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Economy

The wall of death for western economies

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20 minute read

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Elizabeth Nickson

This is an easy fix – you just have to demand it

When I drove 20,000 miles through rural America a few years back, I was struck by the dilapidated nature of, well, just about everything. The towns were rundown, there were thousands of abandoned farms and ranches and family houses.  Sidewalks broken, every other shop was abandoned. Fields ran untended, forests filled with brush and fire ladders, hangers-on in trailers with a junkyard dog and rifle racks on trucks. Hunting was a necessity, not a sport.

In sharp contrast I grew up in a country village of 500 surrounded by tidy productive prosperous farms, and we were a going concern with stone and brick buildings, and beautiful crafted family houses, lawns and weirs, a village pond with ducks, mature trees.  Some estates, but not vulgar monstrosities like today. Everyone adult chipped in. It was vivid, active, close-connected, multi-generational and I never wanted to leave.

What the hell happened?

I didn’t fully understand until a hydrologist in Denver, retired from a career at the Department of Interior, told me at lunch in an Olive Garden, that in the mid-70’s, the blanket instructions coming down from DC switched from enabling business and development to preventing it. He, in his retirement, had a small ranch and on his wells, four meters from four different federal and state bureaucracies, indicating just how closely he was being surveilled. Over the years, regulations had come down so thick and punitive, near everyone operated in a catch-22 situation. You might hurdle one set of regs, only to discover that your success meant another set of regs cancelled you. It was so irrational it was fiendish, I thought to myself. Now of course, I see it as actually fiendish, the work of evil. The government was deliberately ruining peoples’ lives, drawing them down, impoverishing them, with malice.

The only prosperity to be seen was in the rather splendid buildings of the Army Corps of Engineers, and the palatial “farmhouses” owned by what I came to recognize as government farmers, the ones who had lobbied hard and got all the subsidies. Oh yes, and ethanol plants, one of the first green scams. They ate money.

Last week I was in the provincial capital near me, picking up something in Oak Bay Village, ultra-posh in a villagy Englishy way, half-timbered buildings, human-scaled, friendly. And found it to be in the same state, everything covered in a wash of grey, empty shops, abandoned stores, people shriveled and tired. I used to take my mother shopping there, and since she died, hadn’t had the heart to go back. Therefore I was disturbed, even shocked at the change. If the prettiest street in the prettiest city in Canada, visited by millions of tourists a year was dying….I’m sorry, Leading Indicator.

If the prettiest street in the prettiest city in Canada, visited by millions of tourists a year was dying….I’m sorry, Leading Indicator.

In fact, in Canada, even the food banks are running out of food. Bodies are piling up in mortuaries because people can’t afford to bury their dead. Chronically injured soldiers are offered Medically Assisted Dying in lieu of treatment. MAID has saved the “free” health system $90 million in end-of-life care, since it began. So we have to expect more of that.

A recent report showed the MAID drugs mean you drown to death, but are paralyzed so can’t communicate your distress. That means you can drown for 45 minutes before you actually die  – autopsies have proved it. That is how careless our health bureaucracy is. I cannot watch another single mother weeping on TikTok because she cannot feed her children and is always sick. Another once athletic mountain climber sit in a wheelchair detailing her story of neurological pain so intense after vaccine, her husband had to sit with her so she wouldn’t kill herself. Every bureaucracy is killing us.

The U.S. still has the healthiest economy in the world. The thirteen other less rich countries are in per capita recession, which means GDP per person is shrinking: Canada, France, Germany, UK, Australia. Japan just registered a -2% growth rate, but it is already a zombie economy with families living paycheck to paycheck. Like addicts.

It may be that all I have is a hammer but, to me, this is due to impossible green mandates, the choking of energy supplies, the insane expense of green energy infrastructure which doesn’t produce and doesn’t “save money” and above all regulation that means that every job in a small cap public company labors under $50,000 of government ESG mandates. For every $1 you pay your average employee, you pay the government $1.50. That’s before taxes. Not that you have any income to tax. Government is literally eating us alive.

The U.S., according to Bloomberg, is facing a Wall of Death. Or Debt. Bloomberg says 42% of small public companies are losing money; not only that they face a $832 billion wall of debt, $600 billion of which comes due at much much higher interest rates in the next two years.

