Ontario attacks Big Tobacco

The Ontario government is suing tobacco companies
for health care costs. It’s about time, this could be
a landmark case in Canada, and the Quebec government
is already thinking about following suit.

Tobacco firms have passed the health costs of their products
on to taxpayers for the last 60+ years, it’s time to
make the guilty pay. British Columbia has already filed a similar
suit and the court case will soon be underway. In the
USA tobacco firms have lost a similar case and have
agreed to pay $246 billion over a 25 year period to
cover health care costs due to smoking related illnesses.
Tobacco use costs the world billions every year. It’s time
to attack Big Tobacco.

read about the Ontario 50B lawsuit here

Canoe.ca article

Government Motors

After billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money to prevent GM filing for
bankruptcy, GM has spent the last month in bankruptcy court. After
taking two huge handouts from the taxpayers to avoid filing for
bankruptcy, GM immediately hides in the court
restructuring program, which it could have done 8 months ago
without defrauding taxpayers of their money. The government
now owns 80% of GM, hence the appropriate name – Government
Motors.

Why should consumers be expected to pay for a new GM truck,
as we already paid for one and didn’t get it. For the CEO and
board of directors incompetence, consumers have to pay twice
to buy a GM vehicle. Rick Wagoner, the former CEO, should be
in a cell next to Bernie Madof, since he was planning to keep
taking handout money without making the needed changes -
downsizing the company. Now billions of dollars have been
poured into GM that could have been used to help small businesses
that really need help and are worth saving, but thanks to
GM and AIG the USA is now in a budget deficit of 1 trillion dollars,
and now unable to hand out any more corporate welfare money.

good GM article from feb

US Budget Deficit

more budget deficit

it’s all in the numbers

Sept job statistics have been released in Canada. Since
the financial crisis in the global economy has worsened everyone
has been waiting for these numbers, especially politicians who
will use them to justify their failing policies.
Over 100,000 new jobs were created in Canada despite the fact
we are in a very serious recession. Before our government gets
too busy praising themselves for this, almost 96,000 of these new
jobs were part time, low paying service industry jobs – the kind of
employment that just allows people to survive, barely, and not make
mortgage payments or prop up the economy with high consumer
spending. It should be no suprise to anyone how fast the middle
class is disappearing in North America.

The gap between rich and poor is growing much wider in Canada, than
in other developed countries because in the lean 1990’s the
goverment cut back heavily on social programs and now, very tough
times are approaching. We may see another recession as bad as
the one in 1982. The fact that income disparity is increasing so
rapidly is normally a sign of societal decline.

gap between rich and poor growing wider in Canada

employment is up but the jobs suck

stats canada info here

more stats canada info

disposable society

Everything in our society is disposable, often designed for a single
use, after which its thrown away. Both vendors and consumers love
this, as the countless landfills all over the world prove. Convenience
is usually the selling point.
The trouble is, most of the single use items sold every day are
made of plastic, which is made from a non renewable energy
source – petroleum. So, the “quick fix” isn’t always the best way,
especially if it creates more problems in the future. Is this the
best way to use up our very limited supply of petroleum and
leave a huge mess for our grandchildren to live with? The
choices we make will definitely leave an impact on future
generations, it’s not rational for us to waste limited resources on
disposable items that can only be used once or on the mountains
of packaging that goes straight into the nearest landfill. Recycling
creates jobs, too , just in case anyone forgot.

good general info here

throw away society

“life isn’t so simple that you can get rid of all your problems by throwing them away “

dildo’s solar innovator

Energy costs are rising every day, due to speculators. Already some
families are being forced to choose between gas for the daily commute to
work and home heating oil or food for the kids and many Canadians are
already thinking ahead to next winter’s heating costs. Many homes
are already being converted from heating oil to natural gas and even
wood stoves
Jim Meaney, Dildo, Newfoundland’s own backyard genius and junkman,
has come up with an innovative home heating system that makes use of
both solar energy and recycles aluminum cans. If more backyard inventors
follow his example, our rising energy costs could be a thing of the past.
Hopefully, Meaney’s invention will become a popular add on to homes
all over North America and make the town of Dildo famous all over the
world.

