Leading Canada's public healthcare to the free-market guillotine | rabble.ca

Leading Canada's public healthcare to the free-market guillotine | rabble.ca

Leading Canada's public healthcare to the free-market guillotine

By Stefan Christoff

| December 22, 2011

National discussion in Canada on the Conservative government's new healthcare financial ultimatum, a take-it-or-leave-it-style proposal, largely revolves around myths. First that financing alone is key to securing a sustainable public healthcare system and second that free-market economic winds will provide sustainable guidelines, via GDP, for viable future government healthcare financing.

A surprise delivery from Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to provincial finance ministers, over a fancy lunch-in at the Chateau Victoria Hotel this past Monday, the plan offers no space for negotiation toward collective national solutions for public healthcare.

Essentially, the Conservative proposal works to strip federal responsibility in crafting, via national negotiations, coherent and sustainable healthcare systems in Canada's provinces and territories. A clear move away from the flawed but important Canada Health Act and a political node to provincial governments already working to allocate federal healthcare financing toward enhancing the corporate, for-profit sector role in delivering healthcare, as already seen extensively in Alberta and Québec.

In reality, the Conservative plan will see six per cent healthcare funding increases until the 2016-17 fiscal year, with little regulation over provincial governments increasing experimentation with public-private partnerships. Beyond 2016-17 the plan is to bind federal healthcare spending to GDP growth, a fundamentally dangerous move toward codifying Canada's public healthcare into capitalist economic terms.

Essentially, the Conservative deal stands as cash for healthcare in the near future and uncertainty for the long term. Cash solutions are never long-term solutions to collective challenges, fast money and free market thinking will not solve the deep problems facing public healthcare in Canada.

Beyond important calls for the Conservative government to negotiate viable terms to sustain public healthcare in Canada, with politicians from provincial and territorial governments, also note that zero official opportunity for the people of Canada to contribute ideas toward the future of public healthcare have been outlined.

In reality, a viable and democratic process in Canada, relating to public healthcare's future, would encourage neighbourhood assemblies and participatory political processes coast-to-coast, similar to the general assembly model celebrated by the Occupy movement.

Certainly Conservative ministers, along with most politicians across party lines walking the halls of power in Ottawa, would have zero interested in launching a real democratic process on shaping the future of public healthcare in Canada. However there is nothing stopping people and social movements from engaging on the issues and broadening national grassroots discussions on public healthcare in Canada, noting that public healthcare in Canada is rooted in social movements demands voiced by past generations.

Consistent opinion polls illustrate deep support for public healthcare in Canada, an issue that Conservative politicians worked to avoid addressing in substantial ways during the 2011 election campaign. In direct terms the recent Conservative healthcare plan contradicts 2011 election claims, via Conservative politicians, to sustain Canada's healthcare system, openly violating the majority opinion and trust of people in Canada.

Enforcing ideological policy without space for negotiation is quickly solidifying as a cornerstone to Canada's Conservative majority government, from moves to scrap Canada's gun registry, to the omnibus crime bill C-10, that is projected to greatly expand Canada's prisons, little political space has been granted for democratic process.

Next move is toward the public healthcare system, first to close off negotiations and second to place government support for healthcare in volatile economic winds.

Linking public healthcare funding to GDP, announced to start in five years, is another salvo in a long-term campaign to derail public healthcare institutions in Canada.

In moving healthcare policy away from the domain of universal rights toward the fuzzy logic of the market place, Conservative politicians have taken a further step toward constructing a framework for privatization, branding public healthcare as inherently tied to free market economics.

Certainly Canada will never see a Conservative proposal to link military spending to market fluctuations via GDP, given primary importance increasingly diverted toward the Canadian military in Conservative moves to reshape contemporary Canada's political identity toward militarism.

Linking national military financing to free market flux would certainly create financial future uncertainties for Canada's military, a monetary risk that Conservatives are willing to divert toward healthcare but not military spending.

Public healthcare in Canada is being addressed in 2011 by Conservative politicians as a financial annoyance, thrown to the provinces and territories in relation to free market winds, while in contrast securing billions in financing for U.S.-constructed military fighter jets is locked down without question.

In a time of economic crisis that is washing over global markets, a continuing crisis that will manifest in more severe ways on Canadian shores soon, this Conservative proposal will link public healthcare financing to the whims of domestic and international financial winds, largely dictated by an economic logic that has led to our contemporary financial crisis.

