Doing the Woke Watusi right

On page B7 of today's Globe and Mail there is a full page advert placed by one of Canada's lesser known business schools, Goodman at Brock University. "Congratulations to the Goodman School of Business Class of 2023." And congrats to Brock's ad agency for doing the Woke Watusi right! The ad provides no names with pictures of any grads, but instead has a generic photo of a highly diverse (3 women 1 guy, at least 3 of the four "grads" are non-white) group of supposed graduates. That's a damned fine look in the Age of Woke; here at the Goodman School of Business we're 75% female and 75% BIPOC! Meanwhile, on B5 we find a full page ad from Ivey Business School at Western, rated by Bloomberg as the top business school in all of Canada. The folks at Ivey want to brag up Canada's top entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, they chose to provide names and photos of their Class of 2023 top entrepreneurs, and talk about an epic diversity fail! 41 photos. 10 women and 31 dudes, one of whom is non-white. Over 75% male and 97.5% white isn't a good look at all! Western obviously remains mired in institutionalized systemic racism!

Enough about NAFTA

The folks at the Toronto Star are mighty pleased with themselves today. Seems their official Trump fib-tracker, Daniel Dale, has been in DC long enough now to have cultivated a source, apparently at Bloomberg, and after a year and a half, he's finally found himself a scoop!

More than a scoop... a BOMBSHELL!

You certainly don't find those in the Star everyday!

The Bloomberg source told Dale that in off-the-record remarks Trump had told them that he's not about to make any compromises with the Canadian side.

So the talks are over for now, the "deadline" not met.


The reason there was a deadline is because the Americans are keen to push this "new" NAFTA through before the newly elected, more leftish, less corrupt president Obrador takes office in December. Nieto is seen as an easy mark in Washington, whereas Obrador might actually stand up for the interests of Mexicans.

No real danger of Canadian team Trudeau-Freeland standing up for Canadian workers. Or Canadian dairy farmers, for that matter. Selling-out has been the modus operandi of both Canadian ruling parties since at least the Avro Arrow era, so that's nothing new. Canada has never really had an authentic industrial policy, settling instead for a branch-plant economic model.

NAFTA was the most noxious bone jammed up the keister of Canada's working class during my life-time. It devastated the industrial heartland of southern Ontario. Just one example; Magna, the Canadian auto-parts giant, built their first Mexican facility in the early nineties. Today they have 32 plants there and employ 28,000 Mexicans. Where are the Canadians who have benefited from this? In the corporate offices and on the shareholder list, that's where.

That reality has nonetheless never stood in the way of Canada's elite opinion makers crowing about the glories of NAFTA. This should not come as a surprise. After all, these are the same people who believe that working at an Amazon warehouse for $30,000 a year is a "good solid middle-class job."

Unfortunately, when our craven toadies at the top have ensured our branch-plant status for generations, they don't hold much of a hand in these renegotiations. As much as we enjoy mocking Trump, he's evidently smart enough to have figured this out.

So Justin and Chrystia, while trying to do their best to make their inevitable capitulation look like a good deal for Canada, have been derailed by Daniel Dale's bombshell.


Does anybody at the Star really believe that we're going to get a better deal next week or next month?

Putin's billions

Just last week we were shocked to learn that a secret British inquiry into the death of former Russian secret agent Alexander Litvinenko ten years ago concluded that his demise was "probably" approved by Bad Vlad.

This week the news gets even worse; not only is Putin probably responsible for the death of Litvinenko, he's probably corrupt as well! Yup the tried, tested, and possibly somewhat true fable of Putin's billions is making its annual fly-past!

Here's today's story a year ago at Business Insider; Putin worth $200 billions.

Here's Bloomberg in 2013; Vladimir Putin: the richest man on earth.

And here's The Guardian speculating about Bad Vlad's billions all the way back in 2007!

So why does this old story, notably devoid of any actual facts, reappear on such a regular basis? Easy! It takes the Western news consumer's eye off what's actually going on in the world. Right now Putin is playing a role in two unfolding stories.

In the US, where Putin-phobia is a well-established psychosis, the political establishment is using Putin as a stick with which to beat Donald Trump. Yup, Trump must be nutso 'cause he says he admires Putin. Let's remind the public just what a murderous embezzling whack job this Putin chap is and hopefully they'll come to their senses about Trump. Worth a try at least.

The other story giving our elites a spot of indigestion is the exposure of our dear friend, ally, and NATO partner, the wily Erdogan, as a back-stabbing double-dealing fraud. Since Russia joined the war on ISIS in September, it's become completely obvious that Erdogan's "war on terror" has not been on ISIS at all, but on the Kurds, generally considered "our" most effective anti-ISIS ground forces. That's a story that could shake NATO to its foundations...

Heck, if enough folks ask enough questions, this could throw the entire NATO project into disrepute!

Quick! Let's wave Putin's billions around for a few days to get their minds off the real story.

