Canadian PM Carnage sparks up bromance with Mafia Don

Somehow the bankers and the billionairs understand one another. You gotta respect Mark Carney for not getting swept away by the tidal wave of patriotism that overtook our fair land after the CBC and Globe & Mail, the conjoined arbiters of goodthink in Canada, declared that a lame joke about PM Fluffy as the governor of the 51st state was actually a threat to our sovereignty. All concerned are fully aware Canada’s sovereignty, such as it was, has been frittered away over the decades, to the point the entire world knows “Canada” is just an automatic vote with the USA anytime a United Nations vote count matters. That’s a very good reason for the USA to keep at least the appearance of having allies. All these “allies” are proof of the old adage; when you’ve got ‘em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. Oh look! The Free World (ie the nations whose nuts are firmly in Uncle Sam’s iron grip) is backing up the leader of the free world! I for one can not share the euphoria building around the Donald- Mark bromance. At this very moment Donald is enabling a genocide in Gaza, the disembowelment of Ukraine, and the trashing of freedom of speech in America. But we gotta suck up because otherwise a couple of car plants might have to shut down. It’s all about shared values!

Canadian election; are you bored out of your mind yet?

There’s a startling difference between Yankee democracy and ours. In the USA, the campaign essentially runs four years. Trump 2.0 has been in office hardly two months and OAC is on the campaign trail, doing a national tour, rallying support for her run for the White House in ‘28! In Canada, on the other hand, we look to keep our election campaigns as short as possible - four weeks in the current tussle. For good reason; we can barely stay awake for a four week campaign! Anything much longer would completely destroy our democracy! So far the most exciting thing that’s happened is the Liberal Party swapped out Fluffy for a Goldman Sachs man. That bought them an instant 20+ points in the polls. Obviously, even loyal Liberal Party stalwarts were beyond fed-up with their perfumed poseur. Not hard to see why. Before politics, he had a grand total of two years of full-time employment - as a teacher in a tony private school. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it looks a bit wimpy compared to thirteen years at GS, and that much again at the very pinnacle of global finance. Carnage is up against PP, a serious career politician. While Pierre never had to maintain order in a grade 7 drama classroom, he’s acquitted himself well in the drama classroom on Parliament Hill for twenty years. All the polls agree nobody else has a chance. Jag’s best hope is he might once again snatch relevance from the jaws of obscurity in case of a minority Lib government. Frankly, that’s wishful thinking. Jagmeet should resign now and make way for fresh blood in the NDP. He’s become as stale as Fluffy. So it’s a choice between the career banker and the career politician. Lets see how they compare. They both promise to stand up to Trump. They both promise to stand up to Putin. They both promise to stand up for Canada. They both promise to stand up for Ukraine. They both promise to stand up for workers. They both promise to stand up for Uighurs They both promise to spend more, much more, hundreds of $billions more, on the Canadian Armed Forces. They both promise more take-home pay for working Canadians. They both promise to solve the housing crisis. They both promise more money for retired Canadians. They both support Israel’s right to defend itself. They both believe in the ever-elusive “two state solution” that died with Izaak Rabin in 1995. They both condemn Gaza’s genocidal war on Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East… Can you see where things are going here? I’ve got a great idea. Elections Canada estimates this election will cost out at just under $600 millions. Why not just scrub the show and declare them co-PMs! That money could buy half a new submarine, and we need an entire fleet to ensure the future of our democracy. I’m sure at least the Goldman Sachs guy sees the wisdom in my words. Keep me in mind for a Senate appointment.

PM Carnage calls election; demands Canadians check couch cushions to raise $100 billion for Arctic sovereignty

Thanks to the predations of one Donald Trump, Canada has discovered the concept of “sovereignty.” In short, that’s what we pissed away over the course of many decades as our ruling class, the self-anointed “Laurentian elite,” embraced our status as a branch-plant economy and a vassal state. It’s taken Trump 2.0 for them to realize that may have been a mistake. Now they’re over-compensating. Every other day you see another desperate plea for spending billions or trillions or gazillions on cementing our sovereignty via warships and submarines and fighter jets. Because Trump! And let’s not forget the Arctic. Here’s Geoff Russ in the National Post; Canada needs an Arctic Empire, no matter the cost. Seriously? No matter the cost? Funny, that’s also trotted out in defense of warships and subs and fighter jets. A few months ago, we at least knew we were on the side of the angels, and we were willing to make sacrifices to “stand with our allies.” Then the Boss Angel, Lucifer, double-crossed us and joined Putin’s team. Oh my… What to do? It’s clear that the most important thing Canada can do at this moment is double down on military spending… or perhaps triple or quadruple down. As Mr Russ points out, our values of freedom and human rights and democracy must be preserved, no matter the cost. We must establish a robust military presence in the Canadian Arctic to defend our sovereignty. Putin, or rather Lucifer, has his eye on it for sure, and it’s gonna take a firehose of big bucks spraying non-stop before we can face down Lucifer. Indeed. Our Arctic defense force, the Rangers, patrol our North with ten year old snowmobiles and fifty year old rifles. They’re defending a Canadian Arctic population of maybe 150,000, most of whom live in tiny communities of a few hundred souls. Lucifer’s Arctic, in contrast, sports major cities and a population of at least 2,500,000 north of the Arctic circle. Instead of ten year old Ski-Doos, the Russians patrol the Arctic with state-of-the-art icebreakers, of which they have more than all other Arctic nations combined. So what is Geoff Russ saying when he says “no matter the cost?” What he and 101 other pundits are saying is we need to rubbish every present and future social program to facilitate the unlimited expenditure on war toys. Otherwise, freedom and democracy may perish! That’s total rubbish.

