"MICHAEL JACKSON USED $34 MILLION TO BUY SILENCE FROM HIS ABUSE VICTIMS" - DIANA DIAMOND

Michael Jackson spent some $34 million to buy silence from alleged abuse victims, according to a British paper. Diane Dimond has the inside story of the shocking report. I have taken much grief over the years—and received many death threats—from zealous Michael Jackson fans who have been unhappy with my investigative coverage of their idol. Since 1993, I have reported on the Jackson saga on television, radio, and in print. To his fans, the King of Pop was a benevolent and misunderstood saint of sorts who was persecuted by me and other journalists who had the audacity to report what trusted sources told us about Jackson’s private life: the disfiguring cosmetic surgeries, the drug and alcohol abuse, the constant companionship of young boys, the baffling short-lived marriages.

Jackson fans have complained especially about my book Be Careful Who You Love: Inside the Michael Jackson Case, in which I wrote about law enforcement's suspicion that Michael Jackson may have sexually abused many young boys. I also wrote extensively about how his money-hungry family kept their suspicions of Jackson’s pedophilia to themselves for fear it would hurt their economic standing.  If Michael’s earning were interrupted so would have been their allowances from him.

I was branded as a liar who was out to simply make money by destroying an innocent man’s reputation. Among the most memorable of the myriad threatening e-mails I’ve received came from a woman who promised to hunt me down, pin me to the ground, gouge out my eyes with a spoon, and scrape off my face with steel wool. Another declared she was a voodoo princess performing chants to make sure I got breast cancer.

In this business, you have to have a thick skin. I got on with my crime- and justice-based journalism over the years, but I continue to periodically get sucked back into the Jackson morass. Case in point: the latest Jackson story in the British tabloid Sunday People with the screaming headline: “Michael Jackson paid £23 MILLION buying silence of at least TWO DOZEN young boys he abused over 15 years.” (That translates to $34 million.) The paper claims to have “seen secret FBI files”—supposed case numbers CADCE MJ-02463 and CR 01046—that reportedly reveal how the superstar bought off parents of his alleged young victims to ensure silence. The article goes on to report that, “Many of the damning reports in the FBI collection had been commissioned by Jacko himself.”

Here’s what I know. The FBI files are still secret. The documents and cassette tapes reviewed by Sunday People were offered by a private detective who has been knocking around Hollywood with them for a long time. He remained unnamed in the U.K. paper and will remain so here, but he’s hardly a shadowy figure. I have known him personally for many years.

Here’s the backstory: This detective used to work for Jackson’s high-profile private investigator, Anthony Pellicano, in the days immediately following the first child sex-abuse allegations against Jackson in 1993. The pair was tasked with identifying possible trouble for the accused entertainer, and in doing so this Pellicano associate called upon a dogged tabloid reporter named Jim Mitteager to see what information he might have developed. At Mitteager’s home he learned that the National Enquirer reporter had died. His widow gave the private eye a box full of tapes marked “JACKSON” that her husband had been working on.

Included among the hours of salacious interviews was a long discussion with a live-in domestic couple named Stella and Philip LeMarque which was generously quoted by the Sunday People in a companion article. The couple told a story of boys being shown pornography and sexually molested in the Jackson house, the theater area, and in teepees pitched on the landscaped grounds. Among the alleged victims were five child actors, two dancers, and at least 10 other young Jackson admirers dating back to 1989. The children were isolated from their parents, according to the couple, who were housed a quarter mile away in guest quarters while the young boys slept with Jackson. 

(Much of what the LeMarques said on the Mitteager tapes—and to me in 1994—was similar to stories told by other Jackson employees. But the couple’s veracity has been questioned, because they repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to sell their version of events to the media.)

Once in the detective’s possession, all the Mitteager audio tapes were turned into printed reports for Pellicano and filed among his vast cabinets full of Hollywood secrets. In 2002, when Pellicano was arrested on weapons charges, the FBI scooped up all of the gumshoe’s files.  They have remained in FBI storage and—unbelievably—never offered to prosecutors in Santa Barbara who conducted the unsuccessful criminal case against Jackson in 2005. Jackson was acquitted of all molestation charges and denied all the accusations up until his 2009 death.

In a prison interview with The Daily Beast in 2011, Pellicano—who called himself the “Sin Eater” —revealed why he hadn’t worked for Jackson for very long. “I quit because I found out some truths … He did something far worse to young boys than molest them.” Pellicano, the father of nine children, refused to elaborate. The latest reports from the British paper put actual numbers to old Jackson molestation stories—24 boys and $34 million in payoffs—but offer no confirmation of the private detective’s information. Does it mean the stories are untrue? No, but it does nothing to corroborate them either.

The unnamed private eye who provided the newspaper with his copies of the old files said he came forward after listening to Wade Robson, a one-time Jackson loyalist who now claims he was molested by the singer for seven years.  Despite being the lead defense witness at Jackson’s 2005 child-abuse trial, Robson, now 30, has changed his story and says the sexual abuse began when he was 7 years old. In May, Robson filed legal papers and told the Today Show earlier this year he could no longer stay silent about the horrible secret Jackson had “brainwashed” him to keep.

These disclosures come as Jackson’s mother and children pursue a sensational high-stakes wrongful death suit against AEG, the last concert promoter to work with the entertainer. The family maintains AEG ignored Michael’s serious health issues and literally worked him to death. AEG insists that it was Dr. Conrad Murray, hired on by Jackson himself, who was in charge of the singer’s health. The corporation says it had no idea of the nightly Propofol drip the now-convicted doctor was administering to Jackson or how sick their star really was.

The timing of the Sunday People and Robson exposés has caused some to believe AEG is behind the leak of this legacy-damaging information. (AEG has refused to comment on the speculation, and the Jackson family has similarly had no comment.)  On social media and on Jackson-related websites, the King of Pop’s supporters see a conspiracy to taint the Los Angeles trial and negate the positive PR and financial bump the Jackson family enjoyed after Michael’s death in June 2009. Thanks to astute estate management, the hundreds of millions of dollars of debt Jackson left behind has now been erased, replaced by a solid portfolio worth, by some accounts, nearly a billion dollars.

