The NDP has hit the nail on the head with this simple translation of outrageous spending on stupid projects like the F-35s and bottomless prison budgets.
At least one party is trying to keep the Cons honest.
Perhaps ALL Canadians won’t be so ignorant when the next election comes around.
Author’s Note: The following is Chapter 67 of the my online book “Excited Delirium”. Please post comments. Please tell your friends about this story. If you’ve missed a chapter, please click here for Chapter 1 (Prelude) or here for the full index.
It was late in the evening, Beijing time, when the first murmurs of life started to show in what was once a great city.
Before the Olympics were set to start in August, the estimated population was 17 million, but that official number barely accounted for the 2-4 million people that inhabited the hutong, or mazes of alleyways, that surrounded the city. That number was, thankfully, depleted significantly due a government edict that “encouraged” people to leave for holidays and to rent properties to incoming tourists and sports enthusiasts. That, and the actual brutal program of shoving a vast majority of unwanted people out of the city so that it would be clean and presentable for the onslaught of the visitors.
These guesses and figures are important, because to this day, there is still a significant amount of disagreement concerning the number of people that were killed in the Great ’08 and most now acknowledge that we will never know how many people paid with their lives for the ambitions of a select few in North America.
Final official statements were that more than two million either died or were classified as missing (and never found) during and after the Quake. The majority of these people were unsuspecting tourists.
In the past, China had kept the door shut on any interference from international bodies when disaster struck, be it natural or man-made, and in the hours and days that followed, the response was no different, but for reasons that many would not have expected.
The largest government in the world resides in Beijing where the President of the People’s Republic of China (PROC) chairs the National People’s Congress, a party that consists of nearly 3,000 elected seats. These elected officials are supported by tens of thousands of bureaucrats. Few survived the Great ’08 as few were prepared for the fierceness of this seemingly natural attack on their nation. They were preparing to show the world how great China was and they paid with their lives as others sought to bring about a cataclysmic shock.
The original plan for Garamond, Hadlock and a long line of others that wanted China wiped from the map was to marginalize its government. Without an official government, China would wander and fail to respond to desperate pleas from the international community as people arrived at their doors with open hands and buckets of cash.
Most officials of China were now crushed under a tomb of angry steel fingers that squeezed the life out of them when the “Bird’s Nest” – the official Olympic Ceremonies Stadium built specifically for the Olympics – collapsed after the 9.8 Richter scale earthquake and smaller, yet still significant, ripples shocked through the city. The building was crushed as easily as a collection of toy cars get thrown when a child shakes out a small rug.
A headless state, regardless of where it’s located, results in two things: the loss of a lot of blood and the appearance of heroes who try to squelch the pandemonium.
If there was sufficient leadership and guidance, particularly with the intent of digging into the rubble and pulling out a satisfactory status quo, the crisis in China would not have drawn as much attention as it did.
Problems would have been solved, people might have been saved and countless millions might still be with us. Or so we in the West were lead to believe as out politicians descended on the state and began seeking ways to interject private companies and public charities on the will of the Chinese.
By Monday morning, reps from all of the divisions of the OMNINet, along with many other companies, sat in emergency boats and container ships in the Bay of Bo Hai, which is the closest body of water near Beijing. They sat in media rooms and press galleries around the world, waiting to press the ‘enter’ button that would flood the market with stories about how evil the Chinese Empire is and how it needs to be changed. They sat in the offices of Congressmen, EU officials and in Asian foreign affairs departments, patiently waiting for the command to proceed with plans.
All the eager personnel needed to begin their commercial and mission-like invasion of the unsuspecting and living inhabitants was the nod from OMNINet management.
For those people who were there, none will ever forget the events that transpired within just 72 hours of the worst disaster in modern history.
[Author’s Note: I conceived of this plot component in 2006 and wrote most of these chapters into the story of ‘Excited Delirium’ during the course of 2007. I was stunned like the rest of the world when a tragic earthquake struck the province of Sichuan on May 12, 2008. Please believe me that I do not want to ‘profit’ from the suffering that the hundreds of thousands in this quake experienced. I remind all readers that this is a work of fiction and that my goals are to speak to the symbolic reference that’s used in the numerology along with the viewpoint of one fictional cult concerning the fate of the Chinese.]
