©
Hopefully, by the time you read this, the financial crisis on Wall Street will be solved. As I type, the US administration and House leaders have reached some kind of agreement on the $700 billion bailout package.
I worry about the need for governments to backstop our personal RRSP savings. This has some historical precedent. Way back in 1991, the Japanese economy lost about $1 trillion (which is almost exactly what the US just experienced). Japan, too, had grown a housing and cheap credit bubble, largely based on corrupt practices within their banking industry.
According to the report I heard on National Public Radio, small business owners and homeowners in Japan watched their properties lose up to 85% of their value. The government stepped in quickly with new regulations to reorganize and supervise banking, and 20 years later, the Japanese are a nation of savers, not debtors, with combined personal savings in the neighbourhood of $14 trillion.
Compare that to the US. Their total consumer debt is running at $9 trillion. Put another way, that’s a debt of only about $30,000 per man, woman and child, which doesn’t seem that bad. But in Japan today, forget debt—every person has savings, on average, of $110,000. It seems as if the ordinary Japanese consumer took it on the chin, financially speaking, and learned his or her lesson back in the 1990s.
But the Japanese had a big advantage. During their crisis, they were still able to export goods to the US and the rest of the world, which weren’t affected by their credit bubble. So Japanese unemployment levels stayed under 6%, and their GDP continued to rise—in spite of their domestic financial crisis.
This time it’s the US economy doing the tumble. And the American economy is so large that it virtually overshadows any other national economy, and in fact, all other economies are tied into the US markets. So when the US gets financial heartburn, the rest of us reach for the bottle of Pepto.
On the plus side of the US equation, the combined personal net worth is estimated at about $357 trillion. So—at over $1.1 million per US citizen—there’s a lot of personal equity available. But there are two troubling sides to this. First, a massive amount of that wealth is concentrated at the top of the social pyramid. And second, a whole lot of the remaining wealth is contained in assets such as homes and cars—which are now losing value now that the credit bubble has burst. That means that personal net worth in the US is declining.
Naturally, the deflation of net worth makes US citizens a bit wary of spending. If one considers that 70% of the US economy is based on consumer spending—and a good deal of the world’s economy is driven by the US economy—we all have a lot at stake if the US consumer stops spending and goes into savings mode.
But there’s another wrinkle. Over the past 10 years, US corporations (unlike US consumers) have packed away unprecedented levels of savings. Those corporations—and Wall Street—have banked heavily on consumer spending to drive the economy since the last recession in the early 1990s. Ironically in light of the mega-billion-dollar bank bailout, American corporations have the financial wherewithal to kick-start the ailing economy—if they collectively decided to go on a spending and hiring spree. Maybe one of the presidential candidates will have some luck encouraging these cash-rich corporations to create the new “green” economy we’ve all heard them talking about.
And what about the rest of us? Well, we Canadians pride ourselves on our practicality and restraint. And according to recent media reports, most Canadians think that we’re going to fare better than our American cousins, economically. But judging from the “house porn” channel (HGTV), we’re already up to our necks in the “house-as-the-ultimate-investment” concept. We’ve spawned a whole generation of real estate junkies—with our mortgage banks as the primary enablers. Home real estate in Canada became the investment fad of the decade.
I heard Bill Clinton talking on TV this morning about the same phenomenon in the US. He correctly identified why this happened. Because interest rates were pushed artificially low by Alan Greenspan and the US Federal Reserve, most small investors weren’t making any money on their RRSPs. But the cheap credit provided lots of fuel for the real estate market. With cheap mortgages, thanks to low interest rates from the Fed, housing prices quickly escalated. The bubble grew and grew, involving the entire US (and Canadian) housing market.
Stephen Harper’s government was actually supporting the sub-prime lending boom up here by advancing legislation for 0-down, 40-year mortgages. Fortunately, only about 4% of Canadian mortgages fall into this high-risk category, as opposed to 40% of US mortgages.
Fortunately, here in our tiny corner of the world, real estate values have tended to remain stable, with the exception of St. Andrews and its steady influx of newcomers. So most of us have been somewhat insulated from the first wave of the crash. But the next wave of the crash may start to affect exports to the US, hurting our manufacturing, tourism and resource sectors. So we still might want to buckle our seatbelts.
The conventional wisdom is simple. Pay off your mortgage, or at least pay it down. Get rid of the car loan. Put away your credit cards. Cut down on necessary travel and impulse purchases. Put at least three years worth of salary into savings.