It is important to note, however, that the jury in the Jackson vs. AEG trial is admonished daily not to watch, read, or listen to any media, so there is a viable chance that they have heard nothing about the latest allegations. Any effort at a conspiracy could easily have failed. The numerous ugly revelations in court about AEG’s behavior toward Jackson as well as the singer’s lifestyle and the state of his body at death has left many court watchers wondering why Katherine Jackson, 83, would have brought this case in the first place. Surely, she must have known that derogatory information about Michael would surface and some family members have been quoted as saying the stress and anxiety of possibly testifying contributed to 15-year-old Paris Jackson’s suicide attempt last month. While the Jackson suit seeks unspecified billions in damages there is obviously a more than adequate estate already in place to care for Jackson’s three children. My best guess after following this family for 20 years? Since Katherine Jackson’s substantial allowance reverts back to the children when she dies, she is trying to amass funds of her own to leave to her chronically underemployed sons -  From the Daily Beast.

"OH CANADA:HOW AMERICA'S NORTHERN NEIGHBOR BECAME A ROGUE AND A RECKLESS PETROSTATE"

For decades, the world has thought of Canada as America's friendly northern neighbor -- a responsible, earnest, if somewhat boring, land of hockey fans and single-payer health care. On the big issues, it has long played the global Boy Scout, reliably providing moral leadership on everything from ozone protection to land-mine eradication to gay rights. The late novelist Douglas Adams once quipped that if the United States often behaved like a belligerent teenage boy, Canada was an intelligent woman in her mid-30s. Basically, Canada has been the United States -- not as it is, but as it should be.
But a dark secret lurks in the northern forests. Over the last decade, Canada has not so quietly become an international mining center and a rogue petrostate. It's no longer America's better half, but a dystopian vision of the continent's energy-soaked future.

That's right: The good neighbor has banked its economy on the cursed elixir of political dysfunction -- oil. Flush with visions of becoming a global energy superpower, Canada's government has taken up with pipeline evangelists, petroleum bullies, and climate change skeptics. Turns out the Boy Scout's not just hooked on junk crude -- he's become a pusher. And that's not even the worst of it.

With oil and gas now accounting for approximately a quarter of its export revenue, Canada has lost its famous politeness. Since the Conservative Party won a majority in Parliament in 2011, the federal government has eviscerated conservationists, indigenous nations, European commissioners, and just about anyone opposing unfettered oil production as unpatriotic radicals. It has muzzled climate change scientists, killed funding for environmental science of every stripe, and in a recent pair of unprecedented omnibus bills, systematically dismantled the country's most significant long-cherished environmental laws.

The author of this transformation is Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a right-wing policy wonk and evangelical Christian with a power base in Alberta, ground zero of Canada's oil boom. Just as Margaret Thatcher funded her political makeover of Britain on revenue from North Sea oil, Harper intends to methodically rewire the entire Canadian experience with petrodollars sucked from the ground. In the process he has concentrated power in the prime minister's office and reoriented Canada's foreign priorities. Harper, who took office in 2006, increased defense spending by nearly $1 billion annually in his first four years, and he has committed $2 billion to prison expansion with a "tough on crime" policy that ignores the country's falling crime rate. Meanwhile, Canada has amassed a huge federal debt -- its highest in history at some $600 billion and counting.

Liberal critics like to say that Harper's political revolution caught many Canadians, generally a fat and apathetic people, by surprise -- a combination of self-delusion and strategic deception. That may be true, but though Canadians live in high latitudes, they're not above baser human instincts -- like greed. Harper is aggressively pushing an economic gamble on oil, the world's most volatile resource, and promising a new national wealth based on untapped riches far from where most Canadians live that will fill their pocketbooks, and those of their children, for generations. With nearly three-quarters of Canadians supporting oil sands development in a recent poll, Harper seems to be selling them on the idea.

THE RESOURCE UNDERWRITING many of these ugly behavioral changes is bitumen, a heavy, sour crude mined from oil sands. Deposits of the badly degraded asphalt-like substance lie under a forest the size of Florida in northeastern Alberta and comprise the world's third-largest petroleum reserves. Over the last decade, as oil prices increased fivefold, oil companies invested approximately $160 billion to develop bitumen in Alberta, and it has finally turned profitable. Canada is now cranking out 1.7 million barrels a day of the stuff, and scheduled production stands to fill provincial and federal government coffers with about $120 billion in rent and royalties by 2020. More than 40 percent of that haul goes directly to the federal government largely in the form of corporate taxes. And the government wants even more; it's pushing for production to hit 5 million barrels a day by 2030.

Never mind that the entire process is a messy and wasteful one. It takes copious amounts of water, capital, and energy to dig out the carbon-rich sands, let alone upgrade and process the heavy crude, which can't even move through a pipeline until it is diluted with an imported gasoline-like condensate. With brazen cheek, the government nonetheless defends the Alberta megaproject as "responsible" and "sustainable" -- "an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China's Great Wall. Only bigger." Bigger indeed: Approved bitumen mining projects could potentially excavate a forest area six times as large as New York City. Reclamation and reforestation remain an uncertain and costly proposition. To date, oil companies have already created enough toxic mining sludge (6 billion barrels) to flood the entirety of Washington, D.C.

Unsurprisingly, Ottawa has become a master at the cynical art of greenwashing. When Harper's ministers aren't attacking former NASA scientist and climate change canary James Hansen in the pages of the New York Times or lobbying against Europe's Fuel Quality Directive (which regards bitumen as much dirtier than conventional oil), his government has spent $100 million since 2009 on ads to convince Canadians that exporting this oil is "responsible resource development." Meanwhile, Canada has bent over backward to entice Beijing. Three state-owned Chinese oil companies (all with dismal records of corporate transparency and environmental sensitivity) have already spent more than $20 billion purchasing rights to oil sands in Alberta.

