RIP Peter Munk

Never met the guy, but that didn't hold me back from offering sporadic commentary on his various adventures.

And he had plenty of adventures. Check out this story by Peter C. Newman at Macleans from 2014.

I never met Peter Newman either, but I do have a story. Back in one of my past lives I called up the guy who owned the two biggest apartment towers in Guelph at the time.

I said, hey, it's Dieter Neumann, can I have a couple minutes of your time?

He thought I'd said Peter Newman, and he was delighted to give me at least a couple hours. Little did he realize that Peter C. was by then the biographer of choice for Canada's business elite, nor did he realize that owning a few hundred rental units in Guelph was a long way from the "elite."

But back to Mr. Munk.

As an "aristocratic Jew" from Hungary (Newman's words), Munk obviously had some advantages in the game of life, and he was able to take full advantage of those advantages. The mining game will always be awash with rampant naysaying from environmentalists and social justice types of all stripes, who as often as not are funded by your competitors.

I've followed Munk's adventures, at some remove, for a long time, and while his rep was far from spotless, he was a long way from "worst offender" status too.


Happy trails, Mr. Munk!

Revisiting Porto Munkenegro three years on

I noticed with a modicum of alarm that there are now more than five thousand missives posted on this blog. What a humongous waste of time that's been!

But it's been therapeutic for me, at some level...

Take this post on the gangster state of Montenegro from three years ago.

Three years on, Montenegro is now a fully made member of the NATO gang. How is that even possible?

Well, dear reader, the most implausible possibilities have come to pass.

Donald Trump is the president of the United States of America. How the fuck did that happen?

It's hard to know what to say...

My favourite "leftish" web-site, Counterpunch, has of late been inundated with anti-fascist screeds extolling the virtues of beating up fascists in the streets.

Who is a fascist?

Apparently it's anyone who looks like they might have voted for Trump. It's OK to beat those folks up, whether they voted for Trump or not, because after all, if well-meaning folks had beat down more proto-fascists in the streets of Berlin in the 1920's, Hitler would never have happened.

This is a narrative wholly ignorant of the street violence of 1920's Germany. Violence inevitably begets more violence. The parties most amenable to maximum violence will prevail in the end. And then what?

And then fascism, that's what.

This man, Trump, was at one time the toast of the Professional Black Activist class in America. Your google key can find you all sorts of smarmy liberal feel-good celebrations featuring Trump and Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

Today Trump is deemed the embodiment of White Supremacist ideology in America. He's brought fascism to the USA.

Bullshit.

America went fascist long before Trump. One could argue that America was already there by the time Ike made his famous speech warning of the dangers of the military-industrial complex.

Maybe Harvey and Irma will help Americans figure out who they really are...

Tomorrow's basket case today

Big news today in the World 'o Wee Republics; the World Bank has prepped a $300 million loot bag for Montenegro!

Never heard of it? Small wonder, 'cause it's a small wonder alright. A population the size of Toledo Ohio or Portland.

Portland Maine...

20% unemployment. That's the "official" number. Who knows, actual unemployment probably double that. A gangster president who slides into and out of INTERPOL's most wanted on a regular basis. A "democratic" system that seems to keep coughing up aforementioned gangster president.

Not that it's all bad news out of Montenegro. Canadian gold honcho Peter Munk gifted them with a nifty super-yacht port where you can avoid taxes on your yacht fuel. And when you're buying the yacht fuel by the metric tonne like Munk and his pals, and not by the litre, those savings really add up!

And even though the population of the country isn't more than a smallish American city, they do have one thing going for them; a Mediterranean frontage suitable for NATO warship anchorage!

Hence the hand extended in friendship last December to Montenegro's gangster President for Life. Why not join the NATO gang, Mr. President?  

You'll be among friends!

So the announcement this week that the World Bank has a $300 million loan on offer to the bankrupt Republic of Montenegro comes as no surprise.

Sooner or later, of course, the people of Montenegro will come to realise that loan was a loan. They, and not the gangster President, will be expected to make the payments...

Or sell off whatever state assets remain.

Deep fried dandelions

Ya, there is such a thing. Google it.

In my spare time, of which I have an ample supply, I been casting about for something an old retired guy could do that might be at least marginally useful and perhaps make a few dollars.

I've had all kinds of thoughts on the topic.

Bootlegging.

Been awhile since I sat down and hoisted a few with my old pal Don Gregory, but his family used to be one of the prime bootlegging clans in one of the maritime provinces. I won't tell you which one, because hey, maybe they're still at it, and I wouldn't want to spoil the fun.

