“The essential principle of property … cannot apply to what is not the produce of labour, the raw material of the earth. … it would be the height of injustice,
to let the gift of nature be engrossed by individuals.”
— John Stuart Mill Principles of Political Economy 1848 (bk2, ch2, §5: pp. 229-30)
“a network under the control of an adversary
is possibly the most obstructive computer which one could build.
It may give answers which are subtly and maliciously wrong
at the most inconvenient possible moment.”
— Anderson & Needham “Programming Satan’s computer” 1995 (pp. 435-36)
DESPITE A CENTURY OF PRETENSES recently discarded over Ukraine and Gaza, we never stopped living in an imperial world. The lawless game of thrones played by sociopathic rentiers, bankers, and their mandarins never ceased, and now approaches terminus. Neither the League of Nations, nor the United Nations prevented international relations from remaining a brutal competition for the control of gold, silver, and oil as the collateral with which empires project economic and military power. Humanity’s collective fate now dangles between ecocide or the establishment of a regime of law and resource conservation within the bounds of which a liveable planet could still be salvaged.
It is unfortunate — but a fact, nonetheless — that Canadians never achieved sovereignty. Instead, colonial deed to Canada was quietly passed from Britain to the United States while the Nazis were still being lured into attacking Soviet Russia. Later consented to by the USSR’s Joseph Stalin in a “concealed understanding” (Schlesinger Act of Creation Westview 2003p. 61) at 1945’s Yalta Conference, American control of Alberta’s oil is now set to kill us all. Survival is always a matter of time. Our colonial rulers have plotted a course to doom that can only be avoided by piercing many illusions and “acting like owners” before too late.
The clandestine subjugation of Canada and the eventual financialization of 175 billion barrels of Alberta bitumen are imperialism’s all-time greatest ‘achievements.’ It was the fruit of more than a century of public relations and political warfare, largely waged through the Odd Fellows and Round Table groups — semi-secret societies and proto-intelligence agencies that did much of the skullduggery for Anglo-American colonialism. The imperial quest to operationalize oil reserves as legal collateral to print new money required the US to sneak its Canadian colonies past the United Nations Charter, but American success in that meant Canada eventually adopted a curious regulatory and banking model to facilitate the greatest crime ever conceived: the fraudulent financialization of enough carbon to end civilization.
Imperialism ≠ Picnic
Imperialism is no joke. Within five years of securing the right to tax locals in 1765, the avarice of East India Company officials killed ten million Bengalis — one-third of the local population. Adjustments obviously needed to be made to the British brand of snatching golden eggs from its Indian goose — but it was not so much the level that was changed, more the method. Instead of literally taxing the poor to death, the infamous British ‘Bill of Goods’ financed a still crippling scale of theft (~30% of India’s annual national budget) by paying for what the Brits stole with Indians’ own recently paid taxes. Such cleverness at taking gratis may have helped hide the scale and brutality of imperialism, but scarcely diminished it.
In 1900, per capita food grain availability in India was 200kg, and in 1911, life expectancy under the British Raj was 22 years. And yet, the British boot on India’s neck would grow heavier: food grain availability fell another 20 per cent by WWII and was just 137kg/year by the time Britain finally retreated from India. Economist Utsa Patnaik notes that “No country in the world today, not even the least developed, is anywhere near the position India was in 1946.” (Patnaik 2018a+b) India’s golden goose was plucked clean before the British boot finally lifted for partition in August 1947.
These are the horrors from which Americans fled to sovereignty in 1776, just six years after Britain’s first Bengali famine. Britain would immediately set its sights on reuniting its white empire with Washington, but in the meantime, the British Bill of Goods Bezzle[*] is estimated by Patnaik to have drained the current equivalent of $45 trillion dollars from India by 1938. (Britain’s annual GDP is currently ~$3 trillion.) Almost all of us have all been educated by imperialists, so this sort of history is not taught: not a single word on Britain stealing India’s entire export surplus for 180 years can be found in the two-volume Cambridge Economic History of India.
But the lessons must have been clear enough to British imperialism’s aspiring contemporaries. The American cry for freedom, after all, was not merely defensive. Sovereignty was also an opportunity for the US to monopolize the fruits of their own imperialism in ‘their’ hemisphere. And American territorial ambitions always included Canada.