Ripper: the fart-making of Pierre Poilievre

Must say I was taken aback by the title of PP’s brand-spankin’-new just in time for the election biography. Ripper? The word conjures much, mostly negative to my mind. Makes you wonder what the demographics of their focus groups looked like. One of the less offensive connotations involves passing wind, or I should say, the art of the fart. Sure, everybody squeaks one out now and then, but in some environments the passing of wind will draw appreciative comment from bystanders. For example, early in my teaching career, until I gained a permanent contract that enabled me to say no, I “volunteered” to coach soccer and rugby, sports I literally knew nothing about. The team bus inevitably became a venue for competitive farting. “Ripping forth a beauty” meant you’d earned the respect of your peers. If you got really big decibels, cries of “Ripper!” resonated around the bus and fist-bumps were exchanged. The word applied both to the fart itself, and to the fartiste. Maybe that’s the Poilievre plan - to subconsciously appeal to the inner teen in every middle-aged voter.

Why do we continue to spend on war when we could make our world a better place?

Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece on Canada’s spending priorities; Chrystia Freeland's Canada; billions for Ukraine, $200 a month for the most vulnerable Canadians. In the course of my teaching career, I did a few years in “Spec Ed.” That’s where the kids in front of you are what fifty years ago was called “retarded,” forty years ago were “handicapped,” thirty years ago were “special,” twenty years ago were “exceptional,” and are today known as “developmental learners.” Those few years left me some of the best memories of my teaching career. I’m retired now, but the Farm Manager still has her day job as an Ed Assistant with those very students. One of her charges, a young man with a horrendous back-story and multiple challenges, not to mention a history of violence, has captured her ever-bleeding heart. She’s always been the champion of the lost-cause losers. I think maybe that’s why she’s with me. But I digress. Buddy has a fondness for animals, and for some time we’ve been trying to tee up a school visit by me and Bruno. Today we finally pulled it off. Bruno and I were waiting in the parking lot when Buddy and two of his handlers came to greet us. The FM had stocked up on pepperettes beforehand. This young man came out of the building with the flat over-medicated facial expression you see on so many of these students. A couple of pepperettes later, he had erupted into a beautiful full-body smile as he was caressing our Bruno, who, while a bit aloof, can handle a caress after a treat. This evening me and the FM got into a conversation about what lies in store for these kids after they age out of the school system. There’s a great program available locally that is largely volunteer driven and gets next to no official funding. Still, it costs money to rent a space and cover essential overhead. While it provides a variety of stimulating activities, and partially relieves the 24/7 burden of care their parents face, it still costs a hundred bucks a day. And, there’s a waiting list. The vast majority of our developmental learners have no hope to reach this program. What do their futures look like? Bleak. Which brings me back to our former Finance Minister’s budget wherein she promised multiple billions for assistance to Ukraine, and a $200 a month boost for our most vulnerable. Yes, when you’re at least a thousand a month below the poverty line, two hundred dollars does indeed give you a lift, but not out of poverty. At best, you’ll perhaps enjoy a slightly more genteel poverty! But only slightly. Meanwhile, not only have we found a few more billions for Ukraine, but we seem set to embark on ludicrous commitments to commit hundreds of billions of dollars to everything from warships to fighter jets to attack submarines. This is insanity! This is a crime against our most vulnerable! This is a betrayal of our values. Surely we can do better!

Drunk on hubris, American Empire races towards the abyss

For about the last thirty years, I’ve been hectored by save-the-planet types to mind my carbon footprint. If it’s not Greta Thunberg in my face, it’s Al Gore up my arse. We gotta get off fossil fuels or we’re all gonna die! In the here-and-now, we find ourselves in a world run by billionaires and their minions. Many of the billionaires hail from Silicon Valley. Most of them are salivating at the prospect of multiplying their billions many times over. Now that they’ve got a huge majority of the serfs addicted to their digital devices, they have concluded the next level in our enslavement will require massive server farms, aka “data centres,” to process the never-ending data streams we provide them. These require massive amounts of energy. The Silicon Valley billionaires have no compunction whatsoever about running their data centres on the very fossil fuels I’ve been warned away from for the last thirty years! And while the filthy rich keep getting richer, it becomes increasingly obvious that America at large is circling the drain. The physical infrastructure is crumbling due to habitual neglect necessitated by the needs of the one percent for ever-lower taxes. Ditto the education system. Housing precarity has become normalized. Health care in America boasts top-of-the-line expenses, but bottom of the barrel results. America’s vaunted military, by far the most expensive in the world, hasn’t won a war since 1945, and has lost it’s proxy war in Ukraine. America’s blank-cheque no-questions-asked support for Israel’s ongoing genocide is earning it the hatred of 80% of the planet. In response, America destroys the remnants of the rights and freedoms, that once made it worthy of the Statue of Liberty, by stomping on the rights of its critics, people like Mahmoud Khalil. As history repeatedly demonstrates, failing empires eventually resort to looting their allies, more properly termed vassals. That’s where we’re at in the present moment. We’ve destroyed Germany’s industrial economy but invite German manufacturers to set up shop in America. We’re going to snuff out industry in Canada and get their branch-plant economy to come home to Daddy. America is racing towards the abyss. The two hour phone call with Putin yesterday led to absolutely nothing. Our adversaries are not impressed, nor are they intimidated by idle threats. As I write this, the Empire is bombing Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, to make it stop harassing Red Sea shipping. Our operation “Prosperity Guardian” has in one year accomplished exactly nothing. The Yemenis are not cowed. Nor are the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians. The world at large is fed up with American “leadership.” It’s increasingly obvious that Americans themselves, those suffering under the yoke of billionaire rule, are fed up too. Witness Luigi. Witness flaming Tesla stores. Only the blind and stupid, drunk with hubris, fail to see the writing on the wall.

