Greed uber alles

The idea that a major employer like General Motors is bound by some notion of "social contract" is as good as dead.

Greed is the ultimate value these days among the keeners coming out of MBA programs. Greed makes some people filthy rich. Greedy people can get rich enough to buy the people who make the rules. Then you've got a closed-loop self-devouring perpetual greed machine on the loose...


That can only end badly, as it is ending badly for those three thousand families in Oshawa. As it has for 16,000 Sears employees and their pensions.

A couple of greedbags were allowed to plunder CP Rail, destroying over five thousand jobs but walking away with billions for their efforts.

Meanwhile, our precious princeling billows progressive hot air into the heavens in such volumes that we'll never meet our emissions targets, while simultaneously buying us pipelines, because the greedbags who own our oil demand them.

And don't expect to get the whole story from your friendly corporate news media; the greedbags own those too.

Shame

There was a time when we could feel shame.

Those days are long gone.

Take a gander at this excerpt from a time before we were shameless. George Romney, Papa to Mittens, DECLINED a hundred thousand dollar bonus in 1960 because he already made more than enough money...

WTF???

Shame?

George was in thrall to an outdated concept called the "social contract." At some level, the social contract assumed we were all in this thing called the "economy" together.

Fast forward 65 years or so, and you've got pharma-bro. Martin Shkreli had a simple strategy for success. Buy up companies that market life-saving medicines and jack up the prices!

Brilliant!

Shame doesn't even come into the discussion. He's just a brilliant entrepreneur...

It's the same kind of brilliance that allows greed-bags like Bill Ackman and his henchman Harrison "Hitman" Hunter to "save" railways by making the trains longer and running them faster, all the while pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars for their noble efforts.

Shame? No way!

Ackman and Hunter have oodles of laudatory press clippings documenting their genius.

According to the Globe and Mail and the rest of the business press, you're a genius if you can kill 6,000 great working class jobs in Canada as long as you enrich yourself and your investors.

There is no shame in making 6,000 good jobs go away.

Instead, there are accolades.

How did we get from a place where A-list capitalists would refuse a bonus, to a place where destroying working class jobs and working class communities and screwing the sick and infirm is considered legitimate business activity?


I don't have the answer yet, but I'm working on it...

Now THAT'S some serious entitlement!

I was reading at the CBC website where CP Rail boss Hunter "Hitman" Harrison is walking out on his contract six months early "to pursue other opportunities." The head-hunters must be dangling some humongous golden carrots in front of the old greedbag. Check out this quote from the story;

 ...the board agreed to a limited waiver of his non-compete obligations in return for Harrison agreeing to forfeit "substantially" all benefits he is entitled to receive from CP going forward, including his pension, worth in total about $118 million.

Huh? He only worked there for four and a half years! That entitles him to a pension of $118 millions? That's pretty much two million in pension for every month of work, and that's on top of his multi-million dollar salary!

Oh well, I guess that's a small price to pay for a visionary leader who made the profitable CP Rail even more profitable by destroying 6000 excellent working class jobs in Canada.

Uber tough-guy railroader Hunter "Hitman" Harrison meets Green Jesus

Damn near shit my pants when I saw the headline, Fossil Fuels 'probably dead' says CP Rail's Hunter Harrison.

Well bugger me britches!

Harrison is probably right of course, but this is not the kind of talk we expect from the guy we love to hate here at Falling Downs.

Here's our theory (and every shock to the cultural code needs an explanatory theory). Hunter recently had a brush with mortality. Yup, he just barely avoided a date with the Grim Reaper.

All of a sudden he steps back from the abyss, looks around, smells the roses, and decides that having a sustainable economy and a future for the planet may not be such a blasphemous idea after all.

Good on you, Mr. Hunter!

Hell, next thing you know the guy's gonna be campaigning for workers' rights...

In spite of all the nasty aspersions that have been spit-balled your way from this blog, we sincerely wish you all the best in your golden years, and may they be full of further startling insights like this one!

Hunter Harrison makes good on promise to change CP Rail culture

Check out this story about Transport Canada's "unprecedented" order against CP Rail to change their scheduling practices because they are an "immediate threat" to rail safety.

