State sanctioned poverty

[diogenes]

How do the assembled feel about this?

I know a woman whose grand child was kidnapped by the state and she fought for and got custody
This forced her on the welfare system at a loss of approx ½ her previous income
She now gets $510 a month to live on the state pays $257.46 for the support potion of the child

Any monies this grand mother makes is taken from the 510

Where is the incentive ?


For all you smartasses that know of welfare rip-off artists do you also know of this situatin?

Smash the state!

[diogenes]

News
Release
THE HOSPITAL EMPLOYEES’UNION
FRED MUZIN, President • MARY LaPLANTE, Financial Secretary
5000 North Fraser Way, Burnaby, B.C. V5J 5M3 • Tel: [phone] • Fax: [phone] • Web Site: www.heu.org
The B.C. Health Services Division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees
468
LOCAL
HESU
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE OCTOBER 27, 2004
Restore health care and education
services with provincial budget surplus – poll
Reinvest in health care and education – 62 per cent;
reduce debt – 25 per cent; reduce taxes – 12 per cent
Two out of three British Columbians believe the billion dollar budget surplus forecast by the
Campbell Liberal government should be used to restore services such as health care and education,
according to a Mustel Group poll conducted for the Hospital Employees’6 Union.
Twenty-five per cent support debt reduction, while only 12 per cent support a tax cut.
Support for restoring services like health care and education with the budget surplus was especially
high among women (73 per cent).
“Nobody should be surprised by the public’s clear preference for restoring public services over tax
cuts and debt reduction,” says HEU’s acting secretary-business manager Zorica Bosancic. “After all, so
many British Columbians have been hurt by this government’s fiscal policies.”
Since their election, the Campbell Liberals have closed hospitals and schools, raised tuition fees, cut
funding to women’s centres and closed long-term care beds for seniors. They’ve also fired more than
8,000 health care workers and imposed 15 per cent wage rollbacks on tens of thousands more.
“The price paid by British Columbians to create this thinly-disguised election surplus has been too
steep,” says Bosancic. “It's time to deal with the real deficit this government has created in our
schools, hospitals and communities.”
The telephone poll of 507 British Columbians was conducted October 6 – 17. It is considered accurate
to within 4.4 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

[diogenes]

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Who funds the Fraser?

The Fraser Institute's 30th anniversary a good time to review its financing, influence.

Dateline: Saturday, October 23, 2004

by Donald Gutstein

Aspiring reporters are taught in journalism school to "follow the money" when doing business or government stories. Who's financing the project? Who will benefit from the rezoning or tax break? Who will lose out?

This year the Fraser Institute celebrates its 30th anniversary. A gala was held in Calgary two weeks ago attended by 1200 well-fed libertarians, conservatives and reactionaries. Only two numbers were mentioned in the news coverage: 30 and 1200. Missing in action was the more important number, 100 million: the dollars, more or less, that have been funnelled through the institute over the years.

Early on executive director Michael Walker had to scramble to meet his payroll of $100,000. Last year he brought in $6.6 million, the largest amount in its history, vaulting it past some of its sister propaganda outfits in the U.S. When averaged, the grand total is about $100 million - about half of the missing money in the Liberal government sponsorship scandal.

Forgetting what their journalism profs told them, reporters never asked who's pouring that much money into the think tank, and why?

True, it isn't easy to answer this question unless Walker divulges the information, and for once, he's not talking. Canadian law for tax-exempt societies does not require contributors to be made public. The Institute's annual report provides a breakdown by category of donor: 52% from foundations, 38% from organizations and the remainder from individuals.

Tax-exempt foundations must list recipients of their grants, so it is possible to identify most of this foundation money. Four large Canadian foundations provide the lion's share of nearly $3.5 million from this source.

Until recently, the leader was the Donner Canadian Foundation, a key organization in the project to change the ideological fabric of Canadian society. It is known as paymaster to the right and it's safe to say that the reactionary right would have made little headway in Canada in the past decade without Donner's backing. Stephen Harper would be a nobody, for instance.

Donner has assets of $200 million and gives out two million a year to right-wing causes. In the mid-90s, it established three new libertarian think tanks, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies in Halifax, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and the Montreal Economic Institute.

