#canadian capitalists

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"CANADIANS BEAT JUNGLE, SNAKES, TO BUILD WAR-VITAL RAILROAD," Porcupine Advance (Timmins). August 26, 1943. Section 1, page 2. --- Canada's Plane Programme force opening of new Bauxite Mines in British Guiana - Roadbed Kept Disappearing into Swamp, Manager says - 40-mile Road took Year to Complete ---- Montreal, Aug. 24. - Canadian-born engineers have just completed constructing a railroad through forty miles of steaming Jungle in British Guiann, and "they had first to kick the snakes out of the way and then lay the roadbed over and over again he cause the gravel kept disappearing into the swamp," says F. L. Parsons, general manager of the Demarara Bauxite Company, Ltd., who oversaw the job.

Aluminum plants in Canada, turning out the metal which keeps the United Nations flying, forced construction of the new railroad, says Mr. Parsons, now visiting this city. "It taken four tons of bauxite to make one ton of aluminum and your Canadian plants have been eating up the mineral at such a pace that down in South America we have had to open new bauxite mines. We now have to strip from the mine site an overburden of earth up to 100 feet thick.

"It took a year to build those forty miles of road. It runs from Mackenzie, where we crush, wash and dry the bauxite, to a spot in the jungle called Ituni. We had unskilled labor. And we had to deal with the mud, the snakes, and sometimes an ocelot, which is a South American tiger.

"This job has added to the reputation of Canadians, which is already high in South America. They like us down there because we treat the people well. For instance, our colored boys like to travel by train so we give them free rides on the railroad in our Pullmans - old freight cars with the sides out and benches in. And we take good care of our white people, of course. Recently we found it necessary to build a swimming pool for them as they cannot bathe in the river with safety because of a freshwater shark called the piranha, a vicious little brute about eighteen inches long, nearly all mouth and three rows of teeth. It bites off fingers and toes. In gangs this fish even brings down cows drinking in the river. It's a curse.

"Now we're ready to operate our new road, which the people of British Guiana foresee will ultimately lead to opening up back country full of riches. I hope Canada will follow up the good impression her engineers and other technicians have been making down there. Recently, the Daily Chronicle of Georgetown, said: "Taking a retrospective glance, one is bound to say that the history of industrial, economic and social development in this country in the past decade cannot the written without allotting priority of place to the Canadians, our greatest Empire cousins in the Western Hemisphere.

"The job Canadians are doing to the south can, I believe, be built into a lot of good post-war business."

[auressea]

this ^report is from 2020. However- much news has since been reported about the staggering increase of wealth 'at the top' since COVID began.

"...Canadian capitalism is exposed in the study as an oligarchic social order.

According to the PBO, the share of wealth held by the top one percent of Canadians is 25.6 percent. This is almost double the estimate of 13.7 percent given by Statistics Canada."

@allthecanadianpolitics good resource article here.

[junk-thrillz]

"Detention gets out at 4:15. Guess where I am instead of there?"

Well, I WAS going to post this for Day 12 of Cringetober (because the prompt was 'Niche Interest'), but I somehow forgot, even though I literally drew this back in September. Anyways,

Detentionaire is the show ever. I'm obsessed. Everyone should go watch Detentionaire RIGHT NOW. I drew this back when I hadn't even finished Season 1, so you can tell I saw a bunch of out-of-context spoilers and rolled with them haha. The triangle's because of the pyramid in the basement (which I saw a screenie of and promptly lost my shit over), and the tail is because tatzelwurms are typically reptilians with feline heads. Cartoon win, this character is... a cat-lizard! Wahoo! I don't care that it isn't canon, I'm just happy I got to draw my guy.

[sparksinthenight]

Letter to the Canadian Government about Mandatory Human Rights and Environment Due Diligence Laws

Our names are ______. We are from ______. We are writing to you to ask that you create good Mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence laws for all companies operating in, selling goods or services in, or headquartered in Canada. This will help workers, communities, and ecosystems around the world and contribute to the creation of a fair world where current people and future generations have what they need.

