Ungrateful employer

I am so sick and tired of articles and letters that go on and on about the extravagant pensions of public workers, because it is just not true. 
Having taken a medical severance in 1999 due to a severe case of Fibromyalgia, shortly  after 2001 my meagre public employee medical severance pension has steadily been chopped all the way from, free medical and dental till I died, after 2001 everything changed when the great deceiver was elected and everything I was promised has slowly been taken away, every year promised benefits have been cut and deductibles increased, as well as all costs increased. 
This year I have been hit with a further $768.00 dollars for MSP which is a lot when your whole pension is less than $300.00 dollars a month, the public pension plan used to pay that now it doesn’t and the benefits of our health care plan are now an unbelievable $500.00 a year, well excuse me but I have Fibromyalgia and that does not get me through January and now the income tax will not even let me write off my medical expenses. 

What I get for that money is I have been waiting a year for a hernia operation and what I have been told it will be closer to two years before I get it or I end up in emergency whatever comes first, anyone like to guess which will cost more money.

So stop with the public service pension bashing we now have a worse plan than pretty well anybody, so is everybody happy now except probably us retired public employees who apparently worked for a thankless lying employer.

I signed a medical severance pension contract in good faith and now have a document that is not worth the paper it is written on. 

Government employees you are working for people that literally hate you, you know where all the skeletons are buried please help us get rid of this government that only cares about themselves and their rich friends.

PS I waited 76 weeks for the hernia operation.

Wakeup Call

Just when I think the pendulum has swung to the right as far as it can go I am amazed to see us move yet further to the right, this is an obvious truth, now with the American Patriot act and all the other draconian legislation passed since then, America has literally become a Fascist country and because all these repressive American laws supersede Canada’s national laws now thanks to Her Harper we have become just a sorry reflection of big brother America. 
Europe and the rest of the world seems to finally be trying to reverse this shift to the extreme right, but North America in particular fights this trend back to the centre with all the resources the one percent can throw at it. 

Is anyone seriously going to try to make the argument that it was social programs or social safety nets that has brought the world to the edge of financial ruin. I have puzzled about this phenomena for years for example America is actually in worse financial shape than Greece, Greece per-capita debt $47,664 America $49,000 and what does America do but go yet further to the right, even to the extent of a man who is essentially a junk bond profiteer running for President. When things get bad the answer for Americans always seems to be, move further to the right and then wonder why things do not get better, then of course just move further to the right yet again. 

Federally Canada has a government that continues to rule with all the worse polices of George W. Bush.

In Canada provincially we have the same phenomena where in Alberta we just watched a pitched battle between the right and the ultra-right, Redford head of the wild rose party commented that Albertans have been evolving over the last decade, and she is right they are apparently evolving into Ferengi. 

It occurs to me that when the west won the cold war over the east, America was at the height of it’s power and also in the centre of the political spectrum compared to where it is now.

It is worth noting that if you go far enough right you eventually end up left, and pass through Fascism along the way to your unintended goal. 

Canada's sharp turn to the right away from our traditional values such as democratic peace keepers, thoughtful stewards of the environment, and a respected world leader and the fact that Canada is becoming an obvious right wing dictatorship, is to me and many other Canadians the wrong direction for the Canadian people our civil rights and liberties, democracy, the environment of Canada and the world as a whole and all it’s inhabitants.

Time for Canadians to stand up and be counted, while we still have a country left.

Franken Foods

Mr. Emberly thank you for your well researched, informative articles on genetically modifyed foods, some people reading them will undoubtedly call it bombastic paranoia or some similar drivel, but the reality is even more sinister than pictured and in my opinion is easily one of the most immediate clear and present dangers that humans face at this time. 

If you google just one name from Mr. Emberly’s article Monsanto you will find it reads like a James Bond film complete with giant evil corporations trying to control and corrupt the worlds food supply, completely oblivious to the consequences of their actions on the very earth we grow our food and the effects that has on our food supply and ultimately the people that consume it. The consequences are many innocent deaths and sick, including 125,000 Indian farmers that have committed suicide by swallowing Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide because Monsanto went around India buying up all the traditional seeds and burning them forcing the farmers to buy Monsanto's GM seed's and as a result farmers have been consumed in debt and bankruptcy.
Canadian scientist's were bribed with one and two million dollars each, threats, intimidation, fraud, abuse of the legal and justice system, buying whole governments such as America, India, in Indonesia at least 140 government officials were bribed. 