In 2002, the latest year for which figures are available, Donner contributed nearly half a million dollars to the Fraser Institute, including $200,000 for Donner Awards in the Delivery of Social Services. This is a program to undermine government by ostensibly demonstrating that the voluntary sector does better than the public sector in delivering social services. (So who needs government?)

In their fawning coverage of the Institute's anniversary party, reporters never asked who has poured $100 million into the right-wing think-tank, and why.



Donner also gave $100,000 to start CanStats, a Fraser Institute division that purports to monitor how the media report science and statistics. Most of the work is done by ideologues who are neither scientists nor statisticians. Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman call this activity 'flak'. By criticizing and harassing mainstream media, flak organizations can pull media reporting to the right.

By the late 1990s, right-wing Canadian foundations were exhibiting the same coordinated funding behaviour that made the American foundations so formidable. This dangerous development occurred after Michael Walker joined the board of Calgary-based Max Bell Foundation in 1996. (He left in 2003. ) Along with Donner, Bell began providing large sums for school choice projects which are designed to destabilize public education, including $500,000 to the Fraser Institute and similar amounts for charter schools in Alberta. Max Bell also provides money for an intern to marshal the evidence in favour of for-profit health care.

Walker reined in two more foundations to support the school choice work, the Lotte and John Hecht Memorial Foundation, whose money came from selling arms, and the W Garfield Weston Foundation, whose money comes from a less colourful source - selling biscuits. Galen Weston - Canada's second wealthiest person - and his family are becoming the most important funding source. They have committed over $10 million on the institute's school vouchers program.

Corporate contributions are buried in the institute's accounts. It's been 20 years since Walker released a list of corporate members. But a look at the board of trustees reveals some interesting patterns.

There's a representative from Pfizer, the world's largest multinational drug company. Just coincidentally, since Walker claims no trustee can tell the staff what to do, the Fraser has a pharmaceutical policy division which attacks internet pharmacies that provide cheaper drugs for Americans, disparages critics of drug company policies regarding distribution of HIV/AIDs drugs in Africa, attacks generic drugs and opposes the ban on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, all of benefit to Pfizer.

There's big and small oil and gas money from Calgary (Gwyn Morgan of EnCana, R J Pirie of Sabre Energy). Just coincidentally the Fraser has supported so-called climate change skeptics for nearly a decade.

There are investors from Vancouver (Peter Brown of Cannacord Capital) and Toronto (James McGovern of Arrow Hedge Partners who manages $300 million in hedge funds for high net worth individuals). Just coincidentally, cutting corporate and income taxes has been a Fraser mainstay.

If the media don't tell the story, Canadians won't know about the Fraser's reactionary agenda.

It's not obvious why the CBC's coverage of the gala was so uncritical and boosterish. Perhaps the public broadcaster is cowed by decades of anti-CBC flak generated by the institute.

CanWest Global's slavish coverage is more understandable. David Asper is no longer a trustee. He resigned when he became publisher of the National Post. But the Calgary Herald was a sponsor of the event and former Fraser Institute intern Danielle Smith, a Herald editorial writer and now host of Aspers' Global Sunday, emceed the evening.

The Ottawa Citizen editorialized that the Fraser Institute is a dissenting hero standing up to the socialist establishment. Another interpretation is that the Fraser is a small cog in a global wheel of reaction designed to roll back the democratic gains of the twentieth century. Hundreds of millions of corporate and foundation dollars make the wheel go round.

Donald Gutstein is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He was co-director of Project Censored Canada and NewsWatch Canada and is currently working on a book about corporate propaganda.

[diogenes]

Corporate welfare now totals over $167 billion dollars annually. For the average tax payer that means he is paying out $1400 a year in taxes to support corporations. Meanwhile social welfare costs are less than a third of the cost of corporate welfare.

there is more to this and i will ad it in a mo , (multi taskin)
the figures are yand and the same poo hapens here
so dont be whinning to me bout no welfare people

[diogenes]

