The difference between Chinese billionaires and American billionaires

In China, the billionaires function at the pleasure of the state. If and when their interests are deemed incompatible with the interests of the state, bad shit happens. Check out this story from the Wall Street Journal; China hands death sentence to hedge-fund manager. 

In America, on the other hand, government functions at the pleasure of the billionaires. When is the last time you heard about a corrupt "asset manager" getting a death sentence in the USA?

The next time will be the first time. 

Who do you trust more, communists or billionaires?

Fluffy's fried

Watched the Jody Wilson-Raybould hearing from Ottawa for a spell this evening. I think PM Fluffy's days are numbered. JWR exudes a confidence and sincerity that Justin has long lost, especially the sincerity part. Justin's hypocrisy has been exposed for all the land to see. The PM who is all about keeping politics out of the judicial system when he's doing gopher work for Donald Trump (in the Huawei case) has no qualms at all about arm-twisting his Justice minister in the SNC-Lavalin affair.

I think Trudeau should resign. The Liberal Party should have a leadership convention, which JWR could readily win, and then they'd have a chance in October. Otherwise, they're screwed.

And we'd be screwed too, because do you really think things have a snowball's chance in hell of improving under a PM Scheer?

Nope!

Ideally, we'd have a party to the left of the Liberals with a little more appeal than what we see there, but I'm not hopeful.

As for those DPA laws, how is it conceivably a "reason" to have them just because the US and UK have them? Oh, because we need to be "competitive." In the US especially, big corporations routinely get the DPA treatment time and again. It's clearly not a deterrent to corporate malfeasance.

I would suggest it's not intended to be. What it is, is a corporate get-out-of-jail-free card. Not for the company or the shareholders, but for the executives caught dealing dirty. Canada's DPA was sneaked into law in the back pages of last year's budget omnibus bill explicitly for the benefit of SNC. If we were really that concerned about the "rule of law," that should never have happened.

Interesting to look back and see what former SNC Chair Gwyn Morgan had to say when the poop was starting to hit the fan for the company back in 2013. Gwyn had absolutely no idea! I'm guessing he'd be all for the DPA. Gwyn's not a guy who believes in government regulation. We should just cross our fingers and hope the greedbags who cut ethical corners, take integrity shortcuts, and skirt the law somehow develop an honest corporate culture.


Really?

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!