Where Is The Monument To The Victims Of Capitalism?

I'm beginning to weary of fruitlessly championing the truth, and sometimes I am quite unhinged by it.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 1, Section Thirty Two, Constance Garnett Translation.

It doesn't happen often in Ottawa that an issue arises where every level of government rises up in an uproar, but that is exactly what happened when the 'Harper Government' announced the building of the Victims of Communism monument, at a site that was reserved for the new Supreme Court Building, located at the most prime location in downtown Ottawa. This was no doubt done to celebrate the 'Harper Government's many successes pleading before this august body.

 

proposed victims of communism monument...

The local burg(h)ers of Ottawa would be even more alarmed if they did their research a little deeper and discovered that the said monument stands to raise a ton of cash far in excess of its initial costs. There has been no report from the 'Harper Government' where the said hoped for excesses are going to go.. As always in Ottawa if there is even the semblance of smoke you can be utterly certain that at some point there will be fire. You see Dear Reader, if you are so inclined to celebrate the memory of a long gone "loved ones" misfortune of running into communism, you can have the loved ones name inscribed on the above mentioned monster, or rather monument, for a very small fee, not un-adjacent to one thousand dollars! Why just do the math! The sky is the limit!

 Now in Canada there has been very many social systems in vogue over the many years that Canada has been a Colony and later as a nation state. The first system that was found in use by Native Canadians was the tribal system. Then the French brought feudalism, that had a hell of a run from 1600 until well into the beginning of the 20th century! Along the way we also experimented with indentured labor and even slavery, just like in the United States! But the hands down winner was of course the best worst system of good old capitalism. And in the early days it was rabid tooth and claw, right out of Das Kapital as written by Karl Marx.

You had the lumber barons, the rail barrens, the press barons, and of course you had the mighty banking barons. And they have nearly all carried on into the kinder and gentler world of today, many of them such as say the Bank of Nova Scotia in there unbroken histories... But we never tried communism in Canada at all, not even once, that the Oracle of Ottawa is aware of. So The Oracle of Ottawa thought that it would be probably much more fitting to have a monument to The Victims Of Capitalism.  

 It as all tentative so far, but I have some basic ideas for the monuments basic design. In the center would be a huge hand cast in Pyrex Glass holding a very real steel double edge dagger! The glass hand would signify Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, but the real reality would be the 100 foot long dagger! Get it? When you play around in capitalism the invisible hand is bound to get you right in the back, even if you do every thing right...

Then, of course, we must high light the wonderful upside of capitalism in its unregulated glory, just like the 'Harper Government' pushes. How about this? We would have cast in bronze two young girls sorting medical linen waste, just like in the 19th century. Of course these children never got to be teenagers, let alone get into the ages of the double digits. Isn't the invisible hand awesome?

Then to one side we could have the tribute to the great bankers of the world. Such as that one old house in Europe that used to loan money to one country and with their underwriting fees would make a loan to the enemy of the first customer! Why, the first classic two fer! Then with the profits from the gouging interest rates of all the customers, you could sell both sides arms and create a virtuous cycle of misery and death. Yes Sir! Capitalism, how awesome is that? The 'Harper Government' should know this story very well, They are very close friends with the bankers that bought their own state in the Middle East.... 

Justin Trudeau - The Budget WILL Take Care Of Itself

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.
Adam Smith, Lecture, 1775, quoted by Dugald Stewart,  Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, Section IV, 25  

It was a short time ago now, when the Oracle of Ottawa heard the young Justin Trudeau take a lot of heat by the members of the 'Harper Government', when he said right out loud that the budget will take care of itself. Now the Oracle of Ottawa knows that the young Justin is most certainly the 'Next One', and that what he just said was utter and proven truth. The Oracle of Ottawa had heard that line of thought before. It was mentioned by one of the great classical economists. The problem was that the Oracle could not remember which one it was. 

Justin Trudeau is right. The budget Will take care of itself...

 The answer came to the Oracle of Ottawa totally by accident and perhaps by Divine intervention, when by chance he was reading the 2005 edition of David N. Weill's most excellent book Economic Growth. The quote and author that the Oracle was seeking occurs on page 332, at the head of Chapter 12, the chapter on government. It was then a very easy step to source the quote perfectly at the Adam Smith Institute page that popped up with an elementary Google search. 