Let’s be really clear about where that debt came from. It came from people like our Fed Chair who asset stripped all these companies, loaded them with debt, mis-stated their value and sold them on. This is how Jerome Powell made his $50,000,000. He ruined a widget manufacturer. That debt is his dirty-but-not illegal play; his fortune, his I got mine and now I’m in “public service”.  Suffer you peons, suffer more. And the dirty profoundly unethical play of all his associates. When Warren Buffet says he has $180 billion in cash because the market is over-valued, that is down to him and his pals loading up every small and medium manufacturer in the U.S. with debt, selling them on, whereupon another pirate buys the company, mis-states its value, borrows a bunch of money against it, raises the price, and sells it on. ALL small cap street profits in the fifteen years come from that criminal activity by our financial elites. Of course the market is over-valued. They over-valued it to steal from it.

The big companies only carry 50% of the debt of small caps. For small caps, the absolute heroes in this story, in the first quarter of 2024, their sales rose .3%, but inflation for that quarter was 1.1%. Bank of America says that small cap earnings will drop by one-third in the next year. Thanks to the miracle of Bidenomics, sales are dead other than the doom spending of hopeless millennials.

In contrast, big companies have gained 14% and big tech stocks earn 90% of all the gains. Where do you think the next play might be? That’s right, tech.

Median priced houses are now worth 7.8 times median income, twice the normal level, that ratio even above the housing bubble of 08.  Housing prices are slated to rise 20% in the next year. One in five renters are either skipping meals or selling personal belongings to make rent.  Rents will rise double digits in the coming year according to the New York Fed. Millennials have given up, reverting to a nihilistic hand-to-mouth existence.

According to economist Peter St. Onge, who aggregated many of the above states, the first twenty rungs of the ladder have been knocked out.

This is due entirely to the gutting of the heartland, the shipping of manufacturing to the CCP slave state, and the subsequent financialization of the economy. Value is now calculated on the future labor of people whose jobs are being killed off.  They are financializing something that is dying. They know it, you know it, the government knows it.

The core reason for the invasion at the border is for immigrants they can pay dirt wages to keep the whole thing going for a few more years. Your kids, your future? Forget about it.

Of course the bankers have a solution. You know they do. It’s not a sensible, compassionate, creative and exciting solution whereby your life and mine is going to get much much better. It is a solution that means your kids and grandkids are going to live in a world wrought with poverty-driven crime, and dying cities and towns. But never mind! The market will make out like a bandit. The secret lies in the fact that 90% of all gains are currently being made by the digital aristocracy.

That will continue and this is how. To make up for destroying production, the government and markets will list you, your house, yard, cars, boats etc., as a federal asset. As well as national parks, conservation areas, wildlife areas, all ecological study zones, and so on. Then they will borrow against it. Everything you own, because of our federal debt, will be theirs.

The secret, obviously lies in the fact that currently 90% of all gains being made by the digital aristocracy,

It’s the only way. We are de-developing; correction, we are being forced to de-develop. We are de-industrializing, and our hard assets, our water, land and mineral resources are being sequestered from use. We cannot use anything to build anything. We won’t even own our houses, our gardens. We will have a senior partner in our financial lives who tells us what we may do and how much oxygen and water and power we may use. We are finished. We are future peasants.

The Play

Earlier this year, American Stewards, a few state governors and a handful of Congress people managed to stop the SEC from installing a rule allowing for the financialization of America’s national parks. But under the radar, because no media does any work whatsoever on this file, the Biden administration has reworked the proposal. Herewith is what is happening in the U.S.

The 2030 Agenda means that 30% of America’s lands have to be turned into a nature preserve by 2030. All those withdrawals from use hold incredible natural wealth and beauty never to be used or seen by Americans. The April 22, 2024, Fact Sheet notes some of the significant land and mineral withdrawals made to help reach 30×30. That wealth could be used by Americans to build cities and companies and full-on effulgent family and community lives. But it is to be locked away. How much is being locked away? The Biden administration estimates that land held privately, one-third of the U.S. to be worth $32 Trillion. So 2030 lands are worth $32 trillion.

So the idea is to lock away at least $32 trillion worth of resources. While people can’t make their rent. While single mothers weep and beg on socials. While people are electing to die because it is too expensive to live. While an entire generation has no hope and is descending into nihilism.

American Stewards reported the two significant Earth Day announcements released from the White House

“The Administration has already protected more than 41 million acres of lands and waters, and President Biden is on track to conserve more lands and waters than any President in history. This includes establishing five new national monuments and restoring protections for three more; creating four new national wildlife refuges and expanding five more; protecting the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, the nation’s most visited wilderness area; safeguarding Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska; and withdrawing Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and Thompson Divide in Colorado from further oil and gas leasing to protect thousands of sacred sites and pristine lands.”