Kevin O'Leary, cheap gas, and AI data centres

Do you recall ever voting for AI data centres? Me neither. Yet, they’re a really big thing and they’re coming whether you like it or not. According to Kevin O, there’s a $70 billion AI data centre in the works in Alberta. Alberta Preem Danielle Smith has put out the welcome mat for AI data centres. In case you’re wondering, as I am, why we suddenly need to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the electricity grid to power AI, let me bring you up to speed. AI is the future. AI can write shitty essays at all levels of the education system, and while they’re typically shitty as shit, they blend in seamlessly with the shit a typical social science or humanities student produces without the benefit of artificial intelligence. Needless to say, the entire education bureaucracy, from K to post-Doc, is all aboard for the next great thing! The drivers of AI, the big data barons who own the cloud(s), are staking claims on present and future electricity supplies to an extent that AI will impoverish the energy ecosystem regular folks count on to heat their homes and cook their meals, not to mention charging your EV so you can do your part to save the planet! All of that is irrelevant to Big Data. Our digital data universe needs to be properly harnessed so maximum profits can be harvested. So here’s the conundrum. We (ie the Western World led by USA) have been warring against the Chinese tech sector for at least ten years, ever since Obama’s famous pivot. That’s when we started seeing the never-ending yellow peril propaganda all over our media. That’s when we declared war on Huawei and started throwing sanctions at anything that might advance China’s tech sector. Well guess what? The country that graduates 10x more science and math students than the West is pulling ahead in spite of our best efforts. That’s why DeepSeek is excluded from Western tech infrastructure. Chinese tech could run better data centres with 90% less energy consumption. That’s why we have to put a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. Without that tariff, we don’t have a chance to compete. Ya, if you look at the cold hard facts, you might think our Western way of life is doomed. But cheer up, at least we’ve got moral superiority!

Trump makes Liberal Party of Canada great again!

Saw a headline today; “Progressives flock to Liberal Party.” Say what? The party elects a Goldman Sachs man to the top job, and the “progressives” abandon the NDP to climb aboard? As the great Bob Dylan sings in that song I like to listen to after a toke and a few pints, people are crazy and times are strange… To paraphrase Fluffy; make that make sense. Please! Windbag Trump has also managed to fill the sails of the good ship Zelensky with a much needed polling boost. He’s up 10 points since that shit sandwich Donny and JD served him at the famous White House lunch a few weeks ago. If he goes back for a couple more of those, he can probably win the next election! You’d think our new PM would make his first foreign trip to DC, to thank Mafia Don for destroying Pierre Poilievre’s political career, but no, his first trip is to France, there to schmooze failing fellow banker and would-be new leader of Free World Macron (approval rating 27%). Now that Dastardly Don has switched sides in the Russia-Ukraine war, Macron sees an opening in the Global Fight to Save Democracy. To that end, he’s putting together a coalition to send a EU army into Ukraine to enforce the 30 day ceasefire Trump and Zelly have agreed to but Putin hasn’t. What could go wrong? After Paris, our man Carney hopped over the Chanel for a visit with King Charlie (approval rating 51%) and PM Starmer (approval rating 31%). Starmer is all-in with Macron’s EU army plans. Perhaps they can be Co-Leaders of the Free World! After all, their combined approval ratings leave Trump’s 47% in the dust. It’s a shame there wasn’t time for a visit with Germany’s Chancellor-elect Friedrich Merz, another big-league banker. (What is it about Democracy that attracts so many Blackrock - Rothschild - Goldman Sachs types to become public servants?) And a double-shame there’s no time for a meet with Fraulein Faschismus VdL (no approval required and no ratings provided) and her sidekick KK. Oh well, it’s early days for Carney and there’ll be plenty more trips to Europe in the weeks and months ahead. What I’m sensing is a grand anti-Trump coalition in the making. Our new PM is aligning himself with Europe’s champions of human rights and the rule of law. There will be strength in numbers when they all face down the Orange Ogre together. But wait! After our intrepid European freedom fighters prevail over Trump and Putin in Ukraine, perhaps they can mend fences and unite for the greater good. After all, there is an even more important civilizational struggle playing out in the Holy Land. Carney’s new European allies and their nemesis in Washington are all on the same page on that one. Trump, Macron, and Starmer will all support Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians with whatever it takes for as long as it takes.

Can Canada survive Donald Trump?

