Posts Tagged ‘canada’

If there was ever a maxim that lived throughout the ages of investing, sticking with “what everyone needs” certainly rings true today as it did 1000 years ago. That is, what “everyone needs” is basic necessities such as housing, food, clothing, healthcare products, and such items that people cannot live without for more than a few days. In economics we call this kind of item “demand inelastic,” which means that the demand for these kinds of items remains relatively the same as income decreases or increases compared to other items like cars, computers, and other luxury items like televisions and so on.
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The problem the US and Canada are facing is that a large portion of their manufacturing base has been off shored or sent to other countries in the past 20 to 30 years as so called trade agreements such as NAFTA, World Trade Organization, and other so called free trade instruments have been established which gave companies incentive to send middle class jobs to other countries which effectively stripped the parent coutnries of their bread and butter jobs, which eliminated or significantly reduced the spending power of the middle class.

Countries like Japan have, since the 70s to 1980s, pegged their currency to the dollar to take advantage of the manufacturing sector which gave incentive to US and Canadian producers to relocate to Japan or to allow more imports from Japan to be dumped into the US. Now we have a different problem: China, Mexico, Thailand, and Vietnam, but mainly China and its huge population base, extremely low standards, and manipulated currency.
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Since it is predicted that a large portion of the manfuacturing industry we have offshored in the past 20-30 years will return probable best way to attack this is to go back to Standard &Poor’s sector data for the time. However, it won’t be a very fine analysis as it would likely miss emerging industries. It is known that electronics were hot investments as the 1930s wore on– particularly radio, which was state-of-the-art at the time. Zenith Radio emerged as a leading producer: its stock languished until 1935 when it went from the range of 2-2 5/8 at the beginning of the year to 13 1/2 at the end of the year.

Many items, including stocks, reached a historic low in the early 30s.
Some never recovered, but others doubled from their low before the end of the thirties. Therefore we could be in a good buying position later this year, but it is assumed that large increases are unlikely from today’s position. Selling short would be smart before a crash later this year, but there is a fair chance weak prosparity will continue several more years, resulting in large losses for short sellers. So many things have changed since the 30s, and it is thought we won’t learn much, except that a disasterous crash is possible.
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Precious metals are where you can NEVER go wrong since Canada has a large reserve of natural minerals, metals, elements such as uranium and paladium used in nuclear reactors and catalytic converts, respectively (not to mention other uses). Specifically, food and food production is pegged to become the next “big thing” in the United States as the world’s producer of food, or so the prediction goes.

In mainstream economics, the theory is that the primary sector is agriculture from where the development cycle begins for any country. After that comes the secondary sector (manufacturing) and then the tertiary one (services). USA is now sitting at the tertiary sector at the top of this value chain and China seems to be enjoying its manufacturing status. India just jumped from primary to tertiary because of its’ hopping on the information technology bandwagon.

For the ultra safe, conservative types of portfolios, the best bets would be to invest in essential metals like gold, silver, copper, and paladium because these metals will always be in need and will likely raise in price as the world consumes more of the latter two metals. Indeed, copper and paladium are increasingly being used in electronics and other modern applications.

Written by EconoChristian.com

It seems politicians are lying or being glib on their knowledge of economics: Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff told a gathering of southern Ontario business leaders on Tuesday (April 14, 2009) that taxes would have to be raised to combat a growing national debt, local media reported. According to The Record, he responded by saying that to rein in the country’s $480 billion debt, a tax hike might be necessary in the future (Windsor Star, 2009).

Canada Tax Facts:

Taxes already confiscate 45 per cent of Canadian income. The government never point out that average working people pay even more. Smokers and drinkers probably lose 75 per cent of their earnings to taxes. CTF, 2009

According to the OECD, total government revenues for 2004–federal, provincial, and municipal–will be 41.3% of GDP, down from a peak of 44.5% of GDP in 1997 and 1998. This means that Tax Freedom Day is May 30 (since 41.3% of 366 is 151 days into the year.)

What do Canadian Taxes Pay for?

There’s a summary of all government spending for 2003 on the Statistics Canada website, broken down into categories.

To try to make them more comprehensible, I’ve translated them into per-capita numbers, based on a population of 31,629,700 in 2003. A billion dollars is about $30 per capita.

Roughly speaking, out of $15,000 in total spending per capita, there’s $5000 for social services, $5000 for health and education, and $5000 for everything else, including $1500 for interest on the debt and $1200 for protection of persons and property (meaning military, police, legal system, firefighting). Here’s the detailed breakdown.

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Given all of this, if you want to create jobs in an economy, dumping huge amounts of tax-payer cash benefits no one because it is just shifting dollars from one area to another without creating wealth. The “trickle-down” idea only applies to real economics like manufacturing and building; something Canada has had little of these past 30 years, but the end does not justify the means. Remember, however, that manufacturing was still doing well in 2000 and 2001. Since 2003, however, the decline in Canadian manufacturing employment has been the second worst of our peers (the U.K. has experienced more job losses) (PE, 2009).

The myth that governments’ using taxpayer funds is one of the only ways to stimulate private economic growth is rubbish. It was the ineffective hand of government (in collaboration with mega-business) that started the mess with the credit, automobile, wars, and just about any other crisis you can think of. Indeed, when the Conservatives were elected, they promised to do business differently. No more cronyism, no more backroom deals with party hacks. They were going to clean up Ottawa.When the federal government was patting itself on the back last month on the anniversary of the passage of the Federal Accountability Act, it failed to mention that two key components – the appointments commission and the lobbying provisions – have not been implemented.

“The lack of a public appointments commission seriously undermines any credibility that Mr. Harper is serious about cleaning up how business is done in Ottawa,” said New Democrat MPP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay) (TheStar.com, 2008).