The kowtowing to China, now the world's largest oil consumer, highlights Canada's big bitumen dilemma: how to get dirty, landlocked oil to global markets. The United States, Canada's biggest customer, doesn't seem to need it as much anymore; imports declined by more than 4 million barrels a day between 2005 and 2011, and with pipeline projects to the United States like Keystone XL stuck in the mud, Harper's vision of being an "emerging energy superpower" appears in danger. Unsurprisingly, Harper has recently jettisoned criticism of China's human rights record. As a secret foreign-policy document leaked last fall to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) makes clear, Canada has new priorities: "To succeed we will need to pursue political relationships in tandem with economic interests even where political interests or values may not align."

In 2012, Canada quietly signed a controversial trade agreement with the People's Republic and approved a $15 billion takeover of Nexen, an oil sands player, by the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp. And, perhaps to warm Canadians' hearts to the Chinese, the government recently lobbied to rent two traveling pandas at a cost of $10 million over the next 10 years.

Now that oil sands mining accounts for nearly 10 percent of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, Ottawa can't really brook any discussion of a carbon tax, though a majority of Canadians would support one. Harper described the Kyoto Protocol as "a socialist scheme" and a "job-killing, economy-destroying" accord before pulling out of the agreement altogether in 2012. Many of Canada's ministers are now die-hard skeptics even about the science behind climate change. As Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver recently explained to the Montreal newspaper La Presse: "I think that people aren't as worried as they were before about global warming of 2 degrees.… Scientists have recently told us that our fears [on climate change] are exaggerated." To silence any would-be exaggerators, the government simply stopped funding the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, disbanded Environment Canada's Adaptation to Climate Change Research Group, and eliminated the role of chief science advisor. And since 2008, political minders have vetted all media requests for the country's 23,000 federal scientists.

After the government barred a federal scientist from talking about the discovery of a large Arctic ozone hole, a 2012 editorial in the influential science journal Nature demanded that the Canadian government "set its scientists free." It seems Harper heard "cut them loose" instead: His government summarily closed the world-famous Experimental Lakes Area research station, a gem of Canadian environmental science that has helped spur global policy on acid rain, to save the princely sum of $2 million a year (though the Ontario government is working to keep it open).

THE SINGLE-MINDED PURSUIT of this petroproject has stunned global analysts. The Economist, no left-wing shill, characterized Harper, the son of an Imperial Oil senior accountant, as a bully "intolerant of criticism and dissent" with a determined habit of rule-breaking. Lawrence Martin, one of Canada's most influential political commentators, says that Harper's "billy-club governance" has broken "new ground in the subverting of the democratic process." Conservative pollster Allan Gregg has described Harper's agenda as anideological assault on evidence, facts, and reason.

To be fair, Harper's government does have a plan for climate change -- pumping the problem to the United States and/or China. Oil sands crude transported to the United States by the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, for example, could over a 50-year period increase carbon emissions by as much as 935 million metric tons relative to other crudes. And the planned $5.5 billion Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific Ocean would result in up to 100 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, from extraction and production in Canada to combustion in China -- more than British Columbia's total emissions in 2009. The 2012 National Inventory Report by Environment Canada, the country's environmental department, actually boasts that Canada has partly reduced overall emission intensity in the oil sands "by exporting more crude bitumen."

All this underscores Canada's new reality: Just about any kind of rational evidence has now come under assault by a government that believes that markets -- and only markets -- hold the answers. Any act that industry regards as an obstacle to rapid mineral extraction or pipeline building has been rewritten with a Saudi-like flourish. One massive omnibus budget bill alone changed 70 pieces of legislation, gutting, for example, the Fisheries Act, which directly prohibited the destruction of aquatic-life habitats but stood in the way of the Northern Gateway pipeline, which must cross 1,000 waterways en route to the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, funding for Canada's iconic park system has been cut by 20 percent in what critics have called a "lobotomy." The CBC, the respected state broadcaster long scorned by Harper as an independent check on power, has suffered a series of cutbacks. The Health Council of Canada, which once ensured national health standards and innovation across Canada's 13 provinces and territories, also got the ax. Furthermore, with the élan of a Middle Eastern petroprince, Harper appointed the head of his security detail to be ambassador to Jordan. And he did it all with nary a peep from your average Canadian.

More than a decade ago, American political scientist Terry Lynn Karl crudely summed up the dysfunction of petrostates: Countries that become too dependent on oil and gas riches behave like plantation economies that rely on "an unsustainable development trajectory fueled by an exhaustible resource" whose revenue streams form "an implacable barrier to change." And that's what happened to Canada while you weren't looking. Shackled to the hubris of a leader who dreams of building a new global energy superpower, the Boy Scout is now slave to his own greed - From Foreign Policy..

"OH CANADA:HOW AMERICA'S FRIENDLY NORTHERN NEIGHBOR BECAME A ROGUE AND A RECKLESS PETROSTATE"

 For decades, the world has thought of Canada as America's friendly northern neighbor -- a responsible, earnest, if somewhat boring, land of hockey fans and single-payer health care. On the big issues, it has long played the global Boy Scout, reliably providing moral leadership on everything from ozone protection to land-mine eradication to gay rights. The late novelist Douglas Adams once quipped that if the United States often behaved like a belligerent teenage boy, Canada was an intelligent woman in her mid-30s. Basically, Canada has been the United States -- not as it is, but as it should be.

But a dark secret lurks in the northern forests. Over the last decade, Canada has not so quietly become an international mining center and a rogue petrostate. It's no longer America's better half, but a dystopian vision of the continent's energy-soaked future.

That's right: The good neighbor has banked its economy on the cursed elixir of political dysfunction -- oil. Flush with visions of becoming a global energy superpower, Canada's government has taken up with pipeline evangelists, petroleum bullies, and climate change skeptics. Turns out the Boy Scout's not just hooked on junk crude -- he's become a pusher. And that's not even the worst of it.

