‘You, Me, and the S.P.P: Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule’

You'll remember Paul Manly as the guy who shot that video of CEP union President Dave Coles exposing the 3 rock-toting Quebec police provocateurs at the Montebello SPP protest in Aug. 2007. Paul has finally finished his full-length feature film : ‘You, Me, and the S.P.P: Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule’, exposing "the latest manifestation of a corporatist agenda that is undermining the democratic authority of the citizens of North America".

Here are a few quotes from the trailer :

Naomi Klein :

"… after the shock of Sept 11 … that crisis was expertly manipulated by our political leaders to push through a range of policies they actually had wanted to push through before Sept 11, but didn’t have the political conditions that made that possible."

Gordon Laxer, Director, The Parkland Institute, Alberta :

"…if we go along with the Americans on their military, on their human rights, on their Patriot Act, on immigration and refugee policy, on energy, on all kinds of regulations over pesticides or whatever, then they will allow us access to their markets."

Murray Dobbin, Canadian author, journalist :

"… what the SPP really represents is a parallel government, so that the important decisions are either made outside of parliament and outside of legislatures or they make it impossible for those kinds of decisions to be made in those legislative bodies, so that democracy is slowly being gutted."

with more from Peter Julian, Michael Byers, and Maude Barlow.

And here's a portion of the film I posted this morning. To purchase your own copy of the whole film - $20 well spent - and for listings of local screenings, visit Paul's website at manlymedia.com. If we want this quality of reporting from independent journalists, we're going to have to support it. If you can't afford the $20 for your own copy, get your local library to buy a copy, leave him a message of encouragement, and pass on the word. As Paul says : I made this film for all of you.

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Oct 2009 Update : Paul and his film are on a cross-country tour of 33 countries across Canada. You can see all the tour dates on the film website here Each confirmed screening date has a pdf poster, handbill and press release that can be downloaded and used to promote the screening. Please help out where you can. All of the screenings are either free or by donation.

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Jews, Arabs hold peace rally in Israel

"Hundreds of Jews and Arabs from the north and center of Israel gathered near Kfar Kara'a on Highway 65 Saturday in a rally for peace. The only sign present at the demonstration read "Hand in hand – neighbors for peace".

They wore white and held hands to create a human chain along the road for one hour, without disrupting traffic."

h/t Godammitkitty @ Bread and Roses

And on Thursday Ayatollah Ali Khomenei banned hardline Iranian volunteers from leaving the country to carry out suicide bombings against Israel.

But in the US, the House of Representatives voted 390 to 5 "to recognise Israel's right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza".

Nice framing.

There was no resolution asking : "Does Israel have the right to own two concentration camps, Gaza and the West Bank?" h/t Juan Cole commenter

The five who voted "no" were Ron Paul (R-TX), Dennis Kuchinich (D-OH), Maxine Waters (D-CA), Nick Rahall (D-WV), and Gwen Moore (D-WI).

Ron Paul gave a four minute speech to accompany his vote : Israel created Hamas

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Naomi Klein : "Israel : Boycott, Divest, Sanction"

"The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa."

Wall Street Journal : "Israel is committing war crimes"

Corporate welfare fraud

Naomi Klein :

"Washington's handling of the bailout is not merely incompetent. It may well be illegal.

According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals, "Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending -- for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions, etc. -- is a violation of the act." Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used."

American International Group Inc. got an expanded $150 billion government bailout this week, and is setting aside $503 million in compensation for executives.

Bloomberg : "The Treasury has committed $290 billion of the $350 billion already allocated through capital injections to banks and AIG. The four attending members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's subcommittee on domestic policy accused Treasury of picking "winners and losers'' by giving loans to healthy banks to use in buying smaller ones."

"This administration wants to privatize Wall Street’s gains and socialize Wall Street’s losses," said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. ~ Thomas Jefferson, 1802

The Natty Post plumps for the SPP

After it became clear that the main result of the Security and Prosperity Partnership meet-up in Montebello was to alert Canadians to the fact that their country's sovereignty was in deep shit, deep integration's best friends were unanimous in their tough love advice to the ailing SPP's enablers.

Tom d'Aquino of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, Harper's eminence grease Tom Flanagan, the Hudson Institute, the Fraser Institute, John Ibbitson and Neil Reynolds of the Globe and Mail, the usual gang all proposed the same thing.
Don't hide your blight under a Bushel, they all said - explains it to da peeps.


Today, the Natty Post steps up magnificently to this cheerleading task with three, count 'em - three, editorials on how absolutely vital it is to Canada's economic health to sell out to the plummeting rogue plutocracy to the south.


Michael Hart from Carleton U., a NAFTA negotiator, a former official at Foreign Affairs and Int. Trade, and a sometime "deep integration" teacher at the North American University, writes : Canada blew it.

