Are Albertans getting a fair royalty rate for the resources we own?

It’s a reasonable question and one that has dogged Ed Stelmach since 2007 when he “initiated a public review of the province’s royalty and tax regime to ensure Albertans are receiving a fair share from energy development through royalties, taxes and fees.”

An important reason why Ed seems to be hated by much of Calgary’s oil and gas sector is the conventional wisdom (a.k.a. convenient myth, for some opportunists) that this royalty review drove away investment from the province and is primarily responsible for our continued economic woes.  The real blow to Alberta’s “one sector economy” occurred not long after the review when the global market for oil became extremely volatile and the price fell from $142 to $34 abarrel as the global finance industry melted down in the fall of 2008. The price eventually stabilized around $65-75 after the stock market began to recover last March.

It was unlucky political timing for a new Premier having difficulty articulating a vision for Alberta’s future, but even worse for the thousands of Albertans that lost their jobs as a result.

Brent barrel petroleum spot prices, May 1987 – March 2009

Last year’s tough economic times affected Alberta’s entire economy and this year’s $4.7 billion deficit is strong evidence that these circumstances endure. But even with the price volatility ushered in by the greatest financial collapse in 70 years, the question of whether Albertans are getting their fair share for the resources we own remains a reasonable, albeit limiting, one. I would prefer to see us asking how our government can act as more responsible and effective steward of our natural resources, our climate and Alberta’s environment. We also need to look at how to reduce the province’s ridiculous over-reliance on variable resource revenues and make large strategic investments to our post-secondary education system to help diversify our economy, (the exact opposite approach of the 2.7 per cent cut we saw in budget 2010).

Bearing all this in mind, yesterday the Edmonton Journal reported that:

Alberta least competitive in oil and gas: U of C report

EDMONTON — Alberta is dead last in terms of competitiveness for oil and gas development and should drop its current royalty regime, says a University of Calgary professor.

Jack Mintz, director of the School for Public Policy, ranked five provinces plus Texas for the ability of their tax and royalty structures to attract investment, and found Alberta’s current royalty regime “creates a burden on investment that is twice as high on oil and gas” compared with other sectors in the economy.

Interesting findings. Here’s the PDF.

Although the comment is now removed from edmontonjournal.com website, the following was pasted from a Forbes.com database of board of directors’ compensation disclosed by publicly traded companies:

Director Imperial Oil

57 Years Old

Jack M. Mintz, Palmer Chair in Public Policy for the University of Calgary. President and chief executive officer, The C.D. Howe Institute (public policy institute) and professor, Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

Director Compensation (Imperial Oil) for 2008

Fees earned or paid in cash	$69,000.00
Stock awards	$138,200.00
Option awards (in $)	$0.00
Non-equity incentive plan compensation	$0.00
Change in pension value and nondisqualified compensation earnings	$0.00
All other compensation	$0.00
Total Compensation	$207,200.00

Serving on Imperial Oil’s board of directors, Mr. Mintz has a direct financial stake in the success of a subsidiary of the largest oil company in the world that just happens to have billions invested in projects in Alberta.

The introduction to Jack Mintz’s research states that:

it is crucial to know just how much government tax and royalty policies affect the investment decisions the oil and gas industry makes relative to those of other sectors of the economy.”

If the conflict of interest couldn’t be more glaringly obvious, look no further than imperialoil.ca where you find them crowing: Imperial Oil Foundation gives $1 million to the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.

Ridicule is the only appropriate response to this mockery of “public policy research. ”

For the record, I agree it is important to ask how much do “government tax and royalty policies affect the investment decisions the oil and gas industry?”

Without independently funded studies, free of direct financial conflicts of interest on the part of the researcher and the university department undertaking the study, I have little faith in our ability to get a straight answer to this important question… which is another compelling reason for the government to properly fund our post-secondary researchers.

The Journal took some flack on this in the comments for churning out a preliminary story on this naked and seemingly effective, attempt to grab headlines. There are 70 (AHHH!!!) related articles and it looks like most are  churnalism.

Ok. Deep breath.

Can we please all work together and put in a little more effort to ensure that we aren’t being spoon fed bullshit?

K thx.

