#canadian banking system

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"AND THE FLOODS CAME, AND THE WINDS BLEW"," A. G. Racey, Montreal Star. January 17, 1933. ---- The DEPRESSION STORM crashes against the rocks of the CANADIAN BANKING SYSTEM, atop which sits serenely CANADIAN BANKS

[mybeingthere]

Wally Dion, born 1976, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Fabric Star Quilts.

Wally (Walter) Dion is a Canadian artist of Saulteaux ancestry living and working in Upstate New York. Working in a number of media including painting, drawing and sculpture.

Wally explains:

"The first fabric star quilt was made as part of a 2022 residency at Wanuskewin Park. It was my way of reflecting upon prairie tall grass and the reintroduction of bison into the Great Plaines. I wanted to make several transparent quilts and superimpose them; one in front another... a quilt for the microbiome, another for the bison, their manure & hooves, another for the summer fires that scorch the ground and a final quilt for the sweetgrass braid.

I was considering how all of these things worked together for thousands of years to create what is known as the 'prairie tall grass ecosystem'. A vast and fertile expanse of land stretching from the foothills of Alberta to the banks of the Mississippi. I wanted to highlight the invisibility of systems when everything is working well, as it should be.

I started with the green quilt because it is the colour of the sweet grass braid that is exchanged in ceremony and relationship building. I considered the nature and tradition of quilting; impoverished craftspeople using tiny scraps of fabric. I considered the act of offering fabric and adherence to tradition. I thought of a thousand tiny prayers and how that might look; invisible acts of respect and adherence to protocols spanning decades. My thoughts travelled across the land, imagining the trees and rocks collecting these prayers like a bush of cloth, or an etched boulders."

[tanadrin]

medieval monks and accountants start using Italian millione ("one thousand" + augmentative suffix) to mean 10^6 by the 1200s; this spreads to other languages

Jehan Adam coins bymillion and trimillion to mean 10^12 and 10^18 in 1475

Nicolas Chuquet extends this scale up to nonyllion (10^54), with every step being another six orders of magnitude (million, byllion, tryllion, quadrillion, quyllion, sixlion, septyllion, ottylion, nonyllion) in 1484. Note that in this period, it was common to put the digit separator every six digits instead of every three.

Guillaume Budé refers to 10^9 as milliart in 1516, in a Latin text

But in 1549, Jacques Pelletier du Mans uses milliard to mean 10^12, citing Budé as a source

In the 1600s, people start putting digit separators every three digits. But some scientists and mathematicians define the numerical scale according to how digits are grouped, rather than the actual order of magnitude: thus, one billion becomes 10^9, one trillion becomes 10^12, etc, creating the short scale.

"Milliard" is eventually added to the long scale, meaning 10^9 (in keeping with Budé's usage); the first published example is from 1676

By 1729, the short-scale meaning of "billion" (10^9) has already crept into American usage

This is in keeping with French usage at the time: in 1762, the Académie Française dictionary cites billion as meaning 10^9.

By the early 19th century, France has almost completely converted to the short scale, and U.S. usage follows France; the long scale is referred to in some sources as "obsolete." But Britain is still using the long scale (and I assume Germany and most other European countries)

Over the course of the 20th century, the long scale begins to become more influential in France, presumably due to the influence of continental usage; while the short scale becomes more influential in Britain, presumably due to the influence of American English. Notably the SI system very specifically uses unique prefixes that are the same across languages, to prevent confusion!

In 1961, the French Government confirms that they're going to officially use the long scale from now on; in 1974, Britain officially switches over to the short scale, and many other English-speaking countries follow.

In 1975, the terms "short scale" and "long scale" are actually coined, by mathematician Geneviève Guitel.

One reason large number names could be so unstable for so long is, of course, that outside specialized usage they are rare, and were even more rare before modern science and large modern monetary amounts became commonplace points of discussion. Wikipedia says "milliard" wasn't common in German until 1923, when bank notes had to be overstamped during Weimar-era hyperinflation.

As it currently stands, English, Indonesian, Hebrew, Russian, Turkish, and most varieties of Arabic use the short scale; continental Europe and most varieties of Spanish outside Europe use the long scale. A few countries use both, usually in different languages, like South African English (short scale) and Afrikaans (long scale) or Canadian English (short scale) and Canadian French (long scale) . Puerto Rico uses the short scale in economic and technical usage, but the long scale in publications aimed at export.

Notably some languages use neither, having their own names for large numbers--South Asian languages have the Indian numbering system, and Bhutan, Cambodia, and various East Asian languages also have their own numbering systems. Greek, exceptionally, uses a native calque of the short scale rather than a borrowing.

[soon-palestine]

BREAKING: Palestine Action cover ScotiaBank's London office in blood red paint.

The Canadian Bank invest over $500million in Elbit Systems - making them the largest foreign investor in Israel's biggest weapons manufacturer

#StopFundingGenocide

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in world history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach – it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Things didn't improve after the breach. Indeed, the 2017 Equifax breach was the starting gun for a string of more breaches, because Equifax's servers didn't just have one fubared system – it was composed of pure, refined fubar. After one group of hackers breached the main Equifax system, other groups breached other Equifax systems, over and over, and over:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html

Doesn't this remind you of Boeing? It reminds me of Boeing. The spectacular 737 Max failures in 2018 weren't the end of the scandal. They weren't even the scandal's start – they were the tipping point, the moment in which a long history of lethally defective planes "breached" from the world of aviation wonks and into the wider public consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he's just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won't be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they'll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn't even a teardown, it's just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn't start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It's not a toxic asset, because it's not an asset. It's just toxic.

Equifax isn't just a company: it's infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

This witch-hunts-as-a-service morphed into an official part of the economy, the backbone of the credit industry, with a license to secretly destroy your life with haphazardly assembled "facts" about your life that you had the most minimal, grudging right to appeal (or even see). Turns out there are a lot of customers for this kind of service, and the capital markets showered Equifax with the cash needed to buy almost all of its rivals, in mergers that were waved through by a generation of Reaganomics-sedated antitrust regulators.

There's a direct line from that acquisition spree to the Equifax breach(es). First of all, companies like Equifax were early adopters of technology. They're a database company, so they were the crash-test dummies for ever generation of database. These bug-riddled, heavily patched systems were overlaid with subsequent layers of new tech, with new defects to be patched and then overlaid with the next generation.

