One of the tactics we see regularly in use by governments is “silencing by intimidation” – where opponents of an issue are labelled and dismissed as “extremists”, threatened by legal charges that can’t possibly be upheld and which are aimed purely at trying to silence critics. Now we have the latest “card” in this game, where charities are being threatened with removal of their charitable status if they don’t bow down to Conservative political ideology.
Here in Canada, the Harper government refuses point-blank to engage in any discussion with its critics or opponents. At the last election there were numerous cases where people were removed from Conservative “debates” and presentations for no other reason than the fact that they weren’t fully-paid-up members of the Conservative collective ass-kissing community. Harper and his party can’t tolerate dissent in any form it appears.
Now they’re extending this to threatening charities with the removal of their charitable status simply for supporting causes that go against Conservative policy. Tides Canada, for example, recently had its charitable status threatened for supporting ForestEthics - an organization that opposes the dubious Endbridge pipeline.
The Harper government has called people against the Endbridge pipeline “enemies of the government of Canada”. They’re wrong. I’m an enemy of bullies, of anyone who tries to browbeat, threaten and lie in order to achieve their own selfish goals. I believe in democracy, for everyone, not just the self-serving rich and powerful; if this makes me an “enemy” then we have lost democracy completely.
The pathological Conservative government lists the following as “adversaries”: the media, the biodiesel industry, environmental and Aboriginal groups. “Allies” listed are: Energy companies, the National Energy Board, Environment Canada, business and industry associations.
This isn’t a government representing people; these are the tactics of the bully pure and simple. Even if you agree with the development of the pipeline, this behavior is still wrong. Tell Harper you don’t want a country run by bullies.
“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”
- Thomas Jefferson
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15677595
So Rick Perry, guardian of religious insanity and memory loss, would abolish the Depts. of Commerce, Energy and Education…
I suppose it makes sense really. The banks and financial services markets are
allowed to behave in any way they want and bailed out with public money when they screw up, so why do you need anyone to watch them?
The U.S. steals most of it’s energy reserves from other countries through unfair
trade agreements and allows its citizens to squander them at will, so no need for
any energy regulation either.
And as for education? Well, hell, we know for sure the U.S. doesn’t need any of
that high-falutin nonsense…
The Financial Stability Board, backed by the G20 members, was set up in 2009 after the financial meltdown to monitor and regulate international banking.
Last Friday they announced their list of banks “too big to fail”; this list includes twenty-nine banks. It probably comes as no surprise that many of those listed were also recipients of some of the largest bailouts from their respective governments. These include:
- Bank of America – $45 b
- Bank of New York Mellon – $3 b
- Citigroup – $45 b
- Commerzbank – $11 b
- Deutsche Bank – $12 b
- Goldman Sachs – $10 b
- JB Morgan Chase - $247 m
- LLoyds Banking Group – $60b
- Morgan Stanley – $10 b
- Royal Bank of Scotland - $70 b
- State Street – $2 b
- UBS AG – $65 b
- Wells Fargo $25 b
Add all of that up and you have over 350 Billion dollars of bailout; not including many other international banks I haven’t listed that were also recipients of bailout money or at least ‘protected’ in one way or another from the consequences of their selfish and stupid gambles.
These banks, their directors and staff continue to be the beneficiaries of huge profits and disgusting bonus rewards, while the rest of us work our collective asses off to pay for their mistakes. This is a level of payback that will see us through most of our lifetimes and more than likely into our children’s lifetimes.
The reason we are in such a mess is because when things started to go wrong in 2007/8, all of these banks were considered ‘too big to fail’ and were handed barrow loads of cash with no strings attached. Even while taking this money, the bankers continued to pay themselves huge salaries and ridiculous bonuses, rewarding themselves for their ‘success’ with amounts beyond avarice.
And now the FSB is making exactly the same mistake. Lessons from history are often difficult and painful – but now we don’t even learn them after the fact. Parasites like this should be left to fail; they need to learn the lessons and consequences of their own actions.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana 
Something I’ve seen a great deal of in previous jobs is a lot of bullying and attacks on people who spoke out about problems, or were critical of bad decisions or plans. Our corporate culture seems to be increasingly happy to employ a ‘shoot the messenger’ philosophy, in complete denial and disconnection with the reality of the situation they are in.
It’s not only me that seems to be affected by this. Several of my friends, and others I have worked with in the past, relate similar experiences. Increasingly the expectation is that we are all supposed to wander around like passive, silent sheep. If you are perceived to be ‘negative’ then you’re a bad employee: immediately suspicious, undoubtedly seditious and ultimately to be persuaded/manipulated/forced to move somewhere else.
A personal example of this which left me incredulous was during a meeting with senior representatives from a company. The project I was working on already had extremely tight deadlines and in the course of the meeting I was told that the system would now have to interface with two completely different hardware technologies.
