Monday, April 20, 2009

Just like the thirties

Recessions are depressing and the depression has finally gotten to me

I know some old soul or some astute young turk will come along and tell me don’t worry, Willy, it’s not the end of the world. Recessions do not last forever, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. Hell, we’ve all been through these before.

Of course we have and each time, the way we do business, the way we make a living, and the resulting way we are forced, coerced or resign to living our lives, changes.

To our governments, the power brokers, or those that dabble in the lives of workers as investments, recessions are considered to be part of the normal business cycle, a sort of cleansing, you could say, an opportunity for the economy to retool, implement new technologies, restructure or realign the work force.

Unfortunately being a worker that has gone through three of these opportunities and whose role far too often was to perform those restructures and implement those new technologies, it starts to take a toll on you.

The ramifications of the current recession on the last remnants of the manufacturing unions is devastating. I’ve lived my life on the service side of the supply chain, sales, marketing, operations, continually changing what I used to call careers but in truth just adjusting to the latest reality by switching jobs.

As much as I could never accept working in one place for thirty or so years on the sole premise of attaining a planned retirement, I cannot imagine the disillusionment the retired autoworkers who could now loose their retirement incomes, must be feeling. Imagine standing in one spot, doing the same tedious thing for thirty years constantly looking forward to the day you could retire and now that you are finally there, it gets taken away from you. It would be like your whole life was a waste.

The now government assisted destruction of the auto unions will be followed the breakup of the remaining bastions of Canadian unionism, the railroad unions have almost been eliminated through planned attrition, now with the autoworkers about to fall, it will only take another decade before the powerful teachers and public service unions disappear.

However my empathy for the unionists is just that, an empathetic thought, not so much that the union movement has failed, Willy was never a unionist, but more for the personal shock and feeling of failure now being felt by individuals who have lived their lives in naivety.

Willy after all has always been a salesman, living by his own wits and guile, where you not only accepted failure, you were taught to embrace it. You ever heard of the overcoat close. If you make a call and you totally blow it, misreading the buyers intent, bringing up the wrong references and associations, almost and in some cases including getting thrown out of the office, here’s what you do.

Walk to the elevator, stand in the hall, possibly have a quick smoke, then turn around and walk back in. Get back in front of the client with your overcoat on and bag in hand and say. Excuse me Mr or Miss X, I know that I have totally blown the opportunity for our two companies to work together, but I do have a great deal of respect for you and your experience and was hoping that I could ask to help me by explaining what I did wrong at this meeting. After all this is how I am trying to make my living. You might not walk out of the office that day with an order (well you would if you were good) but you will certainly get the opportunity to try for one again.

You don’t get as dramatic a result with an email and that is about as exciting as it gets these days for Willy. It seems that the more technology we apply to the sales process the further we move from actually doing sales. Sales has become order fulfillment. Resources are now spent driving traffic to a web site. Success is measured by traffic counts and the most creative sales strategies being applied consist of controlling and directing the second click. As for Willy he has been moved to the after sales support, dealing day in, day out with both the buyers and his own remorse.

Willy thought he was different, than those workers who gave up their dreams to stand in one spot for thirty years. Willy was a mover and shaker who followed his dreams and always reached for the brass wing, but now in the end he has been replaced by bits and bytes, also questioning the choices he made.

This last year with 585 posts, 18,400 page views and the opportunity to have his rants, recommended by bloggers whom he truly respected, has unfortunately been nothing more than a brief reprieve. Similar to his name sake, the time has come for Willy to end it.

In the end Just Another Willy Loman.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Waking up Canadian




New ad from immigration Canada.

Possibly part of the new branding message from team Harper:D

JAWL

Friday, April 17, 2009

It is racism straight up.


This is the video of Janeane Garofalo on Olbermann calling the tea baggers racists>

Let’s be very honest about what this is about, Garofalo began. It’s not about bashing Democrats. It’s not about taxes. … This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. It is nothing but a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks and there is no way around that.

Good for her, it is racism straight up.


JAWL


From Raw Story here.

Steve is off to meet commies and socialists

Harper gave his views on the upcoming Summit of the Americas meeting in Trinidad in an exclusive Canwest interview. Possibly a personal attempt on his part to increase the listenership and readership of the beleaguered conservative broadcaster and publisher.

