Mosaic Profit Argues for Higher Royalties

By Erin Weir 

Progressive Economics Forum
July 17th, 2012

Today’s Mosaic quarterly report provides further evidence that the Government of Saskatchewan should improve its royalty and tax structure to collect a better return on the province’s non-renewable resources like potash.

Quarterly Comparison

Despite higher potash prices, Mosaic paid lower royalties and resource taxes to Saskatchewan last quarter than in the same quarter of last year. In the three months ended May 31, 2012, Mosaic paid $100 million in provincial resource charges from over a billion dollars ($1,037 million) of potash sales.

By comparison, in the three months ended May 31, 2011, the company paid $108 million from only $982 million of potash sales. In other words, Mosaic’s royalty and resource tax payments to Saskatchewan declined even as the value of potash sales increased.

Reductions in provincial royalties and taxes were supposed to provide incentives for increased production. However, Mosaic actually mined less potash last quarter than a year ago (1.9 million vs. 2.2 million tonnes). The increase in sales values simply reflected higher prices ($455 vs. $404 per tonne).

Annual Comparison

The annual figures confirm that provincial royalties and resource taxes amount to only one-tenth the value of potash sold. In the year ended May 31, 2012, Mosaic paid $328 million to Saskatchewan from $3.3 billion of potash sales. In the year ended May 31, 2011, it paid $294 million from $3.1 billion of potash sales.

The amount of potash mined changed little from one year to the next (7.4 million vs. 7.3 million tonnes). The higher sales value instead reflected stronger potash prices ($448 vs. $359 per tonne). Windfall gains from higher commodity prices should accrue to the people who own the resource rather than to the companies that extract it.

Explanatory Note

Mosaic reports “Canadian royalties” and “Canadian resource taxes.” Since its Canadian potash mines are in Saskatchewan, these amounts represent the provincial Crown royalty and Saskatchewan’s resource surcharge plus potash production tax. There is an interesting breakdown on the second-last slide of Mosaic’s PowerPoint presentation.

Employee “Empowerment” and Corporate Culture

By Gwen Sharp
Sociological Images
July 16, 2012

Recently, reader Nicole D. was shopping at Home Depot and noticed a sign near the front that described ways employees are “empowered.” When we think of empowered employees, we might think of issues such as fair pay, decent benefits, access to full-time work, a way for employees to have input in the creation of workplace policies, or other factors that affect the work environment. But what struck Nicole was how being “empowered” was defined to align with corporate goals.

What are Home Depot employees empowered to do? To provide good customer service, basically — that is, to be “friendly and helpful to every customer,” to actually show customers what they’re looking for and “not point” to it, and to make sure Home Depot’s price-matching program is implemented:

Missing Occupy

Left Eye on Books

July 16, 2012

Whatever happened to Occupy? The movement that rocked the U.S. in the fall of 2011 has faded to background noise. A recent “National Gathering” drew 500 participants, not an impressive number considering how many were roused to action all over the country just months earlier. The “general assembly,” the much-celebrated participatory democratic institution that was the movement’s trademark, seems to have fallen into disuse almost everywhere. And there is no alternative decision-making body emerging to take its place.

Close up, one can identify a number of struggles around the U.S. which Occupy groups have initiated or provided considerable support for. There is a rent strike in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and an occupation of a school in Oakland. Occupiers have supported the struggle of the Cruz family in Minneapolis and stood with a mobile home community that was to be displaced for fracking in Jersey Shore Pennsylvania. Occupiers have also joined the picket lines of Palermo’s Pizza workers in Milwaukee. There are plans to use the first year anniversary of OWS in September to launch a campaign around debt. I’m sure other examples could be identified. Yet the sum total of these struggles does not presently add up to an imposing movement.

Opinions Divided on Climate Change and CCS in Saskatchewan

Canadian News Wire

July 16, 2012

Saskatchewan residents have strong but divided opinions about climate change and carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, concludes a public opinion survey commissioned by IPAC-CO2 Research Inc. released today.

"Almost seven in ten (68%) residents are concerned about climate change," said Joe Ralko, Director of Communications for IPAC-CO2, who managed the survey.

"However, there is no consensus on how to address the problem. That could be because the survey discovered there is no agreement on what residents believe to be the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions. What the people of Saskatchewan are saying is that whatever steps are taken to mitigate climate change must be effective."

Saskatchewan residents are clear on their trusted sources of information on climate change.

Free Book: A Brief History of Neoliberalism

By David Harvey

Open publication - Free publishing

Struggle Blues

Woody Guthrie

  

Marxism, the 21st Century and Social Transformation

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

Freedom Road Socialist Organization
June 28th, 2012

This article was originally published on the website: Philosophers for  change, philosophers.posterous.com.