My response was that this would have a very big impact on the delivery schedule. To my amazement the senior people started to laugh at this point! They also insisted that the project deadlines could not move because they had already promised the dates to clients.
I’m sure that the problem here is fairly self-evident. Double the scope of the project but keep the schedule the same? You would have to be a complete brain-dead moron person with limited experience to even think that THIS was vaguely possible.
I can understand that people don’t like bad news – who does? But to deny it and actively attack the people delivering it, that’s just dumb. We’re not the creators of these things, we’re just reporting reality. Guess what? That quart really doesn’t fit into the pint pot, no matter how hard you try.
On another occasion with the same company, we had a situation where a manager made a successful bid on a contract for a system that involved making significant changes to software components. The manager made up his own estimates for how long it would take to implement the changes without consulting anyone from the software team and without having any personal software development experience.
When the inevitable happened and everyone realised that the bid was completely undeliverable at the bid price and the schedule couldn’t be met due to the underestimates involved, it somehow became the software team’s fault. How does that work exactly? To get out of this the client was lied to, the software team was forced to do overtime for which they were never paid and were castigated routinely for being lazy and useless!
Maybe I’m weird or something. I prefer to know the real situation. Sure the truth can be hard to swallow, but at least if I know what it is, I have a fighting chance of being able to deal with it. If I just avoid or deny that then I’m screwed. Arse-kissing has always been a factor, but when all you have is that kind of person, don’t be surprised when the only thing you have left is a prune-like rear.
This seems to be an issue increasingly apparent in IT work, but recent news on NASA suggests that it is more wide spread.
Interestingly, the behaviours I am talking about are well known and documented organisational anti-patterns. In the same way that in Software Engineering there are documented good solutions for most basic situations, there are also documented bad solutions.
In the case in point we see clear evidence of ‘Management by perkele‘ – where subordinates are deliberately made to be fearful and uncertain in order to instill unquestioning obedience. There is also more than a hint of ‘moral hazard‘ too – where someone is insulated from the consequences of their behaviour and decisions. Finally, the ‘Groupthink‘ pattern is clearly evident too – where people stop promoting ideas that are outside the ‘comfort zone’ of the organisation.
It’s hard to see how any organisation can continue when it suffers from such well known flaws, but has we know bullies are always very inventive in justifying why they act the way they do. It’s also the sad fact that in our culture these types of actions and businesses get away with it because people are just too scared to speak out.
With regard to the ‘laughter’ experience I had. It was explained to me later that I hadn’t handled things correctly. What I should have done was to say nothing, gone away and considered things for a while, worked out the results of the changes and then come back to the senior people with these results.
At which point the answer would have been exactly the same. You see, I didn’t need to take time to consider things and work them out and mull them over. When you double the size of my project I know that the timetable has to shift – what do I need to think about? Not only that but, due to my wily, cunning, nasty, pessimist brain I can even take a pretty good guess as to the size of the timetable shift. Hmmmm hang on, off the top of my head here… ohhh double.
See, that was easy.
The new “Terror Alert” system for the U.S. has just two levels instead of the old system that had five colours ranging from Green to Red (Highest). The new states will be ‘Elevated’ and ‘Imminent’.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is reported as saying that the level is currently at an “elevated baseline” and went on to explain that the threat is -
at its highest since Sept. 11, 2001 because of the increasing number and types of international and homegrown threats. This does not mean there is a specific threat of an imminent attack.
How transparent can you get?
First they use highly charged words designed to communicate that a threat level is higher than ‘average’ and can’t describe any other situation. Secondly they then describe the ‘baseline’ as ‘elevated’.
Okay so a baseline by definition can’t be ‘elevated’, otherwise it’s not a ‘baseline’. But I guess that just wouldn’t scare people enough and ‘imminent’ doesn’t mean something is actually ‘imminent’, but it sure sounds scary too huh?
Homeland Security = FUD.
All of the ‘security’ organisations are playing this card. Get people scared enough and they’ll let the security forces do anything it seems. To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt; the only thing we have to fear are the fear-mongers themselves.
Climate scientists need help
Climate scientists are under attack by unscrupulous pressure groups and various climate change denialists. These groups and individuals use court orders and “Freedom of Information” requests to effectively harass scientists. This witch hunt makes for a hostile environment for the scientists, while also creating doubt in the public perception of climate change, despite the fact that the victims have been cleared of all wrongdoing many times and climate change is accepted as fact by an overwhelming majority of scientists.
Is it any surprise that these denialist groups and individuals are funded heavily by the oil and coal industries and others who have a lot to lose if any real* emissions limits are ever enacted. This gives these groups a virtual bottomless pit of money to continue their actions against scientists and spread their FUD.
Now there’s something that you can do to help. The Climate Science Defense Fund has been set up to raise money for scientists under attack, the money raised goes towards legal fees to fight off these attacks.
* By real I mean not involving carbon ‘trading’ schemes that are nothing but ways to channel money towards fat banks and finance companies in the pretense of doing something about climate change.