The Conservative Broadsided Corporation

                                                               updated below

Noam Chomsky : "That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital."


All graphics from Friends of Canadian Broadcasting




I get Dr Dawg's point : "Dismantle. Then remantle out of new material" 

But I'm afraid once the goal of dismantling is achieved, there will be no remantling.
More likely, just as the dismantling is almost complete, the Cons will opt for keeping a severely controlled ConBullshitCorp limping along under an ever diminishing mantle as a useful and somewhat less ridiculous version of SunNews.

CBC is really just a reflection of our society at large - a whole lot of self-serving repetitive corporate-driven drivel interspersed with occasionally rewarded bright sparks of public-spirit, principles, and courage.

So how about we support those who splash some much-needed cold water on CBC from time to time without actually drowning the CBC in the Cons corporate cronies' bathtub :

Friday Update : Progressive Economics Forum : The CBC - the Corporate Broadcasting Corp.
Good overview of Canadaland/Amanda Lang controversy and CBC's pro-corporate evolution from former CBC insider Bruce Livesey

Predictable response and hit piece on Canadaland from Globe and Mail: 
Journalist Jesse Brown is quick to expose the failures of Canadian media. But what about his own?

Canadaland's Jesse Brown responds by publishing email exchange between himself and author of G&M hit piece. Ha!

Saturday update : Amanda Lang's softball CBC interview with Royal Bank CEO Gord Nixon on TFWs and RBC/iGate in-and-outsourcing in April 2013 was revisited when Canadaland revealed Amanda Lang is in a relationship with RBC board member Geoffrey Beattie.  

I don't really care who Lang is doing.

My own interest in Lang stemmed from her outrageous G&M opinion piece, also from April 2013, defending outsourcing while attacking her CBC co-worker's TFW coverage as "a sideshow" - a mere 10 days before Lang's scheduled keynote address at an iGate/RBC sponsored conference on outsourcing. 

Dear G&M : re your piece on Canadaland's Jesse Brown yesterday and your many "disclosures" including one on Lang's piece for your paper.

You missed one. 

The US Security and Exchange Commission - General Electric 2013 Annual Meeting of Shareholders lists Lang's beau Geoffrey Beattie as "a director of the Globe and Mail" in addition to being on the board of RBC. That bio is also repeated here.

You're welcome.
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Tuesday update : 
George Monbiot at The Guardian : Our ‘impartial’ broadcasters have become mouthpieces of the elite reviews the CBC debacle

Frank Koller : CBC Ombudsman Declines To Review Conflict-of-Interest Policy Violations
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CORE-outsourcing/Amanda Lang/iGATE - on the milk carton

On Saturday I posted a screencap of CBC's 'senior business correspondent' Amanda Lang as keynote speaker at the upcoming CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing?.
CORE displayed Lang's bio above the logos of their 'Corporate Sponsors' - which unhappily included iGATE.  My link to that page subsequently went down over the weekend:








"Oops! The page you are looking for cannot be found."

This seemed most unlikely for an "annual global conference" about to open in 6 days so I fixed it. It went down again. Go ahead - try it yourself. It's gone.

CORE's helpful Oops! advice to try looking for the page in their menu links brings up no mention of the conference at all.                                                                                                                                                                 
    
                                                                         


Their most recent twitter entry on March 13 which provided a link to the conference is also "Oops", while links to it from various conference participants like Everest Group are also pining for the fjords.





The whole CORE-outsourcing April 23 conference page is all just one great big Oops now apparently.

In the course of looking for it, I ran into a CORE page from their 2011 conference advertizing Lang as the Conference Moderator :

as well as iGATE's proud corporate  sponsorship there in presumably happier days :

But the page at CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? , featuring Lang and C.J. Ritchie "Assistant Deputy Minister of the Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, which provides leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of strategic outsourcing contracts" is nowhere to be found.

Did they just go indoors?  Are they making corrections?  
All I know is that CBC has visited that Creekside page upwards of 20 times in the last 24 hours.

If anyone knows what happened, please let me know. After all - it's CORE's 8th Annual Outsourcing Conference - practically a Canadian tradition now.

2pm Update : Frank at Back of the Book found another way in :
http://www.core-outsourcing.org/events/event-directory/Archive/Conferenc2013/index.php

Thursday update from comments below :
Saskboy said : Ombudsman tweeted me that Lang is off the CORE event.

Mystery Solved !          CBC Ombudsman, May 3, 2013
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Boycott the Royal Bank ... and Amanda Lang - Part 4

 "Information technology workers displaced in Canada are being replaced not by cheap Indian workers but by better ones." 

So says CBC's Amanda Lang, senior business correspondent for CBC News and good cop to Kevin O'Leary's bad cop on the Lang and O'Leary Exchange, in yesterday's Globe and Mail.

She wonders if Canadians have returned to 1990 or perhaps to "campaign trail rhetoric in America" - so aghast is she that people are angry about the Royal Bank in-and-outsourcing of Canadian jobs to iGATE in India.  

In her rousing paeon to globalization and "the natural forces of capitalism", she explains :

"a job moved from Canada to India creates a new kind of prosperity. It creates a job in a country we sell goods and services to, increasing the opportunity for our businesses to flourish even more."

If you have $699.00 you can hear more of Amanda's thoughts when she gives the keynote address on April 23 at CORE-Outsourcing's 8th Annual Conference : Fast Forward - What's Next for Outsourcing? sponsored by IBM, HP, and iGATE :

"CORE's mandate is to help member organizations maximize the value of outsourcing by providing independent and unbiased information ... "

Also presenting will be 
C.J. Ritchie, Asst Deputy Minister, Strategic Partnerships Office, Government of British Columbia, providing "leadership to BC’s $5.8-billion portfolio of outsourcing contracts".

A list of CORE's extensive corp members here, and no, Royal Bank isn't on that list including RBC Financial Group and you'll recognize the rest of them.  
In May, CORE is running a course focusing on "the transition from insourced service delivery to outsourced service delivery and through to steady-state operations".

About that...

Walkom : Former outsourcer describes how job destruction works.
Informative interview with a 10 year veteran of doing it in Canada.

But here's what I don't get, Amanda. If you bring in foreign workers in order to save money and drive down wages in Canada by paying those indentured foreign workers 15% less in a market that just lost 54,500 jobs last month, who is going to be able to to afford to buy the stuff and pay for the services you sent offshore?  

And who is going to look into fixing this for us? The same guy who set it up for us.

Boycott the Royal Bank of Canada - Part 1.  


Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 2


Boycott the Royal Bank - Part 3


Sunday update : Great post from Laura K @ wmtc on related issues :
Unpaid labour used to be called slavery. Now it's an internship
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Wednesday update : CORE-outsourcing/Amanda Lang/ iGATE - on the milk carton
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Thursday update :
Saskboy said : Ombudsman tweeted me that Lang is off the CORE event.

May 3, 2013   CBC Ombudsman

March 5, 2014 CBC issues no foul no harm report :
Conflict of Interest and CBC News coverage of RBC and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program
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