Next, they unveiled a new website, conservation.gov that houses the American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas mapping tool. The Atlas was created to track the progress of 30×30 including the protected status of the lands as well as quantifying natural processes such as photosynthesis and pollination used to manufacture an arbitrary ecosystem service value.”

This is where the digital comes in. All those lands have to be surveilled. All those assets, including you and your house and your car, have to be surveilled. The money that will require installing these surveillance tools will be made by the digital titans, because that’s where the money is, now that lands, resources, labor have been destroyed.

As American Stewards reports: in January of 2023, the White House announced the “National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental – Economic Statistics.” Since then, they have been working to establish a methodology to value the ecosystem services.

There are four accounts: Land, Water, Air Emissions and Economic Activity.

The Pilot Land Account measures the economic activity and total market value for all the land in the United States, 2.3 billion acres. They estimate that at around $100 trillion, which includes the 30% owned by humans.

In essence, the administration is conscripting private citizens’ land to secure the national debt, unbeknown to the American people and Congress. And using common land as well. Common land is owned by the people of the country, not the government and not the Nature Conservancy. It is yours. But, they are developing mechanisms to make it theirs. This is the first step.

The Pilot National Air Emissions Account “measures greenhouse gas emissions associated with specific industries on a national scale.” And you. Your CO2 emissions will be tracked and your allowance measured.

Ten years ago I sat in a rancher’s house deep in Wyoming and he told me that his land would be used as collateral for the National Debt that China holds. I felt dread in the pit of my stomach because I felt instinctively he was right. Subsequently, I don’t know how many people told me that was impossible, I was wrong, he was wrong, crazy.

No baby, we weren’t wrong. They are monetizing all public and private land to pay or support the national debt. And the way they are doing it, is by shutting down economic activity, across the board. We will be a resource to be played, monetized, surveilled and restricted for the profits of the market, and the destructive machinations of the bureaucracy.

And all the money to be made from it is digital. And that money, those resources they are stealing? They belong to us.

In my next article, I will describe in detail the players in this game, how the National Security State, Mossad, the PayPal Mafia, Drexel Burnam heirs, President Trump’s economic advisers, are working to destroy the hope of South and Central America. It is complex, fiendish and fascinating. This series starting today, points out that the Green takeover, mostly surreptitious, is driving the world’s economy into the dirt. It is based on falsified science, and convoluted financial ideas that fail repeatedly. Fix this, and we will be living in a Golden Age.

Elizabeth Nickson is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Her studies and commentaries at the Frontier Centre can be accessed here.   Follow her on Substack here.  Her best-selling book Eco-Fascists can be purchased here.

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Alberta

Ford and Trudeau are playing checkers. Trump and Smith are playing chess

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By Dan McTeague

 

Ford’s calls for national unity – “We need to stand united as Canadians!” – in context feels like an endorsement of fellow Electric Vehicle fanatic Trudeau. And you do wonder if that issue has something to do with it. After all, the two have worked together to pump billions in taxpayer dollars into the EV industry.

There’s no doubt about it: Donald Trump’s threat of a blanket 25% tariff on Canadian goods (to be established if the Canadian government fails to take sufficient action to combat drug trafficking and illegal crossings over our southern border) would be catastrophic for our nation’s economy. More than $3 billion in goods move between the U.S. and Canada on a daily basis. If enacted, the Trump tariff would likely result in a full-blown recession.

It falls upon Canada’s leaders to prevent that from happening. That’s why Justin Trudeau flew to Florida two weeks ago to point out to the president-elect that the trade relationship between our countries is mutually beneficial.

This is true, but Trudeau isn’t the best person to make that case to Trump, since he has been trashing the once and future president, and his supporters, both in public and private, for years. He did so again at an appearance just the other day, in which he implied that American voters were sexist for once again failing to elect the nation’s first female president, and said that Trump’s election amounted to an assault on women’s rights.

Consequently, the meeting with Trump didn’t go well.

But Trudeau isn’t Canada’s only politician, and in recent days we’ve seen some contrasting approaches to this serious matter from our provincial leaders.

First up was Doug Ford, who followed up a phone call with Trudeau earlier this week by saying that Canadians have to prepare for a trade war. “Folks, this is coming, it’s not ‘if,’ it is — it’s coming… and we need to be prepared.”

