I know, I know, all the big pundits are piling on now, talking about how he's changed and this isn't the guy
they remember from back before he sold his soul to run for President. Here's the problem: McCain has been a
complete dickhead his entire career. Starting the very first night he was elected to the Senate, when he screamed
at one of his volunteers because the podium he was supposed to speak at was too tall. Pure class, right there.
And if that's how he treats people who give up their weekends to work for him without pay, imagine how he's gonna
treat the rest of us.
"...every year, elections officials strike millions of names from the voter rolls using processes that are
secret, prone to error and vulnerable to manipulation," said Wendy Weiser, an elections expert with New York University's
Brennan Center for Justice. "That means that lots and lots of eligible voters could get knocked off the voter rolls
without any notice and, in many cases, without any opportunity to correct it before Election Day."
Taking a page from the new bipartisan strategy now being employed in Afghanistan - waging cross-border military
raids into sovereign countries in order to protect a failing military occupation in a neighboring country - the United
States has apparently launched its first known incursion into Syria: the usual assault from on high with the usual
tally of children as "collateral damage."
In today's uncertain and, well, terrifying economic climate, it's good to think ahead. While we don't
want to alarm you, basically your company could go broke at any second and you'll be out on the street.
Even worse, it's in their best interest to keep it from you until the very last moment.
Here are six warning signs that you might just be on a sinking ship.
My wife and I fell through many layers of poverty in a few months. First we revisited the genteel
poverty known to grad students, the sort of poverty where you have scary dreams about the rent and eat
a simple, wholesome diet towards the end of the month. But we fell right through that into the sort of
Dickensian privation spoiled first-worlders like me never expected to experience. That's the kind of
poverty a lot of people are going to be experiencing soon - because I'm here to tell you, it can happen
here and it can happen to you.
Yesterday, Canadians gave Stephen Harper's Conservatives a second minority government. After all of the
bluster, 40 days of noise and millions of dollars spent, the election's result was that the Conservatives took
twenty seats or so from the Liberals. This was certainly a boost for Stephen Harper, but in reality, the outcome
was essentially meaningless as they still don't have enough seats to control the house of commons.
The election proved to be all for nothing. Canadians missed a historic opportunity. Stephane Dion's career as
leader of the Liberals is essentially over, and never again will we have such a visionary candidate for
Prime Minister. Dion gave Canadians a campaign of ideas and an actual plan to fight climate change. Due to a
combination of apathy, greed and ignorance, Canadians tuned out and voted for the guy who spent the most money
on attack-ads.
Record-low turnout, combined with greedy, "I don't want to pay an extra penny-per-ton of emissions" attitudes,
as well as a general ignorance about the importance of action in this crucial period of our history gave Canadians
the same dysfunctional Parliament that Steven Harper dissolved just a month and a half ago. Canadians defeated
leader Elizabeth May and every other Green Party candidate across the country. Canadians re-elected national
embarrassments like Maxime Bernier and "environment minister" John Baird. Perhaps the only success story of
yesterday is that Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc Quebecois, as promised, managed to win enough seats in Quebec to
stop the Conservatives from winning a majority.
Canadians had a chance to do something great yesterday. We failed. There are some serious karmic repercussions
to come for this. We had a chance to remake Canada as a sustainable, environmentally friendly model for the rest
of the world. We would have cleaned up our house and gotten rich for it, but instead, our lack of wisdom maintained
a broken status quo. We could have been leaders, but instead we were lemmings. There are hard days ahead, and now,
I have no doubt, Canadians deserve to feel the pain that the changing climate will soon deliver.
The election is in just a few days now, so its time to get serious. If the current poll numbers hold, the Conservative Party
will form the Government of Canada on Wednesday, and Stephen Harper will remain Prime Minister. It is time for progressive
voters to understand this unpleasant reality and act to defeat the Conservatives. We can not allow a right-wing party that
only has the support of one third of Canadians to defeat a divided left comprised of the rest of us.
It is time for strategic voting.
voteforenvironment.ca has information to help progressive Canadians elect a new government. Enter your postal code,
and the site will tell you who has the best chance of defeating the Conservative candidate in your riding, based upon recent
polling data. In many ridings, the progressive candidate, be they NDP, Bloc, or Liberal is likely to win the seat, so the site
will encourage you to vote with your heart. In other cases however, the Conservative candidate leads by only a few points. If
just a few hundred votes were shifted from the likely third and fourth place candidates to the one who is likely to finish
second, the Conservative candidate would be defeated. If this were to happen in enough of the close races across the country,
Stephen Harper would be evicted from 24 Sussex and moved back to Stornoway.
Let's look at the example of Halton Ontario. (in between Mississauga and Hamilton) Current polling data suggests that the
Conservative candidate will win the riding with about 28,000 votes. The Liberal candidate is likely to finish second with
26,000 votes. Way behind in third and fourth, with a likely 8,000 and 7,700 votes respectively, are the Green Party and
the NDP. If just 20% of those 16,000 or so people were to switch their vote to the Liberal candidate, Stephen Harper would be
denied that seat in the house of commons. Progressives must not allow a split in their vote to give power to Conservatives.
Now is not the time to stubbornly embrace a candidate that
is sure to lose!
Like it or not, there are only two outcomes of the upcoming election; a Conservative government, or a Liberal government.
Only one of two people will be the Prime Minister on Wednesday, Stephane Dion or Stephen Harper. I know that a lot of people
do not like the Liberals. For these people, its time for some hard questions. Do you want to stick to your principles and
split the progressive vote, three, or maybe four ways, or do you want Canada to have a Conservative government? These are your
choices, whether you like them or not. You must accept the reality of the situation. Having said that, the strategic choice
in your riding might not be a Liberal vote, in some cases, Liberal supporters will need to vote for the NDP or maybe even
the Bloc Quebecois. Politics is not about honourably finishing third or fourth, it is about winning. A Conservative
government means that two out of three Canadians has lost.
A Liberal win means a minority government dependent upon the support of other parties to stay in power. If you are not a
Liberal supporter, it is very likely that any Liberal government will have to appeal to your party of choice in order to
stay in power. I am urging all progressive Canadians to hold their noses and vote strategically. It is sad and cynical, but
absolutely true that your principles are not as important as the outcome of this election. The future of our country depends
upon this vote. Let's make sure that the man leading us into the difficult days ahead is not Stephen Harper.
"I suspect some good buying opportunities are opening up..." -
Stephen Harper
"Do you really want to be heard saying that?" - Peter Mansbridge
I really like the above quote, the one by CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge that is. Mansbridge immediately recognized
what a huge gaffe it was for Harper, at a time when many Canadians have lost their jobs and many more are in fear
of losing them, to be thinking about bargains on the stock market. I'm not going to play the fake outrage game here,
(Harper's comment amused me more than it angered me) but if I were running an opposition campaign in Ontario or Quebec
I'd be running this clip as a campaign ad around the clock. This Prime Minister is pretty out of touch if he thinks that
people who have lost their jobs have the money to buy stocks. Recently laid-off workers can't feed their families by
playing the market. The fact that Harper also says that a number of businessmen told him that this crisis is a good
opportunity only further highlights his lack of empathy. Canadians are hurting and scared, and Harper's pals think its
a chance to cash in. This is Stephen Harper's Conservatism. Let's prevent him from practicing it on Tuesday of next week.
Click Here to download an MP3 of this interview, the file size is approx. 6.5M
Excellent radio interview with Naomi Wolf. Here she talks about the coup that took place
in the US on October 1st, and how we can resist it. She also talks about the urgent need to arrest
the President and his minions. Forward this to everyone you know.
Now this is exciting stuff! Luckily, according to the articles I've read, Asteroid 2008 2C9 is supposed to burn up
in the atmosphere before it reaches the ground, so nobody is in danger here. The asteroid is supposed to enter
earth's atmosphere somewhere over Northern Sudan at around quarter to seven tomorrow morning local time.
(That's quarter to eleven tonight in New York, quarter to eight tonight in Vancouver) The links 1, 2, 3, 4, say that the asteroid
will be moving from north-east to south-west, so although it will enter the atmosphere above Sudan, if somehow
it does not burn up upon entry, potential impact could occur anywhere in Sudan, Chad, The Central African Republic,
or anywhere else in Central or Western Africa. I haven't been able to determine whether or not the asteroid will pass
over North America, so we may not get to see anything in this part of the world. However, people in Southern Europe,
Northern Africa, and the Middle East may be in for quite a show. The fireball that
will be seen as this big space rock enters the atmosphere will be truly extraordinary.
People don't seem to understand the conditions that have led to what is being called the "Credit-Crisis."
I've been doing a lot of research on this and I think that I have a pretty good handle on what really happened
here, so I'm going to try to explain it in a way that people unfamiliar with the disastrous practices of Wall
Street can easily understand. Its complicated, but bear with me.
First, banks and other agencies began issuing what have been called sub-prime loans. These were mostly mortgages
with really low interest rates. The loans were structured so that the people who took them out would have very
low payments for the first eighteen months or two years of the agreement, but much higher payments after that.
In many cases these loans were given to people who had no income, no job, no assets, and no ability to make
payments once the higher rates kicked in. However, because of the time-lag between the issuing of the loans, and
the day when payments would inevitably stop, firms realized that they had a brief window of opportunity to turn
temporarily valuable loan papers into billions of dollars.
Enter the Collateralized Debt Obligation. (CDO) Firms would carve the sub-prime loan debts that they owned into
pieces and repackage them as a product called a CDO. A CDO would have little slivers of all sorts of different loans
pieced together. A CDO might consist of 1% of Mary's second mortgage on a house in San Diego, 1% of Manuel's car-loan
in Atlanta, 1% of Mohammed's mortgage on a house in Kansas City, and 1% of the money that Acme Widgets Inc. borrowed
when they wanted expand their factory in Pittsburgh.
Even though the firms knew that many of their loans would and could never be repaid, because of the time-lag between
when the loans were good and when they went bust, the firms could temporarily list their CDO's as assets. Because
of this, it was in the interest of firms to issue as many dodgy loans as possible, in order to create as many
CDO's as possible, in order to hold as many assets as possible. Firms began buying and selling their CDO's and using
them as collateral when taking out loans of their own.
Enter the Credit-Default Swap. (CDS) Firms holding CDO's made deals with highly-rated firms. (Companies with good
credit ratings like the now nationalized AIG) The small firm would pay the bigger firm to co-sign with them on a very
large loan, often from a privately owned bank called the Federal Reserve. The small firms would list the income they
were making on their CDO's as collateral, and then make a payment to the large firm for their golden signature. Having
a large firm with a good credit rating as co-signer, dubious firms were able to borrow at astronomical rates, in some
cases at a ratio of up to 40 times of what the CDO's were (temporarily) worth.
Big firms saw windfall profits through their ability to sell their signature to smaller firms. Smaller firms borrowed
tens of billions of electronic dollars at low interest rates from the Federal Reserve Bank, among others. The stocks of
the firms involved in the scheme went through the roof as they were able to show massive amounts of money on their
balance sheets. A handful of CEO's made billions of dollars.
Now the chain reaction. The time-lag has caught up to us, and the higher payments on the sub-prime loans have kicked in.
People can't make these payments, so one of the slivers in a CDO package, then another and another becomes worthless.
The value of the CDO is compromised, but the firm who holds it had already borrowed an astronomical amount of money
against it. With nothing coming in from these now worthless CDO's, firms holding them no longer have enough income to
make payments on their debts. Since the smaller firm can't meet its debt obligations, the company that co-signed the
CDS deal with it has to pay. The larger firm, which has made many CDS deals finds themselves owning the debts of many
smaller firms, and they have to "write-down" their profits. Stock prices dive and some firms go bankrupt while others
are nationalized.
Now the final piece. These large firms are the ones who have been lending money to regular people, regular businesses,
and your bank. Perhaps your RRSP or 401K has put part of your life savings into some of these firms' stock. Now the
big firms can't make loans anymore, they have diverted all of their assests to making payments on the bad debts they
hold. It is all that many of these firms can do to avoid going bankrupt themselves. One fails, then another, and the
problem is compounded. There is very little money available now for people to get a loan to do anything at all, from
buying a house, to sending their kids to college or buying new infrastructure for their businesses.
The suggested solution to this problem has been for the US treasury to give troubled firms a "bailout", but that's not
even going to come close to solving the problem. With interest factored in, there are tens, or maybe even hundreds of
trillions of dollars worth of bad debts out there. The bailout, if it were passed, would do very little to the solve
the problem, though perhaps it would delay the inevitable collapse of the credit markets until after the US election.
Personally I think that the bailout is just a scheme for Bush to loot the treasury as a parting gift to the US...he did
this to the other companies he bankrupted earlier in his career. A better option than the bailout would be for the US
government to nationalize the Federal Reserve Bank, but that's a discussion for another day.
Really, things are way worse than the media is letting on. Wall Street bet your house and mine, and now everybody loses.
There are some monumental days in our near future. The entire financial system is about to be re-organized. Think of the
last days of the Soviet Union. It could only be a matter of weeks before the American System comes crashing down. If this
happens, try to remember that the money being played with is actually an illusion, and that troubled times will pass.
On a positive note, the destructive ideologies of the "Free-Market" and "Neo-Liberalism" are about to be completely
discredited. I hope that whatever financial system rises up from the ashes will be more principled, transparent, and
equitable for everyone.
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