Monsanto is responsible for 56 super-site highly polluted areas including the worse super-site in America, Anniston Alabama that they had to pay out $700 million in restitution. 

These products or unreasonable food facsimiles are all the way from literally poisons to non to low nutrient fill, empty calories at best, poison at worst.

This is a company that uses the most heavy handed predatory business practices imaginable and states that "our job is not to make sure products are safe but to sell product, it is the FDAs job to make sure the product is safe”, which is very scary when the FDA and many politicians are in your pocket. 

The simple fact is that “YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT" and just because it looks like a potato or a steak or a glass of milk doesn’t mean it will supply your body with the proper nutrients to sustain or grow a healthy body, or not give you some strange new disease or make you sterile, 30 percent of the people that consume GM foods will have an allergic reaction to one degree or another, 30 percent of cattle fed GM feed become sterile. 

Quote from George Wald, Nobel Laureate in Medicine. He said for genetic engineering - "The results will be essentially new organisms, self-perpetuating and hence permanent, once created, they cannot be recalled" and "Up to now, living organisms have evolved very slowly and new forms have had plenty of time to settle in. Now whole proteins will be transposed overnight into A wholly new associations, with consequences no one can foretell, either for the host organism, or their neighbours” unquote.
Powerful words worth pondering.

Thank god that Europe has had the sense to stay away from this biological nightmare, to bad we can’t say the same about Canada. 

$$Magic Money$$

I find my eyeballs spinning at times when trying to talk or understand the economic theories of the RIGHT out to lunch. I tried to have a rational dialog with a man that votes Conservative the other day and he keeps bringing up Greece about how socialism ruined Greece and how screwed they are but when I pointed out that his champion America actually has a bigger debt per capita than Greece he informed me that that didn't matter because America can just print more money and Greece can't, so to him it is problem solved, end of story. Then I am watching Bill Maher and they are having a discussion about the inequity of the rich and the other 99 percent, talking about the 99 percent getting their share of the pie, the champion of the one percent informed them there was no pie the money supply is infinate. The right does not seem to even grasp the nature or value of mediums of exchange (money) it is magic mystical like some Genie just waves his magic wand and legal tender just appears out of thin air. Is it any wonder the banks, money markets, stock markets are in the sad state they are at this time in history. I remember hearing one of the architects of the banking collapse talk about it and he made the statement that it was like trading air they didn't even see it as money, they lost sight of the fact that they were playing games with peoples pensions, life savings lively hoods, homes, businesses,and their stupid games inevitably cost the American people 40 percent of their assets.

The really sad part is they are still playing the same games with their depositors money Morgan Stanley just stole another 5 billion dollars of their clients money, absolutely nothing has changed, they have not even learned a thing and no one is making them change with  strict legislation.
In my opinion they should all be doing hard time and have everything they own including all their offshore accounts put towards paying back the people whose money they stole.

Wild Ride

Every once in a while you have to stir up your blood, in other words do something crazy so you don’t have to pinch yourself to see whether you are really alive or this world is just one big dream. The other day I decided to do just that, do something I have been wanting to do for 50 years, so I phoned up Pacific skydiving and made an appointment to cross another wish off my bucket list. 

The common wisdom is that it is crazy to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft, but I am here to tell you that is just wrong, it’s totally awesome. I have done a few awesome things in my life but doing a one minute free-fall is beyond most anything I have experienced. I can’t describe the moment you leave that aircraft and you plummet to the earth at 200 KM an hour and then your parachute opens and you glide and soar in an unbelievable 6 minute drop to earth that is easily the most intense, exhilarating experience ever. It is an experience my son and I will never forget, everything about it was first class from our jump masters Sam and Shawn to the unparalleled beauty of our super natural BC that when you jump out that airplane door looks more like an awesome abstract painting until you finally get close enough to earth that the water becomes water, green becomes trees and the little specks become people. It truly is indescribable and should be on every persons bucket list, if for no other reason than to see the incredible beauty that we are lucky enough to call home. 

Unfortunately my perfect day turned out to have a political side also, Pacific skydiving a well run company that has been providing excellent service to the people of Pitt Meadow and Greater Vancouver for 23 years are being shut down by the Pitt Meadow airport authority. Because of that senseless action not only will 28 people lose good jobs but also many support workers that work with and supply this vibrant company will also be put in jeopardy, not to mention putting a hole in Pitt Meadows commercial tax base. 

