Space: The Distance Between Morality and Inflated Ego
We live in a world whose leaders, economic and political, clearly have lost their moral compass. Our political leaders talk with great excitement about mankind blasting off earth and settling on the moon and Mars and then the universe. Those engaged in space science for a living are awarded the automatic status of the excited…
Keep readingThe Erosion of Democracy: Three Elections
Canada 2021 We live in a quasi-democracy. And it is eroding. The 2021 October 21st Federal unreformed election was simply not fair for at least half of those who voted. The reality: One Liberal MP was elected for every 37,681 votes for the party; One Conservative MP for every 50,873 votes; One NDP MP for…
Keep readingThe War of the World
Our democratic governments have long been at war with our capitalist economy. One seeks to spread power as widely as possible with each person being equal, having the same rights, freedoms and access to being heard. The other concentrates wealth and power and grants rights and freedoms and access to power based on how much…
Keep readingClimate Change Wealth and Power
There was a superb interview on Information Morning on CBC with Louise Comeau of the New Brunswick Conservation Council. It covered both what we are learning form the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and environmental groups like the Conservation Council about the magnitude of the climate change threat and initiatives we can take to avoid…
Keep readingEnergy for Profit or for Service
We are not in a time of business as usual in terms of how we access the energy we need for a functioning society. The latest report of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change makes it clear that the climate change will not wait for us to delay or backslide. The Secretary General…
Keep readingInflation: The Pandemic, Big Oil and Billionaires
There was an interesting interview on inflation on the CBC morning show out of Halifax on March 18. A number of the ‘drivers’ of our current and perhaps future inflation were discussed: Wage demands; Supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic; The surge in the price of petroleum products as a result of Putin’s brutal…
Keep readingAn Attempt at an Honest Settler Perspective and Fair Reconciliation
Having a day to honor the people who were here before any European settlers is long overdue. I grew up in Canada learning so little about the people who settlers found here some 500 years ago, that an honest description of what I knew has to be an admission I was totally ignorant. Let’s be…
Keep readingReflections on the Pandemic
The pandemic has underlined fundamental problems with the basic nature of social economy of many countries including Canada. The polarizing impacts of the Trump presidency in the USA have spilled into Canada and around the world. It has become acceptable to a growing part of the population to spread misinformation, ignore science and deny reality. …
Keep readingLessons from the Pandemic and the Trump Hangover
The Pandemic was an eye opener. Elders died by the thousands because essential workers in eldercare were paid so little they needed more than one job to eat and keep a roof over their heads. They had no sick leave and little or no protective clothing and equipment. When personal care workers fell ill they…
Keep readingHow The Household Appliances of Capitalism Use You
When we built our new home 6 years ago we bought all new energy efficient appliances, all from Sears, all Kenmore. This week while baking some custard, the stove, Kenmore (made by Frigidaire), started beeping and the panel on the Electronic Oven Control (EOC) started flashing “F10”. We dug out the stove manual and after…
Keep readingAn Attempt at an Honest Settler Perspective and Fair Reconciliation
Having a day to honour the people who were here before any European settlers is long overdue. I grew up in Canada learning so little about the people who settlers found here some 500 years ago, that an honest description of what I knew has to be an admission I was totally ignorant. Let’s be…
Keep readingLet’s Not Burn Our Forests for Heating
As the map clearly shows, supplying Northern Pulp and Bowater Mersey has been a destructive process for our forests. We have clear cut far too much of our 12 million acres of our forests to supply a low value product – pulp wood. Since the closure of the mills, some are advocating use of the…
Keep readingLessons from Runaway Capitalism: Capital as ‘god’ and Capitalism as Religion
Do we see a need to transform our society? Why do those who look after our children and our seniors get paid so little when we say we value what they do? Why did Canada’s billionaires increase their wealth by over 35% during the first nine months of the Pandemic while millions faced unemployment and…
Keep readingPursuing an Insane Balance
Balance is one of those words that radiates goodness. We should lead a balanced life. We should avoid extremes and keep everything in balance. A balanced assessment is a good assessment. These statements radiate good common sense. But it is a word that can be abused. Two examples leap out at us in our present…