From the report of the interview here, it sounds like Steve is quite excited about coming face to face with Venezuela's socialist leader Hugo Chavez and Boliva's Evo Morales or as the Post claims two of the strongest left-wing political leaders Harper has ever encountered on the international stage, I guess Harper and the Post think China, Saudi Arabia, Putin’s Russia are flourishing democracies.

Harper and the Post are positioning our prime ministers role at the Summit as the defender of the North American free enterprise system.

Mr. Harper noted he is prepared to hear plenty of rhetoric at the summit about how the global financial crisis has discredited the free-market economic system.

But he said Canada, which he said shares none of the blame for the current global downturn, is a shining example of well regulated capitalism, with social safety nets, stable open markets, coupled with well-run regulatory systems that can prevent fraud.

Of course to most Canadian progressives and socialists this just Harper continuing to take credit for the financial infrastructure of former Liberal governments, combined with the social security net forced upon them by the NDP.

The Post then continues quoting Harper in what I assume is a shot at Chavez, but what could be considered the most ironic statement made by Harper, in the last three years. Ironic and possibly Freudian in nature.

What the last 10 years and various financial crises show is it's our kind of model that will succeed, Mr. Harper said. There's nothing out here that says that running an authoritarian state on petro dollars is not going to get you very far.

For a government that has focussed solely on the oil industry and the protection of the tar sands, delaying environmental protection, redefining immigration to provide temporary workers specifically for that industry, basically turning our environmental ministry into a shill for the Alberta oil industry, while at the same time cutting back on access to freedom of information, reducing funding to women’s support groups, the arts, science and research, not to mention the obstruction of parliamentary committees and our democratic process in general, this sounds absolutely ludicrous.

To this struggling and despondent socialist, Harper's main objective has always been to turn Canada into an authoritarian state backed by petro dollars and if wasn’t for the inherent corruption and final collapse of the US neoconservative version of free enterprise he would have already succeeded.



JAWL

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Tax Day in the USA

Today is tax day in the US when all good tax paying citizens file their tax returns. There is lot of noise coming from the Fox News Tea Bag crowd (GOP holdouts, former neocons, racists and the like) about a yet unverified number of Tea Bagging Parties happening across America.



It is also a day where more economists are joining Krugman in questioning the wisdom and in some cases the honesty of Obamas bail out plan for the banks. However the best critique I have, at least today, since it is written in plain english and I can understand it, is from Zach Carter at Mother Jones.

Carter explains how under Treasury Secretary Geithners plan, the US banks are being granted carte blanche to claim their assets are worth more than they really are worth. A sort of trust me accounting principle. Then as part of the federally funded buyout to bring stability back to the financial systems, the banks can sell those assets at the inflated prices.

The alternative according to Carter and Krugman is to allow the federal regulators to do their job, move in and set the true value for these assets. Then under current US law if there are not enough assets to cover the liabilities, place the bank into receivership, wiping out the shareholders and firing the executives in charge. Federal funds then back the shortfall in assets, protecting deposits and either turn the operation around or sell off assets, merging the remains with more other stable institutions.

This is what happened back in the 1980s when the US banking regulations were changed and last summer when federal regulators seized mortgage lender IndyMac. Although it is tough ride for the remaining shareholders, it is the most prudent action to take, both saving the US tax payer billions of dollars that would be wasted on the purchase of overpriced assets and reestablishing enforceable regulations into an industry that has truly run amok.

Instead as Carter sums up the Fed is propping up bankers who cooked their books to support a gambling binge that they still refuse to admit they lost.

Certainly something to consider on tax day.


JAWL

Embracing multiculturalism, a Canadian value

Although he has not brought forth any changes to our immigration laws yet, our immigration minister Jason Kenny is out stumping across the country testing the waters for his plans to reform our immigration and citizenship rules.

Where his predecessor brought in new immigration rules to bypass the queue if the immigrant had a value to the Canadian economy, be it low skilled temporary workers to fill vacant service industry jobs in Fort McMurray or highly trained professionals that could fill a shortage of engineers and the like, Jason is more concerned with the assimilation of immigrants into our Canadian culture.

With his first proposal immigrants must be fluent in English or French, which is not necessarily an insurmountable requirement depending upon the definition of fluent, Jason is now proposing that people becoming Canadian citizens have a full appreciation of the country's values.