Here's one thought I had; you know how thirty seconds after closing time there's always folks who rip into the beer store/liquor store parking lot and get all overwrought when they find out they were thirty seconds late? Well, that's a prime customer base that is vastly under-served.

Now, imagine you had your pick-up parked in the corner of that parking lot, with the back piled high with cases of Coors and so on. Those folks who pull in thirty seconds late would far rather pay two times the official price than go home empty handed, don't you think?

Got a couple more angles on the bootlegger theme. Been checking out these home distillery kits you can get on the internet. For a few hundred dollars you can get a rig that'll convert a five pound bag of potatoes into a gallon of vodka.

In 24 hours.

A gallon of vodka translates into 128 fluid ounces. A one ounce shot runs you four or five bucks, most places. That's the key; you can't just turn your gallon a day over to some shady barkeep for twenty or thirty dollars. You gotta get the retail customer who's gonna fork over the five dollars an ounce.

So you open up a little greasy spoon in the low-rent thirsty side of town, and you give the clientèle really good value for the dollar, like a two ounce shot in your Bloody Caesar for five bucks. Suddenly that gallon of vodka is worth what, $300 or so? And like I said, that kit will brew you a gallon a day outta five pounds of potatoes.

Problem with these plans is they are, technically speaking, illegal, although if you're a older white dude who owns a suit you'd probably avoid real time. All I'd have to do is get a suit and tie and I'd be OK. Nevertheless, I've been considering some options that don't run afoul of the law.

The landscaping business. Like roofing, anybody with a pick-up can go into landscaping with an investment of a few hundred dollars. Wanna be a roofer? Buy a ladder and put a sign on the side of your truck. Wanna be a landscaper? Hell, you don't even need the ladder!

And here's my special angle. Since they've been cutting back on support programs and "sheltered workshops" for your folks with "challenges," there's a lot of folks around who get a monthly disability cheque but basically have nothing to do. Hire them for the landscaping crew!

Like, how much brain-power does it require to work a rake or a lawnmower or a Whipper-Snipper? This is a win-win and win again. Your challenged folks will have something to do with their day, plus they won't even notice you forgot to pay their wages!

The only fly in that ointment is the quality of the tools out there today. Time was, you could get a hand-me-down lawnmower for nothing from a relative, put in a new spark-plug, sharpen the blade, and be good to go for another ten years.

Those days are gone. Everything is made to break these days. Back in olden times, some guy would invent something, build it, sell it, and take pride in the fact that it would last a lifetime. He staked his name on building quality shit.

Now all the brands are owned by weenies who don't know shit about how anything works but they got a MBA from Wharton and their hedge fund just bought the company that other guy spent a life-time building up. Before you can say "executive bonus," the manufacturing has been outsourced to China, the pension plan has been looted, the brand has been larded up with debt, and that life-time lawnmower is lucky to last two years.

That's because today, the important thing is no longer how long the tool lasts; it's how much free cash flow it sends up the value chain to some shit-bag chilling out on his Connecticut estate or on his yacht in Palm Beach or Monaco.

Or Montenegro if Peter Munk has his way.

That casts a serious pall over my landscaping plans. Even if you can get the labour for free, it ain't gonna work if you have to replace your equipment every year or two.

So I'm kinda leaning towards borrowing a page out of the playbook of my old pal Amanda Rabinovitch down there in Germantown. She's got her Bite-me Bagels brand franchised across sixteen states and three provinces by now, and she's just bought an estate in Connecticut.

Obviously I'm not gonna cut her grass with another bagel brand, but I detect a huge yawning gap in the market for deep fried dandelions...

Oh ya!

Dieter's Deep Fried Dandelions, here we come!

How is this a "news" story?

The brain trust at CBC News dug deep to come up with this gem.

Yup, Peter Munk done gifted a big dose of inappropriate cash to the Harper gang. It's a promising headline, but when you get into the nitty-gritty of the story, you cannot help but conclude that it's mostly bullshit.

There's plenty of ugly shit in Peter Munk's wake that anyone wanting to write scintillating take-downs could readily dig into. We've done it often enough right here at Falling Downs. But this CBC expose is about what? Exceeding campaign contribution limits by a few hundred dollars?

That's a few hundred dollars, not a few hundred thousand or a few hundred million. CBC's crack team of investigative reporters made at least ten times more in wages whilst researching this story than what that supposed malfeasance amounted to.

This is a story?

Get outta here!

Hard times in Montenegro

Things haven't been going all that great in the tiny statelet of Montenegro. Seems the locals have been camped out in the capital Podgorica for weeks, demanding the resignation of Dictator for Life Milo Djukanovic. They're demanding an end to "corruption and nepotism." Apparently Milo is famous for it.