In short, our public healthcare system will suffer free market blues in the not-so-long future, if this 2011 Conservative plan on healthcare is not struck down.

Shifting federal healthcare spending in relation to GDP fluctuation, points to a much broader Conservative vision to reshape Canadian policies and institutions with a free market chisel that will only threaten our collective health and well being long into the future.

Now is the time to stand up and fight back, not only for public healthcare, but for collective social policy not regulated by fundamentally unjust free market economics.

Stefan Christoff is a Montreal-based writer, community activist and musician who contributes to rabble.ca & who is on Twitter.

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private health care Jim Flaherty healthcare Canada Health Act

How Stephen Harper is creating a new Canada | rabble.ca

How Stephen Harper is creating a new Canada | rabble.ca

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Stephen Harper first became Prime Minister in 2006 and has already dramatically transformed the old Canada. But with no election due for four more years, we ain't seen nothing yet.

It's in the nature of true believers and ideologues to believe that any means to their sacred ends are justified. This makes them extremely dangerous people. It's also typical of such people that they're often motivated by unfathomable resentment and anger, a compulsion not just to better but to destroy their adversaries. These are good descriptions of Stephen Harper and those closest to him.

There was never a Trudeauland or Mulroneyland or Chrétienland, but as The Globe's Lawrence Martin has made us understand, there is already a Harperland whose nature is quite apparent. Like the American conservatives whom the Harperites so envy, our government has concocted a new reality of its own that it is systematically imposing on the Canadian people. The values and moral code of Mr. Harper's new Canada are clear.

A central tenet of the new reality is the repudiation of the need for anything as irrelevant as evidence, facts or rationality whenever they are inconvenient. As in cancelling the long-form census, without a shred of reason. As when Injustice Minister Nicholson defends his back-to-the-jungle crime bills by reminding us of a Harperland article of faith: "We don't govern on the basis of statistics." Or, as we now know, on the basis of the findings of serious experts both in and out of the government.

Jason Kenney can stand as a past master at inventing evidence to serve his unfailingly partisan needs. This is a man, after all, who has shamelessly claimed a dramatic rise in anti-Semitism in Canada contrary to all the facts. Just days ago, Mr. Kenney employed gratuitously inflammatory language when he created a crisis over a handful of women who wear a veil, and who are of course Muslim.

But lying is the very mother's milk of Harperland morality. When you invent your own reality, you can also invent your defence. Just follow the distinguished careers of ministers Peter MacKay, Peter Kent and Tony Clement. Old joke: How do you know when certain politicians are lying? Their lips are moving.

In Harperland, hitting below the belt is standard equipment, as the dirty tricks used against Montreal Liberal MP Irwin Cotler nicely demonstrate. Straightforward dishonesty as in the Cotler caper is just the Conservative version of free expression, as Government House Leader Van Loan earnestly explained. When the Speaker of the House brands the tactic as "reprehensible," you know we're no longer in Kansas, kids.

On the complex aboriginal file, Harperland blames the victims for their own wretched circumstances and blames local NDP MP Charlie Angus for not cluing in the clueless Aboriginal Affairs Minister. The minister's assertion that the chief of Attawapiskat had accepted the government's imposition of a ludicrously expensive third-party manager was, of course, immediately contradicted.

Harperland values demand fundamental changes in our governance processes -- the outright attacks on trade unions, the unprecedented measures taken to silence critical NGOs, the muzzling of ostensibly independent federal watchdogs.

But the new values also reverse decades of cherished Canadian policies. Look at the contempt the Prime Minister shows for the United Nations, as described in a new paper for the McLeod Group by former Canadian diplomat and senior UN official Carolyn McAskie, "Canada and Multilateralism: Missing In Action":

The Prime Minister says he has little use for the UN. ... After losing a bid for membership of the Security Council, many government members made disparaging comments about that "corrupt organization" and right wing press commentators referred to it as an organization run by "dictators." Is this the Canada that played such a front-line role in previous decades? How can we behave in this childish manner, spurning a whole system of organizations critical to world peace, security and development?

To damage Canada's reputation even further, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has gravely disappointed those who had high expectations of him as the country's senior diplomat. Sadly, Mr. Baird has proved incapable of eschewing the cheap politics by which he demeaned the House for so many years, complete with endlessly-repeated spin lines that substitute on the world stage partisan slogans for real thought.