What the young Justin took so much heat over, was indeed the same attitude of Adam Smith himself! The Hallowed father of capitalism and modern economics. It must be very embarrassing to conservatives of the 'Harper Government' that the leader of the Third party (at present), knows his Adam Smith better then the lacky conservatives that claim to be his soul and authentic voice. 

Again this proves rather strongly, that Adam Smith was anything but a right wing neo-con wacko. To any one who has carefully read The Wealth of Nations in its unabridged massive whole, one soon see's that Adam Smith would be right at home as Finance Minister in the next Trudeau government! If you carefully read Adam Smith's greatest work and then read Capital by Karl Marx, Book I, you will soon come to the incredible realization that not only was Adam Smith the father of economics, he was the first Marxian, way before Karl Marx! 

                                           Soon - The 2015 Liberal Campaign Theme Song?

Proof of this is the creation of the concept of the idea of Surplus Labour, asking any right winger who the father of that idea was, will always lead to the answer that it was Karl Marx, which would be totally wrong. It was an idea, and a very true and important one, that Karl Marx borrowed from Adam Smith! Yes that young Justin Trudeau is indeed very well informed, indeed...

Tripping On Steve Keen

The belief that a capitalist economy is inherently stabilising is also one for which inhabitants of market economies may pay dearly in the future.
Steve Keen, Debunking Economics, p. 213

The Oracle of Ottawa is off his routine. The usual subject matter has been getting pretty boring. And on top of that the Canadian public has finally clued in and it is all back on track. My work on those recent subjects are all but done now.(See earlier postings...) The truth of the matter is that the Oracle of Ottawa has been side-tracked by a most amazing book written by one Steve Keen, of the University of Western Sydney, way down under, called Debunking Economics...

Steve Keen - equilibrium is bunk!

Frequent fliers to the Economy of Media know that the Oracle of Ottawa loves his books and is most interested in economics. And that he has read all the major "classical" economists texts in their unabridged entirety. Including the General Theory by Keynes in a very, very, early edition. Why the Oracle of Ottawa even read all the small print, how sick is that? And he still can't understand why every one says it is a "difficult book"? A lot of the trouble was due to war time paper and printing restrictions. The Oracle of Ottawa has always thought that Keynes was always a very good read!

But over the years the Oracle of Ottawa has been getting that anxious nervous feeling that a lot of what is taught to young economists is all very, very, well, wrong. This feeling got worse and worse as the Oracle of Ottawa put together a rather nice pile in a stock portfolio over the years, by breaking all the rules that are taught to all the up and coming portfolio mangers. According to the text books the Oracle of Ottawa has just been really lucky, so far...

But according to Steve Keen the Oracle of Ottawa may just be a very early adaptor! All the Oracle of Ottawa can tell you is that if you read one economics book this year make it Debunking Economics! This guy could be the most important economist in our lifetime. This guy is as important as Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Maynard Keynes! So that of course means that he will never win the Nobel Prize for economics, because he is too right! But the upside is that he will be famous forever!

The part where he utterly demolishes the Efficient Market Hypothesis is worth the ten times the price of the book! And I am sure that Warren Buffet would back him up on his conclusions... The Oracle of Ottawa wasn't lucky at all, he was just and truly freaking brilliant!  

And he is a very relaxing guy to listen to, unlike most stuffy pedantic Nobel Laureates. Watch this guy, he is going to be very important and world famous...

Canadian Labour And The Three Tired Regimes

Forget the shrimp Honey I'm coming home with the crabs
Hunter S. Thompson, Better Than Sex, p. 94

The one thing that really eats the Oracle of Ottawa is the deal that today's youngsters are getting in the work place. When I think of the deal that my nieces and nephews have today compared with what the Oracle of Ottawa once enjoyed, well, a man could get weary. Although union labour is still strong in Canada, it just isn't what it once was. Recently I have been pondering much on the problem. When and where did it start to go off the rails? It has been a long and slow process, but the answer came to me just recently. Labour power, in Canada and America especially, started declining on July 30th, 1975. The day that Jimmy Hoffa disappeared.