These systems are intrinsically fragile, because things fall apart at the seams, and these systems are all seams. They are tech-debt personified. Now, every kind of enterprise will eventually reach this state if it keeps going long enough, but the early digitizers are the bow-wave of that coming infopocalypse, both because they got there first and because the bottom tiers of their systems are composed of layers of punchcards and COBOL, crumbling under the geological stresses of seventy years of subsequent technology.

The single best account of this phenomenon is the British Library's postmortem of their ransomware attack, which is also in the running for "best hard-eyed assessment of how fucked things are":

https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

There's a reason libraries, cities, insurance companies, and other giant institutions keep getting breached: they started accumulating tech debt before anyone else, so they've got more asbestos in the walls, more sagging joists, more foundation cracks and more termites.

That was the starting point for Equifax – a company with a massive tech debt that it would struggle to pay down under the most ideal circumstances.

Then, Equifax deliberately made this situation infinitely worse through a series of mergers in which it bought dozens of other companies that all had their own version of this problem, and duct-taped their failing, fucked up IT systems to its own. The more seams an IT system has, the more brittle and insecure it is. Equifax deliberately added so many seams that you need to be able to visualized additional spatial dimensions to grasp them – they had fractal seams.

But wait, there's more! The reason to merge with your competitors is to create a monopoly position, and the value of a monopoly position is that it makes a company too big to fail, which makes it too big to jail, which makes it too big to care. Each Equifax acquisition took a piece off the game board, making it that much harder to replace Equifax if it fucked up. That, in turn, made it harder to punish Equifax if it fucked up. And that meant that Equifax didn't have to care if it fucked up.

Which is why the increasingly desperate pleas for more resources to shore up Equifax's crumbling IT and security infrastructure went unheeded. Top management could see that they were steaming directly into an iceberg, but they also knew that they had a guaranteed spot on the lifeboats, and that someone else would be responsible for fishing the dead passengers out of the sea. Why turn the wheel?

That's what happened to Boeing, too: the company acquired new layers of technical complexity by merging with rivals (principally McDonnell-Douglas), and then starved the departments that would have to deal with that complexity because it was being managed by execs whose driving passion was to run a company that was too big to care. Those execs then added more complexity by chasing lower costs by firing unionized, competent, senior staff and replacing them with untrained scabs in jurisdictions chosen for their lax labor and environmental enforcement regimes.

(The biggest difference was that Boeing once had a useful, high-quality product, whereas Equifax started off as an irredeemably terrible, if efficient, discrimination machine, and grew to become an equally terrible, but also ferociously incompetent, enterprise.)

This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between "too rotten to stand" and "too big to care."

Remember last February, when we all discovered that there was a company called Change Healthcare, and that they were key to processing virtually every prescription filled in America? Remember how we discovered this? Change was hacked, went down, ransomed, and no one could fill a scrip in America for more than a week, until they paid the hackers $22m in Bitcoin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Change_Healthcare_ransomware_attack

How did we end up with Change Healthcare as the linchpin of the entire American prescription system? Well, first Unitedhealthcare became the largest health insurer in America by buying all its competitors in a series of mergers that comatose antitrust regulators failed to block. Then it combined all those other companies' IT systems into a cosmic-scale dog's breakfast that barely ran. Then it bought Change and used its monopoly power to ensure that every Rx ran through Change's servers, which were part of that asbestos-filled, termite-infested, crack-foundationed, sag-joisted teardown. Then, it got hacked.

United's execs are the kind of execs on a relentless quest to be too big to care, and so they don't care. Which is why their they had to subsequently announce that they had suffered a breach that turned the complete medical histories of one third of Americans into immortal Darknet kompromat that is – even now – being combined with breach data from Equifax and force-fed to the slaves in Cambodia and Laos's pig-butchering factories:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/data-stolen-healthcare-hack/index.html

Those slaves are beaten, tortured, and punitively raped in compounds to force them to drain the life's savings of everyone in Canada, Australia, Singapore, the UK and Europe. Remember that they are downstream of the forseeable, inevitable IT failures of companies that set out to be too big to care that this was going to happen.

Failures like Ticketmaster's, which flushed 500 million users' personal information into the identity-theft mills just last month. Ticketmaster, you'll recall, grew to its current scale through (you guessed it), a series of mergers en route to "too big to care" status, that resulted in its IT systems being combined with those of Ticketron, Live Nation, and dozens of others:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hack-data-breach.html

But enough about that. Let's go car-shopping!

Good luck with that. There's a company you've never heard. It's called CDK Global. They provide "dealer management software." They are a monopolist. They got that way after being bought by a private equity fund called Brookfield. You can't complete a car purchase without their systems, and their systems have been hacked. No one can buy a car:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/cdk-global-cyber-attack-update/index.html

Writing for his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tells the all-too-familiar story of how CDK Global filled the walls of the nation's auto-dealers with the IT equivalent of termites and asbestos, and lays the blame where it belongs: with a legal and economics establishment that wanted it this way:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-court-justice-is-why-you

The CDK story follows the Equifax/Boeing/Change Healthcare/Ticketmaster pattern, but with an important difference. As CDK was amassing its monopoly power, one of its execs, Dan McCray, told a competitor, Authenticom founder Steve Cottrell that if he didn't sell to CDK that he would "fucking destroy" Authenticom by illegally colluding with the number two dealer management company Reynolds.

Rather than selling out, Cottrell blew the whistle, using Cottrell's own words to convince a district court that CDK had violated antitrust law. The court agreed, and ordered CDK and Reynolds – who controlled 90% of the market – to continue to allow Authenticom to participate in the DMS market.

Dealers cheered this on: CDK/Reynolds had been steadily hiking prices, while ingesting dealer data and using it to gouge the dealers on additional services, while denying dealers access to their own data. The services that Authenticom provided for $35/month cost $735/month from CDK/Reynolds (they justified this price hike by saying they needed the additional funds to cover the costs of increased information security!).

CDK/Reynolds appealed the judgment to the 7th Circuit, where a panel of economists weighed in. As Stoller writes, this panel included monopoly's most notorious (and well-compensated) cheerleader, Frank Easterbrook, and the "legendary" Democrat Diane Wood. They argued for CDK/Reynolds, demanding that the court release them from their obligations to share the market with Authenticom:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1879150.html

The 7th Circuit bought the argument, overturning the lower court and paving the way for the CDK/Reynolds monopoly, which is how we ended up with one company's objectively shitty IT systems interwoven into the sale of every car, which meant that when Russian hackers looked at that crosseyed, it split wide open, allowing them to halt auto sales nationwide. What happens next is a near-certainty: CDK will pay a multimillion dollar ransom, and the hackers will reward them by breaching the personal details of everyone who's ever bought a car, and the slaves in Cambodian pig-butchering compounds will get a fresh supply of kompromat.