"The crisis of Sept. 11, 2001, provided a perfect opportunity to seize the moment to re-imagine the border, but Canada blew it."

According to Hart, we foolishly we squandered this unique opportunity to implement "the structural and institutional changes of deep integration" because of "nationalist phobias".
Silly us.


Hart laid the deal out rather more clearly when he testified at the Int. Trade Committee on SPP in May last year, you know - the one that Con Chairman Benoit huffed out of in a hissy fit.

"We have made a political choice that we wanted a more deeply integrated North American economy," Hart said. "That means a willingness on our part to, for example, strengthen the perimeter around North America in order to deal with security issues that are uppermost in American minds."

Uppermost in my mind at the moment, Mike, is the peculiar way you've turned being on the wrong end of Naomi Klein's disaster capitalism into "a perfect opportunity".

Onward to the second Natty Post SPP-plumping editorial of the day...from another Carleton U. guy who happens to be the editor of the Financial Post : U.S. border is killing free trade
Integration just isn't happening fast enough for Terrence Corcoran : Harper's Tories are "complacent" while Stockwell Day's record is "dismal".

Probably because they're hoping to be re-elected, Terry.


And thirdly....Natty Post excerpts from a Woodrow Wilson paper, Economic Integration in North America :

"Canada's monetary independence acts as a major barrier to economic integration.
Until Canada decides to adopt the U.S. dollar, formally or informally, and hitch its business cycle more closely to the American rhythm, further integration will confront natural limits."

Not to be a killjoy or anything but ever since Reform Party members Rob Anders, Rahim Jaffer and Jason Kenney spearheaded a debate in parliament over the issue of monetary union for North America in March 1999, and Alliance MP Herb Grubal wrote a paper for the Fraser Institute entitled The Case For the Amero : The Economics and Politics of a North American Monetary Union.., some clown will occasionally bring up the benefits of joint currency, only to hastily add that they don't of course mean the amero.

"Further integration will confront natural limits."
That, of course, will be us.


H/T : Integrate This

SPP : Naomi Klein vs Tom Flanagan

Tom Flanagan, US poli-sci prof at the University of Calgary; Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute; and all-round 'eminence grease' to Stephen Harper, this Tom Flanagan, writes in Saturday's G&M : "In times of perceived crisis, a conservative party can win by positioning itself further to the right, as shown by the victories of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Ralph Klein, Mike Harris, and Goerdon Campbell."

G&M, Saturday Sept 8 :

 "In Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, she argues that an idea that began with Chicago School economist Milton Friedman has determined much of the course of recent history – that a time of crisis, whether a war or a hurricane, offers a strategic opportunity to overwrite the resulting “blank slate” with market privatization and corporatism."

She also argues that such a crisis can be a man-made destabilization of public infrastructure.

Flanagan also has a book out : Harper's Team : Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power.
I'm guessing it isn't going to be "behind the scenes" enough for us though, so I thought we'd have a look at a 2003 policy paper from the Fraser Institute, the think tank where Flanagan is a Senior Fellow.


Mandate for Leadership for the New Prime Minister

• Bank of Canada : Create a new currency—the amero—and a North American Central Bank for Canada,Mexico and the United States.
• Convert existing dollars into ameros. 
• Retain Canadian national symbols on notes and coins.
• Exchange Rates : Remove the Bank of Canada’s power to set interest rates and leave as its main responsibility the convertibility of Canadian into US dollars at par.
• Environment : Withdraw from Kyoto protocol
• Allow export of water for use in non-irrigation projects.
• Labour : Increase flexibility in labour market by, for example, introducing worker choice legislation for those covered by federal labour laws.
• Int Trade & Foreign Aid : Remove Canadian regulations that restrict free trade (unilaterally if necessary), such as the Wheat Board.
• Remove Canadian restrictions on foreign ownership of banks and other financial institutions; airlines and railroads; newspapers and electronic media.
• Allow individuals and firms to sue provinces for damages if trade barriers remain in place.
• Health : Repeal or change the Canada Health Act to remove limits on provincial autonomy over health care, as recognized by the constitution.
• Allow competition in health-care delivery, including, private insurance, for-profit and non-profit hospitals, and private surgery and other treatment facilities.
• Defence : Work for inter-operability with NATO and US for air, naval and ground forces.
• Introduce biometric screening of travelers.  Share air passenger information with the United States.
• Judiciary : Abolish the Court Challenges Program to discourage special interest groups from bypassing the political process to obtain special privileges.
• Aboriginal Policies : Restructure aboriginal policy to empower the individual, not band elites.
• Create a new overseas intelligence service to coordinate counter-terrorism efforts.
• Abolish all policies related to “industrial strategy,” particularly regional economic development agencies.  In Atlantic Canada, the money saved could be used to virtually eliminate corporate taxes.

