Excited Delirium

I picked up “The Armageddon Factor” by Marci McDonald several months ago, shortly after it hit the book racks.

For those who are interested in Canadian politics, this is a must read.

McDonald explores many ideas in this book and the central theme that I drew out of her meticulous work is the idea that Canada is being run by a very small group of nihilists and self-righteous Christian propaganda experts.

Besides that, I came to three conclusions as I put the book down:

1. It seems the Harper Conservatives could care less about legislation.
2. Progressives are fucked.
3. Canadians are as blind to Harper as the Jedi were to Palpatine / Darth Sidious.

It Seems The Harper Conservatives Could Care Less About Legislation

In reading this text and observing current events, I now see that Stephen Harper could care less about moving Canada in any direction when it comes to legislation.  Time and time again, the Conservatives have ruined their owned agenda and progress by proroguing government or timing actions so that it would be impossible to make them come to fruition before the end of a session.

All they really seem to want to do is maintain their hold on power while they pack little baby chirping Cons into the halls of federal offices, be they the halls of the Public Service, various commissions, the Senate, any level of judicial positions, all non-government organizations that are funded by the government and so on.

Even if a new progressive wave of political and media authorities get elected into office, the battles will last for decades as they do what they can to push Conservatives out of work and office.  It will prove to be a holy administrative terror that few will be able to erode.

To make matters worse, the media has not held the Conservatives to task on this mediocre legislative program, which means they’re either lazy or in cahoots.

Progressives Are Fucked

I’m sorry, but I have no other way to explain this nicely.

Another more polite way to suggest my opinion is to reflect on the fact that most progressives – by nature or definition of who they are and what they believe in, myself included – are not quite the ‘A-type’ when it comes to personality.

We don’t run newspaper chains, television stations or tight political campaigns.

We run on emotion, reaction and, in many cases, panic.

There is rarely a plan.  There is rarely a vision.  We fall for smokescreens and fail to see the big picture.

We need to learn from the lessons that Marci McDonald clearly spells out in the Armageddon Factor.

Case after case, she clearly identifies the driving interest, the tactics used to gain momentum and the key players involved and how they got things to the point of being some of the most influential organizations in Canada and the rest of North America.

Conservative ‘values’ are tied in to nearly every component of every day life that everyone (including progressives) is influenced by, including the media, judges, education, our communications infrastructure (you can’t have the Internet without selling out to Bell, Telus or Rogers), the military, foreign affairs, the UN and other institutions that affect our day-to-day activities.

Conservatives leverage the fragmentation that exists in every single progressive camp.  They belittle the bickering that goes on and on and on, while they push forward with single messages and memes that dazzle the general public.

If progressives are ever going to get anywhere in this country, we need to start a process of wearing down every politician in this country from the municipal level right up to the Senate.  We need a checklist and/or inventory of people that are available to cross-pollinate educational and investment opportunities.  We desperately need our own media that will tell the general population the truth about Canadian politics and the poison that Stephen Harper brings to the Hill.

Canadians Are Blind

Seriously.  While watching Star Wars III – the one Anakin becomes Darth Vader – the analogy seemed perfect.  For some reason, Canadians have completely blinded themselves to the reality that Stephen Harper and the Conservatives have only one thing in mind when it comes to Canada:  endless domination, despite their smaller numbers.  And that’s just the starting point.

As I’ve already suggested, most of the cause of this blindness is due to taking media messages at face value, but it’s also related to a very consistent and carefully crafted spin job that comes from the PMO every single day.

Apathy is Comfort – Action is Danger

How do we emerge from the mess that surrounds us?

Neither the Liberals nor the NDP have proven that they are capable of referring to a wider base of Canadian citizens to select their leader, nor do they effectively leverage today’s technology to develop a platform or array of positions that all Canadians want to support.