Ford said that he’s working with Liberal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to put together a retaliatory tariff list. Spokesmen for his government floated the idea of banning the LCBO from buying American alcohol, and restricting the export of critical minerals needed for electric vehicle batteries (I’m sure Trump is terrified about that last one).

But Ford’s most dramatic threat was his announcement that Ontario is prepared to shut down energy exports to the U.S., specifically to Michigan, New York, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, if Trump follows through with his plan. “We’re sending a message to the U.S. You come and attack Ontario, you attack the livelihoods of Ontario and Canadians, we’re going to use every tool in our toolbox to defend Ontarians and Canadians across the border,” Ford said.

Now, unfortunately, all of this chest-thumping rings hollow. Ontario does almost $500 billion per year in trade with the U.S., and the province’s supply chains are highly integrated with America’s. The idea of just cutting off the power, as if you could just flip a switch, is actually impossible. It’s a bluff, and Trump has already called him on it. When told about Ford’s threat by a reporter this week, Trump replied “That’s okay if he does that. That’s fine.”

And Ford’s calls for national unity – “We need to stand united as Canadians!” – in context feels like an endorsement of fellow Electric Vehicle fanatic Trudeau. And you do wonder if that issue has something to do with it. After all, the two have worked together to pump billions in taxpayer dollars into the EV industry. Just over the past year Ford and Trudeau have been seen side by side announcing their $5 billion commitment to Honda, or their $28.2 billion in subsidies for new Stellantis and Volkswagen electric vehicle battery plants.

Their assumption was that the U.S. would be a major market for Canadian EVs. Remember that “vehicles are the second largest Canadian export by value, at $51 billion in 2023 of which 93% was exported to the U.S.,”according to the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, and “Auto is Ontario’s top export at 28.9% of all exports (2023).”

But Trump ran on abolishing the Biden administration’s de facto EV mandate. Now that he’s back in the White House, the market for those EVs that Trudeau and Ford invested in so heavily is going to be much softer. Perhaps they’d like to be able to blame Trump’s tariffs for the coming downturn rather than their own misjudgment.

In any event, Ford’s tactic stands in stark contrast to the response from Alberta, Canada’s true energy superpower. Premier Danielle Smith made it clear that her province “will not support cutting off our Alberta energy exports to the U.S., nor will we support a tariff war with our largest trading partner and closest ally.”

Smith spoke about this topic at length at an event announcing a new $29-million border patrol team charged with combatting drug trafficking, at which said that Trudeau’s criticisms of the president-elect were, “not helpful.” Her deputy premier Mike Ellis was quoted as saying, “The concerns that president-elect Trump has expressed regarding fentanyl are, quite frankly, the same concerns that I and the premier have had.” Smith and Ellis also criticized Ottawa’s progressively lenient approach to drug crimes.

(For what it’s worth, a recent Léger poll found that “Just 29 per cent of [Canadians] believe Trump’s concerns about illegal immigration and drug trafficking from Canada to the U.S. are unwarranted.” Perhaps that’s why some recent polls have found that Trudeau is currently less popular in Canada than Trump at the moment.)

Smith said that Trudeau’s criticisms of the president-elect were, “not helpful.” And on X/Twitter she said, “Now is the time to… reach out to our friends and allies in the U.S. to remind them just how much Americans and Canadians mutually benefit from our trade relationship – and what we can do to grow that partnership further,” adding, “Tariffs just hurt Americans and Canadians on both sides of the border. Let’s make sure they don’t happen.”

This is exactly the right approach. Smith knows there is a lot at stake in this fight, and is not willing to step into the ring in a fight that Canada simply can’t win, and will cause a great deal of hardship for all involved along the way.

While Trudeau indulges in virtue signaling and Ford in sabre rattling, Danielle Smith is engaging in true statesmanship. That’s something that is in short supply in our country these days.

As I’ve written before, Trump is playing chess while Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford are playing checkers. They should take note of Smith’s strategy. Honey will attract more than vinegar, and if the long history of our two countries tell us anything, it’s that diplomacy is more effective than idle threats.

Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.

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Business

Canada needs to get serious about securing its border

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From the Macdonald Laurier Institute

By Todd Hataley for Inside Policy

US President-elect Donald Trump has made clear his intention to call out Canada on weak enforcement on migration, money laundering, and the cross-border trafficking of narcotics, especially fentanyl.

