Excited Delirium

Stories about Excited Delirium, the Shock Economy and a little fiction here and there.

MayDay 2011: Harper Lies About the NDP, Prices and Deficits

Stephen Harper has a Master’s in Economics, but he doesn’t seem to understand the fundamentals.  Once again, we hear him spreading nonsense and lies about the NDP and Liberal platforms.

As a reminder, Steve, here are the basics:  when you have a government that is committed to competition as opposed to a corporate driven monopolistic theocracy, you get price competition as well.  Prices go DOWN.

When you’re a corporate stooge and you’re doing what the media conglomerates, oil companies and food chains want you to do, prices go UP.

Competition is what the NDP would certainly bring and it’s likely what the Greens and Liberals would bring as well on Monday.

The only prices that will likely rise are those of gas, but the whole point of carbon taxation is to discourage wasteful things.  I know we all drive, but we’re going to have to take responsibility for what we’re doing and stop passing the buck to future generations, both in terms of lack of resources, but also in terms of environment disaster.

When it comes to the deficit, it’s easy to speculate that the NDP are not in the pockets of the world’s largest bankers.  Therefore, their primary objective would be – and always has been – deficit reduction.  We’ve seen that the NDP outranks all other political stripes when it comes to budget management and we’d likely see the same continue with a coalition lead by Jack Layton and the NDP.  Research acknowledgement to Buckdog.

balanced_budgets

Finally, good financial management takes the burden off borrowing costs, lowering the interest that you have to pay to the world’s biggest lenders and financiers.  As a result, the overall real cost of borrowing drops, lowering the cost to all Canadians of carrying any debt, if any.

I hate to take you back to your school days, Stephen Harper, but once again you’re lying about the other parties in order to deflect from your own bad management.  Changing the rules for Income Trusts, benefits for only the rich, driving up the cost of EI for small employers (effectively reducing new hires) and not addressing the lack of competition in this country are just a few examples.

It’s time for Canada to FIRE YOU.

MayDay 2011: Alice Klein of NOW Toronto Encourages Us to Shake Off Cliches

Alice Klein wrote a piece in NOW Toronto this past week encouraging all of us to accept the fact that in this election, the stakes are extremely high and that the game has definitely changed.

She reminds us that it’s not about voting your passion, but voting for that party that will unseat the Conservative government and push them out of as many ridings as possible.

She’s behind Project Democracy, but there are other projects as well (copied from the Project Democracy site):

  • Avaaz The campaigning community bringing people-powered politics to decision-making worldwide
  • Lead Now Brings generations of Canadians together to take action for our future and hold politicians accountable.
  • Swing 33 Donate strategically in 33 ridings to defeat Harper.
  • Pair Vote – Vote Swapping Support your preferred party while also stopping Harper
  • Catch 22 Campaign A grassroots effort to help defeat the Conservative government in 22 key ridings.
  • The Environment is my Voting Issue Facebook Group An action-oriented Facebook group aimed at holding politicians accountable for their votes on environment issues.
  • Department of Culture A community of Canadian artists, arts professionals and cultural workers concerned about ensuring the social and cultural health and prosperity of our nation in the face of a Federal Government that is aggressively undermining Canadian values.
  • Fair Vote Canada – On August 1, 2000, a group of concerned citizens formed Fair Vote Canada (FVC) with the aim of building a nationwide campaign for voting system reform. We envisioned FVC as a multi-partisan, citizen-based campaign bringing together people from all parts of the country, all walks of life and all points on the political spectrum. Today FVC has members in all provinces and approximately 20 local and regional chapters.

Project Democracy is exciting because it focuses on helping voters get up to date polling data related to their riding.  In many ‘strategic voting’ ridings, the past favours the Liberals, but since the Liberals are sliding in the polls, should we really be electing someone from the past or someone from the future?  I’ve signed up for their email to get riding updates, so I’ll post more information as it comes to my in-basket.

Finally, I can’t repeat this often enough:  you can contact pretty much any riding and help them with calls, even if you’re not from that area.  Human voices are substantially more valuable to campaigners as opposed to those awful ‘robo-calls’ and they remind voters that this is an election about the future of all people in Canada.  Of course, consider your riding and the ridings that are immediately around you as opposed to those that are across the continent!

MayDay 2011: 22% Control Our Fate

In 2008, only 22% of eligible votes – roughly 5.1 million – voted for the Conservatives.

