John Cassaday is the president, the chief executive officer, and a member of the board of directors, of Corus Entertainment. This company has the most radio listeners in Canada, and also in Vancouver, with their huge radio station, CKNW AM 980. I had a chance to meet Cassaday some years ago when he was president of CTV, the huge television network. I was the driver of his limousine when he spent an evening tooling around Vancouver for some corporate celebration or another. He tipped well enough. When the wonderful, universal, free, effective, and efficient public Canadian health system finally succumbs to the pressures of corporate capitalism and its voracious appetite for all things good, wholesome, and public, it is at his door we may lay a significant portion of the blame.

The False Creek Surgical Centre, currently engaged in an orchestrated and well-planned assault on the Canadian public health system for the purposes of rendering it vulnerable for US-based corporate takeover, puchases advertising on prominent shows broadcast on CKNW. These advertisements extoll the virtures of cue-jumping for better, faster medical attention for emergencies, using one’s relatively higher wealth than what is found in the pockets of the rest of Vancouverites warehoused in the public Emergency waiting rooms.

The advertising, like the marketing of the False Creek Surgical Centre, the architecture of it, the financing behind it, and the health care professionals staffing it, are slick, good, and irresistable. Like the General Motors ads for private cars placed on the back of public transit buses extolling the virtures of contributing more to greenhouse gasses by slagging those who choose the inconvenience of a bus for the good of their fellow man, hitting at public systems is always easy. Companies like General Motors and the False Creek Surgical Centre contibute nothing to the public good; they are freeloaders who are parasites on public investments, and of course it’s profitable, and of course it’s easy. There is seldom a penalty anymore for this level of anti-social behavior: we have laws against mobs burning down corporate headquarters, ever since the unfairly-maligned Luddites burned down the houses of the owners of the weaving machines (which they did far more than attacking the actual machines, interestingly).

To that list, so long as they choose to lend their good corporate name by dint of accepting the money and the advertising copy of False Creek Surgical Centre, we can add Corus and it’s radio station CKNW. And it is President and CEO John Cassaday who answers to the court of public opinion for the actions of this company. There is no law preventing any broadcaster from rejecting any ad for any reason. If John Cassaday believes in the Canadian public health system, he should instruct Corus to phone CKNW and order the ads from False Creek Surgical Centre canceled. And he should do it because those ads are bad for Canada. The company is not so hard up they can’t do without the proceeds of this one advertiser.

The Canadian Childrens’ Hospital of Palestine?

An East Vancouver man is hoping to make a difference in the Middle East. Sam al-Jondi, a refugee immigrant to Canada from Palestine, is offering to donate one acre of land he owns three miles south of Hebron in the West Bank, for the creation of a hospital for children.

Al-Jondi envisions a school financed by the Canadian government built on his donated land to be called “The Canadian Childrens’ Hospital of Palestine.” Al-Jondi already has a Vancouver developer offering to build the hospital, and awaits only the Canadian government response to the idea.

Those wishing to support al-Jondi and who would like to get involved with efforts to prompt the Canadian government to accept his generous offer, should contact this newspaper at kpotvin@republic-news.org, or at 604-218-4952

Bilderberger lacking real meat

Within 24 hours of his surprise victory at the Liberal leadership convention in Montreal, the Internet was crackling with old news about Stephane Dion’s attendance at a Bilderberger meeting in Scotland in 1998.

The Bilderberger Group, according to various attendees, is an informal gathering of world leaders to discuss problems in a forum well away from the distractions of constituents and the media.

For its detractors, Bilderberger is code for New World Order, and the meetings are highly secretive negotiations among world dominators carving up the planet and taking it over in every sense of the word.