Yup, things have gone mostly downhill since the triumph of capitalism and democracy in the former province of Yugoslavia. In fact, things are so bad that a lot of folks are joining the great trek to Europe that has been passing through Montenegro on its way to Germany. That would be the great migration from Syria and Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan you've been reading so much about.

But thankfully, it's not all bad news out of Montenegro. The website traveldailynews.com recently reported that the latest phase of Peter Munk's ultra-posh Porto Montenegro development has sold out! That's the little real estate development Barrick Gold founder Peter Munk took on as a legacy project a few years ago.

Munk has taken on a few partners since I first wrote about this venture, and according to the Wikipedia page for Porto Montenegro, they're quite the crew of heavy hitters: Bernie Arnault, a couple of Rothschilds, and Russian super-mogul Oleg Deripaska.

Now, here's what's puzzling me. On the one side, you've got a country wherein the locals are rioting in the streets in a desperate attempt to drive out a corrupt government. Their assessment of the level of corruption could have some merit; Transparency International ranks Montenegro right behind Romania, Senegal, and Swaziland on their corruption index. On the other side, you've got operators long accustomed to doing business in some of the most corrupt environments in the world.

That makes me wonder about a quote that originated in the Globe and Mail and was included in one of my previous missives about Porto Montenegro;

Thanks to Mr. Munk’s adept political skills, fill-ups at Porto Montenegro are about half the price it would be elsewhere in the European Mediterranean. That’s because Mr. Munk negotiated a sweet deal with the Montenegrin government that allows yachties to avoid fuel taxes and excise charges. As a result, big yachts from all over the Med find that it pays to tie up at Porto Montenegro. 

My question is this; a "sweet deal" on yacht fuel has cost the Montenegro treasury millions every year. Was this sweet deal the result of Mr. Munk's "adept political skills?"

Or was it the result of something else?

Fear and loathing and sheer imbecility at the Munk leader's debate

You gotta feel Peter Munk's pain. A couple of years ago he had the biggest gold mining company in the world. Now he's got the "Munk Debates."

Tonight's iteration of that over-reaching franchise is billed as the "Munk Leader's Debate," and features the three old boy leaders while ignoring the new girl, Green Party leader Elizabeth May.

Near as I can tell, the only winner in this "debate" was the unctuous moderator, "social entrepreneur" and careerist extraordinaire Rudyard Griffiths. He was obviously enjoying his most recent fifteen minutes of fame.

I have a hunch that a lot of tickets for this gig were sold via the Ukrainian-Canadian Council. How else to explain the undue prominence given that tired trope, "Putin's aggression?"

Before watching this I read the texts of both Obama's and Putin's speeches at the UNGA. Sure, Obama was obliged to toss in a few bromides about how it's unacceptable for big countries to run roughshod over small ones, but absolutely no one in the place takes that seriously.

Who runs over more small countries? The USA or Russia? And how many refugees are streaming out of Crimea?

The Israel-pandering was quite distasteful too. Apparently none of these charlatans can grasp the fact that it's possible to be "pro-Israel" while being vehemently anti-Netanyahu, anti-settlement, and anti-Likud. In fact, the long-term viability of Israel will depend on allies who are capable of doing just that.

Who won the debate?

Elizabeth May, simply by not disgracing herself by being a part of it.

John Baird embarks on "stuff-my-pockets" phase of career

After two decades as a high-profile political operator, John Baird has bid adieux to public service.

He's moving on. Last week we learned he had signed on as an "International Strategic Advisor" to Barrick Gold, a "job" that pays well into the six numbers for the chore of attending one or two meetings a year.

When I told Peter Munk 15 years ago that I was willing to be a strategic advisor for a mere $75k a year, he laughed me out of his office.

I even gave him a bit of free strategic advice; a free sample as it were. Put Pascua Lama on ice, I said. It's gonna be a black hole, a money pit.

Get the fuck outta here, he says to me.

Woulda saved him billions to heed my advice.

Back to Baird. Last week Barrick Gold. This week Canadian Pacific. Yup, Bullshittin' Baird is now a director of the new and improved CPR, which also pays well into the six numbers for a couple meetings a year.

He'll feel right at home there. After all, when you listen to Hunter Harrison's bullshit 'n bluster, it's almost like you're listening to a more senile version of Baird.

And you can't blame Baird for looking out for his pocket book. After twenty-plus years of public service, his parliamentary pension is a paltry $65,000 per. Mind you, he must have something coming from Ontario, where he spent some time learning his chops at the feet of Mean Mike Harris, but still, he's gonna have hardly enough to pay for a decent bachelor pad on Bank Street.

But lets not fret. We're up to three or four meetings a year in return for half a million in the bank, and by my math I figure he can still squeeze a couple dozen more directorships into his schedule. A directorship with one of Sheldon Adelson's operations is a no-brainer; a thank-you for the yeoman's work he did promoting Likud and slandering Iran.

Plus, while he's never going to be an A-lister on the public speakers circuit, you can see him making a tidy 25-50k per engagement, mainly due to his extravagantly high profile as Minister of Foreign Affairs, a profile largely earned by being the most inept FM in Canada's history.

Oddly enough, at Barrick he'll be joined by the ultimate carpet-bagger, the Newtster, who managed to coax his net worth from twenty-nine dollars when he entered public service, to multiple millions today.

In the great US political system you don't have to retire before lining your pockets!

Where to gas up your yacht for cheap while cruising the Mediterranean

When last we looked in on octogenarian Canadian tycoon Peter Munk, he had just purchased the impoverished country of Montenegro. Plans were afoot to reboot the residual rump state, leftover from the breakup of Yugoslavia, into an independent homeland for stateless wanderers in need of casinos, tax shelters, and berths for their mega-yachts.

Still smarting from his forced retirement from the company he founded, Barrick Gold, Munk is consoling himself with this retirement project  in the Bay of Kotor. And, unlike Barrick, which has shed about two thirds of its value over the past three years, things seem to be moving in the right direction in Porto Munkenegro.

Yacht berths are leased at 95% capacity, the new five star Munk Meridien Hotel is now open, and hundreds of locals have found gainful employment swabbing decks, changing sheets, and otherwise servicing the needs of the super-rich.

And leave it to the ever-crafty Munk to come up with a winning strategy to lure the mega-yachts away from Monaco - cheap gas!

 Thanks to Mr. Munk’s adept political skills, fill-ups at Porto Montenegro are about half the price it would be elsewhere in the European Mediterranean. That’s because Mr. Munk negotiated a sweet deal with the Montenegrin government that allows yachties to avoid fuel taxes and excise charges. As a result, big yachts from all over the Med find that it pays to tie up at Porto Montenegro. 

Yup, that's how they roll in the bigs! You use your "political skills" to cut a deal on fuel taxes that 
cheats a near-bankrupt state out of revenue... hey, an octogenarian maybe, but he still has his chops!


And best of all, he'll be leaving a legacy that's about more than dispossessed peasants and leaking 
tailing ponds.

Peter Munk's Midas touch is but a fading memory

You remember Mr. Munk. The guy who built Clairtone into an international brand and then bailed, leaving the shareholders holding the bag as the company went tits-up.

Munk had a number of resurrections and finally hit a homer with Barrick Gold, now the worlds biggest gold producer.

Also the world's most indebted gold producer. It has invested sums in its Pascua Lama mine in South America that are the equivalent of half the market cap of the company.

Speaking of market cap, it's about half of where it was a year ago.

And twice what it will be a year from now.

The pesky natives down there in South America just keep throwing up one roadblock after another. The latest setback was a $16 million fine levied on the company by the government of Chile, normally considered miner friendly.

You know you're in trouble when the friendlies are screwing you over.

Here on the home front Munk hasn't helped himself by underwriting foolishness like the "Munk Debates." These are the folks, loosely affiliated with the Munk Centre for Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, who bring in "public intellectuals" for public debates.

Oddly enough, Toronto is so desperate to be seen as a "world-class city" that they can actually sell out Roy Thompson Hall for these debates.

When they had a debate about God, they hired in Tony Blair to speak for God.

Next week they've got Newt Gingrich coming in.

That's right; the Newtster. Public intellectual.

Stop laughing; tickets are sold out!

The joke is obviously on Toronto... and on Peter Munk.

north of superior

I'm sitting at my campfire, overlooking the Little Pic River and Lake Superior. A freight train is chugging along a rock cut overhead. It's beautiful here.

This is a trip I need to make every couple of years. A pilgrimage.

Seventy something years ago my grandfather got a job here, logging along the Little Pic.

There aren't a lot of jobs up here anymore. Yesterday I bought the local paper at a variety store in Marathon. The clerk was a guy in his mid fifties. Until a couple of years ago he worked at the Marathon paper mill.

A good gig. Sixty thousand a year before overtime. The mill is closed now. When I was up here 25 years ago the place was booming. Construction workers from the big gold mines on the other side of Marathon lived in the park I'm camping at.

At the tourist info center just before Marathon I learned that Barick Gold is still pulling 4-500 thousand ounces of gold out of the ground here every year. But the construction boom is long past and Barick can do this with just a few hundred workers.