Until just very recently, Canada has remained largely silent on these issues. Security agencies, such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), Sûreté du Québec (SQ) and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), have tried to secure the border via memorandums of understanding, framework agreements, and legislated agreements that allow them to share information and even work together.

However, resources are limited for cross-border law enforcement co-operation. CBSA remains  understaffed and RCMP Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (which work with US security agencies) have limited geographic reach, leaving much of the enforcement between ports of entry left to police of jurisdiction, who already are hard pressed to provide services to the communities they serve.

The Canadian government’s apparent strategy of largely ignoring the problem is becoming more difficult to maintain. With the United States Border Patrol intercepting increasing numbers of illegal migrants crossing into that country from Canada, it’s clear the porous border is a concern. Exacerbating the situation is the recent discovery of illegal narcotic super labs in Canada – where production far outstrips the market – and Canada’s unfortunate, albeit well-deserved reputation as a haven for global money launderers.

Thanks to Trump’s 25 per cent tariff threat, the crisis is now endangering Canada’s relationship with its largest and most-important trading partner. This announcement sent all sectors of government and the private sector into a frenzy, prompting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to fly to Florida to seek out an early audience with Trump at his Mar-a-lago resort home. Trudeau’s team spun the trip as proof that the federal government is serious about working with the US to address its border security and public safety concerns.

But with political crises piling up, it will be difficult for Trudeau to also manage the political optics of kowtowing to Trump, who is widely unpopular among Canadians. Spending extra money to appease Trump during the ongoing housing, immigration, and health care crises could make the Trudeau’s popularity nosedive even further. Adding insult to injury, Trump is essentially demanding that Canada do America’s work by stopping illicit goods and people from entering the United States: customs and border security officials generally work on the principle of stopping goods from entering their country.

Trudeau faces many practical challenges, including the need to ramp up the number of border and law enforcement agents who have the skill sets and training required to police offences such as drug production, money laundering, and the cross-border smuggling of goods and humans. Purchasing helicopters and drones to conduct surveillance will do little to aid enforcement, since most goods smuggled across the border pass through legitimate border crossings. RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme even suggested putting RCMP cadets along the border – a challenging proposition since vast swathes of the border are either wilderness or water. Surveillance is one thing, but the act of enforcement takes skilled people with the capacity to investigate, gather evidence, and articulate that evidence into something that can be used by the courts for convictions. These concerns are not being addressed in this current frenzy to spend money on border security.

There is also good evidence that fortifying the border, or what has become known as forward deployment along the border, does nothing to stop the cross-border transit of contraband goods and people. One need only look as far as the United States-Mexico border to see the failure of forward deployment.

As authorities increase border enforcement activities, the costs of smuggling goods and people mounts for criminals. Eventually, it drives out amateurs, leaving only the professional, skilled, and well-equipped criminal groups. This, in turn, often leads to increasing levels of violence along the border, making interdiction and disruption far more difficult for law enforcement agencies.

Canada has several clear options to address Trump’s border concerns. It can increase the staffing of frontline CBSA officers, including border agents, inland enforcement units that actively investigate and remove individuals from Canada, international liaison officers, and customs processing staff. It can also create a plan for CBSA to take over enforcement between ports of entry. Currently, CBSA enforces entry into Canada at the ports of entry and the RCMP are responsible for the areas in between. Having a single agency manage the border builds capacity and expertise, avoiding inter-bureaucracy competition and confusion.

Canada can also work to better integrate law enforcement, intelligence units, and border services at all levels of government and across international boundaries. Cross-border crime operations are often planned and execute far from the border.

Some of this already takes place, as noted above, but it needs to go much deeper and be more supportive at both institutional and individual levels. This process must also include private sector stakeholders: companies such as FedEx, UPS, and Amazon, as well as freight forwarders, trucking companies, and customs brokers, are all involved in cross-border trade. Their participation as partners in reducing cross-border criminal activity is essential.

Finally, the government needs to designate laws specific to cross-border crime and include meaningful penalties as a means of deterrence.

Hyper-focusing on the border while ignoring other aspects of cross-border crime may be good political optics, but it is a bad strategy. What we really need is functional enforcement – including an integrated process extended vertically and horizontally across all sectors of border stakeholders, at and away from the border, supported by strong policy and legislation. This is the path forward to better cross-border crime enforcement.


Dr. Todd Hataley is a professor in the School of Justice and Community Development at Fleming College. A retired member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he worked as an investigator in organized crime, national security, cross-border crime, and extra-territorial torture. He is a contributor to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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