Right now, companies are doing horrific human rights abuses and environmental abuses all around the world.

First of all, workers are being horrifically overworked and incredibly underpaid in intensely dangerous working conditions. Three million workers die every year due to workplace accidents or poisoning. Fifty million people are literally being held in modern slavery. Ten percent of children worldwide are doing child labour. Two thirds of the world are in multidimensional poverty, where they don’t have five or more of their basic needs (such as food and sanitation and education) met. Forget living wages, most workers are not even paid bare subsistence wages. And experts have described working conditions as soul-destroying for workers around the world.

Local communities around factories and plantations and power plants and mines and whatnot are also being polluted. Chemicals from industrial developments leach into the ground, air, and water, poisoning people, destroying crops and plants, and killing local fish and wildlife. This leads to many people dying from being poisoned or losing their livelihoods. People lose their access to clean water and air, to food, and to life.

And the environment is being harmed by industrial activities too. We are at the start of the worst biodiversity crisis the earth has ever faced. Ecosystems all around the world are collapsing, and will continue to collapse. Not to mention, the climate is warming and causing devastation for people the world over. All humans rely on a healthy climate and healthy ecosystems for fertile soil, clean water, safety from extreme weather, pest and disease control, and the list goes on. But it is the actions of industry, companies, and supply chains that are the biggest contributor to the climate and biodiversity crises.

And often, when people stand up for the air and water and land, when they stand up for their communities and/or their fellow workers, they are threatened, intimidated, or even killed.

The companies that are headquartered in Canada or sell their products in Canada are benefitting from and causing all these problems. Their supply chains are rife with human rights abuses and environmental abuses, and they do not take adequate measures to stop the many abuses in their supply chains. Because of this, Canada and all Canadians are guilty of destroying the world and uncountable lives.

But a better world is possible. Mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence Laws, or Mandatory Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Laws, or whatever you want to call them, would ensure that any companies that abuse the workers, local communities, and local environments tied to their supply chains are made to pay. Not just made to pay a fine, which companies don’t mind and only view as a cost of doing business, but actually made to face justice and jail time.

These laws are necessary in order to ensure that workers and other people are given the human rights and human dignity they deserve, and they are necessary in order to protect the world’s ecosystems so that future generations can live. Without due diligence laws, the situation will continue to get worse and worse. But with due diligence laws, we can see improvement.

Please enact Mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence Laws.

Thank you,

Send to:

Prime Minister Trudeau- justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca

Deputy Prime Minister Freeland- chrystia.freeland@parl.gc.ca

Minister of Foreign Affairs Joly- melanie.joly@parl.gc.ca

Find your MP here: https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en

Minister of Women and Gender Equality and Youth Ien- marci.ien@parl.gc.ca

Minister of Environment and Climate Change Guilbeault- Steven.Guilbeault@parl.gc.ca

Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Wilkinson- jonathan.wilkinson@parl.gc.ca

Minister of Export Promotion, International Trade, and Economic Development Ng- mary.ng@parl.gc.ca

Minister of International Development Hussen- ahmed.hussen@parl.gc.ca

Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry Champagne- francois-philippe.champagne@parl.gc.ca

Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard Lebouthillier- diane.lebouthillier@parl.gc.ca

[nando161mando]

Living up to its reputation I see

[enbycrip]

Been digging into things on Canadian/British, United States/British and South American/Spanish history recently and the notable thing that has come up on both - in all three cases, the European settlers were the ones actively engaging in genocide of the indigenous population. It was not the active policy of the European government.

In all three cases the European government actually passed protective legislation for the rights of indigenous subjects at the request of either indigenous people themselves travelling to Europe to make these representations, or not-entirely-awful Europeans passing on what was happening to them. They weren’t *incredible* protections in any of the three cases, but they at least recognised that indigenous people were *people* with actual basic rights. Like “not being automatically murdered or enslaved”.