Our institutions have failed us as well and we need to build our own tools, again leveraging today’s technology.  It has to come from the ground up, preferably with our infrastructure.  If not, we’re just riding on the backs of people that will sting us to death when we’re not looking.  We have all kinds of online tools, like wikis, social tools and other platforms but even with aggregators like Progressive Bloggers, we still only seem to capture the hearts and ideas of the passionate and not the average citizen.

Since progressive-minded people represent the majority of Canada’s population, how do we create a tsunami wave of ideology that our politicians simply can’t ignore?

Avaaz.org has started a petition to encourage the support of Konrad von Finckenstein, head of the CRTC, to prevent ‘Fox News North’ (a subsidiary and entity managed by Quebecor Media Inc) from launching in Canada.

However, please also remember that an effective petition against Fox (and supporting the CRTC) should also include a boycott of Quebecor Media Inc, all subsidiaries and the companies that advertise on their sites.

Please spread the word that Canadians will not tolerate the abuse of media that QMI, Quebecor, Sun Papers, Canoe and other subsidiaries impose on us every day and that they will bury us with if Fox News North goes live in the coming months.

I figured it out.  Canada has its own version of a very uncool, very unpopular Austin Powers.  In fact, I need to correct myself:  we have a version of Dr. Evil (I wish I was good at doing image mockups, but I think you get where I’m going with this).

Stephen Harper has found a time machine and has dropped the entire nation of Canada in the 1950s.

You don’t believe me?

• The Cold War is still going on.  The evil Ruskies are everywhere.  (Is our PM really trying to pick a fight with Russia?  Really?  Does he think we’re all that stupid?  Don’t answer … we are.)
• Everyone is white and Canada belongs to ‘Europeans’.
• McCarthyism is in full swing.  Fear and reprisal are everywhere.  No one can be trusted.  Arrests of ‘terrorists’ are constant, ongoing and ubiquitous.  We will fill jails with those that oppose us.
• Roads and the auto industry are the only things worth saving in this country, but it’s too bad those damn unions are gumming things up.
• There is no “Internet”.  It’s just print and TV and our friends in those media universes will help us ’shape’ our messages to Canadians (just like our friend Goebbels did in the 30s and 40s!)
• We fold the map of time and our political landscape follows Dief the Chief and no one else.  The Liberal domination from the 1960s onwards never happened.
• Women are supposed to be bare-foot and pregnant in the kitchen (or publicly humiliated when they act up a bit).
• GOD is the only religion, dammit.  Everything else is magic and witchcraft (and should be punishable by death, a la Sun editorials).

In the progressive world and for most others, we know this isn’t true, but Stevie and his 15-20% of Canada’s population as minions are stuck in the 50s.

What can we do to move forward?

How do we end Canada’s pain?

Back in Feb 2009, I wrote ‘Why Can’t We Just Spend Our Way out of the Depression‘, knowing full well that the American and US economy was being supported by smoke and mirrors and little else.

At the core of this article was the rationale that we’re facing a seismic shock in spending, not because of what people’s attitudes are about the economy, but because of a totally different economic issue:  life-cycle planning.

Boomers have always influenced our economic fortunes or issues.  Bananas, oil shocks, market gyrations and soon, market collapse.

Nearly a year later, I followed up with this piece on the US housing crisis.

It finally seems like the mainstream is catching on to this idea.

Wall Street Journal:  Another Threat to the Economy: Boomers Cutting Back

This piece has an excellent chart in it:

For those brilliant no-minds that just dumped billions into the auto industry:  your (and ours) investment will likely be cut in half within the next couple of years because boomers have cut their demand in half.  This makes sense because we’re seeing the steep rise in empty nesters that don’t need two or three SUVs sitting in their lot.  Instead, they’re buying one convertible or Honda Accord (for those that lost their shirts on one of the many manias in the last 30 years).

Any recovery that we’re seeing with car companies will be short-lived.  GM will have to design a marketing strategy other than giving cars away.  Chrysler will have to end ‘employee’ pricing.

A lot of change will happen in the next 10 years and it won’t be pretty.  Pensions will go bust and pensioners will have to take up part-time work at dumps like Wal-Mart of Costco.