A discussion of the future of socialism and social transformation must be grounded in two realities. The first reality is the broader economic, environmental and state-legitimacy crises in which humanity finds itself. In other words, the convergence of these three crises means that the necessity for a genuine Left capable of leading masses of people is more pressing than ever. It means that while one cannot sit back and wait for the supposed “final” crisis of capitalism to open up doors to freedom — since capitalism is largely defined by its continual crises — it is the case that the convergence of these three crises brings with it a level of urgency unlike any that most of us have experienced. Not only is there a need for a progressive, if not radical set of answers to these crises at the level of immediate reforms, but the deeper reality is that capitalism — as a system — is incapable of providing legitimate, sustainable answers to these crises, whether individually or collectively.

The second reality, and the central focus of this essay, is that any discussion of a progressive post-capitalist future must come to grips with the realization of the crisis of socialism in which every trend in the global Left has been encased. This has been a crisis at the levels of vision, strategy, state power and organization. It is a crisis that cannot be avoided by either a retreat to pre-Bolshevik Marxism or slipping into the abyss of post-modernism. The reality of the crisis of socialism can only be avoided at our own peril.

Read more HERE.

Myanmar is Open for Business

The Saskatchewan Potash Corporation rushed to sale potash in Myanmar (Burma) even while hundreds of political prisoners still languished in jails. This article provides some  background - NYC.

By Ko Tha Dja 

Dissident Voice

Burmese junta

July 14th, 2012

Wow! The cynicism and hypocrisy of U.S. foreign relations and policy has no limits. Against the wishes and will of Aung San Suu Kyi, and anyone remotely familiar with the social and economic conditions of Burma, it’s appalling that Obama has lifted investment sanctions against Burma. According to Arvind Ganesan, quoted in the Washington Post article by Karen Deyoung on July 12, “The U.S. government should have insisted that good governance and human rights reform be essential operating principles for new investments in Burma.” Excuse me, Mr. Ganesan, may I kindly ask where have you been for the past few years?

The U.S. government does its best business with brutal totalitarian military dictatorships – not with nations seeking real Democracy and social justice for all. If Aung San Suu Kyi never existed, do you believe for a minute that the United States would have waved a banner of principle for Democracy in Burma? After all, Chevron has been doing business here for years – during sanctions. Why is that? Oil.

Paraguay: Velvet Coup

By John Cherian  
Frontline
July 14-27

The ouster of the Paraguayan President, Fernando Lugo, in a legislative coup in the third week of June came as a surprise. Neither the citizens of the country nor the governments of the region were prepared for such a scenario. President Lugo was all set to demit office next year after the completion of a constitutionally mandated five-year term. During a visit to New Delhi in May this year, he had told this correspondent that he had absolutely no plans of changing the country’s Constitution in order to seek a second term.

The event that triggered the present crisis in the landlocked Latin American country was a clash between landless peasants and the police in mid-June. Seventeen people – six police officers and 11 farmers – died in the incident.

Labour lawyers respond to Sask. government's "consultation" paper

SGEU
July 13, 2012

The Saskatchewan committee of the Canadian Association of Labour Lawyers (CALL) released a response to the Saskatchewan government's "Consultation Paper on the Renewal of Labour Legislation in Saskatchewan" on July 12, 2012.

CALL states in its response that "it is of the opinion that the process envisaged by the paper is anything but consultation" and offers its suggestions for a more meaningful process.

CALL Letter to Ministry of Labour Relations & Workplace Safety, July 12, 2012 (full document)

Truth and Reconciliation in Saskatchewan: Two articles

Gordon's School. Students being transported to St. Luke's Church -- Oct. 11, 1953.

TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION AT THE VILLAGE LEVEL 

By Jim Harding

No Nukes

July 13, 2012

I once team-taught with an anthropologist from New Zealand who told me that if a community got bigger than 200, people lost track of each other. Face to face contact declined and third-party rumour increased, he suggested. I was telling him how quickly I seemed to be forgotten when I moved from a rural area to a large Ontario city to teach. He responded that “it’s far more than being out of sight, out of mind…it’s more like you’re already dead and gone.”

This old friend is now dead and gone and I think of him regularly and fondly, so I’m not sure that what he said was the whole story; he was a bit of a loner-wanderer with a streak of cynicism. But I am still predisposed to living in a small community where face-to-face relationships are more likely.

Read more HERE.