But then European settlers went *batshit* at this legislation. The entire idea of “No Genocide” policies provoked enormous settler backlashes in all three cases. It was even a material, if not enormous, factor in why the US declared independence.

And the European governments in question just…rolled over. Made no real attempt to enforce this protective legislation. And it *certainly* was *not* why Britain sent in troops when the US declared independence. The Founding Fathers just viewed even the fact they had been *asked* to not murder indigenous people as an outrage.

None of this is to excuse European colonial states today of our responsibility to pay reparations and lobby for protections for indigenous people (and BIPOC in general) in our ex-colonial states. We’ve benefitted so much, especially on mass resource plundering, that reparations are a responsibility we cannot shirk.

(I just finished a biography of Charles Hapsburg and how he frittered away *massive* silver imports stolen from South America on European wars. That huge resource injection was pretty vital to the beginning of European international capitalism in the 16th-17th centuries. Before that, states just kept coming up against insufficient metals for currency, especially ones with the intermediate value of silver that let a critical mass of lower-level transactions happen.)

What it is, however, is an examination of the different ways states can be responsible for genocide, eugenics, and other crimes.

It does not need to be active policy for a state to be responsible. Even passing protective legislation doesn’t prevent a state’s responsibility if they don’t take measures to enforce that legislation, and, particularly, *if they give in to loud backlash from privileged parties who see it as an infringement of their privilege for people they are oppressing to be given some basic rights.*

I am not a proponent of “history repeats itself”. Context *always* matters, and every different situation has a different context. However, history itself provides an incredibly important and *necessary* context for situations we face now. And these facts are *incredibly* relevant to *many* situations we are currently facing.

[cupcakechemistsblog]

"On June 8, the New Brunswick government rolled back protections for trans students in public schools.

The announcement of the review of Policy 713 drew hundreds into the streets in defence of the policy. Days after the announcement of the review, more than 350 protesters rallied in front of the New Brunswick legislature in Fredericton in support of the policy.

The New Brunswick Union has already stepped up to condemn the revisions to the policy, and back its members who do choose not to implement the revisions. […] If all teachers and school staff refuse to apply the change, then the revision of Policy 713 will remain a dead letter. This would be a tremendous example of workers’ solidarity in the fight against oppression for all others to follow."

[citraforever]

useless eater

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Elected at the 15th annual convention in the Royal York Hotel, Toronto, were the above officers of the Canadian Daily Newspapers Association, Left to right, top-O. L. Spencer, (Calgary Herald), vice-president; W. J. J. Butler (The Toronto Mail and Empire), president; W. B. Preston (Brantford Expositor), chairman, special committee on agency relations. Middle row- F.L Ker (Hamilton Spectator), chairman, paper committee: T. N. Dwan (The Toronto Evening Telegram), chairman, advertising promotion committee: A. W. Robb (Halifax Herald), past president; William Wallace (The Toronto Star), treasurer. Bottom row - Victor Sifton (Leader-Post, Regina), chairman, circulation committee; T. F. Drummie (Telegraph-Journal, St. John, N.B.), chairman, advertising policy committee." - from the Kingston Whig-Standard. May 7, 1934. Page 7.

[janieunknownwriter]

p In this week’s show, Prof. Wolff discusses the massive strike of Canadian public employees; economics of the unemployed; business owners,executives and lawyers dominate US state legislatures; and how rising interest rates push the most vulnerable to the margins of US capitalism. In the second half of the show, Wolff interviews Anand Giridharadas on his new book, The Persuaders./p

