LIVING FOREVER?? YES!

Not really impossible! In my constant quest to be forward looking, I seem to have slipped a cog. I can see into the future, and whether or not that future includes me, doesn’t really matter. What will matter will matter only to my descendants? They will, I hope, say: “He was right. It turned out exactly as he predicted.” My father predicted that the properties he optioned, which was farmland at the time, in the north of Forest Hill Village, would become prime land. He was right. He didn’t live to see it, but along the way he made millionaires out of semi-literate Italian bricklayers whose descendants now people the Toronto haute-monde and are seen photographed at charity balls and high-toned fund raisers. Is that vindication enough? Perhaps.

I will continue to predict that unless the capitalist system undergoes a complete cleansing of conscience, it will continue to lose ground against the economies of less-than-democratic countries like China, where they dictate from above and make decisions which appear to benefit their people not their capital interests. O.K. Enough pie-in-the-sky.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the madness of Potash been taken over by the huge Australian mining company BHP. That company has a lot to gain by taking over Potash Corporation. They will dominate the fertilizer business. The government of Saskatchewan is having second thoughts. Meanwhile BHP promises to locate the head offi9ce in that province. Sure, just like U.S. Steel promised to continue business as usual at Stelco in Hamilton. The point I made in that earlier piece is that BHP was actually buying Potash Corporation with that company’s own money! The new company would have an enormous debt, but they could pledge the virtually unlimited resources of Potash against that debt. All I want to know is: in whose interest is all this takeover stuff? Does it benefit the public, who after all, finally, are the real owners of what lies beneath the ground in Saskatchewan? This is where the Chinese bid makes more sense, if you can make any sense of takeovers in the first place. China needs potash. Not only for profits, but to develop a more prosperous agriculture to feed its own people. I don’t see even a hint of this altruism in the BHP bid.

All this investment-world turmoil came bubbling up when I read a story about future takeovers. There is a wonderful tactic used by entrepreneurs. They start up a company and their first objective is to make that company attractive to its competition. So we have three new wireless pretenders in the market: Wind Mobile, Mobilicity, and PublicMobile. According to the orthodoxy of the market economy, competition is good for everyone. They like to call it "win-win." Prices go lower because there are more players competing in the market. What can possibly be wrong with that? Let me tell you what is wrong. First: because the competitive prices become predatory the big guys try to force the newcomers out of business. The result is that those new companies default on their debt, shareholders get burned, and the economy takes another hit. But in fact, the big guys don’t believe competition is good. Neither do the start-ups. What happen, and it almost always does, is that through “convergence” or other euphemisms for monopoly-building, the start-up gets exactly what it wanted: to be taken over at a price that puts profits in their pockets. No one is hurt. The big guys get bigger. The only downside there is that the takeover company now probably has an even bigger debt load and who pays for the cost of that debt load? Need I ask??

Instead of being the beneficiaries of the market system, we are the patsies. Far too much of the world of business cares nothing for its real stakeholders, the people it sells products and services to. You have all heard know, that “We have to grow the company for the benefit of the shareholders.”

Try not, as so many critics, to call me names. Labelling me “Socialist” does not answer my questions. What I am politically has nothing to do with pragmatic reality.

Today, America is being swept off its feet by jargon-flaunting nitwits using name-calling instead of educated opinion. (Hey – it’s happening in Toronto!) And it is that jargon that is going to determine who runs America (and Toronto) after November.

This prediction is my legacy. It is a twisted kind of immortality.