe the vehicles we meet every day, are not so simply divided as Cribb would suggest. There are multiple versions of "relatively clean" and relatively polished and relatively scratch-free on the cars bearing our publicly made-up 'suits-on-wheels' that our co-workers rarely, if ever see in the parking lots at the office. And, let's hope that women, too, are far more evolved from those "first date" perfections, and those Sunday-best offers of humility (or was that vanity?) that were signatures to our desperately hoped-for impressions by those who endured our first dates, and the God who also smiled at our earnest attempt to "present" as near as holy as our bank account would permit.
Having been through both the 'carcissism' stage with a 1966 blue Mustang that seemed to capture what I wanted to depict at twenty-four, and the multiple stationwagons of family life, prior to the inception of the more adaptable SUV, there is now a mini-SUV sitting in the garage, whose battery succumbed yesterday after 140,000 kilometers, and whose skin is covered with the dust of gravel roads plied daily over 100 k's, while serving the needs of Canada Post clients in rural Ontario. She is not an expression of my carcissism, nor of my carelessness, but rather of the current need for utility wheels, that comes with a degree of dependability, reliability and cost-effectiveness that I wish I had had to good sense to pursue earlier.
Comfort, and dependability and a relatively predictable cost...these three are now trumping what once could easily have been called carcissism, especially with the '66 Mustang and the ''76 Audi Fox and the '70 Volvo....
However, what cannot be disputed is the male connection to his wheels, as part of his sense of himself. The car companies know more about men, in varying degrees depending on the company, than do most of our partners and that knowledge is likely to remain so classified that even wikeleaks will not be able to uncover its secrets. We will find a way to 'jazz-up' even the smallest "Smart car" to make it fit into our "pyschic" garage, although most of those bells and whistles will be there for our ego's that seem so dependent on a unique kind of expression.
It is like our ties; we want what we want and no one can tell us what they will be at the moment of deciding except that inscrutable inner voice that simply "knows" which one feels right...and we trust that voice as if it were our mother-father-grandmother-grandfather in both authority and credibility.
And we can only hope that our partners are either unconscious of that little drama or have become so aware and accepting of its enduring strength that they will smile and speak softly to themselves, "Yes, that's the little boy I love!"

Friday, September 2, 2011

Chartered Banks raise mortgage interest rates while drowning in profits

By Josh Rubin, Toronto Star, September 1, 2011
Canada’s big banks are raking in billions of dollars in profits, but if they want to keep doing it while the economy stumbles, look out for another boost in mortgage rates, analysts say.

Toronto-Dominion Bank announced Thursday that it earned $1.45 billion in profits during the fiscal third quarter, up from $1.18 billion in the same quarter last year. TD also boosted its dividend for the second time this year.
During the quarter, the six biggest banks in the country earned a combined $4.56 billion.
But all but BMO saw earnings drop in their capital markets divisions, the banks’ trading arms, thanks to volatility in the stock market. Banks are also likely to see lower revenues from their investment banking divisions as fewer companies do takeover deals or have initial public offerings when the economy and markets are in the tank, says analyst Brian Klock.
That, says Klock, means banks will be looking to boost earnings elsewhere, particularly in their retail banking divisions.
“I don’t think they’re going to be doing it by nickel and diming customers on their fees. The easiest way to do it is to raise mortgage rates,” said Klock, a banking analyst and senior vice-president at New York-based Keefe, Bruyette & Woods....
Last week, Royal Bank, BMO and CIBC raised rates on their variable mortgages, citing increased borrowing costs in the bond market.

That came as little surprise to Fred Lazar, an economics professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business. A bank’s borrowing cost may well be going up, said Lazar, but it’s tempting to tack on a little extra profit for themselves when raising the rate they charge customers.
“It’s not a one-to-one ratio. If the yields on five-year bonds go up 10 or 15 basis points, they’ll probably raise their mortgage rates 20 or 25 points,” said Lazar, adding banks are also making plenty of money from their credit card divisions.
“The spread between what they’re paying out on deposits and what they’re charging in interest is growing,” said Lazar. While banks often justify the rates they charge by saying credit cards represent a greater risk because they’re unsecured, Lazar says they’re not as risky as banks would have people believe.
When will it be time for the government to step in to reign in the voracious profit appetites of the chartered banks in Canada? Growing the spread between what they pay out on deposits and what they charge in interest feeds only their own corporate greed, and let's not tip-toe around the dynamic.
While it is true that our chartered banks are among the most secure in the world, with respect to their capitalization, they are not, and must not be treated as a religious institution. They are, after all, at the centre of the economic activity and their record of treatment of the ordinary Canadian is never going to be inscribed in the "social conscience" sector of the World Encyclopedia.
These banks are little more than capitalist monsters, in bed with the current and most previous governments, cowing most legislators and most governments provincial and federal into submission to their avarice, at the expense of the ordinary Canadian. And their shareholders are their masters, demanding more and more profits and dividends.
It is time we had a government who would stand face-to-face with these monsters and demand that they serve the public in a more economical and less greedy manner, and reducing the spread between their pay-outs and their interest charges would be a good place to start.