But on the plus side, the need to pay these huge ransoms is key to ensuring liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets, because ransoms are now the only nondiscretionary liability that can only be settled in crypto:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

When the 7th Circuit set up every American car owner to be pig-butchered, they cited one of the most important cases in antitrust history: the 2004 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Verizon v Trinko:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/02-682

Trinko was a case about whether antitrust law could force Verizon, a telcoms monopolist, to share its lines with competitors, something it had been ordered to do and then cheated on. The decision was written by Antonin Scalia, and without it, Big Tech would never have been able to form. Scalia and Trinko gave us the modern, too-big-to-care versions of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech baronies.

In his Trinko opinion, Scalia said that "possessing monopoly power" and "charging monopoly prices" was "not unlawful" – rather, it was "an important element of the free-market system." Scalia – writing on behalf of a unanimous court! – said that fighting monopolists "may lessen the incentive for the monopolist…to invest in those economically beneficial facilities."

In other words, in order to prevent monopolists from being too big to care, we have to let them have monopolies. No wonder Trinko is the Zelig of shitty antitrust rulings, from the decision to dismiss the antitrust case against Facebook and Apple's defense in its own ongoing case:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/073_2021.06.28_mtd_order_memo.pdf

Trinko is the origin node of too big to care. It's the reason that our whole economy is now composed of "infrastructure" that is made of splitting seams, asbestos, termites and dry rot. It's the reason that the entire automotive sector became dependent on companies like Reynolds, whose billionaire owner intentionally and illegally destroyed evidence of his company's crimes, before going on to commit the largest tax fraud in American history:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaire-robert-brockman-accused-of-biggest-tax-fraud-in-u-s-history-dies-at-81-11660226505

Trinko begs companies to become too big to care. It ensures that they will exponentially increase their IT debt while becoming structurally important to whole swathes of the US economy. It guarantees that they will underinvest in IT security. It is the soil in which pig butchering grew.

It's why you can't buy a car.

Now, I am fond of quoting Stein's Law at moments like this: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As Stoller writes, after two decades of unchallenged rule, Trinko is looking awfully shaky. It was substantially narrowed in 2023 by the 10th Circuit, which had been briefed by Biden's antitrust division:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/22-1164/22-1164-2023-08-21.html

And the cases of 2024 have something going for them that Trinko lacked in 2004: evidence of what a fucking disaster Trinko is. The wrongness of Trinko is so increasingly undeniable that there's a chance it will be overturned.

But it won't go down easy. As Stoller writes, Trinko didn't emerge from a vacuum: the economic theories that underpinned it come from some of the heroes of orthodox economics, like Joseph Schumpeter, who is positively worshipped. Schumpeter was antitrust's OG hater, who wrote extensively that antitrust law didn't need to exist because any harmful monopoly would be overturned by an inevitable market process dictated by iron laws of economics.

Schumpeter wrote that monopolies could only be sustained by "alertness and energy" – that there would never be a monopoly so secure that its owner became too big to care. But he went further, insisting that the promise of attaining a monopoly was key to investment in great new things, because monopolists had the economic power that let them plan and execute great feats of innovation.

The idea that monopolies are benevolent dictators has pervaded our economic tale for decades. Even today, critics who deplore Facebook and Google do so on the basis that they do not wield their power wisely (say, to stamp out harassment or disinformation). When confronted with the possibility of breaking up these companies or replacing them with smaller platforms, those critics recoil, insisting that without Big Tech's scale, no one will ever have the power to accomplish their goals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

But they misunderstand the relationship between corporate power and corporate conduct. The reason corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us. They don't inflict those harms out of sadism: rather, they do so in order to externalize the costs of running a good system, reaping the profits of scale while we pay its costs.

The only reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it need not care about us will not care about it. You can't fix Facebook by replacing Zuck with a good unelected social media czar with total power over billions of peoples' lives. We need to abolish Zuck, not fix Zuck.

Zuck is not exceptional: there were a million sociopaths whom investors would have funded to monopolistic dominance if he had balked. A monopoly like Facebook has a Zuck-shaped hole at the top of its org chart, and only someone Zuck-shaped will ever fit through that hole.

Our whole economy is now composed of companies with sociopath-shaped holes at the tops of their org chart. The reason these companies can only be run by sociopaths is the same reason that they have become infrastructure that is crumbling due to sociopathic neglect. The reckless disregard for the risk of combining companies is the source of the market power these companies accumulated, and the market power let them neglect their systems to the point of collapse.

This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia – and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 – set out to make. The fact that you can't buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Canada’s Department of National Defence (DND) will host trial sessions for Israeli arms technology used to kill Palestinians and maintain apartheid and occupation during a three-week “sandbox” event in Alberta next month.

From May 27 to June 21, DND is giving a select group of military suppliers the chance to test products that are designed to counter aerial drones, with direct assistance from Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) staff and experts. Among those selected is a company called “Twenty20 Insight Inc.,” which is testing the “Smash Hopper counter-drone weapon station.”

The “Smash Hopper” is a remote control weapon system developed and manufactured by Israeli arms company “Smart Shooter,” whose technology is deployed by the Israeli military in fortifications that are used to suppress Palestinian dissent in the occupied West Bank, as well as in military hardware currently being used in Israel’s assault on Gaza.

As reported by AP News in November 2022, Smart Shooter developed remote control turrets deployed by Israel that fire tear gas, stun grenades and sponge-tipped bullets at Palestinian protesters in the occupied West Bank.

Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, told AP: “This system will only [...] further grave Israeli human rights abuse and further the Israeli army’s abuses and the Israeli government’s crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against millions of Palestinians.” [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland, @abpoli, @vague-humanoid

[folk-enjoyer]

Song of the Day

"Call of the moose" Willy Mitchell, 1980 As you might know, September 30th is Truth and Reconciliation day (more commonly known as Orange Shirt Day), a national day in Canada dedicated to spreading awareness about the legacy of Residential schools on Indigenous people. Instead of just focusing on a song, I also wanted to briefly talk about the history of the sixties scoop and its influence on Indigenous American music and activism.

The process of Residential schooling in Canada existed well before the '60s, but the new processes of the sixties scoop began in 1951. It was a process where the provincial government had the power to take Indigenous children from their homes and communities and put them into the child welfare system. Despite the closing of residential schools, more and more children were being taken away from their families and adopted into middle-class white ones.