The spirit of conquest was a powerful force in the American Revolution, ‘and it took about a century thereafter to satisfy the territorial ambitions of the United States.’ (Van Alstyne 1960p. vii) Thomas Jefferson described the American confederacy as “the nest, from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled.” It was just as well, Jefferson felt, that the continent should be in the hands of the Spanish and English thrones until “our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece.” The British were not averse to the American project in the western hemisphere and set in motion a complementary plan the moment Napoleon’s France was finally vanquished.
Monroe Doctrine Was About Collateral
The week before Napoleon invaded Russia in the summer of 1812, the United States brazenly declared war on Britain — chalking up their first defeat of London’s imperial navy on August 19th 1812 (an anniversary often invoked in subsequent Anglo-American transfers). Within days of European powers signing the Treaty of Ghent enforcing a hard peace on the French empire, a British secret society for reuniting its empire with Washington was introduced into Halifax, Nova Scotia — Canada and its eventual oilfields in Alberta were London’s colonial bait for luring Washington back into alliance.
Within a couple of years, Britain’s Independent Order of Odd Fellows took root in Baltimore, Maryland. From there, the Americanized Odd Fellows were reintroduced into Montréal in 1843. And from then, the Odd Fellows very quickly spread across Canadian high society and then the frontier — founding towns and laying claim to natural resources. And therein lay the real reason for the United States announcing the Monroe Doctrine in 1823: collateral.
In 1821, Britain had established an international financial regime that limited a state’s capacity to print new money. The International Gold Standard was ‘a policy whereby upstanding governments demonstrated their fiscal and monetary rigor by linking their currencies to their holdings of precious metals, both domestically and in colonies.’ (Mattei The Capital Order UofChicago 2022p. 7) That naturally gave a gigantic advantage to Britain’s all-time biggest empire. But the US was not about to allow the British a free hand in the America’s hemisphere, what with so much buried treasure/collateral yet to be dug up/financialized.
While formulating the thinking that led to the Monroe Doctrine, John Quincy Adams declared it among the laws of nature that “our proper dominion” was “the continent of North America.” The British crown evidently agreed. As would be repeated a century later in concert with the US again when farmers tried to conserve Alberta’s oil, the British crown invoked its pre-democracy Reserve Powers to disallow legislation to protect Canadians from the Anglo-American conspiracy:
anti-secret society agitation, which had commenced in the United States, in 1826, had reached Canada as well; and a bill had been introduced in the Provincial Parliament with a view to suppress all such organizations. The Odd Fellows endeavored to secure the exemption of their Order from the provisions of the bill … The bill, however, passed, but was disallowed by the British Government. (Odd Fellowship 1897pp. 425-26)
Quiet Quest to Collateralize Oil
In 1834, the world’s first recorded purchase of a property for its oil reserves took place in Ontario, and eight years later, brothers John and William Hardy were initiated into the Independent Order of Odd Fellows out west and in New York before implanting the Americanized IOOF in Montréal. ‘These two brethren deserve all the honor that can be accorded them as the fathers of Canadian Odd Fellowship. As far as can be learned, they were the only Odd Fellows in Montreal’ in 1843, according to the society’s official history. The IOOF ‘occupied the position of the leading social club of the time, in which many of the principal men of the provinces held membership. … These were leading statesmen, members of Parliament, prominent merchants and manufacturers, — the very élite of Canadian society.’
The Odd Fellows help explain how Imperial Oil (a collective of local Ontario producers organized to keep the tentacles of the Rockefeller octopus out of Canada) secretly fell to the Standard Trust by the spring of 1898. ‘The Liberals in Canada systematically dismantled the protectionist measures that had shielded Imperial from the Americans’, according to business historian Graham Taylor’s Imperial Standard: ‘Imperial shareholders would receive … a remarkably generous takeover (… a dividend of $93,000[†] …), which prevented many lawsuits from outsiders and criticism from the Canadian press. As usual, Standard had achieved its objective secretly.’ Six months after the Americans gained control over Canadian oil, Britain brought in the first oil and gas regulations — but most of the oil soon to be ‘discovered’ in Alberta was still not available for lease and development was only allowed south of Calgary.
The Odd Fellow conspiracy also explains why newborn Ernest Manning’s father purchased a quarter section near Rosetown in 1909 for the modern equivalent of $170. (Brennan The Good Steward 5th House 2008pp. 1-2) The Manning homestead in the Bad Hills district of western Saskatchewan was purchased sight-unseen, but ~equidistance between the eventual highways to Calgary and Edmonton in oil-rich neighbouring Alberta. In 1905, the British Admiralty had secretly acknowledged significant potential oil developments north of Calgary, near Edmonton and Fort McMurray. Within months, Parliament created the province of Alberta and a comprador Liberal premier installed.
But the imperial scheme to financialize Alberta’s oil ran into its first major obstacle in the summer of 1921, when Henry Wise Woods’ United Farmers defeated the provincial Liberals. Before the election year was over, however, Calgary Petroleum re-formed as Royalite Oil — with the Rockefellers’ Imperial Oil being the majority shareholder. The Rockefellers’ PR and political warfare against Alberta farmers would culminate in a Royalite director becoming prime minister the five years preceding in the US installation of Ernest Manning in 1935.
Manning’s Comprador Cap
By the next autumn after the United Farmers’ election, Ernie, the fourteen-year-old future premier had supposedly earned enough helping out during harvest to purchase a 30-ft radio tower that cost ten times as much as their Bad Hills quarter-section. His curious purchase enabled the supposedly life-changing experience of hearing a self-taught bible scholar, high school principal, and Calgary radio evangelist William “Bible Bill” Aberhart. By the age of eighteen, Ernest convinced Bible Bill to start a religious college, for which the current equivalent of a million dollars was swiftly raised in 1927, and where Ernest was its first student, rooming with the Aberhart family by his second year and eventually becoming known as Bible Bill’s “Echo” on depression-era radio.
By his mid-twenties, Manning had convinced Bible Bill to found a political party based on social credit theory (which they did not believe in/understand, but which shares much in common with Modern Monetary Theory). Bill & Ernie’s promise to create a provincial ‘bank’ to print the modern equivalent of $500/month for every Albertan during the Great Depression proved a winning strategy, and Manning became the youngest cabinet minister in the British empire with August 22nd 1935’s provincial election. His authoritarian ‘social credit’ party would facilitate the American plunder of Alberta until 1971, with Ernest Manning serving a quarter century as premier after Aberhart’s unexplained death in the spring of 1943.
In 1938, Alberta’s new oil and gas regulator was run by a Texan recommended by Washington to the American Manning installed the province’s minister for oil and gas, Nathan Tanner. And on November 22nd 1938, section 44 of Manning’s new ‘Conservation’ Act placed American oilmen above the law; section 46 ensured the American polluter would never pay. A decade later, now-premier Manning further clarified Sections 44 & 46 by promising (in Cabinet orders & an out-of-court settlement) to never collect more than 1/6th of Alberta’s oil and gas revenue & to never make the polluter pay. (Breen 1993p. 280) Despite all that has come to pass in the decades since, Ernest Manning’s “Comprador Cap” remains in place and cleanup is still on the to-do-list decades after the main oilfields have been depleted:
Yellow Brick Road to Ruin
When trying to wrap one’s head around the scale of imperial conspiracy necessary to impose these irrational limits on the ownership of Albertans’ resources, it helps to appreciate the depravity of the yellow press so essential to modern imperialism — a century ago and today. The same year Canada’s longest serving prime minister William Lyons Mackenzie King was first installed as Liberal leader, Upton Sinclair self-published The Brass Check in 1919 about the brand of journalism Ivey Lee and Mackenzie King cultivated for the Rockefellers:
What is the Brass Check? The Brass Check is found in your pay-envelope every week — you who write and print and distribute our newspapers and magazines. The Brass Check is the price of your shame — you who take the fair body of truth and sell it in the market-place, who betray the virgin hopes of mankind into the loathsome brothel of Big Business. (Sinclair 1919p. 436)
Mackenzie King didn’t just run Canada for most of the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s, he was also an under-appreciated innovator in public relations (Hallahan 2003p. 411) and a traitorous American agent who cashed a few brass cheques himself.[‡]
Yellow journalism and correlated yellow scholarship have been essential elements in another underappreciated dimension of imperial success over the last century: the power to forget. (The insightful study of which is now called Agnotology.) Yellow reporters and historians are essential to how we got and have forgotten that one Canada’s richest men and a Rockefeller executive in Calgary became prime minister in Mackenzie King’s brief stead (1930-35) and that R.B. Bennett also created the Bank of Canada and what became the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Piss-yellow journalism — often up to 4 pages/day — in the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald played a major role in the Americans defeating Alberta’s United Farmers in August 1935. (Savage-Hughes & Taras 1992pp. 200-1)
As reward, and in anticipation of looming annexation, dozens of Alberta newspapers received in the spring of 1938 the only Pulitzer ‘prizes’ ever given outside the US. The PR stunt was broadcast nationally on CBC radio and hosted by a Canadian Supreme Court Justice and the dean of America’s most prestigious journalism school. Quisling Mackenzie King invited Emperor Franklin D. Roosevelt north to announce Canada as part of the Monroe Doctrine August 18th 1938. The next summer, the British royal family toured Canada and the US for first time and, in summer of 1940, FDR returned WLMK’s favour. A phone call the day before invited the prime minister alone to Ogdensburg, New York, where 100,000 US troops were amassed on the border. After a sickeningly cordial evening with FDR and his secretary of war, Mackenzie King agreed to the 110-word Ogdensburg Treaty that Roosevelt jotted down after church the next morning. FDR downplayed the agreement to avoid requiring Senate approval, but Canada had just been transitioned from British colony to American protectorate. (Granatstein 1974p. 8)
(I dare anyone to read the front-few-pages’ coverage in the Globe & Mail and New York Times on August 19th 1938 and August 19th 1940 on a full stomach; I threw up in my mouth a little and recalling the coverage continues to leave me nauseous.)
In case anyone still had any illusions about what all this political warfare was really all about, the Ogdensburg Treaty was re-affirmed and re-signed February 12th 1947 — the day before the Rockefellers tapped Leduc #1 in front of a crowd of hundreds, launching Alberta’s modern oil industry with their hand on the spigot. Public relations & yellow journalism, together with political warfare & yellow scholarship, have operated in agnotological service to the American empire bezzling Alberta out of trillions in treasure and financial capacity. Our fate as a lucrative colony of the world’s violent and declining hegemon is certain doom unless we assert sovereignty like Premier Peter Lougheed and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau briefly achieved in the 1970s and 1980s.
Really-Existing Imperialism
Two common and related misconceptions about modern imperialism are that it is never aimed at western democracies and that the British crown’s ‘Reserve Powers’ over colonial governments have long-since fallen into disuse. Neither was ever really true, but especially not in the subsequent American age of imperialism. Understanding the foreign veto power of Anglo-American empire is essential to escaping our current entanglements with imperialism as it actually exists today.
Initially, the right to advise the Crown on the prerogatives of war and peace and “imperial concerns” was ‘kept in the hands of UK ministers.’ But as soon as the United Farmers were elected in Alberta in 1921, Field Marshal Jan Smuts & Secretary of State for the Colonies Leopold Amery considered it essential that colonial Governors-General should represent British crown, instead of Britain’s elected government. By 1926, an Imperial Conference was organized for quisling prime minister Mackenzie King to push the idea, and with the Statute of Westminster in 1931, royal prerogatives were delegated by the King to his Governor-Generals. (Valkoun 2020pp. 196-97; Commons Library 2023p. 33)
No one seems to have noticed or remarked publicly, but it is perfectly clear in hindsight that Britain reorganized its empire to keep Alberta farmers from conserving their oil. Sustained secrecy and imposed forgetting around that fact facilitated the later invocation of the same Reserve Powers in Australia a half-century later: On November 11th 1975, Anglo-American imperialism struck western democracy again, replacing the Australian government in what was also a stark warning for other uppity democracies like Canada under the likes of Lougheed and Trudeau. The subsequent piercing of royal secrecy around the Australian coup has ‘shattered claims of royal neutrality and non-involvement, revealing the intensely political nature of the [Governor-General’s] correspondence – none more so than on the existence and use of reserve powers; lingering colonial entanglements of the imperial aftermath mean the circumstances allowing 1975 coup remain unchanged today.’ (Hocking The Palace Papers Scribe 2020ch. 12)
Another big misconception about imperialism is that the world de-colonized after WWII. The actual history of the founding of the United Nations is not pretty. The Americans were keen to smuggle their imperial dowry of Canada past the UN Charter and all that decolonization hullaballoo. President Franklin Roosevelt had died two weeks before the UN’s founding conference opened in San Francisco in the spring of 1945, but a secret deal with Stalin at Yalta in February gave part of China and part of Japan in exchange for the USSR looking the other way about US trusteeship over former British possessions. Atomic brinksmanship and the war’s most vicious Allied bombing succeeded in establishing US colonies like Canada as “strategic trusts”, only answerable to the veto-able UN Security Council. A massive propaganda campaign sold the UN Charter (which preserved the Monroe Doctrine and America’s Strategic Trusts) to the US public. The new US President made a rare personal presentation to the Senate, requesting no pictures be taken and no microphones be permitted. Truman evidently convincing Senators they could have their UN cake and eat Canada too. (Schlesinger 1994+1995+2003) No wonder it took a half-century for someone to write about the sordid birth of the United Nations.
Modern Imperialism = White-Collar Crime
Another lesson of really-existing imperialism is that its bezzles are primarily financial. Replacing political leadership and independent regulators are means to increase looting, not ends in themselves. Whether political or regulatory, each Canadian coup has been swiftly followed by increased economic exploitation and resource concessions to Washington and Wall Street. Lop-sided trade agreements were repeatedly signed by Mackenzie King and cabinet orders from Manning’s comprador government gave away some of the greatest oilfields of all time. But even those trade ‘deals’ and billion-barrel fields were but appetizers for the greatest crime ever conceived: the fraudulent financialization of tens of trillions of dollars’ worth of carbon in northern Alberta. Enough carbon to kill us all, weaponized by fraudulent loans.
The financial fuse that finally lit Alberta’s bitumen bomb was the 2003 release of National Instrument 51-101: Standards of Disclosure for Oil and Gas Activities. By financializing 175 billion barrels of bitumen licenced gratis to above-the-law Americans by their quisling Manning, NI51-101 also let loose sub-prime mortgage predation in the United States. Bitumen was the collateral for trillions in predatory bad loans. Impossible!, you say — There’s no way trillions in US loans could be given out using Canadian oil reserves as collateral! Or is there?
Multi-trillion-dollar crimes require elaborate systems, developed piecemeal, under false pretenses, coalescing at the right time to pull off the bezzle. Conveniently, imperialists love anniversaries. That imperialists largely communicate by significant dates makes for a useful shorthand to track the evolution of their conspiracies. August 18th’s have already been noted a couple times for significant imperial events, which get reported on the Anglo-American anniversary of imperial transfer: August 19th 1812. Another key anniversary is the founding of the Odd Fellows’ Grand Lodge of British North America on January 19th 1847, which grew in its first year to include 22 lodges and almost 2,300 members.
When the British finally issued ordinance declaring Canadian oil and gas licensees had to be British subjects, the wink to the Rockefellers came with the law’s conspiratorial birthday: January 19th 1914. And it was January 19th 1942 that President Roosevelt approved the creation of an atomic bomb, beginning with creating the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory that same day. And after atomic blackmail secured the Anglo-American imperial transfer despite the UN Charter, it was January 19th 1951 that President Truman appointed a blue-ribbon Presidential Commission on Materials Policy to coordinate and optimize maximum looting across his now vast global empire.
Canada and Alberta did briefly escape complete US control under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (1968-84) and Premier Peter Lougheed (1971-85) but got swiftly re-integrated into American empire under the quislings that followed. Under prime minister Brian Mulroney (1984-93) and premier Don Getty (1985-92), some curious things began happening to Canadian banking. Established in July 1987, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) is ‘an independent federal government agency dedicated to fostering public confidence in the Canadian financial system.’ (Thompson 2024) Weeks later, ‘two officers from the Bank of Canada … presented for the first time a rough draft of how the central bank could manage … a monetary system without any reserves … [the two officers] must have managed to convince their superiors at the Bank of Canada that such a project was feasible, because it was gradually put in place. … Compulsory reserve requirements were progressively diminished, until they were fully phased out in June 1994.’ (Lavoie 2019pp. 2-3)
Notice the imperial crime there? Banks held presumably billions in reserves as cushions against bank runs until 1994, when someone put all that money in their pocket instead. Hint: It wasn’t Albertans that benefitted from this curious reform, unique in the world.
Concurrently with all these changes, chartered banks and their Canadian Payments Association agreed in 1992 to move towards a more modern electronic payment system … inspired, in part, by the Clearing House Interbank Payment System (CHIPS) operating in New York, and [Canada’s] present electronic large-value payment system [LVTS]… utilizes the CHIPS technology. Designs and discussions at the Bank [of Canada] took place in 1995 as to how monetary policy could be implemented through the LVTS. The LVTS itself was put in operation in February 1999.’ (Lavoie 2019p. 3)
Stolen Collateral For Bad Loans
When the Alberta Securities Commission produced a draft of NI 51-101 in the fall of 2002, ASC’s former chief accountant resigned. “I’m worried that if [the changes] go through that way I don’t want to be associated with it,” said Henry R. Lawrie. Oil and gas companies should be required to adhere to a much more stringent set of requirements before reserves can be booked as “proved”, he said. Those fears came true on the same day US marines pulled down Saddam’s statue in the Iraqi capital to complete the US occupation: April 9th 2003. That also happened to be the day the US government also formally recognized 175 billion more barrels of Alberta’s bitumen as “proven” for the first time. Six months later, implementation of NI 51-101 in Ontario conjured almost $9 trillion dollars in new legal collateral. In less than a year, the FBI was publicly warning of an “epidemic” of financial crimes that could become “the next S&L crisis.” (CNN 17/9/4) That was stolen Alberta collateral flooding America as its imperial troops held Iraqi production down and prices up to maximize Washington’s and Wall Street’s takings.
(Everyone always knew the crime of aggression against Iraq in 2003 was motivated by oil. Now you know how and why: Iraq was about maximizing the value of fraudulently financializing trillions’ worth of stolen Alberta bitumen. It was the culmination of America’s Bitumen Bezzle that began with the secret takeover of Imperial Oil in 1898. Trillions of dollars and world domination are worth waiting for.)
The summer before NI 51-101, personal liability for cleanup was lifted for Alberta oilpatch executives. Then, on the Rockefellers’ favorite anniversary, August 19th, it was reported that reclaimed wellsites in Alberta were no longer going to be inspected before being certified by Alberta ‘regulators’ – blindly releasing industry from liability and increasing the likelihood citizens will be saddled with the inevitable consequences. Financially speaking, Alberta oil was now as good as gold (and firmly in American grip). Without having to worry about royalties or cleanup, the billions of barrels of bitumen that Manning & Tanner gave away to the Americans for free has joined gold as the only liability-less assets. This has been of no small consequence to subsequent world events.
While comprador premier Don Getty was preparing Alberta for its full return to American clutches under quisling premier Ralph Klein, comprador prime minister Brian Mulroney was getting Canadian banks prepared for the American Bitumen Bezzle. In 1985, a new financial watchdog was being modelled on the US Securities Exchange Commission as an inquiry was revealing that Canadian banking regulation was the joke one would expect to find in a financial colony:
The inspector general of banks has virtually no legal means of forcing banks to comply with his wishes and relies instead on moral persuasion or “the wink and the nod” approach, says Donald Macpherson, assistant inspector general. … Macpherson said the country’s chief banking watchdog has only one statutory sanction at his disposal when he thinks a bank is indulging in unsafe or unsound practices. And that sanction itself is flawed, he said. …
“The Bank Act … doesn’t give us many real weapons to use. The one sanction authority we have now is the ability of the minister to direct the bank with respect to the level of its capital and the levels of its liquid assets. And that was put in the act in 1980. Prior to that, there had been nothing.” (Canadian Press 30 Oct`85)
Canada’s unexplained, unremarked, and unique banking system just happens to be ideal for concealing trillions in cross-border looting. Private clearing of bank transactions outside the Bank of Canada means there no double-entry bookkeeping in Canadian finance. At the end of Canada’s dalliance with sovereignty in the 1980s, the oil and gas and bitumen industries were borrowing ~$2 billion from Canadian banks. But by the end of Ralph Klein’s 1990s, new bitumen development raised that to ~$10 billion. And since the time NI 51-101 has been in full flight since the early 2000s, industry borrowing has consistently been in the $100 billion range. Quisling premier Jason Kenney dismantled the last of Alberta’s oilfield liability management regime before handing the keys to the province’s governing party to fellow Manning family protégé, Danielle Smith. Since, the quisling Smith has returned Alberta to full US colony status and industry borrowing increased 40% to $140 billion.
And that is the crime. The American Bitumen Bezzle does the British one better. Instead of using locals’ own taxes to finance foreign plunder like in India, the Americans use Canadian banks to create new money to be stolen before anyone misses it or understands where it came from. That is the greatest crime ever conceived, sitting there in front of our noses. When you lend money to foreigners to dig up your treasure, it is a direct colonial transfer because those loans are repaid from future production of local resources your foreign friends never paid for. Canadians repay industry’s loans with our own diminishing stock of carbon that can still be responsibly developed within climate limits. Last year, because Canada is a US colony, American shareholders and their Canadian accomplices increased their financial tribute 40%, stealing $140 billion in financial capacity from Canadian citizens even while climate change-related chaos accelerates. For Canadians and citizens everywhere else, the opportunity costs of American imperialism have grown existential. We can have the rule of law and genuine conservation, and live; or we can have US imperialism, and perish in service of squeezing out of humanity a few more days of American luxury before their chosen apocalypse.
Where We’re Headed
In an American colony, you only learn after-the-fact that your financial regulators have taken a few-year holiday from combatting money-laundering while Canadian banks lobbied for the same immunity their American counterparts enjoy. OSFI ended its oversight role in 2021. ‘In doing so, OSFI rescinded its guidance on deterring and detecting money laundering … and handed over its regulatory responsibilities …
OSFI’s decision to get out of financial crime compliance was bewildering because banks are among the most vulnerable businesses when it comes to both money laundering and terrorist financing, according to the federal government’s threat assessment. (G&M 7/6/24)
The American Bitumen Bezzle solves that bewildering puzzle. Imperialism, by very definition, defies any limits placed upon it, whether legal or moral. And so it is with avarice. However many trillions are extracted from Canadians, it will never be enough. Indeed, the predatory financial games are really taking flight under Jason Kenney’s and Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party and Justin Trudeau’s compradors-once-again federal Liberals:
several new private funds aimed at retail investors have launched in the past 18 months. … spurred by an easing of regulatory constraints … several Canadian fund managers … are now seizing upon … a limited understanding of alternative assets … Many new private market products mimic certain characteristics of a standard mutual fund … Although … there are still hurdles to clear, such as concerns over access to invested capital, valuation transparency and the potential for fraud. … There are also liquidity constraints to be aware of. Despite efforts to create “evergreen” funds in private assets, there can be temporary holds on redemptions and other terms that may lock a client’s capital up for a period of time. (G&M 3/6/24 +G&M 25/3/24)
The national newspaper of record’s senior business writer notes, ‘how easy it is for organized criminals to use anonymous shell corporations to access the banking system and launder illicit profits’. That is not an accident. It is an imperial crime that is also weaponizing enough carbon to kill us all. The emancipatory power of acting like owners and the public collecting trillions in resource rent remaining within a carbon budget could yet still save the world from doom. Imperial finance rigged with Alberta’s trillions in stolen collateral is what is wrong with the world today. A sovereign Canada could still fund transition, cleanup, and reparations; a US colony will not be allowed to protect Canadians or the climate. The hour is late, but not yet too late. And the choice to assert meaningful sovereignty and genuine conservation remain ours and ours alone.
[*] Economist ‘John Kenneth Galbraith used [“bezzle”] to describe a form of theft that comes with a time lag. In other words, you don’t know you’ve been robbed until much later. In his classic book, The Great Crash of 1929, he says, “Weeks, months or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery.” … Galbraith went on to note that during the period of the bezzle: “The embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.”’ (Bradley 2019)
[†] The Bank of Canada’s online inflation calculator only goes back to 1914, but a sense of the value to each shareholder in 1898 can be glimpsed by knowing that $93,000 in 1914 translates to ~$2.5 million today.
[‡] Mackenzie King was always available to John D. Rockefeller Jr., ‘yet he declined offers to become a permanent employee. … In 1919, King returned to his homeland and picked up the pieces of what had seemed a ruined political career. He was elected leader of the Liberal party, and in 1921 became Prime Minister of Canada, a position he would hold for all but five of the years until his retirement in 1948. As a token of his affection for King, Junior sent him a gift of $100,000 [~$1.4 million in 2024$] when he left the government and had the Rockefeller Foundation provide another [~$1.4M] to help King prepare his private papers and diaries for publication.’ (Collier & Horowitz 1976pp. 130-31n)
Nathan Tanner’s ‘ingenious’ approach to regulation ‘resulted from much consultation with American and British oil interests … In 1952, Tanner retired from the Alberta Social Credit government … then became the president of an oil company financed by Charles Merrill (of Merrill Lynch fame) … Tanner had met Charles Merrill while consulting with American oil industry leaders [in 1938].’ (Livingstone 2011p. 491)
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