This is the kind of thoughtless actions that angers me, governments are so willing to bend for the big corporations but here a successful small but labour intensive company like Pacific Skydiving is just shut down over a couple acres of grass and a proposed runway expansion, apparently there will be jet planes flying over some very expensive real-estate, homes that have been there forever, this is inevitably a political shit-storm, this defiantly seems to me to be an issue that should be of concern not only to the Pitt Meadows council but the taxpayers of Pitt Meadows as well. I have to wonder even if the runway is extended why the two enterprises can't co-exist. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

Time for a DO-OVER

Here is what listening to the failed economic policies of the trickle down pie in the sky rhetoric of the one percent has gotten us. America, Canada and most European economys are in crisis and the working man and middle class are fighting for their financial lives, most barely able to keep their heads above water. 

The power elite have convinced the majority that the only way we can stave off a depression and global catastrophe was to bail out the banking and wall street criminals that have brought the whole world to it’s knees, and not only let them keep all the money they stole but reward themselves even further with public funds, while forcing tens of millions out of their homes, losing millions of jobs, all in all managing to wipe out 40 percent of ordinary Americans assets, and causing the failure of untold small businesses to boot. So much for conventional financial wisdom. In other words carry on as usual.

It seems Iceland had a novel idea contrary to popular practice, they charged the Prime Minister and all the CEOs of the big banks with over two hundred separate criminal offences, and put them in jail. They even went further away from conventional wisdom and instead of punishing the homeowners that suffered from these criminal actions, instead they forgave any debt over 110 percent of the value of a home mortgage debt. About now you are probably thinking how stupid can they be you can’t do that and get away with it, well you would be wrong not only has it worked but after the total economic collapse in Iceland in 2008, 2009 needless to say was a disaster with a 6.7 decrease in growth but in a very short time 2010 they had a 2.9 percent increase and 2011 2.4 increase and are now one of the healthiest countrys economically in the world, I know now you are going to say Ya but it is just a small country it wouldn’t work here, but the truth is they had a much higher debt per capita than America or Greece. 

The final inevitable argument as always when someone else has a system or idea different or should I say better than America, oh that is just an anomaly it would never work here, no I guess as long as rewarding criminals and hanging on to failed tired old economic theories and the bought and paid for politicians that perpetuate these failed polices, we are doomed to relive the inevitable booms and crashes, and the middle class and workers of the world will pay the price as always. 

Fitch Ratings had this to say about Iceland “ Unorthodox crisis policy response has succeeded.

 “Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” ― Albert Einstein

You have to be Kidding

Re: Letters don’t enhance eco-system The times July 10/2012

Just keeps getting stranger and stranger, Mr. Kamp claims that if Mr. Lawrence MacAulay wants to change environmental policy he stop writting letters and instead should partner with Harper and the rest of the clones and just do what Da Fuhrer dictates. This could even be amusing if the Canadian people had not just witnessed the undemocratic farce they call the debate over C-38 where even the Conservatives that questioned the bill voted 100 percent for the bill and likewise against a single one of the hundreds of amendments proposed by the opposition. 

Harper and cohorts do not listen to scientists, parties with special knowledge such as ex-fisherys ministers, thousands of Canadians protesting all over this country including the scientists unprecedented march in the "Death of Evidence" protest yesterday, threatening and slandering environmental experts and other environmental groups and activists even going to the extent of labelling them radicals and terrorists. 

Mr. Kamp claims that the so called budget received a significant amount of scrutiny and debate, excuse me don’t both those words mean critical observation, compromise and revision based on that observation. I have to wonder if in that month Mr. Kamp also had time to scrutinize and debate the 70 other laws that this all in one corporate wish list affects. Isn’t it a little like putting the cart before the horse to launch consultations to receive 

feedback on your new, old approach to fisheries protection, I can only imagine who you are consulting with Mr. Kamp, Enbridge, Cermag group and of course how can you have a good consolation without KinderMorgan. 

“The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity” Quote Tennessee Williams

It is no surprise to me that Cons do not respect scientific facts as many of them believe the world is 6000 years old and Jesus rode around on dinosaurs, so much for science. 

Just as John Diefenbaker destroyed Canada’s Avro Arrow the most advanced fighter aircraft in the world at the time and by doing so set the Canadian aerospace industry back decades, Harper is doing the same thing to all of Canadian science at a time when we should be putting even more money into scientific research and development, to be the first to find the scientific break throughs of the future that hold the promise to bring Canada and the rest of the world out of this financial downward spiral.  

Harper has shown the Canadian people what happens when you put the Fox in charge of the henhouse.