And skipping down a bit :

"When Canada did not agree to take part in the US ballistic missile defence (BMD) program, the US worked around it, locating the necessary radars in Alaska and Greenland. Space-based assets have made Canada’s geographic position less important than that of Poland or Rumania. 

All of these issues (and there are many others) must be addressed in the very near future. They all point in the same direction: Canada can preserve its sovereignty and its prosperity only by a closer relationship, particularly in military and security policy, with the United States."

Gosh, those all seem so familiar to us now, don't they?
From Flanagan and the Fraser Institute' lips to Harper's ear.
And he who has the ear of the king is more important than the king, yadda, yadda.

Actually the above disaster capitalism wish list is so complete a description of Harper's SPP policies, I'm somewhat disappointed to find no mention in it anywhere of his infamous jelly beans.

Link fixed : Mandate for Leadership for the New Prime Minister
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SPP and "The Shock Doctrine"

Chet Scoville of Vanity Press, blogging at Shakesville :
"...the SPP is an especially dangerous example of the privatization of government that neoconservatism has been demanding and putting into place for a quarter of a century: the sort of thing Naomi Klein outlines in The Shock Doctrine. It's especially dangerous because, being multinational and happening as it is below the radar, it will be extremely difficult to undo once it's done."

Stephen Lendman in an excellent review of Klein's book at Mostly Water :
"The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" explodes the myth of "free market" democracy.

On Milton Friedman's Chicago School revolution of rapid-fire economic transformation he called "shock treatment" : " It's central tenets are structurally adjusted mass-privatizations, government deregulation, unrestricted free market access for foreign corporations, and deep cuts in social spending with repressive laws."

On "the whirling revolving door between government and business taken to a new level" :
"That's the whole idea in a get rich quick environment - get an impressive government title, stay in office long enough in a department handing out big contracts, collect insider information with market value, then quit and cash in. Klein calls public service now "little more than a reconnaissance mission for future work in the disaster capitalism complex."

"Fighting "terrorism" is big business. September 11 unlocked the potential, a huge new growth market was created, and protection from terror became more important than big brother watching.

Klein calls it "an unprecedented convergence of unchecked police powers and unchecked capitalism, a merger of the shopping mall and the secret prison."

The Security and Prosperity Partnership : a North American merger of the shopping mall and the secret prison.

War... What is it good for?...Absolutely boatloads of money

The Globe and Mail has a four page excerpt from Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine :

"In December, 2006, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group fronted by James Baker issued its long-awaited report. It called for the U.S. to “assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise” and to “encourage investment in Iraq's oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies.”

The Bush administration immediately pushed ahead by helping to draft a radical new oil law for Iraq, which would allow companies like Shell and BP to sign 30-year contracts in which they could keep a large share of Iraq's oil profits, amounting to tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars – unheard of in countries with as much easily accessible oil as Iraq, and a sentence to perpetual poverty in a country where 95 per cent of government revenues come from oil."

"Explaining why it was justified for such a large percentage of the profits to leave Iraq, the oil companies cited the security risks. In other words, it was the disaster that made the radical proposed law possible."

Naomi Klein's husband, Avi Lewis, interviewed James Baker for his CBC show On The Map. Only one in twenty Iraq MPs saw that oil law before it was passed. And then there are the profits to be made from the privatization of war. Klein :

"Associated Press put the number of contractors in Iraq at 120,000, almost equivalent to the number of U.S. troops. In scale, this kind of privatized warfare has already overshadowed the United Nations. The UN's budget for peacekeeping in 2006-2007 was $5.25-billion – that's less than a quarter of the $20-billion Halliburton got in Iraq contracts, and the latest estimates are that the mercenary industry alone is worth $4-billion."

In a book interview on CBC's TheCurrent this week, Klein remains obstinately hopeful. Canadians have been fighting "disaster capitalism" for decades, she says, with their continued support for public infrastructure and medicare. The best insurance against being "shocked" into accepting any colonialist corporate agenda is to be ready for it by being informed. Go, Naomi.

Immediately following Klein's CBC interview, Greg Palast and Aurel Braun from Trinity College heatedly discuss the book. Aurel Braun gets the phrase 'conspiracy theory' out a couple of times before Palast puts the ideological boots to him. It must really bite Brown's ass that Palast, who actually studied under Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys, can so easily one-up a Friedman apologist like Braun, who didn't.

Go on - treat yourself.

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"The Shock Doctrine" on YouTube

"Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around."—Milton Friedman

The Shock Doctrine is the secret history of the "free market" and how it came to dominate the world.

"Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect."

~ Naomi Klein

Naomi has a short 6 minute vid up on YouTube entitled The Shock Doctrine

YouTube courtesy of Skdadl at POGGE via Bread and Roses.