Winnipeg General Strike - June 21, 1919

At first hearing it all sounds a bit much over the top. But like all profound revelations, it improves with each and every additional pass. What are the foundations of the whole worker thing? What is it all based on? How is that labour got so far behind the eight ball? Well the Oracle of Ottawa actually rounded up some material on the subject recently. The reason there is not much good information on the subject is that the works are so incredibly expensive! It seems to be a conspiracy of some nefarious powers of billable hour powered interests. But already I have learned that the basis of labour law is based on three (tired) regimes. And I will try to share with you what I have gleaned so far.

The first regime is the common law of employment. "Which treats employers and employees as free and equal contracting parties in the buying and selling of labour." Don't you just get a real laugh out of that howler? This is essentially the same common law that Adam Smith and Karl Marx bitched about in their major works over a hundred years ago. And what is even more depressing is that their arguments are still as relevant today as the centuries of the past that they first recorded them! You as a worker, essentially have no power what so ever under the common law. We had better hope that the other two regimes left have something better to offer.

Jimmy Hoffa - Left - Where Labour Leaders Come From...

The second regime is collective bargaining. " It is based on the realization that the usually inferior economic position of the employees vis-a-vis the employer keeps the individual employment contract from being a satisfactory mechanism." No shit! Once labour was totally on top of this and really ran successfully with it for many many years. Then somehow, during the recent right wing wave that has circled the earth, this most powerful tool has been slowly and very successfully undermined. The one weird thing about all this to the Oracle of Ottawa is that the corporate overlords have no problem forming as a block against the workers of the world, through such "unions" as the Bilderberg Group, and all the other various secret societies! And yet they will not seem to allow and are never at all happy when we try to do the same thing for our own protection! Are you starting to see the problem here? 

The third regime is statutory regulation. This is the employment standards legislation of you province or state, that you happen to reside and / or work in. You don't need the Oracle of Ottawa to tell you that, depending where you live, this regime is now, it seems, constantly under attack. The Oracle of Ottawa is just in shock when he watches the incredible decline of American workers rights, especially as of late. It seems that the corporate blue suited whores will use any trick method, or naked power to even accelerate this dismantling. The old days of hearing the knees knock on the other side of the table is long gone it seems to me. What is to be done?

We need another Golden Age. And perhaps a Global Master Freight Agreement??

Globalization Free Trade Fail

The fox has been in the henhouse for many years, but now the coon is coming.
Hunter S. Thompson, Better Than Sex, p. 88

God! What a haul it was! Finally finished reading George Ritzers monster book on globalization, entitled Globalization - A Basic Text. Yes, dear reader,  the Oracle of Ottawa read it so you wouldn't have to. Drier than all the sand dunes in Libya. But in conjunction with the Oracle of Ottawa's Thinking About Thinking Project, I think I have made several breakthroughs! You don't need the Oracle of Ottawa to tell you that there is really something fishy with this globalization crap. When you hear the knuckle dragging social Darwinist's of the Conservative Party of Canada going on about its wonders you know you have to be worried. And when you are sitting at home in, say, Southern Ontario, waiting for your first unemployment check, that you are not going to get, because your workplace just left for Mexico or China without you, then you will know that globalization is a crock of crap. How did it all come to this?

Milton Friedman - Fooled ya!

It is all a very convoluted and twisted tale. The two names you will hear the most often are Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The right wing Chicago School economist will go on endlessly about the benefits of the Invisible Hand as first written about by Adam Smith, then this will lead invariably to a long dissertation on the brilliance of Comparative Advantage. Now the Chicago School is big and unquestioned ever since Milton Friedman did his big thing in Chile, you know that miracle story? But when you really look at the whole thing closely today, you see it was all an engineered set up. It seemed to be old Milty's big rush to get into the Ivy League. Never happened, alas. Now you will hear about the miracle of the Chicago Boys, but did you hear about the bits about the Ford Foundation and the United States State Department? Geez, you soon come to realize that once with the full unimpeded power of the United States of America you could make darkness happen at noon! Let us just say that the playing field was altered somewhat before the said great experiment even started! And of course that coup thing had nothing to do with the "successful" outcome...