All this is, of course, easier said than done. And it’s probably not so good for the immediate economy, which as I’ve mentioned, depends on everyone spending lots of cash. So how do we start saving without disrupting the economy?
We should consider moving from non-essential work, such as administrative and consulting services, to more locally sustainable work. This could include more research and education, “green” product development, “green” energy production and environmentally-friendly construction. We could also look at local agriculture, holistic health care, in-region tourism and value-added resource-based activities such as handlaid paper production, and of course, arts-culture-and-crafts, which have been highly undervalued activities in our modern economy.
Yes, there’s a lot of good work to do. But to do it, we have to be able to think globally—and actually motivate ourselves to act locally.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Cows past, present, future
©
Every time I drive to St. Andrews I pass a small herd of tawny-brown and white-faced cattle. They’re usually facing the sun in a vivid green pasture on a hill overlooking the St. Croix River and St. Croix Island. It’s beautiful and bucolic—a scene from another century.
The scene always gets me thinking. A century ago, this area was almost entirely self-sufficient. Along with the farms were highly productive fisheries, a busy logging and lumber industry, and a lucrative craft, trades and manufacturing culture.
A colleague of mine brought home just how recently this culture has disappeared. Now in his late 40s, he can remember in his youth travelling with his dad into the woods to visit the bush camps. His father was a supervisor there, overseeing—and paying—the workers, who were still using teams of horses to draw the logs out of the forest, right up until the early 1970s.
The changes we’ve seen over the last 40 years have been remarkable. But fasten your seatbelts. Even more are on the way. On the one hand we’re seeing the exponential growth in knowledge and new technologies. On the other hand we’re experiencing the unprecedented degradation of our environment and the inevitable decline of our fossil fuel economy. The great hope is that we’ll be able to use our newly minted knowledge to overcome the looming prospect of a growing scarcity of natural resources—including both fuel and food.
One of the more fascinating things about change is that it’s not exactly linear. A few short years ago, leading financial economists were telling us that our generation could look forward to at least another 20 uninterrupted years of unrestrained economic growth on the stock market and in the real world, with only a few minor corrections. Obviously, that prediction isn’t quite working out. After the events of the last couple of weeks, nervous financial professionals on network television are now publicly worrying that we may be headed for another Great Depression as the woes of Wall Street hit Main Street.
In my mind, the trouble with Wall Street is it’s too complicated, with its derivatives, futures, commercial paper, short selling and the like. Real life is a whole lot simpler. Here in the real world, we learn the hard way not to spend what we don’t have. If we live on credit and for some unexpected reason lose our job, we may lose our car, our house, or everything we own. In the real world there’s no safety net for you and me.
But a great many of us have been drawn into the credit-crazy Wall Street world. The government has very actively encouraged us to buy RRSPs to offset our taxes and to bolster our old age pensions. The banks have marketed low-interest consumer loans, escalating interest credit cards and low-to-no-down-payment mortgages. So Americans and to a lesser extent Canadians have borrowed themselves silly.
The entire system, of course, has become a giant Las Vegas casino. However safe it may seem, an RRSP is still a gamble on the stock market. And one of the bad things about RRSPs is the fact that you can’t take cash them out without paying a big penalty in income tax. However, when the market gets bad, you can move your investments into the money market—which is kind of like parking your money on the side of betting table.
This has always seemed a safe way to go—until now. With financial institutions losing such huge amounts of money in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, they’re facing a serious shortage of real cash. Or, in banker parlance, liquidity. One of the few sources of liquidity available is in the money market. And ordinary investors can easily get so nervous that they’d start to pull their cash out of the money market. Had that happened it would have caused a panic—with consequences of epic proportions.
To put some liquidity and spine back into the market, the US government and international banks have pushed over a trillion dollars of liquid cash into the US financial system. Most of this bailout will come from the US taxpayers.
To put this in perspective, just before the Great Depression millions of ordinary people invested their life savings and even borrowed money to invest in the stock market. It was their panic that sent the markets plunging into ruin. It wasn’t until the early 1950s that the value in the stock market rose to the level it was in 1929.
One of the things that this current crisis should teach us is that we need some regulatory protection for small investors. If the government wants us to “save” using RRSP investment tools, it needs to either guarantee our initial investment, or allow small investors to get out of the market altogether—without penalty—when stock markets get too volatile. But that’s never going to happen, because the markets are now too dependent on our personal savings.