However, critics say Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has appointed hundreds of people with Conservative ties – the kind of cronyism the Conservatives and their predecessors used to howl about.

Where does the money come from?

The government sees that for every dollar injected into the economy it must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. Thus, government spending only redistributes already-existing money which otherwise could have been created by a healthy manfacturing sector. Under President Obama’s “stimulus” plan, jobs will be created to weatherize buildings, construct schools and wind turbines, and repair roads and bridges. But outside the market process, there is no way to know whether those are better uses of scarce capital than whatever would have been produced had it been left in the private economy. Since government services are paid for through the compulsion of taxes, they have no market price. But without market prices, we have no way of knowing the importance that free people would place on those services versus other things they want (Creator’s Syndicate, 2009).

We need to invest in green industry, but the problem we face is unfair competition allowed under the auspices of the WTO; so the hope of making Windsor a green corridor is a pipe dream until countries like China and Korea open their markets. Only then can we have a real green revolution.

When are people going to do their homework and take a stand?

EconoChristian.com

By EconoChristian.com

Governments around the world seem to be increasing the grasp of their reach into the daily lives of individual citizens. Increasing amounts of taxes, regulations, and intervention in the daily transactions of business are just a few of the examples of the hand of government that are intruding upon individual liberties. As if national governments were not enough; the collective nations of the world decided to embark on the idea of forming an inter-national organization tasked with the responsibility of supposedly maintaining international order and being the moderator of participant national government’s bureaucratic wishes.

The end of World War 2 also supposedly marked the end of the atrocities committed which were often caused by negative nationalism; that is, the introverted, angst-ridden type of nationalism that supported dictators such as Mussolini who formed the basis for fascism. Out of the ashes came the United Nations with its task of rebuilding war-torn Europe. Historians would unlikely refute the fact that the world needed a stabilizing factor against the chaos at the time. However, historians rarely point-out that the main cause of the first and second World War were chiefly caused by international bankers who financed these blood conflicts with the help of individual countries’ ruling elite who included heads of business, and corrupted heads of public representation. Indeed, the United Nations — as an international governing body — has failed to live up to its promises.

Since the major world wars, the United Nations — through the collective agreement and accession of its members — embarked on a multitude of previously sovereign state-run enterprises including the enforcement of human rights, environmentalism, nation-building, and the upcoming-proposed global taxation.

Proponents of these endeavors claim that state sovereignty is unimportant and that the accession of previously state-run into a central governing body such as the UN serves a useful purpose. Critics of the UN see it as the beginnings of a new communist-era body; effectively stripping previously sovereign nations of their individual liberty, including all those who call themselves citizens in it, and increased corruption (as government tends to be notorious for). Indeed, evidence definitely points toward the latter with examples ranging from the the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol (which undermines state sovereingty); the failure of the Security Council to enforce UN resolutions; and the failure of the UN to stop the United States from unilaterally attacking Iraq in 2003.

Corruption is also a defining and defiling mechanism to which the United Nations operates its arms of bureaucratic-wielding power. Recent examples included the exposure of the Oil-For-Food scandal which involved the son of the then-Secretary General Kofi Annan. This scandal involved high-profile dignitaries, including Kofi Annan himself, receiving large bribes in exchange for their silence of indignities being committed in Iraq (among others).

The United Nations’ attempts at cessation of human rights and genocidal violations by member and non-member countries has also mired this supposed great organization in controversy during the last 50 years, with the Palestinian/Israeli conflict being the chief flashpoint of controversy. The organization was criticized for producing a disproportionate number of resolutions blaming Israel for its treatment of the Palestinian people. It has also equally been criticized for letting countries such as Cuba, Sudan, and China, for violating human rights.

In conclusion, it is easily seen that the vision of a successor to the early 20th century’s League of Nations (a similar endeavor to the UN) has been a failure by the elite of member nations to create an all-encompassing world-governing body. Not only has it been criticized for eroding state sovereignty as witnessed by the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, but also has been chastised for the failure of the enforcement of human rights, and lastly the failure of member nations to uphold anti-corruption policies within the organization.

Jury says refusal to pay tax not crime
Sonja Puzic and Dave Battagello
Windsor Star
Tuesday, June 27, 2006

A Superior Court jury ruled late Monday that a Windsor optometrist was not guilty of tax evasion when he refused to pay nearly $350,000 in income taxes over five years.

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Mr. Charlie Hart of Winnipeg Man., Engineer, Never paid one cent in Federal Income Tax. The Feds took him to court and, using the B&A Act (the recognized Canadian Constitution, the judge found him not guilty. The feds took him to court two more times with the same result. The third time the Judge told the Revenue Canada that if it took Mr Hart before it again, he (the judge) would fine Revenue Canada in contempt of court. Read the B&A act. It is remarkable that Canada is the only Country of stature that does not teach its Constitution to its students.

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There are two specific sections of the B.N.A. Act that deal with the delegation of authority between the Federal and Provincial Governments. Sections 91 and 92 deal with authority for various types of taxation, who has authority to levy which taxes, and various other areas of jurisdiction.

The Act is very specific in its direction. The right to tax income, known as “direct” tax, was delegated to the provinces; and it was clearly indicated that any monies so raised must be raised provincially, and used for provincial purposes. The Federal Government was denied the right to levy income tax.

But the Supreme Court of Canada goes further. It states that no level or government is allowed to transfer its authority to another level of government, and if transfer were attempted by one level, it could not legally be accepted by another.

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Jury says refusal to pay tax not crime
Sonja Puzic and Dave Battagello
Windsor Star
Tuesday, June 27, 2006

A Superior Court jury ruled late Monday that a Windsor optometrist was not guilty of tax evasion when he refused to pay nearly $350,000 in income taxes over five years.