Even though Indigenous communities only made up a tiny portion of the total population, 40-70% of the children in these programs would be Aboriginal. In total, 20,000 children would be victims of these policies through the 60s and 70s.

These adoptions would have disastrous effects on their victims. Not only were sexual and physical abuse common problems but the victims were forcibly stripped of their culture and taught to hate themselves. The community panel report on the sixties scoop writes:

"The homes in which our children are placed ranged from those of caring, well-intentioned individuals, to places of slave labour and physical, emotional and sexual abuse. The violent effects of the most negative of these homes are tragic for its victims. Even the best of these homes are not healthy places for our children. Anglo-Canadian foster parents are not culturally equipped to create an environment in which a positive Aboriginal self-image can develop. In many cases, our children are taught to demean those things about themselves that are Aboriginal. Meanwhile, they are expected to emulate normal child development by imitating the role model behavior of their Anglo-Canadian foster or adoptive parents."

and to this day indigenous children in Canada are still disproportionately represented in foster care. Despite being 5% of the Total Canadian population, Indigenous children make up 53.8% of all children in foster care.

I would like to say that the one good thing that came out of this gruesome and horrible practice of state-sponsored child relocation was that there was a birth of culture from protest music, but there wasn't. In fact, Indigenous music has a long history of being erased and whitewashed from folk history.

From Buffy Saint-Marie pretending to be Indigenous to the systematic denial of first nations people from the Canadian mainstream music scene, the talented artists of the time were forcibly erased.

Which is why this album featuring Willy Mitchell is so important.

Willy Mitchell and The Desert River Band

This Album was compiled of incredibly rare, unheard folk and rock music of North American indigenous music in the 60s-80s. It is truly, a of a kind historical artifact and a testimony to the importance of archival work to combat cultural genocide. Please give the entire thing a listen if you have time. Call of the Moose is my favorite song on the album, written and performed by Willy Mitchell in the 80s. His Most interesting song might be 'Big Policeman' though, written about his experience of getting shot in the head by the police. He talks about it here:

"He comes there and as soon as I took off running, he had my two friends right there — he could have taken them. They stopped right there on the sidewalk. They watched him shootin’ at me. He missed me twice, and when I got to the tree line, he was on the edge of the road, at the snow bank. That’s where he fell, and the gun went off. But that was it — he took the gun out. He should never have taken that gun out. I spoke to many policemen. And judges, too. I spoke with lawyers about that. They all agreed. He wasn’t supposed to touch that gun. So why did I only get five hundred dollars for that? "

These problems talked about here, forced displacement, cultural assimilation, police violence, child exploitation, and erasure of these crimes, still exist in Canada. And so long as they still exist, it is imperative to keep talking about them. Never let the settler colonial government have peace; never let anyone be comfortable not remembering the depth of exploitation.

Every Child Matters

[beardedmrbean]

In a classic example of better late than never, a Federal Court in Canada ruled on Tuesday that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's invocation of The Emergencies Act in 2022, used to crush the largest and most peaceful protest in Canadian history, was "unreasonable," "unjustified," and "violated the fundamental freedoms" set out in Canada's constitution.

The case was brought to the court by a number of individual applicants as well as several Canadian civiil liberties groups, including the Canadian Constitution Foundation and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. And in the decision, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley expressed what every trucker and other participant in the trucker's Freedom Convoy knew to be true: There was no justification for granting the government powers that amounted to near Marshall Law over a protest that was 100 percent peaceful, with no violence or property damage committed—that is, until the Emergencies Act was passed, and the police trampled grandmothers under horses, fired tear gas canisters at journalists within point blank range, beat protesters down and smashed the windows of the truckers rigs, and generally deployed the type of violence that the government had knowingly falsely accused the truckers of engaging in.

The government also froze the bank accounts of truckers, seized donated funds, and shut down of the economic lives of hundreds of Canadian citizens, a draconian measure which shocked the world.

Every protester and trucker who took part in the Convoy knew that the government and it's bought and paid for media were lying to the public about the Freedom Convoy, and though it feels good to once again be proven correct, that doesn't change what happened. It also doesn't change the division in Canadian society which took place under COVID, and it remains to be seen if this ruling will put an end to the ongoing punishments of various Freedom Convoy protesters which continue to this day.

For example, the trial of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, who emerged as public faces and leaders of the Ottawa portion of the Freedom Convoy, has now become the longest mischief trial in Canadian history. Finally getting underway in September of last year, the trial proceeded in fits and starts into December, and is set to resume in February.

Or take Guy Meisner, a trucker from Nova Scotia, was one of the first to be arrested and charged when the crackdown began after the Emergencies Act was invoked. He will be back in Ottawa near the end of February for the ninth time to face his "mischief" charges.

Then there is the case of Christine Decaire, a woman who protested in Ottawa and was charged by the police, who was acquitted last year; much like this ruling today, however, The Crown has decided to appeal her acquittal. To drag an innocent person back to court is the kind of grossly vindictive behavior on the part of the Trudeau Government that they have become well known for.

There are dozens of cases like this working their way through the system.

And then we have The Coutts Four, a group of men who were arrested in Alberta right before the Emergencies Act was invoked and have been kept in custody without bail nor trial ever since. Hopes are high that this ruling may help change their circumstances, but it has now been two years since they have seen their families, which is a grossly offensive situation, especially in a country where nearly everyone gets bail.

All of these cases point to a level of vindictive cruelty on the part of this government as constituted under Trudeau, who was only too happy to champion the fair treatment of someone who fought on the side of The Taliban in Afghanistan and was later apprehended by American forces. Champion the rights of his own peaceful citizens to a fair trial? Apparently that is beneath the Prime Minister.

Trudeau's deputy, Chrystia Freeland was behind the bank account freezing acting as Finance Minister, and she appeared almost immediately after the ruling to announce that her government would be appealing, claiming to "remind Canadians how serious the situation was." This though all the evidence and testimony presented in 2022 at the official inquest into the invocation of the Emergencies Act found that no threats existed, and everything the media said about the truckers was a fabrication.

Justin Trudeau has remarked in the past that Canada is a "post-national" state that has "no core identity," yet when that identity asserted itself to say enough is enough to the strictures of his punishing COVID Regime, he was only too happy to unleash the full power of his "post-national" state to attack these citizens whom he holds in utter contempt.