(Note: “Excited Delirium” is a work of fiction. Any person, place or thing depicted in this work of fiction is also a work of fiction. Any relation of these subjects or characters to real locations, people or things are an unintentional coincidence.)
Did you miss a chapter? If so, click here to see all chapters or click here to go to Excited Delirium: Chapter 1 (Prelude)
Excited Delirium by Liam Young is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License .
Based on a work at www.exciteddelirium.ca .
So, we’ve had more than a month to ruminate on the situation in London, Ontario where international machinery company Caterpillar battles it out against a few hundred unionized labourers at Electro-Motive Diesel.
Unfortunately, there’s not much that’s going to happen because all of our leadership is on the side of selling out to the international ‘who’s who’ of screw local workers and these people will have to accept half of what they used to just to put food on the table.
With this in mind, I have a suggestion: 50% days, starting in London, taken nationally.
We create a bunch of pins, bumper stickers, shirts, etc that declare that we – citizens of this community – are fine with accepting 50% off our wages and salaries, but we’ll also demand 50% off other costs of living, including some of the following:
And … to top it all off, the City of London should embark on a ’50% off profits’ campaign, where any company not based in London will also face a 100% increase in property taxes to reflect the reductions demanded by its citizens.
It’s the only way folks: since the Kevin O’Leary MBA-types out there are telling us it has to be this way and we have to take it or leave it, we need to fulfill the second part of the equation.
C’mon people: even organizers of the planning sessions in Davos agree that ‘capitalism, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us,’ and yet Stephen Harper stands on a stage and declares war against the evil pensioners.
I’m sorry, but this is shameful. He can’t stand on Canadian soil and make such a declaration and he’s still pretending that he’s done something special with the Canadian economy.
What’s his track record?
And now … the war on pensioners.
If you’re a Conservative, can you really be proud of this? Do you enjoy the idea of pulling the plug on your parents?
Good luck Boomers. Enjoy your Alpo after all the contributions you’ve made to Canada.
I hope you think twice before you choose Conservatives and pocket-book politics if we ever get a chance to go to the polls again.
In most media circles, the title ‘The Future of Labour in Canada’ is almost always asked as a question and not as a statement: ‘what’s the future of labour in Canada?’
While I’m not a labour expert, I’m more optimistic and I don’t see it as a question. It’s an opportunity.
It won’t take Harper and the rest of the country’s neo-cons to destroy every facet of organized labour in this country and we’ll all be poorer as a result.
Weekend work, no benefits, rental housing instead of ownership are just a few simple examples of what an economy without basic rights to earn just a little bit more holds for all of us if we don’t start to take action in this country.
For the record, I’m not a unionist, but every day, I enjoy the contributions that folks on the line have made over time towards my lifestyle and I do try – in my own little way – to thank them whenever I can.
This poll on rabble.ca asking what labourers should do provoked this blog entry. Feel free to answer the poll yourself, but my preference is this suggestion: occupy the plant.
While I know it’s not a realistic solution, we have to remind ourselves that Canadians have invested in this plant, the City of London has made commitments towards it and by definition (admittedly, a thin one) and one could argue that we own that plant. It’s ours, we should occupy it and we should kick Caterpillar out of this country.
Again, it’s very unlikely that this will happen. Our government, like or not, doesn’t support this and would sooner send in riot police to protect the plant before acting as moderator to a potentially awful situation for the City of London.
It speaks to a bigger consideration when it comes to the future of labour in Canada.
Historically, most labour organizations have made significant advances when it comes to their own personal gains, but we’re about to witness the evolution – forced for sure – of Canada’s labour movement.
First, take the idea of a union out of the equation. For now.
All of us need to ask ourselves what options exist for Canadians to make a better living, assuming for a moment, that unions don’t exist.
In a classic capitalist scenario, there’s stuff like basic wage rates, benefits and even stock options for a lucky few, but when we’re talking about people working for massive international organizations like Costco or WalMart, those examples just become ridiculous. There’s no way ‘Joe 6-pack’ or ‘Sally Single Mom’ will ever have any leverage over these kinds of institutions.
Second, cut the big companies out. No, not in a violent, vendictive kind of way.
We need to decide that it’s time to shift our economic fortunes towards people that matter and the only way we’re going to do this is if we truly understand who’s local and who’s not. We have to turn our back on the bigger forces of globalization and find ways to enjoy and support the undercurrents.
