Anna Burns may have won the Booker, but monopoly publishers are the real victors

The Man Booker rules make submissions from small publishers very tricky because of the size of the print run required and the amount of money that involves. Because of this, a win can be a drain rather than a boost, and costs can outstrip sales if you don’t win.

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Who is singing now?

By TONY SEED

(July 11, revised July 19) – The world has been saved from an England-France Brexit final at the 2018 World Cup, renditions of “Three Lions” and “Rule Britannia” in the stadiums, and the tsunami of British chauvinism unashamedly embraced by the Canadian sports media.

What goes around, comes around. The dodgy English threw their final match in the opening round with Belgium back on June 28 with the pretext of resting players and avoiding injuries for the Round of 16. “Sometimes, you have to make decisions with the bigger picture, and that’s what I did tonight,” rationalized head coach Gareth Southgate at the time – as if the decision was his and his alone. That bigger picture seems to have included getting a better draw in the knockout stage, that is, to avoid Brazil and therein build the betting pool, the TV market, the revenues of the English Football Association, and “hearts and minds” diversion from the crisis at home – giving a new definition to match fixing and a level playing field. Such are the elastic ethics of England. 

No consent – No pipeline! Canadian’s opposition to Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline project

Protesters block the gates of Kinder Morgan’s Burnaby Mountain facility, March 17, 2018.

Sobeys attacks workers and economy in Western Canada

Whose Economy? Who Decides? | Workers’ Forum

Since Sobeys’ 2013 takeover of Safeway in Western Canada, it has closed over 50 stores within its empire affecting thousands of workers and those who relied on those locations for groceries and other supplies. Fifty store closures alone were announced in June 2014, that the company asserted “logically follow the acquisition of Canada Safeway.” These included Sobeys, Safeway and IGA stores in the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, with a majority in Western Canada.

Who owns Amtrak?

The name Amtrak comes from a combination of “American” and “track.” The USA does not have a national passenger rail system, let alone a publicly-owned system.

The National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) is a government-owned corporation established as a product of the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, to provide intercity passenger train service throughout the United States. It was created by the Richard Nixon presidency largely to protect the private railroads (today’s Class I freight railroads) from their obligation of having to run money-losing passenger routes. The U.S. government owns the preferred stock while private rail companies, including Canadian Pacific and Canadian Rail, own the common stock. Later the Congress stripped preferred shares of voting rights and any liquidation preference, effectively leaving common shareholders in control. Curiously, there has never been a shareholder’s meeting.

‘Panama Papers’: It’s actually quite simple – corporate taxation is a fraud

No information has been released so far in “The Panama Papers” from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with all its bells and whistles about any U.S.  or Canadian millionaires, monopolies or government officials hiding wealth in offshore tax havens. The six Canadians of the 350 reportedly in the data dump who have been identified so far by the collaborating media in this country, the Toronto Star and the CBC, are small fish, e.g., a sports physician from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.

What did you expect?

Canada is a corporate tax haven. It is no mystery. On August 19, 1993 the Canadian Press reported about the probated will of K.C. Irving, in which he left most of his multi-billion-dollar empire to his three sons in a trust they cannot run unless they live outside Canada, i.e., avoid Canadian taxes. One of Canada’s biggest business empires, the Irving group of companies in New Brunswick, is “owned” by a series of family trusts registered in Bermuda where there are virtually no income taxes. Nothing secret about it. So too is Irving’s Kent Line, enabling it to circumvent Canadian maritime labour and safety laws by using flags of convenience for its fleet of oil tankers, freighters and other cargo vessels. The links of these oligarchs to the ruling Liberal Party and how they have been systemically enriched from the public treasury, including the largest warship contract in history, are a matter of record. 

Looking at the Trudeau budget

The federal government released its 2016 budget on March 22, which it calls Growing the Middle Class. The March 26 issue of TML Weekly  features part one of a series “Looking at the Budget,” which points out that the “aim of the Liberal budget is found in the details.”