It appears that there is no ruling Trudeau will not appeal or lawfare he will not pursue to ensure punishment of the enemies of his party.

Justin Trudeau is not a leader, but merely a narcissistic tyrant. This week was only the latest evidence.

Gord Magill is a trucker, writer, and commentator, and can be found at www.autonomoustruckers.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

[georgegraphys]

2024 team sponsors recap!

this is completely irrelevant to F1 but i study and do these stuffs for a living sooo 😩😩 2023 sponsors are based on the sponsors that are there at the beginning of the season (new sponsors that join in the middle of the season will be classified as 2024's)

Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team:

New sponsors: Whatsapp, Luminar (American tech company), SAP (German software company), nuvei (Canadian credit card services), Sherwin Williams (American painting company) 2024 data last update: 2024/02/14

Old sponsors that left: Monster Energy, Pure Storage (American technology company), fastly (American cloud computing services), Axalta (American painting company), Eight sleep (American mattresses company) 2023 data last update: 2023/01/07

Oracle Red Bull Racing F1 Team:

New sponsors: Yeti (American cooler manufacturer, joined later in 2023), APL (American footwear/athletic apparel manufacturer, joined later in 2023), CDW (American IT company, joined later in 2023), Sui (American tech app by Mysten Labs, joined later in 2023), Patron Tequila (Mexican alcoholic beverages company, joined later in 2023) 2024 data last update: 2024/02/15

Old sponsors that left: CashApp, Walmart, Therabody (American wellness technology company), Ocean Bottle (Norwegian reusable bottle manufacturer), PokerStars (Costa Rican gambling site), Alpha Tauri (? no info if they're official partners or not but Austrian clothing company made by Red Bull), BMC (Switzerland bicycle/cycling manufacturer), Esso (American fuel company, subsidiary of ExxonMobil), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (American technology company) 2023 data last update: 2023/03/07

More: Esso is a subsidiary of Mobil so there's possibility they merged or something

Scuderia Ferrari:

New sponsors: VGW Play (Australian tech game company, joined later in 2023), DXC Technology (American IT company, joined later in 2023), Peroni (Italian brewing company), Z Capital Group/ZCG (American private asset management/merchant bank company), Celsius (Swedish energy drink manufacturer) 2024 data last update: 2024/02/15

Old sponsors that left: Mission Winnow (American content lab by Phillip Morris International aka Marlboro), Estrella Garcia (Spanish alcoholic beverages manufacturer), Frecciarossa (Italian high speed train company) 2023 data last update: 2023/02/16

More: Mission Winnow is a part of Phillip Morris International. They are no longer listed as team sponsor but PMI is listed instead.

(starting here, 2023 data last update is 2023/02/23 and 2024 data last update is 2024/02/15)

McLaren F1 Team: (Only McLaren RACING's data is available idk if some of these are XE/FE team partners but anw..)

New sponsors: Monster Energy, Salesforce (American cloud based software company, joined later in 2023), Estrella Garcia (Spanish alcoholic beverages manufacturer), Dropbox (American file hosting company), Workday (American system software company, joined later in 2023), Ecolab (American water purification/hygiene company), Airwallex (Australian financial tech company), Optimum Nutrition (American nutritional supplement manufacturer), Halo ITSM (American software company, joined later in 2023), Udemy (American educational tech company, joined later in 2023), New Era (American cap manufacturer, joined in 2023), K-Swiss (American shoes manufacturer, joined later in 2023), Alpinestars (Italian motorsports safety equipment manufacturer)

Old sponsors that left: DP World (Emirati logistics company), EasyPost (American shipping API company), Immersive Labs (UK cybersecurity training company?), Logitech, Mind (UK mental health charity), PartyCasino (UK? online casino site), PartyPoker (American? gambling site), Sparco (Italian auto part & accessory manufacturer), Tezos (Switzerland crypto company)

Aston Martin Aramco F1 Team:

New sponsors: Valvoline (American retail automotives service company, joined later in 2023), NexGen (Canadian sustainable? fuel company), Banco Master (Brazilian digital banking platform, joined later in 2023), ServiceNow (American software company, joined later in 2023), Regent Seven Seas Cruise, Wolfgang Puck (Austrian-American chef and restaurant owner, joined later in 2023), Financial Times (British business newspaper), OMP (Italian racing safety equipment manufacturer), stichd (Netherlands fashion & apparel manufacturer)

Old sponsors that left: Alpinestars (Italian motorsports safety equipment manufacturer), crypto.com (Singaporean cryptocurrency company), ebb3 (UK? software company), Pelmark (UK fashion and apparel manufacturer), Peroni (Italian brewing company), Porto Seguro (Brazilian insurance company), Socios (Malta's blockchain-based platform), XP (Brazilian investment company)

Stake F1 Team (prev. Alfa Romeo):

???? Can't found their website (might be geoblocked in my country???)

BWT Alpine F1 Team:

New sponsors: MNTN (American software company), H. Moser & Cie (Switzerland watch manufacturer), Amazon Music

Old sponsors that left: Bell & Ross (French watch company), Ecowatt (??? afaik French less-energy smthn smthn company), Elysium (French? American? Software company), KX (UK software company), Plug (American electrical equipment manufacturing company)

Visa CashApp RB F1 Team (prev. Scuderia Alpha Tauri):

New Sponsors: Visa, CashApp, Hugo Boss, Tudor, Neft Vodka (Austrian alcoholic beverages company), Piquadro (Italian luxury bag manufacturer)

Old sponsors that left: Buzz (?), Carl Friedrik (UK travel goods manufacturer), Flex Box (Hongkong? shipping containers manufacturer), GMG (Emirati global wellbeing company), RapidAPI (American API company)

Haas F1 Team:

New sponsors: New Era (American cap manufacturer, joined later in 2023)

Old sponsors that left: Hantec Markets (Hongkong capital markets company), OpenSea (American NFT/Crypto company)

Williams Racing:

New sponsors: Komatsu, MyProtein (British bodybuilding supplement), Kraken (American crypto company, joined later in 2023), VAST Data (American tech company), Ingenuity Commerce (UK e-commerce platform), Puma (joined later in 2023)

Old sponsors that left: Acronis (Swiss software company), Bremont (British watch manufacturer), Dtex Systems (American? cybersecurity company), Financial Times (British business newspaper), Jumeirah Hotels & Resorts, KX (UK software company), OMP (Italian racing safety equipment manufacturer), PPG (American painting manufacturer), Umbro (English sports equipment manufacturer), Zeiss (German opticals/optometrics manufacturing company)

[kremlin]

at taco truck waiting for food. guy just put next batch of chicken on skillet so i had a minute to kill. go into shitty corner store. buy a scratch off ticket because i’ve never done it before. thoughts:

- cash only, seems funny, like to combat the potential kiting fraud you could potentially pull off. i feel like the worst analyst at the worst investment bank (def canadian) would do this. guy that only has a little narcciscism/sociopathy. more like drunk uncle that has a “system for scratchers”

- $20 ! and i picked a cheaper one. that is too much.

