While
reading the newspaper this morning I came across several pieces of what I
thought were good news. Only later did I occur to me that to many people, what
appears as good news to me, must look like bad news to many others, since to me
good news is when the capitalist system is showing signs of tension or
difficulty.
A couple of the items that caught my
eye this morning were:
1.
That ships full of Canadian canola (which used to be called
rapeseed, until the gender fanatics got to work on it) are lining up at Chinese
ports because of delays in clearing them by customs officials.
(Back story: this has been happening
since the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the executive of the Chinese electronics giant
Huawei, at Vancouver on December 1 while she was in transit, an arrest known
about in advance by our “happy days” PM, and his increasingly dysfunctional
(for confirmation of this adjective
examine the disarray of our foreign policy, with its recent manifold screw-ups)
sidekick Ms. Freeland, an arrest carried out at the command of the Trump
administration.
Of course, one must feel
sorry for canola farmers who are being deprived of their incomes, a result
that the two responsible persons for the
arrest apparently did not foresee, or think about.)
2.
Alberta fears being up a creek because of the recent court
decision that in the event of bankruptcies
by oil companies, a priority in repayment must be given to the cleaning up of
oil wells abandoned by the company, in advance of payments to creditors.
(Back story: Our western lands are
littered with abandoned oil wells, thousands of them, tens of thousands of
them, when they are all counted --- some
are called abandoned, others, orphaned, and so on --- which have risen to a
figure like 155,000 leaking wells--- this is so huge as to sound hardly
credible, but there you go, capitalist companies are allowed to get away with
murder, even in beautiful Alberta. The
bill for the province could be as high as $8 billion. All these are wells that
have been either closed for one reason or another or simply abandoned when they
have run dry, but for whatever reason, they are still leaking oil, and are left
to the farmer on whose land the well sits, to pay for what is euphemistically
called “remediation.”).
This reminds me of the dreadful
examples of tailings left behind by various mining enterprises that I have
reported on in the long-forgotten past: such as a huge pond full of
radio-active mine tailings in Elliot Lake, Ontario, once the home of Canada’s
first uranium mines; and an even bigger tailings lake in Jamaica, left behind
by the Canadian aluminum multinational Alcan, as a gentle reminder to the
impoverished people of that island of all the benefits they have had bestowed
upon them by the visitors from overseas. In places where workers have been routinely
poisoned by companies, one usually runs into widows’ committees, full of
grieving women who watched their husbands shrink to nothing, and then die.
Hundreds and hundreds of such women. It’s not much wonder that Canadian
companies are so sensitive when they spot anyone approaching their factory
gates with a camera. They usually have a lot to hide.
The reason I like this
story from Alberta is that it shows the true face of capitalism: heartless,
irresponsible, believing itself to be above the law that governs everyone else
--- and of course this is grist to a guy like me who is always looking out for
information that might change people’s minds about our dominant ideology.
Great stuff, right? Wot the hell!
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