[communistkenobi]

like even just speaking in my own context as a social science PhD student in a canadian university, graduate students are required to apply for federal grants for their funding. this includes a detailed proposal about what you plan to research. the federal government lists what research projects they are interested in funding each year, and it’s understood that you need to pitch your research in such a way that you are appealing to those research aims, including what kinds of questions you want to ask and what you’re hoping to contribute to your field. the language you use must speak to furthering Canadian interests. this is not a neutral process! How critical do you think academic scholarship can be when their funding depends on flattering the policy and research aims of a settler colonial capitalist state? and many, many academics are fine with this, there is no secret hoard of marxists in universities chained to the whims of Big Government or whatever, but like even using this one singular example you can see how maybe the shit they teach you in universities is concerned with speaking to funding agencies before there is any consideration for discovering, like, capital T Truth about the world. nothing you read is produced out of nowhere, and if you’re reading academic scholarship that means that there is a titanic amount of financial and administrative infrastructure that that knowledge is produced in. If you believe you go to university to learn the truth about the world, that university is a progressive institution because they teach marx to undergrads, then I’m sorry but you’ve bought into both the liberal myth that universities are primarily concerned with teaching the truth and the conservative myth that universities are SJW hellholes

[sparksinthenight]

This Canadian fossil fuels company intends to deprive tens of thousands of people of water. https://aboveground.ngo/canadian-support-to-reconafrica-lacks-transparency-and-regulation/

[nando161mando]

Panama explodes in protests against Canadian copper mine

[spider-xan]

tumblr crashed and ate my post again, and I don't feel like re-writing anything, but I was venting about how the overly utopic propaganda about Canada (specifically that we have actual universal healthcare) leads to Americans who can't mind their own business or not make everything about the US having the gall to jump into Canadian discussions about our crumbling health care systems due to capitalism (my province is literally in the process of transitioning to an American style healthcare system that will destroy and even kill so many vulnerable people bc of our right wing government is selling out public heath care to his rich friends) and lecture us about how we're ungrateful to complain when it's worse in the US, like, we fucking know, but what the fuck is, say, chronically ill people opting for death by euthanasia bc that's more dignified and less painful than starving to death while unhoused supposed to do with that lecture?

This is also obviously not a post in support of American right wingers who use Canada as an example of universal health care being evil, but holy shit, some nuance would be fucking nice if neither side will leave us alone.

[jcteamcapitals]

Revenue-based financing is less expensive than equity-based financing. For example, Angel investors and venture capitalists expect 10 to 20 times the amount of money in return.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Vice surrenders

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in LA with Adam Conover at Vroman's, then on MONDAY in Seattle with Neal Stephenson, then Portland, Phoenix and more!

Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership. RIP, we hardly knew ye.

For those of you who don't know, Vice was a Canadian media success story. It was founded by a motley clique of hipsters, one of whom – founder of the Proud Boys – has since grown to be one of the world's great fascism influencers. Another perfected the art of getting young people to work "for exposure" even as he built a massive, highly lucrative media empire on their free labor:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/vice-oral-history/

Eventually, Vice transitioned to a string of progressively worsening corporate owners, each more dishonest, predatory – and gullible – than the last. The company was one of the most enthusiastic marks for Facebook's infamous "pivot to video" – in which Mark Zuckerberg destroyed half the media industry by tricking them into thinking that the public was clamoring for video content, based on fraudulent viewing numbers:

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

Vice went all-in on video, spending hundreds of millions to finance Zuckerberg's doomed attempt to conquer Youtube. But unlike other the rubes who got zucked, Vice found greater fools to scam, convincing giant, slow-moving meidia companies that the best way to get in on the Next Big Thing was to shower them with vast sums of string-free money:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viceland_(Canadian_TV_channel)

And yet, at every turn, through a succession of increasingly incompetent owners who bought the stumbling, declining Vice at fire-sale prices and then proceeded to hack away at the wages and tools its journalists depended on while paying executives salaries so high that they beggared the imagination, Vice's reporters continued to turn out stellar material.