- such nice printing and design. but i’ve seen the fiends. they dont even *scratch*. they just have the clerk immediately scan it & tell them how much they won (lost). i bought one that was nautically themed, but distinct from pirates/ships/treasure. more like long john silver’s interior aesthetic. chose it because it was the weirdest one

- asked clerk for a penny to scratch & he immediately handed me a fake plastic large coin with “good luck” stamped on it. clearly the go-to for this request. this pissed me off so much.

- too much scratching

- weird scratching shavings on my shirt, afraid i’ll leave these places & ppl will secretly assume i’m not good at math (nightmare)

- ODDS. lmfao. they have to print the odds. all of the instructions are meant to like, make it unclear the win/lose rate but they have to print it on the back. did the math on my cell phone calculator but would have preferred ti-89 titanium ® or Wolfram Mathematica ®

- above deserves its own post

- won $500

[nelliesnellie]

My fingers are covered in decades of family grime. What follows are glimpses of family history, told through a bag of loose change. In other words, I sorted some coins and got all thinky and shit.

"Here," my mom said, when I was packing to move for grad school. "You should take our Canadian coins with you." She handed me a hefty plastic sack of loose change, accrued over about twenty years. The part of New York State we were living in is quite rural – the sort of region with more cows than people. So we would frequently make the short trip across the St. Lawrence River into Ottawa and its suburbs (or as we called it, "the Canadian Riviera").

I've kept that sack of change over the past three years living in the easternmost region of Canada. I've never dealt with it, largely because the banks here don't have any goddamn coin machines. A coinstar, a coinstar, my kingdom for a coinstar! I'm now unemployed, and faced with increased rent until I can find new roommates. That bag of coins became worth the hassle, and I sat down with some Christmas music and plastic Dollarama coin wrappers.

Rather than being a medievalesque pouch of gold, this particular sack of coins was a heavy duty gallon sized plastic bag, with several smaller receptacles inside. First I pulled out a bag of what turned out to be Euros. Ok. Off to an interesting start. I set them aside, knowing they may be useful one day. How closely were these coins sorted?

As I began to sort the coins, two unexpected piles became necessary: Canadian Pennies, and Unexpected Chaos. Pennies have been out of commission in Canada for over a decade. And Deutschmarks, a prime sample of the Unexpected Chaos, were replaced by the Euro in the early 2000s.

I wondered why these particular Deutschmarks ended up in this bag of money. Probably it was from our family trip to Germany in the late 90s. I like to think however, that they came from an earlier trip, perhaps even my Mom's time living there in the 70s as an exchange student.

My fingers quickly began to feel gross from handling decades of family grime that had gathered on the coins. Out of the bag fell a small, familiar looking object. After a moment I realized it was a piece of dry cat food. It was the brand that my dear cat ate. She was my best friend for quite a long time, before passing away four years ago. Eating was complicated for her in the end, but she never lost her affectionate and cheerful demeanor. How did a piece of cat food end up in here?

While the Deutschmarks were my mom's, the English shillings had to have been my dad's. He's a bit of an anglophile, and traveled in the country in the 70s. Odd that they stuck around that long.

Other countries represented included: Mexico, Norway, Turkey, the NYC Transit System, and Greece. Norway had to be a result of the 2018 family trip, and the only family member who's been to Turkey is my sister. That coin must be hers. The Greek coin must be from my parents honeymoon. I wonder how they feel about this, now that they're separated?

The coins were interesting but seriously gross. Although I suppose money is always gross, since it touches so many hands and places. Some Canadian friends were talking shit about American dollar bills recently. I find the soft papery money far more comfortable than the plastic of Canadian bills, but my friends thought it felt gross. Surely, though, it isn't that much worse, germ for germ?

I have no idea how the Mexican coin got there. Maybe it came from Nana, who knows? As far as the old NYC transit tokens go, I might make jewelry from them. I was born in the city, so its nice to have some ephemera from there.

After about ninety minutes, and a fair amount of wrestling coin rolls, my task was done. I had a much smaller bag of wrapped coins ready for the bank, a tin full of random currency, a few old sandwich bags, and a now empty mason jar. It was time to wash my hands.

[mugiwara-lucy]

President Trump and Border Czar Homan WILL succeed when they raze that third world shit country to the fucking ground where it belongs. Maybe that Mexican whore can get spared and used as a way to help keep the Trump line going that way she can have some use in this life :) The American people will be cheering Trump and Homan all the way down to the bank along with their mass deportation scheme! I'm anticipating a bounty system is put in place which will give American citizens not only the ability to round up these disgusting vile specimens but get paid to round up these repulsive, stinking animals as well as notify the authorities of any traitors who want to protect these disgusting piles of subhuman garbage like you :) Enjoy Prison! 20 Million criminals to be hunted down and rounded up with a minimum of $500 a head to get these vermin the fuck OUT of America once and for all and I would mow all of them down. All day, every day.

I.....

I just have no words.

You MAGAts are not only SICK IN THE HEAD BUT FUCKING EVIL.

These are REAL HUMAN LIVES that you sick mother fuckers want to ruin just for a lack of Melanin. I find it funny you have all this shit to say about Black and Mexican immigrants but you're COMPLETELY SILENT on the Canadian, Scandinavian, Russia and Ukrainian Immigrants. Could it be a lack of Melanin?

This is NOT the fucking HUNGER GAMES. And I hope Trump and his MAGA crew DOES invade Mexico so she can turn around and FUCK THEM UP SO BAD MAGA will be a shitty distant memory.

THIS is why no one wants to be associated with you MAGAs. Your ideas of "fun" and "humor" are FUCKING SICK. You pieces have NO REGARD for human lives which starts at the top with your disgusting cult leader.

[alicepao13]

Hudson and Rex S06E14

Damn it, no Mankiewicz lol. Yeah, it was okay, had some funny moments too (Rex is a comedian). There’s a pattern lately where the promos immediately hook me up for the next episode, so even as I’m writing this, I’m already thinking of the next one.

