129,000 Jobs Lost

Well, it's inevitable that the loss of tax revenue will surely wind it's way through government expenditures-- except of course, for our rarely sitting members of our legislature-- and one of those expenditures will be government money that finds it's way into universities and colleges, and eventually into the paycheques of academics. 

Granted, because academics speak and dress much like our legislaters, heaven and earth will be moved to insulate them as much as possible from this ever spreading catastrophe, but the government will not be able to protect all it's friends.

Maybe.

Maybe they are like me, and just waiting for someone to call us to the streets.

Yes, there's a lot of that going on.  I can remember the same thing when the fishery collapsed back during the Mulroney era.

I'm not sure it's so much that there's lack of support, but a lack of understanding what could be done.  We look to our political leadership, and there is none.  

We are watching whole sectors of the Canadian economy slipping away, often sold out to the benifit of other naitons, and our political leadership clearly does not care one bit.

I do not know if that technically meets the deffinition of treason, but I know them for traitors.

I just listened to an interview with Sen Don Riegle, who was the former Chair of the Senate Banking Cmte in the USA and what he said is not promising in the slightest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_W._Riegle,_Jr.

They were discussing the DJ going up a couple of hundred points today which I'm sure tomorrow's press will be hoop-de-doing. The Senator said all it was is short sellers covering their ass over the weekend.

Anyways, more importantly Don was talking about the stimulus package and the people Obama has appointed for financial matters, and Sen Reigle is not at all happy with the appointments as these were the people that got us into this financial nitemare in the first place. It is like puting the foxes in charge of the hen house. We're hooped.  And Canadians are doubly hooped, in spite of what the press is saying, because we have the Bush mentality twin at Sussex Drive. 

Maybe as remind has stated it is time for consideration to be given to the idea of a general strike in Canada.

Either the goal is to increase employent, or there is a policy to increase the bonuses and tax deductions for the elites.

 It's quite black and white regardless of the BS being shoveled at us by economists.

If we allow Harper to continue with his policies much longer, it will take our Canadian society decades, if ever, to recover.

Tommy_Paine wrote:

Well, it's inevitable that the loss of tax revenue will surely wind it's way through government expenditures-- except of course, for our rarely sitting members of our legislature-- and one of those expenditures will be government money that finds it's way into universities and colleges, and eventually into the paycheques of academics. 

Granted, because academics speak and dress much like our legislaters, heaven and earth will be moved to insulate them as much as possible from this ever spreading catastrophe, but the government will not be able to protect all it's friends.

I can think of a lot of present and former legislators who neither speak nor dress like academics (whatever that's supposed to mean; there is a dress code in parliament and the legislatures). And government support for academia of various kinds is far less than that for big business. Support for basic scientific research has been an embarassment for decades.

When this all started in manufacturing, one of the first things individual plants did was to really crack down on non value added jobs. Meaning, if you didn't actually perform a function that physically moved the product through the process, your ass was grass.

And it makes perfect sense. This is what is meant by "the real economy", and "restructuring".

Truly, an economy in the national or international sense depends on much more than just those working in resource extraction, manufacturing or farming. There are real support facets of the economy that those sectors require in order to function.

But having said this, there is an utterly fantastic layer of non value added sectors that not only leach away funds from the real economy, but happen to be in control of governments.

Top of the list, perhaps, might be speculators who add no value to a given product, but siphon off money which would be better used elsewhere. Their lamprey attacks on us have to be taxed out of existance.

Not long ago, a member of the Supreme Court of Canada, in an utterly unusual move, derided lawyers who were charging up to $650.00 an hour for court time. With wages like that, you'd think at least we'd be spared the financial burden of wrongfull convictions. But I dream. It does, however, bring up the issue of how much value for our money the consumer of legal expertise receives.

Similarly, I am witnessing a phenomena at work where co-workers paying spousal support based on an income that included overtime now have to have payments adjusted to account for an income based on 4 days a week, or work share, or unemployment. Instead of support being based on a percentage of the income, which would adjust automatically, any dispute sees a return to court for the parties involved.