Reading the story, it's obvious that "Hitman" Harrison has succeeded in creating a culture of fear at the venerated CP Rail.

Now back up a few years, when Harrison was the widely lauded "new Sheriff" in town. Yup, he'd just trousered his fifty million dollar signing bonus from hedgie Bill Ackman, and he was gonna shake up that "spoiled, horrible, permissive" work culture at CP Rail.

Sounds like he's succeeded!

Those lucky folks still on the payroll now have a culture of fear instead of the awful spoiled, horrible, and permissive culture that prevailed in the Fred Green era!

But it's not all coming up posies at CP Rail...

Take a gander at the CPR share price history over the past five years. Ackman was loading up on shares back in 2011 when they were in the fifty dollar range. Peaked at well over two hundred in late 2014. By then Ackman had announced an ambitious share buy-back plan designed to drive the share price even higher.

Hasn't quite worked out that way. As of today, CP Rail shares have lost over half their value from that peak.

The think tank here at Falling Downs would like to think that our January 2014 research report had some small role to play in helping the markets get over their Ackman-Harrison euphoria.

It's high time I renamed this blog the "Bolshevik Bruce Research Report" or some such nonsense and fobbed it off as an "investment strategy advisory"...

...or some such nonsense. And of course charged big dollars for an annual subscription!

Maybe if I could get Todd Hirsch to do a guest spot once in awhile...

Guess John Baird's next sinecure and win a Falling Downs coffee mug!

We've already congratulated Big John on his appointments at Barrick Gold and CP Rail. As we predicted, those two sinecures leave vast amounts of open space in Mr. Baird's schedule, open space destined to be filled with more lucrative influence-peddling appointments.

Sure enough, today word comes out that John will also be advising Hong Kong billionaire Michael Li, son of mega-billionaire Li Kashing, richest man in Asia!

These must be heady times for the humble former politico from Ottawa!

So what's next for Big John? We've already speculated that Sheldon Adelson will have a little something for him, for his great work on behalf of the right-wing lunatics in the Holy Land, but what else?

Remember the "Tour de Canada" that Baird treated the Foreign Minister of the UAE to last summer? Apparently he and Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan got along like a house on fire! And guess what? Sheikh Abdullah isn't just the Foreign Minister of the UAE, he also happens to be the son of the country's founding father AND Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, the second richest sovereign wealth fund on the planet!

I'm guessing Sheikh Abdullah is always on the look-out for key strategic advisers and that John Baird would fit the bill perfectly.

What else? I think an operator like Dan Gertler could use a man of Baird's prodigious connections to take his company to the next level of respectability... but why not throw this guessing game open to the general public?

Announcing the BIG BUCKS FOR BIG JOHN BAIRD POOL. What global multi-national or mega-billionaire will be next in announcing that they have signed up Baird to give them strategic advice? Just send ten dollars along with your guess to this blog, and if you guess correctly, we'll send you a genuine Falling Downs coffee mug!

See, we can all win when John Baird wins!

CP Rail boss Hunter "Hitman" Harrison wags terror threat

It's not two years since a rail accident caused by criminally negligent railroad managers killed 47 innocents in Lac Megantic, but Hunter Harrison is not afraid of accidents.

He's afraid of terrorists!

Yup, those dastardly terror types could blow up a train-load of Bakken crude any time, any place.

True enough. Yet this potential terror threat he sketches out seems to be strictly imaginary. Those 47 dead in Lac Megantic were totally real.

If there were actual terror cells active in North America, one would expect they might have struck by now. Yet, before and after 9/11 they've done exactly nothing. I think it's safe to say that they don't exist.

Sure, we get the regular headlines about the FBI/Homeland Security/CSIS/RCMP busting up some half-brained terror plot or another, but on close inspection these can uniformly be filed under "informers gone wild." You pay informers millions to lure dim-witted Muslim kids, or even more reprehensible, actual home-grown Canadian kids who have fallen through the massive cracks in our mental health-care infrastructure, into talking stupid shit into the ubiquitous police recording instruments, and voilà, you've busted another terror plot!