The new Canada is a place where militarism is given pride of place over peacemaking. Watching Defence Minister Peter MacKay taking bows at the Grey Cup game for Canada's part in the Libyan campaign, Globe columnist Lawrence Martin observed:

The blending of sport and the military, with the government as the marching band, is part of the new nationalism the Conservatives are trying to instil. It is another example of how the state, under Stephen Harper's governance, is becoming all-intrusive. ... State controls are now at a highpoint in our modern history. There is every indication they will extend further.

The University of Ottawa's Ralph Heintzman, who created and headed the federal Public Service Office of Values and Ethics, provides an important insight into what's happening here: There is a "lack of sense of inner self-restraint on the part of the prime minister, a sense that it is some kind of war and therefore anything is legitimate, that it's quite acceptable for a prime minister to lie, for example, about how our parliamentary democracy works."

Politics as war is exactly what former Harper strategist Tom Flanagan has long advocated. A Globe piece by Mr. Flanagan before the 2011 election was actually titled "An election is war by other means." Mr. Flanagan also chose to compare the 2008 campaign to ancient wars in which Rome, the Conservatives, defeated Carthage, the Liberals, and "razed the city to the ground and sowed salt in the fields so nothing would grow there again."

As Alan Whitehorn of the Royal Military College of Canada wrote: "This suggests a paradigm not of civil rivalry between fellow citizens of the same state, but all-out extended war to destroy and obliterate the opponent. This kind of malevolent vision and hostile tone seems antithetical to the democratic spirit, not to mention peace and stability."

In fact like Mr. Harper, Prof. Flanagan seems to get a kick out of "destroying and obliterating" those he's not fond of. When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was making news, Prof. Flanagan commented: "Well, I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something. ... I would not feel unhappy if Assange 'disappeared'."

To a woman who e-mailed him objecting to his (presumed) flippancy, Prof. Flanagan responded: "Better be careful, we know where you live." What would Freud have made of such kibitzing, I wonder? After all, the good professor has cited Machiavelli's odious comment that "fortune is a woman and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force."

Ironically, if you want to hear from the other Canada, the former Canada, the one so much admired by the world, you should (and still can) listen to last Sunday's interview on CBC radio's Sunday Edition between host Michael Enright and Iceland's President, Olafur Grimmson. There, in Mr. Grimmson, was the voice of humanity, thoughtfulness, pragmatism and commonsense. He is the perfect Canadian and would make the perfect Canadian prime minister. No wonder the masterminds of Harperland want to disappear the CBC.

