Alberta's big polluters demand 500 millions in taxpayer money to clean up their mess

I see where the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, one of many oil industry lobby groups, has the begging bowl out for a cool half billion!

Apparently there's at least 75,000 defunct oil and gas wells scattered about Alberta that were never properly decommissioned by the folks who drilled them.

Wonder what Gwyn Morgan has to say about that?

Pauline Marois quits Quebec election campaign, joins Ehud Olmert in creating new investment bank

M&O Investment Bank will specialize in negotiating contracts between infrastructure providers and governments throughout the Middle East and in Quebec.

Speaking to reporters in Quebec City this evening, Ms. Marois said " I've done all I can for the people of Quebec; it's time I did something for myself. I owe it to my children."

Speaking to reporters in Tel Aviv this evening, Mr. Olmert said "I've done everything I can for the people of Israel; it's time I did something for myself. I owe it to my children."

It is rumoured that Canadian Gwynn Morgan, former Chair of Canadian infrastructure big dog SNC-Lavalin and noted anti-corruption campaigner, will be CEO of the new investment bank.

Speaking to reporters in Canada, Morgan said "I've done enough for these sanctimonious assholes; it's time I did something for myself. I owe it to my grandchildren."

The Susan Rice double indemnity dilemma; she's black and rich

The think tank here at Falling Downs has been prognosticating that Susan Rice will never take over the Sec of State file because she's black. It can't possibly happen as long as there's a black dude in the White House. With a white Mormon in the White House, it was a possibility, but that post is toast for now. That's just too much black on America's face to the world.

Turns out there's another reason she won't make it. She's rich. That in itself is not reason to be excluded from high office of course. In fact, it's often been seen as an advantage. But God help you if you're black and rich!

That's just not the natural order of things in America!

And not only that; it seems that in her multi-million dollar stock portfolio she has a fondness for Canadian tar sands stocks and Canadian pipeline stocks. Stocks that will go up up up when that Keystone pipeline gets the green light.

Great!

Now all those old white racists in the Senate who weren't going to ratify her nomination under any circumstances will be able to point to her conflicts of interest instead of the color of her skin.

The blissful certainties of a black-and-white world

Gwyn Morgan, according to the brief bio beneath his byline in the Globe and Mail, is "a Canadian business leader and a director of two global corporations".

Yesterday Morgan's astute analysis cut straight to the heart of the global economic crisis. The world is divided into two camps. On the one side you have the "givers". These would be your hard-working right-voting folks; entrepreneurs and wealth creators.

On the other side is your left-tilting grab-bag of liberals, Democrats, socialists of all stripes, welfare cheats, drug addicts, the sick, the halt, the lame, the weak of back and slow of mind, et. cetra. These are of course the "takers".

Quoting reverently from Glenn Beck's idol Friedrich Hayek, Morgan warns the reader that the long-suffering "givers" are on the verge of giving up. It's clear to Morgan that the insatiable demands of the "takers" are threatening the very future of the free enterprise model, which history has irrefutably proven to be superior. He cites two vastly over-simplified examples.

Look at Germany when the wall went down. Free-enterprisers on the one side. A socialist wasteland on the other. Germany was able to absorb those Eastern slackers and become the manufacturing powerhouse of Europe, but now all these "takers" in Greece and Spain threaten to break the back of the German miracle.

He finds an example in Canada as well. Look at those student protesters in Quebec. Talk about thankless "takers"! The lowest tuition in the land and yet they march for lower tuition?

And the "givers" in his Canadian scenario are the tax-payers of Alberta, who work tirelessly digging their self-created oil wealth out of the ground so that they can provide the "lions share" of the 7 billion in equalization payments that the rest of us bestow on Quebec every year.

But no economic analysis by this Fraser Institute regular is complete without a gratuitous slap at the NDP, the former socialist party with aspirations to form a government in the event that Canadians ever wake up and smell the Harper.

So Morgan has got the pro-labour NDP leader Thomas Mulcair marching to the barricades with the Montreal students. There they go, students and unionists arm in arm, rallying to "replace free-market capitalism with government controlled socialism".

The final triumph of the "takers" over the "givers".

Then it struck me that both the students and the NDP leader would be more than comfortable in Germany!

No tuition!

Government mandated union representation on corporate boards!

And suddenly I realized that it's not such a black-and-white world after all. Maybe there are other options besides "free-market capitalism" and "government mandated socialism".

Maybe a government regulated capitalism?

Perhaps we should embrace the German model, Mr. Morgan!

But his economic analyses aren't all that's dodgy about Gwyn Morgan.

In the course of his business career Morgan built Encana into North America's second largest natural gas company, leaving a trail of despoiled communities all over the continent as a result of his wholesale embrace of industrial-scale fracking practices.

Since leaving Encana he has become Chairman of the Board of SNC-Lavalin, the Canadian conglomerate currently under a cloud of suspicion over corruption in Bangladesh, Mexico, Libya and Switzerland.

And here's the punch line; he's on the speakers circuit these days, giving lectures around the world on the topic of business ethics!