Dr. Jack Klundert hugged his lawyer, Doug Christie of British Columbia, and wiped tears from his face and glasses after the jury was discharged. He smiled faintly at his wife, who sat in the courtroom and took notes.

Superior Court Justice Joseph Quinn thanked the jury for tackling “the complex issue.

“These decisions are not easy to make,” he said.

SECOND TRIAL

Klundert, 53, was standing a second trial for tax evasion under the Income Tax Act. He failed to pay $348,231 in taxes on income estimated at $1.5 million between 1993 and 1998.

Klundert was found guilty of making a false statement on a tax return in 2002 and fined $80,000.

He was also ordered to enrol in a constitutional law course as part of his two-year probation.

But the Court of Appeal found fault with Superior Court of Justice Steve Rogin’s instructions to the jury and Klundert took his protest against Revenue Canada to court again.

He told the jury he wrote zero income on his tax forms because he believed the federal government had no constitutional right to pursue him. He said disclosing his earnings to the government would be like “sitting down with thieves” and telling them where his valuables are kept.

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The media likes to spin this story to make it look like he is avoiding paying taxes. The real truth is that he is trying to prove that the Federal government has been taking power away from the provinces for the past 90 years and by refusing to pay income tax to the Federal government, they won’t be allowed to hoggle all the money that the Provinces should be getting directly.

Giving power back to the Provinces would be a major step for democracy because this political paradigm works best when it is decentralized and closest to the hands of the electorate.

Written by EconoChristian.com with other sources.

A personal account of the decline of manufacturing in the Western world is poignantly displayed in the following post. It seems that with the financial manipulation of countries like China, combined with their immense labor market, along with non-existent labor laws and environmental controls, will allow companies to displace middle class Americans and Canadians out of the manufacturing sector. The question is, what will happen when almost nothing is manufactured in America anymore?

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Economists and gullible financial analysts, not to mention mentally disabled laymen touting the end of manufacturing as good thing, miss some central points concerning losing manufacturing:

The key fact is that manufacturing is the back bone of an economy because this sector is the one which actually produces tangible items. Some might say that intangible items like financial services, computer programs, and the like are products, but the reality of the situation is that these activities can be done almost anywhere in the world by anyone. What will stop these industries from fleeing just as manufacturing did? Indeed, they would flee even faster due to their nebulous nature. We have seen are only in the infant stages of the off shoring phemonenon of industries such as financial services and computer programming by large multi national companies.

Some facts and figures:

The US global merchandise trade and current account deficits hit annual rates of $900 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005, which amounted to 7 percent of US GDP, twice the previous record of the mid-1980s (as a result of which the dollar declined by 50 percent over the three-year period 1985–87). The deficits could reach annual rates of $1 trillion within the next year or so.

China’s role in the global imbalances is even greater than these numbers might suggest. A substantial increase in the value of the Chinese currency, the renminbi, is essential to reduce the imbalances, but China has blocked any significant renminbi rise by intervening massively in the foreign exchange markets, buying $15 billion to $20 billion per month for several years to keep market pressures from pushing its currency up. China apparently sees its currency undervaluation policy as an off-budget export and job subsidy that, at least to date, has avoided effective international sanction (Peterson Institute, 2006)

Figure 2. Rising imports fuel trade deficit with China : Canada-China trade, customs basis

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Are the Chinese taking over the world?

I grew up in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. I was the son of a steelworker. As a small boy, I watched in disbelief as Americans bought foreign products. Now that all the decent working class jobs have fled the country, people are beginning to wonder why they’re all so poor. As I hear more and more people complaining that they can’t make ends meet, I gloat in their suffering. They know the pain that both my father and myself felt when our jobs went overseas because Americans bought foreign products.

All this bunk about high pay, benefits, and the like is what caused the jobs to leave is complete rubbish. Despite the pay, benefits, and the like, companies of the past still turned a profit. They simply couldn’t compete with the cheap foreign labor (caused by currency manipulation and little or non-existent labor/environmental laws) and America’s myopic lust for cheap foreign goods. Since all the jobs are now gone and all that we’re left with is low paying service jobs, those products are so cheap are they? Why must companies have such huge profit margins? Shirts that cost eight cents to manufacture are sold here for twenty plus dollars. A pair of sneakers that cost a dollar to manufacture are sold for as much as 100 – 200 dollars all so some CEO and a few stock holders can have several million dollar mansions, private jets, and the like…
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“Education is the key,” many cry. The only education that this country ever needed was the one I got from my steel-working father, “buy American!” Not everybody is capable of getting an education. What we need more than education are working class jobs that afford the average person the ability to buy a house and support a family. Until this happens, we’re destined to have a lot of people on the dole.

I’m a prime example of how this country failed. I used to have a very good working class job. For over ten years, I worked this job. I could afford a house, support a child, and a wife. After losing everything to a foreign market, I fell into a very bad depression. It’s now lasted some fourteen years, and for the past six, I’ve been on Social Security Disability.

At one point, I cost my state 10,000 – 12,000 dollars a month for nearly three years as I sat in a state run mental institution. Why should I work for five to seven dollars an hour when I can sit at home and collect 400 tax-free dollars each week? I’ve tried college, but the depression is too great; moreover, if I do finish college, I’ll be a Registered Nurse. Do you really want somebody who’s embittered at the society that bought him out of a job taking care of our nation’s sick? Education…

I can’t wait to see this country completely fail!

Signed,
The Acerbate American

Why is this happening?

