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Thursday, 20 November 2008 |
Suppose you give me a million dollars with the instructions, "Invest this profitably, and I'll pay you well." I'm a sharp dresser -- why not? So I go out onto the street and hand out stacks of bills to random passers-by. Ten thousand dollars each. In return, each scribbles out an IOU for $20,000, payable in five years. I come back to you and say, "Look at these IOUs! I have generated a 20% annual return on your investment." You are very pleased, and pay me an enormous commission.
Now I've got a big stack of IOUs, so I use these "assets" as collateral to borrow even more money, which I lend out to even more people, or sell them to others like myself who do the same. I also buy insurance to cover me in case the borrowers default -- and I pay for it with those self-same IOUs! Round and round it goes, each new loan becoming somebody's asset on which to borrow yet more money. We all rake in huge commissions and bonuses, as the total face value of all the assets we've created from that initial million dollars is now fifty times that.
Then one day, the first batch of IOUs comes due. But guess what? The person who scribbled his name on the IOU can't pay me back right now. In fact, lots of the borrowers can't. I try to hush this embarrassing fact up as long as possible, but pretty soon you get suspicious. You want your million dollars back -- in cash. I try to sell the IOUs and their derivatives that I hold, but everyone else is suspicious too, and no one buys them. The insurance company tries to cover my losses, but it can only do so by selling the IOUs I gave it!
So finally, the government steps in and buys the IOUs, bails out the insurance company and everyone else holding the IOUs and the derivatives stacked on them. Their total value is way more than a million dollars now. I and my fellow entrepreneurs retire with our lucre. Everyone else pays for it.
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Friday, 07 November 2008 |
By
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A 62-year-old blind widow who was married for 42 years is wondering
if marriage is meaningless after she lost her deceased husband's CPP
survivor's pension to another woman.
Audrey McKnight was 19, starry-eyed and in love when she
married her husband Marvin, her first boyfriend, in 1965. They raised
three children in the small town of Stettler, southeast of Edmonton,
where Audrey was employed at the weekly paper and Marvin worked at an
area gas plant.
In 1995, tragedy struck. Audrey began having eye problems and
was soon diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder that slowly destroyed
her eyesight over the next few years. The pain was so excruciating that
she eventually had both eyes removed.
Her disability put a huge strain on their marriage and the
tipping point came when Marvin went to a town reunion in Saskatchewan
in the summer of 2004 and met an old flame.
By December, he'd left Audrey for the Other Woman. "He knew I
was going blind and couldn't take it," says Audrey, who now lives in an
assisted living facility in a community north of Red Deer.
Then tragedy struck Marvin. He was diagnosed with cancer in July 2005 and his new companion moved in with him in the fall.
Eighteen months later, in March 2007, Marvin died and both his
common-law partner and Audrey applied for his CPP survivor's benefits.
The Other Woman won because, under the rules, she was the last person
to have lived with him in a conjugal relationship.
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Friday, 17 October 2008 |
... or something a little like that...
 Investigation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast released today
Don’t worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election.
According to an investigative report out today in Rolling Stone
magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long
investigation, reveal a systematic program of "GOP vote tampering" on a
massive scale.
- Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.
Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled
every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge -
ten times the average state's rate of removal.
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Wednesday, 15 October 2008 |
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By Kim Hutchison
From
Oct. 15-17 Farm Credit Canada’s (FCC) fifth annual “Drive Away Hunger”
tour will hit the streets of Alberta in an attempt to do what its title
suggests.
The tour began in 2004 when an FCC
employee in Ontario drove an open-cab tractor and trailer through the
Listowel area for eight days. Camping along the way, he collected food
and donations for local food banks. Since then, the tour has grown
bigger and better rolling through communities in Saskatchewan, New
Brunswick, Ontario, Prince Edward Island and Quebec and raising an
impressive total of nearly one million pounds of food.
This year the tour will be taking place in Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Alberta. The goal is to raise 100,000 pounds of food.
The
central leg of the tour will begin when one of two tractors and
trailers driven by FCC employees and supporters departs from the FCC
office in Red Deer at 10 a.m. It will then head at to the Ponoka Vold,
Jones, Vold Auction from 1:30-3:30 p.m. and Ponoka Agro from 4-4:30
p.m. before departing for various locations in Lacombe, Clive, Alix,
Stettler and Bashaw. The fundraiser will conclude when both tractors
and trailers meet at the Edgeworth Centre grounds in Camrose from
5-7:30 p.m. on Oct. 17.
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Heart of Alberta Content : Zionism is the probl... (0) by hermetic - March 19, 2009, 12:31:05 PM
General Discussion : Somebody Better Tell... (2) by Uncle Raoul - March 18, 2009, 04:40:07 PM