We will get it all back Comrade....

Well, the Oracle of Ottawa has discovered two new logical fallacies that allow this crap to be continued to be sold. The first fallacy I call Era Displacement. For example comparing the workings of comparative advantage in the time of David Ricardo to the modern world of today! Workers at the time of Ricardo who were engaged in so called foreign trade were not much better off in respect to one another, more or less. In todays modern world, there are great differences between the workers of the first world and the third world! And when you allow the capitalist corporate pigs to carry off our factories to third world countries, you are essentially allowing them to export unpaid for surplus labour back to the originating country, got it? Talk about adding insult to injury! Ponder that for a moment! And soon your first world country will be transformed ever so slowly to a third world country! Don't believe me? Just ask anyone that lives in say Windsor, Ontario...

Working through another problem....

The second fallacy is very similar to the first, but very subtle, I call it the fallacy of Proportion Displacement. Free trade between similar countries of social development will more or less work pretty well. But so called free trade between a first world country and a third world country is a total rip off for the citizens of the first world country, and the citizens of the third world country. The only ones that really laugh all the way to the bank coming and going are the right wing economists and the global corporate whores, of no fixed address.
Now the Oracle of Ottawa has a solution to these two newly discovered fallacies. See my blog post entitled "A Gold Standard For the Rest Of Us". (Not a neo-con rant...) Totally solved it didn't I? And by the way, it was not Karl Marx who first coined the concept of surplus labour, it was Adam Smith! Can you find the exact reference in The Wealth of Nations?  No? Some economist you are!
        

Now watch this carefully and then read the above text again...

Employment Insurance Canada - A Crown Corporation

The life insurance industry is filled with good people who believe in their work and their companies, but who may never have challenged the assumptions underlying their efforts. 
Andrew Tobias, The Invisible Bankers, Everything The Insurance Industry Never Wanted You To Know, p. 65

It all starts at the earliest school experience. The rights of private property and how capitalism is the most efficient system ever devised. You have get them young. You pretty much buy-in to all the propaganda, since you have nothing to compare it to, and any alternatives are certainly not allowed to be discussed. Soon you are out in the real world, and you start to notice things aren't quite right.

Adam Smith would approve, read the text...

For example, there are three burger joints in your "hood" and they are always empty most of the time. Think of that carbon foot print for a moment! You crawl on saturated freeways, full of empty cars, all really going no where in particular. You fly on business, and notice that there is a constant line of half or emptier jets all going to the same place. Now you start to wonder at the plain insanity of deregulation, and pondering back to 9/11 on and of the wisdom of deregulation, and the brilliance of "open skies" Great idea that was...

Soon the factory you work for is ripping the machines from the floor and shipping them to Mexico or China. Your worthless globalized ass is now unemployed. You have paid into employment insurance for years and now you have to apply for it! What the fuck kind of insult is that? The Oracle of Ottawa has a future solution for this. And it will no doubt happen when the NDP forms government. Or sooner than you think!

Soon to be just a bad memory.....

The solution is a Crown Corporation for Employment Insurance. From your first job, you are their most important client! All the money you pay for your employment insurance goes to Employment Insurance Canada. There mission is to protect you and help you to realize your maximum potential over the period of your working life. When you become unemployed, your first check will be in the mail automatically! No waiting period crap. You will also find information in the envelope of all the "out services" you can access right fuck'in NOW! Just like the pigs in suits! This will include several re-trainings over your working life...

Now, the mandate of Employment Insurance Canada is pretty wide open and the lads are ready to keep it wide open. For example due to such the large "group" of all the workers in Canada EIC will be able to offer insurance pretty cheap. Soon they will be offering full insurance packages and allied services.(i.e. estate planning..) For example you will be able to get life insurance, real cheap and very sweet. Of course the corporate pigs now selling insurance won't be nationalized, we the workers will enjoy watching them starve to death one by one!