But Harrison wants rail traffic re-routed around major urban centres, just in case. This will of course be paid for by the public, not by the railroad that Harrison and his hedge fund bosses are busy looting. That will minimize the chances of a terror attack utilizing a "Bakken bomb" in the downtown core of a major city.

Good thinking, Hunter.

But think about this; we send tractor-trailer loads of highly explosive propane and gasoline and myriad other concoctions into urban cores every day, all across North America, with absolutely no security. Never has there been a terror attack on a single one!

What that tells me is that these terror cells we're supposed to be so afraid of simply don't exist.

Nevertheless, that's what Hunter Harrison felt compelled to talk about in his speech to the Canadian Club today, and it sure made good press!... completely took the eye off the fact that CP Rail's recipe for success since the Ackman putsch consists of nothing other than running longer trains faster with fewer employees.

That's a far greater threat to our safety than the imaginary "terrorists" he's waving around.

Tim takes it dry

Where's Eddie Shack when you need him?

Eddie once had the idea that he would be the next Tim Horton. Not on the ice, but in the world 'o donuts. For a few years you saw Eddie Shack donut stores here and there around Ontario, but alas, things never really caught fire for Eddie.

We got the news today that 350 Timmies employees, mostly head office folks with many years of service, got pink-slipped due to the new ownership of the venerable coffee and donut chain. It's all about synergies 'n efficiencies, don't ya know.

Mainly of course it's about making some filthy-rich hedge-fund shit-bags even richer.

So, what do you figure the future prospects are for some loyal employee who has worked at Timmies HQ for the last thirty years? I'd say they're pretty much screwed. Maybe, with a bit of luck, they can get a job passing coffee out the drive-thru window at their local Timmies.

I hit one of those pretty much every time I'm out and about. I'm inclined to boycott Timmies, but here's the problem; the success of the chain was built on the backs of the local franchisees. The gal who has the seven or eight stores in these parts is an incredibly hard-working woman who has a reputation for treating her employees well, and has always been actively engaged in the community. I don't want to boycott her.

If we had such a thing as government for the people, Industry Canada would not have rubber-stamped this deal. We do not have government for the people, however.

We have government for international capital.

The same government that allowed hedgies to destroy 5000 jobs at CP Rail while lining their pockets to the tune of billions.

The same government that allowed Caterpillar to shut down a perfectly viable locomotive manufacturer and destroy 400 well-paid manufacturing jobs in Ontario.

We need government that governs for the people of Canada, not for multinationals, hedge-fund managers, and international finance.

There's an election coming up soon. Obviously we've got to rid ourselves of this loathsome Harper crew. The tragedy is that there are no viable contenders on the horizon. Do you seriously think Trudeau will stand up for Canadian workers? He'll offer more in the way of banal pieties, but that will be that.

Regrettably,  now that the NDP has expunged their roots from their mission statement, I can't see anything changing with Mulcair either.

Canada needs to grow it's own Alexis Tsipras, and soon.

Canada determined to host major rail disaster

And we're talking MAJOR here.

Apparently the sacrifice of 47 lives in Lac Megantic last year was just something we're to expect in the "business as usual" department, because mere days ago former CN boss Hunter Harrison was standing in front of a Senate committee crying about the government's over-reaction to that disaster.

So now we have a new disaster, at the great Canadian railroad that Hunter gutted before he gutted the other great Canadian railroad, and from all accounts it is only a matter of dumb luck that this didn't turn into another Lac Megantic.

Neither Lac Megantic nor this latest close call will silence the de-regulators and privatizers in their campaign for zero oversight of railroads. Sooner or later, one of these Bakken bombs will go off in the downtown of Winnipeg, instead of the outskirts of some out-of-the-way non-entity like Wadena.

Then we'll have hundreds or even thousands of deaths, instead of the mere dozens fried in Lac Megantic.

And you can bet that the Hunter Harrison types who have pocketed vast fortunes in making Canada's railroads less safe, will continue whining about over-regulation.

Globe & Mail sticks it to farmers

Barrie McKenna has a story on the front page of the business section today bemoaning the injustice of Bill C-30, aka the "Fair Rail for Grain Farmers Act".