RECONCILIATION TAKES TWO

Residential school survivors gathered in Saskatoon critical of federal government's actions

By Sandra Cuffe
The Dominion

July 13, 2012

SASKATOON—The thunderclouds had scattered by morning when the sounds of footsteps, engines and drumbeats converged in Saskatchewan last month. Thousands of Indigenous residential school survivors, their relatives and people from different walks of life gathered in Saskatoon, traveling from all four directions.

From June 21 to 24, laughter, tears, songs and stories were in the air at Prairieland Park, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada held its fourth national event. Survivors who gave statements about their experiences and participants who witnessed the event reiterated the importance of documenting and understanding the truth of residential school history. But on the reconciliation of that history, consensus was not even on the horizon.

Read more HERE.

THE WEAVERS: WASN'T THAT A TIME!

One of my favorite documentaries (1982). From a source in Germany apparently - NYC

The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller

Here's what they don't teach: When the blind-deaf visionary learned that poor people were more likely to be blind than others, she set off down a pacifist, socialist path that broke the boundaries of her time—and continues to challenge ours today.

By Peter Dreier 

Yes magazine
Jul 12, 2012

“So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me 'arch priestess of the sightless,' 'wonder woman,' and a 'modern miracle.' But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics—that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world—that is a different matter! It is laudable to give aid to the handicapped. Superficial charities make smooth the way of the prosperous; but to advocate that all human beings should have leisure and comfort, the decencies and refinements of life, is a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.”

—Helen Keller (letter to Senator Robert La Follette, 1924)

The bronze statue of Helen Keller that sits in the U.S. Capitol shows the blind girl standing at a water pump. It depicts the moment in 1887 when her teacher, Anne Sullivan, spelled “W-A-T-E-R” into one of her 7-year-old pupil's hands while water streamed into the other. This was Keller’s awakening, when she made the connection between the word Sullivan spelled and the tangible substance splashing from the pump, whispering “wah-wah,”—her way of saying “water.” This scene, made famous in the play and film “The Miracle Worker,” has long defined Keller in the public mind as a symbol of courage in the face of overwhelming odds.  

Going with the Flow: Neoliberalism and Cultural Policy in Manitoba and Saskatchewan

By M. Sharon Jeannotte
University of Ottawa
Canadian Journal of Communication Vol 35 (2010) 303-324

This article examines the impact that the neoliberal “tide” of the 1980s and 1990s has had on cultural policies in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. It analyzes these developments in the context of the dominant political ideology that preceded neoliberalism in these provinces—social democracy. In Manitoba neoliberalism has been tempered by tensions between the centre and the hinterland, while in Saskatchewan it has been mitigated by tensions between the professional and community-based cultural organizations. Decisionmakers
have “gone with the neoliberal flow” in some respects, but have had to balance this with the traditional forces that have shaped cultural policy during the past 50 years.

Introduction

One of the favourite nostrums of the neoliberal movement is that “a rising tide floats all boats”—in other words, that privatization, deregulation, lower taxation, lower inflation, free trade, and cuts to the Keynesian welfare state will yield economic benefits for everyone in a society. the ideological “tide” of neoliberalism that has swept over most of the developed world in the past two decades has had a profound impact on public policies, even if the effects of “trickle down” economics remain in dispute.1 Most jurisdictions have made significant changes to their administrative machinery to accommodate this ideological shift, including increased use of public/private partnerships, more support for measures intended to harness market forces, more contracting out of government services, and more emphasis on self-help instead of reliance on government services.

Read more HERE. (pdf)

Norman Bethune: Gravenhurst a mecca for Chinese tourists paying homage to Canadian hero

By Jennifer Pagliaro 
Toronto Sun
July 11, 2012

JENNIFER PAGLIARO/TORONTO STAR Parks Canada tour guide Kun Zhang demonstrates how visitors can pose with a cutout of a popular photo of legendary Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune. Zhang said parents who hope the picture will bring good luck for children they hope will become doctors too. 

GRAVENHURST, ONT.—Hongxia Guo enters the historic yellow-clapboard homestead as if she is simply coming home.

In the front hall, the 43-year-old native of China who now lives in Mississauga pays a small fee for each of the guests she’s ferried here, before being ushered into the parlour where legendary Canadian surgeon Dr. Norman Bethune spent the first three years of his life.

In the heart of cottage country, where Muskoka chairs adorn every dock, thousands of Chinese nationals are making a pilgrimage to the birthplace of a man who they call doctor, martyr, friend.

A delegation from China will join Canadian officials on Wednesday — declared Bethune Day — for the grand opening of a new visitor centre at the site of the Bethune Memorial House.