Barbara Ehrenreich has a PhD in cell biology, a 40 year career as an activist and an incredibly impressive curriculum vitae as an academic, journalist and writer. Listening to several interviews promoting her new book, including this appearance on The Daily Show, we hear the incredibly griping story of how her battle with breast cancer illuminated the immense problems with the ‘power of positive thinking’-fueled self help industry and the effects of an ideology Jon Stewart calls a “secular religion” on our society.

On one such interview on CBC’s The Current, Ehrenreich explained how the positive thinking ideology infiltrated corporate culture and contributed to the 2008 financial collapse:

Anna Maria Tremonti:

So what are the consequences for a world full of people who believe that everything you decide is true, is true ?

Barbara Ehrenreich:

I think we saw the consequence in 2008 when the huge financial meltdown happened. Because what I got very interested in tracing in this book is how is positive thinking became the corporate culture; how it infiltrated the corporate culture through the motivational speakers who were brought in, through the many many books, motivational books …

It really grew: in the middle of this decade you could be fired for being a negative person.

That meant if if you said, “hey, I’m worried our bank has too much sub-prime [mortgage market] exposure,” [they would say] “hey, that’s negative that’s a downer. Let’s get rid of this person.”

…we created  – around this positive thinking – a workplace culture  where the idea is not to get a job done, so much as it is to flatter and reassure the boss. Just say good things. Never be the bearer of bad news. Never raise a question or a doubt.

Sound familiar?

AMT:

What’s so bad about feeling bad?

BE:

Well, this is an ideology, what can I say? It is an ideology that says everyone should be cheerful and smiley at all times. And if you want to, you can think of it as a brilliant form of social control. If you tell people who are suffering from one thing or another, illness or layoffs or whatever, that they’re really supposed to be happy about it, and that the solution is in their minds anyway, you don’t get a lot of social protest.

Listen to the whole interview: [MP3]

Barbara also blogs at ehrenreich.blogs.com

I leave you with her answer to Jon Stewart’s question about ends vs. means: “I never think delusion is OK.”

I was inspired to sign up and write a post on climate change for Blog Action Day 2009 after reading Alex Abboud’s excellent post entitled “Embracing Post-Modernism.”

My first consideration of the risks of resource depletion, overpopulation and the need for long term thinking and sustainable practices was over a decade ago in grade 10 high school science class. The problem seemed almost as intuitive, even obvious, as it is today.  But for a middle-class 16 year-old eager to begin driving a car, while living in a resource laden country, the problems never seemed as tangible as they are today.

Looking back, it was as clear then as it is now that exponential  population growth in conjunction with an increasing,  resource gobbling,  standard living were leading us down a dangerous road. Advances in technology, medicine and even in social system systems -  the ascendancy of globalized capitalism and its recent failure, for example – are leading us ever closer to a precipice where tough decisions are necessary.

Some are even likening the willful blindness towards living within our means, or more accurately the lack of action taken to rectify our recent collective awakening to accelerating climate degradation, to a massive global ponzi scheme.

I worry most about the cost of inaction, of maintaining the status quo, given the huge uncertainties and potentially destabilizing global security risks we’re all facing as a result of anthropogenic climate change, which is only one of the environmental threats to our continued security and prosperity.

Last night I heard the latest news in what seems to be a perpetual parade of disconcerting stories about the rapid changes in our climate. CBC is reporting that climate researchers now believe we will have ice free summers at the North Pole in only 10 years.  This will have enormous consequences.

So what can we do?

For starters, myopic sloganeering about “local food” as the panacea for addressing climate change is not the magic cure all some make it out to be – though I wish it were.

I recognize that the growing chasm being awareness and action is the real issue here. Most people now accept that climate change is happening and that it is a major problem but few people seem to have changed their behaviour and lifestyles to minimize their impact. As a human being, I am not without fault here either, but I am trying.

So I agree that lifestyle changes are important. When aggregated they can really make an enormous difference. However,  much of the massive change needed to address our climate bankruptcy can only come from new rules, laws and policies on a systemic level.  To put it another way: this is a problem that governments at all levels, from around the world, must immediately work together to address.

A new age of cooperation is required. Right now. Will the COP15 United Nations climate change conference this December be the turning point?

For the sake future generations, let’s all hope so.