According to Kevin Phillips, author of Bad Money, the events of the last couple of weeks could be just a warning of what’s to come. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Phillips cited his ‘seven sharks’ of the economy, “…the first is financialization because we’re so dependent on this industry that’s sort of half lost its marbles. The second is that you have this huge buildup of debt, absolutely unprecedented anywhere in the world. The third is you’ve now got home prices collapsing. The fourth is you’ve got global commodity inflation building up. The fifth is you’ve got flawed and deceptive government economics statistics. The sixth is that you’ve got what they call peak oil where the world is, to some extent, running out of oil. So it’s not just commodity inflation, it’s a shortage of oil. And then the last thing is the collapsing dollar. Now, whenever you get this sort of package in one decade, you got a big one…I think it’s…on a par with the Thirties.”
So getting back to those wonderful brown cows on the hill in the sun. They and their local farm may pointing not to yesterday as much as to tomorrow. No matter what the marketplace does short term, we’re all likely facing a future with much tighter constraints and greatly limited resources.
Today it takes a whopping 9 calories of fossil fuel energy to put just 1 calorie of food on your plate. We can’t afford to keep living on borrowed energy. We—and our politicians—need to wake up. Sustainability in the future can’t be supported on government-subsidized global trade. It will have to be based on a much greater extent on our ability to produce what we can, as effectively and sustainably as we can, locally.
Every time I drive to St. Andrews I pass a small herd of tawny-brown and white-faced cattle. They’re usually facing the sun in a vivid green pasture on a hill overlooking the St. Croix River and St. Croix Island. It’s beautiful and bucolic—a scene from another century.
The scene always gets me thinking. A century ago, this area was almost entirely self-sufficient. Along with the farms were highly productive fisheries, a busy logging and lumber industry, and a lucrative craft, trades and manufacturing culture.
A colleague of mine brought home just how recently this culture has disappeared. Now in his late 40s, he can remember in his youth travelling with his dad into the woods to visit the bush camps. His father was a supervisor there, overseeing—and paying—the workers, who were still using teams of horses to draw the logs out of the forest, right up until the early 1970s.
The changes we’ve seen over the last 40 years have been remarkable. But fasten your seatbelts. Even more are on the way. On the one hand we’re seeing the exponential growth in knowledge and new technologies. On the other hand we’re experiencing the unprecedented degradation of our environment and the inevitable decline of our fossil fuel economy. The great hope is that we’ll be able to use our newly minted knowledge to overcome the looming prospect of a growing scarcity of natural resources—including both fuel and food.
One of the more fascinating things about change is that it’s not exactly linear. A few short years ago, leading financial economists were telling us that our generation could look forward to at least another 20 uninterrupted years of unrestrained economic growth on the stock market and in the real world, with only a few minor corrections. Obviously, that prediction isn’t quite working out. After the events of the last couple of weeks, nervous financial professionals on network television are now publicly worrying that we may be headed for another Great Depression as the woes of Wall Street hit Main Street.
In my mind, the trouble with Wall Street is it’s too complicated, with its derivatives, futures, commercial paper, short selling and the like. Real life is a whole lot simpler. Here in the real world, we learn the hard way not to spend what we don’t have. If we live on credit and for some unexpected reason lose our job, we may lose our car, our house, or everything we own. In the real world there’s no safety net for you and me.
But a great many of us have been drawn into the credit-crazy Wall Street world. The government has very actively encouraged us to buy RRSPs to offset our taxes and to bolster our old age pensions. The banks have marketed low-interest consumer loans, escalating interest credit cards and low-to-no-down-payment mortgages. So Americans and to a lesser extent Canadians have borrowed themselves silly.
The entire system, of course, has become a giant Las Vegas casino. However safe it may seem, an RRSP is still a gamble on the stock market. And one of the bad things about RRSPs is the fact that you can’t take cash them out without paying a big penalty in income tax. However, when the market gets bad, you can move your investments into the money market—which is kind of like parking your money on the side of betting table.
This has always seemed a safe way to go—until now. With financial institutions losing such huge amounts of money in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, they’re facing a serious shortage of real cash. Or, in banker parlance, liquidity. One of the few sources of liquidity available is in the money market. And ordinary investors can easily get so nervous that they’d start to pull their cash out of the money market. Had that happened it would have caused a panic—with consequences of epic proportions.
To put some liquidity and spine back into the market, the US government and international banks have pushed over a trillion dollars of liquid cash into the US financial system. Most of this bailout will come from the US taxpayers.
