How is underwear not "essential?"

Great news from the front lines of the pandemic! I was heading into town to pick up my blood pressure meds, and the CBC news was on the radio. New covid cases at their lowest since last September! The presenter sounded almost euphoric.

Shoppers Drug Mart has been open for the duration. That makes sense. People need their meds. While you're in the store you can pick up a few things that may not be quite as life-or-death as your meds. Essentials like lip gloss, eyeliner, nail polish. That makes sense too. After all, you're blowing your germs around the place anyway, so what difference could it possibly make?

With so much good covid news I thought I'd swing by Giant Tiger to see if they were still curbside pickup. Since that a-hole hedge-fund manager in Florida killed Sears Canada, Giant Tiger's been my go-to spot for socks and underwear. That last three-pack of Fruit of the Looms I bought before covid are beyond threadbare, to the point where, even if they were fresh out of the wash, their disgraceful appearance would shame the family name for years to come were I to suffer an unexpected trip to the hospital.

There's people going in and out! Alrighty! New undies at last!

I mask up and head in with a bounce in my step... and you wouldn't friggin' believe it; they've blocked off the entire store with yellow caution tape except half a dozen food aisles at the back. 

To my way of thinking, undershorts are every bit as essential as eyeliner and nail-polish. In fact, reasonable people will agree underpants are every bit  as important as shoes. Just like shoes keep dogshit off your feet, shorts keep skid-marks off your Levis. You're already in the store. If you grab some tinned tuna and a box of cereal, how will anyone be put at increased risk if you pick up a three-pack of Fruit of the Looms on your way out?

The shoe stores have been closed too!

Strikes me as ridiculous. But, I'm not an expert, so what do I know...

Speaking of experts, I guess now that our numbers are at record lows those of us who've spent the past year denigrating them owe them an apology.

I'm sorry, experts.

But I do wonder about one thing. This record low number of new cases once again happens to happily coincide with a record low number of tests. In January daily testing peaked at over 75,000 daily. Yesterday Ontario did barely 15,000.

Gee, who would've expected case numbers to go down when you do 80% less testing?

What we're talking about when we talk about "rule of law"

As every good Canuck knows, nobody does rule of law rulier or lawier than we do. Look up "rule of law" in the encyclopedia and there's a picture of a little beaver waving the Maple Leaf.

That's us!

"Rule of law" has become a get-out-of-jail-free card for those who make our laws and rules.

Wanna slap Meng Wanzhou in the slammer for a couple years to disabuse the Yellow Peril of their fantasies about 5G dominance? Rule of law! We had no choice!

A jerk-off US hedge-fund titan loots Sears Canada for billions and leaves 16,000 Canadian pensioners in the lurch? Rule of law! We had no choice!

Another US hedge-fund titan adds billions to the value of CP Rail by killing over five thousand excellent Canadian working class jobs. We are so grateful we thank Bill Ackman for making this Canadian icon more efficient, and gift him a couple of billions as a token of our gratitude.

We had no choice... rule of law!

But nothing throws into relief our attachment to rule of law quite like the Wet'suwet'en debacle. At least we've cleared up one of the great mysteries of this rule-of-law juggernaut.

When we talk about rule of law, we talk about the rule of White Man's Law.

Yup, all of Justin's vacuous twaddle about reconciliation and mutual respect and nation-to-nation dialogue is going down the shitter even as I type these words.

Now he's asking  our FN neighbours, living with the legacy of 400 years of betrayal and broken promises, to be patient. At least he's being even-handed; that's also what he's asking of the non-natives who have been inconvenienced by the rail blockade for a couple weeks.

We are, after all, a fair and just nation, governed by the rule of law...

Eddie Lampert: mendacious greedbag or just a moron?

In The looting of Sears Canada I blamed the mendacious greedbag Ed Lampert for the demise of Sears Canada, once my favourite place to shop for socks and lawnmowers.

Aside from forcing me to change my shopping habits, Shithead Ed has also forced Sears Canada's 16,000 retirees to change theirs... Ya, you work hard your whole life, and whoopsie, their goes your pension!

Here's Eddie's 288 foot boat, the Fountainhead.



You don't top up that puppy with change you found under the couch cushions. Sorry pensioners!

But in fairness, Ed wasn't just buying a super-yacht with those sumptuous dividends he was siphoning out of Sears Canada, he also wasted billions on share buybacks of the parent company, and we know where that ended...

 In bankruptcy!

That briefly led me to suspect that perhaps Ed wasn't just a money-grubbing Ayn Rand acolyte who only cared about Ed. Maybe he was just stupid?

Then along comes Eddie to buy the company he bankrupted out of bankruptcy for $5.2 billion! At the time Sears filed for bankruptcy they claimed $6.1 billion in assets and $11 billion in liabilities. In other words, by running the company through bankruptcy court, Lampert has emerged with the assets intact and the liabilities gone!

Ayn Rand would be proud, and the rest of us can be confident that, no, Ed Lampert is not a moron.