With oil and gas now accounting for approximately a quarter of its export revenue, Canada has lost its famous politeness. Since the Conservative Party won a majority in Parliament in 2011, the federal government has eviscerated conservationists, indigenous nations, European commissioners, and just about anyone opposing unfettered oil production as unpatriotic radicals. It has muzzled climate change scientists, killed funding for environmental science of every stripe, and in a recent pair of unprecedented omnibus bills, systematically dismantled the country's most significant long-cherished environmental laws.

The author of this transformation is Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a right-wing policy wonk and evangelical Christian with a power base in Alberta, ground zero of Canada's oil boom. Just as Margaret Thatcher funded her political makeover of Britain on revenue from North Sea oil, Harper intends to methodically rewire the entire Canadian experience with petrodollars sucked from the ground. In the process he has concentrated power in the prime minister's office and reoriented Canada's foreign priorities. Harper, who took office in 2006, increased defense spending by nearly $1 billion annually in his first four years, and he has committed $2 billion to prison expansion with a "tough on crime" policy that ignores the country's falling crime rate. Meanwhile, Canada has amassed a huge federal debt -- its highest in history at some $600 billion and counting.

Liberal critics like to say that Harper's political revolution caught many Canadians, generally a fat and apathetic people, by surprise -- a combination of self-delusion and strategic deception. That may be true, but though Canadians live in high latitudes, they're not above baser human instincts -- like greed. Harper is aggressively pushing an economic gamble on oil, the world's most volatile resource, and promising a new national wealth based on untapped riches far from where most Canadians live that will fill their pocketbooks, and those of their children, for generations. With nearly three-quarters of Canadians supporting oil sands development in a recent poll, Harper seems to be selling them on the idea.

THE RESOURCE UNDERWRITING many of these ugly behavioral changes is bitumen, a heavy, sour crude mined from oil sands. Deposits of the badly degraded asphalt-like substance lie under a forest the size of Florida in northeastern Alberta and comprise the world's third-largest petroleum reserves. Over the last decade, as oil prices increased fivefold, oil companies invested approximately $160 billion to develop bitumen in Alberta, and it has finally turned profitable. Canada is now cranking out 1.7 million barrels a day of the stuff, and scheduled production stands to fill provincial and federal government coffers with about $120 billion in rent and royalties by 2020. More than 40 percent of that haul goes directly to the federal government largely in the form of corporate taxes. And the government wants even more; it's pushing for production to hit 5 million barrels a day by 2030.

Never mind that the entire process is a messy and wasteful one. It takes copious amounts of water, capital, and energy to dig out the carbon-rich sands, let alone upgrade and process the heavy crude, which can't even move through a pipeline until it is diluted with an imported gasoline-like condensate. With brazen cheek, the government nonetheless defends the Alberta megaproject as "responsible" and "sustainable" -- "an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China's Great Wall. Only bigger." Bigger indeed: Approved bitumen mining projects could potentially excavate a forest area six times as large as New York City. Reclamation and reforestation remain an uncertain and costly proposition. To date, oil companies have already created enough toxic mining sludge (6 billion barrels) to flood the entirety of Washington, D.C.

Unsurprisingly, Ottawa has become a master at the cynical art of greenwashing. When Harper's ministers aren't attacking former NASA scientist and climate change canary James Hansen in the pages of the New York Times or lobbying against Europe's Fuel Quality Directive (which regards bitumen as much dirtier than conventional oil), his government has spent $100 million since 2009 on ads to convince Canadians that exporting this oil is "responsible resource development." Meanwhile, Canada has bent over backward to entice Beijing. Three state-owned Chinese oil companies (all with dismal records of corporate transparency and environmental sensitivity) have already spent more than $20 billion purchasing rights to oil sands in Alberta.

The kowtowing to China, now the world's largest oil consumer, highlights Canada's big bitumen dilemma: how to get dirty, landlocked oil to global markets. The United States, Canada's biggest customer, doesn't seem to need it as much anymore; imports declined by more than 4 million barrels a day between 2005 and 2011, and with pipeline projects to the United States like Keystone XL stuck in the mud, Harper's vision of being an "emerging energy superpower" appears in danger. Unsurprisingly, Harper has recently jettisoned criticism of China's human rights record. As a secret foreign-policy document leaked last fall to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) makes clear, Canada has new priorities: "To succeed we will need to pursue political relationships in tandem with economic interests even where political interests or values may not align."

In 2012, Canada quietly signed a controversial trade agreement with the People's Republic and approved a $15 billion takeover of Nexen, an oil sands player, by the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp. And, perhaps to warm Canadians' hearts to the Chinese, the government recently lobbied to rent two traveling pandas at a cost of $10 million over the next 10 years.

Now that oil sands mining accounts for nearly 10 percent of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, Ottawa can't really brook any discussion of a carbon tax, though a majority of Canadians would support one. Harper described the Kyoto Protocol as "a socialist scheme" and a "job-killing, economy-destroying" accord before pulling out of the agreement altogether in 2012. Many of Canada's ministers are now die-hard skeptics even about the science behind climate change. As Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver recently explained to the Montreal newspaper La Presse: "I think that people aren't as worried as they were before about global warming of 2 degrees.… Scientists have recently told us that our fears [on climate change] are exaggerated." To silence any would-be exaggerators, the government simply stopped funding the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, disbanded Environment Canada's Adaptation to Climate Change Research Group, and eliminated the role of chief science advisor. And since 2008, political minders have vetted all media requests for the country's 23,000 federal scientists.

After the government barred a federal scientist from talking about the discovery of a large Arctic ozone hole, a 2012 editorial in the influential science journal Nature demanded that the Canadian government "set its scientists free." It seems Harper heard "cut them loose" instead: His government summarily closed the world-famous Experimental Lakes Area research station, a gem of Canadian environmental science that has helped spur global policy on acid rain, to save the princely sum of $2 million a year (though the Ontario government is working to keep it open).