Risotto, jeez, if I was a guy I’d hate Charlie Hudson for the impossible cooking standards he’s setting.

That guy messed up all the floorboards with his blood dripping all over! Good luck getting that out.

Rex being upset and whining as forensics is sweeping the house. Yeah, this sucks, buddy.

Joe did not seriously consider not giving Charlie this case. The man has investigated his own brother!

Well, that seemed like a cold night of shooting. I bet they all enjoyed that :P

“Looks like Rex and I are your problem again tonight”. Well, at least they’re letting us know he didn’t sleep at Joe's couch at the precinct. I’ve given up on seeing Sarah’s apartment and I’d like her to give up on the idea of pretending to live there too.

Are you telling me that packages are not getting scanned somewhere inside the precinct before getting delivered? Oh, boy.

I’ll say this again, if they don’t trust Rex to sniff out whether there’s bomb components inside a package, then there’s no reason to allow him to work in cases. 

That’s a lot of keys and I can't help thinking of what their prop master thought about all this.

“Better be safe, right Charlie?” lmao the passive aggressive comment from Joe. Leave him alone, he was right this time. Trust Rex.

Rex barked at the ransomware? Yeah, okay, lol

Getting from low-tech burglaries to high-tech heist. That’s an interesting transition.

Ah, stakeout. And they’re eating fries which was what I was also eating as I was watching this, on a very random note.

Pirating one season of Death Note? How can anyone only watch one season? Lock him up! Also, are we sure this kid is old enough to work at a bank?

Sarah with the beverage assist. I swear, some of these scenes seem like reshoots to add more Charah after complaints were made.

Well, that whole car almost hits Rex thing was anti-climactic. Obviously I didn’t want it to hit Rex, but make it a bit exciting. And it was the cutoff for the commercials too? I mean, I didn’t have to watch them but still.

Someone really loves cryptocurrencies in this show. The displayed price is off by, like, a lot since Bitcoin took off the last few months, which is understandable. Also, assuming that it’s in Canadian dollars, I estimate by the price (if they used the real one) that they shot and/or post-processed this episode near the end of November, as it didn’t really fluctuate around those levels again after that. And kudos for displaying an accurate BTC address.

“Well, that must have hurt”. I beg to differ. These boxes were very obviously empty.

Wait, so is this the end of the unwelcome guests in Charlie’s house? I’m not sure I like the new security system.

Ha! Sarah is still after the risotto. I totally get her.

lol Rex! Look at that evil smirk. He’s totally tripping the alarm for the heck of it. To be fair, when Rex is at home, there’s no need to put the alarm on but let Charlie make the risotto.

While it was an interesting case, it lost me a bit as we were going through the names of the people involved. Also, I did expect someone who came to bleed out inside Charlie’s house to have a more personal connection to him. I find it ridiculous that packages which are sent to the precinct aren’t scanned for explosives, I mean, that’s the first thing you do when a package arrives at a police station.

Promo: Charlie with a bomb strapped to his chest! What’s not to love? Oh, by the way, remember what I said about concussions and getting hit a second time on the head in a short while? This is actually the ghost of Charlie Hudson strapped to a bomb. Also, he has an earbud, which is presumably to communicate with whoever is doing this? Can we use to tell Sarah goodbye please? If this is parallel to the Castle episode, Charlie is going to say “I love you” to… Rex :P

One more piece of useless trivia, a bomb is how we lost one of Rex’s partners in the Italian version (and of course Rex had to watch because why not torture the poor dog, as it was canonically his third partner that was killed). But somehow I’m certain that Charlie will manage to pull through.

Only 2 episodes left! As always, I don't care much for a renewal until we're almost out of episodes.

[ratedasresistance]

In the wake of students in the west being arrested and forcibly cleared from their campuses for standing up for Palestine.

I wrote a speech to show solidarity for all of those people who have taken it upon themselves to organize a peaceful encampment movement

But I’m also calling for them to make use of armed resistance against those who sacrifice their conscience and lives to uphold systems of oppression steered by the elites and state representatives who support and benefit from our oppression through white supremacist patriarchal and capitalist systems.

Even though the ones that uphold them don’t always stand a chance to actually benefit from keeping the wheels of oppression churning. You have to understand and remember that the elites and state representatives are defenseless that’s why they need the police force to enforce the status quo and commandeer the military industrial complex against us. For we are viewed as the lowly class of peasantry worthy ranks that snap into obedience. Yet we are the danger that they need to be protected from but it is rather us that need to be protected from the danger that they pose to our rights, freedom, human civilization, the various species in the animal kingdom and most importantly Mother Earth.

So it is our job to remove the safeguards around their blood stained mansions in order to render their power obsolete. So we do not aim at them for that is a waste of our time but rather aim at those who they trust to defend their interest.

I will share this very speech that I’ll perform in my video and I'll upload it on every social media platform and I hope that it will pick up some steam so help me get it to go #viral so that people will see it and perform it in distinct and creative ways while keeping the very essence of the overall message.

Cuz it never stands to be diluted or dialed back to be more consumer friendly, I want to hear the rage in your voices, wrinkles on your faces and the pain in your bodies because you feel for the students who are being held to the ground and deprived of a considerable amount of oxygen during their arrest. CHANNEL THEIR PAIN & THOSE OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE EVERYWHERE ESPECIALLY THOSE IN THE GAZA STRIP, RAFAH AND THE WEST BANK!

Cuz WE are being Wronged or Fucked too in every sense of the word whether we’re aware of it or not as our tax dollars go into funding a genocide instead of helping the American & Canadian people thrive and we’re even letting our conscience die by listening to cowardly voices from western media establishments.

AS A PEOPLE WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE WILL STAND FOR OPPRESSION AND FALL TO UPHOLD OPPRESSION WHETHER IT BE THEIR OWN OR THAT OF OTHERS CUZ AS WE WATCH THEM COME FOR OTHERS WE FORGET THAT THEY’LL COME FOR US NEXT TOO! SO WE MIGHT AS WELL RISE TO THE CHALLENGE THAT IS REPRESENTED BEFORE US BY OUR OPPRESSORS AND TAKE OUR TIME TO PROPERLY RESIST/ FIGHT NOT ONLY FOR OUR RIGHTS BUT ALSO FOR THOSE WHO SUFFER AT THE HANDS OF THE US EMPIRE ACROSS THE WORLD! THE LEOPARD WILL NEVER STOP UNTIL IT EATS EVERY SINGLE ONE OF OUR FACES SO WE MIGHT AS WELL FIGHT TO KEEP EVERYONE’S FACES PROTECTED RATHER THAN TRYING TO PROTECT OUR OWN FACES CUZ AGAIN WHEN THEY’RE DONE WITH THE OTHERS, THEY WILL COME FOR US NEXT TOO!

