Foreign Influence and D-Day

 I just can't get excited about this controversy of MP's being influenced by foreign governments.  A report claims certain parliamentarians colluded with foreign states — could they be charged? | CBC News.  The CBC story mentions China and India but hints there could be others.  China, of course, is the big one.  China is our enemy.  We're soon going to have to go to war with China.  Because, we're told, the Chinese are conducting a genocide.  And they're evil.  India is also mentioned because Modi is a racist authoritarian who did nothing to prevent or halt a Hindu-nationalist progrom against the Muslim population of the Indian state of Gujurat when he was governor there.  Plus, like China and Russia, he's a member of the BRICs and he hasn't been particularly helpful in punishing Russia for its evil, unprovoked, genocidal, evil, barbaric, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and all of the human rights violations that have resulted.

The CBC story doesn't mention the USA or Israel by name.  Even though their influence is far greater.  As the leader of NATO, the USA drags Canada into all sorts of unsavoury actions.  And both Israel and the USA are conducting a genocide right now against the Palestinians in Gaza.

Was stephen harper colluding with China when he signed that sweetheart mining deal?

With China’s ratification of the deal long since signed, sealed, and delivered (and, really, when you can convince another government to sign a deal this lopsided in your favour, wouldn’t you ratify as quickly as possible too?) Canada’s ratification of the deal means it will enter into force on October 1. And once that happens, we’ll be locked into the terms of FIPA for a minimum of 31 years. That’s right, even if a new government is formed after the election next year and they choose to back out of FIPA, the next seven Canadian governments will be bound by the consequences of Harper’s poor negotiations.

Just how bad of a deal has Harper locked the next seven Canadian governments into? Here’s how Diane Francis — hardly an anti-trade left-winger — described it in an op-ed in the Financial Post:

The Tories, backed by a naïve Canadian Chamber of Commerce and a handful of big, conflicted business interests, have demonstrated the worst negotiating skills since Neville Chamberlain.

Ottawa capitulated to China on everything. The deal, using a hockey metaphor, allows only a select few to play on Team Canada on a small patch of ice in China and to be fouled, without remedies or referees. By contrast, Team China can play anywhere on Canadian ice, can appeal referee calls it dislikes and negotiate compensation for damages while in the penalty box behind closed doors.

The terms agreed to by Ottawa are unprecedented and would be laughed out of Britain, Brussels, Canberra or Washington. Beijing has negotiated a heads-I-win-tails-Canada-loses deal.

So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that the Harper government tried to downplay ratification of the deal and sneak out the back door when nobody was looking.

Would Pierre Poilievre call for "Big Daddy" harper's arrest if the RCMP could prove that harper was "colluding" (whatever that's supposed to mean in this context) with China?  

What about shit-head Peter Mackay's signing Canada up to the F-35 White Elephant program?

Why? US pressure, a focus on NATO interoperability and the Air Forceprogram’s fixation on fifth-generation technology are important factors. But the Liberals probable reversal is largely about the power of the world’s largest arms dealer, which is overseeing the $1.7 trillion joint strike fighter project.

A US-based company, Lockheed is an effective operator in Ottawa. Throughout the Trudeau government’s time in office its Canadian subsidiary has been among the most aggressive lobbyists. Lockheed’s name appeared 39 times when I conducted a “12-Month Lobbying Activity Search” of the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada in late 2017. 

...

The Liberals are set to select a warplane dogged by performance questions and its capacity to fly long distances required to cover Canadian airspace. The F-35 also consumes significantly more carbon intensive fuel than other (already heavy GHG emitting) fighter jets.

Trudeau’s likely about face on the F-35 is a stark reflection of the power an American-dominated arms industry has over the government. It is business as usual in a corrupt, wasteful and ecologically damaging sector of capitalism.

I suppose that we're supposed to worry about MP's acting in the interests of these foreign powers rather than for us.  And this is different from when Canada buys crappy, overpriced fighter-bombers, or spends a decade wasting blood and treasure in Afghanistan, or losing diplomatic credibility at the United Nations and elsewhere from behaving as a craven lapdog for the USA and Israel.  Or when our political parties serve the banks, the [foreign dominated] fossil fuels sector, and tax-dodging and profiteering domestic billionaires over us.

Next up is this:  D-Day 80 years | Reflections on what’s changed and what’s to come | CBC.ca

D-Day is still of historical importance.  But only in so far as one rotten empire beginning to topple another rotten empire.  And most of the effort to topple the rotten empire of Nazi Germany was done by the rotten empire of the Soviet Union.  Nazi Germany was on its last legs by the time Britain, Canada and the USA landed at Normandy.

But (as I've mentioned in earlier posts) I used to think that the political-economic system of the Western "democracies" (more "republics" actually) was a better thing than the dictatorships in Germany and the Soviet empire.  I used to have a view of the world where the better forces triumphed and that "arc of the moral universe" really was "bend[ing] towards justice."

But seeing us all coddling and enabling Israel's genocidal barbarism against the Palestinians, with the "lesser evil" Joe Biden actively participating in it, ... and seeing the explosion of corruption and authoritarianism and racist shit that's poured out of our oligarchic governments since the end of the Cold War, ... I don't feel that way any more.