moral hazard

Aside from the issue of governments rewarding companies bad
business practices – i.e. bailing out hedge funds and banks who
made bad decisions by selling subprime mortagages as top rated
bonds, America encourages greed and mismanagement by
giving CEO’s of failing corporations huge bonuses at the expense
of stockholders and employees. Consider this, General Motors
is in the middle of a disastrous year where losses will be the
worst in the company’s history and thousands of employees will
lose their jobs, yet as a reward for his mismanagement, CEO
Rick Wagoner will take home and extra 15.6 million dollars in
bonuses for the great job he’s doing of running GM into the
ground. That teaches other future and present CEOs they will
be rewarded for bad decisions and immoral practices instead
of being fired as they should be or at least having to eat the
loss by losing their fat bonus. Just what kind of behavior is it
we are trying to encourage in the business world by rewarding
corruption and incompetence?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16734629

http://www.wtop.com/?nid=111&sid=1393645

the devil’s business card

Credit cards, almost everybody has one and whether you pay your
bills on time or not, cardholders are being gouged by high interest
rates. Everything costs far too much already without the added
18 % interest rate.
If you’ve been a loyal customer of your credit card company,
i encourage you to phone the service number on the back of
the card and tell whoever is listening in a calm and professional
manner that you have been paying your bills on time and deserve
a lower rate. Be firm and polite in doing so and you may be able
to get a lower interest rate. If they say no, tell them you’ll find
another company who will give you a better deal. In a recent
experiment by CBC News, 70% of the cardholders who tried got a
lower rate, some as dramatic as half the interest they were being
charged before.

antitru$t

Evil empire Micro$oft is attempting a forced takeover of Yahoo, after offers
to buy the company over the last two years were rejected, ironically
citing their reasoning being Google’s monopoly on the market share.

Less than a month ago, Micro$oft was nailed in Europe again with hefty fines for
its unwillingness to share the market with any other company to the tune
of 1.3 billion dollars for failing to comply with a 2004 court ruling against
the company’s illegal practices. So far, Micro$oft has now paid 2.5 billion
in fines in total. This has forced Micro$oft to reveal some of its source
code or face further fines. Micro$oft is fine with monopoly, so long as
they’re the ones at the controls.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/business/worldbusiness/28msoft.html?ex=1219726800&en=386d01a094d84063&ei=5087&excamp=GGBUmicrosoftfine&WT.srch=1&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_id=BI-S-E-GG-NA-S-microsoft_fine

http://science-community.sciam.com/blog-entry/Sciam-Observations/Microoft-Gets-Spanked-Twice-Week/300004435

there’s always big money in waste and pollution

Plastic bags. Everybody hates them, Leaf Rapids, Manitoba even
banned them, China is considering doing the same. Here in
North America, though, plastic bags will likely be around for many
more years. Why? Because even if we don’t want them,
someone is getting very rich producing them.

It’s estimated that 10% of all petroleum produced becomes
plastic bags, which are often used one time at best and then
sent to the local landfill or more likely seen blowing around
uglifying the local landscape. This wasted petroleum could
easily be used for something else that consumers really
want or need. But it won’t be, instead corporations and
our governments will sit on their hands while billions more
unwanted plastic bags are produced daily.

Some interesting facts on recycling:

Throwing away an aluminum can is like pouring out six ounces of
gasoline. Last year americans recycled enough aluminum cans to
conserve 15 million barrels of oil

Incinerating 10,000 tons of waste creates one job; landfilling 10,000
tons of waste creates six jobs: recycling 10,000 tons of waste
creates 36 jobs

National recycling rate of 30 percent saves the equivalent of
more than five billion gallons of gasoline, reducing dependence
on foreign oil by 114 million barrels. This could be even higher

Recycling 35 percent of our trash reduces global warming emissions
equivalent to taking 36 million cars off the road

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0721-04.htm

http://www.cdnn.info/news/eco/e061111a.html

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/03/28/136/

Are ceos overpaid? You decide

Last year, the imbalance bewteen CEOs and the people
who work for them grew to a new level, despite the poor
performance of the majority of the world’s corporations.
Are we rewarding bad business practices with huge,
unjusitfied pay increases? By 2005, the average CEO, not
the best performing one, was earning 262 times as much
as the average worker. In 2006, the average CEO got an
11.5 % increase in pay, up to 360 times the average worker.
This is yet another corporate rip off and has many “social costs”
for our society besides the culture of greed it is promoting.

http://www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/paywatch/pay/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20497109/