So Here’s the actual speech:

You’re going to stand right here and say that you have a warrant from Turtle Island turned into the Most United States demanding for our arrest!?

Are you asking us to obey?

And pray at their behest?

It’s okay. Cuz we will not erupt in protest!

For we do not beg!

It is our rite of passage

To complete the most noble quest

So what is ours shall be taken!

And we shall not be shaken by your stern stare

We will only prevail in times of despair

Say it for the ones at the back who are too blind to oppression! Free free free Palestine! Free Congo and Free Sudan!

Say it for the ones at the front who are too scared to fall! Free free free Palestine! Free Congo and Free Sudan!

Cuz everything and those everywhere long for liberation all at once!

This is the golden ages ripe with the opportunity for progress

So we have to rise to pass the litmus test

For we grow complict in our own undoing through the violence in our silence

As others not deserving of hell fell into the heavens

While we hid in our nest

Only in the moments that we'll seek to rest our heads on our cozy beds

We shall be so harshly and rudely awakened

By the reality that we will forever be oppressed

Unless we keep the faith in our every breath

For we cannot stand to lose in the slightest

As we cannot tell those who will come next that we tried our best

Cuz they deserve the heavens and the earth

Free from those who wish to make it their conquest

And take them as their new subjects

Again we shall not be shaken!

We shall come for each and every one of your colonial nations!

And reduce them into our shrines of liberation!

So beware and behave or you shall be tamed by the wrath of our rage.

And we shall make a feast out of your faces if you even dare.

🤣😇😎👹🤡🤬☠️💀💋🙈🙉🙊

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar’s “The Big Fix”

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/05/ted-rogers-is-a-dope/#galen-weston-is-even-worse

The Canadian national identity involves a lot of sneering at the US, but when it comes to oligarchy, Canada makes America look positively amateurish.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/05/ted-rogers-is-a-dope/#galen-weston-is-even-worse

Canada's monopolists may be big fish in a small pond, but holy moly are they big, compared to the size of that pond. In their new book, The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians, Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar lay bare the price-gouging, policy-corrupting ripoff machines that run the Great White North:

https://sutherlandhousebooks.com/product/the-big-fix/

From telecoms to groceries to pharmacies to the resource sector, Canada is a playground for a handful of supremely powerful men from dynastic families, who have bought their way to dominance, consuming small businesses by the hundreds and periodically merging with one another.

Hearn and Bednar tell this story and explain all the ways that Canadian firms use their market power to reduce quality, raise prices, abuse workers and starve suppliers, even as they capture the government and the regulators who are supposed to be overseeing them.

The odd thing is that Canada has been in the antitrust game for a long time: Canada passed its first antitrust law in 1889, a year before the USA got around to inaugurating its trustbusting era with the passage of the Sherman Act. But despite this early start, Canada's ultra-rich have successfully used the threat of American corporate juggernauts to defend the idea of Made-in-Canada monopolies, as homegrown King Kongs that will keep the nation safe from Yankee Godzillas.

Canada's Competition Bureau is underfunded and underpowered. In its entire history, the agency has never prevented a merger – not even once. This set the stage for Canada's dominant businesses to become many-tentacled conglomerates, like Canadian Tire, which owns Mark's Work Warehouse, Helly Hansen, SportChek, Nevada Bob's Golf, The Fitness Source, Party City, and, of course, a bank.

A surprising number of Canadian conglomerates end up turning into banks: Loblaw has a bank. So does Rogers. Why do these corrupt, price-gouging companies all go into "financial services?" As Hearn and Bednar explain, owning a bank is the key to financialization, with the company's finances disappearing into a black box that absorbs taxation attempts and liabilities like a black hole eating a solar system.

Of course, the neat packaging up of vast swathes of Canada's economy into these financialized and inscrutable mega-firms makes them awfully convenient acquisition targets for US and offshore private equity firms. When the Competition Bureau (inevitably) fails to block those acquisitions, whole chunks of the Canadian economy disappear into foreign hands.

This is a short book, but it's packed with a lot of easily digested detail about how these scams work: how monopolies use cross-subsidies (when one profitable business is used to prop up an unprofitable business in order to kill potential competitors) and market power to rip Canadians off and screw workers.

But the title of the book is The Big Fix, so it's not all doom and gloom. Hearn and Bednar note that Canadians and their elected reps are getting sick of this shit, and a bill to substantially beefed up Canadian competition law passed Parliament unanimously last year.

This is part of a wave of antitrust fever that's sweeping the world's governments, notably the US under Biden, where antitrust enforcers did more in the past four years than their predecessors accomplished over the previous 40 years.

Hearn and Bednar propose a follow-on agenda for Canadian lawmakers and bureaucrats: they call for a "whole of government" approach to dismantling Canada's monopolies, whereby each ministry would be charged with combing through its enabling legislation to find latent powers that could be mobilized against monopolies, and then using those powers.

The authors freely admit that this is an American import, modeled on Biden's July 2021 Executive Order on monopolies, which set out 72 action items for different parts of the administration, virtually all of which were accomplished:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

What the authors don't mention is that this plan was actually cooked up by a Canadian: Columbia law professor Tim Wu, who served in the White House as Biden's tech antitrust czar, and who grew up in Toronto (we've known each other since elementary school!).

Wu's plan has been field tested. It worked. It was exciting and effective. There's something weirdly fitting about finding the answer to Canada's monopoly problems coming from America, but only because a Canadian had to go there to find a receptive audience for it.

The Big Fix is a fantastic primer on the uniquely Canadian monopoly problem, a fast read that transcends being a mere economics primer or history lesson. It's a book that will fire you up, make you angry, make you determined, and explain what comes next.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) will be issuing the long-promised "grocery rebate" payments to eligible Canadians on July 5.

Months after Parliament passed the one-time benefit first unveiled as part of the 2023 federal budget, the payments will be hitting Canadians' bank accounts on Wednesday.

The food-inflation focused affordability measure is set to roll out to approximately 11 million low- and modest-income Canadians.

Essentially a re-branded GST rebate boost, the payment will be issued through Canada's GST/HST tax credit system, alongside the regular quarterly GST/HST payments. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada