Workers look to cash in on mining industry riches
It pays to hire an apprentice - Landmark study reveals that employers accrue $1.38 for every dollar they invest in training an apprentice
CUPE boycott of Israel won't help cause of peaceBut then Buzz wants to raid them so his motives are not exactly pure. And he is still ticked off that the CUPE dominated Ontario NDP kicked him out.
The labour movement and the left should try to counteract despair in the Middle East with calls for genuine dialogue and exchange, not by finger-pointing and boycotts, writes Buzz Hargrove
Equalization report favours Quebec Well slap me up the head and call me stupid, I would never have expected that.RBC forecasts slower economic growth for Quebec
RBC notes that for Quebec, as the most reliant province on the manufacturing sector, the stronger Canadian dollar brings some challenges to many of these industries, specifically high-tech and electrical products, machinery manufacturing, primary and finished textiles and clothing, transportation equipment, paper, furniture and wood products. Combined, these industries make up over two-thirds of Quebec's GDP and about 400,000 workers. In addition, export sensitivities exist particularly in industries exposed to the coming slowdown in North American housing and auto markets. Another area for concern is the impact of aggressive competition in the U.S. from low-wage countries like China and India, in industries such as textiles and clothing, furniture and fixtures and machinery, in which Quebec has traditionally been strong.
Canada Economic Development -- The Economy of Quebec
See: Quebec
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.
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.
Brookfield, Blackstone to Buy Trizec for $8.9 BlnMunk is the man with the golden thumb. But not all that glitters is gold. Munks Trizec has major problems in its West Coast investments.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.
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.
"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)."
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.
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.
City Beat Interview with Mike DavisThe 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.
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.
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