This article was first published in the Globe and Mail

New Photos Released of Iraq Atrocity, With Documents and Video

New Photos Released of Iraq Atrocity, With Documents and Video

Every American should read this letter: December 18, 2007 To: Mr. Randy Waddle, Assistant Inspector General, Ft Carson, Colorado CC: LTC John Shawkins, Inspector General, Ft Carson, Colorado Major General Mark Graham, Commanding Officer, Ft Carson, Colorado Major Haytham Faraj, USMC, Camp Pendleton, California Lt General Stanley Greene, US Army Inspector General Subject: Formal Notification of War Atrocities and Crimes Committed by Personnel, B Company, 2-12, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division in Iraq Dear Mr. Waddle, My name is John Needham. I am a member of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry division, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, (BCo,2-12INF,2BCT,2ID . I deployed with my unit to Iraq from October 2006 until October 2007 when I was medically evacuated for physical and mental injuries that I suffered during my deployment. The purpose of my letter is to report what I believe to be war crimes and violation of the laws of armed conflict that I personally witnesses while deployed in Iraq. Upon arriving in Iraq in October of 2006 my unit was assigned to the ¼ Cavalry unit at Camp Prosperity. In March of 2007 I was sent back to my unit, B Company 2-12 at Camp Falcon. It was at Camp Falcon that I observed and was forced to participate in ugly and inhumane acts against the Iraqi citizens in our area of responsibilities. Below I list some of the incidents that took place. In March of 2007, I witnessed SSG Platt shoot and wound an Iraqi national without cause of provocation. The Staff Sergeant said that he suspected the Iraqi be a “trigger” man. We had not been attacked and we found no evidence on the man to support the suspicion. As the Iraqi lay bleeding on the ground, PVT Smith requested to administer first aid to the Iraqi. SSgt Platt said no and “let him bleed out.” When SSG Platt walked away, Pvt Smith and PVT Mullins went to the Iraqi, dragged him to an alley, and applied first aid. They then drove him to the cache for further treatment. In June of 2007 1SG Spry caused an Iraqi male to be stopped, questioned, detained, and killed. We had no evidence that the Iraqi was an insurgent or terrorist. In any event when we stopped he did not pose a threat. Although I did not personally witness the killing, I did observe 1sg Spry dismembering the body and parading of it while it was tied to the hood of a Humvee around the Muhalla neighborhood while the interpreter blared out warnings in Arabic over the loud speaker. I have a photo that shows 1SG Spry removing the victim’s brains. On another occasion an Iraqi male was stopped by a team led by Sgt Rogers as he walked down an alleyway. The Iraqi was detained and questioned then with his hands tied behind his back, SGT Rogers skinned his face. 1ST Spry shot a young Iraqi teenager who was about 16 years old. The shooting was unprovoked and the Iraqi posed no threat to the unit. He was merely riding his bicycle past an ambush site. When I arrived on the scene I observed 1SGT Spry along with SSG Platt dismember the boy’s body. In August of 2007, I responded to radio call from SGT Rogers reporting that he had just shot an Iraqi who was trying to enter through a hole that the platoon had blown in a wall to allow them observation of the area during a security patrol. When I arrived, I saw a one armed man who was still alive lying on a barricade. The man was about 30 years old. He had an old Ruger pistol hanging from his thumb. It was obvious to me that the pistol was placed there because of the way it hung from his thumb. The Iraqi was still alive when I arrived. I saw SGT Rogers shoot him twice in the back with hollow point bullets. The Iraqi was still moving. I was asking why they shot him again when I heard Sgt Hoskins say “he’s moving, he’s still alive.” SPEC Hoskins then moved to the Iraqi and shot him in the back of the head. SSG Platt and SGT Rogers were visibly excited about the kill. I saw them pull the Iraqi’s brains out as they placed him in the body bag. CPT Kirsey must have learned something about this incident because he was very upset and admonished the NCOs involved. I have seen and heard 1SGT Spry brag about killing dogs. He kept a running count. At last count I remember he was boasting of having killed 80 dogs. On many occasions I observed SGT Temples, SSG Platt and SGT Rogers beat and abuse Iraqi teenagers, some as young as 14, without cause. They would walk into a house near areas where they suspected we had received sniper fire, then detain and beat the kids. I have photos that support my allegations. I also have numerous other photos on a laptop PC that the unit illegally seized from me. I have requested its return but they have refused. My experiences have taken a terrible toll on me. I suffer from PTSD and depression. I had no way to stop the ugly actions of my unit. When I refused to participate they began to abuse and harass me. I am still in treatment at the Balboa Naval hospital. I respectfully request that you investigate these matters, that you protect my safety by reassigning me to a different unit that is not located at Fort Carson, that you return my PC or, at least, seize it to protect the evidence on it, and that you issue a military protective order to prohibit the offending members of my unit from harassing, retaliating, or contacting me. I have some photographs and some supporting documentation to these allegations. Respectfully, PFC John Needham US Army And every American should view these photographs (warning, extremely revolting). And then watch this superb video to learn from John Needham's father what became of him: On the Dark Side in Al Doura - A Soldier in the Shadows from Pulse TV & Maverick Media on Vimeo. WARNING: Graphic and disturbing photos between 38:47 and 40:00. VIDEO DESCRIPTION: U.S. Army Ranger John Needham, who was awarded two purple hearts and three medals for heroism, wrote to military authorities in 2007 reporting war crimes that he witnessed being committed by his own command and fellow soldiers in Al Doura, Iraq. His charges were supported by atrocity photos which, in the public interest, are now released in this video. John paid a terrible price for his opposition to these acts. His story is tragic. CBS reported obtaining an Army document from the Criminal Investigation Command suggestive of an investigation into these war crimes allegations. The Army's conclusion was that the "offense of War Crimes did not occur." However, CBS also stated that the report was “redacted and incomplete; 111 pages were withheld.” http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18559_162-57323277/war-damaged-vet-kills-girlfriend-ptsd-to-blame/?tag=currentVideoInfo;videoMetaInfo Salon covered this story too: http://www.salon.com/2009/02/12/coming_home_three/ Thanks to Cindy Piester for the excellent video and all of this information.

David Swanson is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by David Swanson

End of Nations: Canada, the US and the "Security Perimeter" | Global Research TV

End of Nations: Canada, the US and the "Security Perimeter" | Global Research TV