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!