Bloomberg has bad news for Trump

Check out this headline at Bloomberg; Trump is losing the Davos primary among his fellow billionaires.

Yup, there's billionaires at Davos who are pretty darned sure Trump's gonna be gunning for them once he's done with the Muslims and the Mexicans!

How would that be a bad thing? Oh, for the billionaires maybe, but it's high time America stopped catering to the 1% anyway...

Or the .001%.

Anyway, the Davos primary isn't the one that matters...

While have-not states like Kentucky are burning their grow-ops, have-more states like Washington and Colorado are taxing them

This photo-essay at Bloomberg is ironic on several levels.

First off, it's got great thought-provoking photos like this one;



Yup, that's a law-enforcement official dousing a pile 'o pot with gasoline, the better to set it aflame.

Dude! If you wanna burn weed, stick it in a pipe or something!

What a waste!

So here's some food for thought. Have you ever thought that the reason some states (like, just to arbitrarily pick a couple of high-performance states out of the air at random; Colorado and Washington) habitually show up at the high end of the quality-of-life indices, and other states (again, completely random; Kentucky and West Virginia) habitually show up at the bottom, might have something to do with the average IQ of the denizens of those states?

Now I don't mean to offend my relations in Kentucky, but they got a lot of somewhat dopey folks among them, which I think might be at least partially the result of a) cousins marrying cousins, and b) marrying at age 15.

Meanwhile, over in your have-more states of Colorado and Washington, instead of spending money fighting the weed 'o wisdom, they're MAKING money taxing it! Oddly enough, these states also vastly out-perform the have-nots in educational achievement etc.

Coincidence?

I think not...

This is what Darwin was talking about.

Even Bloomberg recognizes that Koch brothers are dirtbags

Here's a cover from Bloomberg Markets circa 2011.

And that's not all. Guess who's behind the big push for that Keystone pipeline? Those Canadian tar sludge developments are as much about Koch as they are about Canada.

So those GOP contenders who weren't invited to the shindig in California this weekend should see that as a badge of honour.
 
There's plenty more out there; keep reading!

Hillary Clinton; Secretary of State or Secretary of Sales?

While it's long been received truth that the US government primarily governs in the interests and at the pleasure of the corporate elite, you might be surprised at how explicit the relationship between government and big business is at the highest levels.

Hillary Clinton, the most traveled Secretary of State in history, does much of that traveling on behalf of corporate interests she is lobbying for. According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek  Clinton lobbies foreign governments around the world on behalf of US corporations like Westinghouse, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing.

The dynamics of that lobbying relationship aren't hard to discern. If the government of a  foreign country needs something from the US, something like foreign aid, back-up in a squabble with a neighbor, or access to the American market, there is an obvious quid pro quo.

Sign a multi-billion contract for Dreamliners or fighter jets or a new nuke plant, and Sam's your uncle. Otherwise, forget about it.

All those demands on her time from the lobbying activities may have caused Clinton to spread herself a little thin. That could explain the complete disarray in America's Syria policy. It could also explain why she dropped the ball on the Benghazi file.

But at least we know Hillary will be well looked after by the corporate clients she has been serving as Secretary of Sales when she retires.

666

666 million dollars that is.

That's the number the original story at Bloomberg News gave when they first reported the buyout of Duff and Phelps.

I notice that they have since amended that to $665.5 million. Maybe some mid-level editor glanced at the headline and said WTF! We're gonna have the NWO crowd crawling all over us!

No matter. Rounded that still ends up as 666.

And you're not going to escape the New World Order types anyway. Look who's buying Duff and Phelps.

A consortium.

A consortium led by Carlyle Group!

And if that's not enough, the consortium includes the Edmond de Rothschild Group!

Carlyle. Rothschild. 666 million. I couldn't make this stuff up!

I'm heading out back to check on the crop circles...

Why your kid owes 40k in student loans

Here's a timely discussion about why post-secondary education is out of reach for more and more regular folks.

Spending on university administration has grown at twice the rate of spending on research and teaching for the last twenty years. There's a reason for that.

The more administrators you have, the more administrators you need. Administrators like to liaise with other administrators. They need to do this in order to come up with mission statements and policy directives and protocols. Administrators love protocols, even though most people who are not administrators would not recognize a protocol if it peed on their shoes.

What administrators prefer not to do is spend time with grubby and often liberal teaching faculty. Why? Because in many cases those people actually have to spend time with students...

EW!!!...YUCK!!!!

Long gone are the days when a small local university made do with a principal/president/chancellor and his immediate secretarial staff. In the modern palace of wisdom entire office buildings are dedicated to legions of administrators who never in the course of a forty year career will have to "interface" with a stinky smelly student. Not even a "Vice President of Diversity" would consider the supplications of a maligned student without going through several layers of intermediaries.

It's a much-needed discussion, especially at a time when more degree-holding graduates are working at Wal-mart than ever before.