This went on literally until the last moment. The memorial posted by 404 Media rounds up a selection of major stories Vice's beleaguered, precarious writers produced even as Vice's vulture capitalist leadership were pulling the rug out from under them:

https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-vices-legacy-and-the-idea-that-the-internet-is-forever/

True to form, those private equity scumbags locked all those workers out of the company's CMS without notice – and then forgot to lock down the podcasting back-end. That allowed a group of Vice veterans – Matthew Gault, Emily Lipstein, Anna Merlan, Tim Marchman and Mack Lamoureux – to gather for a totally unauthorized, tell-all session that they pushed out on an official Vice channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKT4OtDEJRA

It's a hell of a listen. Not only do these Vice veterans have lots of fascinating history to recount, but they also describe the conditions under which those blockbuster stories of Vice's final days were produced. As the "visionary leaders" of the company paid themselves millions, they halted payments to key suppliers, from Lexisnexis to the interview transcription service the writers depended on. Writers paid out of pocket to search PACER court records.

Not only did Vice's reporters do incredible work under terrible and worsening circumstances, but the Vice writers who got out ahead of the total collapse are also doing incredible work. 404 Media is a writer-owned investigative news publisher founded by four Vice escapees – Samantha Cole, Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, which is both producing incredible work and sustaining the writers who founded it:

https://www.404media.co/

All of which leads to an inescapable conclusion: whatever problems Vice had, they didn't include "writers don't do productive work" and also didn't include "that work isn't economically viable*. Whatever problems Vice had, they weren't problems with Vice's workers – it was a problem with Vice's bosses.

Which makes Vice's final, ignominious punishment at the hands of those bosses even more brutal, stupid and inexcusable. According to the leaked memos emanating from the company's investors and their millionaire C-suite toadies, the business's new strategy is abandoning their website in order to publish on social media.

This is…I mean, this,..

This is…

Wow.

I mean, wow.

The thing is, the social media business model is a giant rug-pull. They're not even bothering to hide their playbook anymore. For social media, the game is to encourage media companies to become reliant on third parties to reach their audiences. Once that reliance is established, the companies turn down – or even halt – the ability of those media companies to reach their audience altogether. Then, they charge the media companies to reach their audiences:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

Now, this wasn't always quite so obvious. Back when Vice was falling for Facebook's "pivot to video," it wasn't completely obvious that the long con was to take your audience hostage and ransom them back to you. But deliberately organizing your business to be reliant on social media barons today? It's like trusting your money to Sam Bankman-Fried…in 2024.

If there was ever a moment when the obvious, catastrophic, imminent risk of trusting Big Tech intermediaries to sit between you and your customers or audience, it was now. This is not the moment to be "social first." This is the moment for POSSE (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere), a strategy that sees social media as a strategy for bringing readers to channels that you control:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now-we-are-two/#two-much-posse

Predicting that a social media platform will rug the media companies that depend on it today doesn't take a Sun Tzu – as cunning strategies go, the hamfisted tactics of FB, Twitter and Tiktok make gambits like "Lucy and the football" look like von Clausewitz.

The most bonkers part of this strategy is that it's coming from private equity bosses, who laud themselves as the great strategists of the 21st century, whose claim on so much of our global capital and resources is derived from their brilliant insight, which allows them to buy "distressed assets" like Vice, "restructure" them to find "efficiencies" and sell them on.

The reality is that PE goons – like other financiers – are basically herding animals. Everyone's hit on the tactic of buying up beloved media companies – from the 150-year-old Popular Science to modern publications like CNet – and then filling them with spammy garbage in the hopes that Google will fail to notice and continue to award them pride-of-place on search results pages:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

The fact that these billionaire brain-geniuses can't figure out how to "turn around" a site whose workers a) produce brilliant, popular, successful work; and b) depart to found successful firms that commercialize that work tells you everything about their ability to spot "a good business opportunity."

PE – like other mafiosi – only have one business-plan, the "bust out," where you invade a business that produces useful things, force them to pay your chosen suppliers sky-high fees for things they don't need, extract massive fees for your "management" and then walk away from the collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck