Motley Moose – Archive

Global stocks fell sharply last week on news of increasing inflation which will limit the Federal Reserves ability to continue cutting interest rates. On Tuesday the Dow Jones Industrials tumbled 294 points following the Fed’s announcement of a quarter point cut to the Fed Funds rate. The financial industry is going through a major retrenchment, losing more than 25% in aggregate capitalization since July. The real estate market is collapsing.  You get the picture.

Take the case of Citigroup – a once- great bank brought near to ruin by a grossly negligent board of directors. The cost? A mere $351 billion – that is, only $1,000 for every man, woman and child in America. Blame abounds, but most of it must can be directed to the Citigroup directors – the men and women paid well to make corporate policy, and to oversee its proper execution. But that got me thinking about blame…  

Open a newspaper, turn on the computer and the brutal economic news comes at you like an asteroid storm.  Now no doubt some of it is true.  But am I the only who feels the fear-mongering coming on a bit too strong?  

Instilling fear has so far been working with company after company laying off workers, even when its absolutely not necessary. Hey why not lay people off when we can get the others to work twice as hard?  Yet we read and hear more and more of these stories, and shake our heads in disgust…

Perhaps what pisses me off the most though is that we continue to let it happen.  Case in point is everyone’s favourite CEO Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers who now can proudly claim to be the poster boy for the global economic meltdown.

(cross posted at kickin it with cg)

(cross posted at kickin it with cg)

Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger known as Hoder was arrested in Tehran on charges of spying for Israel and could face the death penalty, according to a number of media reports.  

Derakhshan, lived in Toronto for seven years and moved to the U.K. in 2007. Widely considered the most prominent Iranian blogger, Derakhshan has been writing on his blog since 2001 and it has been censored numerous times by Iranian authorities. His pioneering work has earned him the nickname of “Godfather of the Iranian Blogosphere.”  Hoder is also considered a controversial figure for his support of the Iranian regime.

(cross posted at kickin it with cg)

Well at least until Jan. 26 that is.  

For those of you not in the loop, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper suspended the country’s legislature for more than 7 weeks in a bid to stave off a challenge from opposition parties seeking to bring down his government.

(cross posted at kickin it with cg)

Back in August Stephen Hockman QC proposed an interesting idea. Namely proposing that a body similar to the International Court of Justice in The Hague be the supreme legal authority on issues regarding the environment. Hockman argues that for the lack of solutions at hand for addressing climate change, “only an impartial adjudicating body is capable of providing the catalyst for a global consensus as to the fairest way to distribute the burdens that accompany solutions to the climate change problem.”

The understandable reluctance of developing countries to sign up to carbon commitments – unless the developed world is prepared to make an equitable contribution – calls for more radical options. Those options must be realised at state, regional and international levels, and they will require political, economic and legal solutions.

In this mix, international legal instruments are crucial. The existing tools lack the necessary jurisdiction, clout and transparency. The time is ripe for a serious consideration of an international court for the environment. Such a court was mooted in Washington in 1999, but sank without trace. Today, however, we cannot afford to drop the ball.

Hockman, who is also a trustee of Client Earth, a nonprofit environmental law group, argued that such an institution would also offer a centralized system, “an enhanced body of law regarding environmental issues, and consistency in the resolution of environmental disputes“. He wrote that such a court should be compulsory and have its own scientific body to assess technical issues.

However some are skeptical as to whether this concept would work, as Environmental Capital notes:

But what about the two giants in that global economy? The U.S. and China together account for about half the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Any meaningful climate-change pact begins and ends with what Washington and Beijing decide. And while both presidential candidates are less hostile to the ICC, ceding control to supra-national jurisdictions generally gives the U.S. pause. Chinese leaders, meanwhile, have not traditionally embraced global law or institutions with open arms.

Concluded Environmental Capital: “Are lawyers really the best way to save the earth?”

Teams of heavily armed gunmen stormed luxury hotels, a popular tourist attraction and a crowded train station in at least seven attacks in India’s financial capital, killing at least 78 people and wounding at least 200, officials said Thursday. The gunmen were specifically targeting Britons and Americans and a top police official said the gunmen are holding hostages at two luxury hotels, the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels.

Well elections have come and gone both in Canada and the US, and some are asking — but what of the goal of advancing women in political leadership?

How long will it take us? We already are well into the fourth decade since the contemporary women’s movement of the 1970s spawned a generation that sought to claim an equal place in the halls of power.

As a marketer I have noticed some interesting trends in recent months.  Namely that traditional media (print, radio, TV) has started to decline in both consumption and advertising revenue.  Here in Canada, budgets are being slashed by international accounts and belts are being tightened.

What is interesting is that not 5 years ago, media outlets were ‘throwing in’ internet advertising as a bonus with a traditional media buy.  Well those days are long over. As a medium, the internet has exploded bringing with it much good and bad – especially in the political scene.

On C-Span 2’s post election Presidential Election Analysis Panel by the Smithsonian Associates. That’s how Howard Dean put it. See below.

Some key quotes from the video:

“Washington doesn’t get it. They always get it last. This is the most underwritten story of this campaign… by the press… by the media.”

“Women my age, in my generation felt this really acutely. Because they were the ones that suffered all of the indignities that you suffer when you fight to win the battle for equality. As they did.”

“Nobody understood the agony that women, particularly of my generation, were undergoing about this…issue…and to this day, it has been swept under the rug and been forgotten because she didn’t win.”

“We thought we were past all this stuff and we weren’t. We weren’t surprised about the degree of racism or lack of it or whatever, that was endlessly examined. We did not examine the fact that we didn’t get, we haven’t gotten nearly as far ahead as we thought we were about equality between the sexes. And that ought to be revisited as a result of what happened.”

“and it happened to Sarah Palin too. All the stuff that happened to Sarah Palin, and I know God knows I don’t have a lot of sympathy for her political points of view, but a lot of the stuff that happened to her, as she pointed out, would not have happened had she been a man.”

Do you think an honest discussion of this topic is possible yet?

Back in July, it was more than confirmed what a wacko Michael Savage really is when he decided to direct his angry rants at autistic children. Well in case you were hoping that he went back under the big dark rock from where he came, sorry to disappoint – he’s at it again.

During the November 18 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage said:

“You haven’t seen any of what’s coming in this country. You are going to see the wholesale replacement of competent white men, and I’m targeting exactly the group that’s gonna be thrown out of jobs in the government. And I’ll say it, and I’ll be the first to say it, and I may be not the only — the last to say it. I am telling you that there’s gonna be a wholesale firing of competent white men in the United States government up and down the line, in police departments, in fire departments. Everywhere in America, you’re going to see an exchange that you’ve never seen in history, and it’s not gonna be necessarily for the betterment of this country.”

Here’s a listen if you feel like barfing a little.