Keep readingLessons From Runaway Capitalism: Lesson 1: Let Us Not Be Smug
“Humanity faces a potentially terminal crisis of collapsing environmental systems, extreme and growing inequality, failing institutional legitimacy, and disintegration of the basic trust of one another on which the social fabric depends. No individual caused these vast problems, and no individual or group of individuals can solve them alone.” David Korton, Yes Magazine, 21 Jan…
Keep readingHow the Household Appliances of Capitalism Use You
When we built our new home 6 years ago we bought all new energy efficient appliances, all from Sears, all Kenmore. A week ago while baking some custard, the stove, a Kenmore (but made by Frigidaire), started beeping and the panel on the Electronic Oven Control (EOC) started flashing “F10”. We dug out the stove…
Keep readingCan We Change Our World? Atautsikut/ Leave None Behind, Says YES
I am often bemused by people who respond to my critiques of capitalism and promotion of co-operatives by gently, and sometimes not so gently, saying, “But you know that is not possibly going to happen.” Or they say, “There is no alternative to capitalism.” Imagine an indigenous group for whom the government’s objective was to…
Keep readingBlack Lives are Sacred – Change the Culture – Part 2
In Part One I reflected on the links and roots of racism in the capitalism that benefits from it. But, why are our governments seemingly unable to deal with racism and the inequality that is linked to it? They are faced with 1% of the world’s people owning more than 50% of the world’s wealth. …
Keep readingBlack Lives Are Sacred- Change the culture – Part 1
The image of a police officer torturing and executing a black man in Minneapolis was horrifying. It was not the first, and regrettably will not likely be the last, in spite of the outrage it generated. Most similar killings in Canada are not caught on video. Life is sacred. Black lives are sacred. Why do…
Keep readingCOVID 19: The Case for a New Eldercare Model
As we struggle through this pandemic buffeted by the additional tragedy in Nova Scotia, one fact becomes increasingly clear. As of May 3rd 2020, 83% of the 37 deaths are seniors living in elder care facilities. Across Canada almost 80% of the more than 3,600 deaths have been seniors living in elder care facilities, and…
Keep readingResponding to Colchester’s Traumatic Pain
We are reeling. The unimaginable has happened. We are learning the names and hearing the stories of people just like us gunned down in their home or on the street. We are learning that wonderful people – family, friends, neighbors, care givers, people who were loved – have succumbed to a wave of evil acts…
Keep readingLessons from COVID 19: How did we get here?
COVID 19 will be a disastrous milestone. The pandemic leapt out of a hole mostly dug over five decades by the richest people and corporations in the world. Ironically they are the least likely to be hurt by it. Like the world wars and the great depression and great recession, it will leave a changed…
Keep readingLessons from COVID 19 – Co-operating makes a Better World
What are the most important things to remember as this earth-shaking pandemic rolls through our communities? The first is that every life is a sacred trust to be protected. That the dignity of every person is to be respected. These are not lofty and abstract ideas but ones that face us every day. Especially during…
Keep readingAlberta and Canada: When Democracy Gets Sacrificed
We live in a quasi-democracy. And it is eroding. The October 21st unreformed election was simply not fair for at least half of those who voted. The reality: One Liberal MP for every 37,681 votes for the party; One Conservative MP for every 50,873 votes; One NDP MP for every 118,717 votes; One Green one…
Keep readingAlberta and Canada: A Public Policy Failure in Process?
Canada faces huge, long term, destabilizing challenges. Inequality of wealth is soaring. The richest 87 Canadian families own as much as 12 million average Canadian income earners while Alberta gives tax breaks to the rich and cuts services to the poor.While much of the world surges ahead developing renewable energy and post fossil fuel economies,…
Keep readingCorporate Imposed Taxes and How they Reduce Our Quality of Life
The word ‘markups’ does not arouse the same emotions as taxes and profits. But markups are an important and little understood form of ‘taxation’. When a business sells something, it takes the cost of either making it or buying it and adds a markup. The markup can be low for high volume goods and services,…
Keep readingClimate Change Roulette
1 Metric Ton (MT) = 1000 kg 1 Metric megaton = 1 million MT 1 Metric Gigatonne = 1 billion MTMeasuring Carbon Dioxide If we are to have a 66% chance of limiting global warming to 2C, the people of our planet have to have a limit on the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into…
Keep readingWhy Do Our Governments Act Like Subsidiaries of the Oil Companies?