But one thing the conspiracy-minded don’t address is how the Bilderberger Group list of annual attendees doesn’t reflect very much real power in the world. The list typically has no names from the highest pantheons of business and government in new power-houses China and India, for example. What group can plausibly be said to be world-dominating that doesn’t include Li Ka-Shing? A few years ago, Conrad Black was famously held up as the shining example of the kind of untouchable ultra-powerful men who gather at Bilderberger Group meetings to plot their final take-over of the world. A short time later, a very short time later, Black was photographed by security cameras shuffling his own boxes out of his office and into his car, has been brought before the courts on several serious charges for financial crimes, and has been parted from most if not all of his wealth, while no one, not a single friend from Bilderberger or anywhere else in the world, has uttered a peep in his defence. Nor has anyone offered a dime to help him with his legal troubles, so far as The Republic knows. Where is all that power now? Did it ever really exist?

The Bilderberger myth has had a good long run. It’s time to let it go.

Flying blind at the helm of the free world

The rapid disintegration of US policy in Iraq is a marvel of the modern world. Administration officials are now openly admitting they are canvassing far and wide for any ideas, any at all, that might help the US military situation in Iraq. Stephen Hadley, White House spokesperson, earlier this week admitted his boss is looking over “a laundry list” of ideas on Iraq left behind by now-parted author of war crimes there, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. James Baker, one-time secretary of state for the current president’s father two decades ago, has delivered to the White House results of a study on new ideas about what to do in Iraq. The study found none. New Secretary of Defense Gates also said there are no new ideas on Iraq. US columnist Maureen Dowd highlighted this week all the officials who have recently admitted to having no clue what to do. And a week after Democrats regained control of the House and Senate in mid-term elections, the president himself, George Bush, openly declared his administration was “all ears” on any new ideas incoming legislators might have on what to do in Iraq. Even the New York Times got into it. A headline last week read, “Amid hints Bush may change policy, clues that he won’t.”

It is all so unseemly and shameful, and to see this kind of scrambling out in the open is extremely worrisome. It’s one thing to have no clue what to do in a tight situation; it speaks of a completely collapsed position when people give up trying to hide their desperation and openly beg for new ideas, any new ideas at all.

It recalls vice president Dick Cheney’s infamous quip about “deadenders” in Iraq “desperate” now that they are in “their last throes.” Clearly it is the administration of George Bush that is at its deadend, and certainly it is they who appear desperate, and the US military that looks like it’s in its last throes. Meanwhile, soldiers the US dispatched to Iraq still shoot, bomb, and capture Iraqis amidst a civil war they themselves caused.

In just one week, authoritative news sources, quoting high-placed officials, offered plans ranging from tripling the number of US soldiers in Iraq to cutting the number to a third of what they are, from moving all US soldiers out of cities and to desert posts and border stations, to moving all US soldiers into downtown Baghdad, from involving neighbours Iran and Syria in peace talks, to laying waste with nuclear weapons to Iran’s nuclear facilities, and wiping out Syria at the same time.

And this whole chicken-without-its-head routine took place during a time when no major events were occurring. What would the leaders of the free world look and sound like if something major should go off, or if US forces fell under truly organized and sustained attack in Iraq, Afghanistan (remember that war?) or elsewhere? It’s one thing to find the cockpit taken over by a band of crazy guys. It’s another thing altogether to find nobody in the cockpit at all.

Don’t talk

Socialist candidate for French president Segolene Royal is being harshly attacked for miserably failing her first real test at international diplomacy. Her crime? She met with members of Hezbollah on a fact-finding mission to Lebanon, where she wished to put into action her ideas for “participatory dialogue.” Apparently, critics like London’s Daily Telegraph, and the Vancouver Sun editors who chose to reprint it’s article about Royal, feel that dialogue in the Middle East should not include all major players in the Middle East. A spokesperson for her right-wing opponent in France, Nicolas Sarkozy, claimed Royal should not have talked with Hezbollah officials because it was Hezbollah that provoked and led last summer’s war waged by Israel in Lebanon—a war loosely named, as it amounted to the killing of 1,100 Lebanese civilians, and about 100 Israeli soldiers and civilians. It’s surely a record for fastest historical revisionism. For the sake of France and the world, even at the risk of semantic contradiction, The Republic endorses Royal.

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