According to the crack journos at CBC and the Globe & Mail, Canada is facing an existential crisis. Our forever besties south of the border want to annex us. For real! Read any recent op-ed by Andrew Coyne. It’s all because of the unhinged moron our neighbours voted into the White House last November. Catherine Cullen, of CBC’s The House, got a few minutes with UK Foreign Secretary this morning. He was in Canada for a meeting of the G 7 foreign ministers to formulate their Ukraine strategy. She spent one minute asking one question about Ukraine, and ten minutes asking one question, over and over again, about why our G 7 allies aren’t standing with us against Trump. The short answer, Catherine, is that every one of them is, just like Canada, a US vassal. Number one rule for vassals who have ceded their sovereignty to the Hegemon is this; remember your place. Otherwise, you’re cruising for a slap-down. Neither Lammy nor any of the other G 7 chihuahuas are dumb enough to risk that simply because the thin-skinned Canadians feel threatened by Trump referring to us as the 51st state. Perhaps our elite are suffering a pang of conscience for the many years they looked the other way while the Leader of the Democratic World bullied sundry smaller nations. Surely they are acquainted with the “Ledeen Doctrine;” every ten years the US needs to throw some shitty little country against the wall to show the world we mean business. The term was coined 25 years before Mafia Don entered politics. Maybe they’re afraid it’s our turn, or maybe it’s just a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which has always hit the journalism profession particularly hard. While much of our over-reaction strikes me as juvenile posturing unworthy of a serious country, the moment provides an opportunity for sober second thought on some recent decisions. The F-35 purchase comes to mind. The more you read about it, the more you realize it’s an overpriced piece of shit American pilots would prefer not to fly. There are sound reasons the plane has never seen combat, unless you count dropping bombs on Gaza or shooting down Chinese weather balloons. The F-16 and F-18 are superior fighter jets. By far the most intelligent thing I’ve seen in the Globe re the Trump threats is a full page advert on page A20 in today’s paper, placed by Caldwell Investment Management CEO Brendan Caldwell. It’s an open letter to Mark Carney, exhorting him to take the high road and eschew the “elbows up” jingoism so popular these days. After all, we don’t demonstrate Canadian values by stooping to Uncle Sam’s level.

Are we there yet? How criticism of Israel became a hate crime

The attached essay, first published at Neumann’s Blog in 2015, is about then Foreign Minister in Big Steve’s government, Little John Baird, first declared war on the BDS movement’s campaign to isolate the state of Israel for its policies of apartheid, land theft, and ethnic cleansing. PM Fluffy’s government took the next step in 2019, adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which condemns virtually any criticism of Israel’s conduct vis-a-vis the Palestinians as antisemitic, and therefore a hate crime. That solves the mystery behind the supposed epidemic of Jew Hate in Canada, and in fact in the world at large. When the PM and Defense Minister of the state of Israel announced their intent to commit genocide, and then proceeded to do exactly that for the next year and a half, it is not surprising that criticism of Israel has ramped up. ____ Sunday, January 18, 2015 It's official; support for BDS is now "anti-Semitism" in Canada John Baird made news today when he was seen running from a barrage of shoes and eggs directed his way when he had the chutzpah to show his face in Ramallah. The Palestinians, due no doubt to the troubling impact their religion has on their thought process, see Baird as an Israeli stooge.After giving the Palestinians a stern lecture on the importance of the rule of law etc, he decamped to Jerusalem, where he signed six "memoranda of understanding" with Avigdor Lieberman, his Israeli counterpart. The cumulative effect of the memoranda is to totally hand off Canadian foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. Canadian foreign policy hasn't been independent for some time, but today's signings make it official.Included in the memoranda is this gem, governing "public diplomacy cooperation." That means Canada will not only blindly support Israel behind the scenes; we are now committed to make sure we are seen to be doing so in public!Here's the bit that equates BDS with anti-Semitism;Deeply concerned by efforts to single out the State of Israel for criticism and isolate the State of Israel internationally including calls for a boycott of the State of Israel, for the divestment of investments, and for sanctions to be imposed on Israel, Recognizing that the selective targeting of Israel reflects the new face of anti‑Semitism, We're there, folks! Look for the Harper gang to push through something in the next anti-terror bill that incorporates this development, and criticism of Israel will be a crime in Canada.

Trump's bullshit "peace plans" exposed as flim-flam

Who can forget Donald Trump’s bold campaign rhetoric? He was going to go into the history books as a peacemaker for the ages. Those two wars in Ukraine and Gaza, which would of course never had started, had he been in the Oval Office instead of Biden, the worst president in US history, would be wound up right away; Ukraine in 24 hours, and Gaza maybe a day or two later. We’re past the first fifty days of Trump 2.0. Should the Nobel Committee be mooting a Peace Prize for Mafia Don? Alas, that would be premature. The current Gaza ceasefire went into effect the day before Trump’s swearing in. Its primary flaw is that Israel has never ceased fire. They’ve merely scaled back the genocide, killing a mere handful of Gazan’s per day instead of dozens or hundreds. At the same time, they shifted the focus of their ethnic cleansing campaign, massively expanding their attacks on the West Bank. For the past week Israel has again blocked all food, water, medicine, and energy entering Gaza. There is no peace and no ceasefire. The 24 hour peace envisioned for Ukraine was stillborn. Instead, some 1,200 hours in, Rubio has announced, with much fanfare, that Zelensky has agreed to the Trump plan, and “the ball is now in Putin’s court.” The Trump non-plan is for a 30 day truce. Of course Zelensky signed on. He has no choice! But what’s in it for Russia? Even in our legacy media, all but the most deluded fabulists now admit what was obvious enough from the beginning, that Ukraine is losing and will continue losing more every day. Threats of more arms, or the even sillier threat of more sanctions - really tough ones this time - are as ridiculous as they sound. The official Kremlin response has not arrived, but it would be foolish to expect anything other than a big fat nyet. In conclusion, Trump the peacemaker is 0 for 2 at this juncture. On the other hand, Trump the destroyer is batting it out of the park all over the place!

