How the Media's Anti-Union Spin is Framing Catalyst Paper's Financial Situation

Hundreds of media outlets are parroting their corporate owners spin of the Catalyst Paper financial situation with their one sided anti-union perspective. The fact is that there are two groups who must agree to endorse the changes being demanded. One is the union locals the other is the bondholders who had to have over 2/3 in agreement for the recapitalization deal to move foward. The company said Monday that it had secured support from 79.47 per cent of those holding its senior secured notes due 2016. However, just 54.96 per cent of its senior notes due 2014 supported the recapitalization.

So all the stories about how workers at the Crofton mill represented by the Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers Union of Canada Local 2 turned down a tentative agreement as 58 per cent voted against the deal are only part of, not the whole, story. For sure Catalyst is presently losing money from its combined 4 mills. The disgruntled bondholders voting against the present deal know that in the three months ending Sept. 30, the company lost $205.7 million or 54 cents per share as it booked a $151-million impairment charge on the Snowflake recycled newsprint mill in northeastern Arizona. So most of the losses by Catalyst recently are a common occurrence for goodwill where a company's purchase another company for more than the value of the net assets of the target company.

The bondholders have Bond Insurance that will bail them out IF Catalyst fails to meet its interest payments. The individual workers have no such insurance which means they will lose grocery money if the current recapitalization scheme goes through but the bondholders won't lose, in fact they'll gain control of the board of directors which would allow the vultures to sell off Catalyst's assets in a peicemeal fashion that would probably spell the end of many good paying jobs here in coastal BC.

It's all such crap. It's all caused by the first multinationals, the vampires, flying in and sucking the life blood out of the local BC mills and using that lifeblood to pay bonuses and buy the Snowflake operation. Now with everything stateside in deep doo-doo because of the Wall St. and bank bailouts making Snowflake, along with a lotta other Arizona stuff, worth far less than Catalyst paid they want BC's workers and local communities to bail them out. It's bullshit.

The solution is for Port Alberni, Crofton and Powell River's workers and local investors to buy out their local operaions and run them for the benefit of the local communities - the 99% - and boot the suits - the 1% - out. Bankster capitialism sucks...it sucks out the lifeblood of the needy to further engorge the material assets of the greedy.

Wall St. Rejoices as Moneybags Mitt Appears Set to Win Florida Primary

It's Moneybags Mitt in the lead, Newt fading fast in second with Rick the righteous and outsider Ron Paul in a dead heat for last heading for the wire in Tuesday's Republican primary in Florida. The sucking sound you're hearing is the sigh of relief coming from Mitt's fellow vampire capitialist buddies on Wall St.

Money talks and bullshit walks as the old saying goes. But the 'real' story, IMO, in Florida and beyond is how the corporate media is doing everything in its power to bury the Ron Paul Revolution. Newt's unpredictable and that scares the Republican establishment, who knows what 'big idea' he'll come up with next now that his moon colony appears unlaunchable. But Ron Paul is the one who's long held ideas are so far off the Republican reservation that he's achieved piraha status among the elites.

Of course, mr. mud likes Ron Paul because he doesn't speak with a forked tongue like the liar in chief Obama and he's willing to stand up and speak that truth, as he sees it, to the powerful and the not so powerful just as he has for decades. During the debate last Thursday in Jacksonville Paul gave another great speech-ette. This time on the stupidity of the Cuban blockade. He said his truth, which this writer agrees with, to a Florida audience and received an ovation for it. Perhaps most Floridians, especially Republicans, don't agree with Paul's stance on noormalizing relations with the evil commie dictators in Cuba. But they do applaud his courage to say what he thinks.

Ron Paul can't win the Republican nomination but maybe, just maybe, he can open up a space for real debate on the critical issues of our times. The David Seaman videocast below about the mainstream media bias against Ron Paul, and why Mitt Romney has nothing in common with the average man is worth a watch.



Hell, Fire and Blackberries

Between mid-Janurary and mid-Feburary is the best time to clear-temporarily-blackberries here in Cascadia. mr. mud has been slowly trying to build a perimeter fence around the hideout here in Blackpoint. The point of this fence building exercise isn't to exclude 'others' but to be a greater service to the animal rescue-especially dog rescue-people in the area. Since moving to the Powell River area i've met and been inspired by all the folks involved in this nobel cause and unless the property is well fenced there's no way to foster any of the dogs or other creatures so deserving of a second chance. The lives of so many of our innocent cousins are hell, not because of anything they do to deserve such a fate, but because so many short-sighted, selfish rogue primates find it easy to abandon or abuse those they see as seperate from themselves and therefore discardable.

Fence building in the desert or on the prarie is one thing, fence building here in glacial till and through the mother of all passive resistors-the blackberries, is another.