THE SINGLE-MINDED PURSUIT of this petroproject has stunned global analysts. The Economist, no left-wing shill, characterized Harper, the son of an Imperial Oil senior accountant, as a bully "intolerant of criticism and dissent" with a determined habit of rule-breaking. Lawrence Martin, one of Canada's most influential political commentators, says that Harper's "billy-club governance" has broken "new ground in the subverting of the democratic process." Conservative pollster Allan Gregg has described Harper's agenda as anideological assault on evidence, facts, and reason.

To be fair, Harper's government does have a plan for climate change -- pumping the problem to the United States and/or China. Oil sands crude transported to the United States by the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, for example, could over a 50-year period increase carbon emissions by as much as 935 million metric tons relative to other crudes. And the planned $5.5 billion Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific Ocean would result in up to 100 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, from extraction and production in Canada to combustion in China -- more than British Columbia's total emissions in 2009. The 2012 National Inventory Report by Environment Canada, the country's environmental department, actually boasts that Canada has partly reduced overall emission intensity in the oil sands "by exporting more crude bitumen."

All this underscores Canada's new reality: Just about any kind of rational evidence has now come under assault by a government that believes that markets -- and only markets -- hold the answers. Any act that industry regards as an obstacle to rapid mineral extraction or pipeline building has been rewritten with a Saudi-like flourish. One massive omnibus budget bill alone changed 70 pieces of legislation, gutting, for example, the Fisheries Act, which directly prohibited the destruction of aquatic-life habitats but stood in the way of the Northern Gateway pipeline, which must cross 1,000 waterways en route to the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, funding for Canada's iconic park system has been cut by 20 percent in what critics have called a "lobotomy." The CBC, the respected state broadcaster long scorned by Harper as an independent check on power, has suffered a series of cutbacks. The Health Council of Canada, which once ensured national health standards and innovation across Canada's 13 provinces and territories, also got the ax. Furthermore, with the élan of a Middle Eastern petroprince, Harper appointed the head of his security detail to be ambassador to Jordan. And he did it all with nary a peep from your average Canadian.

More than a decade ago, American political scientist Terry Lynn Karl crudely summed up the dysfunction of petrostates: Countries that become too dependent on oil and gas riches behave like plantation economies that rely on "an unsustainable development trajectory fueled by an exhaustible resource" whose revenue streams form "an implacable barrier to change." And that's what happened to Canada while you weren't looking. Shackled to the hubris of a leader who dreams of building a new global energy superpower, the Boy Scout is now slave to his own greed - From Foreign Policy.

"160 MILLION DUMB NIGERIANS" - BY BAYO OLUWASANMI.

Despite its very evident prosperity, many people in Nigeria are in excruciating pain. That distress is most visible to the poor majority while the ruling elites do not see it or pretend not to see it.

The broken covenant – the social contract – between the government and the governed illuminates the ineptitude and callousness of those elected by the people to fight on their behalf.

Romantic yearning for Utopia and revolt against a polluted society are the two poles which provide the tension of all militant uprising or civil agitation.

We see things differently. While the psychiatrist sees the craving for Utopia and rebellion against the status quo as symptoms of social maladjustment, the social reformer sees both as symptoms of a healthy rational attitude.

Max was right when he said that a moribund society creates its own morbid gravediggers. Revolt against injustice is not only honorable but it is imperative.

Since independence, Nigeria has been blessed with nonentities as leaders. Leaders who perceive no need-spots for specific problems. Leaders who possess no gift and no competence to address the needs of the people.

Leaders who cannot persuade people. Leaders who are not able to attract others to join a cause. Leaders who pursue no purpose and employ no measures to accomplish the desired goals.

We lack a strong leader who could cast a national vision. In these days, there is no one in charge in Nigeria: everyone and everything seem to thrive in chaos.

The federal economic and finance minister/coordinator, manipulators, and other self-styled economic gurus, continue to deceive Nigerians with voodoo economic analyses that things are not as bad as they seem. But behind closed doors, they sing different tunes.

One thing however they cannot refute is the reality of the perpetual chasm separating the poor and the ruling class. The ruling class inflamed the anger and the pain of the working class by refusing to talk about it and being disinclined to listen.

The impoverishment of our people keeps me awake at night. I hear them in the darkness around me. It is the cries of these countless victims which rouse me in the long watches of the night.

It is the willing silence and sheepish submission to subjugation, poverty, and oppression that infuriate me to write today and always. It is thinking of the martyrs who fought and died for the starved and strapped Nigerians that egg me on.

The members of the ruling class have destroyed the vision of the future. They have turned their backs on the future and embraced the past. The addiction of these vultures to corruption and wickedness frankly and nakedly set them against all human values and democratic norms.

The slightest opposition and the merest criticism expose the few Nigerians who dare the authorities to the severest penalties. People in our reform social ladder are instantly suppressed and those who stand out independently are mown down.

Nigeria is in a mess. Able-bodied Nigerians turned beggars wandered through the streets. Petty street hawkers of underwear, socks, rubber heels, corsets, silverware, and other ancient objects appeared like a rash over the face of Nigeria towns and cities.

Graduates at all levels across disciplines drive danfos, molues, and bolekajas for a niggardly amount. Others settle for the “Area Boys” specialties and dark alley businesses of assorted brands.

Our unemployed youths in the millions have become a wild and homeless lot, socially disinherited, candidates for Aro, morgues, prisons, and the electric chair.

Our elderly are hungry. They depend on public charity and their Good Samaritan neighbors for food and for a place to sleep.

Days of somber discouragement follow our pensioners. Some died in penury, of hunger and disease. The rest of them live a vagabond, lonely, and perilous lives. Their depression soon reached that extreme stage when the will is paralyzed and physical resistance suddenly gives way.