To put this in perspective, just before the Great Depression millions of ordinary people invested their life savings and even borrowed money to invest in the stock market. It was their panic that sent the markets plunging into ruin. It wasn’t until the early 1950s that the value in the stock market rose to the level it was in 1929.
One of the things that this current crisis should teach us is that we need some regulatory protection for small investors. If the government wants us to “save” using RRSP investment tools, it needs to either guarantee our initial investment, or allow small investors to get out of the market altogether—without penalty—when stock markets get too volatile. But that’s never going to happen, because the markets are now too dependent on our personal savings.
According to Kevin Phillips, author of Bad Money, the events of the last couple of weeks could be just a warning of what’s to come. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Phillips cited his ‘seven sharks’ of the economy, “…the first is financialization because we’re so dependent on this industry that’s sort of half lost its marbles. The second is that you have this huge buildup of debt, absolutely unprecedented anywhere in the world. The third is you’ve now got home prices collapsing. The fourth is you’ve got global commodity inflation building up. The fifth is you’ve got flawed and deceptive government economics statistics. The sixth is that you’ve got what they call peak oil where the world is, to some extent, running out of oil. So it’s not just commodity inflation, it’s a shortage of oil. And then the last thing is the collapsing dollar. Now, whenever you get this sort of package in one decade, you got a big one…I think it’s…on a par with the Thirties.”
So getting back to those wonderful brown cows on the hill in the sun. They and their local farm may pointing not to yesterday as much as to tomorrow. No matter what the marketplace does short term, we’re all likely facing a future with much tighter constraints and greatly limited resources.
Today it takes a whopping 9 calories of fossil fuel energy to put just 1 calorie of food on your plate. We can’t afford to keep living on borrowed energy. We—and our politicians—need to wake up. Sustainability in the future can’t be supported on government-subsidized global trade. It will have to be based on a much greater extent on our ability to produce what we can, as effectively and sustainably as we can, locally.
Friday, September 19, 2008
The world had a bad day
©
My computer hard drive went down this morning. Very frustrating. After tinkering with it for an hour or so, I gave up and flipped on the news. There was another meltdown in progress, this one at Lehman Brothers, the giant billion-dollar financial investment firm.
From what the experts say—people like Alan Greenspan, the former head of the US Federal Reserve—there may be more to come. It seems like the sub-prime lending crash hasn’t found bottom yet. European and Asian stock markets dropped by 2% to 5% overnight. Morgan Stanley has been sold to one of the US banks. And other investment firms are tottering on the brink.
The news cut away to the other US disaster currently underway—Hurricane Ike. When I checked satellite photos on the weather channel early yesterday the storm was as big as the entire Gulf of Mexico. Today it’s crossing Texas having razed the city of Houston a huge residential population and the several hundred oil refineries located there. Amazingly, only 10 or so of the refineries went off line—and this good news immediately plunged the price of oil to below $95 dollars a barrel. Sadly, tens of thousands of people have lost their homes and millions of people are without electricity, and may continue to be for another two weeks or more. This, while residents down there are still cleaning up after Hurricane Gustav.
On the Canadian scene we’re being treated to, thankfully, less dramatic news. The federal election is being turned into a war of personalities by the Stephen Harper Conservatives and the New Democrats’ Jack Layton (who is running a much slicker campaign than ever before). Of course their target is the exceedingly image-challenged Liberal leader, Stéphan Dion, who is blithely and awkwardly trying to address the real issues, such as Canada’s flawed immigration process.
One wonders why he doesn’t trot out the high profile Liberal team to back him up, Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae for example. Maybe then we could focus on the real issues—such as the war in Afghanistan, the mega-polluting oil sands project and the concept of building a green-tech economy before we run out of cheap oil. Maybe we could even talk a bit more about decoupling from the US economy, which would seem to be a healthy idea for Canadians given the long-term prognosis for the US.
I won’t hold my breath though. I don’t think we’ll see any real political solutions in the near term. Call me cynical, but my kids are teaching me all about why the world seems to be having more bad days than ever lately.
Sharon and I helped them clean up their rooms this weekend. I had no idea how many clothes and toys they’d collected, and how few of them they used with regularly. They’d pull them out, toss them around the room, sweep them under their beds, and wait—until mom and dad did an all-out, in-depth deep clean. It wasn’t quite that way when we were kids. We lived in an Internet-free zone in a 7-channel universe and with far less kid-related material goods. It’s not that we were any better; it’s just the way it was.