In a prematurely administered autopsy of the ‘death of conservatism’, Bill Moyers’ Friday interview with Sam Tanenhaus, (the Editor of the New York Times Book Review and the Week in Review section) dissected the motivations and ideology of the “revanchist” anti-Obama birther/teabaggers and the movement against health care reform.

It should come as little surprise that a protest movement attempting to paint Obama as “a basic pastiche of right-wing hobgoblins” is fraught with internal contradiction. Reports of anti-government, anti-tax protesters complaining about the ineffectiveness of public transit service aside,  anti-government protesters demanding that government not touch the effective government program they depend on, Medicare, tend to elicit the most laughter.

(via lookatthisfuckingteabagger)

In a interesting interpretation of the thought (or lack there of) behind these strange messages, Tanenhaus conjures up an articulation of the deep-seeded, nearly unconscious visceral distrust of the dependency created by the patron/client relationship  between the citizens and the state, unleashed by by the  Johnson Administration’s “Great Society” legislative agenda (where, it should be noted, Bill Moyers served in a variety of roles including LBJ’s White House Press Secretary):

BILL MOYERS: There’s a paradox there, right? I mean, they say they’re against government and yet the majority of Americans, according to all the polls, don’t want their government touched. You know, there were people at these town hall meetings this summer, saying “Don’t touch my Medicare.” You know, keep the government out of my Social Security.

SAM TANENHAUS: Yes. This is an interesting argument. Because it’s very easy to mock, and we see this a lot. “Oh, these fools. These old codgers say the government won’t take my Medicare away. Don’t know Medicare is a government program?” That’s not really what’s going on, I think. I think there’s something different. A sense about how both the left and the right grew skeptical of Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson, and the argument was everyone was becoming a kind of client or ward of the state. That we’ve become a nation of patron/client relationships. And a colleague of yours, Richard Goodwin, very brilliant political thinker, in 1967 warned, “We all expect too much from government.” We expect it to create all the jobs. We expect it to rescue the economy. To fight the wars. To give us a good life”. So, when people say, “Don’t take my Medicare away,” what they really mean is, “We’re entirely dependent on this government and we’re afraid they’ll take one thing away that we’ve gotten used to and replace it with something that won’t be so good. And there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re powerless before the very guardian that protects us.“

Certainly this revelation does not explain the totality of the situation in the United States, but I think it does offer a nuance often missed in similar attempts to delineate conservative ideology.

Tenenhaus’ comments on the dominance of theater and show in American politics are also worth the look: download the podcast of Friday’s Bill Moyers Journal interview with Sam Tanenhaus.

While on one of my many bike rides of late (apologies for neglecting this blog in the summer!), I listened to this great interview with Robert Kenner on Food Inc., his documentary that opened in Calgary this weekend.

On the Media is one of my favourite podcasts. I never miss an episode. Ever.

So it did not surprise me at all that they followed the Kenner interview by unearthing some excellent background on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to provide some context on the history of the muckracking  exposé versus the food industry.

Over 100 years later, we still exert too little control (or even thought) about what we eat. Myself included. But I hope we can change that.

I will be watching Food Inc. this week as it plays at The Uptown here in Calgary. (Showing: Nightly: 4:50, 7:00, 9:00 & Sat-Sun: 2:20, 4:50, 7:00, 9:00)

Today we learned that one of the primary purposes of the systemic torturing of prisoners by US defense and intelligence officials was to try to establish the non-existent link between Iraq and al-Qaida, thereby justifying the illegal 2003  invasion of Iraq after the fact. McClatchy reports:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003.

It really comes as no surprise that the neoconservatives in the Bush-Cheney administration, not content to merely tell the public lies, actually sought to create “evidence” through the use of torture; The poverty of their underlying philosophy actually promotes a bastardized version of the Platonic “noble lie.” But it seems that they’ve taken it to new extremes.

Andrew Sullivan captures this furious state of reality-denial (and “reality” creation) with respect to the use of torture in the term “imaginationland” he coined in 2007:

Torture gives false information. And the worst scenarios that tortured detainees coughed up – many of them completely innocent, remember – may well have come to fuel US national security policy. And of course they also fueled more torture. Because once you hear of the existential plots confessed by one tortured prisoner, you need to torture more prisoners to get at the real truth. We do not know what actual intelligence they were getting, and Cheney has ensured that we will never know. But it is perfectly conceivable that the torture regime – combined with panic and paranoia – created an imaginationland of untruth and half-truth that has guided US policy for this entire ["War on Terror"]**.

