Canadian Census Sold to Number One Torture Firm

We had an "election" awhile back and as Tommy Douglas would say "we exchanged one suit for another."

Our Canadian census system (software/hardware) has been contracted to Lockheed Martin, a firm listed as one of the top abusers of human rights (in the world), and a military industrial interrogator under contract.
(In other words - torture.)




We presumably do not deport people to countries that torture and yet we contract our entire census system to a company involved in torture and an illegal war?
I realize we've been asleep at the switch but wow:

Friday, March 24, 2006

The 14 Worst Corporate Evildoers
Global Exchange December 12th, 2005

Corporations carry out some of the most horrific human rights abuses of modern times, but it is increasingly difficult to hold them to account. Economic globalization and the rise of transnational corporate power have created a favorable climate for corporate human rights abusers, which are governed principally by the codes of supply and demand and show genuine loyalty only to their stockholders.

Several of the companies below are being sued under the Alien Tort Claims Act, a law that allows citizens of any nationality to sue in US federal courts for violations of international rights or treaties. When corporations act like criminals, we have the right and the power to stop them, holding leaders and multinational corporations alike to the accords they have signed. Around the world--in Venezuela, Argentina, India, and right here in the United States--citizens are stepping up to create democracy and hold corporations accountable to international law.

Caterpillar

For years, the Caterpillar Company has provided Israel with the bulldozers used to destroy Palestinian homes. Despite worldwide condemnation, Caterpillar has refused to end its corporate participation house demolition by cutting off sales of specially modified D9 and D10 bulldozers to the Israeli military.In a letter to Caterpillar CEO James Owens, The Office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights said:

"allowing the delivery of your ... bulldozers to the Israeli army ... in the certain knowledge that they are being used for such action, might involve complicity or acceptance on the part of your company to actual and potential violations of human rights..."Peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed by a Caterpillar D-9, military bulldozer in 2003. She was run over while attempting to block the destruction a family's home in Gaza. Her family filed suit against Caterpillar in March 2005 charging that Caterpillar knowingly sold machines used to violate human rights. Since Corrie's death at least three more Palestinians have been killed in their homes by Israeli bulldozer demolitions


Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin is the world's largest military contractor. Providing satellites, planes, missiles and other lethal high-tech items to the Pentagon keeps the profits rolling in. Since 2000, the year Bush was elected, the company's stock value has tripled.

As the Center for Corporate Policy (www.corporatepolicy.org) notes, it is no coincidence that Lockheed VP Bruce Jackson--who helped draft the Republican foreign policy platform in 2000--is a key player at the Project for a New American Century, the intellectual incubator of the Iraq war.

Lockheed Martin is not the only defense contractor that goes behind the scenes to influence public policy, but it is one of the worst. Stephen J. Hadley, who now has Condoleeza Rice's old job as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, was formerly a partner in a DC law firm representing Lockheed Martin. He is only one of the beneficiaries of the so-called revolving door between the military industries and the "civilian" national security apparatus. These war profiteers have a profound and illegitimate influence on our country's international policy decisions. More at this link:
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/randy/swas1.htm

U.S. CORPORATIONS AND THE NAZIS

"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. . . .
"Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there."
-- William E. Dodd, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, 1937. (1)

A large volume of documentary evidence exists that reveals that many of the richest, most powerful men in the United States, and the giant corporations they controlled, were secretly allied with the Nazis, both before and during World War II, even after war was declared between Germany and America. This alliance began with U.S. corporate investment during the reconstruction of post-World War I Germany in the 1920s and, years later, included financial, industrial and military aid to the Nazis. (Search the U.S. National Archives under Bush Nazi connections - all the facts are there including companies "seized for trading with the enemy" AND details of firms pharmaceutical, banking and otherwise who profited from the slave labor of Auschwitz concentration camp).

On the pages which follow we will review which prominent Americans and corporations were involved, what aid and comfort they gave our nation's enemies - treasonable offenses during time of war, and investigations into these matters which produced evidence of a US/Nazi corporate conspiracy to bring a fascist state to America, and eliminate competition in the industrial raw materials market in order to force world-wide dependance on oil-based petrochemicals.