Another train goes by. There are probably campers who would find this distracting. I find them beautiful. Even more, they remind me of what we used to be able to achieve in this country.

Imagine, a railway from coast to coast!

Canada was able to do this 130 years ago. We could never do it today.

That's progress.

The front page story in the local paper is all about Barick Gold giving the local medical center a contribution of $100,000. Just like that - no strings attached.

One hundred grand.

Oh, maybe they'll have to call it the Munk Medical Center.

Peter Munk survived the shame of bankruptcy and reinvented himself as the founder of Barick Gold. The 500,000 ounces they get out of their Marathon mine translates into something around three quarters of a billion dollars a year.

This gift to the Marathon Medical Centre is emblematic of the Canadian spirit; great Canadians don't just take and take and take, they also give back.

So Peter Munk reinvented himself as a gold miner.

Buddy at the variety store reinvented himself as a variety store clerk, and my grandfather, after being drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939, reinvented himself as a logger.

Another train.

Imagine, a railway from coast to coast! If we tried that today it would never happen.

Today it takes twenty years of planning for 10 kilometers of subway. Train tracks across the country?

I figure at least a hundred years for the feasibility studies. Then the environmental impact studies.

Imagine all the sensitive wetlands a trans-Canada railway has to cross!

At least a couple of hundred years for that.

Then the aboriginal land claims...

In Nippigon, a couple of hours drive west, I ask the clerk in the liquor store where  locals go to work.

Fort McMurray she says. She's not trying to be funny.

Nippigon is hurting. All the towns along the north of Superior are hurting.

The jobs are gone. Except the few hundred still digging gold out of the ground for Peter Munk.

It seems a lifetime ago, but I remember Mulroney campaigning on his "job jobs jobs NAFTA jobs jobs jobs NAFTA" platform in 84.

Sounded fishy to me.

You mean our stupid brown brothers south of the Rio Grande only want the shit jobs?

We're gonna keep all the good ones?

Oh yes, not only keep all the good ones; there'll be more more more!

Well, people voted for that.

That's democracy, I guess.

Another train.

Mulroney probably gets a bad rap.

The mere mention of his name conjures up images of cash-stuffed envelopes being furtively passed from hand to hand in sleazy hotel rooms.

In the first place, and let's do Mulroney justice here, they weren't sleazy hotel rooms - they were the poshest of posh.

Secondly, I think we forget the leadership role that Brian Mulroney played in the boycott of apartheid South Africa.

Those were turbulent times.

Nelson Mandela had been jailed as a terrorist for many years, and although that was before the Palestinians gave terrorism a bad name, it still took courage for a world leader to stand up for him.

Brian Mulroney took that stand.

Apartheid South Africa had one main export - the Krugerrand. The Krugerrand was the gold coin of choice for people around the world who needed to hoard gold.

I don't know why people need to squirrel away gold - I'm sure there are lots of legitimate reasons. When Brian Mulroney took his stand against apartheid, the Krugerrand had but one competitor - the Canadian maple leaf gold coin.

Here's another train.

When I first heard these trains many years ago I couldn't figure out why the brakes were squealing at the same time as the engines were pulling. Then I realized that the back half of the train was still going downhill while half a mile ahead the engines were already pulling uphill. They are a marvel, these trains.

So Buddy at the variety store thinks the mill jobs might come back. Apparently some politicians together with some wheeler-dealer types have a plan afloat that will use the mill to make bio-fuel to use in Ontario's coal fired electricity generating plants.

I wish him well.

So NAFTA came in.

The jobs on the north shore of Superior are gone.

The factories in the south are gone to Mexico.

Brian Mulroney left politics and became a director of Barick Gold.

Peter Munk has the biggest gold company in the word.

Nelson Mendela got out of jail and became President of South Africa. He's celebrating his 93 birthday today. All's well that ends well.

Except for Buddy at the variety store, maybe, but we'll see.

So my grandfather gets drafted, goes to war, and gets captured in the first week. My other grandfather gets sent to the eastern front and freezes to death in a snowdrift.

Fate.

Here on the north shore the German POWs considered themselves the luckiest Germans in the world.

Every morning a guard would take twenty prisoners out for a nature hike. You can see pictures of the guards and prisoners at the information center at Neys Provincial Park.

The prisoners had a handball club, orchestra, boxing team, wrestling team... escape attempts were rare indeed.

You can see it in the pictures...

Fate.

These men, some guards, some prisoners, were all in this together. If not for fate, they'd have been somewhere in Europe trying to kill each other.

I hear another train.

I don't think we could build a railway across Canada today.