We want to make sure that when people become Canadians, they totally understand that Canadian history becomes their history, Canadian values become their values," Mr. Kenney, MP for Calgary Southeast, told reporters.

Of course defining those values might be a bit of a problem.

Values are considered subjective, vary across people and cultures and are in many ways aligned with belief and belief systems. Types of values include ethical or moral values, doctrinal or ideological (political, religious) values, social values, and aesthetic values.

Although this makes great fodder for the Reform wing of the conservative party. Strange looking immigrants taking Canadian jobs was the Reforms biggest success in Ontario.

Canada is a multicultural country. It is one of our values. Our immigration and citizenship rules should embrace other cultures it makes us a richer society.

However for citizenship purposes under our present government it might be wiser for new Canadians to claim that they want to live in a country where they can get a job, raise their family, possibly sign their kids up for hockey, let them get an education, grow old, retire, play with their grand kids and die.

Of course that was probably their intent, in the first place.


JAWL

Monday, April 13, 2009

Thank you for your opinion Preston, now go away

In a Globe and Mail Opinion piece, this morning, Preston Manning is urging Ontario to lead the way by introducing two tier health care.

He must be loosing his patience with Harper for not making healthcare reform part of an economic recovery program and decided to jump in himself and run one up the flag pole, test the waters, get the ball rolling, so to speak.

Either that or he just a fucking idiot that can't get over the fact that universal healthcare works and that it is free enterprise that is now broken.

JAWL


h/t Buckdog here.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Teabagging M4M





With the help of powerfully talented Rachel Maddow I am trying to get my site visits up on a slow Sunday, by attracting either more right wing republicans or those interested in gay porn. Wait maybe that is the same group.

Definitions: Teabagging and M4M

JAWL

You cant tell a book by its cover




Worth a watch especially on a slow Sunday. More on Susan Boyle here.

JAWL

Video might get pulled down soon.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

The Chocolate Bunny test


From bewarethecheese.com

You really think you know yourself... Well I doubt that very much. For years people have been searching for a way to look inside and see the inner person. Well search no longer, bellow is the perfect test for you to look at yourself in a whole new light. go here and simply click on the part of the bunny that you would eat first, to try again hit the back button. Live, learn, but most importantly, eat chocolate.

Happy chocolate bunny day.

JAWL

Friday, April 10, 2009

Mulroney owes conservatives 35 dollars


The Harper conservative party will absolutely continue to accept former progressive conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney as a member, provided that he ponies up the $35 for a five-year membership card.


This confirmation by the Harper conservative party president Don Plett came about after intervention by Harpers defense minister Peter MacKay. A staunch supporter and personal, friend of the former prime minister, MacKay thought Mulroney should be granted a lifetime membership, similar to the ones issued by the former progressive conservative party.

Unfortunately he did not offer to pay the thirty-five bucks on Mulroney’s behalf or state whether he would renew his own membership in the future.

Maybe we need to get a fund started to keep Mulroney an active member of Harpers conservatives.


JAWL


Reference: CBC here

No need to verify the nonexistence of the nonexistent


The CIA announced this week that they are no longer operating the secret prisons that they never had and will be decommissioning the remaining sites that were run under third party contracts which of course they also didn’t use.

No list of sites, identity of prisoners held, or related number of deaths was provided. Nor whether the prison population will be released or continue to be retained, by the now independently run torture chambers.

Apparently no verification process seems necessary since it is impossible to verify something that never existed, no longer exists.

JAWL


Reference: RAW STORY

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Funeral - English



This is quite touching.

Funeral is a new TV commerical launched by the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) in Singapore which looks at relationships in a different light, through a woman at her husband's funeral.

Ultimately, the TVC celebrates the beautiful imperfections that make a relationship perfect. This is fresh off MCYS latest Viewers' Choice 2008 win for last year's Family TVC which promotes the importance and value of family bonding.


JAWL

Monday, April 6, 2009

Keeping the unemployed entertained



I am starting to feel like Number Six, trapped on island where my days are filled by government run festivals designed to prevent me from uncovering their hidden ideology.

For some reason or another the Harper government continues to believe that refurbishing hockey arenas and investing in festivals is the best use of our infrastructure dollars.

Today the government announced another $100 million for festivals across the country. They believe money invested in these events will help tourism, maintaining the current number of visits to Canada.