But first an understanding of corporations and how they have evolved to become a menace to our freedoms is needed. Make no mistake that the danger posed by corporations and the almost inherent accompanying fascism poses the greatest threat to the liberty that anyone reading this will face in their lifetime. But most Americans understands little about how corporations became so powerful. They are largely unaware of the past restrictions on corporations that served the nation in good stead. This chapter will take a brief look at pass state constitutions and court cases to provide the reader with a background in understanding how corporations were kept in check in the 1800s.
The reader will note before beginning that past corporate laws held corporations in check up until the later part of the 1800s with the rise of the silver and railroad barons. A time that coincided with one of the most diasasterous court decisions of all time that gave corporations the rights of personhood. Another case dating in the first half of the 1920s the reader should note required the government to obtain search warrants to obtain corporate files. A decision that no doubt saved more than one profit monger that supplied arms in WWI and hindered the prosecution of corporations that traded with the Nazis during WWII.
The old adage that you can’t fight city hall applies in spades to corporations. If the reader doesn’t believe me I have a draw full of changes corporations made without my permission to my insurance policies, my banking accounts and my mutual fund accounts. In effect corporations control virtually every aspect of life today.
Today many senior citizens make monthly pilgrimages to Canada to refill their prescription drugs. The state of Maine has even adopted a law requiring in the future that drug prices there must be comparative to those in Canada. Even an Internet site exists to help seniors to obtain their prescriptions through mail from Canada.
So what is the difference between Canada’s health care system and that of the United States? If one was to listen to the extreme right and the Republican Party they are screaming that Canada’s health care system is socialistic. Balderdash! Those same prescription drugs that can be obtained in Canada for a fraction of the price they sell for in the United States are produced by the very same corporations that are gouging American citizens. If those corporations were owned and run by the government then it would be truly a socialistic system. But why the lie? Its simple Canada chooses to regulate their corporations. We have the same choice but the right wing politicians are shills bought and paid for by the very corporations that they are in charge of regulating. Its simply a diversion and sc
sorry! it ended there!

[SilverSpirit]

>>I know a woman whose grand child was kidnapped by the state and she fought for and got custody

Written in 1997

The Case Against: Seized Children

Kathy Tait, Children and Families Reporter The Province
“What Critics Say

Social workers have no rules, no law and that's what makes them so dangerous'
Child Protection workers have been given enormous powers under B.C.'s Child. Family and Community Service Act to apprehend any child they believe is neglected or faces physical. emotional or sexual harm. Normaly they require a court order but in an emergency they may act without one.
Critics of the ministry for children and families say the process is fraught with:
- False, malicious and anonymous allegations.
- Poor investigation. Social workers often apprehend within two or three hours of receiving, a complaint without any investigation.
- The reactions of inexperienced, overwhelmed or cover-your-rear social workers. Richmond lawyer Patricia Fleming, who handles a lot of apprehension cases, says some removals should never happen. She says the toughest front-line protection work is most often given to new recruits.
"What we've got now is a flood of inexperienced social workers," says Fleming. -- The lack of ministry help for families wanting to do a better job.
Frequently social workers with heavy caseloads apprehend rather than take the time to give the family support to solve their problems
- Unfair law, legal abuses, court delays and judges who simply rubber-stamp ministry decisions.
The pressure of many removals on a limited supply of foster homes.
Kari Simpson of the Citizens Research Institute says children are routinely placed in foster homes when capable family members are available.
- Parents having to prove themselves innocent, rather than the ministry
having to prove they are guilty.
"Social workers are God says Simpson "They have no rules, no law and
that's what makes them so dangerous."
/
Simpson, a garrulous and hyperbolic advocate, says hundreds of families a
year come to her for help to fight the ministry.
- Too many children unnecessarily separated from their families for months, sometimes years, even forever.
Simpson says she will often advise people to put their children in hiding. And, “we have a number of safe houses." Simpson says people should not be able to make complaints anonymously and should be held responsible for malicious complaints.

The law does say that if a person knowingly reports false information, that person is liable to a fine of up to $!0,000 or six months in jail, but no such charge has ever been laid because of the difficulty of proving intent. -
- The poor parenting practices of the ministry itself, in which children in care are continually moved or simply forgotten.
If you would like to contact the person, jenny. who posted this, email: [e-mail]

Not much has changed since this writer had written, except maybe the S .H .I .T. is a little bit higher and deeper.

Isn't it interesting that there is one hell of a lot more interest and concern shown in the Pitt Bulls "Drama" then in these cases of State Sanctioned Abduction that happens more and more right here in good Ol' Canada. It just totaly sickens me.

