Volunteerism

More than 22 million Canadians - 85 per cent of the population over 15 - gave money to a charity or non-profit group in 2004 for a total of $8.9 billion.

And those that did were average Canadians, not the wealthiest Canadians. Charity begins at home, and Canadians donot mind paying for social services others require, it is the nature of our social democratic society.Which is why we don't mind paying taxes. If the services are provided. We bitch when they aren't. And of course you get a tax recieipt for your donation, which gives you more of a tax deduction than RRSP's.


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Worse Than Terrorists

The White Slave Trade. Yep overlooked in all the sturm and drang about the supposed Muslim terrorist cell broken up over the weekend, and CUPE's boycott of Israel, was this little story.

Israeli-Canadian women trafficking ring busted

According to suspicions, ring members placed ads in Russian newspapers in Israel offering escort services in Canada

I await the outrage from the Blogging Tories ,the Zionist apologists and those who praise the fall of the Soviet Union.

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womens-rights, feminism, feminist,

Build It In Lloydminster

Alberta too expensive to build super-refinery

Ok so build it in Lloydminster since we share the city with Saskatchewan it should be cheaper on one side of the street or the other.

After all they have the Husky upgrader there.

Sheesh do I have to tell youse guys everything? There and that didn't cost a half million like the consultants report did. Geez.


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Lloydminster, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Oil, refinery, Edmonton,

Drop In The Bucket

Oh big threat. The Alberta Government has finally gotten off its ass a year later and charged CN rail with environmental damage for the toxic spill at lake Wabamun. The fine a piddly $500,000, a drop in the bucket for CN who had record profits and donated a cool $1 million US to a local hospital to assuage their guilt. Heck it's spare change to Hunter Harrison the American CEO of CN.

The cost of the clean up? $75 million. That fine really is going to help the taxpayers of Alberta who have had to clean up the mess. Guess this is another fine example of Alberta Government regulations, when they finally are enforced, defintely prove this Government is not in the business of regulating business....just screwing Albertans.Wabamun residents unhappy with CN charge

And oh yeah CN had another toxic spill this weekend, in Quebec.

See: CN



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Happy Birthday to the Anti-Christ

Somewherei n the world today the dread lord of all that is evil is born. Evil is of course just Live spelled backwards.

Like all the nutty notions of evil conjured by the Christian and other patriarchiacal monotheistic faiths thay are what they hate. They are their own worst enemies, becoming what they denounce.

Any ways here's the link for all the Google news about 666 since this is the Sixth Day of the Sixth Month of 06. Which has not occured for at least one hundred years, since 6/6/1906. So maybe the Anti-Christ is 100 years old.

1906 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

June 6 - Durham & South Carolina Railroad operates its first revenue train, Bonsal to Durham, North Carolina. The date, when written as a six-digit date and the zeroes removed, evaluates to the Number of the Beast (numerology) (666).


Or perhaps 200 as he could have been born 6/6/1806 or maybe 300, or 400, or...well you get the idea.

Besides everyone knows the Great Beast was Aleister Crowley. And he is dead.

Besides now that the Soviet Union is gone we all know the Evil Empire is Amerika, and it is the evangelical christians that run that Empire that are agog about the end times, armageddon and the apolcalpyse and can't wait to make it happen, which may explain much about George W's foreign policies. After all he talks to god. Of course that god maybe the other guy.

So on with the show this is it. The End Times Are Here.....Again.

Also See:

The Morning Star

New Age Libertarian Manifesto

Judas the Obscure

My Favorite Muslim

Antinominalist Anarchism

Icky Icke

Could It Be Satan

Papal Fallibility

Pope Benedict Deus Cannus Est

Catholic Hajib

Another Catholic Child Molester

Christian Killers and Rapists

Keeping the 'X' in X-MAS

American Fairy Tale

Ken Lay and Son of Sam

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666, Crowley, Great-Beast, Satan, Anti-Christ, 6/6/06, Omen, Evil, Live, Christian, monothesism, religion, apocalypse, armageddon, endtimes

Truth Be Told

I like reading the capitalist press. No not the MSM, the business press. They tell it like it is. Like who the new Federal Reserve Chairman in the U.S.; Ben Bernanke, really represents. In this throw away line from Business Week; "Is the Fed chieftain simply failing his own class on clear messages?"

There ya go. We know which class they are talking about too, the ruling class.

And his message...the dreaded word that strikes fear into the very heart of capitalists....Revolution? No. Stagflation!

Something Monthly Review has said was inevitable under the current market dominance of the State and Monopoly Capital in the U.S.

Fears of stagflation leave Dow battered
Bernanke's comments unnerved investors because they raise fears of stagflation, an environment of rising prices and stagnating economic growth. His tough talk on inflation also increased concerns that the Fed will raise its target for short-term interest rates, currently 5%, again at the end of June, dashing hopes it would pause in its two-year-long rate-tightening campaign.Bernanke's comments unnerved investors because they raise fears of stagflation, an environment of rising prices and stagnating economic growth. His tough talk on inflation also increased concerns that the Fed will raise its target for short-term interest rates, currently 5%, again at the end of June, dashing hopes it would pause in its two-year-long rate-tightening campaign.

Stagflation fears stalk UK industry

WILL HIGH OIL BRING STAGFLATION?

Tuesday, May 09, 2006 - FreeMarketNews.com

Will rising oil prices bring stagflation? Stagflation is the combination of high inflation and high unemployment/recession, a phenomenon that Keynesian economists long thought to be impossible—until it happened in the UK and the US in the ‘60s and ‘70s. -Jeff Vail

Stagflation Here We Come!
May 15, 2006

For the foreseeable future I believe we are looking directly at Stagflation.
Stagflation is an Inflationary environment coupled with very low rates of growth.

Here’s why I believe we are facing Stagflation:

The US economy is a paper tiger. Almost everyone I know in the US is involved someway or another in Real Estate. And that means Debt!
Now Debt is ok provided the assets behind the debt don’t Fall in price and precipitate a massive Liquidation.
So the Fed’s job is easy. Print money ‘til the Cows come Home but don’t ever allow asset prices to drop.

There’s one problem ofcourse - Gold.
That pesky metal is so sensitive to an increase in the money supply. Whenever it rises it scares the Dickens out of the public into believing that Price inflation will break out any moment.
To maintain credibility the Fed bangs its fist on the table and says they’ll raise interest rates to snuff out any sign of inflation.

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More Munk-Key Business

After blogging about Barrick Gold Meister Peter Munk yesterday, today another Munk key business is in the news.

Brookfield, Blackstone to Buy Trizec for $8.9 Bln

une 5 (Bloomberg) -- Brookfield Properties Corp., owner of the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan, and buyout firm Blackstone Group LP agreed to acquire Trizec Properties Inc. for $8.9 billion including debt, the second-largest takeover of a real estate investment trust.

Trizec, whose chairman is Canadian real estate mogul Peter Munk, will almost triple Brookfield's U.S. properties, especially in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. Half of Brookfield's 48-million-square-foot portfolio is in Canada.

Even though Trizec's shares have outperformed most other office REITs in the past year, ``the company continues to be undervalued in the public markets,'' Tim Callahan, the Chicago- based company's chief executive officer, said today in a statement.

Office REITs Jump on Merger Speculation
NEW YORK — Shares of office real estate investment trusts rose in afternoon trading Monday after Brookfield Properties Corp. agreed to buy Trizec Properties Inc. at an 18 percent premium.

Munk is the man with the golden thumb. But not all that glitters is gold. Munks Trizec has major problems in its West Coast investments.

For Trizec, the deal marks the end of a turbulent and fascinating history that saw a company with a major stake in retail development transformed into a leading office market player. Two attempts at grand-scale retail development, in L.A. and Las Vegas, proved disastrous, and frequent course changes under Peter Munk's guidance in the late 1990s also marred the stock's performance.

Los Angeles the city of light and darkness, the contrasts of poverty and excess, of working class enclaves and big city development. As Marxist Urban Historian Mike Davis has documented in his books on Los Angeles.

"The ultimate world-historical significance---and oddity---of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism," writes Davis, in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. "The same place, as Brecht noted, symbolized both heaven and hell. Correspondingly, it is the essential destination on the itinerary of any late 20th century intellectual, who must eventually come to take a peep and render some opinion on whether 'Los Angeles Brings It All Together' (official slogan), or is, rather, the nightmare at the terminus of American history (as depicted in noir)."

Trizec led that development which disposed of older working class communities in favour of large scale downtown buildings, with tax breaks and tax incentives from the generous ruling class of the city.

City of Quartz, Fortress LA

Eighty years later, the martial spirit of General Otis pervades the design of Los Angeles's new Downtown, whose skyscrapers march from Bunker Hill down the Figueroa corridor. Two billion dollars of public tax subsidies have enticed big banks and corporate headquarters back to a central city they almost abandoned in the 1960s. Into a waiting grid, cleared of tenement housing by the city's powerful and largely unaccountable redevelopment agency, local developers and offshore investors (increasingly Japanese) have planted a series of block-square complexes: Crocker Center, the Bonaventure Hotel and Shopping Mall, the World Trade Center, California Plaza, Arco Center, and so on. With an increasingly dense and self-contained circulation system linking these superblocks, the new financial district is best conceived as a single, self-referential hyperstructure, a Miesian skyscape of fantastic proportions.

Like similar megalomaniacal complexes tethered to fragmented and desolate downtowns--such as the Renaissance Center in Detroit and the Peachtree and Omni centers in Atlanta--Bunker Hill and the Figueroa corridor have provoked a storm of objections to their abuse of scale and composition, their denigration of street life, and their confiscation of the vital energy of the center, now sequestered within their subterranean concourses or privatized plazas. Sam Hall Kaplan, the former design critic of the Times, has vociferously denounced the antistreet bias of redevelopment; in his view, the superimposition of "hermetically sealed fortresses" and random "pieces of suburbia" onto Downtown has "killed the street" and "dammed the rivers of life."'

Yet Kaplan's vigorous defense of pedestrian democracy remains grounded in liberal complaints about "bland design" and "elitist planning practices." Like most architectural critics, he rails against the oversights of urban design without conceding a dimension of foresight, and even of deliberate repressive intent. For when Downtown's new "Gold Coast" is seen in relation to other social landscapes in the central city, the "fortress effect" emerges, not as an inadvertent failure of design, but as an explicit--and, in its own terms, successful socio-spatial strategy.

The goals of this strategy may be summarized as a double repression: to obliterate all connection with Downtown's past and to prevent any dynamic association with the non-Anglo urbanism of its future. Los Angeles is unusual among major urban centers in having preserved, however negligently, most of its Beaux Arts commercial core. Yet the city chose to transplant--at immense public cost--the entire corporate and financial district from around Broadway and Spring Street to Bunker Hill, a half-dozen blocks further west.

Once again Munk has benefited from State Capitalism, as with his Clairtone business in Nova Scotia which sucked millions from taxpayers before going belly up. In the case of Trizec from municipal state capitalism as they were inticed with tax give ways to invest in the redevelopment of downtown LA.

TRIZEK ANNOUNCES DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES PROPERTY ACQUISITION

Trizec again reports poor Hollywood sale

In another indication of the continued struggles at the Hollywood & Highland complex, developer Trizec Properties Inc. has disclosed that operating income will be sharply lower than expected this year and that the adjoining Hollywood Renaissance Hotel had average occupancy during the first six months of 54 percent, far below break-even levels.