**(or should I now call it the “overseas contingency operation” -AMcIntyre)

In light of today’s news Sullivan explained the point even more clearly now that we are finally past the Bush-Cheney nightmare:

It ended, as all regimes bent on total power always end, with torture. Why? Because reality may differ from ideology; and when it does, it is vital to create reality to support ideology. And so torture creates reality by coercing “facts” from broken bodies and minds.

This is how torture is always a fantastic temptation for those in power: it provides a way for them to coerce reality into the shape they desire. This is also why it is so uniquely dangerous. Because it creates a closed circle of untruth, which is then used to justify more torture, which generates more “truth.”

The release of the information in the McClatchy article, and the ongoing uncovering of the details of the torture tactics, are provoking intense discussion around the Orwellian term “enhanced interrogation techniques” and other politically loaded terms like the “War on Terror.”  Yet, I sat with jaw hanging as I watched even the ultra-conservative Fox News check much of its own typical newspeak at the door in this discussion: 

To be “Fair and Balanced” I should provide some real context for this conversation:

Judith Miller is the former New York Times reporter who broke one of the key stories in the lead up to the illegal American invasion of Iraq called “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts” which was widely criticized as shoddy reporting. Further to that, in 2005 Miller again cherry picked information from the same nefarious network of neoconservative Bush admin. sources when she wrote a piece outing the identity of Valerie Plame, a former covert CIA agent whose husband happened to call B.S. on an attempt to tie Nigerian “yellow cake” uranium to Saddam Hussein.   

Clifford May is the president of a thintank called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.  His defense of torture, even if he believes it to be “near-torture” fundamentally violates one of his own foundation’s tenants: “No one should be denied basic human rights, including minority rights, women’s rights, and religious freedom.” How ironic that Mr. May doesn’t seem to grasp that governments in democracies that flirt with torture, much less embrace it whole heartedly in their policies, are a much larger danger to their democratic values than ANY external threat could ever be. 

In spite of this typical Fox News non-disclosure and beltway-media-insider asshattery, when Mr. May asks Judith Miller this question at 5:30 “Judy… Is putting someone in a small … confinement with a caterpillar torture?” it instantly made me recall one of the most terrifying scenes in Orwell’s 1984 where Winston’s captors subject him to his worst fear: Rats. 

“But for everyone there is something unendurable — something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to.” 

Only by conjuring up his worst nightmares and placing him in a specialized tiny torture cage full of “old scaly grandfather[s] of the sewers” could they finally break Winston and make him hollow inside. 

With the long list of torture techniques the US had at its disposal, and the consistent involvement of psychologists and “doctors without morals” in the process, you be the judge as to the Bush administration’s intentions and their  ability to realize the worst fears of Muslim detainees: 

Waterboarding: simulated drowning. al-Qaida no. 2 KSM was waterboarded 183 times in one month. 

Walling: slamming prisoners into a flexible wall

Sleep deprivation: the CIA was ­authorised to deny detainees sleep for up to 180 hours.

Forced nudity: often in the presence of female guards to exaggerate the feelings of discomfort. 

Cramped confinement: placing detainees in uncomfortably small containers or boxes. 

Insect in confinement: placing detainees in a tiny box and introducing an insect

Repeated slaps: repeated slapping of detainees in the face and body

Water dousing: continual dousing of detainees with cold water

Food deprivation: slowly starving detainees by limiting them to a diet of 1000 calories a day. 

Just in case  Clifford May has forgotten Orwell’s dire warning about unchecked power in his mindless defense of torture in the name of democracy: 

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

Yet, in a supposed democratic system of government that respects human rights, no matter how great the perceived threat and no matter how supposedly “effective” the techniques are, torture is never justified under any circumstances. The end never justifies the screams.

UPDATED: 4:21 PM April 23, 2009: This sad yet powerful song via Rob Hyndman (@rhh)

Fox News needs to die in a grease fire.

Reading News Corpse seems to calm me down.