It has become more or less a sick joke with the so-called “right” these days; marking occasions such as National Public Service week while simultaneously, and very publicly, destroying the very things they’re there celebrating; just like Ford’s speech at International Freedom of the Press Day, made shortly after he announced his open war against all the “maggot” media.

One might almost call it a perfect example of irony if it wasn’t so disgusting.

“I want to extend my appreciation to all federal public servants who serve with dedication, professionalism and commitment to the interests of Canadians,” Harper said in a statement issued Sunday.

This is, of course, anti-Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is doing his damnedest to make Canada’s civil service into a glorified form of slavery, something he’s trying to do to the rest of Canada too because, after all, it’s the absolute highest ideal of the neo-Con business model / government. No, seriously, I defy anyone to name a business that wouldn’t want its workforce labouring for free and cowering in fear at the whims of the owner(s), and that’s what Ford, Harper, and the rest of their slimy cronies, have been pushing for loud and clear.

This is all being done under the manufactured banner of austerity which the politicians have made quite clear will only be saddled on the regular, average taxpayers while they themselves can be free to “misplace” billions of dollars of our increasingly hard-earned money. On top of this, it’s painfully obvious that the government is not in any way interested in making the civil service more effective and they sure aren’t interested in reducing any waste. Regardless of how much they lie in public, it doesn’t take much to put these facts together and to determine what their intent is.

Conservative minions, like the recently exposed scumbaggery of Harper’s appointment to the Human Rights Tribunal, Shirish Chotslis, are all pretty much cut from the same despicable, criminal, sociopathic cloth.

I have no doubt (see below), that the vast majority of Harper’s hand-picked cabinet would gleefully engage in exactly the same things as she did:

Chotalia treated staff and appointed members disgracefully: harassing, screaming, spying on staff; speaking to them and about them in derogatory terms; impugning their credibility in front of colleagues; and contaminating the workplace by sowing misinformation about them. She belittled and humiliated, frequently reducing employees to tears.

“The result was a poisoned atmosphere at the tribunal, a place that, ironically, is supposed to place respect of individuals at the very highest level,” Dion told reporters.

But it went even beyond that, to outright lunacy, the madness of entitlement.

On the day of her swearing-in-ceremony — which also happened to be the day that a magnitude-five earthquake struck Ottawa — Chotalia would not allow staff to leave their 11th-floor office, compelling everyone to stay where they were so that the ceremony could proceed as scheduled.

She ordered one employee to carry a set of keys to the office around her neck — like a latchkey — “despite the fact that this person complained that this caused discomfort and pain,” the report discloses. She indulged in petty retaliation. She ordered staff to spy on an employee while at work and to report that person’s movements and actions to her.

She repeatedly attempted to terminate a staff without justifiable cause and tried to pursue disciplinary action against another even after they left the CHRT.

She maintained a secret file on an employee, entitled “Insubordination,” even though that individual had never been advised of any problems. She demanded that staff be available around the clock, to corral her non-essential BlackBerry communications.

She accused staff of stealing items from her when unable to locate them, many witnesses stating Chotalia regularly lost these items.

She ordered staff not to cancel a trip to Vancouver for a mediation session, even though the parties involved had come to an agreement. She flew to the West Coast and then transferred to a San Diego-bound flight for a previously planned personal trip.

The list of insupportable conduct goes on and on.

When Ford was ousted for breaching the law for the umpteenth time in his Conflict of Interest trial, he responded with:

I was elected two years ago by the people of Toronto to do a job … This comes down to left-wing politics. The left wing wants me out of here, and they’ll do anything in their power to (do that).

In the fucked up world of the Harper conservative, it should be noted, unions are the same thing as the “lefties”, and that goes for anyone not supporting the tyrannical government or their agenda to sell out Canada and separate Canadians from not only their basic rights but from the very necessities of life.

But, of course, Harper can speak for himself:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says unions are behind a misinformation campaign about changes to the employment insurance program.

His comments came as Human Resources Minister Diane Finley admitted Thursday that the government hadn’t conducted studies on the potential impact of the reforms.

As protesters were kept away from the Premier Tech plant where Harper was announcing a $9.2 million loan, the prime minister pointed a finger at unions for creating some of the turmoil around changes to the program.

“I read that some unions were saying we’re cutting seasonal workers. That is completely false.”

And just so you know how Harper justifies his crackdowns:

… Harper said the [anti-terrorism] measures are supported by “law enforcement people” across the country, and the Tories have been promising the changes for a long time.

“We were elected specifically to move forward on them, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

There are also brown-nose trolls like Harper’s Goebbels-in-waiting, Vic Toews:

Toews’s department [while Minister of Labour], proposed the privatization of home-care delivery services in 1996, drawing opposition from many in the field and triggering an extended strike. He was also forced to deal with strikes at Boeing, Inco, and the Manitoba Lotteries Corporation, leading one journalist to describe 1996 as “the busiest year for picketing since the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike”. Toews blamed unions for provoking the strikes, saying they were conducted “for political, not economic, reasons.”

In explaining why Toews is vigorously backing the creation of a horrific police/Gulag state in Canada:

“We were elected to bring change.”

Seeing a running theme there? Same shit, same mentality, same results. It’s not in any way a stretch to think that Harper, Toews, Ford, or any other Conservative wraith aren’t treating their staff in exactly the same way, using the same excuses, refusing to find anything wrong with any of it, etc.

And just like all good corrupt Harperites, Chotslis was rewarded for her exemplary service to the government with a cushy new position in the private sector and a commitment by her Conservative buddies to refuse to discuss the matter or do anything about it.

Rob Ford, Dalton McGuinty, and Stephen Harper are all into the austerity game. Oh yeah, we all lived way beyond our means and it’s time to start paying back!

Except guess what…it’s an unbelievable scam being perpetrated by the big banks that’s bankrupting our economy, not any of our social programs, our schools, our libraries, our garbage collection…

I think it’s about time to start electing politicians that will:

a) Tell the goddam truth about where our money is really going
b) Stand up to the banking cartels (let’s not mince words, they are criminal enterprises)

If you’re not quite sure, have a gander at this documentary. All the numbers and facts are correct, and none of the stinking politicians seem in the slightest interested in fixing it.

To nutshell the above video, yet another court challenge regarding Covid mandates that stripped millions of Canadians of their fundamental rights has been dismissed by a Canadian court as “moot”.

Slaves, after all, have no rights that aren’t benevolently granted and that cannot be arbitrarily taken away.

Another interesting tidbit to emerge from this interview is how the government overtly and directly lied about following the advice of their own health advisors while simultaneously crushing any and all questions about the necessity for mandates, masks, and vaccines. Shocking.

The sad part of this video is hearing lawyer Keith Wilson maintain hope that the government-owned-and-operated courts are not entirely corrupt — I guess he hasn’t read anything about how the government simply snubs its nose at, lies to, and defrauds its own courts like the Canada Revenue Agency has been doing for years (I recall complaining about exactly the same thing a while ago). So even if you do somehow get a favourable ruling in an overwhelmingly corrupt and ridiculously unfair system, the state will simply ignore it and tell you to go fuck yourself while threatening you to pay taxes (a euphemism for debt slavery), and remind you to put a little check in a little box every four years because it’s such a great, glorious, and sacred privilege (and just another “Right” that they can summarily strip you of).

Hearing the interviewer close with the supposition that Canada might by a dictatorship would be almost funny if I hadn’t been screaming the exact shame thing for years. In fact, pompous government fucks were openly bloviating about our “benign dictatorship” many years ago while simultaneous musing about what they would do when they became the dictator (which then happened).

Then this asshole took over:

I’ve given this a lot more thought since my earlier analyses but people still seem hell bent on replacing the problem with more of the same (i.e. government), so instead of wearing out my keyboard for another decade I’ll invite anyone who’s interested in discussing the topic seriously to contact me or to leave a comment.

Although it’s lacking teeth,  an op-ed piece in the National Post fairly succinctly summarizes what I’ve been blathering on about for God-only-knows how long now. You don’t need to have a PoliSci degree to see what’s happening but although I doubt I’ll ever be able to shake my ageing parents’ (and many of their generation’s) scorn at my “naiveté”, “ignorance”, and “radical” views on government, at least I know I’m in fine scholarly company.

…the prime minister seems to have the unchecked power to decide when the House should be in session, when elections should occur, and even, in some circumstances, when their governments do or do not have the confidence of the House.

In the past I’ve referred to this as fascism, sometimes as a dictatorship, and often as a tyranny, but as I’ve tried to point out labels ultimately matter far less than deeds.

In the House, the prime minister and government have considerable control over day-to-day operations. This allows governments not only to set the agenda, but to carry it out with ease. The prime minister commands the steadfast loyalty of his MPs, largely through a carrot-and-stick approach; co-operative MPs might be rewarded with cabinet posts or coveted committee positions, while rogues can be — and at times are — punished with removal from caucus or even barred from running as a candidate for the party in future elections. All of these are vestiges of prime ministerial power. The party caucus has little leverage with which to counterbalance the prime minister’s power because party leaders are chosen (and replaced) by the party at large, rather than by the caucus. Thus, the government’s MPs have no effective mechanism through which to stand their ground against a very powerful leader or effectively represent his or her constituents.

Critics regularly cite our seemingly dizzying array of market choices as proof that government has little control in our day-to-day lives. Although they can hardly provide a straight and articulate answer without sneering derision, state supporters are often stumped by simple facts. For example, all of the so-called “choices” that the so-called “free market” offers are all directly controlled by government.

No?

Okay, name any product or service in Canada that doesn’t require government legal authorization, licensing, approval, etc. In other words, you have only the choices that government allows and you’re coerced, backed by threats of violence and imprisonment, into paying for this through taxes. Yes, you can buy things on the black market but you face the wrath of government if you decide thusly to exercise your “free choice” and of course you’re guilty until you can prove otherwise (which they can still arbitrarily reject).

Because they’re now stumped, government lackeys immediately pivot their argument to deflect by claiming that this is necessary to “keep us safe”. To this I would simply suggest cracking open a newspaper – the evidence of how government doesn’t keep us safe is in the news pretty much on a daily basis. Whether this involves food, health, personal safety, privacy, and a litany of other claims about protections, there are regular and glaring examples of how this simply isn’t true.

The statist argument typically changes course once again at this point to demand that nothing – our hospitals, roads, water and electrical systems, etc. – would exist without government. I’ve addressed these obviously specious arguments a number of times in the past but I will concede that government vehicles with government employees do sometimes drive up to a pothole, and one labourer and three supervisors spend three to four weeks filling it with a cop or two gladly accepting extorted taxpayer money to text or browse the web on their cell phones or chat with the crew, while out of sight pedestrians and cars are left to their own devices to share the dangerous inches left for them. Sounds an awful lot like the lazy welfare whores that government is keen to trot out to justify how we should receive even less state “benefits”, doesn’t it?

In other words, government supplies a few services through a wasteful, overpriced, badly (if at all) regulated process, something that is typically done far more efficiently by the private sector. This makes sense – the private business has to look out for their bottom line, government can just raise taxes and you’ll be brutalized or extorted by “authorities” and go to jail if you don’t like it. There’s no incentive for government to be efficient or benefit citizens in any way, and every single government institution behaves according to this.

Don’t believe? Just try and apply for any government “benefits” to see how hard your loving, benign government works for you. Call up a government “service” phone line and see for yourself how much service you receive. While you’re at it, try calling the cops when you actually need them – I have and that’s why I know better.

Rather than becoming more like a system of presidential executive authority, this situation has left Canadian prime ministers in a position more akin to historical monarchs. The evolution of Westminster democracy in Canada is very much a story about the struggle to wrestle power away from the Crown and shift it to Parliament, and specifically the House of Commons, our primary democratic body and check on unfettered prime ministerial power. The ability of prime ministers to retain and use these Crown powers, alongside other powers over MPs and the House of Commons, is resulting in a situation where prime ministers have the power to make decisions, partisan and otherwise, that limit or negate Parliament’s role as a guardian for accountability in our democratic system.

This is not simply about politics or even personalities. Almost all recent prime ministers have used these powers to try to advance their partisan interests. What it is about is the erosion of our democratic institutions and the effect on democratic governance.

The next rhetorical recourse of any good government lapdog is to state that, yeah, okay, maybe government isn’t perfect but we have “checks and balances” to ensure that things more or less work out for most people. And if we don’t like it we can vote in someone else!

These are other points I’ve addressed at length and are yet more claims that can be factually rebutted with a mountain of evidence to the contrary (this blog is filled with it). And while it’s claimed that the media would surely alert us to these issues it’s easy to demonstrate that this is highly unlikely to be the case. Unless you seek out increasingly derided alternative sources you will only know what government and friends want you to know.

If your final argument is that people are too stupid to know what’s good for them, hence the need for unquestionable government, then kindly shut your ignorance hole – you’ve just brilliantly insisted that you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

Put this all together and the will of the people is entirely irrelevant and, in fact, something to be suppressed.

It’s at this point when state defenders throw up their hands and exasperatedly exclaim, “Oh well! Then I guess we must be living under a King or Queen then, huh?!”

Yeah, smart guy. Flip over your Canadian money or do a Wikipedia search – Canada is a monarchy and whether the titular head is the queen or Harper the effect is the same.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/05/21/more-money-from-stephen-harper-for-rcmp-and-border-services-to-fight-terrorism.html

So now that we have Harper basically signing top secret free trade deals with anyone and everyone and in the process directly trying to undermine and sign over Canadian sovereignty to foreign entities without so much as a group huddle (isn’t that treason?), it’s worthwhile to ask what kinds of wonders Canada can realistically expect when all of these agreements are loosed on us.

Chinese companies will be able to seek redress against any laws passed by any level of government in Canada which threaten their profits. Australia has decided not to enter FIPA agreements specifically because they allow powerful corporations to challenge legislation on social, environmental and economic issues. Chinese companies investing heavily in Canadian energy will be able seek billions in compensation if their projects are hampered by provincial laws on issues such as environmental concerns or First Nations rights, for example.

Cases will be decided by a panel of professional arbitrators, and may be kept secret at the discretion of the sued party. This extraordinary provision reflects an aversion to transparency and public debate common to the Harper cabinet and the Chinese politburo.

Patrick Brown, CBC

This isn’t my area of expertise but I did manage to get a sense of what might happen economically — the base justification for all of this — by looking at some Toronto-based data (PDF) around the time when the last two free trade agreements (FTA and NAFTA), were dropped.

Across the board the numbers indicate a major blow to the economy, unemployment rate, number of jobs, housing prices and starts — almost everything was hit hard and most indexes have not yet recovered back to late 80s numbers.

I don’t remember these being part of the promises being heaped on Canadians by the government 25 years go, do you? In fact, we were promised the opposite. Funny how what the government promises and what we get are often diametrically opposite. Well, at least we can stuff flimsy paper ballot boxes to our hearts’ content; tell ’em what we think at the next election! (because they give a shit)

I remember opining not long ago about what appears to be public theatre between police chief Blair and the Fords. As I recall, I speculated that it had something to do with propping each other up in the media, a backroom friendship publicly laid out for the media as animosity. The purpose is simply to boost each others’ profiles, something the Fords shamelessly pursue.

Now consider the most recent circumstances:

• Blair is retiring and not considering a run in politics. Even if this isn’t true, he’ll probably need to parlay his high profile into his next gig, whatever that happens to be. In other words: media attention=good.
• As late as yesterday, Blair and Doug were staring each other down over Doug’s slanderous comments. Despite extended threats of litigation and with no new developments in the intervening 16-ish hours, Blair does a 180 and says everything’s forgiven. Aww, shucks.
• Blair continues to look like a stalwart law-n-order guy, and the Fords continue to appear to be the poor, beaten-upon “common folks” to their seething, money-trumps-life supporters:

Against the backdrop of another big corporation taking the law into their own hands (where’s Blair big denouncement on corporate vigilantism?), we get the simultaneous news that one — yes, one 25-year-old person has been found guilty of “orchestrated” and “widespread” voter suppression (election fraud), by the Conservative party during the last election.

What did Harper have to say right after the scandal broke out? Oh yeah…

“Our party has no knowledge of these calls. It’s not part of our campaign,” Mr. Harper told reporters on Thursday. “Obviously, if there is anyone who has done anything wrong, we will expect that they will face the full consequences of the law.”

And that is, of course, why he immediately and deeply cut funding to Elections Canada (the people running the fraud investigation), and then introduced a new law making it harder for people to vote just like they’re doing in the US (because, of course, that was the problem).

You can be forgiven for forgetting the 2006 “money funneling” scam that Harper used to fraudulently take the previous election. Elections Canada investigator Ronald Lamothe described it at the time as, “entirely under the control of and at the direction of officials of the Conservative Fund Canada and/or the Conservative Party of Canada.” The Conservatives went so far as to admit guilt in that case — they eventually conceded to winning through fraud and blowing millions to first deny, then defend it all. 

No one was found guilty, the government paid itself a fine and announced a “big victory”, and we are told to believe that the Conservatives won a second majority, one so overwhelming that Harper is unopposed in government. Well, I guess there’s no problem then. Nothing to worry about!

believe! (or else)

The ugly.

Harper’s propensities are a toward building a corporate-fascist tyranny in Canada.

It’s tough to find agreement on just how far Harper’s machinations have progressed, but both his actions and his words repeatedly reassure us that this is precisely what he’s gunning for.

Tyranny, according to the people who coined the word, means “one who rules without law, looks to his own advantage rather than that of his subjects, and uses extreme and cruel tactics—against his own people as well as others”.

The evidence of government tyranny can be found all over TCL — just flip through some old posts.

And fascism, according to both original and modern definitions, is generally defined as, “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Or, if you prefer war-and-oppression-loving Benito Mussolini’s definition: “The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State–a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values–interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people … Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and economic sphere”.

Lawless and absolute control over economic and societal affairs?

In Canada?

Yes, and it’s obvious: the government is a monopoly that demands absolute obeisance to itself while keeping all of its citizens in debt-bondage to the state (a.k.a. taxes that you “owe” for your entire life and beyond). The vast majority of citizens never agreed to this or its administration; rather, they acquiesced after being threatened with seizure (theft) and jail (kidnapping and imprisonment). Of course, despite the fact that they overtly demand that these are crimes, government flatly rejects any definitions other than that of benevolent benefit when they engage in them. They have to; how could they undermine their own “authority”?

To be fair, Harper didn’t come up with the lie of calling Canada a “democracy” (which it’s simply not), or foisting the apparatus of the state to dominate and control. But he, like most other politicians, engages in stately depravity. He knows that after years of screwing over Canada he’ll be rewarded with a fat pension and lots of gifts from his international buddies for things like looking the other way to systemic human rights abuses. “Important Canadian values” my ass.

What about checks and balances?

Oh, you must be referring to the government-appointed juduciary (or a healthy smattering of corrupt, degenerate, ignorant and incompetent Justices of the Peace), or maybe the equally undemocratic Senate, or maybe the innumerable, undemocratic “authorities” that are imposed on us via the shell game of elections and self-appointed power of the moneyed ruling class.

So the term “fascist tyranny” is not a spurious, knee-jerk reaction or a flimsy propaganda label — it’s a sober definition based on overt deeds.

If it quacks like a duck, as they say.

Okay, so you still don’t like “corporate-fascist tyranny”? Too many memories of Nazi Germany? How exactly could Israel and Canada be such close partners given such strong overtones? How indeed, how indeed.

Very well. So if Harper himself called Canada a “dictatorship” and has been working hard to remove that “benign” prefix from the description, what exactly does that make him? And what does that make Canada?

The bad.

The awful arguments of moral relativism — “at least we’re not as bad as _______!” — imply that anything and everything goes as long as our government doesn’t behave like those animals in other countries.

This means that all that needs to happen is for continuing debasement and destruction of those countries (helped along, of course), for the argument to remain valid. They might behead you arbitrarily over there, so it’s okay for us to torture you here. When they get to doing unspeakable things to children, you being merely beaten and imprisoned for having adult opinions is perfectly acceptable … helluva lot better than what they’d do to you.