(I have only included a smattering...the balance can be reviewed at the link)

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST

According to journalist George Seldes:

". . . Hitler had the support of the most widely circulated magazine in history, 'Readers Digest,' as well as nineteen big-city newspapers and one of the three great American news agencies, the $220-million Hearst press empire.
". . . William Randolph Hearst, Sr., . . . was the lord of all the press lords in the United States. The millions who read the Hearst newspapers and magazines and saw Hearst newsreels in the nation's moviehouses had their minds poisoned by Hitler propaganda.
"It was . . . disclosed first to President Roosevelt (by Ambassador Dodd) almost on the day it happened, in September 1934, and it is detailed in the book 'Ambassador Dodd's Diary,' published in 1941, and again in libel-proof documents on file in the courts of the state of New York. William E. Dodd, professor of history (at the University of Chicago), told me about the Hearst sell-out . . .
"According to Ambassador Dodd, Hearst came to take the waters at Bad Nauheim in September 1934, and Dodd somehow learned immediately that Hitler had sent two of his most trusted Nazi propagandists, Hanfstangel and Rosenberg, to ask Hearst how Nazism could present a better image in the United States. When Hearst went to Berlin later in the month, he was taken to see Hitler."
Seldes reports that a $400,000 a year deal was struck between Hearst and Hitler, and signed by Doctor Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. "Hearst," continues Seldes, "completely changed the editorial policy of his nineteen daily newspapers the same month he got the money."
In the court documents filed on behalf of Dan Gillmor, publisher of a magazine named "Friday," in response to a lawsuit by Hearst, under item 61, he states: "Promptly after this said visit with Adolf Hitler and the making of said arrangements. . . said plaintiff, William Randolph Hearst, instructed all Hearst press correspondents in Germany, including those of INS (Hearst's International News Service) to report happenings in Germany only in a friendly' manner. All of such correspondents reporting happenings in Germany accurately and without friendliness, sympathy and bias for the actions of the then German government, were transferred elsewhere, discharged, or forced to resign. . . ."
In the late 1930s, Seldes recounts, when "several sedition indictments (were brought by) the Department of Justice . . . against a score or two of Americans, the defendants included an unusually large minority of newspaper men and women, most of them Hearst employees." (2)

ANDREW MELLON

"Thurman Arnold, as assistant district attorney of the United States, his assistant, Norman Littell, and several Congressional investigations, have produced incontrovertible evidence that some of our biggest monopolies entered into secret agreements with the Nazi cartels and divided the world up among them," states Seldes in his book, "Facts and Fascism," published in 1943. "Most notorious of all was Alcoa, the Mellon-Davis-Duke monopoly which is largely responsible for the fact America did not have the aluminum with which to build airplanes before and after Pearl Harbor, while Germany had an unlimited supply." (3)


http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/2006/03/democratizing-world-one-torture-victim.html

Albert McCoy’s A Question of Torture probes and exposes the extent of “the Land of the Free’s” involvement in human torture over the years. Only a mainstream media 90% controlled by five major corporations (whose executives and major stockholders are amongst the de facto rulers of the America’s so-called republic) could so effectively maintain the illusion that the United States is the world leader in protecting human rights. Somewhere out there, David Copperfield is burning with envy. Rest easy, David. They are running out of magic. Destroying our Constitution and reversing the humanitarian gains achieved by millions of Americans with a social conscience throughout our nation’s history, the Bush Regime is extinguishing the candle of hope America once offered to humanity. Despite the exhaustive efforts of the media handmaidens, people are taking notice.

...

Meanwhile, our Canadian Prime Minister drones on... catapaulting the propaganda by repeating again and again five lame promises he actually plans to keep because they offer no threat to the American agenda for Canada.

It is time to GET UP / STAND UP and say, "no more, not now, not ever - especially in our names - HOW DARE YOU ?

HOW DARE YOU? What on earth made OUR government think this would be acceptable to us as a people?