 




Thursday, September 1, 2011

Pope cannot trump Premier over bullying of gays in Ontario Separate Schools

It is a very complex society in North America, especially in the cities where well over 75% of the population lives, a number than grows yearly. One of the complexities, among many, is the question of political/legal intervention into questions of social justice. In Metropolitan Toronto Roman Catholic schools, along with public schools, there has been a growing issue of bullying, much of it directed towards gay and lesbian students. To counteract these nefarious acts of bullying gays, the province has instituted a model of student peer alliances, organized by students, bringing both gay students and straight students together for the purpose of enhanced awareness, enhanced acceptance and enhanced community building within the schools, a key ingredient to the learning process for all students. Clearly, there would also be a significant decline in the occurrence of bullying, at least with respect to targetted gay students, as a consequence of these alliances.
However, Roman Catholic parents insist on the Roman Catholic church's teaching about homosexuality, which is that it is a "sin" and these parents see a slippery slope in the proposal to "integrate" gays and straight students, the result of which will inevitably be the "lowering of standards of the Roman Catholic faith" and an abandonment of the Roman Catholic teaching about homosexuality.
One Toronto headline dubbed the battle this way: "Pope trumps Premier"...indicating that the teachings of the church take precedence over the "alliances" proposed and instituted by the (Roman Catholic) Premier.
Of course, to takes sides in such a dispute, is to evoke the wrath of the other side. And, as in pregnancy, there is really very little middle ground. Either we are going to promote civility and tolerance and the elimination of this form of bullying, or we are going to honour the teachings of the Roman Catholic church. And let's not forget these Roman Catholic schools are funded by the province, and the Roman Catholic parents are entitled to their "religious" schools under the British North America Act.
However, while not seeking to provoke additional wrath from Roman Catholic parents and trustees, the civil society must take priority over the teachings of the church, when those teachings undergird attitudes or rejection, disdain, and deep and profound judgement of the gay and lesbian community. It is those attitudes that contribute to the violent, and the not-so-violent treatment of gay students in the school system.
The BNA does not guarantee Roman Catholic parents the implied or the stated "right" to foster bigotry, alienation and violence against any group of students in their schools. Of course, parents of gay students do have the option of selecting the public system, but one would think they might have chosen the Roman Catholic system for its "Christian" teachings, in the hope that it would foster the very attitudes of tolerance, acceptance and collegiality that would seem to some to be at the core of the "Christian" faith, as expressed in the gospels of the New Testament. They may even have chosen the Roman Catholic system because they, too, are members of the Roman Catholic church.
The Premier must be supported in his stand to continue to foster and encourage the alliances in the Roman Catholic school system, not in spite of, but rather because of the danger implicit in a culture in which the teachings of the Roman Church are incompatible with of a culture and a climate conducive to learning. Violence, bigotry and forced (and condoned alienation and separation, not to mention terror) against students whose sexual orientation is neither an inducement of the Satan who reigns in their Hell, nor it is a personal choice based on some whim of adolescence.
Here is one important case where the civil society must continue to trump the Vatican, the Pope, and the long-standing teachings of the church against homosexuality.
The Charter of Rights could conceivably be invoked by the Premier, or the Crown, in a case that seeks to uphold his courageous, insightful and honourable intervention. And, should it go to the Supreme Court for a final arbitration, I can only hope that the court will find in favour of the Premier and the Ontario Government.
Alliances between gay and straight students will not, and cannot, be expected to eliminate all bullying, or all violence in and around schools in any jurisdiction. However, to take pro-active steps directed at reducing this "anti-gay" bullying, in all its forms, is one step the wider society and culture can support.
We can only hope that all three parties running in the provincial election in October will support the Premier's stand, and remove this issue from partisan debate. Failure to do so could result in an even more divided school system, not to mention an even more divided body politic.
Just as the Premier has said "no" to the implementation of Sharia Law for those Ontarians of Islamic faith, he must continue to say "no" to the opposition to any form  of intervention that insists on civility between students and between opposing faiths in the culture.