5. To bring about the end to all industrialization and the production of nuclear generated electric power in what they call “the post-industrial zero-growth society”. Excepted are the computer- and service industries. US industries that remain will be exported to countries such as Mexico where abundant slave labor is available. As we saw in 1993, this has become a fact through the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA. Unemployables in the US, in the wake of industrial destruction, will either become opium-heroin and/or cocaine addicts, or become statistics in the elimination of the “excess population” process we know of today as Global 2000 (Educate yourself, 2009)

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Written by EconoChristian.com with help from various sources.

Governments are no longer suited for the role of definers, defenders, or supporters of the public good (nor have they ever been). Low voter turnout, democratic deficit, and increasing anomie and apathy of the public at large are stark examples of how the voting electorate have lost trust in their Government and the way in which elected representatives are made as purveyors and definers of the public good. Election after election, the polls show steady declines of the public exercising their fundamental right to appoint representatives into Parliament. Indeed, according to statistics from Elections Canada, voting turnout in the 2000 elections was the second-lowest ever, at 61.5 per cent (CBC, 2004). How then, would the Government, as many people claim to be the ideal choice as definers of the public good, be justified in defining and governing a country full of rightly-so cynical voters? In order to answer this kind of question, one must examine the methods in which society has traditionally allocated resources.

The economic market bears the most resemblance to the ways in which traditional societies allocated and distributed resources. Here the basic tenets of economic theory were displayed to function in a systematic manner; there was supply, and then there was demand. Soon came Government into the picture, as best depicted in the post World War 2 era when Keynesian economics came into play where it contested that Government intervention in the free market was needed to serve as the balancer of supply and demand because it was thought that the free market wasn’t able to control itself. While this may be true, many authors have speculated that Government also had the possibility of failing.
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A theory developed by James Buchanan, who won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to economic theory and thinking became the founding basis of the term public choice theory. It also led to the development of the Center of Study for Public Choice at Mason University where it remains the most popular source for this theory. The premise behind this theory is that the same principles that economists use to predict peoples’ actions in the traditional market-place and melding them with peoples’ actions in collective decision-making. Essentially it means that people are self- interested in how they spend their money.

The chief advantage to public choice theory fits neatly as a panacea with the current situation due to the rational ignorance of voters. That is, each voter is faced with a small possibility that their suffrage will change the outcome of an election; therefore the logical choice for the voter is to be generally ignorant of politics. This could be called government failure, akin to the market failure that the government is supposedly there to protect against. Where is the economic efficiency in having low voter turnout and a politically apathetic populace, and how would the government be able to determine the public good? The answer is very simple: the government is not in the ideal position to define the public good.

The first argument in this debate is that of corporate campaign contributions to political parties and patronage appointments of party- friendly businessmen and lawyers to government-office by in-power political actors. History is replete with examples of major political actors and public representatives rewarding their major campaign contributors with rewarding posts in office. In a democracy where the government exists as a pure public good for the mass of voters, there exists interest groups, or conglomerates of concentrated interests, which seek to influence Government policy (which include their definitions of public good) to implement economically-inefficient policies that would benefit not the whole public but just their slim minority.

Political appointments, often in the form of careers in the public service, have stood to be the most common type of rewards given to political party-friendly businessmen (and women). Affirming this claim is a report by Ward (2006) where Justice Gomery stated that “… numerous political appointments to Crown corporations that have been made over the years have been a smudge on the integrity of the appointments process and have often stood in contradiction to the merit principle” (Ward, 2006).

A prominent example of government corruption includes the sponsorship scandal, which started in 1995 to give the Federal Government more visibility in the eyes of the people of Quebec. Chiasson, Gail, Wentz, and Laurel (2005) reported that Justice Gomery, in his account, concluded that between 1996 and 2002, $282 million was spent on this program where 44% of the money going mainly to Quebec advertising agencies that over-billed their claimed amounts (Chiasson, Gail, Wentz, and Laurel, 2005 ). This case clearly demonstrates the arrogance and contempt that elected politicians, accountable to the public, clearly have for the democratic system. This case further solidifies the idea that government irresponsibility runs rampant throughout government; leads the public into disillusionment with their elected representatives; and further driving up the democratic deficit, which in turn provides less legitimacy for government to determine the ‘public good.’
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On another vein, we see that corporate campaign contributions have always been a determining factor in election outcomes in Canada. It is common sense that political parties with the most funds are able to muster a much larger political campaign than those with less. The traditional “big three” parties of Canada have been recipients of large sums of money from special interest groups which included business and corporate donations. Further examples of patronage, large influence from corporate donations, and otherwise ‘unethical’ behaviour abound. The orgy [patronage appointments in the 1984 campaign] confirmed what many Canadians already suspected: Liberals were pretty much a piece, greedy, smug, more concerned with their own interest rather than with the national interest, oblivious to outrage, deaf to dissent (Simpson, 1988).

Indeed, according to Michael Pinto-Duschinsky (2002), “In addition to being a source of scandal and corruption,” he writes, “the ways in which political activity is [are] financed may lead to severe inequalities. If the costs of campaigning are prohibitive, citizens without private wealth may be prevented from running for public office” (Duschinsky, 2002, p. 69). Here he adds weight to the claim that corporate funding of political parties is prohibitive to citizens without private wealth, which would allow them the public good and right to run for office.

Download the full report in this PDF file
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Inflation is on its way and we’re not prepared for it, says establishment shill economists and financial analysts Kevin Phillips and Nouriel Roubini, who both published books within the last 2 years predicting the rise of this insidious evil lurking around the corner in economies where government plays a nefarious intrusion in the lives of private citizens.

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For those green to the term, inflation occurs when the money supply is increased and “chases” prices of goods and services; much of which all people in countries use and consume on a daily basis. When this happens, prices often skyrocket but are not matched by increased sums of income for purchasing power. Essentially it hurts the savers, low income people, and those with high debt loads on their backs because these groups of people are not able to comfortably absorb price shocks as those with no debt and/or high incomes and large amount of wealth.