The first step here is to temporarily clear a pathway through the resistance forces. This is best done in mid-winter when the blackberries are at their most dormant. Each and every attempt to accomplish this part of the task is an excercise in blood letting. Blackberries can teach us many lessons about the hubris of humans. i'm convinced they communicate with each other in some alien way because the instant i cut one cane the other canes nearby, both the green living and old brown apparently dead, seem able to turn their thorns at and attack the intruder. Their thorns have tiny fishhook shaped barbs at the end that they leave behind embeded in the flesh to remind us of our transgression long into the future.

Of course, as Tom Robbins explains so well in his novel 'Still Life With Woodpecker', there are billions of juicy sweet berries throughout coastal Cascadia every August but there is only one blackberry plant. It reproduces canes from both its roots and by rerooting canes that have bent down to rejoin their family in the earth. That's why any apparent clearing of them is at best a temporary illusion, never a victory.

After clearing an area through which the fence will run there's a huge pile of cut canes to deal with. After licking my wounds i've found it cathartic to introduce them to the element of fire. Yesterday i tended and was warmed by the flames of their crackling bodies confident that the fire and the clearing were merely a stage in the ultimate evolution of the next dominant species now arising to replace us-the overly confident two legged group-whose one real purpose is to keep creating the ideal conditions for the one blackberry plant's future rule.

Canada's Harpo Delivers His Regressive Agenda in Davos Speech

Yesterday Canada's facist in chief delivered his red meat loaded agenda to the assembled choir of billionaires in Davos Switzerland. For one thing Harpo touted Canada's strong economic condition within the developed world's economies, which is true. But, of course, he trumpted his government's actions as the major factor in Canada's position when in fact it's a combination of relatively strong banking regulations passed by the former Liberal government and designed by then Finance Minister Paul Martin that kept Canada's banks from loading up on derivatives Canadians have to thank not Harpo's Conservatives who at the time howled bloody murder about any regulations to control the banker's greed. And, of course, the wholesale give away of Canada's non-renewable resource commodities that are providing his billionaire audience with short-term 'profits' and bling.

He went on to talk about the wonders of his increasingly regressive tax system that further pads the pockets of his supporters by informing us back home that the qualifying age for the senior's supplement would be soon raised to 67 from its decades old 65 years of age. Canada's tax structure used to be far more progressive but down through the decades both of our major parties have shifted from tax revenues based mostly on income and corporate taxes -progressive- to sales taxes-regressive.

But the real kicker, in this writer's opinion, was Harpo's declaration that he'll make it a "national priority" to create the capacity to export energy products to Asia - something the Northern Gateway pipeline would do. "We will soon take action to ensure that major energy and mining projects are not subject to unnecessary regulatory delays - that is, delay merely for the sake of delay," he said. Which translated into canuck means he's about to eliminate the environmental asessment of projects like the Northern Gateway Project.

Even if Harpo allows the commission now conducting hearings into the Enbridge pipeline to conclude in its present form he's already setting the stage to reject its fndings if they don't concur with his ideological agenda. As the First Nations are 99.9% opposed to the pipeline a rejection of the commission's findings-were they to end up reccommending against building the damn thing-would inevitably send the whole matter to Canada's Supreme Court. But even then, as Harpo has recently shown in The Canadian Wheat Board situation, the courts hold no sway in his mind because he and his ilk aren't bound by the laws of mere mortals, they get their direction from a 'higher' law who's voice whispers the 'real truth' in Harpo's ear. We used to call those who heard voices schizophrenic, now we call them Prime Minister here in canuckistan.

View from the Reichstag - German history offers a lesson for Canadian democracy.

Adbusters Calls for May Day Showdown in Chicago

This just in from Adbusters. Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters, was the person who orginally called out folks to Occupy Wall St. Hopefully this will be as huge a success and as groundbreaking as that one continues to be.

ADBUSTERS TACTICAL BRIEFING #25...Showdown in Chicago.

Hey you redeemers, rebels and radicals out there,

Against the backdrop of a global uprising that is simmering in dozens of countries and thousands of cities and towns, the G8 and NATO will hold a rare simultaneous summit in Chicago this May. The world’s military and political elites, heads of state, 7,500 officials from 80 nations, and more than 2,500 journalists will be there.

And so will we.

On May 1, 50,000 people from all over the world will flock to Chicago, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month. With a bit of luck, we’ll pull off the biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen.

And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights. We’ll go there with our heads held high and assemble for a month-long people’s summit … we’ll march and chant and sing and shout and exercise our right to tell our elected representatives what we want … the constitution will be our guide.