The dismal results, revealed as part of New York-based Trizec's earnings report, provide the most revealing glimpse to date on how badly the once-ballyhooed project has been performing. While much of the sluggish business can be tied to factors beyond the developer's control--in particular the post-Sept. 11 slowdown in Asian tourist business-the numbers are certain to renew questions on the project's long-term viability.

In Los Angeles Trizec benefited from insider real estate deals that Davis documents, and of course from Proposition 13 which boosted the real estate and development sectors bank accounts. That wealth went into the pockets of companies like Trizec which are tax free trusts.

City Beat Interview with Mike Davis

Remember, California had a lot of poor immigrants in the ’30s and, ’40s, but that generation went to good schools and got free higher education. The same level of opportunity is not being made available to this generation. Their future has been looted in advance by the selfish policies of Proposition 13. Who benefited most massively from it and the reason it was a fraud were commercial and industrial property owners. They got untold billions. This grew out of a very justified complaint in a period of rapid land inflation. Poor people and retired people were faced with punitive tax bills. But the solution was to simply destroy progressive property tax as a source of revenue. It had the most perverse effect – taking away funds from schools. It has led to newer home buyers paying sometimes 10 to15 times more taxes than their neighbors. It has allowed a lot of wealth to escape taxation.

The looting of LA which Davies links to the Rodney King riots today continues in the merger and acquisition orgy on Wall Street and the sale of Trizec Truist into private hands. More capital flows out of LA and into the world market.

Also check this interview this Davis.

Tomdispatch Interview: Mike Davis, Turning a Planet into a Slum

Tomdispatch Interview: Mike Davis, Green Zones and Slum Cities

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Munk, Canada, LA, Trizec, REIT, real-etate, income-trust, Barrick, urban-studies, Mike-Davis, City-of-Quatrz, Ecology-of-Fear

Russian Oligarchy

The New Zealand Herald has published a mini bio of the ruling class in Russia. Ruling Class. Not party apparatchiks, not the central committee, though many of them came out of the ruling one party state. The AZ of Russian oligarchs
Contrary to the ideological mythology of the liberaltarians, when state capitalist regimes embrace capitalism they do not become free markets, or markets period. They merely become monopoly capitalism. And the difference between state capitalism and monopoly capitalism (the military industrial complex) is an illusion.


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Irony

Here is the definition of irony in the tradition of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce or H.L. Mencken. Freedom of The Press Conference....in Moscow.

Moscow Hosts International Press Congress

MosNews

The WAN press freedom roundtable was held Sunday, on the eve of the World Newspaper Congress, World Editors Forum and Info Services Expo 2006, the global meetings of the world’s press. More than 1,700 newspaper publishers, editors, other senior newspaper executives and their guests are in Moscow for the events, which open Monday.

Free Russian media guarantees democracy - Putin

Yep the only free press belongs to those that own one. And Putin owns the press in Russia.Many have complained that Putin has suppressed the free press in Russia, which is an old Bolshevik tradition. And Putin is an old Bolshevik.
World’s Press Appeals to Putin for Press Freedom

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Press, media, freedom, Mencken, Bierce, Liebling, Putin, Moscow, Russia, WAN, newspapers,

Living In The Past

As I have said before the Bank of Canada is living in the past with its anti-inflation fetish for raising interest rates. And I am not the only one who noticed they are stuck in the Mulroney era with their policies.

During the 1985-90 period, for example, when oil prices were very low, inflation in Calgary was well below the national average, while inflation in Toronto and Montreal generally outpaced the national average. That episode also underscores that the net effect of an oil shock on overall inflation need not be a wash -- national inflation actually rose during that period of cheap oil, from about four per cent to five per cent, but Toronto's inflation rose more, to 6.3 per cent.

The bottom line? There can be little doubt that the current energy boom contains some inflation risks for Canada. However, so far, the inflation risks in oil-producing regions are being at least partly offset by disinflationary pressures in regions that do not produce oil, but use a lot of it.

Stephen S. Poloz is senior vice-president corporate affairs and chief economist for Export Development Canada.

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