Make no mistake. I think our kids are great. But I think they have less regard for their possessions and privileges—because they have so many of them and they come so easily. If they break the remote control on the TV, we buy another one. If they break their bikes, we fix them, or just replace them every couple of years. If they smash their toys, there’ll be more and better ones on the way at Christmas or on their birthday. And like most parents, we’d rather spend a few dollars than spend the time fixing broken plastic toys. They’re not worth it, and nowhere is this more clear than at a yard sale full of old toys. You can’t even give the stuff away.
Since the computer melted down, we’re in the market for a new computer (read: adult toy) too. Old computer gear is just about as valuable as old kid stuff. Again, here are these expensive machines that are virtually worthless and obsolete in just three or four years.
When you think about it, all this conspicuous materialism might just be linked to why the world having more bad days lately. Let’s connect the dots. The consumer society runs on buying ever-more stuff. And the marketing industry makes sure that we all keep wanting stuff. So the consumer-driven economy is at the base of everything we do, economically speaking. That means we need to keep up our levels of consumption.
On the other hand, there are no more frontiers on little planet Earth. New, giant economic engines are just starting to rev up in China and India with over 2 billion new consumers getting into the game—just in time to chart a massive collision course with global climate change and the end of the cheap oil era. I seriously doubt the luxury-starved folks in those emerging economies have any desire to curb their appetites on our behalf. And hey, it’s pretty clear that we’re not willing to curb our desires, either.
We’re just like today’s kids who don’t know the true value of the things we so easily possess and consume. For example, out here where we live, recycling is almost an unpracticed activity. Sure, a few conscientious people do it. But most of us don’t.
So if we’re going to change, we have a few options. We can either cooperate, or compete with the rest of the world. With large world populations and diminishing resources, competition is likely to become fierce. And education is a key indicator. Today a BA is an entry-level ticket to almost any real job, even an assistant manager of a grocery store. A good professional job now requires a post-grad degree, preferrably from a good school. Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Stanford and MIT to the front of the line, please.
The other path is cooperation. One of the best ways to cooperate is through our political system. Our government is the only way we have to effectively redistribute wealth and to invest in the common good. And the proof is in who’s now talking about just that—business gurus like Purdy Crawford, Warren Buffet, George Soros, and many many more.
Surprise, surprise, we’re seeing the end of the Utopian free market-driven society. Now it’s up to us to decide what comes next. Forget the politics of personality. We need a few politicians who actually understand what needs to be done.
My computer hard drive went down this morning. Very frustrating. After tinkering with it for an hour or so, I gave up and flipped on the news. There was another meltdown in progress, this one at Lehman Brothers, the giant billion-dollar financial investment firm.
From what the experts say—people like Alan Greenspan, the former head of the US Federal Reserve—there may be more to come. It seems like the sub-prime lending crash hasn’t found bottom yet. European and Asian stock markets dropped by 2% to 5% overnight. Morgan Stanley has been sold to one of the US banks. And other investment firms are tottering on the brink.
The news cut away to the other US disaster currently underway—Hurricane Ike. When I checked satellite photos on the weather channel early yesterday the storm was as big as the entire Gulf of Mexico. Today it’s crossing Texas having razed the city of Houston a huge residential population and the several hundred oil refineries located there. Amazingly, only 10 or so of the refineries went off line—and this good news immediately plunged the price of oil to below $95 dollars a barrel. Sadly, tens of thousands of people have lost their homes and millions of people are without electricity, and may continue to be for another two weeks or more. This, while residents down there are still cleaning up after Hurricane Gustav.
On the Canadian scene we’re being treated to, thankfully, less dramatic news. The federal election is being turned into a war of personalities by the Stephen Harper Conservatives and the New Democrats’ Jack Layton (who is running a much slicker campaign than ever before). Of course their target is the exceedingly image-challenged Liberal leader, Stéphan Dion, who is blithely and awkwardly trying to address the real issues, such as Canada’s flawed immigration process.
One wonders why he doesn’t trot out the high profile Liberal team to back him up, Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae for example. Maybe then we could focus on the real issues—such as the war in Afghanistan, the mega-polluting oil sands project and the concept of building a green-tech economy before we run out of cheap oil. Maybe we could even talk a bit more about decoupling from the US economy, which would seem to be a healthy idea for Canadians given the long-term prognosis for the US.
I won’t hold my breath though. I don’t think we’ll see any real political solutions in the near term. Call me cynical, but my kids are teaching me all about why the world seems to be having more bad days than ever lately.