And when the G8 and NATO meet behind closed doors on May 19, we’ll be ready with our demands: a Robin Hood Tax … a ban on high frequency ‘flash’ trading … a binding climate change accord … a three strikes and you’re out law for corporate criminals … an all out initiative for a nuclear-free Middle East … whatever we decide in our general assemblies and in our global internet brainstorm – we the people will set the agenda for the next few years and demand our leaders carry it out.

And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear.

Jammers, pack your tents, muster up your courage and prepare for a big bang in Chicago this Spring. If we don’t stand up now and fight now for a different kind of future we may not have much of a future … so let’s live without dead time for a month in May and see what happens …

for the wild, Culture Jammers HQ

The Role Rapid Climate Change and Pine Beetle Habitat Expansion Played in the Burns Lake Disaster

Yesterday's post was about the roles human psychology and ecomonics played in the recent disaster at the Burns Lake sawmill. Today's will attempt to show how rapid climate change and the accompanying rapid spread of the mountain pine beetle's habitat also played a big part in the disaster.

The mountain pine beetle has been around for millions of years. It's habitat has grown and shrunk many times through all those years in response to the climate it needs to survive. Like everything, the mountain pine beetle has an important role to play in the dance of nature. Its role is forest renewal. Without vectors like the pine beetle the forests couldn't evolve in parallel with the environment and would suffer.

Through those millions of years the waxing and waning of the climate's parameters has taken hundreds or thousands of years to move the borders of different species, including the beetle's, any appreciable distance. Moving along with the beetles are its predators, its hosts and other factors like the age of the forest and the consequent spacing and ages of the trees. Now though we are faced not with the slow natural climate variations of the past but a new set of circumstances caused by the rapid changes taking place that are easily measured in decades. In response to these rapid climate changes of today certain species, like those with legs, wings-or in the case of the beetles-trapeze like filaments can move more quickly than the forests who must rely on the much slower process of reseeding to move.

Our distant cousins, the beetles, who's range is limited to areas where 30-40 consecutive days of -40C don't occur, have in just a few decades marched north because the winters in parts of the northern hemisphere where these these parmeters used to always occur aren't quite as cold for quite as many consecutive days as they have been in the past. Not only climate change has helped their northern migration, in addition they've found that we humans have altered the natrual forest's age ranges by our logging practices. See, another factor in the ability of the beetles to spread rapidly is the spacing between trees. In a mature forest the distance between large trees- determined by sunlight avalibility, fire and species-is much larger than in a forest occupied by trees of approximately the same age as happens after logging regardless of whether natural reseeding of replanting has occured. Our cousins travel from tree to tree by dangling trapeze like on a filament swinging in the wind, the closer the trees are together the easier and more quickly they can move.

So, we've created the perfect marching conditions and our cousins have marched. In response to the widespread death of the lodgepole pine and a growing number of other types of pines have produced losses of expected revenue that the harvest of these second growth pine forests should have, in the capitialist's opinion, brought in. We now are harvesting these standing dead and dried trees as fast as possible to extract as much money as possible from them before they fall over, as they naturally would, and decompose into the food the next type of trees who should be moving in to replace the pines will need to eat to sustain themselves.

Whew. Which brings us back to the Burns Lake Mill and why the extra dry dust content in the air that fateful day was so high that, along with the shuttering of the ventalation windows because of the -48C tempratures and the natural gas leak in the basement, caused the huge explosion that killed 2 innocent men and injured 19 others. The natural gas leak in and of itself couldn't have been the only factor because natural gas concentratrions must reach a certain level before they become explosive. In a huge volume of air like the sawmill building long before those concentrations were reached all the workers would have had headaches or nausea or felt like they were about to passed out, they didn't. So perhaps in a smaller zone, like the basement or a thermally stratified small corner, the natural gas did reach explosive concentrations that were then ignited by a spark from the machinery or a welding torch but the resulting explosion couldn't have blown the roof off such a huge building, there had to be another source of energy and that was the huge quantity of extra dry dust created in the building by the processing of the dry dead remains of the infested pine forests.

Who caused the explosion and fire? We all did our part. By rapidly consuming, as we all do, the carbon sequestered over geologic time frames to power our lifestyles. We created the conditions that destroyed the lives and broke the hearts of the folks in Burns Lake. For my part in that i'm truely sorry.

Climate Change and Pine Beetles - To understand just how complex, scary and immediate climate change is, look no further than the case of the tiny mountain pine beetle.

Workers Could Smell Natural Gas For 2 Days Before Huge Explosion and Fire at Burns Lake Sawmill

The town of Burns Lake is in shock and mourning the death of two members of its tight knit community. The sawmill that exploded and burned to the ground injuring 19 and killing 2 is owned the Burns Lake Native Development Corp. and Portland, Ore. based forest products company Hampton Affiliates.