Total eligible voters in Canada in 2008:  22.9 million.  Of that number, here’s how the vote worked out:

  • Conservative votes:  5.1 million (22%) – by the way, NOT a majority of voters
  • Liberals:  3.6 million (16%)
  • NDP:  2.5 million (11%)
  • Bloc:  1.3 million (6%)
  • Green:  933,600 (4%)
  • Other:  157,000 (1%)
  • Absent:  9.3 million (41%)

How many of you know at least a dozen or so of the 5.1 million that voted for the Conservatives?  It doesn’t matter.  If you know any at all, it’s important that we clearly establish just how crooked the Stephen Harper government was and will continue to be if your friends and family members vote for the Conservatives again.

If they want a small-c conservative option, there are many.  Please refer to this post for details.

MayDay 2011: At Least Someone Will Make Money Off The Tar Sands

The EU announced earlier this week that it will begin to price Canadian oil from the Tar Sands ‘differently’ than other energy products and sources.

In effect, the EU is putting a tariff on our oil since we’re not willing to control and take responsibility for this issue ourselves.

This is great news for the EU though:  they’ll be making billions off our oil.

And we don’t under a Conservative regime.

What an awesome plan!  What’s next?  Letting someone sell our water for a profit?

Project Censored Top 25 List of 2010

I would add unprecedented G20 arrests in Canada as one of the biggest stories.

That said, here are the 25 stories from Project Censored:



In Guantánamo, the notorious but seldom-discussed thug squad, officially known as the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF), deployed by the US military remains very much active. Inside the walls of Guantánamo, the prisoners know the squad as the Extreme Repression Force. In reality, IRF is an extrajudicial terror squad, the existence of which has been documented [...]



A little more than a year before he was fired on June 23, 2010, for making potentially insubordinate remarks in a Rolling Stone profile, General Stanley McChrystal was appointed by President Barack Obama as commander in charge of the war in Afghanistan. He had been formerly in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) [...]



The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has become history’s first global army. Never before have soldiers from so many states served in the same war theater, much less the same country. At the eighth anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan, the world is witness to a twenty-first-century armed conflict waged by the largest [...]



India’s 1.2 billion citizens are to be issued biometric identification cards. The cards will hold the person’s name, age, and birth date, as well as fingerprints or iris scans, though no caste or religious identification. Within the next five years a giant computer will hold the personal details of at least 600 million citizens, making [...]



Speaking in advance of the climate summit in Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the United Nation’s leading climate scientist, warned that Western society must enact radical changes and reform measures if it is to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told the Observer that Western society [...]



Charter schools continue to stratify students by race, class, and sometimes language, and are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the country. Charter schools are often marketed as incubators of educational innovation, and they form a key feature of the Obama administration’s school reform agenda. [...]



On April 24, 2009, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner hosted meetings with finance ministers from the world’s top economies to discuss increased oversight of the global financial system in the wake of the meltdown. The meetings preceded semi-annual gatherings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in Washington, DC. The April G20 meeting [...]



Chevron’s 2008 annual report to its shareholders is a glossy celebration heralding the company’s most profitable year in its history. Profits of $24 billion catapulted Chevron past General Electric to become the second most profitable corporation in the United States. The oil company’s 2007 revenues were larger than the gross domestic product (GDP) of 150 [...]



Nanotech Particles Pose Serious DNA Risks to Humans and the Environment Personal products you may use daily and think are harmless—cosmetics, suntan lotion, socks, and sports clothes—may all contain atom-sized nanotech particles, some of which have been shown to sicken and kill workers in plants using nanotechnology. Known human health risks include severe and permanent [...]



In October 2009, under great pressure from the United States, the government of Spain decided to limit its own jurisdiction in cases of genocide and crimes against humanity, thus closing one of the last windows of accountability for the most serious crimes committed by the most powerful nations on Earth. Under international law, such crimes [...]

Archive for the Category ‘Top 25 of 2011’


Around midnight on December 2, 1984, the citizens of Bhopal, India, a city of over 500,000 people in central India, were poisoned by approximately forty tons of toxic gases pouring into the night air from a largely abandoned chemical insecticide plant owned by the US-owned Union Carbide Corporation (UCC). The long-predicted gas leak at UCC [...]



Several contentious issues still plague the US government and their version of the events of September 11, 2001. Those in political power along with media elites would like to see the ongoing grassroots debates surrounding unanswered 9/11 questions and discrepancies disappear, despite the mountains of evidence that suggest that American citizens were told little about [...]