A year ago, Kevin Phillips, an ex advisor to the Nixon administration, warned of a the pending explosion of a 25-year “multibubble” that started in the 1980s, when the financial sector accounted for 10 percent to 12 percent of the U.S. economy had started metastasizing into an “arguably crippling” 20 percent to 21 percent by the middle of this decade (Reuters; Daniel Trotta, 2009).

Indeed, all of the government manipulation of the US economy — not to mention the governments and economies in the rest of the world — is starting to come home to roost. All of the overleveraging and “easy credit” was bound to create a disaster all of which can be blamed on U.S. Treasury Secretaries all the way back to the Nixon administration, but more prevalently during the Clinton and Bush regimes.

The fact is that central bank manipulation — government manipulation — is the prima facie for the financial bubbles which have been plagueing economies of the world for quite some time since the introduction of central banks in the early to mid twentieth century when the Federal Reserve (a quasi-private institution) was established by international bankers in the 1930s in the United States.

The US economy — already suffering from bank failures, insane trade deficits, and astronomical public debt — has not seen the full effect of these facts and is about to encounter further hardship from areas ordinary Americans rely on day to day; that being credit card debt and personal loans. Since the banking sector has essentially restricted loans to those with previously good credit ratings, many businesses relying on cheap credit are being held in the mud. In a corollarily to the housing bust that occured in the past year, the US economy has yet to witness the fruition of other sectors that have relied on previously cheap credit manipulated by the central bank, those being the commercial and industrial real estate markets.

What economists, politicians, and pundits do not mention is the poignant fact that the entire monetary system of the world — having been essentially taken over by the Federal Reserve through the forced creation of central banks in each country around the globe — has enforced the creation of fiat, or government issue money. This fasci of money has throughout history been the target of control and manipulation of all politicians, dictators, and despots. Convincingly, Rome fell mostly because of their issuance and debasement of their currency.

In fact, at the end of the Roman empire, their mercernary legions refused to take Roman currency. “Whenever a nation slips from wealth creation to wealth preservation, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain the prior level of wealth. As the cost of maintaining the Legions went up, the ROI on having them declined. In order to pay the cost of preservation, Rome debased its currency multiple times. Debasement is a way to pay today’s bills with tomorrows worthless coins. That led to incredibly high rates of inflation. Payment in kind often substituted for worthless currency” (Newsvine.com, 2009). It surely seems the United States economy is on this very same route since the US dollar is bring printed out of existence as we speak to pay for a tripled debt (now currently approximately 15 trillion dollars) — a debt already unsustainable during and previously to the Clinton administration. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” is stated in the Holy Bible in Ecclesiastes 1:9.

With Canada being such a close neighbor with the United States, and sharing such a huge amount of trade volume with its neighbor, it will surely experience a severe bout of inflation to match the economic pain being experienced in the United States. “Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Friday (April, 2009) the Canadian economy is likely to “accelerate” out of what he deemed a “mild” recession – although warning that the next problem policy-makers may face is inflation” (Financial Post, 2009). The primary problem, however, is not trade issues, but debt incurred by the “financial stimulus” that Canada’s political elite are pushing on the Canadian populous as the economic savior. Keynes himself would be so proud.

The Obama Administration will not save us

For those thinking the Obama regime has the answers the solutions, please think again for the same people who worked for previous administration are working for this administration. At the helm of the newly created “economic recovery board” is Paul Volcker, a Nixon and Carter-era economist who was the former Federal Reserve Chairman at that time. It doesn’t stop there for the Federal Reserve Chairman in this term is Ben Bernanke, a former Bush administration Federal Reserve Chairman. How can things change when things stay the same? Indeed, Einstein told us that insanity is when you do the same things and expect different results.

Government intervention is now in such an elevated state that the entire banking system is at risk of being nationalized. Many major banks have already been taken over by the US government and many more are in danger of being usurped as well. It is obvious the current ‘crisis’ has been engineered to put the economic reins of power into the hands of ‘dear government’ who will guide us toward a socialist paradise with a controlled economy.

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The Obama Deception is a hard-hitting film that completely destroys the myth that Barack Obama is working for the best interests of the American people. The Obama phenomenon is a hoax carefully crafted by the captains of the New World Order. He is being pushed as savior in an attempt to con the American people into accepting global slavery. We have reached a critical juncture in the New World Order’s plans. and only by exposing the con can we help to save freedom in America. The Obama Deception is not about Left or Right: it’s about a One World Government. The international banks plan to loot the people of the United States and turn them into slaves on a Global Plantation. Covered in this film: who Obama works for, what lies he has told, and his real agenda, and how his initial appointments and actions prove he serves the corporate oligarchs, not the American people. If you want to know the facts and cut through all the hype, this is the film for you.

Article written by EconoChristian.com with references to various sources stated herein.

How often have you seen job advertisements stating that some type of degree, diploma, or certificate is necessary? Performing a job or task often requires an applicant to have the pre-requisite knowledge or at least some kind of affinity and ability for the task and work being applied for. If this is so, why are so many job positions asking for so many qualifications?

Students across the world are beginning to question the necessity and value of college education as the cost of such training has risen by 110% over the past 20 years, median family income has risen by only 27% (New York: The College Board, 2001)[1].

Have you ever wondered if the requirement of qualifications and credentials has always been so prevalent? The reality of the situation is that back in the post World War 2 economy of the industrialized countries (Europe, North America, etc) there was a shortage of labour (people to take up jobs) so the qualifications necessary for these positions was often waived or learned on the job, and the employer paid training option was often implemented.