Price of freedom, buddy.

And … AND … terrorism!

Oh yeah…terrorism. Who’s responsible for that again? Surely we need our government to protect us from all those baddies! Okay, so some (unbelievably audacious and fundamentally illegal), abuses might happen, but surely those people will be held to account.

Yeah, surely.

Obviously.

The moral relativist is in most arguments in favour of a race to the bottom, to the very worst crimes and debauchery that humanity can think up — as long as those crimes are slightly better than the other guy’s. The concept of absolute, inhuman control by the fascist state is mirrored in its mindless apologists, along with all the overt lies about your “protection” and “safety” (Terrorism! Crime! Environment! Lefties! Traffic!)

Even if you don’t believe that we’ve arrived at this point, is this what we should be striving for?

Even if you believe that this is merely incompetence, is it logical to depend on the very same people who created and perpetuated these problems for decades/centuries to miraculously fix them?

Okay, I know I’m hammering this topic pretty hard, but only because I absolutely know that the time to take a solid stand is now. The march of corpo-fascism continues across North America and elsewhere, fully promulgated by our “democratically elected” leaders.

All tomorrows are too late.

The good.

The map above is from Norse Corporation’s IPViking Live site where you can see many of the world’s cyber attacks in realtime.

While a map of attacks in the ongoing “cyberwar” (a fear-based buzzword), may seem like utter devastation, it really only shows good old-fashion hack ‘n crack activity with the occasional DDOS attack (nothing more than the target being overwhelmed with too much intentional internet traffic — a very brute-force technique).

In fact, aside from a change in connectivity and some improvements in security, many of the underlying penetration techniques haven’t changed much since I was a pimply-faced, war-dialing teenager.

What the map reveals, however, is that Canada’s internet connection to the world is still somewhat open and unencumbered (net neutrality not withstanding), which is confirmed by the the renewed attention of the copyright goon squad.

Better still, the increasingly brave belief in privacy and anonymity (and moreover simply basic justice), are alive and well in Canada. It is increasingly Canadians who champion truth, justice, and democracy (in the truest sense), around the world.

Take, for example, Montreal’s Subgraph. They come right out of the gate with a firm declaration:

Subgraph is an open source security company.

This means that we believe that open source means the best possible assurance of security at a time when trust is increasingly challenging.

Subgraph takes its inspiration from the domain of cryptography where proprietary algorithms are never trusted, and extends this principle to software.

If a proprietary algorithm cannot be trusted, why trust proprietary, closed-source security software?

I like where they’re going with this. I also like that they’ve taken on the task of creating Subgraph OS and Mail, a much-needed alternative to Tails which is a fully self-contained operating system built around security, privacy, and anonymity that has recently received some skepticism.

Closer to home we find the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, a group dedicated more to threat analysis and neutralization rather than the creation of new products (though they sometimes make those too).

Citizen Lab is lead by Ron Deibert who Sarah informs me often carries himself (and is received as) a rockstar, probably because of stuff like this:

…he was sitting on a panel with John Adams, the former chief of the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), the National Security Agency’s little-known northern ally. Afterward, he recalls, the former spy chief approached and casually remarked that there were people in government who wanted Deibert arrested—and that he was one of them.

…

It’s a bit freaky to hear that,” Deibert said when he recalled the Calgary encounter in an interview with Ars. “When people ask, ‘are you worried about the Chinese or some other adversary out there,’ I say I’m always a bit more worried about my own government, because this is the kind of thing I hear occasionally.”

It’s Citizen Lab’s razor-edge stride between academic rigour, establishment paranoia, and charisma that make it both a formidable force as well as a model for what I think needs to happen, at least in the online world. Increasingly, I believe that Citizen Lab is an example of the type organization that freedom and truth-minded individuals will come to rely on — a group of enlightened individuals who know what time it is.

If you don’t go for these freewheeling hippie types, there are older and more established schools of thought that underscore this entire line of thinking; schools like the Rothbard Insitute, another academic but considerably stuffier organization espousing individual freedom through “radical” economic ideas, and the Mises Institute which runs along similar lines.

