Rogers and BCE to own pro sports in Toronto...both content and distribution...

By Tim Kiladze, Tara Perkins and Rita Trichur, Globe and Mail, December 9, 2011

BCE Inc. (BCE-T40.52-0.08-0.20%) and Rogers Communications Inc. (RCI.B-T36.59-0.36-0.97%) have struck a deal to buy 75 per cent of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, giving the telecommunications giants majority ownership over a lucrative sports empire with highly sought after television content.

Together, BCE and Rogers will take control of a franchise that produces some of Canada’s most-watched live sports programming. This content is one of the hottest commodities in broadcasting because advertisers are willing to pay top dollar when viewers are likely to sit through commercials.
The deal also gives the buyers control over both ends of the broadcasting spectrum, creating “the perfect marriage of content and distribution,” Rogers chief executive officer Nadir Mohamed said at a press conference on Friday.

Under the purchase agreement with Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, BCE and Rogers will buy 75 per cent of the company in a joint bid, splitting their ownership evenly. Larry Tanenbaum will also boost his stake from 20.5 per cent to 25 per cent, giving him ownership of the rest of the company.
The deal values MLSE, the parent of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Toronto Raptors, the Toronto FC soccer club and other assets, at just over $2-billion, including debt. Teachers’ 80 per cent stake is being sold for $1.32-billion.
That Teachers agreed to a sale came as a surprise. Just two weeks ago the pension fund publicly announced that its 80-per-cent stake in MLSE was no longer on the block because it did not receive bids that met its terms and conditions.
On Friday morning, Jane Rowe, senior vice-president of Teachers' Private Capital, noted that “less than a week later, we were unexpectedly approached with a new, unsolicited offer. It was comprehensive, it was firm, and it met all the terms and conditions that we considered necessary.”
Packaging and selling televised sport content over television, internet and cell phones is what this deal is all about.
It is certainly not about providing Toronto sports fans with winning teams, now that Rogers will own all professional sports franchises in Toronto, including the American League Blue Jays. Their recored on the baseball diamond has certainly not exceeded, or even matched minimum expectations of moderate patient and long-suffering fans. The Blue Jays won the World Series in both 1992 and 1993, and since have struggled even to make the first round of the post-season.
The NHL Maple Leafs have not won a Stanley Cup since 1967; the Toronto Raptors of the National Basketball Association have been in the first round of the play-offs only once or twice in their history.
This deal is about money, more mounds of money, generated by the predictable sale of both live hockey, basketball and baseball games, and secondarily, through the broadcast of these games.
One suspects that, if this deal had developed in a U.S. city, the anti-trust section of the competition laws in that country would require a federal panel to review and potentially to disallow such a single-ownership conglomerate of all the sports teams in a single market.
In Canada, under the current government, there is little or no reason to expect the Harper conservatives to intervene to block, or even to amend this proposed sale. After all, BCE (Bell Canada Enterprises) and Rogers are both, most likely, heavy contributors to the Conservative party coffers. Companies of the size of these two behemoths in the telecommunications sector make such contributions in order to be able to pull off such mega-deals with their mega-bucks, if and when the opportunity presents itself.
Now, if either the Liberals or the NDP were in power in Ottawa (I know, I dream!) and they were to facilitate a purchase, by making shares available to ordinary Canadians, in this, one of the most lucrative corporations in the country, that would be something to crow about. It just isn't going to happen. Professional sports franchises like the Green Bay Packers and the Saskatchewan Roughriders are only two public ownered franchises on the continent at the top professional level and that model is not going to have any traction in Ottawa.
In Toronto, the provincial Liberals are unlikely to even ask to intervene in the sale-puchase, even if there were a legal opening for such an intervention. The Toronto city council, under Mayor Ford, could conceivably be asked to pass a resolution of support for the deal, given the right-wing leanings of the chief executive.
High-tech, digital communications is riding a huge wave of both sales and investment dollars, and likely to continue to grow, at least among the few "big players" still remaining in the sector, for the conceivable future.
The Maple Leafs have been a season sell-out for decades; the Raptors cost and deliver much less, as the single pro-basketball team in the country. The Blue Jays, also the single pro-baseball team in Canada, are available for the few Canadians whose passion is the "field of dreams," and the several U.S. visitors who cross the border each year,and take in thei national sport on Canadian soil, although the players themselves come from the U.S. and the Dominican and other Caribbean islands.
Public addiction to the wireless world of digital communications, soon to be enhanced by "talking smart phones"...that can eliminate the need for keypads and 'typing'...will only grow, as will the profits of these mega-corporations, and they could care less whether or not the teams under their ownership win, lose or draw, so long as it takes a fleet of Brinks trucks to cart the cash to the various banks after each game that has been beamed into the living rooms, rec-rooms, bars and lounges across the country, over cable, internet and wireless cell phones.
Talk about another monopoly, or should we say monopsony and monopoly...with the owners owning both the content and the delivery systems of the highly lucrative sports entertainment business.
The history of these telecommunications companies in Canada is filled with evidence of profit-generating strategies and tactics that certainly have not favoured the Canadian consumer. We pay higher rates for our cell phones, for example, that do U.S. consumers. Our cable rates are higher as well. Our long distance rates have been no bargain and the market has not been opened to world competition, because of the strong lobby of the political connections and strategies of the players.
In fact, the CRTC, the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, a government appointed equivalent to the U.S. FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has demonstrated little or no muscle when hearing and granting both fee increases and market share to the Canadian giant in the field.
One wonders whether the NHL governors will see this sale/purchase as one that seeks and supports the long-term goals and aspirations of the league, and if it does not, whether they will intervene to block the sale.
Canadian sports fans clearly are not being considered in executing this deal, only the profits of the corporate players.

2012: Obama versus the "banksters"...on behalf of the 99%

By Chrystia Freeland, Globe and Mail, December 9, 2011
All the doubting Thomases who wondered whether Occupy Wall Street would have a lasting political impact got their answer this week in Osawatomie, Kan. That’s where President Barack Obama travelled to deliver a speech that is being billed as the mission statement for his 2012 re-election campaign.

He chose that town of fewer than 5,000 people, 80 kilometres southwest of Kansas City, for its historical resonance – it is where Theodore Roosevelt journeyed just over a century earlier to give his seminal “New Nationalism” address.

But Zuccotti Park in New York, the informal epicentre of the leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement, served as an equally important, albeit less explicit, inspiration. The movement’s accomplishment is to have legitimized discussion of rising income inequality in the United States – Mr. Obama described it as “the defining issue of our time.” That is a landmark declaration.
In recent decades, the participants in the national political discourse have been queasy about addressing issues of class and distribution directly. One of the intellectual victories of the Reagan Revolution was to make it feel practically un-American to talk about how the pie was divided. The culturally acceptable, win-win question to ask was how to make that pie grow.
Mr. Obama’s speech represents an important shift for another reason. As recently as last summer, when the headline battle was over the debt ceiling, the issue driving the political debate was government spending and how to cut it. But today, thanks in great part to Occupy Wall Street, talking explicitly about the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent is not just okay, it seems to be a way a man presiding over an economy with 8.6 per cent unemployment thinks he can be re-elected.
On the left, the preferred culprit for income inequality is political – the argument that the 1 per cent have amassed their fortunes by capturing the political process and thereby securing lower taxes and more favourable, generally weaker, regulation.
But as Mr. Obama sees it, the big drivers are the twin revolutions reshaping the world economy – globalization and new technology.
He compared the creative destruction of today’s economic transformation with the Industrial Revolution. The “massive inequality and exploitation” of that transformation spurred Roosevelt to action, just as income inequality today should be at the top of the national agenda.
Framing the woes of the 99 per cent as the consequence of a massive economic transformation was a brave political choice. Pinning it all on the banksters, as they were called by the left during the Great Depression, would make for more powerful rhetoric and delight the Democratic base. Moreover, the potential downside of alienating Wall Street is something this White House has done already.
But Mr. Obama’s speech understated two facts.
The first is the grim economic reality that the hollowing out of the U.S. middle class will be very hard to reverse. One reason the bankster explanation is so appealing is that it has a simple remedy – raise taxes and tighten regulation. But if you believe, as Mr. Obama does, that a larger and largely welcome economic transition is also at work, figuring out how to rescue its victims becomes a more daunting challenge.
To understand the scale of the problems the Western middle class faces, consider how it looked to Indian business leaders I recently spoke with in Mumbai. S. Gopalakrishnan, co-chairman of Infosys, the pioneering Indian outsourcing company, told me bluntly that the per-capita consumption of the Western middle class would have to decline as the developed and developing worlds “meet somewhere in the middle.”
The second consequence of Mr. Obama’s chosen explanation is political. As is his wont, he took great pains to unite rather than divide: “Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1 per cent values or 99 per cent values. They’re American values, and we have to reclaim them.”
But it might not be quite that easy. He shared the jaw-dropping facts that the average annual income of the top one-100th of the 1 per cent is $27-million, and that the typical CEO makes 110 times more than his typical worker. Mr. Obama wants to believe that “all will benefit” from the vision of America he articulated. But if the problem you are trying to fix is a winner-take-all society, it may take more than rousing rhetoric to persuade the winners to back your plan.
Banksters are attempting the winner-takes-all final victory in their own self-interest. Republicans and Tea Partiers, and Harper neo-cons in Canada are attempting to side with the 1%, or if they can, the top one-100th of the 1%.
The rest of us, finally, have a leader who knows and understands that his political future, and our's, are intimately and inextricably linked to a ballot box in November 2012.
Borrowing from the Occupy Movement, and from Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican President, as Obama has done so often, is not only historic and spirit-lifting. It makes perfect political sense.
Running against either Romney or Gingrich (and Calistta his wife, who has risen to the top of the pyramid of his campaign bosses) means that Obama will have to find more than a single bullet of both rhetoric and policy, as well as achievements, by which to bring an angry, disenchanted and disenfranchised electorate onside.
The Democrats have not been his strongest ally over the last three-plus years, with the Blue Democrats having abandoned his approach too many times. Their's has been a house divided, and the Republicans are hoping to seize on that with their united "against taxes and government" approach.
In a libertine country, where guns count more than votes, and dollars more than jobs, and narcissism more than agape or empathy or compassion, and conservative ideology trumps equality, this first black president has taken the gloves off, finally, in his campaign to "save the middle class" from complete extinction.
With Europe having drawn a new treaty, excluding Britain from the fiscal union that includes penalties for spending excesses, and with Obama's numbers dipping to even or below those of his Republican opponents, the world will be watching with more than mere academic interest in the waves of both rhetoric and passion that will sweep over the continent in the next eleven months.
And we will be watching with our self-interest at stake.
This election, unlike many others, is a watershed moment for the American people to push back against a tsunami of ideology that seeks to turn the wealthiest country in the world into a virtual and a literal "gated community" excluding hundreds of millions of ordinary, and mostly under-deployed, educated and under-utilized, professional and under-valued workers, both men and women trying to raise a family, send their kids to college and create a more equitable country, against the growing force, almost like gravity, of a "narcissistic monster" at the top.
We all know that the only ethical route is to defeat the "right" and to restore some balance.
We also know that money, and not ethics, plays too large a hand in this brink-like poker game.
And we are counting on Obama, and all the forces he can and will muster, to bring home the winning run, or the winning basket, or the winning touchdown in the last minutes of what will also be a highly explosive and entertaining piece of political theatre.
Would the Greeks of old not consider this fight for democracy one for the ages?

Apocalyptic thirst in North America's southwest? What does it mean for Canada?

By William deBuys, from truthdig.org   posted December 5, 2011   December 8, 2011
This article was produced and published by TomDispatch.
Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust, and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), biggest fire ever in New Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history (3,697,000 acres).
The fires were a function of drought. As of summer’s end, 2011 was the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat. It was the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.
Virtually every city in the region experienced unprecedented temperatures, with Phoenix, as usual, leading the march toward unlivability. This past summer, the so-called Valley of the Sun set a new record of 33 days when the mercury reached a shoe-melting 110º F or higher. (The previous record of 32 days was set in 2007.)
And here’s the bad news in a nutshell: if you live in the Southwest or just about anywhere in the American West, you or your children and grandchildren could soon enough be facing the Age of Thirst, which may also prove to be the greatest water crisis in the history of civilization. No kidding.
If that gets you down, here’s a little cheer-up note: the end is not yet nigh.
In fact, this year the weather elsewhere rode to the rescue, and the news for the Southwest was good where it really mattered. Since January, the biggest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead, backed up by the Hoover Dam and just 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas, has risen almost 40 feet. That lake is crucial when it comes to watering lawns or taking showers from Arizona to California. And the near 40-foot surge of extra water offered a significant upward nudge to the Southwest’s water reserves.
The Colorado River, which the reservoir impounds, supplies all or part of the water on which nearly 30 million people depend, most of them living downstream of Lake Mead in Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Tijuana, and scores of smaller communities in the United States and Mexico.
Back in 1999, the lake was full. Patricia Mulroy, who heads the water utility serving Las Vegas, rues the optimism of those bygone days. “We had a fifty-year, reliable water supply,” she says. “By 2002, we had no water supply. We were out. We were done. I swore to myself we’d never do that again.”
In 2000, the lake began to fall—like a boulder off a cliff, bouncing a couple of times on the way down. Its water level dropped a staggering 130 feet, stopping less than seven feet above the stage that would have triggered reductions in downstream deliveries. Then—and here’s the good news, just in case you were wondering—last winter, it snowed prodigiously up north in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.
The spring and summer run-off from those snowpacks brought enormous relief. It renewed what we in the Southwest like to call the Hydro-Illogic cycle: when drought comes, everybody wrings their hands and promises to institute needed reform, if only it would rain a little. Then the drought breaks or eases and we all return to business as usual, until the cycle comes around to drought again.

So don’t be fooled. One day, perhaps soon, Lake Mead will renew its downward plunge. That’s a certainty, the experts tell us. And here’s the thing: the next time, a sudden rescue by heavy snows in the northern Rockies might not come. If the snowpacks of the future are merely ordinary, let alone puny, then you’ll know that we really are entering a new age.
And climate change will be a major reason, but we’ll have done a good job of aiding and abetting it. The states of the so-called Lower Basin of the Colorado River—California, Arizona, and Nevada—have been living beyond their water means for years. Any departure from recent decades of hydrological abundance, even a return to long-term average flows in the Colorado River, would produce a painful reckoning for the Lower Basin states. And even worse is surely on the way.
Just think of the coming Age of Thirst in the American Southwest and West as a three-act tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions.
The Age of Thirst: Act I

The curtain in this play would surely rise on the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which divided the river’s water equally between the Upper and Lower Basins, allocating to each annually 7.5 million acre-feet, also known by its acronym “maf.” (An acre-foot suffices to support three or four families for a year.) Unfortunately, the architects of the compact, drawing on data from an anomalously wet historical period, assumed the river’s average annual flow to be about 17 maf per year. Based on reconstructions that now stretch back more than 1,000 years, the river’s long-term average is closer to 14.7 maf. Factor in evaporation from reservoirs (1.5 maf per year) and our treaty obligation to Mexico (another 1.5 maf), and the math doesn’t favor a water-guzzling society.
Nonetheless, the states of the Lower Basin have been taking their allotment as if nothing were wrong and consequently overdrafting their account by up to 1.3 maf annually. At this rate, even under unrealistically favorable scenarios, the Lower Basin will eventually drain Lake Mead and cutbacks will begin, possibly as soon as in the next few years. And then things will get dicier because California, the water behemoth of the West, won’t have to absorb any of those cutbacks.

Here’s one of the screwiest quirks in western water law: to win Congressional approval for the building of a monumental aqueduct, the Central Arizona Project (CAP), which would bring Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona agreed to subordinate its Colorado River water rights to California’s. In that way, the $4 billion, 336-mile-long CAP was born, and for it Arizona paid a heavy price. The state obliged itself to absorb not just its own losses in a cutback situation, but California’s as well.
Worst case scenario: the CAP aqueduct, now a lifeline for millions, could become as dry as the desert it runs through, while California continues to bathe. Imagine Phoenix curling and cracking around the edges, while lawn sprinklers hiss in Malibu. The contrast will upset a lot of Arizonans.
Worse yet, the prospective schedule of cutbacks now in place for the coming bad times is too puny to save Lake Mead.
The Age of Thirst: Act II

While that Arizona-California relationship guarantees full employment for battalions of water lawyers, a far bigger problem looms: climate change. Models for the Southwest have been predicting a 4ºC (7.2ºF) increase in mean temperature by century’s end, and events seem to be outpacing the predictions.
We have already experienced close to 1º C of that increase, which accounts, at least in part, for last summer’s colossal fires and record-setting temperatures—and it’s now clear that we’re just getting started.
The simple rule of thumb for climate change is that wet places will get wetter and dry places drier. One reason the dry places will dry is that higher temperatures mean more evaporation. In other words, there will be ever less water in the rivers that keep the region’s cities (and much else) alive. Modeling already suggests that by mid-century surface stream-flow will decline by 10% to 30%.
Independent studies at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in California and the University of Colorado evaluated the viability of Lake Mead and eventually arrived at similar conclusions: after about 2026, the risk of “failure” at Lake Mead, according to a member of the Colorado group, “just skyrockets.” Failure in this context would mean water levels lower than the dam’s lowest intake, no water heading downstream, and the lake becoming a “dead pool.”
If—perhaps “when” is the more appropriate word—that happens, California’s Colorado River Aqueduct, which supplies water to Los Angeles, San Diego, and the All-American Canal, which sustains the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, will go just as dry as the Central Arizona Project aqueduct. Meanwhile, if climate change is affecting the Colorado River’s watershed that harshly, it will undoubtedly also be hitting the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
The aptly named Lester Snow, a recent director of California’s Department of Water Resources, understood this. His future water planning assumed a 40% decline in runoff from the Sierras, which feeds the California Aqueduct. None of his contemplated scenarios were happy ones. The Colorado River Aqueduct and the California Aqueduct make the urban conglomerations of southern California possible. If both fail at once, the result will be, as promised, the greatest water crisis in the history of civilization.
Only Patricia Mulroy has an endgame strategy for the demise of Lake Mead. The Southern Nevada Water Authority is, even now, tunneling under the lake to install the equivalent of a bathtub drain at close to its lowest point. At a cost of more than $800 million, it will drain the dregs of Lake Mead for Las Vegas.
Admittedly, water quality will be a problem, as the dead pool will concentrate pollutants. The good news, according to the standard joke among those who chronicle Sin City’s improbable history, is that the hard-partying residents and over-stimulated tourists who sip from Lake Mead’s last waters will no longer need to purchase anti-depressants. They’ll get all the Zoloft and Xanax they need from their tap water.
And only now do we arrive at the third act of this expanding tragedy.
The Age of Thirst: Act III

Those who believe in American exceptionalism hold that the historical patterns shaping the fate of other empires and nations don’t apply to the United States. Be that as it may, we are certainly on track to test whether the U.S. is similarly inoculated against the patterns of environmental history.
Because tree rings record growing conditions year by year, the people who study them have been able to reconstruct climate over very long spans of time. One of their biggest discoveries is that droughts more severe and far longer than anything known in recent centuries have occurred repeatedly in the American Southwest. The droughts of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, of the 1950s, and of the period from 1998 to 2004 are remembered in the region, yet none lasted a full decade.
By contrast, the drought that brought the civilization of the ancestral Puebloans, or Anasazi, centered at Chaco Canyon, to its knees in the twelfth century, by contrast, lasted more than 30 years. The one that finished off Mesa Verdean culture in the thirteenth century was similarly a “megadrought.”

Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona who played a major role in the Nobel-Prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, tells me that the prospect of 130° F days in Phoenix worries him far less than the prospect of decades of acute dryness. “If anything is scary, the scariest is that we could trip across a transition into a megadrought.” He adds, “You can probably bet your house that, unless we do something about these greenhouse gas emissions, the megadroughts of the future are going to be a lot hotter than the ones of the past.”
Other scientists believe that the Southwest is already making the transition to a “new climatology,” a new normal that will at least bring to mind the aridity of the Dust Bowl years. Richard Seager of Columbia University, for instance, suggests that “the cycle of natural dry periods and wet periods will continue, but… around a mean that gets drier. So the depths—the dry parts of the naturally occurring droughts—will be drier than we’re used to, and the wet parts won’t be as wet.”
Drought affects people differently from other disasters. After something terrible happens—tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes—people regularly come together in memorable ways, rising above the things that divide them. In a drought, however, what is terrible is that nothing happens. By the time you know you’re in one, you’ve already had an extended opportunity to meditate on the shortcomings of your neighbors. You wait for what does not arrive. You thirst. You never experience the rush of compassion that helps you behave well. Drought brings out the worst in us.
After the Chacoan drought, corn-farming ancestral Puebloans still remained in the Four Corners area of the Southwest. They hung on, even if at lower population densities. After the Mesa Verdean drought, everybody left.
By the number of smashed crania and other broken bones in the ruins of the region’s beautiful stone villages, archaeologists judge that the aridifying world of the Mesa Verdeans was fatally afflicted by violence. Warfare and societal breakdown, evidently driven by the changing climate, helped end that culture.
So it matters what we do. Within the limits imposed by the environment, the history we make is contingent, not fated. But we are not exactly off to a good start in dealing with the challenges ahead. The problem of water consumption in the Southwest is remarkably similar to the problem of greenhouse gas pollution. First, people haggle to exhaustion over the need to take action; then, they haggle over inadequate and largely symbolic reductions. For a host of well-considered, eminently understandable, and ultimately erroneous reasons, inaction becomes the main achievement. For this drama, think Hamlet. Or if the lobbyists who argue for business as usual out west and in Congress spring to mind first, think Iago. (Emphasis added by acorncentreblog.com)
We know at least one big thing about how this particular tragedy will turn out: the so-called civilization of the Southwest will not survive the present century, not at its present scale anyway. The question yet to be answered is how much it will have to shrink, and at what cost. Stay tuned. It will be one of the greatest, if grimmest, shows on Earth.
William deBuys is the author of seven books, including the just published A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), and The Walk (an excerpt of which won a Pushcart Prize). He has long been involved in environmental affairs in the Southwest, including service as founding chairman of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the 87,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico. 
Copyright 2011 William deBuys
For many years, people have been noticing this increasingly dangerous development of aridity in the southwest.
Some Canadians, I among them, have been nervous about the implications of this potential draught on the largest freshwater supply on the planet, the Great Lakes. How long will it take for an enterprising American to build a pipeline underground from Ohio or Michigan or Illinois to Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and California and begin to pump water from those Great Lakes?
And what is there to stop them?
The Canadian government? NAFTA? The United Nations? The International Court at the Hague? The World Court? The Supreme Court of Canada or the United States?
And with Canada virtually ostracized in Durban South Africa, at the UN Conference on Climate Change, what kind of leverage will Canada have to moderate this pipeline's literally insatiable appetite for fresh, clean drinking water?
Mr. deBuys' observation that inaction is the main achievement on climate change is sound; his speculation that a similar pattern is likely on water consumption in the southwest bears deep thought, reflection and hopefully some beginning reactions.
First, Canada and the U.S. could formally open talks about the future of water supply on the North American continent.
Second, university departments that study water could be funded to study the various projections, depending on the many variables in climate projections, consumption patterns, population demographics and projections and outline the several  possibilities which they, through public debate, including formal debates in the legislatures of both countries, could determine collaborative responses, costs and responsibilities.
Third, both governments could embark on water conservation programs of an educational and an economic nature, in order to slow water consumption on both sides of the 49th parallel. Incentivizing low consumption toilets, showers, dishwashing machines, clothes washers "natural lawns" of rocks and dried vegetation, lowered water consumption on golf courses, increased preservation of wet lands under the direction of non-profits like Ducks Unlimited....these are just a few of the potential options available.
However, we cannot depend on either apathy or inaction. Neither will see us out of this dilemma successfully.
And if beBuys' reflections, research and projections are worthy of our consideration, and there is no reason to doubt their credibility, then the time to begin to act is now. We have less than a century to deal with this inevitable thirst.

Gay Rights ARE Human Rights...Obama and Clinton

By Steven Lee Myers and Helene Cooper, New York Times,  December 6, 2011
 GENEVA — The Obama administration announced on Tuesday that the United States would use all the tools of American diplomacy, including the potent enticement of foreign aid, to promote gay rights around the world.
In a memorandum issued by President Obama in Washington and in a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton here, the administration vowed to actively combat efforts by other nations that criminalize homosexual conduct, abuse gay men, lesbians, bisexuals or transgendered people, or ignore abuse against them.
“Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct,” Mrs. Clinton said at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, “but in fact they are one and the same.”
Neither Mr. Obama nor Mrs. Clinton specified how to give the initiative teeth. Caitlin Hayden, the National Security Council’s deputy spokeswoman, said the administration was “not cutting or tying” foreign aid to changes in other nation’s practices.
Still, raising the issue to such prominence on the administration’s foreign policy agenda is important, symbolically, much like President Jimmy Carter’s emphasis on human rights.
With campaigning already under way in the 2012 presidential contest, Mr. Obama’s announcement could bolster support among gay voters and donors, who have questioned the depth of his commitment. He chose the Rev. Rick Warren, a pastor who opposes same-sex marriage, to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. Mr. Obama himself has not come out officially in favor of same-sex marriage. But he successfully pushed for repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that prevented gays from serving openly in the military. And the Justice Department has said it will no longer defend in court the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman.
Who said President Obama is not leading? Who says human rights does not include gay rights?
Here is a bold, courageous and visionary announcement for which the world can and will thank the current administration. Of course, the Republican candidates will demonstrate their bigotry in denouncing it.
Of course, the right wing in Canada will denounce it.
Of course the fundamentalists in many world religions will denounce it.
However, truth be told, gays and lesbians are human beings too! Surprise!
And they are entitled to the same rights, responsibilities and privileges as straight people.
Their sexual orientation is not a matter for discrimination. And when the President and Secretary of State both support the position, including all of the U.S. relations around the world, there is a great heft and gravitas to the support for the equality.
Will the Roman Catholic church oppose the announcement? Most definitely.
Will the Christian, Protestant right oppose the announcement? Most definitely.
And both will use the Bible as the support for their argument. And both will ignore the principle of "love for neighbour as yourself" that flows like a giant river through the pages of that Holy Book.
We at the acorncentreblog.com applaud with both hands this announcement, and encourage all public media organs in all countries to do likewise.

7-6 vote to evict Occupy Movement....on Kingston City Council

December 6, 2011, the Mayor and six councillors voted to evict the Occupy Movement from Confederation Square across the street from city hall.
According to the "occupiers" interviewed by acorncentreblog.com, the city had originally committed permission for the encampment to remain in Confederation Square until the Spring of 2012. What happened to that agreement? Not only must the encampment be removed by 12:01 on Friday, December 9, but the protesters must not establish a similar encampment on any other city property. Originally, the agreement with the city was that the encampment could and would move to a less visible site in the Spring of 2012.
Stories of councillor Kevin George having heard from people attending the Santa Claus parade that "the tent should be removed" and then his announcement that he was to put a motion to council to have the encampment removed are evidence that some in the city, and presumably on council, would rather not talk about the issues raised by the Occupy Movement and would rather see the pristine city property across from city hall vacated.
Is there some political fear that the council would be tarred with the "brush" of politically aligning with the Occupy Movement? And just how bad would that be?
For the Mayor to chastise the occupiers (some of whom actually attend local colleges) for not "being there" and for comparing their persistence to that of the Sisters of Providence who for sixteen years have demonstrated against poverty on the sidewalk in front of city hall each Friday, is to show more of his own colours projected onto the occupiers. Nice and tidy, squeaky clean...and certainly not leading a city in Canada that has the distinction of being one of the last to evict the Occupy Movement....that is not the legacy of a Mayor who seeks re-election.
So, just in case some might wonder, come the next municipal election, which councillors supported the eviction motions, here is a list of their names: 
                                                           Kevin George
                                                           Dorothy Hector
                                                           Jeff Scott
                                                           Bryan Paterson
                                                           Brian Reitzel
                                                           Sandy Berg
                                                           Mayor Mark Gerretson

Some of us will remember their names when the next municipal election rolls around, and will encourage anyone within earshot NOT to vote for their re-election.

Those supporting the Occupy Movement's permission to remain in Conferation Square were:
                                                           Jim Neill
                                                           Rob Hutchison
                                                           Liz Schell
                                                           Lisa Osanic
                                                           Bill Glover
                                                           Rick Downes 
As one interested observer of the Occupy Movement, we would like to thank these six for their political courage, their vision and their tenacity in supporting the Occupy Movement, its goals and its presence in the Square.
We will also promise to urge friends and neighbours to support them, should they decide to submit their names for re-election next time around.

Data AND Analysis on 7 Billion People

By Jim Hagemann Snabe and Babatunde Osotimehin – Special to CNN

From the CNN website, December 6, 2011
Editor’s Note: Jim Snabe is a co-CEO of the business software maker, SAP AG. Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin is Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. They recently launched this global dashboard.

The world’s population has just crossed 7 billion, according to United Nations estimates.
This is a big milestone for the planet. Only a century ago, world population was about a billion. A sevenfold increase in a century has been possible because of unprecedented advances in science and technology. Today, on average, the world’s poor are better nourished and live longer than their counterparts a century ago – although a lot still remains to be done.
So what is next? In the next hundred years, experts predict that the fastest population growth will take place in countries that are currently the least developed.
If the world can help improve investments, the quality of life – health, education, human security – and governance in those countries, we could unleash a lot of human potential. This leadership falls on the developed countries and technology leaders – people who know from experience how this can be done. On the other hand, if we fail to address this challenge, we will see negative consequences. If we cannot provide adequate education and employment opportunities to the youth in developing nations, particularly young girls, we could see waves of instability or violence result from frustration.
In the age of Google and Facebook, transparency, crowd-sourced knowledge, education and investments will help win the day. In fact, they are necessary if we are to continuously improve a world of 7 billion men, women and children. How will we manage our finite resources? How will citizens make sure their representatives are accountable?
New technology is putting more information in the hands of ordinary people, and the time is no longer very far off when citizens seeking to inform themselves will be able to determine quickly and easily whether their governments are actually tackling the serious problems they have promised to address.
For instance, Ushahidi, a web-based platform developed to aggregate live reports of post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, enables people with mobile devices to submit real-time information on rapidly unfolding events of public interest. It has been deployed similarly in places as far apart as Brazil and Kyrgyzstan, and has been used successfully to track earthquake recovery initiatives in Haiti, Chile and Japan.
Even more recently, a mobile application developed by Recovery.gov, a website that tracks the spending of the US Government under the 2009 stimulus bill, made it incredibly simple for just about anyone to look into how the programme’s taxpayer dollars were being spent.
This is welcome news to people with an interest in promoting greater transparency and accountability in government and society – which ought to be nearly everyone. In less-developed countries, corruption and lack of transparency in government are commonly cited among the top obstacles to business activity and improvement for the populace.
Ultimately, these new methods for accessing and analyzing data can help translate into jobs and growth.
With this in mind, SAP and UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund) have partnered to create a dashboard for analyzing information related to the world at 7 billion. Using it to look at a country like Pakistan, for instance, you can see that 21% of its 42 million children are enrolled in secondary school. This is 1 in 5. And of these, 43% are girls. If you are a young parliamentarian in Pakistan, or a policy expert, or just someone seeking more accountability from your representatives, this is powerful information to have – to argue for better education for the generation that is growing up, particularly girls.
Until recently, an analysis of this sort would have taken months of aggregating data from hundreds of spreadsheets from schools, departments and government agencies. It would have been complicated and costly. Today, thanks to tools using data from multiple U.N. agencies, anyone can access and analyze this information. The data and – even more significantly – a tool to analyze it are now in the hands of the people, not just in Pakistan, but also for countries across the globe.
For some, it may seem hyperbolic to claim that the latest technology can fix so many problems. And, of course, much of what needs to be done to address far-reaching challenges like food security and health-care inequity involves hard work and substantial capital investment.
But new technologies can help citizens ensure that available funding and the sweat of dedicated individuals do not go to waste. The clock is ticking, and it is up to us to show leadership, build partnerships and make investments to address this challenge for billions of today and the ones to follow.
(The views expressed in this article are solely those of Jim Hagemann Snabe and Babatunde Osotimehin.)
Gathering and analysing the data, primarily a research process, able to be undertaken by both individuals and organizations, inside universities and think tanks, and outside both, is one thing.
Finding the political will, spine, courage and discipline to act on that information and its analysis is quite another.
The optimism expressed by these two individuals is commendable; it is unlikely that governments, based on the current evidence from all quarters of the globe, will provide the collaborative political vision, courage and will to put into place the necessary collaborative measures that would see:--

• the world's starving find food,
• the world's dying find health care,
• the world's dispossessed find shelter and work,
•  the world's illiterate find education...
• the world's thirsty find safe and clean drinking water
• the world's unemployed and underemployed, find appropriate work
• the world's victims find peace and solace and comfort
• the world's criminals and terrorists find justice and a cessation of their misguided ambitions
• the world's leaders find strength to tell the truth in public, to all their people
• the world's bankers and financiers find their ethical compass in empathy and compassion
• the world's corporate executives find balance in their pursuit of profit and social utility
• the world's poets, artists and composers find their voices and compositions heard and appreciated

This is not rocket science, as the 'dashboards' might be thought by some to be. This is the potential that all humans, collectively, collaboratively and urgently need to seek and to find, with the help of their spiritual angels.

Harper's Dropped Balls: mentally ill, First Nations, environment, asbestos, TRUTH

By Kim Mackrael, Globe and Mail, December 6, 2011
Canada’s prisons are facing a growing crisis as they become the “institutions of last resort” for people with mental illnesses, the Canadian Psychiatric Association says.

“Corrections [Canada] is not geared to deal with some of the needs of a vast population of people with major mental illnesses,” CPA board member Gary Chaimowitz told The Globe and Mail.
Dr. Chaimowitz will be on Parliament Hill Wednesday morning to ask the federal government to improve prison services for mentally ill offenders.

More than one in 10 men and nearly one in three women held in federal prisons have mental-health problems, according to 2009 figures from the Correctional Service of Canada. Those numbers represent a near-doubling in the total proportion of inmates with mental illnesses between 1997 and 2009.
“Psychiatric institutions have been closing over the years, and the mentally ill … have now found that the correctional system has become the institution of last resort,” Dr. Chaimowitz said.
He said those prisoners often end up in segregation units and without adequate treatment because the prisons don’t have the staff or resources to properly care for them.
The problem could intensify once the omnibus crime bill becomes law, Dr. Chaimowitz added. The legislation, which includes new provisions for mandatory minimum sentences, is expected to significantly increase the number of people in prison.
The Conservative government says it is expanding prison space and staff to accommodate the anticipated growth.