Contemporary Tight Labor Markets

Indeed, as Wikipedia points out, labor shortages were felt in [during and after WW2] agriculture, even though most farmers were given an occupational exemption and few were drafted. Large numbers volunteered or moved to cities for factory jobs. At the same time many agricultural commodities were more needed for the military and for the civilian populations of Allies (Wikipedia, 2009).

Before the war, there were not enough jobs to go around, hence the depression. As America geared up for the war and then got involved, two things happen which would have a great effect on postwar America. The first, to produce what was needed for the war, America’s manufacturing began to grow at a fantastic rate. Secondly, there was rationing, so as workers started making money again, there wasn’t a lot for them to spend it on. So, they saved lots of money.

With this tremendous boom there was a severe need for employers to fill positions which now require “qualifications” that were often learned on the job. Also, many new industries were created along with new job titles, so naturally academia and the college industrial complex jumped on the bandwagon to cash in on the increasing numbers of people looking for work as the economy tightened and contracted with the crises seen in the late 70′s to early 80′s and has not stopped since then.

It can be supposed that a certain element of this preference for a University degree is related to the local labor market conditions (supply and demand of people with certain qualifications), but the reality of the situation is that many people who come out of colleges are more suited for the working world due to the fact that it is more vocationally oriented training rather than the pervasive theory taught in Universities. It is true that Universities purportedly produce workers more suited for managerial or “abstract” thinkers, but it is more likely a matter of class and status and the epitome of the specialized economy’s need to compartmentalize people into specific roles.

The Rise Of Credentialism

University degrees were, up until recently (50 to 60 years), strictly an affair for the wealthy and well connected in society, while those at the lower rungs were relegated to community colleges and technical colleges. As many professions became regulated and bureacratized, Universities came into the fold as the necessary qualification to be completed to qualify for positions such as Nurses, Lawyers, Doctors, and other traditional occupations usually occupied by the wealthy of society and their offspring.

Back in the 1960′s to early 1970′s, high school graduates were able to enter teacher’s college directly from their previous level without having to attain a University degree in a specific or general subject. They could just literally become teachers out of high school and were encouraged to attain a University level qualification during their teaching career.

Similarly, concerns about the commercialisation of universities began to emerge during the debate of the late 1970′s about the safety issues surrounding the then-new recombinant DNA technology. The concern centered on the potential influence of the commercialisation of university research on the university as an institution (Kenney, 1998 & Science in Africa, 2002).
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According to a Statistics Canada report released a day after the 1998 “students’ budget,” students are paying more than ever for their university education. After inflation, tuition fees have leapt 62 per cent since the beginning of the decade, while family incomes have dropped by 5 per cent. Fees for undergraduate arts students increased in all provinces but Quebec. With yet another rise slated for the 1999-2000 academic session, students can prepare themselves for fee hikes well into the 21st century.

The sharpest rise in costs occurred in Newfoundland where, on average, students paid 18 per cent more than in earlier years. By comparison, Ontario had a jump of 10.1 per cent. In other provinces, the tuition surge ranged between 1.7 per cent in British Columbia and 8.3 per cent in Alberta. The national average was 9 per cent. Employment incomes of those aged 20 to 24 have fallen by 21 per cent during this period.

At the same time, average loans from the Canada Student Loans Program remained constant and because it has not kept pace with changing realities, students are left having to do much more with less. But youth aren’t exactly foregoing the post-secondary option due to the fee hikes. The proportion of 19- to 24-year-olds enrolled in university grew consistently from 1975 to 1995. That growth stalled in 1993 and then dropped slightly in 1996, but it is once again on the rise. So who is paying for these changes? Check out the numbers: the average undergraduate debt after graduation in 1982 – $5,260; in 1990 – $8,690; in 1995 – $17,000; in 1998 – $25,000.

Academics, teachers, and other so-called “role models” keep chanting the “need for formalized education to get a job” mantra because our economy apparently needs skilled workers, they say, but is the connection between formalized education and just “getting a job” that clear? Most people in semi-professional roles require skills such as exercising considerable judgement and certain specialized skills.

It would seem that before enrolling in and barely scraping by to complete a life draining 4 year degree, it would be more advantageous and cost efficient to offer more University or community college programs 2 years in length rather than the former. Indeed, many community colleges already offer 2 year programs that should be sufficient to compete for positions such as those offered in the business field such as marketing, business analysis and so on. After all, most of what you’re going to need to know is going to be learned on the job anyway.

The statistics and facts seem to be falling on deaf ears with childrens’ role models, teachers, and parents because in the last 30 years the percentage of positions/jobs requiring college/University education has more than doubled while the job responsibilities and tasks have remained the same or have been deskilled (ie. eliminated or replaced by new, argueably less skilled) by technology. Indeed, according to most “role models,” if students do not plan to pursue college education, they will often be threatened with flipping burgers for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately now that the degree obsession from employer human resource departments has expanded into society, lack of a college education often not make it past human resource departments’ clerks’ eyes (or computers).

Why would this be? Well, according to his book Executive Blues, G. J. Meyers warned of the “academic stench” that can often label an applicant “over-qualified” for many of the jobs available in today’s economy. Maybe what attracts employers to college graduates is their ability to sit for unbearable lengths of time at a desk staring at computer screens, or maybe it is the fact that after a college education that many students run up debts to which they will likely never repay in their lifetimes.

Where is the accountability?

In the Ontarian schooling system (in Canada), the Universities, colleges, and post-secondary institutions are empowered under an enabling act and are bound by provisions of different provincial statutes (ie. The Expropriation Act). In addition, because these institutions receive public funds directly in trust (by way of endowments), there are therefore restricted by the rules of accountability. This essentially means they are accountable to the public for demonstrating where the public funds were spent for the goals intended, and to see that it is spent in an efficient and economical manner. However, as all pundits of economics know, and what the economic and historic models show, is that government is not capable of being effective when power is taken away from individuals.
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This means that University administrations are supposed to be responsible for the management of the public funds they receive for collective purposes (very broadly for education and research), but who watches the watchers? Supposedly the board of governors serve this function, but the reality of the situation is that this board is largely a controlled aspect of University Chief Executive Officers’ preferences with no real stated process for reporting their effectiveness to taxpayers. Indeed, the MUSH sector (Municipal, Universities, Schools, and Hospitals) does not guarantee public accountability of funds with regards to University effectiveness (or lack thereof). This fact is so credible that even the Ombudsman of Ontario admitted it:

“Ontario has fallen behind in oversight of non-governmental organizations providing critical public services referred to as the “MUSH” sector – municipalities (except for the ability to investigate complaints about closed meetings in some cases), universities, school boards, hospitals, nursing homes and long-term care facilities, police, and children’s aid societies (Ombudsman, Ontario, 2008)

It would seem that the problem in education starts much earlier than previously thought; it starts in earnest during the grade school education paradigm where students are socialized into specific patterns of social and scholastic thought. The education system has been patterned after the “outcome based” education model where it promotes curricula and assessment based on constructivist methods and discourages traditional education approaches based on direct instruction of facts and standard methods.

Though it is claimed the focus is not on “inputs”, OBE generally is used to justify increased funding requirements, increased graduation and testing requirements, and additional preparation, homework, and continuing education time spent by students, parents and teachers in supporting learning. (Wikipedia, 2009). Could the outcome based education model be preparation for the post-secondary treadmill racket we call Universities and colleges? All signs would point to “yes.”

Some solutions

In his famous presentation, “The problem with rock tumblers: Why Canada’s education system is in urgent crisis and how to fix it,” Tod Maffin outlines the need for education reform from a system where students are encouraged to have their individualities nurtured, developed, and focused into specific areas of study and vocation. Under the current system of outcome based education as outlined above, students are thrown into a public school with over crowded populations, assigned over worked teachers, and expected to come out of this Marxist factory with direction in life.
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What Mr. Maffin compares this system to is a “rock tumbler” where “you take all the students at the beginning of the cycle and toss them into a rock tumbler. You turn on the switch and tumble them for about 12 years.” Essentially this system is meant to form all students into generalists who do not have the chance to develop their individual skills as they should. The nice stones that come out of the tumbler are like the students that come out of the current education system, which he believes creates a bunch of generalists. “Everyone comes out being able to do everything generally well … Few people come out doing one thing extraordinarily well” (Leader Post, 2006).

Parents realizing this disturbing trend are increasingly enrolling their children into private schools, or in many cases, are teaching them at home in an individualized, nurturing environment — guided by Christian or other religious teachings — often not offered in public schools where students of marginalized situations often find themselves ostracized by fellow students, which ultimately defiles their educational experience and dooms their educational future.

Indeed, the US Department of Education’s report “shows that approximately 1.5 million children (2.9 percent of school-age children) were being homeschooled in the spring of 2007, representing a 36 percent relative increase since 2003 and a 74 percent relative increase since 1999.[2] One private researcher estimates that as many as 2.5 million school-age children were educated at home during the 2007-2008 school year.[3]”
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Jesus calls on Christians of all denominations to call into question the current public education system that their children attends as secular schooling has been stripped of all value and meaning when He has been taken out of the curriculum. Without God or Jesus, students become lost in the wild of secularism and often adopt secular ideals. Phil Brennan of Newsmax.com has exposed this secularization of the schooling system stating that “”government schools must stamp out love of country and the family must be viewed as the enemy: ‘As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only rather precarious results. As we have pointed out, it is frequently the family that infects the child with extreme nationalism. The school should therefore use the means described earlier to combat family attitudes that favor jingoism’”" (Newsmax, 2003).

References:

(1) The College Board, Trends in College Pricing, 2001 (New York: The College Board, 2001).

[2]U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, “1.5 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2007,” December 2008, at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdf (January 6, 2009).

[3]Brian D. Ray, “Research Facts on Homeschooling,” National Home Education Research Institute, July 2, 2008, at http://www.nheri.org/Research-Facts-on-
Homeschooling.html (January 6, 2009).

Politicians, businessmen, and media conglomerates working together have been touting that they had no knowledge of the current depression and economic trouble. Somehow this should be hard to believe given the way in which the economies and financial systems of the world were slowly manipulated throughout the years. It has been in the making for decades, made worse since Canada and the United States’ politicians signed away their respective economic sovereignty to the unelected World Trade Organization and NAFTA; not to mention the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
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This pipe dream of stabilizing Canada’s economy is not to be solved by shipping its manufacturing base, already less than a quarter of its economic activity, to countries where they utilize slave labour and manipulate their currency. It also is not to be solved by the proliferation of Casinos and gambling houses which destroy the moral fabric of communities and eventually countries. Here is a brief history of how gambling came to be common practice in Canada:

A 1969 amendment authorized provincial governments to manage and conduct lottery schemes and authorized charitable groups to do likewise under license – the federal government still had control, however, and even had their own lottery. The provincial and territorial governments soon negotiated provisions that led to the introduction of further gambling options in Canada such as province-run ticket lotteries. Governments began to generate substantial revenues from their virtual monopoly on Canadian gambling and became interested in diversifying their gambling offerings. (University of Alberta Study)

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Why would a country with decent, primarily Christian people, decide to open state-run Casinos thoughout its lands without any thought of consequence? You can bet your bottom dollar the policy makers knew the harmful effects that gambling would have on a population, but were desperate for solutions to declining public revenues due to de-industrilization (loss of manufacturing industries; backbone of the economy) and were under the influence of powerful people hell bent on destabilizing the middle class industrialized people of the world. “Canada experienced a dramatic increase in legalized gambling in the 1990s, primarily because of governments’ need to increase revenue without additional taxation” (CMAJ, 2000).

The industrialized world is steadily losing its manufacturing base to countries with low or non-existent labor, environmental, or financial laws. China is such an example of a country where they regularly manipulate their currency, condone limits on speech, disallow private sector unionization, and have poor or non-existent labor laws. Workers work 12.5 hours per day, spend 16.5 hours in the factory, and have to work all night during delivery rush. “There is no overtime pay. Workers are paid on product count. After all kinds of deductions, the average salary per hour is 13 cents” (China Labor Watch, 2001).

How could this come to be?

There should be no misunderstanding here. No one should be opposed to fair trade, but it’s time to recognize “free trade” is fiction because every trading relationship is managed in some way. Indeed, in an ideal world there would be no governments and therefore no need for representative government and public collectivization which all countries eventually become when people of similar values and morals come together in common cause. Indeed, Jesus fought for human freedom and did not give up even after he was crucified and nailed to a cross. As Jesus Christ said to Luke, “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his palace, his possessions are safe” (Luke 11:21).

One has to wonder if the de-industrialization; loss of manufacturing industries (and the subsequent decimation of the middle class); increases in drug trafficking and rises in crime mostly caused by a purposely faulty judicidial system; the increase in gambling and sinful behaviours such as prostitution (being legalized in some countries) and homosexual marriage; and the general acceptance of lies and deceit were deliberately planned out. Indeed, John Coleman, a famous historian and Christian, has stated this is the goal of the elite, satanist cabal steering planetary affairs. Indeed, he states point number five:
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“To bring about the end to all industrialization and the production of nuclear generated electric power in what they call “the post-industrial zero-growth society”. Excepted are the computer- and service industries. US industries that remain will be exported to countries such as Mexico where abundant slave labor is available. As we saw in 1993, this has become a fact through the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA. Unemployables in the US, in the wake of industrial destruction, will either become opium-heroin and/or cocaine addicts, or become statistics in the elimination of the “excess population” process we know of today as Global 2000″ (Educate yourself, 2000).

Who is responsible for this?

The respective governments of Canada, USA, and the other industrialized and developing countries of the world — supposedly represented by their respective politicians — rammed the World Trade Organization’s agenda down the collective throats of their respective peoples through the incremental global trade agreements settled on shortly after World War 2. If one were to do their research, they would find that there were no public consultations regarding the need for so-called free trade rather than the much needed “fair trade.”

The World Trade Organization’s website states that the WTO agreement was ratified in member nations’ parliaments and consultative bodies, but what they do not mention is that nine in ten (90%) Canadians believe that politicians are “likely to lie” when they make statements in the media about important issues (60% “very likely” and 30% “somewhat likely)* and therefore agree that government does not represent common peoples’ concerns. Where is the democracy in that?

What Jesus calls his followers to do is emulate the way he lived his life. That is, to emulate his love for humanity, God, and the ability to question what rules and regulations authority has put upon mankind. Jesus was a revolutionary teacher. “His ideas shocked and frightened the people of His day. He would probably do the same to us today were He here in person. The sad truth is that the teachings of Jesus are just as revolutionary today as they were when He was here, but we have overlooked their importance. Or, we have failed to make application of them to our lives” (The Examiner).

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I call upon all Christians of all denominations to print out and cast their signature(s) as well as persuade their community members and families to sign the following petition in WORD format.

PETITION

to the House of Commons

in Parliament Assembled

We, the undersigned citizens and residents of Canada draw the attention of the House to the following:

THAT manufacturing jobs are important to Canada’s national economy,

THAT Canada is losing thousands of manufacturing jobs every year,

THAT each week more manufacturing companies shut their doors,
THAT losing manufacturing jobs in Canada affects millions of Canadian families, who either work directly or indirectly in the manufacturing sector,

THAT the loss of these jobs will negatively impact the future economic prosperity of Canada,

THEREFORE your petitioners call upon Parliament to immediately develop and implement a plan of action to protect Canadian manufacturing jobs in consultation with all stakeholders including labour and the business community.

Special thanks to Mario Silva for the petition document.

* These are the findings of an Ipsos-Reid poll conducted between October 22nd and October 24th, 2002 on behalf of The Comedy Network. The poll is based on a randomly selected sample of 1,000 adult Canadians. With a sample of this size, the results are considered accurate to within (+/-) 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, of what they would have been had the entire adult Canadian population been polled. The margin of error will be larger within regions and for other sub-groupings of the survey population. These data were statistically weighted to ensure the sample’s regional and age/sex composition reflects that of the actual Canadian population according to the 1996 Census data.

Are Income Taxes Illegal and Unconstitutional?

As 130 million Americans dot the I’s, cross the T’s and staple their income tax returns, an increasingly vocal minority of people are doing none of the above and calling themselves “non tax payers” and using the 861 position are not paying their share of income taxes. This tax honesty movement includes some curious members including a former IRS member, Joseph Banister; and a conservative congress member from Texas, Ron Paul who favors the total elimination of income taxes and says their violate the US constitution.

Joe used to work for the IRS and he says that the share of solid evidence by doing 2 years worth of investigation working for the IRS. His evidence fills-up dozens of file-binders regarding liability statutues, what forms to file, etc. When you look at the regulations rether than the pamphlets, you learn that the IRS doesn’t have the right to tax people as everyone believes.

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