But he is an exceptionally mendacious greedbag.

Corporate rule

Here's a question; why has our government worked so hard to make a "deferred prosecution agreement" (DPA) available to SNC-Lavalin?

Here's another one; why has no mainstream media outlet ever investigated how hedge fund sharpie Gerald Schwartz was able to more than double the value of Husky Injection Molding in less than four years?

And another; why was Hunter Harrison universally lauded as a hero in our mainstream Canadian media for eliminating over 5,000 excellent working class jobs at CPR?

Here are some tentative answers.

The purpose of a DPA is to allow corporate entities that engage in bribery, bid-rigging, and other nefarious business practices to get off by paying a fine instead of being charged with a crime. Corporations love it! Paying the fine becomes just another cost of doing business, just like the original bribe. The Trudeau government's rationale for having slipped a DPA provision into law last year, in the back pages of an omnibus budget bill, is that Canada needs to have a level playing field vis-a-vis our competitors. Ergo, if the UK and US go easy on corporate crooks, we must too, or we won't be competitive.

Husky was the life's passion of Robert Schad, a German immigrant who started out with a little machine shop in the mid 50's. He famously made Husky one of the most desirable workplaces in Canada by providing not only good wages, but unprecedented employee perks, from free meals to free day-care to on site gyms. Getting on in years, he sold his baby to Gerald Schwartz's Onex in 2007 for just under a billion dollars.

Less than four years later, Schwartz sold Husky on to another hedge fund for two billion. How did Schwartz add a billion dollars in value to the company that Robert Schad had spent a lifetime building up? He ripped out all that feel-good stuff that detracts from the bottom line, that's how. That's what "building value" looks like in the world of hedge fund operators. 

That's appalling, disgusting, scandalous... but Gerald Schwartz is a Very Big Deal who just donated $100,000,000 to the University of Toronto. No newspaper publisher, let alone reporter, is going to touch that story with a fifty foot pole, because it would be their last story.

Canadian news media lapped up every drop of mendacious idiocy that dripped from Hunter Harrison's lips as Harrison and his hedge fund boss Bill Ackman destroyed more than 5,000 working class jobs at the iconic railroad. Harrison was "the new sheriff in town," don't you know. He was going to "change the culture" at CPR.

And he did. He replaced a culture of collegiality with a culture of fear, and he and Ackman walked away with a cool two billion for their troubles. For that, they are regarded as business geniuses by our business press.

That's what corporate rule looks like. There are innumerable case studies to choose from. Eddie Lampert looted Sears Canada to the tune of billions, leaving 16,000 pensioners in the lurch, but our media claim the company failed because of changing consumer tastes and inept management. The same corporate media still proclaim NAFTA a resounding success, even as all evidence shows it decimated Canada's manufacturing sector.

Which brings us to our current Prime Minister. He serves as an invaluable cover for the greedbags who call the shots behind the scenes. All the talk about feminism and diversity and human rights is designed to take our eye off the fact that he's 100% committed to corporate rule.

Here's a bold prediction. SNC-Lavalin will yet get their DPA. Our media, both corporate and the state broadcaster, will keep hammering away at the credibility of JWR and the (completely bogus) claim that 9,000 jobs are at risk.


Corporate rule will prevail.

Why the old order is doomed

The "American Dream" is dead.

And it's not just dead in America. Thanks to the ubiquity of US pop culture and its usurpation of native cultures around the world, the death of the American Dream has global repercussions.

Hard work and making sure your kids get a decent education, so that they'll make an even better go of things, well, that might still work today, if you're lucky.

But in all probability, it will not.

Hard work don't mean shit if the place you worked for thirty years gets bought and stripped bare by the hedgies. That happens over and over again, and it's just considered business as usual. Look at what happened to Sears Canada once that asshole in Florida got his hands on it.

Goodbye pensions! Goodbye jobs!

As for getting an education, good luck with that.

The recent Ivy League admissions scandal is just a step beyond what always goes on. Certain schools have a more prestigious degree than others, and that can make all the difference in a career. The stupid children of the rich are far more likely to get into those schools than the smart children of the poor.

Not that all rich kids are stupid, and of course poor folks have lots of stupid kids too. But unless you've got the right credentials from the right place, that university degree you owe $40,000 in student loans on is gonna take a big bite out of your paycheck as a barista or an Uber driver.


And, horror of horrors, the kids are figuring this out.

Sunny Daze Trudeau says tough sh@t to pensioners screwed by Sears Canada bankruptcy

Bad news is apparently more palatable when it's delivered by a guy in a turban. That's why PM Sunny Daze had Navdeep Bains break the news that his government has no plans to protect workers from engineered bankruptcies like the flame-out we're witnessing at Sears Canada.

They are, however, "open to consultations."

Great!

I'm sure they're busy "consulting" half a dozen business lobby groups even as you read these words.

Don't hold your breath.

The looting of Sears Canada

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.