Of course some of them will find little low profit niches that will allow them minimum wage. Capitalism in the clean up mode. Capitalism at the service of the people who created it and is supposed to serve. Now as time progresses, Workers Compensation and Canada Pension integrates into Employment Insurance Canada, with constitutional safeguards and protections. After-all the 19th century was two centuries ago....

John Kenneth Galbraith, No Greater Gift

Conscience is better served by a myth.
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, Chapter 4, p.111

John Kenneth Galbraith never won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Although he invented an idea as powerful as the invisible hand and left a body of work that is still seen on bookshelves to this very day. His greatest idea was that of "countervailing power". It is an idea that will become more and more important as the future unfolds, because you can apply it to political processes and all levels of sociological interactions. As a matter of fact you can trace a lot of organizational problems to the lack of countervailing power. As a matter of another fact, the lack of countervailing power leads to my great idea, the process of skidmarkization. That is a new word. I have found that large organizations without countervailing power soon lose their best people and the process of skidmarkization sets in as the brother in laws and brats replace the competent people.. Look around you! But enough of that!

John Kenneth Galbraith came from a farm in southern Ontario. Not very far from where I live. It always strikes students of Canadian history how a farm kid from Canada ended up serving in four of the greatest political administrations of the most powerful country on Earth! How the Hell did he get a security clearance?
Under the Kennedy administration he served as American Ambassador to India! Where at one point he single handedly prevented World War III! Damn! Where he did he get the jam? I get exhausted just thinking about it all...

John Kenneth Galbraith (left)

 Now John was also a fully tenured Harvard Prof. He wrote about 48 books and over 1000 articles! And do you remember The Age of Uncertainty television series? I grew up watching it on TV Ontario, I never tired of watching it. As a matter of fact it lit an interest in economics that has stayed with me all my life..(so far..) Darn! He must have been stinkin' rich!  The literary estate must still generate handsome cheques. What I always wanted to know is; what did he do with his money? Was it all in government bonds? Was he a shrewd successful stock picker? Or did he just spend it like a sailor? I always wanted to know that....   

But I do know how those residual cheques could be larger. Would someone look into getting the complete BBC series of The Age of Uncertainty into a DVD box set? If it could be digitally remastered pure heaven! My favorite episode was the third segment " The Massive Dissent of Karl Marx." It was utterly brilliant! And I am sure it will always be timely, since all the footage was captured at the exact locations of the subjects. And include a guide book perhaps? An updated version of The Age of Uncertainty? In time for Christmas would be perfect indeed!

 A little teaser, still plays very well, my favorite segment of The Age of Uncertainty...

Stream of Joyce it is....

Good roads, canals and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expence of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those of the neighbourhood  of the town. They are upon the greatest of all improvements.
Adam Smith , The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter XI, Part I,  p. 174

Preamble:
I am so tired hearing the right wing wack'o conservatives whining about taxes. There are a whole bunch of places on Earth where there are low or even no taxes. Like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ethiopia to name a few failed states of tax free bliss. Yet the havens of tax free bliss have not relieved me of my whining conservative friends. Why is that do you think? It seems even in Canada that the tax system runs more on inertia and four more years then on the greatest good for the greatest number. What I would like to see is an international index of tax efficiency measured with a numerical value to four decimal places from .0000 to 1.000. Now as we all know governments spend tax dollars. How do you measure a well spent tax dollar? How do you measure a poorly spent tax dollar?  Well lately it has dawned on me that a well spent tax dollar can be measured by the number of tax dollars it will return to government revenue in the future! Let me list a few well spent tax dollar projects (i) the Saint Lawrence Seaway, (ii) Hoover Dam (iii) Tennessee Valley Authority
(iv)Canadian National Railway  and (v)Petro Canada. The last two were sold off simply because government shouldn't be in business! And the Canadian government made an absolute killing on both deals! That is a well spent tax dollar! Hoover Dam generates a whooping river of money still; not to mention all the tourist traffic. That was a well spent pile of  tax dollars. Have you seen the brand new Buicks? The latest GMC trucks? Well my little tea-party friend "Government Motors" seems to be working really well indeed! The United States government should retain the interest in Government Motors. It appears that so far the quality of the managers in the Federal Civil Service are of a much higher quality then mere vulgar capitalism based corporations! Someday not tomorrow or the next day, but soon enough, we are going to go toe to toe with the Asians again! Where do you think you are going to get your tanks planes and guns? Toyota? Cream of Sum Young Guy Motors in China? Oh stop your killing me....What is a poorly spent tax dollar? It is simply a tax dollar spent that will not return even itself to government revenues in the length of time of a 25 year residential mortgage!! A good example of poor tax spending is excessive defense spending. A good example of a well spent tax dollar is education... I figure there must be a way to measure this just from the standard "national accounting" numbers that are already out there... Is there or what?