A small example, but if the entire court system was based on justice, instead of a device to maximize profits for lawyers, more money would remain in the hands of the real economy, in the hands of the people who add value to our society.

And, the list could go on. Lest I be accused of picking on lawyers, I am willing to bet that there are scores of other areas where similar systemic scams are the rule of the day.

It comes to mind that with increased talk of spending money on "infrastructure" we might want to examine projects carefully for value. Remember, we live in an age where a civil engineer signed off an a water system that had the intake downstream from the sewage outflow in Kasetchewan. To no consequence, either criminal, civil, or within the profession.

And, with all this talk about the SEC in the States, we should remind ourselves that we have an office building in Toronto full of people making six figures who are even more inept than the SEC.

If it is ineptness.

Yesterday, in Ontario, the case was made to regulate the Pay Day Loan bottom feeders who prey upon the desperate. Regulate? How about eliminate? or even Confiscate?

And even more revelations about insider wins in the OLG.....

well... at least Harper gets to keep his job.  It's a great trade off.  We have to let the markets blah blah blah.

The wisdom in Toronto has us all committed to funelling anywhere from $40 to $70 billion taxpayer dollars into nuclear power expansion and maintenance by a small number of Canadian and US contractors over the next ten years or so. There will be no debate about it, because it's up to our 22 percenters at Queen's Park.

I think there's an outcry because concentration of people and jobs in large cities is what people were led to believe is the natural evolution of post-cold war capitalist economies. Large regions of the US have been abandoned by capitalists since the 1980s and 90s. And in Canada, northern regions are ghostifying in favour of packing people higher and deeper to live along the Can-Am border. Northern towns are greying while young people are told to move to the cities, because that's where the jobs are. That was the wisdom to now. 

I beg to differ on Krugman, George Victor.

First of all, a reminder that the so-called Nobel for Economics  is not a true Nobel prize but an invention tagged on to the Nobels, but I won't quibble with you or all the journalists or Krugman himself who is happy to be introduced as a "Nobel laureate".

 Second, and most important, is that all I've read/heard from Krugman (mainly through US msm, granted, but also on some US "liberal" websites) is proposing more of the same:  bailout + bailout to "strengthen monetary policy" and relieve the banks to free up credit.   Stieglitz, on the other hand, has finally come out in favour of nationalizing banks and addressing the "Main street" component directly.

Obama is pinned in by Wall St. and its shills in academia (Summer, and to a lesser extent Krugman) and in congress (all its rentals and purchases over the years), or perhaps he too can't or won't think out of the box, either because his coming to power was underwritten by same Wall St. or because they can undo him if he crosses them.  Whom has he now named to chair his council of "wise men" economic advisors?  Paul Volcker, Greenspan's predecessor at the Fed.

Who's his treasury boy?  The guy who  claims to have known nothing, while NY state SEC chair, of wall st's shenanigans or of bernie madoff's (all we know is he DID nothing despite warnings by whistleblowers).  A snotnosed smartass who learned his craft at Summer's knee under Mr. let-the-banks-and-the- paper-mongers -merge-and-invent-new-bubbles-to-save-capitalism Clinton, and whom Obama and the Senate now put in charge of the IRS after he KNOWINGLY failed to pay his social security (money the IMF gave him as it does all employees who request it, to cover said mandatory US contributions, which is proof that he KNEW he had to pay it).

I admit that next to some of these winners Krugman's mild criticism comes off sounding wise and reasonable, but he must be evaluated in the wider context of options other than monetarist solutions, namely a very concentrated effort on the fiscal side and on controlling and restraining any further grabs by the financiers.

(forgive uncontrollable rant. I'm in such a rage over this and now over the opportunistic Canadian budget.)

Does anyone believe that union workers, who have currently retained their jobs, and most likely will continue to, for a bit yet, will stand up in solidarity for the rest of Canadians and Canadian workers? Or will they, as others have been before,  as I mentioned above,  not give a rat's ass, as it has not affected them YET, and are hoping for continuing status quo for themselves, if they stay out of the frey?