Like inflated currency, Nigerian workers have lost the real meaning of living. They look like a huddle of stragglers from a beaten army. Irony and shame kept intruding in their chosen vocations and careers. Their former passion for dignity of labor has turned into perversion.

The once virile and vibrant Nigerian Labor Congress (NLC) of Michael Imodu and Wahab Goodluck has become a castrated giant whose brag and bluster only served to cover its lost virility.

Oil – our commonwealth – has been cut into cubes and blocks shared among the military hyenas and civilian vultures.

Nigerian governments – federal, state, and local – always stand for swindling, intrigue, and privilege. They could not stand for anything else. Neither law nor force can change it. If retribution occasionally catches up with them, this can only be by the dispensation of God.

The hopelessness of Nigerians’ limited lives – lives truncated and impoverished by the oppressors – keeps the rest of us wondering what next?

Majority of Nigerians live on less than $2 a day. And it is their starvation wages which permit the swollen pay packets of the ruling class and other privileged economic saboteurs.

Once Nigerians started on the slippery slope, nothing could hold them back. At every turn, they are forced to advance, sliding further into the abyss of shame.

Each federal legislator takes home N29 million every month. The governors, state legislators, and local government chairmen and council members receive criminally huge compensations. The same governors said they couldn’t afford the minimum wage of N18, 000.

The ruling native tyrants have seized as it were, all available prime land and jerked up prices everywhere in the country. Few days ago, I read that a plot of land in Banana Republic in Ikoyi sells for N1 billion while the landless poor have nowhere to lay their heads.

Also last week, I read that a village head in Akwa Ibom State had begun a three-month hunger strike in protest of a dilapidated high school building erected 31 years ago. He said the governor had repeatedly ignored his pleas to visit the school. Here is a story on Governor Godswill  Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State reported by SaharaReporters June, 30:
“Three stewards working in the Akwa Ibom state governor's lodge in Asokoro, Abuja was on Friday summarily dismissed by the governor, Godswill Akpabio, over missing bundles of mint fresh dollars valued at over  $250,000 (N40 million) kept in the governor's bedroom.

The governor who reportedly issued the instruction to dispense with the services of the political appointees personally found out on Wednesday during his visit to Abuja that four bundles of the foreign currency he left in his bedroom had been stolen while he was gone to a dinner with President Goodluck Jonathan at the Aso Rock Villa.

Saharareporters gathered that the bundles of dollars kept in the drawers in the governor's bedroom were leftovers from stacks of hard currency stashed away in a private security safe.”

Instead of building new roads, the rulers have resorted into buying jets with stolen money from our treasury. As at the time of writing, 400 privately owned jets were reportedly parked at hangar of Abuja International Airport.

The death trap roads are now exclusively reserved for the poor. Meanwhile, Nigerians are dying in abnormal numbers every day on these roads.  

Our local schools, colleges, and universities are but wastelands of academic refuse. The institutions have been abandoned long ago by the children of legislators and other robber barons.  Our hospitals have become death houses for the poor – the only patients that still patronize such institutions.  

As humiliated and downtrodden people, Nigerians endure the worst abuses without complaint. One would have expected Nigerians to develop a strong hatred and dislike of the obviously rich- the thieves, crooks, scammers, embezzlers, looters, and leeches - of the economy, not because they could afford to buy things at any price, but because they were able to do so without a guilty conscience.

Few among the suffering Nigerians deny their anger even as they show it. A large number has been beaten into almost numb submission into accepting poverty as an act of God and that they’ll never reach the goals they once thought possible.

But the few, very few, refused to accept being treated as lesser human beings and they respond to the insult with furious indignation by brief sporadic, uncoordinated, protests and resistance.

For a moment or so, the cultural atmosphere would be saturated with experimental resistance, protests, and movements. With the exception of one cleric who always pitches his tent with the poor masses, the rest of legion of jet pastors would admonish the poor to embark on marathon night vigils and fast for their deliverance from the oppressors.

For once – Occupy Nigeria – looked indeed as if Nigeria convulsed after the subsidy removal, underpinned by scourged inflation, depression, unemployment, and the absence of a faith to live for.

Composed mainly of handful of Nigerians, Occupy Nigeria attests to the all time truth that at all times and in all creeds only a minority has been capable of courting trouble and committing emotional hara-kiri on behalf of the proletariat.

The bedroom confidence of the protesters soon evaporates like a puddle under a scotching desert sun. The protest was high jacked by lukewarm labor leader corrupters.

The uncompromising fire of radical, and purist zealotry lit by the organizers was instantly put out by the union bosses who clung to the empty shell of greed driven by polluted civilization.

After Occupy Nigeria protest (and like many previous protests) had been effectively neutralized and vanished like a tantalizing mirage, social life went back to normal.
Nobody asked: Why can’t the oppressed prolonged and sustained the protest longer? Why can it not become a permanent basis for the reorganization of our public life?

It is not a false interpretation to conclude that the major obstacle to Nigeria’s version of Arab Spring is fear. Nigerians are cowards, spineless, and weak.

Have you ever tried to hammer a nail with your shoes? Or tighten a screw with a fingernail file? Or shield yourself from a rainstorm with just a newspaper? When do you need a hammer or screw driver or umbrella?

The ruling class has provided the ingredients necessary for their successful overthrow. So far, Nigerians are substituting lethal weapons generously supplied by their oppressors with shoes as hammers, fingernail files to tighten screws, and newspapers as umbrellas for rainstorms.

The rigor of the economic clime, the poverty colony, and the harsh living conditions should have made Nigerians one of the toughest, hardest, and enduring protesters and resisters in the world.

The cautious, calculating, submissive, nervous time-server Nigerians watched their steps, looked over their shoulders, loudly professed loyalty, and monotonously repeated the official propaganda in exchange for crumbs from the master’s table.

Everything about Nigeria is different. Everything is in the reverse. Things that worked in other countries won’t work in Nigeria. Which is why the country is not moving forward and it would take eternity for it to advance with the rest of the developed world.