Although the various festivals are obviously happy for the additional funding, it is rather questionable how many tourists be they Americans or Canadians will travel to another city to attend these events. We are talking about close 10% unemployment in both countries, but hey who knows, maybe the conservatives believe that the unemployed will have a lot more free time on the hands and festivals will keep them busy.

If the conservatives really wanted to get a bang for the buck they could take the advice of the CCPA report today and increase cash transfers directly to Canadians that need it, through child benefit programs, or higher employment benefits. It would be a faster and more effective way of spurring economic activity than hoping that we have the extra cash on hand to go to a local festival.



JAWL

Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss

Big lessons to be learned in America today.

As the majority of Americans, through either fear or ignorance, sat back during the Bush years and either quietly or patriotically accepted the loss of their personal freedoms, they were warned by the ranting few that the losses could be permanent. Personal freedoms cannot be placed on hold. Once surrendered they are at risk of being permanently lost.

Today Obama, invoked the state secrets act to prevent a court from reviewing the legality of the National Security Agency's warrant-less wiretapping program,

A San Fransisco court is trying to review documents relating to the NSA program that was expanded by the Bush Administration to include wiretapping of telephone conversations between US citizens. The case is following up on allegations made by a former AT&T employee, Mark Klein.

He revealed that AT&T allowed the agency to install network monitoring hardware to spy on American citizens. Public reports have also implicated that Verizon, MCI and Sprint also participated in the US government's eavesdropping efforts.


Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties. Unfortunately the new boss is the same as the old boss.

In Canada our telephone calls are probably not being routed through central servers and run through a database looking for key words and phrases, but like the Americans had with the Bush administration we certainly have a government that would try it if they could get away with it.

In Canada the governing party cannot yet make new laws without a majority of parliament approving them, but they can certainly get away with ignoring the existing laws of land, be it Kyoto, the gun registry, access to information, ordering the arrest of citizens in a foreign land, or any other issue that fits their current ideology.

Unfortunately like the Americans our next Canadian government, the one we will eventually elect to replace our current ideologues, will not necessarily roll back changes, or necessarily act any different in respect to the existing laws, regardless of what they now say in opposition.

Let enough of these changes to how we are governed go through and eventually we won't recognize where we are living, as I am sure many Americans are wondering today. So pay attention and be concerned when some blogger goes on a rant about some seemingly irrelevant policy change that our government is putting forth or some story he has pulled from the press.

Like this minor rant for instance.


JAWL


Reference: RawStory.com

Saturday, April 4, 2009

The hardest blues in the world to play



The first CD I ever bought was Muddy Waters Greatest Hits. It wasn’t because I was a great blues fan, (I wasn’t reading pogge back then), I had bought my first car with a CD player, and my kids said I should start buying CDs. The cheapest one I could find with the most songs on it was Muddy Waters Greatest hits. For the next six months or so I listened to Muddy Waters every day. Not a bad way to start on the blues.

Muddy Waters was born in the Mississippi Delta on April 4, 1915. When Muddy was in his teens the Delta blues was dominated by Son House then in his early thirties and Robert Johnston in his early twenties. The story goes that Son House taught Robert Johnson to play the guitar or as House said, just a couple notes. If it is true that the music gets passed down then Muddy Waters learned from both of them. He had the voice of House and the guitar styling of Johnson.

It wasn’t until age 25 that he made his first trip to Chicago, playing with the Silas Green Minstrel Show. After that short stint he returned to the Delta where he opened a juke joint, where he might have remained playing every night if not for Alan Lomax and Library of Congress. Lomax made two recording sessions with Muddy. It must of been like the American Idol for bluesmen at the time. It was the first time that Muddy heard his own voice and he thought hey I can do it.

Two years later he moved to Chicago to become a part time professional musician. It was another two years before he got first electric guitar and his first recording contract with the precursor to Chess records. Now in his thirties the Muddy Waters band along with the Howlin Wolf band dominated the Chicago blues scene of the fifties. Their bands consisted of the best blues musicians of the era and spawned many solo careers.

Although his career waned in the sixties along with every other black man that played the blues, he had somewhat of a revival in the seventies, partly kindled by his performance at and in the Last Waltz, but primarily with the help of Johnny Winter who got Waters signed by his recording company. The two toured together on and off through the seventies, with Waters working until the year before his death in 1983 at the age of 68.

Waters is considered as the Father of Chicago Blues and is ranked as the 17th greatest artist of all time by Rolling Stone and today he would be 94.

