Jerry J. Fortin

Why? What business of it is ours. Middle east peace is an oxymoron. It is not something that can be solved or facilitated from the outside, it must be dealt with by the parties involved and resolved according to their dictates not ours. Neither side is going to simply give up and hand over power or control of anything at all. The fight will go on. The Arab states support Palestine, the US supports Israel. Yet peace cannot be enforced by either side, only by the inhabitants of the region in question.

Hey BC, you will be surprised soon enough. You folks called Ron Paul a crackpot, the lone public voice of monetary reason in your government, and you folks simply are either afraid of the truth or unwilling to learn from your mistakes. Your new President has an awful lot on his plate, and he simply won't be able to deal with things the way you folks think he will. Health care is your new mantra for public spending. Once you add that to the baby boomer pension mountain and you take the whole mess and factor in military spending the bailout packages and stimulus plans become a mere drop in the bucket. You are spending your way into the dirt and too foolish to realize it. The only direction your nation is progressing in is toward debt and financial destruction. The fat cats will survive, as they always do. The average investors will get wiped out financially, kiss your 401k goodnight. You have ways around the problem acting on your own behalf, but as a nation tough luck. Dump your investments soon, there is a small bump happening but it will not last long and then the real downward spiral will take place. You should be liquid before that happens. Get out of debt as quick as you can. Then unload any T-Bills and dollar holdings, they are going to lose a majority of their value. Buy gold and silver, pickup real estate where it can be had for cheap and use it as rental property when you can. Use off shore accounts to the extent that you can and avoid US Banks. Canadian Banks are relatively stable and safe. Create a startup company, run it out of your own home and take all possible tax deductions. Consider multiple companies if you are able, dealing with facets of your own consumption habits to help you avoid spending on your own behalf. That small bump I am referring to is a stop gap created by financial institutions to reorganize their investment strategies and position themselves in order to take advantage of the numerous pennies on the dollar liquidations that are going to result from the massive numbers of business failures and fire sales of assets as more and more businesses and citizens end up in bankruptcy courts. In my view these institutions should be ready inside of the next few months. By the end of summer the shit will hit the fan. Best bets for investments are energy and utility companies. There is simple no way around using these commodities. Even so, the smaller companies may suffer greatly from defaults and may end up being bought out. That does not mean that only the largest companies will survive, it means that the companies with better administrative talents have a better shot at survival. You may find that foreign companies end up buying out your troubled industries to a degree you never imagined. The world has studied the US business model, tweaked it and made it work for them over the last few decades. The competition is only just now starting to heat up. As your economy tanks, and you cease to be the great consuming society your economic leverage begins to erode. When the greenback ceases to be the benchmark that will be the final warning of collapse for you. Even as we speak the Euro is replacing the greenback for bulk oil purchases in the middle east. China is buying your T-Bills and financing your debt with their current account trade surplus, they sell those T-Bills in chunks with interest and they are using those pretty greenback dollars of yours to buy gold, from Russia and South Africa mostly. They then sell the gold for Euro's and use those to buy middle east oil. The process has already begun. Like I said before your nation is in deep trouble and without reforming your monetary system and your financial industry you are screwed.

You file that data wherever you like. As we all do. You don't see this as a problem? Your government set the standards, your banking system set the actual qualifications. This was all a result of pursuing the "American" dream. The politicians and the bankers were simply facilitating the realization of that dream. You do understand that many of these people were on fixed incomes, which under the standards and qualifications at the time allowed them to have that mortgage in a very legal and binding way, right. Some years after they get their homes the cost of living goes up and inflation kicks in. Their fixed incomes remain the same but their expenses have all gone up and they can simply no longer afford to make their payments. These increases in expenses were a result of the continual growth of the system, a net result of the central planning being done by the banking industry. Boom and bust business cycles that were and are designed by the financial industry to correct market conditions and ensure the secure acquisition of expanding capital pumped into the system. Increased money supply only leads in one direction and that is the devaluing of currency and inflation. This is a simple economic truth. The Queen no longer has any say in matters in Canada. I think you should read the Statute of Westminister 1931, that document describes the nature in which the Crown and the British Parliament have removed themselves from the responsibility of legislative matters in the former colonies of the United Kingdom. Your nation has indeed eclipsed the UK as being the biggest pricks on the planet. A fact that most of your citizens do not seem to fathom. A fact that your foreign policies still fail to take into consideration and a reality that only your citizens can experience once outside of your own nation. Nice birds! We scored a few of them not so long ago. They are better than the Russian heavy lifters I think and vastly superior to what the Europeans use. I think all three of those nations you mentioned are in deep shit. Again I want a stronger USA, not a weaker one. The USA has been a good influence on the rest of the world for the most part anyway. Nothing is perfect.

I make no claim to wisdom, spin things round and round but you will trap yourself in your own assumptions. I guess then there is not and has not been any problem at all with your housing sector. The millions that have already or will soon lose their homes to bankers are of no import to you at all. You are wrong BC, I never said that the dream had died, I said there were problems. Canadian Empire? You mean the British Empire that a couple of centuries ago were responsible for both your nation and mine? You became the most powerful nation at sword point. It worked then, and it is working now. It is expensive in terms of dollars and the lives of your sons and daughters but the warrior culture you have created is well aware of that. I don't suggest you wait at all. I suggest that you only have that long before the house of cards falls in upon itself and completely buries you in debt. Simple arithmetic can prove this coming result at current rates of consumption and loss.

I am a long way from an American hater. I am an Albertan, we damned near revere the Americans. We know what they have done, what they can do and what they need. That is how our economy functions here, realizing these things is very important to us. The last thing Alberta wants is a harmed friend of our economy.

Canada has no voice at the table. I am not delusional, and no sane Canadian would believe that we do either. Yet we have concern for our southern friends. You folks are just to close to the game to see it any way other than you do. Understandable and unfortunate it may be, but that is the way it is. Your central banking system is breaking you, slowly but surely. You can't see the forest for the trees from where you are but that perspective issue is your problem to deal with as well. You guys are trapped in your military industrial complex with a major fraction of total employment at stake. That complex costs billions of tax dollars every year, and it is very nearly the last bastion of your remaining manufacturing base. Making disposable products sold only to government at tax payers expense does little to improve the economic standing of your nation. Especially when you consider the debt being held outside of your nation because of it. Meanwhile your corporations are moving to nations with lower production expenses for most of your consumer products. This too has had detrimental impact on your economy. The one single shinning star of your once great economy was the realization of the "American" dream, citizen homeownership, and now that the bubble you folks have created and sold as "investments" has realized consequences that have now crippled your financial industry. America needs economic reforms, fiscal reforms, financial reforms and monetary reforms just to "take a lickin' and keep on tickin' ", it all boils down to dollars and cents for you folks because that is your sword. Either America turns a corner and addresses the issue before it, or the empire will collapse. its just that simple. You folks can do it by not renewing the charter for the fed and take control yourselves, at least it is a starting place. You can go from there to begin to fix the rest of your problems. On the other hand if you do not take control of your problems they will be your undoing. I will give America one single decade to handle this, no more. Perhaps less, but surely no more. In this decade on loan America will realize that the arithmetic works against them in terms of time taken to fix the economy. An economy can shrink as fast as it has grown, and that reality is something that nobody is talking about. The ramifications are unbelievable in their scope.

Kissing your sheepish butt wasn't my idea dude. I have been beaten silly on several occasions, some were my own fault and some were not. Yet I am not a victim, I just take my lumps as I go, just like everyone else. I am not laying blame, I am learning facts and applying what I have learned. I don't have all the answers, I don't even have all the questions.....yet. I probably never will. The one thing I can say for sure is that society has made many mistakes for many reasons. Unfortunately the greater the influence or affluence of the individual the smaller the impact of those mistakes to that individual. As for some grand plan well let me say this. There are options, lots and lots of options. Unfortunately for the United States, there are a corresponding number of problems. The greatest nation on earth is having problems, and the world waits to see what happens. The truth is that the shear size of the American economy boggles the imagination and it permeates international events with is twitches and trembles. Solutions need to be found, and quickly. If America falls, it will make a very large noise. What can be done is to use American influence and purchasing power to force changes as the nation desires. America still calls the ball, and will continue to do so until the Chinese and the Arabs start selling off all of their US T BILLS. Then the greenback my cease to be the global standard and the crunch will begin. That may be inevitable, but it may also be mitigated. Fortress North America may in fact be the only viable solution for the USA. The creation of a new nation would allow monetary reforms and the like to begin to ensure a stable financial system. Right now the US financial system is in deep trouble. A stable financial system could be used to deal with the production and consumption equations that will some become the talk of the town. Simple arithmetic shows all the fallacy of exponential growth and its impact on economic systems, that is where the problems were started and that is the only place that solutions can be found. Consumption drives production and that creates profits, but where do you draw the line? When you are consuming more than you are producing you begin the downward spiral you see in front of your face today. Profits are still being made, but they are ending up in far fewer places. That causes a loss of consumer confidence and that is another thing we are now seeing. We can all see what is happening, but we simply can't agree on what to do about it.

You cut yourself off! At any rate, our fiat currency has no real value. It is only our trust in the medium that is relevant. The amount of dollars in circulation is indeed a problem, but not one that is not able to be solved. That task is the purported function of the centralized banking system. As you have likely realized, they are not very good at that job. Increasing the money supply causes inflation and decreasing it causes deflation. The term "business cycle" is most often used to describe the boom and bust system we have adopted. The centralized banking system sets its interest rates and attempts to control money supply based on demand, that hasn't worked very well either. The problem as I see it is not merely the amount of currency, or money supply but the interest charged under the fractional reserve system we use. It is that interest that has been the true culprit of government debt. A vast percentage of the worlds money supply is created in interest bearing debt incurred on a fiat currency that central banks create without almost any expenses incurred to them for the medium of exchange and with huge profits generated through highly leveraged fractionally increased profits. There are lots of them. To get rid of income tax you need the federal government involved. Provincial tax is only about half of federal, so we can make a dent but that is all.

I am not Scottish, so the sheep bum thing has no appeal to me! BC I am glad for you that you are making out well, unfortunately not everyone has or will. I think you realize that we are almost able to see the tip of the iceberg from here. The depression is still about 6-9 months away, and then you can expect deflation. I called you a lemming because like you, most folks are believers in the system. That is understandable because if you knew how to work it, it probably made you a ton of money. Unfortunately billions of 401K retirement plans evaporated in the last 9 months. You see, my beef is with the system, not the people. The system uses people a lot more than people use the system. The system does it better, and it has been doing it for longer.

You are a sheep BC. Just keep thinking that way, it makes sense to you, besides you are in the company of many others. You have the herd mentality. Perhaps you are more properly described as a capitalist lemming.

I am still a large follower of the concept. Not the political corner, because it was never meant as a political system, and the Social Credit Parties that still exist are not subscribers of the economic reality of the concept at all. I keep reading and keep thinking that it is too bad that Douglas was so well misunderstood that his detractors gained the kind of public support that was what Douglas really needed to pull this off. King beat up Aberhart and killed our chances of having this resolved, it was Bible Bill that dropped the ball because he should have known that provinces cannot play with monetary policy. There were ways around the problem, and there still is in my view, but he dropped the ball playing the game he did. What we did gain out of the deal was ATB Financial, a provincial crown corporation that is a way out, if the government has the balls to use it. We don't have to mess around in the fed playground of monetary policy, all we have to do is use ATB and Alberta Provincial Bonds to get what we need. That is a reformed financial system. In Alberta we have the opportunity to make mortgages for private dwellings provincially tax deductible. Those mortgages can be designed to be income scaled and interest free with term amortization configured to allow citizens with even modest incomes own their own homes. This is a key issue because it is the first step in effective wealth creation and since the government is able to provide the opportunity to achieve this through making available a greater disposable family income then it just seems to me the logical way to go. Along with the ownership of homes from the private citizens there would be a corresponding demand for all sorts of consumer goods to be used inside these homes. It would seem to me that it would provide a major incentive for a home grown manufacturing sector, a corner stone of a new and viable secondary industry infrastructure. There are just too many benefits to ignore the opportunity in my view.

A dollar a vote is pretty damned cheap. If you want folks to participate in the system why not just legislate them into the damned corner and force them to vote?

I would be all for internet voting, if it could be done from the home. If it could be setup with sufficient security systems in place, and if it was transparent and verifiable.

Central banks run economies, whether we believe the government does or not simply doesn't matter. In Canada our central bank has far more leverage than the government which owns it. That is why the government does not instruct the bank on how to act. Should the government choose to do so it could in fact eliminate the public debt to a great degree. It is a laughable situation when the Bank of Canada, a wholly owned crown corporation loans money to the Government of Canada at interest. That fiat currency is created as interest bearing debt, at great expense to the tax payer. Not all government debt is held by the Bank of Canada, some debt is owed to other central banks. The system is a joke, it is merely a fancy means of wealth distribution, a capitalistic version if you will.

Lets get something straight, the Six Nations came to Canada after being tossed from the US. They were granted land, which they sold. They can leave anythime they want to, the sooner the better.

The central banking system was all ORIGINALLY private. In some case it still is. The important point is how much grief did and do private central banks cause. How much did tax payers have to pay to buyout stockholders and cover debts incurred?

The NDP will always need members and never form a federal government. In provincial terms, the party always has a good shot everywhere but Alberta.

The attack adds, or truth adds, call them what you will, formed a carefully crafted campaign against Iggy. Iggy appears to have been fooled into acting in a manner the Prime Minister wants. It remains to be seem whether or not Iggy is smart enough to take the PM's job away from him. The Liberals had the momentum, it now appears that approval is stalled to say the least. The summer must be filled with Liberal propaganda in order to take advantage of the coming bump when the inevitable failure to come to terms with EI enhancement becomes public at the beginning of the next session of the House of Commons. The slow dispersal of stimulus funds will cause the Harper government much grief. International authorities are now talking about winding down stimulus efforts world wide.

The Governor General has considerably more responsibility than what you have outlined.

Ask the right question, get the right answer. Especially when you consider how the question is formatted in conjunction with the the only available well formatted answers then things become very clear. The efforts with respect to mathematically computations are equally well designed.

I will suggest that the Federal Government is going to take a hit on this. I am not very happy about that, but there it is. As much as I dislike this government, its not all their fault and I will not blame them for a disease. The simple fact is that the First Nations are as much to blame

I don't see management that way Oleg. They are just folks who want to keep their hands clean and use their brains instead of their backs to earn a living. They are usually better educated than most other employees, and they are generally team players with ambitions. They are no different than the workers with the one exception that they usually are willing to put in a big effort and expect a big reward. The union guy just does his job, doesn't worry about the other guys job, and general does as little as they can. Some people do power trip and in fact this exists within the unions as well as in management. These folks are just jerks, and there is no shortage of these people anywhere on the planet. Its not just union good, management bad because they are all people and subject to all of the flaws of humanity.

I do have a suggestion for folks to consider. Join the party in power in your constituency. Work toward getting more meetings and have those meetings with the elected representative present at every opportunity. Even when the representative is not there, present constituency opinions on the issues of the day and have the representative explain and defend their own and the party position. Its not a very big deal to build a website. Its not a very big deal to get your hands on all proposed legislation in the House of Commons. There is no big deal setting up a poll on a website. There is nothing wrong and no big deal for constituents to start "campaigning" by door knocking to seek out public opinion for the constituency. These things can be done, without to much effort. As a matter of fact I am in the process of doing just this. I will join the party in power just to get a seat and a voice at the local table. I will work not for the party but for the constituents, by this I mean I will not promote any partisan ideology but instead seek public opinion and use that to influence to the degree possible policy at the local level. Representatives are compelled to here the voices of citizens in their constituencies, but more political weight can be found in the partisan corner of that constituency. The more members the greater the issues for the elected representative and potential candidates. Joining the party in power also provides the ability to have a say in candidate selection. These are all positive outcomes from working within the system. If the representative gets defeated, I will bailout and go to the next guy. The idea is a little radical, but I can think of no better way to at least begin to bring some form of accountability to at least my own representative.

The answer to production costs and economic development is not to reduce the standard of living of workers here with respect to wage earnings. The reality that standards of living are improving elsewhere due to their productive efforts is not to be derided either. The truth is that the answer to the problem lays within an automated production process where labor costs are not merely lowered but instead eliminated to the extent possible. We have the technology to do this, and we have the resources to do this. We should do this. The existing labour force needs to be converted from production line employees to civil engineers, software designers and highly trained technicians to produce and maintain the means of automation. We can build factories and we can build robots, so there is no technical reason not to put two pieces of the puzzle together and create a picture. This nation also has sufficient resource wealth to provide the raw materials of production needed at lower costs than in some other locations. So we have an advantage from which we can build upon. The level of education in this nation is also relatively high as well, so we have the technical expertise and the ability to innovate whatever we find that we require to implement an automated production system as well. Secondary industry is legendary for its ability to create employment opportunities, and the efforts expended in applying advanced technologies in this field of endeavor will most likely result in very similar realizations. With all due respect the unions do exactly what the capitalistic free market lets them do by charging whatever the market will bear for their services. The real issue is not unions at all, but instead cost of production. That is not the fault of the worker, but the problem of the employer. The worker only does as they are told and are paid for what they do. Management or administration is responsible for the business decisions and marketing end of the production equation. Business needs to stop leaning on governments for legislative efforts on their behalf just as much as labour does. Government should concern itself with legislative efforts relevant to public safety and service deliver of its programs.

The governor board of what is appointed by the government? You can't mean the Fed, because the US government only appoints two positions on that board. Would you believe a court ruling that proves my point? http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...va&aid=8518