Nigerians are afraid of police arrest, police clubbing, police shooting, afraid to be handcuffed afraid to endure the sun or the rain for a little longer than necessary, and afraid to confront their oppressors.

They are easily cowered and easily bought. They forget that freedom is not free. And that the only language that oppressors understand is force or fire.

A poor, powerless Black woman by the name Rosa Parks ignited the American Civil Rights movement. She risked her life when she dared the white oppressors by refusing to give up her seat for a white passenger. Men, women, and children were killed, maimed, beaten, and jailed in the fight for racial equality.

Steve Biko and other countless patriots sacrificed their lives to end Apartheid. Of course our legendary President Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for the cause of freedom.
Not long ago, a young unemployed Tunisian graduate preferred to be immolated than surrender to the oppressive Tunisian regime. His personal sacrifice gave birth to the Tunisian Revolution.

Egyptians have taken to the streets again calling for the ouster of their newly elected President Muhammed Morsi. Brazilians came out in thousands to protest against increased fare in public transportation. President Dilma Rousseff had since bowed to the people’s will.

Remember President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines whose wife owned 2,000 pair of shoes? Well, the dictator was brought to his knees by the People Power Revolution in 1986 comprised over two million Filipino civilians as well as several political, military, and including religious groups led by Cardinal Jaime Sin, the Archbishop of Manila.

Lech Walesa the unemployed Polish electrician organized the illegal 1970 strikes at Gdansk Shipyard in protest of government’s decree raising food prices. Because of his singular act of bravery, the Solidarity Trade Union grew into a 10 million-member movement. The government was forced to accede to the workers’ demands.

The list goes on and on, and on.

The world watched with disdain and mockery at the stupidity of oppressed Nigerians:

If these native oppressors are worst than colonial masters, why didn’t they rebel?
How could small band of thieves in government enslave so many people and exert complete control over the rest 99.9 per cent of the 160 million people?

How could they have successfully immobilized and sterilized so many Nigerians mentally, spiritually, and physically?

How could they have successfully perpetuated a blend of covert and overt tyranny, public policy, and secret alliances with the very oppressed?

Why didn’t the tyranny, humiliation, and primitive stagnation of life of the poor caused by these vultures in government provoke a rebellion on the part of the oppressed?

The answer to these and other nagging questions could be summed up in one sentence: 160 million dumb Nigerians! - From Sahara Reporters.

Author's email:byolu@aol.com

"PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH JR ON NELSON MANDELA, EDWARD SNOWDEN AND BARACK OBAMA"

(CNN) -- Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, are in Zambia, where they are renovating a health clinic. In an exclusive interview, he tells CNN why he respects Nelson Mandela, what he thinks about Edward Snowden and President Barack Obama, and how he's not going to be around when his legacy is finally decided.

• On Snowden: "I think he damaged the security of the country."

• On Mandela: "His legacy will last for a long time."

• On Obama: "It's a hard job. He's got plenty on his agenda."

Bush talked about Snowden, the computer contractor who leaked details about secret U.S. surveillance programs, to CNN's Robyn Curnow in Zambia on Sunday.

He said he believes the Obama administration "will deal" with the fallout from the controversy unleashed by Snowden, who is now thought to be holed up in the transit area of a Moscow airport after fleeing there from Hong Kong.

Snowden's disclosures about the programs carried out by the National Security Agency have shaken the U.S. intelligence community and put the Obama administration on the defensive over accusations of government overreach into citizens' privacy.

But Bush refrained from criticizing the current president.

"I don't think it does any good," he said. "It's a hard job. He's got plenty on his agenda. It's difficult. A former president doesn't need to make it any harder. Other presidents have taken different decisions; that's mine."

The White House has defended the surveillance programs as necessary tools to defuse terrorist threats. Obama has said he welcomes a debate over how to strike a balance between security and privacy.

"I think there needs to be a balance, and as the president explained, there is a proper balance," Bush said.

Asked about an NSA program that tracks people's Internet activity, Bush said, "I put that program in place to protect the country. One of the certainties was that civil liberties were guaranteed."

Bush talked about Snowden, the computer contractor who leaked details about secret U.S. surveillance programs, to CNN's Robyn Curnow in Zambia on Sunday.

He said he believes the Obama administration "will deal" with the fallout from the controversy unleashed by Snowden, who is now thought to be holed up in the transit area of a Moscow airport after fleeing there from Hong Kong.

Snowden's disclosures about the programs carried out by the National Security Agency have shaken the U.S. intelligence community and put the Obama administration on the defensive over accusations of government overreach into citizens' privacy.

But Bush refrained from criticizing the current president.

"I don't think it does any good," he said. "It's a hard job. He's got plenty on his agenda. It's difficult. A former president doesn't need to make it any harder. Other presidents have taken different decisions; that's mine."

The White House has defended the surveillance programs as necessary tools to defuse terrorist threats. Obama has said he welcomes a debate over how to strike a balance between security and privacy.

"I think there needs to be a balance, and as the president explained, there is a proper balance," Bush said.

Asked about an NSA program that tracks people's Internet activity, Bush said, "I put that program in place to protect the country. One of the certainties was that civil liberties were guaranteed."

"He wasn't the only guy," he said. "It's OK. I made decisions that were the right decisions. History will ultimately judge. I never held someone's opinion against him; I didn't look at him differently because he didn't agree with me on an issue."

Bush also initially said he wasn't bothered about his ratings in opinion polls, even if some of them now put him at a similar level to Obama.

"The only time I really cared was on Election Day," he said.

Then, drawing laughter from his wife, he checked himself and said, "You know, I guess it's nice. I mean, let me rephrase that: Thank you for bringing it up."

In any case, the former president said he doesn't expect a fair assessment of his legacy in his lifetime.