In McKenna's view, fairness is a zero-sum game. "What's fair for farmers is by implication less fair for every other business that uses the rails to move goods..."

I think what's unfair is writing an article purportedly about the railways' lack of capacity to move grain, without mentioning that CP Rail has idled 400 locomotives and 10,000 rail cars since US hedge fund Pershing Square bullied its way into control of the company. You don't need a PhD in logistics to conclude that would reduce capacity.

And McKenna is either naive or disingenuous when he writes "Ottawa could also have simply let the market fix the problem. When there is excess demand and short supply of rail capacity, freight rates will naturally go up... it would give the railways more revenue to make badly needed investments, helping resolve capacity constraints."

What foolishness! Why would the railways want to reduce capacity constraints that increase freight rates and profitability? What the management of CP Rail has shown is a commitment not to investing in the railway, but in maximizing the amount of money they can take out of it.

Back in March the company announced their intention to spend close to a billion dollars on a share buy back. That's an expenditure that does absolutely nothing for rail capacity and won't get one bushel of grain to market one minute sooner. It's an expenditure designed to boost the share values of stock-holders, nothing more and nothing less.

Bill C-30 may well be a heavy-handed solution to a rare and unforeseen problem, but when the invisible hand of the free market isn't working, sometimes the heavy hand of regulation is needed to move things along.

CP Rail fires engineers, will focus on financial engineering instead

Oopsie!... there goes another CP freight train careening off a bridge in Northern Ontario!

But never mind. Harrison and co. have bigger fish to fry!

Much bigger!

Seems that over the past 100 years as they've sold off 800,000 acres of their original land grants in BC they didn't mean to sell the resource rights along with them.

Those resource rights are worth billions today.

They're going to need them to pay Harrison his next performance bonus.

Dozens of lawyers are going to be making careers out of this for years to come.

Ackman's vision for CP Rail vindicated by record quarterly results!

Read it and snivel, Ackman haters. Bill Ackman's vision, being executed by $50 million man Hunter Harrison, has left the doubters in the dust.

Profit up by over 50%!

Most profitable quarter in the history of the 130 year old company!

This should secure Bill's place in the pantheon of top hedgies once and for all!

Bill Ackman dons mantle of righteousness

Taking a break from his screw-over of Canadian Pacific Railway, "activist investor" Bill Ackman is making headlines with his pledge to drive the value of Herbalife shares to zero.

And even though Ackman claims his Pershing Square hedge fund has accumulated an enormous short position in Herbalife, Bill says he's not doing this for the money. In fact, he says that in the event he makes any, he will donate the gains to charity.

Bill is doing this for "poor people" says Bill. Poor schmucks in Africa who have been beguiled into believing that they too can get rich as a Herbalife distributor.

Hell, I figure anybody that stunned is just a patsy waiting to be fleeced anyway. But it sure is nice that Bill cares.

Frankly, anyone seriously interested in getting rich would be well advised to copy Bill's MO. That "activist investor" shtick has worked wonders for him. All he has to do is take a minority position in a company, and then manipulate the media to publicize the pending shake-down... sorry, I meant to say shake-up of management.

Viola! The publicity itself will produce astonishing results in Ackman's portfolio.

So if you're a young keener with a hunger for riches, forget that Herbalife nonsense.

Gather up a few friends, pool your resources, and become an activist investor like Bill Ackman.  

The rape of CP Rail

CPR stock swooned to new highs today after it was announced that up to a quarter of the work-force will be dismissed over the next coupe of years.

Hedge fund visionary Bill Ackman and his management team have figured out that if you just make the trains longer you can get by with fewer crew.

Guess that's why he's a billionaire and I'm not.

Bill is no ordinary hedge-fund shit-bag. He is an "activist investor," as the papers never tire of telling us. That means he takes a minority stake in a venerable company and uses that to bully the existing management out of the way and install his hand-picked rapists.

Rapist-in-chief at the new CPR is Hunter Harrison, the man who successfully did away with the eight hour day at rival railroad CNR a decade ago.

That's the least of what you can expect at the "new" CPR.