[diogenes]

Wow!!
now this is the stuff that grabs me!

pets are pets

and one does get attached to them

But children are our heritage!
thanks for this Silver S

[SilverSpirit]

I have several case studies that I have run accross, I believe that these should be shared ever more with the public. As a matter of fact, perhaps a personal web site devoted to this shall be one of my projects in the not too distant future. Watch for the links.





















leave links here for any interested.

[diogenes]

Save the pit bulls Abandon the children!
abondon the poor!
abandon hope!

Safe Streets Act passes
Critics say legislation punishes the poor
by Victoria Barber
In a meeting spearheaded by the UVic NDP club, members from an eclectic range of local groups convened in opposition to the Safe Streets Act, a piece of legislation banning “aggressive panhandling” that was passed into provincial law Oct. 26.

Members of the Community Solidarity Coalition, UVic Child and Youth Care, the Vancouver Island Compassion Society, and International Socialists agreed that a unified front was necessary to oppose what they called “the scapegoating of the poor.”

Those attending the meeting agreed that the act punishes individuals who are affected most by the B.C. government’s cuts to welfare and the social safety net—including social housing programs—and that these cuts have directly contributed to the presence of panhandlers and homeless people in downtown Victoria.

“We’ve got the government tossing people onto the street, then telling them not to stand there,” said Philippe Lucas of the Vancouver Island Compassion Society.

Charlayne Thornton-Joe, who represents downtown on the Victoria City Council and sits on the Downtown Advisory Committee, said in an email that she does not support the bill. “I do not think it is the answer to the concerns that we have on the streets—I feel we should be dealing with root causes,” she said.

The Safe Streets Act will punish panhandlers who solicit in a way that would make a “reasonable person” fear for his or her safety and makes it a criminal offence to ask for spare change near instant tellers, phone booths, bus stops, taxi stands and public toilets.

The act would also prohibit squeegee kids from approaching vehicles at intersections.

The Safe Streets Act was introduced as a private member’s bill by Vancouver-Burrard MLA Lorne Mayencourt in May of 2004.

Bruce Carter, CEO of the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce, wrote on the Chamber of Commerce website that “many Victorians feel unsafe to walk our streets both at nighttime and during the day.” Carter said that the act is not a solution in itself, and that more social assistance and funding for extra policing is necessary for “peace and harmony on our city streets.”

Carter added that the $2 million that the City of Victoria expects to receive from traffic fine revenues will go a long way towards financing the police budget.

Those convened on Friday agreed that directing resources at police will not solve the problems of homeless people downtown and that the bill is an attempt to divert attention from the B.C. government’s social policies onto the poor.

Steve Perks, assistant director of the Law Centre, called the bill an attempt to make escalating poverty “invisible.”

“We have cutbacks in services and a lack of resources to deal with poverty, and this act says that it is the poor people who are the problem,” he said. Perks added that the aggressive behavior targeted by the act is already covered in the Criminal Code.

Bill Burrill, president of the Together Against Poverty Society, agreed.
“You can control this kind of behaviour with the Criminal Code. Its provisions for assault, extortion and criminal behaviour are so broadly written, it covers every possible kind of inappropriate behaviour,” he said.

Critics have also questioned the enforceability of the bill, which would either fine the panhandler or serve him or her with a court summons.

Bruce Wallace, research coordinator of the Vancouver Island Public Interest Group, said that failure of a panhandler to pay his or her fine may create a pretext to be taken into police custody, regardless of the panhandler’s activities.

“The act criminalizes the poor—it says that if you are poor you will always be a criminal, no matter what you do,” said Wallace.

The new law will not be enforced until the government figures out how to punish aggressive panhandlers. According to Attorney General Geoff Plant, this should take until December at the latest.