The notable increases are with health insurance and drugs.  These companies will likely be one of the only profitable sectors over the next decade, despite the cries of communism coming in the wake of Obama-care.

To pay for everything, all savings will be liquidated and converted to Viagra, Lipitor and a moderately decent nursing home.  Don’t be surprised if the best-selling horror stories are those related to retirement home abuse (or STDs).

US Is Bankrupt …

This one comes to us from Bloomberg.

The US is incapable of paying its bills and there’s suggestion that the situation will be worse than Greece within a few years.

Gerald Calente Video

Believe it or not, Gerald Calente is not the source of my predictions.  One of the people that captured some of these ideas best was David Foot, who wrote Boom Bust Echo a while ago.

Next Steps?

The US administrators will continue to try to bail out industry over the next decade.

Every time they do, they will face an economic wall.  Bailouts require that they print money, printed money = inflation, inflation = dollar deflation, falling dollar = rising commodity prices, rising commodity prices = economic collapse.

This cycle was best recently described by Jeremy Rifkin as an Economic Endgame.

What To Do?

Realistically, there are three things we can do:

1. Stop spending, particularly on stupid wastes like car companies, prisons and military;
2. Start taxing the rich and taxing consumption;
3. Start slashing what corporations can deduct from their taxes.

People like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are smart because they’re getting old and they saw it coming a while ago.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other efforts are great ways to say ‘I’ve made all of this money and I’m going to protect it before the government comes and takes it away’.

Fine … we’ll tax the charities too, especially the religious ones.

As people like me get older, we won’t have the luxury of avoiding the wealthiest in our effort to feed our parents and kids at the same time.

We’re going to lift every rock to find money and we’re going to start at the top.

Or … Dear Tony, Please Don’t Count Me In Your Numbers

There’s an insane level of noise happening with respect to the census and the Conservative plan to drop the mandatory aspect of the long-form.  There’s very little clarity.

As part of his defense, Tony Clement is suggesting that with the last census, several Canadians did not submit the long-form census on the grounds that they were concerned about their privacy.  This is only half true.

I am one of those Canadians, but allow me to explain myself.

I did not submit the long-form census because I was concerned about my privacy.  That’s a fabrication that’s being spread by the Conservatives because they don’t like statistics and the reality that they reveal (eg. lower crime rates or people dropping out of organized religion).

Unlike the Conservatives, I trust Statistics Canada with my personal information and also trust that it will be aggregated to show general trends and observations about our population, our needs as citizens and where investments should be made by our various levels of government, just to name a few ways in which we rely on this information.

That is a basic principle of statistics that I think Tony Clement and the rest of the Conservatives have failed miserably to understand:  statistics are about larger numbers, not individual details.  There are no privacy concerns if you trust the institution.

But let’s get to my personal choice to remain absent on the last census.  I refused to fill this document because the data is being stored and managed by a third-party called Lockheed-Martin.  Yes, that Lockheed-Martin.

In fact, in 2006, there was a substantial grassroots movement that tried to stop the Canadian government from outsourcing this critical data collection exercise to a company that manufactures weapons of mass destruction.  It was called CountMeOut and details can be found here.

What’s fascinating to me is that the Conservatives have successfully taken a public protest against the government and turned it into some kind of libertarian boogie monster pep rally that has all deep blue Conservatives getting their pitchforks blabbing about the ills of big government coming to take my family away.

What’s worse is that this campaign makes all protesters of the original long-form census hypocrites.

The point of all this: when Tony claims that thousands of Canadians are refusing to submit to the long-form census because they’re concerned about privacy, maybe he’d better check his stats.

Oh yeah … he doesn’t have any.  Or he soon won’t.

Welcome to Stephen Harper’s “Conada”, where lies are truth and truth is terror.

In the bulk of people, sites and organizations that have any suspicions about what’s going on in the world and who’s calling the shots, the ‘Bilderbergs’ almost always come up as the THEM that rule the planet.