Sharon and I helped them clean up their rooms this weekend. I had no idea how many clothes and toys they’d collected, and how few of them they used with regularly. They’d pull them out, toss them around the room, sweep them under their beds, and wait—until mom and dad did an all-out, in-depth deep clean. It wasn’t quite that way when we were kids. We lived in an Internet-free zone in a 7-channel universe and with far less kid-related material goods. It’s not that we were any better; it’s just the way it was.
Make no mistake. I think our kids are great. But I think they have less regard for their possessions and privileges—because they have so many of them and they come so easily. If they break the remote control on the TV, we buy another one. If they break their bikes, we fix them, or just replace them every couple of years. If they smash their toys, there’ll be more and better ones on the way at Christmas or on their birthday. And like most parents, we’d rather spend a few dollars than spend the time fixing broken plastic toys. They’re not worth it, and nowhere is this more clear than at a yard sale full of old toys. You can’t even give the stuff away.
Since the computer melted down, we’re in the market for a new computer (read: adult toy) too. Old computer gear is just about as valuable as old kid stuff. Again, here are these expensive machines that are virtually worthless and obsolete in just three or four years.
When you think about it, all this conspicuous materialism might just be linked to why the world having more bad days lately. Let’s connect the dots. The consumer society runs on buying ever-more stuff. And the marketing industry makes sure that we all keep wanting stuff. So the consumer-driven economy is at the base of everything we do, economically speaking. That means we need to keep up our levels of consumption.
On the other hand, there are no more frontiers on little planet Earth. New, giant economic engines are just starting to rev up in China and India with over 2 billion new consumers getting into the game—just in time to chart a massive collision course with global climate change and the end of the cheap oil era. I seriously doubt the luxury-starved folks in those emerging economies have any desire to curb their appetites on our behalf. And hey, it’s pretty clear that we’re not willing to curb our desires, either.
We’re just like today’s kids who don’t know the true value of the things we so easily possess and consume. For example, out here where we live, recycling is almost an unpracticed activity. Sure, a few conscientious people do it. But most of us don’t.
So if we’re going to change, we have a few options. We can either cooperate, or compete with the rest of the world. With large world populations and diminishing resources, competition is likely to become fierce. And education is a key indicator. Today a BA is an entry-level ticket to almost any real job, even an assistant manager of a grocery store. A good professional job now requires a post-grad degree, preferrably from a good school. Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Stanford and MIT to the front of the line, please.
The other path is cooperation. One of the best ways to cooperate is through our political system. Our government is the only way we have to effectively redistribute wealth and to invest in the common good. And the proof is in who’s now talking about just that—business gurus like Purdy Crawford, Warren Buffet, George Soros, and many many more.
Surprise, surprise, we’re seeing the end of the Utopian free market-driven society. Now it’s up to us to decide what comes next. Forget the politics of personality. We need a few politicians who actually understand what needs to be done.
Monday, September 8, 2008
A kinder, gentler Stephen Harper?
©
Election madness is sweeping over North America. Maybe it doesn’t affect you, but I’m sorry to say the madness is starting to affect me.
After months of watching Hillary and Barrack, I am now thoroughly sick of hearing either of their voices. Hillary’s shrill voice wore out quicker. But now I find the sound of Obama’s pontificating oratory even more nauseating. On the other side of the fence, I would be quite content to never hear John McCain say, “my friends…” ever again.
Of course there are some serious issues going down south of the border. Their national debt has ballooned out of sight, not to mention their annual federal deficit. The Chinese and Saudis own large chunks of the US economy. Their housing market is in the crapper after the sub-prime lending fiasco. Consumer confidence is in the tank. Millions of American jobs have been shipped overseas thanks to globalization. The gap between the rich and poor continues to widen dramatically. (So much for the Ronald Reagan trickle down theory.) More than 20% of US citizens have no health care coverage whatsoever. The high cost of oil is bankrupting the American transportation industry. The Russians are sabre-rattling or much worse in Georgia. Then there are those two pesky wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, costing billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives. And finally, there are the gridlocked partisan politics, the lobbyists and the special interest groups hijacking the entire US political process.
With all that going on, it’s kinda nice to be a Canadian, isn’t it? Or is it? Well, if you’ve been watching Canadian television ads, you’d have to conclude that our issues are rather tame, and we’re so very fortunate to have that nice, smiling Stephen Harper at the helm. In these schmaltzy 1950s-style ads we’re told that he’s the best choice we have. Sounds like that “lowered expectations” skit on Saturday Night Live a whole lot of years ago.
And really, what a pile of horse hockey. We’ve all seen the boxy, stone-faced Harper touring the Arctic or reviewing the troops in the field. Or the smirking, sarcastic Harper during Question Period, dismissing the opposition with a patrician wave of his hand. When I saw the first “nice” Conservative ad with the smiling Harper, I was sure his face would crack.
So here’s the low-down from a reformed advertising man. When a TV ad is telling you something, it’s usually trying to mask a fear of the exact opposite. When the Conservative Party starts to spend a lot of money advertising that their leader is a nice guy, what they’re actually afraid of is that most people think he’s not a nice guy. And by doing that, they’re acknowledging that they, too, know that their leader isn’t such a pussycat.
How could it be otherwise? Here’s a man, our prime minister, who makes a commitment to the Canadian people to have fixed terms and fixed dates for elections. And then he breaks that commitment at the first opportunity—a favourable popularity poll, and the need to get ahead of the US election just in case the “liberal” Democrats win an set the tone for a Canadian election. But it’s just politics as usual, right? Cynical, dishonest and utilitarian.
We Canadians do have a few serious issues. Harper has been busy over the past two years decoupling the provinces from the federal system. Thanks to the Canadian oil agenda, he’s quickly moving us from a nation of equals to a federation of unequal states, if that’s all right by you. And then there’s this little issue of the Canadian military acting as a spare backup battalion for the US Army over there in Afghanistan. Here at home we have the prospect of a disappearing Arctic ice sheet in summer, which will completely impact not only the Inuit culture but the future of all Arctic species. And with all that open water up there comes a big sovereignty issue with the Northwest Passage and untapped oil and gas reserves, which will be hotly contested by those two old rivals, the US and Russia, right on our northern doorstep. And who could forget that we’re completely indexed into the US economy, which hasn’t been doing so hot lately? I guess we’ll be kissing our manufacturing and forestry sectors goodbye for a while.
I had a coffee yesterday with an old friend. We got into some of the same topics, and his big concern was apathy—how ordinary Canadian voters seemed to care so little about getting involved in politics. I had to agree, and I’ve written about this before. It must be getting pretty bad when the Conservative candidate, Greg Thompson can run nearly unchallenged, and the federal Liberals here in Southwest New Brunswick, while they seem to have a candidate, don’t even have a riding president listed on the Liberal website. And with just a little over a month to go before the election.
This might concern residents of the region. While we know that Greg’s a good man, the ruling Conservatives have a big interest in maintaining Arctic sovereignty. Inevitably, this may include the occasional trade-off—say for instance, allowing the US to park one or two Liquified Natural Gas terminals on their own side of the border in Maine, and letting their LNG tankers run through Head Harbour Passage—in order to secure our bigger interests up north.
The old adage says that politics is the art of the possible. Which, I suppose is code for “situational ethics” or flat out utilitarianism. And therein lies the importance of the passionately involved citizen. If all politics lead politicians toward compromise, then it’s only by the grace of an ethical electorate that we’ll ever get the spine we need. Which means you matter. As a citizen, you’re the one with the uncompromising ideals and the independent voice.
And that’s exactly what the party system of government is lacking. Party politics turn party supporters into true believers. The party line becomes the important thing. It becomes a religion. What we need today are more vocal, highly skeptical, disbelieving voters.
Frankly, I don’t give a fig about Conservative principles or Liberal philosophies. It all ends up in a power game, in which absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I hope we haven’t all forgotten the purpose of government—which is to protect. Not to protect a ruling political party, or the politicians, or big businesses. But to protect ourselves. And if we do it right, we also get to protect our future generations.
I know it sounds hokey, but I just don’t trust our politicians to do it without us.
Election madness is sweeping over North America. Maybe it doesn’t affect you, but I’m sorry to say the madness is starting to affect me.
After months of watching Hillary and Barrack, I am now thoroughly sick of hearing either of their voices. Hillary’s shrill voice wore out quicker. But now I find the sound of Obama’s pontificating oratory even more nauseating. On the other side of the fence, I would be quite content to never hear John McCain say, “my friends…” ever again.
Of course there are some serious issues going down south of the border. Their national debt has ballooned out of sight, not to mention their annual federal deficit. The Chinese and Saudis own large chunks of the US economy. Their housing market is in the crapper after the sub-prime lending fiasco. Consumer confidence is in the tank. Millions of American jobs have been shipped overseas thanks to globalization. The gap between the rich and poor continues to widen dramatically. (So much for the Ronald Reagan trickle down theory.) More than 20% of US citizens have no health care coverage whatsoever. The high cost of oil is bankrupting the American transportation industry. The Russians are sabre-rattling or much worse in Georgia. Then there are those two pesky wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, costing billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives. And finally, there are the gridlocked partisan politics, the lobbyists and the special interest groups hijacking the entire US political process.
With all that going on, it’s kinda nice to be a Canadian, isn’t it? Or is it? Well, if you’ve been watching Canadian television ads, you’d have to conclude that our issues are rather tame, and we’re so very fortunate to have that nice, smiling Stephen Harper at the helm. In these schmaltzy 1950s-style ads we’re told that he’s the best choice we have. Sounds like that “lowered expectations” skit on Saturday Night Live a whole lot of years ago.
And really, what a pile of horse hockey. We’ve all seen the boxy, stone-faced Harper touring the Arctic or reviewing the troops in the field. Or the smirking, sarcastic Harper during Question Period, dismissing the opposition with a patrician wave of his hand. When I saw the first “nice” Conservative ad with the smiling Harper, I was sure his face would crack.
So here’s the low-down from a reformed advertising man. When a TV ad is telling you something, it’s usually trying to mask a fear of the exact opposite. When the Conservative Party starts to spend a lot of money advertising that their leader is a nice guy, what they’re actually afraid of is that most people think he’s not a nice guy. And by doing that, they’re acknowledging that they, too, know that their leader isn’t such a pussycat.
How could it be otherwise? Here’s a man, our prime minister, who makes a commitment to the Canadian people to have fixed terms and fixed dates for elections. And then he breaks that commitment at the first opportunity—a favourable popularity poll, and the need to get ahead of the US election just in case the “liberal” Democrats win an set the tone for a Canadian election. But it’s just politics as usual, right? Cynical, dishonest and utilitarian.
We Canadians do have a few serious issues. Harper has been busy over the past two years decoupling the provinces from the federal system. Thanks to the Canadian oil agenda, he’s quickly moving us from a nation of equals to a federation of unequal states, if that’s all right by you. And then there’s this little issue of the Canadian military acting as a spare backup battalion for the US Army over there in Afghanistan. Here at home we have the prospect of a disappearing Arctic ice sheet in summer, which will completely impact not only the Inuit culture but the future of all Arctic species. And with all that open water up there comes a big sovereignty issue with the Northwest Passage and untapped oil and gas reserves, which will be hotly contested by those two old rivals, the US and Russia, right on our northern doorstep. And who could forget that we’re completely indexed into the US economy, which hasn’t been doing so hot lately? I guess we’ll be kissing our manufacturing and forestry sectors goodbye for a while.
I had a coffee yesterday with an old friend. We got into some of the same topics, and his big concern was apathy—how ordinary Canadian voters seemed to care so little about getting involved in politics. I had to agree, and I’ve written about this before. It must be getting pretty bad when the Conservative candidate, Greg Thompson can run nearly unchallenged, and the federal Liberals here in Southwest New Brunswick, while they seem to have a candidate, don’t even have a riding president listed on the Liberal website. And with just a little over a month to go before the election.
This might concern residents of the region. While we know that Greg’s a good man, the ruling Conservatives have a big interest in maintaining Arctic sovereignty. Inevitably, this may include the occasional trade-off—say for instance, allowing the US to park one or two Liquified Natural Gas terminals on their own side of the border in Maine, and letting their LNG tankers run through Head Harbour Passage—in order to secure our bigger interests up north.
The old adage says that politics is the art of the possible. Which, I suppose is code for “situational ethics” or flat out utilitarianism. And therein lies the importance of the passionately involved citizen. If all politics lead politicians toward compromise, then it’s only by the grace of an ethical electorate that we’ll ever get the spine we need. Which means you matter. As a citizen, you’re the one with the uncompromising ideals and the independent voice.
And that’s exactly what the party system of government is lacking. Party politics turn party supporters into true believers. The party line becomes the important thing. It becomes a religion. What we need today are more vocal, highly skeptical, disbelieving voters.
Frankly, I don’t give a fig about Conservative principles or Liberal philosophies. It all ends up in a power game, in which absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I hope we haven’t all forgotten the purpose of government—which is to protect. Not to protect a ruling political party, or the politicians, or big businesses. But to protect ourselves. And if we do it right, we also get to protect our future generations.
I know it sounds hokey, but I just don’t trust our politicians to do it without us.
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