On the political front we find groups like the Pirate Party which, despite the malignancies heaped on the name by the corpo-state, is ultimately for individual rights and freedoms:

To describe the goal of the Pirate Party in a single word, I would use “empowerment”. The beauty of the Internet and information technology is the ability for a poor child to have the same opportunities to create change as a wealthy privileged adult. It is the goal of the Pirate Party to encourage that strength, and to promote values which will empower every Canadian.

And if Rothbard or Mises are too rigid for your enjoyment, there are many bright, well-spoken, informed individuals out there that help to bridge the gaps; everything from applicable advice to thought-provoking witticisms.

Complacency and continuing acquiescence are, of course, an option. Going along with or supporting the increasingly fascist state are another. We could also worship the flying spaghetti monster, believe that voting makes a difference, trust that government is working for our benefit, etc.

We have some good examples of how such beliefs work out … maybe it’s time for something different this time?

I’m sure this isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned how the state and its agencies are getting so bold with our basic, fundamental freedoms that to compare them to East Germany’s post-World-War-2 Stasi is in no way an exaggeration.

A constant, around-the-clock surveillance on all citizens, guilty or innocent, is taking place – that much is now well and publicly established fact. Granted, we don’t have the secret police disappearing people off the streets just yet, but both Harper (Bill S-7) and Obama (NDAA) have made sure that that kind of thing will be all nice and legal when they decide to roll it out. Or they just passed these laws for shits and giggles, maybe? Oh, I know, it’s just for the bad guys, right?

Thankfully, there’s a growing backlash in the United States:

And we’re seeing some fightback from the CCLA on the topic too. But government is just one tiny step away from business, and the same scummy lack of morals and ethics pervades both houses of rot and greed.

Just recently, Bell announced it would be sharing your data with third-parties to bring better-tailored advertising to your mobile phone. According to a contract which would otherwise be viewed as being produced in bad faith (but, you know, big money), Bell reserves the right to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as do most banks and other big business we are forced to deal with at a cost and by law — unless I haven’t heard and the Canadian government is using its own solely legal tender (cash) again?

Oh sure, you can opt-out of the ads, but only whenever they feel like getting to it. Oh, and they’re still gonna track you and share the data with whomever they please — just to be clear.

Rogers recently did something similar, albeit in an opt-in fashion. Funny thing is, if Rogers is the good guy, it really makes you wonder what kind of shit is going on behind the scenes at Bell. As you may recall, Rogers spent months fighting tooth and nail against having to tell the truth in their ads because they claimed it infringed on their freedom of speech.

Simultaneously, our governments are pulling the rugs out from under their citizens by clamping down on unbiased scientific information in exchange for government propaganda, which is almost 100% pro-business and pro-big-money, and increasingly just simply telling their subjects that they’re not entitled to any information or say on things like massive, global, secretive agreements and deals like CETA, which will directly affect most of them negatively for a very long time — importing dirt-cheap European labour while Canadians remain unemployed, higher drug costs (government “subsidies” come out of Canadians’ pockets as taxes, don’t forget), and I’m sure a few other surprises and gotchas too — not like anyone’s allowed to actually see the damned things. But we might get cheaper eau du toilette though!

Even the people who Harper claims that the fast-tracked CETA is supposed to help aren’t happy with it. Ain’t the first time he’s pulled this stunt either. But what does King Harper care?

He’s become so accustomed to getting his way that as he was busy throwing his appointed minions under the bus, he and his helper monkeys became enraged when most news stations refused to air his recent caucus speech because he demanded that only cameras be let in — NO ONE MAY ASK QUESTIONS!

But our benevolent government is throwing us lowly serfs one little bone among all this, they’re going to allow us  to look over results of drug safety analyses of Health Canada. Yeah! Now we’re allowed to see the information produced with the money that is seized from us in order to determine if something might kill us or not. Aren’t we lucky?! Of course, the previous reasoning was that they would be giving away business secrets with this information, which obviously trumps God himself.

Is it just me or is this shit starting to get real old?