[MyParentsHouse]

the Ministry for Children and families??? You are posting some informative stuff but not the full story...just as in anything you can find disgruntled people in ANY area of this. Yes...the ministry people are overwelmed...they have so many people say they aren't doing enough for the family until and are too quick to pull the children then in the next breath saying they are too quick to judge a family in a positive manner trying to help them and have a child dead. I have done daycare for 12 years now...some for kids in the system....and have looked after social workers children...only to have them come to my house crying after a long hard day. I myself was investigated...why....for one lady a serious problem....I was in route to Ft. St. John to my Step sister's wedding...4 kids and grandma in tow...2 older girls and 2 babies in car seats. We went into a restaurant and the babies started crying..I told grandma to finish her supper and took babies outside(I care about other people and their dinner and this was a family restaurant but a nicer one) I was swinging the boys in their car seats strapped in with hoods up. A lady approached me and said I was going to give them shaken baby syndrome...I acknowledged her concern and said this is just like their swings at home and with 2 just about 20 lb babies in carseats I can't move them far. Just enough to calm them down. We had a hotel just behind the restaurant to sleep and get a fresh start in the am for the kids sake. Mom and I were sitting outside of the hotel room, babies bathed, kids in bed sound asleep and not 20 minutes after we were finished voila...a ministry worker showed up. Well I was so upset..we had been listening to the radio and a child whom hadn't been apprehended by the ministry was killed by a father who shook him to death...was I scared...YOU BET YOUR BOOTS I WAS...was I going to be the example. The report was the I was shaking the babies unmercifully...and their heads were flopping around very badly. Well after talking to the worker...she conceded that there was no way on gods green earth that my babies heads were moving(snugglies tucking their heads still), strapped in and she took one look at the boys and said there was no way that I could get them both moving fast enough to worry. Also with the hoods on the car seats that come up and are attached to the handles that there was no way the lady could have seen the babies anyways the way that I was holding them.....I even took the ministry worker back to where I was. With being a daycare worker I hand out the info on Shaken baby syndrome...(not that a daycare worker couldn't do this but I was very aware of what it took to make it a true case) This lady took matters into her own hands thinking she was doing good. What needs to happen though is people need to be more informed before making judgements that can affect people's lives so profoundly. Over 75% of reported abuse cases are FALSE....these people are so overwelmed by people making uninformed reports of problems and having to try and make time for the IMPORTANT cases...children starving to death...being abused...mentally and physically.

What about those cases are turn out well?? We NEVER hear about the hundreds of cases where the children are returned successfully to the families...the families lives are turned around...why because people don't want to hear it. They love the media coverage on the cases that are messed up...media hype....the drama of it all. Yes...these children are hurt and we do have to try and do something about it but do we actually have an average of how many kids slip thru the loopholes in comparison to those who make it and are returned to their families. What they ask is not unreasonable....submit to drug tests if a known drug user...take parenting courses for those who need support, anger management for those who abuse physically and mentally. Take cooking courses for those who were never taught. Work with the Foster families to learn these skills and have the children integrated back into their lives. How many people know the inner workings of the offices....of the Foster families? How many people care enough to dig the truth up thru somewhere other than the media and to see what is TRULY being done to help these children...I think you would see a whole pile more than what is Ever portrayed in the media as it doesn't sell magazines or papers....

[SilverSpirit]

It's true that we don't hear a lot of the stuff that goes on in these situations. We hear one side, and hopefully the other (in a case) and somewhere in the middle we can find TRUTH.
Yes, I totally agree that there is the aspect of the overworked case workers, and I also agree that there are a lot of children that SHOULD be taken by the Ministry of Children and Families that are allowed to stay in the home of abusive parents. There have been so many children who have died at the hands of their "supposed" loving parents, but there have also been those that have died in the (safety?) of foster homes. There is an example of a baby that was brought (by the foster mother) to a parental visit to the Ministry office upside down in the car seat.

However, there are also case workers that abuse their power, and have taken children based on their own personal biase.

More to follow:

[diogenes]

Thank you for this SS
If there forums are for anything they are to pass on to otheres the information and knowledge we have gained
so that they too might find the strencth to find Their voice

[diogenes]

Thank you for this SS
If there forums are for anything they are to pass on to otheres the information and knowledge we have gained
so that they too might find the strencth to find Their voice

the issues raise in regard to the apprehension of child is far to important to be buried by my or anyone elses drivel
I have noticed here thought anything of a serios nature , whether local or international get short shift

[SilverSpirit]

Thanks Dio. I will be bringing more info to this thread very soon.
Everybody, please stay tuned.

[diogenes]

Gitty up!