But some mental health advocates had hoped to see specific provisions in the legislation to deal with treatment for mentally ill inmates. The Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers asked MPs to change the bill to allow judges to exempt some mentally ill offenders from mandatory minimum sentences.
Liberal justice critic Irwin Cotler suggested the amendment during a clause-by-clause review of the bill last month, but his proposal was rejected by the Conservative-dominated committee.
Warehousing individuals for minor offences with longer sentences, without providing appropriate mental health services, because "that is a provincial responsibility" is another way for this government to off-load its duty, without sharing the fiscal and the ethical responsibility for those services, while in the process, creating banner headlines about being "tough on crime" for its political base.
Power, and the addiction to power, for its own sake, is at the core of this government's complete operation. People with talking points, rehearsed in private, including the "I am trying to answer your question" impertinence when a reporter or interviewer interrupts because the member is NOT answering the question but merely reciting the rehearsed talking points, is no substitute for a democratic government. Cotler's appropriate recommendation in committee to permit judges to exempt some mentally ill offenders from mandatory minimum sentences is just one of many examples of professional, responsible and even visionary proposals to which this government turns a deaf ear.
This government is, in a word, without compassion, without a human touch, without a long-range vision that is serving the country's best interests; rather, it is obsessed with its own pursuit of power, the percs of power, the status and appearance of power, the maintenance of its own power and they will do anything to manipulate the opposition, the truth, the fourth estate, and thereby the electorate to achieve that end.
When the Chief of the Attawapiskat First Nations Band declares a state of emergency, after months of inaction by the government, the Harper gang changes the story to "where is the $90 million we spent there?" over the last six years for all of the band's expenses including housing, education, health, and social services. And then they attempt to appoint a "third party manager" as if their indignation will strike a chord of resonance with their political base.
There is a growing and legitimate perception that Harper and his gang have no interest in the people of this country, except when it comes time to place an "X" on a ballot.
They tell the Coptic Christians in one riding that they will establish an "Office of Religious Freedom"" to mollify that group, but then they struggle, as they should, with the purpose of such an office, and its public perception, as indicated by, once again, talking points obtained by CBC and displayed on Power and Politics on Monday, this week. We all thought and believed that Canada was well known and honoured for its historic commitment to religious freedom so we are confused when that freedom needs an office as proof of the tradition.
They turn the human crisis in First Nations reservations into a "where is the money?" chase and agree to meet with the band chiefs for the first time in six years only after a public outcry.
They seek to incarcerate the mentally ill, as their way to depict themselves as "tough on crime".
They buy large numbers of fighter jets, ships both armed and unarmed, as their props for the theatre of "nationalistic pride" so they can beat the drum for patriotism.
They turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the pleas of the UN and its climate conference, hiding under the veil of deception that "only when all countries join" will Canada come on board, thereby demonstrating their allegiance to their corporate buddies in the oil and gas sector.
They tell us the new border deal with the U.S. is to enhance trade with that country, when it will also surrender a chunk of Canadian autonomy to the U.S. in intelligence and security.
They tell parliament they want $50 million to beef up border security and then spend that money on gazebos and cosmetics for the Clement riding of Parry Sound-Muskoka, without providing a paper trail for the Auditor General.
They tell the voters in Mount Royal that Irwin Cotler, the respected Liberal member there, that he may not be running in the next election, and that there may be a by-election, when they are doing "voter identification" only to undermine the respected member's credibility with his constituents.
They tell parliament that they will support the export of a deadly substance, mined in Canada, asbestos, when the substance has been banned by all other countries thereby demonstrating their blind and excessive addiction to the power of "trade" and the talking points that accompany that file.
They turn a deaf ear to the respected and responsible pleas from hundreds of the country's best minds to retain the long-form census, as the best way to provide data for long-range planning in various sectors, using the lame and dumb excuse that "it is too invasive" into the private lives of Canadians, where there had been few, if any, complaints on that score.
They turn the Grey Cup game into another "campaign moment" with fly-pasts of military planes, as they do the "pin-the-medal-on-the-general ceremony" in the Senate after withdrawing from Libya.
And they must think or believe that Canadians are either not watching and listening, or really don't care. Neither is the case. We are both watching and listening, and we really do care what this gang of power-addicted ego-maniacs is doing to the long and honoured traditions of the country...in truth-telling, in compassion, in peace-keeping, in honourable hosting of world leaders, in listening to the opinions of the opposition, bringing down crime rates through a balanced approach of judicial discretion, rehabilitation and incarceration, in bringing the country together rather than dividing for the narrow interests of the government's retention of power.
And then to watch Harper and his gang attempt to "own" both the crown and the Arctic as their own political/national symbol is like watching a grade two child tell his parents they don't know what they are talking about when they tell him it's bedtime.