Traffic jam in Indian Creek

Last summer the beavers built a dam on Indian Creek, right under the bridge where it flows under Concession Road 20. That’s right where the snappers will crawl out of the creek and lay their eggs in the gravel shoulders of the road come May and early June. There’s typically a couple dozen turtle nests each season, and the racoons generally have them cleaned out within 24 hours. I walk along there every day, and in almost twenty years I’ve encountered a total of one baby snapper. Infant mortality among the snapping turtle population is horrendous, but somehow the species has survived since dinosaurs roamed the earth. There’s also river otters in that stretch of creek. We’ve had a couple sightings just in the past week, one adult and one adolescent, scampering through the snow on the creek bank. I assume if the beavers hadn’t blocked the creek under the bridge, they’d just swim down the creek. Instead, they now have to exit the creek, run along the bank up to the road, cross the road, and then get back in the creek on the other side of the bridge. We’re gonna have river otter road-kill one of these days. Today there was a muskrat sitting on the ice just on the south side of the bridge, on the edge of open water. It was a fairly young one judging by its size. I stood there eyeballing it for a solid two minutes before it noticed me and plunged into the icy water. An adult would have noticed me and disappeared long before I ever saw it. It’s mighty busy in our little stretch of Indian Creek. Somehow all these different species manage to coexist peacefully on the same small patch of real estate. We humans could learn a lot from them.

Jewish student arrested for Nazi salute at Auschwitz during school trip

I know what you’re thinking. Neumann’s been drinking deeply from those fringe news outlets that spew non-stop antisemitic bile. Guilty as charged; that headline comes from the Jerusalem Post. The Polish authorities, still a little sensitive over their complicity in the holocaust, arrest this Israeli teen who has come to Auschwitz on a school trip. Auschwitz is a top destination for school trips not only from Israel, but throughout the West. Auschwitz generates serious tourism dollars for the state. That’s why the local cops nipped this teen sieg-heiler in the bud, pronto. As a veteran teacher who supervised a few school trips, I can vouch for the fact teens will get up to all kinds of shit. I remember I chaperoned a busload at the International Plowing Match one year, and I had to spend the entire day in the beer tent to keep the little shits out of it! It’s not hard to imagine a teenage wise guy impressing his pals with a Nazi salute at the gates of Auschwitz. They are teens, after all! Luckily for him, his pals spun a pretty good yarn to get him a much-reduced sentence. They were just taking random pictures as Hitler Youth boy was innocently waving at them, and it just happened to look like a Nazi salute! You know, just like that shot of Musk’s recent Nazi salute.

Canadians excited to have former Goldman Sachs banker as new Prime Minister

We’re in the big leagues now! We finally have our own GS alum in the top job, just like they had Rishi Sunak in Britain, Italy had Mario Draghi, and Australia had Malcom Turnbull. Off the top of my head, I don’t recall any of their governments celebrated for improving the lot of their people. Trump packed his first cabinet with GS alumni. His shadow boss Steve Bannon is former GS. There are literally scores of them at the top of the banking and insurance industry in the US and EU. Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right AfD in Germany is a GS grad. They generally skew right politically, although they were plentiful in recent Dem administrations (not that I’d consider that skewing left!). There’s less of a GS presence in the Trump 2.0 cabinet. That’s too bad, otherwise Carney could have sorted out this tariff fracas with a phone call. The billionaires Trump’s hired on from Cantor Fitzgerald and Morgan Stanley are probably just as sympathetic to the interests of the common people as the GS folks. After retiring from the BoE gig Carney was handed not one, but two lucrative sinecures, at Bloomberg and at Brookfield. I’m willing to wager he’s got more billionaires on speed-dial than Chrystia, but probably not as many Ukrainian ones. It was a little unnerving to witness the raucous applause he got from the Liberal faithful at the convention. They’re obviously expecting great things. I am too. Not so much for the folks lining up at the food banks, but certainly for the kind of people he’s spent his entire professional career serving.

Trump and the ever-gushing firehose of horseshit

It’s comforting to imagine the dismay and disarray that has befallen our “Laurentian elite” since January 20 is part of an awakening to just how destructive to Canadian interests US domination of our economy and society has become. Alas, this elite has been all too comfortable with our vassalage, which has been undeniably obvious at least since John Diefenbaker killed the Avro Arrow in 1959. I don’t believe their sudden obsession with Canada’s sovereignty is anything other than nostalgia for the gentler pre-Trumpian days, when Uncle Sam picked our pockets clean while whispering sweet nothings into our ears. Trump, on the other hand, claims we’ve been sponging off the American Empire all along and demands we make it up to them. It’s a vulgar despoilation of the fantasy that we’ve always been besties. Recall it was merely three months ago that our pretty but undeniably stupid Foreign Minister announced the Canadian Arctic was henceforth to be known as the North American Arctic, and that we Canadians were in actuality members of something I’d never heard of; the “North American Homeland!” My view has consistently been that Trump’s political persona is an integral part of America’s Democracy Theatre. Insofar as there ever was a functioning democracy in the US, it has long ago ceased to be such. The billionaires who control the joint can’t just come out and admit that, hence the ever-gushing firehose of horseshit about values, human rights, democracy, and so forth. There’s an excellent essay on view at Naked Capitalism which is well worth a read. The writer argues that the perceived chaos in Trump’s Washington is nothing more or less than the rebranding of the American Empire to better reflect the interests of its owners. I’m inclined to agree.

Remember the looting of Sears Canada

Yesterday’s HBC news brought to mind the not-unrelated fate of Sears Canada, so I thought the time is right to revisit that unfortunate episode in Canada’s economic history. Our PM at the time was the same lightweight goofball who the Liberal Party is officially replacing today. If I recall correctly, he was really sad that 16,000 Sears Canada had lost their jobs and their pensions, but there was nothing he could do. That’s the same guy who frequently attended the openings of new Amazon warehouses in Canada to thank Jeff Bezos for bringing “good” jobs that would “strengthen the middle class.” As if! Of course, when the benevolent Bezos recently shuttered eight Amazon warehouses in Quebec to prevent their unionization, our PM was again missing in action. Frankly, I don’t see Freeland, Carney, or Pierre Poilievre doing anything different. The looting of Sears Canada (from Neumann's Blog, October 15, 2017) In yesterday's Globe and Mail business section, "retailing reporter" Marina Strauss offers yet another it's-all-over-but-the-crying insight into the slow and painful death of Sears Canada. This paragraph caught my eye;Sears's insolvency came after years of declines and red ink at the retailer amid shifting strategies and leaders. At the same time, its major U.S. shareholder – hedge fund manager Edward Lampert – profited from Sears Canada's asset sales over the years in the form of generous dividends while leaving relatively little money to invest in the chain.That's the only mention of Edward Lampert. So he arranged for some generous dividends for himself, did he? Just how generous were they? Don't the folks at the Globe and Mail think that might be a relevant bit of info? I'd sure like to know!This seems like an unfortunate oversight from an outfit that never tires of reminding us how great their professionally trained journalists are, how they speak truth to power, and blah blah blah... Anyway, since Marina won't tell me, I decided to look it up for myself.According to dividendchannel.com, in the ten years before Sears Canada fell into the clutches of Ed Lampert, the company paid a modest dividend of .24 per share per year. That's $2.40 over ten years. Then our brilliant American hedgie gets his hands on the wheel, and the good times get a-rollin'!First thing over the side is the Sears Canada credit card unit. That was considered the most valuable part of the company according to news stories of the day. It fetched almost three billions at auction! At that point, the company could have chosen to reinvest in the business, but who are we kidding!? That's not generally the business model that hedge funds pursue, so instead, within months of Lampert's arrival, there's a special dividend of $18.64 per share to spread the loot to the shareholders, especially himself! That's about 750% more paid out in the first year of King Eddie's reign than was paid out in the previous ten years combined!Is this guy a genius or what!And the special dividend gravy train had barely left the station. There followed special dividends totaling $7.00/share in 2010, another 100 million out the door in 2012, and yet another ten bucks/share in 2013!The company that paid out a dividend of twenty-four cents/share per year before Eddie, paid out an average of $4.50/share/year over the first eight years after Eddie. Or putting it another way, over ten years before Eddie, the then profitable company paid out about a quarter of a billion dollars in dividends. In the ten years after Eddie, the now money-losing company paid out close to four billion dollars in dividends. And as the biggest shareholder, Eddie Lampert was the biggest beneficiary of these "special" dividends!Ain't that special!So now the game is over. Sixteen thousand employees have an opportunity to find more meaningful work, and who needs a pension anyway?... But that's a small price to pay for this great system that brings so much prosperity to all of us.More to some than to others.

Canada once again promises the new warships they've been promising for 20 years

I see where the long-promised new fleet of warships, formerly the “surface combatants,” now the “River-class destroyers,” have moved one step closer to actual construction. They allegedly started cutting steel for the first ship last summer. Today’s news is that at least three of the proposed fleet of 15 have got the green light. The bad news is they’re scheduled to come in at 7+ billions apiece. The worse news is, given our wretched shipbuilding history, that number will at least double by the time they’re commissioned sometime in the mid-2030s. Worse than that, by the time the last of the 15 new ships hits the seas in the 2050s, you can mark my words, we’ll have sunk half a trillion dollars into this project. All that, so we can “stand with our allies?” That’s especially problematic now that we’re not sure who our allies are anymore. And let’s not forget; war has changed since this project was first on the drawing boards twenty years ago. The Russians are losing battleships to $100k amphibious drones in the Black Sea. Why would anyone build a multi-billion dollar warship that can be sunk for a hundred grand? That threat aside, Russia continues to build warships like there’s no tomorrow. Last year the Russian navy took delivery of 12 new surface ships and four submarines. That’s a half- century of production by current Canadian standards! But we’re not Russia. We simply cannot afford this idiocy. Look around you. Any tent encampments in your town? Crazy people wandering the streets shouting at God? We have record-breaking line-ups at food banks clear across the land. We simply have more important priorities. Let’s scrap this insane idea that we need to spend untold billions on warships and F-35s while we’re on the precipice of becoming a third-world shithole. Breaking away from the American Empire is the first step in making things right. Go Trump!

The slow and painful death of the Hudson's Bay Company

While my Globe & Mail today was mostly saturated with Trump tariff hysteria, they did find the space to inform me that our beloved Hudson’s Bay Company was filing for bankruptcy protection. How sad, I thought. I was aware the company had fallen into the clutches of American hedge fund billionaires some years ago, but I still saw it as Canadian. Turns out the only time this almost 500 year old company actually had Canadian ownership was for a few years after Canadian billionaire Ken Thomson, also known as Baron Thomson of Fleet, bought it in 1979. According to Wikipedia, Thomson bought the company for $400 million, sold off the oil and gas assets for $550 millions, and eventually sold on what was left to US billionaire Jerry Zucker for a billion! That’s a pretty sweet return on investment! Far from being a Canadian company, two hundred years older than the country itself, HBC was a tool of British colonialism, and a very effective one. In the 1800s the HBC trading posts formed a network that extended as far south as San Francisco. They even had an outpost in Hawaii. They actively discouraged settlement in the northwest, fearing it would interfere with their lucrative fur trade. That changed when HBC was sold to the International Financial Society, a consortium of London bankers, in 1863. Many of London’s banking houses were neck-deep in the promotion of railroad stock, and they saw the potential in the vast land holdings of HBC. Thereafter, the company became aggressively pro-settlement, because you don’t need railroads without a population. Among the bankers was Richard Potter, father of Beatrice, whose bank eventually evolved into the JP Morgan we all know and love today. Not that they didn’t continue the fur trade. In the 1920s the famous Doctor Frederick Banting, and his good friend, the painter A.Y. Jackson, did a tour of the far north and were disgusted by the company’s treatment of the indigenous population. Outraged, Banting travelled to London and faced off with the directors. He accused them of swindling the locals out of $100,000 worth of fox pelts in exchange for $5,000 worth of unhealthy whiteman food that made their teeth fall out. It was the HBC bigshots’ turn to be outraged. They accused Banting of slander. Alas, they themselves had never been to Canada. When they made some enquiries, they backed off, and actually sent Banting an apology. But back to the present. It has been the sorry end of many a once-iconic institution, built up over decades and sometimes centuries, to fall into the hands of today’s robber barons, the venture fund sharpies who specialize in enriching themselves by destroying the livelihoods of others. They have made themselves so filthy rich that, where they once were content to buy race-horses, they now buy politicians. Proving yet again that as long as we allow money to be power, we will always be ruled by the rich.

Globe & Mail editorial board laments death of Pax Americana

According to the clique of American Empire Loyalists who comprise the Globe & Mail’s editorial board, the post-WWII era of US hegemony, “Pax Americana,” was a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity in the world. It was? Try telling that to the millions of Koreans who paid the ultimate price from 1950 to 1953. Try telling that to the further millions who made the ultimate sacrifice in Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and ‘70s. Try telling that to the millions in the Middle East who have enjoyed the non-so-tender machinations of the Leader of the Free World, from the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953, to the destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, to the unlimited support for Israel’s decades long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestine of Palestinians. Try telling that to the peoples of El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, and Argentina where US support for fascist governments disappeared hundreds of thousands. The cozy smug American Empire Loyalists at the Globe editorial board don’t remember any of that. All they recall is 80 years of peace and prosperity! Now, in the space of a week,… Mr. Trump has ended Pax Americana. Oh, for fucks sakes! How can you publish such overwrought rubbish? Yesterday’s editorial goes on to proclaim that Canada is left with no choice but to follow the liberal democracies of Europe as they rally to keep Pax America afloat without America. This means joining the unelected Ursula von der Leyen’s jihad to raise a trillion euro’s for the defence of democratic Ukraine. Ya sure, why not? Another trillion down the “whatever it takes for as long as it takes” black hole? That’s beyond stupid, beyond counter-productive, beyond complete mental retardation. Yup, that’s the road we want to take! And it’s not just the editorial board at the Globe. Top Globe thought-leader Andrew Coyne has become completely possessed by Trump Derangement Syndrome, to the point where his latest rants are a cry for professional intervention. In one single recent 800 word op-ed, he informs his readers that Trump is: a nullity, depraved, callous, insane, a criminal, a madman, crazy crazy crazy, a threat to the peace of the world, and a moron. Dude! Lean back in your La-Z-Boy, put on some Bob Dylan, and fire up a fattie. Works for me.

Ukraine, Gaza, and Trump's Nobel Peace Prize

According to the UN, Russia’s unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has over three years claimed the lives of almost 700 Ukrainian children. Israel’s war on Gaza, in less than a year and a half, has claimed the lives of over 18,000 Palestinian children. When PM Trudeau met the press this morning, to outline Canada’s response to Trump’s tariffs, he prefaced his remarks with the observation that, in his mind, it was incomprehensible that Trump would turn on his allies, while normalizing relations with the “murderous dictator” in Moscow. In my mind, it’s incomprehensible that Justin would bring that up, considering he has never said a word about the murderous war criminals running amok in Gaza. Justin and a lot of his fellow NATO underlings are aghast that Trump is moving to normalize with Russia. For them, even though they’ve nothing to contribute other than their best wishes, they remain mesmerized by the “Putin can’t be allowed to win” mantra. Trump recognizes something they don’t; Russia has won. It’s all over except the pissing and moaning and finger-pointing. Not only is Ukraine defeated; NATO has been exposed as a paper tiger. NATO is just coming to terms with the fact that, without America, they hold no cards. It’s over. Rant all you want about Uncle Sam’s callous perfidy in provoking this war (and I’ve done my share of ranting) and then walking away from it. Donald Trump imagines himself to be a peace-maker, and he’s doing the right thing. Which brings me to Gaza. I predicted early on that no matter how toxic Biden was to the Palestinian cause, Trump would be exponentially worse. Yet Trump took the Arab-American vote in the crucial states of Michigan and Minnesota. Arab-Americans hated the Democratic Party so much they were willing to give Trump a chance. How is that working out? Today there was an Arab League summit in Cairo. They were making plans to rebuild Gaza, a plan that would not involve the removal of its inhabitants. Would this summit have occurred if Trump had not floated his uber-gauche plan to turn Gaza into a casino resort? No! Trump has managed to consolidate an Arab coalition willing to rebuild Gaza. So far so good, but what about Netanyahu’s ultimate dream; to have America lead an attack on Iran? To my way of thinking, that’s the ultimate litmus test viz Trump’s intentions. Bibi won’t launch that attack without US participation. If Trump holds back, the Greater Israel fantasies are over. And if Trump can pull that off, he fully deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

Doug Ford, the mouth that roared

Did anyone else figure that brou-ha-ha in the Oval Office last Friday looked suspiciously like it might have been scripted by Dana White? Think about it. Don and Dana are pals from way back. Dana’s got the secret sauce that can get the rubes to cheer for… whoever he wants them to cheer for! That’s why I worry about Doug Ford. Doug is Preem of my province. He recently pissed away $180 millions to hold an unnecessary election so he could have a strong mandate to take on Trump. For all those millions, his party gained one solitary seat. I’m surprised he got as much support as he did. At the onset of this unnecessary campaign, he announced he had a plan to ensure every Ontarian had a doctor within four years. I thought, hey Doug, you’ve already been Preem for seven years, why the fuck don’t we have doctors already? But you know politics… I can see Dana’s scriptwriters penciling in Trump’s next victim after Zelly. Doug Ford, the mouth that roared.

Mysteries of the Woke Mind

I took my first university courses in the ‘70s. There were ashtrays on the desks in case you felt like having a smoke during class. Political correctness had yet to be invented, and its toxic spawn, the woke warrior, could not have been imagined. PoMo literary theory, at least in the non-elite schools that admitted the likes of me, was an entertaining novelty, enthusiastically debated over pitchers of beer in the campus pub. It was heady stuff! Once you realize that absence can be framed as the highest form of presence, you’re looking at a big new world of possibilities! In hindsight, it’s not hard to find the through-line to Woke-world and the Woke Mind. Consider a couple of scenarios, purely hypothetical of course. Scenario I: A young girl, let’s call her Muffy, is born into an Italian family, but grows up to believe she is actually an American Indian. A gifted singer and songwriter, she achieves great success and champions Indigenous human rights causes, to the extent that she finds herself on the FBI’s list of radicals and her career suffers twenty years in the wilderness. She perseveres, stays true to her adopted identity, eventually becoming, in regular minds, an iconic voice for Indigenous Rights. In the Woke Mind, she is a fraud, and must be exposed, humiliated, and stripped of decades worth of honours. Scenario II: A young boy, let’s call him Billy, grows up to believe he is actually a girl, in spite of the obvious evidence in his pants that this is not the case. In high school, with the encouragement and support of a caring community, he comes out, and switches from the boy’s swim team to the girl’s. Regular minds immediately claim he is a fraud, and demand Billy keep his willy out of the girl’s change room. In the Woke Mind, Billy is a hero, who should be celebrated for finding the courage to live his authentic life! Maybe fraud is the highest form of authenticity… or is authenticity the highest form of fraud? Either way, you can blame post-modern literary theory.

Starmer's Summit of Silliness promises to keep making empty promises for as long as it takes

British PM Sir Keir Starmer only got that job because the Israel lobby in Britain kneecapped his predecessor on account of his refusal to endorse Israel’s extermination campaign against the Palestinian people. As such, he is fully aware that his tenure is at all times dependent on far more than the whims of British voters. Indeed, every “sovereign” nation outside the Big Three exists at the pleasure of their more powerful neighbours. So what’s an enfeebled vassal state to do when world events call upon it to show some spine? Why, call a meeting, of course! And that’s what Starmer did, hastily convening the “Securing our Future” confab in London yesterday. And, while our own PM Fluffy wasn’t on the original guest list, there he was in all the photo-ops, ingratiating himself with his fellow non-entities. Here’s a quote from his official website: “Ukraine’s fight for sovereignty is a fight for freedom and democracy everywhere. The important discussions we had today reinforced our shared resolve: as Allies, we will remain steadfast in our support for Ukraine. Canada will be there for Ukraine until there is a just and lasting peace. Slava Ukraini!” - The Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada If hot air, wishful thinking, and empty promises could win wars, the Ukrainian army would have occupied the Kremlin a year and a half ago! Slava Ukraini indeed! Starmer’s coalition of the deluded concluded with promises of allied “boots on the ground and planes in the air” to push back Putin and save democracy. When you read the fine print, this remains entirely dependent on what is euphemistically referred to as the “US backstop.” In other words, he affirmed what Trump spelled out to Zelensky last Friday applies to the entirety of Europe; without America you’ve got no cards. But you can bet the empty promises will keep on coming for as long as it takes.

Zelly visits White House, gets shit sandwich with side of humiliation

I had just wrapped yesterday’s rant on the catastrophic consequences of America’s “help” to Ukraine over the past decade, when I turned on the TV to that live presser from the Oval Office. What a fitting exclamation mark to the point I was making! It was the old ass-grabber and war criminal Henry Kissinger who observed that being America’s enemy was dangerous, but being America’s friend could be deadly. How do people forget that? Yet every time another one-time ally gets stabbed in the back, we are shocked and appalled all over again. Wrap your minds around it folks; horny Hank wasn’t joking! America has no friends and no allies. It has only “strategic interests.” The dimwits in Ottawa desperately crafting a policy of appeasement in hopes of avoiding Trump’s threatened tariffs are wasting their time. Trump will do what he does, and no amount of ass-kissing will change the outcome. During Trump’s first term Chrystia Freeland tried to ingratiate herself with Mafia Don by assuming leadership of the Lima Group, that made-in-USA confection that tried and failed to fob off the ridiculous Juan Guaido as the legitimate leader of Venezuela. She achieved nothing other than tarnishing Canada’s reputation in the Global South. Did her service to Trump raise his opinion of her? Just yesterday he dismissed her as a “whack job,” so I’m guessing not. And about that 51st state nonsense. The first time Trump said it he had no idea of the scale of bed-wetting it would unleash in this massively insecure country, so now he tosses it out there at every opportunity just to get a rise out of us. We’ve got serious people writing at CBC and the Globe bemoaning that none of our allies have asked Trump to stop making that lame joke. One overwrought journo wondered why King Charles wouldn’t step up and say something! Really? Grow up, Canada!