Third, all of us need to consider and pursue a different business model: the co-op.
2012 will be the ‘Year of Austerity’ brought to us by the likes of Rob Ford and Stephen Harper, but they’ll ‘discover’ that there is no ‘gravy train’ and will have to make draconian cuts once they’ve pretended they’ve lifted a few rocks called ‘efficiencies’. The resulting insults to all Canadians who have relinquished control to these liars will hopefully incite some response, but that response will be weak and will not have the impact needed to alert Canadians that our standard of living is about to drop down a deep shit hole.
2012 is also the International Year of the Co-op. For those who haven’t heard of this business structure, a co-op is essentially a worker owned, typically local organization that earns and keeps revenue locally.
It is jointly owned and democratically controlled.
And co-ops offer the only hope for Canada’s labour movement.
There’s no choice. The age of animosity must come to an end and the age of ownership must begin. Labour has no choice but to adapt.
Finally, the voice of labour – the NDP – must adapt as well. The fortunes of the NDP will quickly dry up when Harper and Ford and others kill unions. Relying on a dwindling base is foolhardy, at best. Becoming a central force behind the growth of co-ops in Canada will ensure longevity and loyalty from those who’s fortunes rely on strong, local economies.
The NDP could add co-ops in a productive way to their platform:
I’m sure there are lots more options. We just have to work together.
Is this an admission of the failure of the world’s economic intellectual ‘powerhouses’ to develop a real and functional economic system that doesn’t pit man against man, man against nature, and so on?
Pundit George Soros has already called it and you can now consider yourself warned:
Socialism, then?
Fascism, more likely.
This image is a fantastic representation of the rapid array of mergers and financial manipulation that took place in the 20+ years preceding the whole ‘too big to fail’ ‘financial crisis’ that occurred in 2008.
People: be wary of Conservative talk about how ‘they’ prevented a financial meltdown because they probably would have let it happen here if they were in charge (I know … the PCs were in charge in the early 90s, but they were progressive).
For most of the world, this is all old news, but I have to vent about this issue.
Electro-Motive, the locomotive manufacturing company that’s owned by Caterpillar Inc., gave a shocking update to 500+ employees at the beginning of 2012 by telling them they had to accept less than half their original pay or the plant will be closed.
Caterpillar’s move devalues us all.
When these guys were making $30 an hour, I could charge a similar rate for my time. Now that they’re being forced to accept about half that, that has a negative impact on my billing rate.
Should I charge clients $25 per hour? $20? $15?
How low are we supposed to go?
This is a kick in the junk for all Canadians.
Admittedly, one of the greatest challenges this country (and others) faces is the resistance of unions to change. How many accept stock option plans or direct local ownership? How many engage in co-op-type models instead of worker / employer models that are cast in the beginning of the 20th century as opposed to the 21st?
What are unions doing to respond to these kind of actions locally and globally?
And what actions are our governments taking when they forked out millions to Caterpillar Inc. to set up shop in London, Ontario? What did they do to encourage ownership at the local level? Why didn’t they anticipate companies coming in, stealing our money and locking out local citizens?
What’s their plan for stability or are our politicians only good at throwing our money around for foreign corporations?
Last question: when so much went into this plant in terms of public investment, why are not considering Electro-Motive to be public property? If we spent the money to get the plant here, then part of that plant is ours and belongs to the people of Canada. It probably wouldn’t be easy, but we should re-tool the facility and convert it to making all kinds of train-related vehicles (trains, subway cars, trams, light rail, high-speed transit, etc).
To be honest, I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I know this: more people should be asking them.
I’ll be there. Join me.
Plutocracy = rule by the elite.
From ‘the Rothschild Model’ to the ‘Rise of Corporations’ as methods by which we are all fueling perpetual war.
This is 26 minutes well spent.
Of course, not all of it should be taken as gospel, but we need to understand his last comments as they relate to the ‘market’. There is a supra-national group of organizations that are not subject to any democratic input.
I also like the solution: don’t fight the beast. Stop feeding it.
The essence of the article addresses America’s expansion around the world and extension of hegemonic corporate powers universally.
It explores the deceit that’s being used to fool us into believing that a revolution is happening worldwide, while it also exposes the abyssmal coverage of the #occupy movement that occurred in North America and elsewhere.
Go ahead. Click through, print off and grab a coffee and enjoy some truth for the holidays!