"I won't be around, because it will take a while for the objective historians to show up," he said. "So I'm pretty comfortable with it, I did what I did; I know the spirit in which I did it." - FROM CNN.

"THE AMERICA'S SUPREME COURT VOTING SUPPRESSION LAW WILL BACKFIRE"

Ever since the election of George W. Bush, the Republican strategy has been to keep a growing Democratic majority at bay by repressing the votes of people and groups likely to vote Democratic. In 2000, when Al Gore beat George W. Bush, a corrupt Republican election official in Florida and, ultimately, a partisan Supreme Court made sure that Bush was seated as president. In 2004, deliberate voter suppression in Ohio and elsewhere made the difference for the GOP. But in 2008, a surge for Obama thwarted the Republican strategy; and in 2012 the dismal candidacy of Mitt Romney and high turnout of the Democratic base, coupled with failed voter suppression efforts in state after state, re-elected Obama.

So Republicans were left once again with the Supreme Court. This week's ruling in Shelby County v. Holder was such a cynical, naked and disingenuous power grab that it takes your breath away. The 5-4 Roberts majority argued that we don't need Justice Department pre-clearance any more because "our country has changed." But of course if things have changed in the Deep South, it's only because of the very pre-clearance protections that the Court struck down. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent just blew away the posturing of the majority decision.

It took the Texas Attorney General only two hours to re-file a voter ID plan that the Justice Department had disallowed in March as discriminatory. And more sneak attacks on the right to vote will follow -- tampering with voter rolls, abuse of ID requirements serving as a new poll tax, long lines in minority and working-class neighborhoods, shameless re-districting to dilute Hispanic and black voting strength -- you name it. There are, however a couple of possible silver linings.

First, the ruling could so outrage blacks and Hispanics that the increase in voting turnout and the hostility to Republican tactics might more than make up for the Court's mischief. Another possibility is that civil rights groups will collect case after case of new voter suppression efforts, file new lawsuits, and maybe persuade at least one Justice that the High Court erred. You want current data, Justice Roberts? Just wait. What is extremely unlikely is Congressional action. Yet another piece of cynical disingenuousness on the part of the Court was to pitch the question back to Congress, knowing full well that the House will refuse to update the Voting Rights Act.

In sum: we will need to fight the civil rights revolution of the 1960s all over again, on the ground. In the long run, we have demographics on our side. A ton of damage, however, can be done in the short run, and this will take mobilization of a movement to fight for the right to vote and to have every vote count. The other thing we have going for us is that Republicans keep demonstrating that they are on the wrong side of history.

With Hispanics and Asians as the fastest growing demographic groups, black turnout surpassing white turnout in some jurisdictions, and equal LGBT rights now the overwhelming majority position, the Republican Party just keeps alienating voters. Voter suppression only underscores that reality. For two centuries, the American story has been about expansion of democracy. Today's Republicans would narrow it, abetted by the most nakedly partisan High Court ever.

Most Republicans are hostile to immigration reform. Though a decent bill was approved last week by the Senate (with only 14 Republicans voting to support it), the Republican House will try to either kill it or add poison pills. If comprehensive immigration does pass Congress, Hispanics and Asian Americans will appreciate that it is no thanks to the majority views of the Republican Party.

Likewise on LGBT rights, though some Republicans wish their colleagues would bow to reality as a 5-4 Supreme Court majority did last week, the social conservatives in the Party are just too strong. The GOP is on the wrong side of history here, too. Absent gross mischief to hold down or dilute minority voting, key southern states are on track to shift from red to purple, (Texas, Georgia) and from purple to blue (Florida, North Carolina, Virginia).

Other states that used to be reliably Republican such as Colorado are becoming more heavily Democratic thanks both to shifting demographics and changing views on social issues. So we have quite simply a race between demographic and ideological change and flat-out voter suppression.

In the 1960s, thanks to the civil rights movement, the liberal wing of a still moderate Republican Party, and Lyndon Johnson's legendary arm-twisting, the great civil rights acts of 1964, 1965 and 1968 passed Congress with a lot of Republican support. It was the Democrats who were split between northern progressives and diehard segregationist Dixiecrats. Today, however, the obstructionists and vote suppressors are all Republicans. Ultimately, this will not be lost on a changing electorate. The forces of anti-democracy have won this round, but if the progressive movement gets itself organized, this victory for Republicans will be Pyrrhic - From Robert Kuttner's new book is Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior Fellow at Demos.

"THE OIL IN NIGERIA IS A NATIONAL CURSE SINCE ITS DISCOVERY"

The oil wealth in Nigeria is the primary breeding ground for the massive official corruption and the mammoth mismanagement of her state resources since it was discovered in commercial quantity in the 1960s. Nigeria as a nation keeps borrowing money year in and year out for many decades now to survive from the World Bank, IMF, Paris Club, London Club and African Development Bank (ADP) despite her international status as the world's sixth largest producer and exporter of oil as well as her over four decades of the daily production of this black gold.

The oil as one of the naturally occurring minerals on earth can be a source of blessing and prosperity or a curse to any nation where it is found. It all depends on the way the wealth from that oil is managed. In the case of Nigeria, It is a curse so far. Nigeria as a nation and her 160 million citizens have nothing today in 2013 to show physically for this huge oil wealth. Nigeria has made about $700 billion to date from this oil, about $400 billion of this oil wealth had been stolen by Nigerian rogue leaders and public officials according to the World Bank. Nigeria as an oil-rich nation has being borrowing money to survive from the western financial institutions in the midst of this oil wealth to date. 

The price of one gallon of petrol in Nigeria is the one of the highest in the whole world. The minimum wage of $110 per month is one of the lowest in the world.  The unemployment rate of 30% is one of the highest in the world today in 2013. The salaries and allowances that are paid to Nigerian public elected officials are the highest in the world. The Nigeria's highly corrupt public officials have used this oil wealth to curse Nigeria as a nation in particular and her citizens in general with massive poverty, unemployment, retrogression, misery and hopelessness.