The Bilderbergs have been notoriously secretive and have done their best over the last few decades to keep member names and meeting dates and times out of the public eye.

Mentioning the Bilderbergs would either get you the label of ’shit bat crazy’ or ‘cunning conspiracy theorist’.

Well, as it happens, the Bilderbergers now have a web site.

Excuse me while I go wrap the tinfoil a littler tighter.

This article reminded me of the conditions applied to Canadian Economic Action Plan programs:  no environmental review.

This will cost us all.

My hope is that sooner rather than later Canadians will have the ability to audit these programs, not just economically but also with respect to their impact on the environment.  And when we do, we’ll likely realize that Canada’s Economic (In)Action Plan will be much more costly than originally thought.

Stay tuned.

This …

Or this …

Would you believe that the Tar Sands in Alberta could pose a greater environmental risk than the drilling rigs off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico?

Certainly, if you have time to read this 96 page report from this Ceres-commissioned report authored by RiskMetrics Group.

A brief review of the document was provided on the Ceres website, including the following observations:

• Alberta’s oil sands are already the world’s largest energy project—with $200 billion in funds committed from the world’s leading oil producers, including BP, ExxonMobil and Shell.  However, these producers face numerous environmental, production and distribution challenges that will grow as the oil sands industry pushes to boost production amid tighter regulations and resource constraints
• Oil sands companies in Alberta are already producing 1.3 million barrels a day, and their goal is to triple production by 2030.
• Ceres president Mindy Lubber:  “The energy-and water-intensive nature of oil sands, combined with climate change regulations, permitting obstacles and other challenges, are a recipe for diminishing revenues and returns if not properly managed.”
• Investors have already filed shareholder resolutions on the oil sands topic with Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, BP and ConocoPhillips. The Shell resolution will be voted on at tomorrow’s annual corporate meeting in London.  ExxonMobil’s shareholder resolution is up for a vote on May 26.
• While just over half of U.S. oil comes from overseas countries like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, the fastest growing source is from two North American regions – the Gulf of Mexico and Canada’s vast oil sands region. Oil production from these two areas has grown to three million barrels a day in recent years, supplying more than 15 percent of total U.S. oil needs.
• Long-term risks from development in Canada’s oil sands region are arguably greater. Many of these risks stem from already-high financial costs and the environmental impacts of transforming highly viscous bitumen into synthetic crude oil – a process that requires vast amounts of energy and water.
• “Investors need to question whether this is a wise use of resources,” says Doug Cogan, a report co-author and director of climate risk management for RiskMetrics Group.  “The oil sands process takes natural gas—the cleanest-burning and lowest-carbon fossil fuel—to turn one of the dirtiest and highest-carbon fuels into a saleable product.  Large volumes of freshwater are also consumed in the process, and end up in toxic tailings ponds.  It’s like the Gulf of Mexico spill, but playing out in slow motion.  From a climate and ecological perspective, we’re really no better off.”
• “This report makes clear that oil sands companies must do more to analyze the far-reaching risks from current and future production in Alberta,” said Jack Ehnes, chief executive officer of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), the nation’s second largest public pension fund. “With nearly $1.9 billion invested in the equity securities of BP, Shell, Exxon and ConocoPhillips combined, we have quite of teachers’ money at stake here. We need to ensure these companies are properly recognizing and managing oil sand risks.”

Among the report’s key findings:

Shrinking profit margin: The costs of producing oil sands – already the world’s most expensive source of new oil -  are rising and will continue to do so due to the onset of carbon pricing, higher input commodity prices, and rising costs for water treatment and land reclamation. As a result, global oil prices will need to remain high – possibly approaching $100 per barrel – to ensure a competitive rate of return on $120 billion in planned expansion projects. Oil sand operators must also be mindful that if global oil prices get too high, between $120 and $150 a barrel, it will likely reduce global oil demand and shift markets in favor of alternative fuels.

Vulnerability to changes in U.S. Markets: Presently, the vast majority of of the 1.3 million barrels being produced every day flows to the United States. Long-term access to this market is jeopardized, however, by emerging low-carbon fuel standards in the U.S. that will require a lower carbon intensity in transportation fuels. These fuel standards, already adopted in California, will put carbon-intensive oil sands fuel at a distinct disadvantage because oil sands output will likely have to be mixed with next-generation biofuels that are not yet being produced on a commercial scale.

Other Distribution Obstacles: Transporting expanded oil sands production west to China and other Asian markets is another alternative. However, there is strong opposition to building pipelines to Canada’s West Coast from Aboriginal communities who have significant rights under the Canadian constitution.

Water and Other Resource Constraints: Oil sands production is highly water intensive, with up to four barrels of freshwater consumed for every barrel of oil produced from surface mining extraction. Water withdrawals from the Athabasca River watershed are already restricted during winter months to protect fish habitat. If oil sands production volume grows according to companies’ estimates, some oil sands mining operations could exceed their wintertime allowances as early as 2014, causing possible production interruptions. Climate change may also exacerbate this situation; glaciers feeding into the Athabasca River watershed are already shrinking.

Growing Land Reclamation Costs/Liability: After 40 years of production, no oil sand companies have yet fully reclaimed the extensive tailings ponds used for holding polluted wastewater. This is because the fine tailings in these ponds take decades to settle out. These tailing ponds, already covering an area the size of Washington D.C., pose risks of contaminating adjoining lands and water resources, and present health problems in downstream communities. Alberta’s Directive 74 requires oil sands miners to speed up remediation of existing ponds – an order that creates especially large liabilities for the industry’s legacy miners such as Suncor and Syncrude.

The report specifically recommends that oil sands producers:

• Review the lasting impact of their proposed development plans and pursue more pro-active, incremental strategies to manage environmental and social risks;
• Provide guidance for assumed oil, natural gas and carbon prices in future production forecasts.
• Do a better job of articulating to community groups and other stakeholders their strategies for land use planning, water management and carbon mitigation;
• Disclose information from these more detailed evaluations to investors;
• Develop stronger ties with the U.S. biofuels industry both for speeding up development of advanced biofuel capacity and sharing existing infrastructure, such as oil sands pipelines that already feed into the U.S. Midwest.

“All oil is getting dirtier and harder to produce,” said Bob Walker, vice president of sustainability at Northwest and Ethical Investment in Canada. “With Chinese investment and demand set to grow outside the U.S., oil sands production is likely to grow. Investors need to be aware of the environmental and social risks and engage oil sands companies to improve disclosure, operational performance and to make technological investments to reduce environmental and social impacts.”

“We recognize that oil companies will continue to invest in the oil sands,” continued Lubber, “but they shouldn’t do so blindly. Investors need assurances that the risks outlined in this report are being taken into account.  This includes the fact that carbon will be regulated, that water will be increasingly scarce, that tailings ponds need to be cleaned up, and that doing all this will be expensive. Companies need to build solutions in up front or they shouldn’t be building these projects at all.”

The full report is available at http://www.ceres.org/oilsandsreport and http://riskmetrics.com

About Ceres
Ceres is leading coalition of investors, environmental groups and other public interest groups working with companies to address sustainability challenges such as climate change. Ceres also directs the Investor Network on Climate Risk, a network of 90 institutional investors with $10 trillion of collective assets focused on the business impacts of climate change.

About RiskMetrics Group
RiskMetrics is a leading provider of risk management and corporate governance services.  Its ESG Analytics Group analyzes cutting edge issues like climate change, water and ecosystem services that support the global economy.

Tony Clement announced yesterday that Industry Canada and the Government of Canada would pursue fines against anyone caught tampering with gas pumps.

Unfortunately, this is a well-timed smoke-screen that is another attempt to get gullible Canucks to side with the most scandalous leadership on the planet.

I’m not a gas pricing expert, nor am I a logistics expert, but I have done a little reading about this.  The question is whether or not certain pumps clog or get impeded and then, in most cases, unintentionally give the consumer less than what was recorded.

On the surface, this is a very noble effort, but let’s pull it apart a little:

• The potential variations are likely to be a maximum of a percent of a percent of your overall spend on gas and you may even wind up getting more gas than was recorded
• The timing is perfect for the launch of the ’summer driving’ season (the time when most Canadians start their road trips and visits across the country)
• The timing is also perfect in that the Cons desperately need a ‘good story’ to deliver to the public, hopefully diverting our attention from the massive array of scandals that are strangling this government from doing anything but choke on its own filth
• This crusade is a lot like the Con’s general goal of being ‘tough on crime’.  It makes for great marketing, but little substance
• The actual effort will likely translate to an assault on small businesses and independent gas suppliers, most of whom do their best to keep gas prices competitive
• Nothing will be done to address the overall ridiculously high price of gas given the climb in the Canadian dollar

I’ll address the last comment:  when the Canadian dollar has been rising as it has, the price of everything else should be dropping.  Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen nearly a 50% increase in the value of our currency vis-a-vis the US dollar and yet we’ve seen little to no reduction in the cost of gas, books, vegetables, fruits and other things we import on a daily basis.

Canadians are being gouged and it’s time that Tony Clement and our other so-called leaders look at what I call ‘Price Parity’ issues with imports.

As I mentioned, gas is just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a massive portion of our disposable expenditure.  The high price of gas also has an impact on nearly ALL of our daily activities.

Of course, if pushed, I would also say that gas should be $5 per litre, but that’s more because we need to reduce our reliance on gas, but as long as we’re trying to find the cause of ‘high’ prices, let’s be sure that Tony’s tantrum doesn’t misdirect us from the true cause:  suppliers are gouging us.

In future blogs, I’ll address two things:

1. How to address our addiction to gas (and how to end it)
2. Price Parity Policies that will put more money in the hands of Canadians

I’m late in the game about critiquing the various shenanigans of Geurgis and Jaffer, but I’m noticing one important trend:  if you work for the CPC, be prepared to be thrown under a bus if you even remotely come close to f***ing up.

It’s a pretty ballsy thing to suggest and I would be the last person on the planet to actually defend the likes of Guergis or Jaffer, but look at the press releases that have come out in the last week or so:

• Rather than quietly accept a resignation, a major press release and whirly circus-like routine is launched, including a threat that there are ‘impending investigations’, simultaneously causing the Libs and Dippers to chase after said ’shiny object’ like a dog after a laughing squirrel.  Good luck, Helena with your next job hunt.  Try explaining the investigation that no one will launch!
• The release of expense reports related to a big whopping $1000 or so on ‘other expenses’ by Guergis, along with what I can only assume are officially sanctioned flights and trips made on behalf of Canada but charged to the public.  Are these people supposed to pay for flights out of pocket?
• Jaffer’s questionable business dealings and accusations that he was lobbying other ministers with his environmental business while in office.

BUT HOLD ON …

I heard Jim Prentice on the radio today say that he was approached by Jaffer A YEAR AGO with solicitations related to his business.  If it was such a big issue, and has instantly become such a big issue, why the hell wasn’t this reported A YEAR AGO?

Which opens up a bigger question:  if this wasn’t reported A YEAR AGO how do we know the entire caucus isn’t running around making other business deals behind the backs of Canadians?  What other conversations in the hallways happened A YEAR AGO (or more or recently) that we should bring to light? Are other MPs of the governing party working with businesses on the side pitching to their buddies for sweet, no-questions-asked contracts?

Is what we’re hearing just the tip of the iceberg?

Do actions, regardless of how questionable they were A YEAR AGO, only get publicized when you’re out to lampoon people that work for you and screwed up?

I’m not one to support the Liberals with their AdScam program, but isn’t this activity in the halls of Parliament just as disgusting?  Have I missed something here?  Have I misunderstood what’s supposed to be happening in the halls of Parliament?

How many scandals are enough, Canada?  How many?