What happens to a society when a commodity and those who have been made rich by it takes control of economic and political decision making? What happens when commercial benefit tops the interest of the vast majority of citizens? The result is that rational evidence based decision making is thrown out the window. Decisions get…
Keep readingAre Co-operatives Likely to Build a Better World? (1)
The trends sketched out In Chapter 1 of From Corporate Globalization to Global Co-operation: We owe it to our grandchildren are daunting. That said, the co-operative business model offers a healthier alternative. It does not drive the worst trends. Credit unions did not create the bad mortgages and worthless derivatives that caused to 2008 collapse…
Keep readingBuilding a Co-operative Economy
Some people react to the idea of creating a new economy to replace capitalism as pure naive optimism. It is just too big a task they believe. The reality is that if we all believe that, the new economy will never be built. The realty also is if enough people decide to make something happen…
Keep readingEveryone Welcome – March 15
With Author Tom Webb Thursday 15 March 2018, 7:00PM to 8:30PM – Room 132, Beveridge Arts Center (BAC) Acadia University 10 Highland Ave., Wolfville, N.S. Exploring Public Policy – Hosted by the Kings South NDP Abstract From Corporate Globalization to Global Co-operation explores some of the interconnected and disturbing trends facing our world and…
Keep readingRewording the trickle down theory
“The “trickle-down” theory: the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.” William Blum, US author and journalist If you like this definition you might also like his book: Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War…
Keep readingOur Search For Meaning
In a world that some mornings seems to have gone mad, it is all too easy to give up hope. I once gave a talk at Oxford University and a man in the front row asked, after I was finished talking about co-operatives, “But Mr Webb I liked much of what you said but surely…
Keep readingCo-operation More Powerful Than Competition
An excerpt from: From Corporate Globalization to Global Co-operation, Page 90 “Neoclassical economics and right wing philosophy would tell us that the most powerful driver in human nature IS individual self-interest in the rational pursuit of maximum wealth for minimal effort. Wouldn’t that mean that co-operatives were just utopian dreams out of touch with what…
Keep readingSearching for Meaning
In our own lives, what is more important, what we consumed today or what we contributed to our families, our communities and our world? What would leave us more dissatisfied, knowing that we acquired a less than perfect automobile, didn’t have the latest electronic gadget or that an idea we had failed to make the…
Keep readingGrowing Inequality or Economic Freedom
CBC’s Fifth Estate’s headline read: “Wealthy Canadians exposed in KPMG offshore tax ‘sham’ $5-million ‘minimum’ entry fee to get into offshore scheme.” Seniors who have worked hard all their lives but who are living below the poverty line want a better economy, a different economy for their children and grandchildren. Students graduating with no…
Keep readingWhy are so many people angry?
When the economic elite takes and takes and sets the rules for how the economy works and how trade will benefit them, it destroys hope and produces despair. Despair is where anger grows. When those who practice the politics of fear, lies, hatred, violence and revenge find despair and anger they cloth themselves in righteousness…
Keep readingMaking the Vision visible
“For example, despite being surrounded by farmland, Marks (Louisiana) residents had to drive 20 miles to the nearest Wal-Mart just to get fresh vegetables. But Shreveport Federal Credit Union changed all that by organizing local farmers into a worker-owned cooperative, renovating a building, and creating what became the Delta Muletrain Farmers Market.” James Trimarco…
Keep readingInvestor-Owned Banks vs The People
Are you puzzled or upset or angry by the CBC’s recent Go Public revelations about banks serving their investors at your expense? You need to ask, ‘What is the purpose of a bank?’ It is not to provide you with financial services or good advice. The purpose of a bank, the reason it was incorporated,…
Keep readingIt is About Humanity and Planet Earth
From the preface of From Corporate Globalization to Global Co-operation “This book is not about economics or politics or society. It is about where they all meet. It is not value free. The vision that drives it is the search for a better world. The motivation for writing it is grounded in a growing apprehension…
Keep readingHarnessing Discontent to Build Rather than Destroy
There are powerful forces in our world unleashed by growing inequality. They are a significant part of where Donald J Trump found the people who were so angry they stopped thinking and voted for him. They fueled Brexit. They are being used to whip up anti-immigrant and religious hatred across Europe. A key source of…
Keep readingThe Sane Society by Eric Fromm
Published in 1955 this book still has a lot of relevant thinking. For example: “Exploitation as it developed in the nineteenth century was essentially different. The worker, or rather his labor, (became) a commodity to be bought by the owner of capital… . Exploitation was not personal anymore, it had become anonymous as it were. …
Keep readingTrudeau Government Breaks Electoral Reform Promise
An Open Letter 8 February 2017 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau House of Commons Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6 Dear Prime Minister, I do not often write letters to leaders of majority governments because they almost never listen, but on this issue I feel compelled to do so. I am appalled by the decision to ditch electoral…
Keep readingAn Economy for the 1%
“The Oxfam report An Economy for the 1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010, a drop of 38 percent. This has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the richest 62…
Keep readingWhat You Pay for Capitalism
A Book on what it costs to prop up Capitalism? What does it cost to prop up an increasingly unstable post capitalist economic system? The 2008 crisis cost an estimated $20+ Trillion USD globally. And this was just a slightly bigger than normal blip. There are a lot of insights in Joyce Nelson’s book Beyond…
Keep readingOxfam, Inequality and Co-operation
“The Oxfam report An Economy for the 1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010, a drop of 38 percent. This has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the richest 62…
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