I think some will want to, but the majority of others will concern themselves not at all, as they want to believe, wrongly,  and short sightedly, that this  economic meltdown, manufactured to solidify global control of individuals, will not affect them. Just as central Canadian, union manufacturing people, thought they would never be affected by the creeping and incremental destruction that has faced, fisherman, farmers, and forestry workers.

Go back under your Bageant blanket, George - your cred suffers when you question other people's reading habits.

Ontario yawned when the Fisheries collapsed.  Southern Ontario yawned when Northern Ontario suffered and BC's logging industry disappeared.  Is that not the point Remind is making?    

As much as I feel for the people of, say, St Thomas, who have lost their jobs, my sympathies are balanced by the fact that they weren't - and aren't - being proactive.  I spoke with a recently laid off Sterling Truck plant worker, a mother of two young kids, whose husband will lose his job at the end of March.  She said there were people in that plant who couldn't be bothered to vote, or who vote Con\Lib, or pay attention to their own union.      

That might explain why when Layton was in St Thomas before the budget, about forty people showed up.  And half weren't from St Thomas.  It was quite depressing.     

"Ontario yawned when the Fisheries collapsed.  Southern Ontario yawned when Northern Ontario suffered and BC's logging industry disappeared.  Is that not the point Remind is making? "

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fascinating how you find geographic areas, not social groups,  "yawning" farmpunk. Remind at least said that some union people would likely be onside.

But, yes, autoworkers have had a habit of yawning. I used to piss off Unionist on a regular basis for saying how that condition goes back to the early 70s.You can even find it mentioned in the now closed thread where Jack Layton promoted "buy Canadian" . It ran from Feb. 3 to 5.  But you would not remember that, of course.

But I'm not, now, feeling all warm and vengeful. People fail, farmpunk. It's why our species winds up going to war and worse. Hell, we seem to be going collectively down a big environmental toilet.

And it's largely because folks haven't the foggiest idea of what's coming down the chute at them. They become lambs ready for slaughter. Reading would help overcome that .

But I didn't think you were up to anti-intellectual outbursts yourself.

Not that I'm concerned about my "cred" with you, farmpunk - couldn't give a fiddler's fart at this point - but was it the bit about economists? You've nothing to offer but a shot at Bageant? Your record is stuck, mate.

I guess what I find fascinating is the degree of obsessiveness over what people at the bottom of the pile get paid while we just blithely accept the obscene amounts of money being paid out at the top. The CEO of Nortel, for one example, accepted huge bonuses even while steering the company into bankruptcy. How many people would just his bonuses provide with rent and food for a month?

The great political failure of the working and middle-classes is that we're too busy tearing at each other's flesh to look up and recognize we're the dogs in the ring.

God you add great colour in your description of  events and relations among Homo saps, FM. The imagery stays with one.

But, yes, we continue to allow greed among the captains of industry to go unpunished or ignored because they still command authority among Lord Conrad's "underlings".

C.S.Jackson, founding head of the U.E once told me that in organizing workers at the GE plants in the 40s he'd use a loudspeaker system in the back of a truck, circling the plant and calling down management. He believed that it created a bit of a vicarious thrill for listening workers. They could imagine themselves saying those things to authority, the bosses.

Given the correct political circumstances, of course, that union leader would have had bosses doing time in Labrador. And it never became a "business union", unlike so many.

I wonder if old Stephen predicted this one?

Can you tell me anything about the Christian Labour Association of Canada, My Cat?

I suspect it is being used as an umbrella organization for the introduction of cheap labour into this country, but can you point to specific acts?

Thanks for the link, My Cat. It agrees with Ledcor's use of a "company union", as explained by albertagirl in an aborted Introductions thread. She claimed not to be racist, but should have explained how, in fact, she opposed racism before attempting to float  such a tale in these waters, I guess.

The old QNS&L RAilway had a history of hiring abroad (looking to  Europe) to make sure that organizing was presented with lots of hurdles, there on the Quebec North Shore. I would think that CLAC would be a perfect vehicle for managing labour costs  in Alberta's Christian tar patch.

So it sounds like albertagirl has  good cause for concern.

But how does Canadian mainstream labour view bringing in foreign labour (signed up by CLAC. in the case raised in Introductions).  Is condemnation of the practise necessarily racism?