Economy:
The "rare earths" article has surged in page views recently at Wikipedia. This was caused by the Chinese choking off some delivery's to Japan... The Chinese have a "stranglehold" on rare-earth? Since freaking when? Is this figure as accurate as there GDP growth numbers? This is a crock!! The Russians have more of this filth stored from the Soviet days then the Chinese can shake a stick at! Here in Canada we haven't even started and or bothered to look for it! But it is here.. oh ya we got it up the wazzooo! I must be right... the surge has petered out and the article is back to its average number of page views... hmmmm do you think there is information in that??

Rare Earth-What today is made of...

Media:
This blog is reaching the farthest ends of the earth! I can't freaking believe that people in Russia are reading!??
And eight other countries.. It seems, much to my chagrin, that the most read post was my first stream of shit rant! I thought I would get booed out of the blog o verse.. And the post that I thought would go through the roof was the one on Saint John the Apostle.. really proud of some of the turns of the word in that one... Not one freaking view! Go figure. Writing is frustrating hard and cruel. Pictures are coming! I am starting to amass them and soon as I can figure out how to pound them in you will see them...Watched the New Sherlock Holmes on WPBS this evening and it was the best television I have ENJOYED in a long time...When Sherlock says "I am not a psychopath! I am a high functioning sociopath.. Get it right!" He really is a man of my own heart.

Seeing the light...

Nothing but the most exemplary morals can give dignity to a man of small fortune.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part III, Article III, p. 874

If you have ever read the Wealth of Nations straight through -cover to cover- in the unabridged edition you will notice that the work starts with unabashed optimism. But as the end nears I could sense that the optimism was giving way to a realization that he had discovered the dark side of the new economics that he was relating to the world. But yet, like realizing that the wife is cheating on you, you want to be the last to know. What Adam Smith witnessed being born was the greatest social system ever to emerge. Its strength brooked no challenges it would destroy and create everything in its path and it has! Even militant communism lasted but a blink of economic time. But will it get us also?

Adam Smith.

World markets are firming, the Canadian TSX gained over 80 points today. Even "bad news" is having no effect. If you have the time, check out the William Stanley Jevons article at Wikipedia. Jevons was the first to propose that the activity in our Sun drove the "animal spirits" here on Earth. His major problem was that he did not have very good data. Today we have the Royal Belgium Observatory and the Solar Influences Data Center. Check out the pretty charts. I don't know about you but I could trade off of that. The peak of each period or wave looks to me to be pretty easy to nail more or less...When you think the peak has been reached may I suggest a square root out of the money straddle? No I have not seen it in any book either..Now just do a little mental math. If you miss the peek and nothing happens your out chump change. If you hit the payoff could be very huge indeed. If your a real rocket scientist you might want to sim it out.

While attempting to watch my beloved CBC TV, there is this stupid recurring commercial that just boogles the conscious mind. It is about a casement window that is made in Canada. Okay... The rather fat and ugly swarthy guy goes on about how well they work in all the different climate conditions in Canada. Okay... Then he starts going on about would this window work in the Amazon jungle? Then cut to a board hut in the Amazon jungle! (WTF??)  Then the fat swarthy guy gets up off his fat ass and goes to open and close the window! BUT the shack is soo crappy that the cracks between the boards let in more then enough light and ventilation!! Why would any moron put a $1,200.00 casement window in a $1.99 shack? You are free to do what you are told... You are free to do what you are told.. You are free to do what you have been sold....Hey Wait a Minute!! (See: You-Tube-Bill Hicks- any performance..) God help us all....