The first video is from 1966 and this one is from the seventies, the band consists of Waters on vocal/guitar, Bob Margolin on Guitar, Willie "Big Eyes" Smith on drums, Jerry Portnoy on Harmonica and Luther "guitar" Johnson on guitar.




JAWL

PS: I could never understand why Muddy Waters brought his own guitar player Bob Margolin to the Last Waltz. The Band was backing up everybody that day.

However in referencing this post Waters is quoted, commenting on the use of other musicians to play his blues. In describing top British musicians in the 70s that he recorded with, he said, These boys are top musicians, they can play with me, put the book before 'em and play it, you know. But that ain't what I need to sell my people, it ain't the Muddy Waters sound. An' if you change my sound, then you gonna change the whole man.

The Muddy Waters sound is described as Delta Blues Electrified, but his use of something called microtones or in other words music which contains intervals smaller than the conventional contemporary tones (the short pause) makes his sound distinctive and is apparently very difficult to play. Or as he told Rolling Stone magazine, When I plays onstage with my band, I have to get in there with my guitar and try to bring the sound down to me. But no sooner than I quit playing, it goes back to another, different sound. My blues look so simple, so easy to do, but it's not. They say my blues is the hardest blues in the world to play.

Don't know if that is the reason, maybe Rpbbie Robertson or Bob Margolin will anonymously leave a comment. Stranger things have happened in the past.

Frank Zappas, Lundens Cough Drop Commercial



In 1967 Frank Zappa was hired for $2,000 to do a sound track for this animated TV commercial. It won a CLIO award for best use of sound.

JAWL:

Jason Kenny our minister integration and misguided values



If our initial two solitudes, taught us anything, it was that our acceptance of our diversity of culture, ethnicity, customs and language is what has made us Canadian. Something our minister of immigration and multiculturalism has somehow forgotten or possibly never knew.

Jason Kenny is continuing to push his insulting rhetoric about the purification of our immigration process with the recommendation that immigrants not only be able to fluently communicate in English or French, but that our existing ethic communities need to further embrace Canadian values.

Kenny believes that Canadians should not be naive about the very real dangers of radicalization, of extremism. He is concerned some communities are not actively integrating with mainstream society. He is pushing an integration agenda.

Kenny then adds that there are people who come to Canada or are born in Canada that have very illiberal views, who believe that their religious dogma or their ethnic grievance justifies violence.


Unfortunately for most us, regardless of our ethnic heritage, the same could somewhat be said for our existing government, whose own ideological dogma threatens to destroy the truly Canadian values that not only founded our country but made us uniquely in the world, Canadian.



JAWL

Friday, April 3, 2009

We are Abousfian Abdelrazik

...and our government has been duplicitous in having us arrested and tortured. Our government has lied, broken promises and now rebranded us a terrorist threat, in a nefarious effort to hide their duplicity in our torture. We are Canadian citizens.


JAWL

World leaders arrive for NATO meetings



French president Sarkozy rolled out all the pomp possible, with a red carpet arrival for US president Obama, with full military honors from a company of soldiers at the majestic 18th-century Rohan Palace, once home to the bishops of Alsac. The visit will be much watched, especially for the encounter between their wives, Carla and Michelle, who were to share a sumptuous lunch prepared by a two-star chef while the presidents met.

Obama will use a U.S.-style town hall meeting with French and German youths in Strasbourg later today to appeal directly to the European public for support for the Afghan mission after which Obama will be heading to Germany to meet with Chancellor Merkel who is co-hosting the 60th NATO meeting with Sarkozy. .

Canada’s prime minister will arrive later in the day and would, I expect be given an agenda of when the official photo opportunities will take place and a map showing where the various facilities are located.



JAWL

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Yo Harper you finished in there yet




The traditional photo of the G20 leaders will be reshot after Prime Minister Stephen Harper missed his opportunity Thursday to be in the first snap.

The BBC is reporting that Harper was in the bathroom while the photo was being taken. The other leaders initially waited for Harper but then went ahead with the photo without him.

In a sincere effort to assist the prime minister and possibly save time at these very important G20 meetings (after all the world is falling a part) I have taken the liberty of photoshopping the prime minister in next to the German Chancellor where he was originally scheduled to stand, using one of his more popular images from the web.

There everyone back to work.



JAWL

Reference CBC here.