President Obama’s decision to increase military spending this year and in the future will result in the greatest administrative military spending since World War II. This decision is being made in spite of continued evidence of extreme waste, fraud, abuse, and corporate welfare in the military budget. At the same time, spending on “non-security” domestic [...]



Cuba was the first to come into Haiti with medical aid when the January 12, 2010, earthquake struck. Among the many donor nations, Cuba and its medical teams have played a major role in treating Haiti’s earthquake victims. Public health experts say the Cubans were the first to set up medical facilities among the debris [...]



The H1N1 virus has spawned widespread panic and fear throughout the world. However, upon closer examination, many of the claims made by the World Health Organization (WHO) seem to be based on weak and incomplete data. The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has created and used data to grossly exaggerate the need [...]



In a continuous flow of money, American tax dollars end up paying members of the Taliban and funding a volatile environment in Afghanistan. Private contractors pay insurgents with the hope of attaining the very safety they are contracted to provide. Concurrently, US soldiers pay at checkpoints run by suspected insurgents in order to get safe [...]



The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) has released a study indicating that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories. The HSRC commissioned an international team of scholars and practitioners of international public law from South Africa, the United Kingdom, Israel, and the West Bank to conduct the [...]



On World Environment Day, June 5, 2009, Peruvian Amazon Indians were massacred by the government of Alán García in the latest chapter of a long war to take over common lands—a war unleashed by the signing of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Peru and the United States. Three MI-17 helicopters took off from the [...]



Resource exploitation in Africa is not new, but the scale of agricultural “land grabbing” in African nations is unprecedented, becoming the new colonization of the twenty-first century. State violence against Kenyan indigenous pastoralists and Nigerian civilians in oil-rich regions has heightened, leaving thousands dead as the military burns whole communities to the ground and police [...]



Despite national legislative health reform, health care in the US will remain dismal for many Americans, resulting in continuing deaths and personal tragedies. A recent Harvard research team estimates that 2,266 US military veterans died in 2008 due to lack of health insurance. The figure is more than fourteen times the number of deaths suffered [...]

Archive for the Category ‘Top 25 of 2011’


At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives inside and outside Pakistan. The Blackwater [...]



Agents of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are holding thousands of US residents in unlisted and unmarked subfield offices and deporting tens of thousands in secret court hearings. “If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” Those chilling words were spoken [...]



Following in the steps of its predecessor, the Obama administration is expanding mass government surveillance of personal electronic communications. This surveillance, which includes the monitoring of the Internet as well as private (nongovernmental) computers, is proceeding with the proposal or passage of new laws granting government agencies increasingly wider latitude in their monitoring activities. At [...]



The US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported. In spite of the evidence, the environmental impact of the US military goes largely unaddressed by environmental organizations and was not the focus of any discussions or proposed restrictions at [...]



Nations have reached their limit in subsidizing the United States’ military adventures. During meetings in June 2009 in Yekaterinburg, Russia, world leaders such as China’s President Hu Jintao, Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev, and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation took the first formal step to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve [...]

What are yours?

Does (a Conservative) Canada Suck?

Answer:  hell, yes.

Maybe Canadians will finally get the message that Conservative politics are mean, nasty, dirty and cruel politics and that we deserve the embarrassment that we got today when Stephen Harper’s plea for a security council seat was denied by the UN.  (I know … as a technicality, the Cons withdrew to save face, but the reality is that we lost the bid).

Maybe we shouldn’t have been acting like petty dictators, both towards our own people or towards other countries.

Maybe we need an unbiased and non-religious approach with people like the Palestinians who are now facing genocide at the hands of Israeli greed.

Maybe we should get our heads out of our asses and start to try to make a difference again.

Maybe, just maybe, we should get back to our roots with the UN and support the f-in institution instead of try to destroy it.

Hopefully this is the tipping point.  Steve has failed the country and we need to remind him of that at every turn.

The rest of the world has told us that a Conservative Canada sucks.

Now Canadians need a chance to make the same decision.

No, wait.  We demand the right to vote these losers out of office.

Action Plan Infrastructure Inquiry Needed

We need to question the authenticity of Stephen Harper’s Canadian Economic Action Plan.

Last year, I suggested that it would translate to a $60 billion marketing plan for the Conservatives.

Many other publishers are starting to agree with this perspective:

To quote from one article:

Millions of dollars in taxpayer stimulus cash doled out by the Harper government was conditional upon project managers putting up federal promotional signs, The Canadian Press has learned.

What were the objectives of Canada’s Economic Action Plan?  Were they to generate long-term jobs with a healthy infrastructure for future generations or was it all about lining the pockets of conservative supporters and friends?

Or were key ridings showered with cash in order to shore up support for the Cons in the next election, as this article with the Globe suggest:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/quebec/key-tory-ridings-in-quebec-showered-in-stimulus-money-study/article1665981/

Did the Action Plan actually have objectives like the following:

  1. Clean water for all Canadians
  2. Top-notch digital infrastructure
  3. State-of-the-art hospitals or schools
  4. Advanced research facilities for new technologies

The central concern here is that Canadians are being fleeced by the Stephen Harper regime in exchange for loose diatribe about ‘economic recovery’.  Our tax dollars are financing billion-dollar boondoggles and we need an inquiry into the scope and effectiveness of this ‘action plan’.

We need a review of where the money has been spent, if it has been spent at all.

I’d like to see the following in a table of details related to the Canadian Economic Action Plan:

  • Project
  • Money Spent
  • Riding
  • MP Name
  • Party Affiliation
  • Category (identify 20+ categories like ‘Schools’, ‘Hospital’, Clean Water, Energy Infrastructure, etc
  • Employment (# of jobs created, total person-hours, average wage, job title, duration of project, etc)
  • Beneficiary (contractor hired, affiliation with MP, Conservatives, donations made in the past)

Only by thoroughly exploring the expenditures that took place across the country will we be able to determine the true economic impact of the ‘Action Plan’ and who benefitted from it.

A crowd-sourced listing would be the most ideal way to generate a full inventory of these projects and what their supposed impact was on the economy.  Only once we’re all able to see the waste in its bigger picture will we truly resent the waste that’s been thrust upon us.

The United Stale Economy

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:

Boomers-Cutting-back

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.

Germany to be Carbon-Free by 2050

Germany has always been known as a leader with wind and solar power collection – two of several options for renewable energies.

However, according to Germany’s Federal Environment Agency, there is a distinct possibility that Germany will have completely quit it’s reliance on carbon-based energy by the year 2050.

Here are some of details to consider:

  • “A complete conversion to renewable energy by 2050 is possible from a technical and ecological point of view,” Jochen Flasbarth, president of the Federal Environment Agency, told reporters earlier this week.
  • The transition would also create new jobs and increase exports of renewable energy technologies.
  • The country already employs some 300,000 in the renewable energy sector and is the world’s leader in installed photovoltaic capacity and second largest generator of wind power after the US.
  • Currently around 40% of Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions come from electricity generation, particularly coal-fired plants, but the Government has committed to cutting emissions 40% on 1990 levels by 2020 and 80-85% by 2050.
  • Meanwhile, the German authorities have finally agreed a two-step plan to reduce feed-in tariffs by 3% later this year.
  • The German Federal Network Agency says that 714 MW of solar capacity was installed in Q1 of this year, a ten-fold increase on last year. The change to the feed-in tariff is expected to calm the market but not lead to a collapse, according to media reports.

Going one step further, I started to browse the German Environment Agency web site and found that most of the articles are those that would make head-in-the-sand Conservatives and environment-deniers shriek:

  • “Germany met its Kyoto Protocol Climate Protection Obligations in 2008″
  • “Unecological subsidies cost 48 billion Euros in tax revenues every year”
  • “How to reduce Germany’s CO2 emissions by 40%”
  • “CO2 capture and storage is only an interim solution” (and not a real one, Steve)
  • “Climate protection fuels employment”

All of this goes to show that ‘necessity really IS the mother of invention’.  Germany’s not known for its natural energy resources – except for coal – so they’ve got to take care of themselves some other way.  And because Canada is sitting on the world’s biggest cess pool of crap some people call ‘oil’, we don’t bother investing in technology and energy supplies that might actually be sustainable.

Despite how distressing the situation is (and how much it makes me want to move to Germany), I can’t help but laugh at the image of Merkel and Harper in a literal wrestling match and exchanging fisticuffs every time they get together for a little $1.2 billion party.  But then, I suppose Merkel’s probably thinking ahead with ideas like “we’ll be selling these trolls everything they need over the next 50 years and we’ll pretty much own Canada”.

The Cost of Carbon: A History of Oil Spills

The Star had a feature on the weekend showing the history of oil spills around the world.  They took a slight more sinister approach by suggesting that these are oil spills we haven’t heard of.

Have we?

I have to admit, most were news to me.

However, by the time BP has finally got their act together, my guess is that the estimate for oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexicoil will be 200-250 million gallons, making it the second largest ever.