Wilf Adam, the chief of the Lake Babine Nation, said he has talked to several workers who say they warned of a gas smell for 2 days before the disaster. "The morning shift said that there was a big gas odour coming from the basement, and when the afternoon shift came on, that's when it happened."

90% of the wood the mill had been cutting in the last 3-4 years was timber salvaged from area forests ravaged by the pine beetle. It’s really dry so the dust factor is extremely high. The temprature in Burns Lake that day was -48C and during cold winter weather the mill is more closed in, without fans sucking out the dust. Many Burns Lake residents are speculating that it was gas that caused the explosion. However there have been many demonstrations by firemen showing that dust particles are highly flammable. Probably something sparked the gas which set off a huge dust explosion.

"Many workers said they were under a lot of pressure to keep production at a high pace at the mill, they were being pushed,” chief Adam said.

Workers do have the right under BC's WCB rules to refuse to work under unsafe conditions but the combined pressures of managers trying to meet production goals, having to bring home a paycheck to buy groceries and pay rent plus the that of ones peers under those same pressures is nearly impossble to overcome by any individual. i was in dangerous situations often many years ago when i worked at the pulp mill in Port Mellon. It was incredibly difficult to refuse to keep working no matter how much my gut told me to stop. One night shift we did, 'we' being the operative word because i never could have stood up to the bosses by myself.

There will be an investigation of the Burns Lake disaster but its doubtful that all or any of the psychological causes will enter into the conclusions as to what happened. Hopefully, in the end, after all he tears have been shed, there will be enough fire insurance and enough government assistance for the tiny community to rebuild its broken economic engine. They say 'time heals all wounds', but the broken hearts in Burns Lake will take generations to recover.

Catalyst Paper Corporation's Hedge Fund Owners Drive Powell River Pulp Mill Into Bankruptcy

The American hedge fund, Third Avenue Management LLC, a N.Y. city hedge fund that is the principle bond holder of Catalyst Paper Corporation and Trimark Global High Yield Bond Fund, the next largest bond holder, have loaded the Powell River mill with debt during the past years when pulp and paper prices were high. Instead of re-investing in the mill's infrastructure by buying new equipment that would have increased productivity the hedge funds paid bonuses to the managers and shareholders. It's the story of hedge funds and absentee owners everywhere.

Now that pulp and paper prices hve returned to more normal historic levels the management of Catalyst can't pay the interest on the debts they've accruded, whadda surprise. So they've now taken the next usual corporate step of attempting to reduce the cost of inputs. These reductions involve labour, raw resources, and by influencing politicians in power to eliminate regulations and taxes. Property taxes are latest boogeymen to be targeted by the corporation.

Catalyst is also demanding immediate concessions from each of its local unions, cuts that would help pay for things like the almost $5 million exit package of chief executive officer Russell Horner who resigned last Monday [Jan. 16th].

Over the decades when the facilities had belonged to BC Forest Products, MacMillan Bloedel, Crown Forest Industries, Fletcher Challenge and Norske Skog the14,000 residents of Powell River benefitted from the mill through the wise usage of the tax revenues generated. In many ways the residents saw these benefits as a tradeoff for the pollution of air and water quality they lived with. Over those decades the union, to its discredit, continued to negotiate only for higher wages instead of taking an equity position along with improvements in working a safety conditions that were so rightfully won.

Now Catalyst is successfully blackmailing the city of Powell River into lower taxes and other concessions by threatening the mill's closure and the local economic depression such a closure could cause. Many locals though, including the writer of these lines, knows that when Pope and Talbot financially failed and closed their Harmac Pulp Mill in Nanaimo, the workers and two other private interests took over the mill and made it profitable and have heard nothing about Harmac crying the blues about the taxes it pays.

We here in Powell River have nothing to fear from Catalyst and its hedge fund owners. Let them get the hell out and don't let the door hit 'em in the behind while they're leaving. The sooner Catalyst goes bankrupt the sooner the mill will be locally owned and run for the benefit of the workers and the community they live in. Power to the people, workers of Powell River's mill must unite not in fear but in victory, they have nothing to lose but their chains.

Is Anonymous The Air Force of a Worldwide People's Revolution?

Anonymous, a worldwide hacktivist un-organization, has shown in the last few days with its successful attacks on a wide variety of government, security and capitialist websites that it is a powerful force despite it's un-organized hive like nature. In fact it is this un-organization with its horizontal decision making that generates that power and makes it capable of being thought of as 'The Air Force' of the #Occupy movement.

Anonymous, like the Indignados, the Occupy movement and The TEA Party, are expressions of a worldwide disgust with the globalized capitialist power structure that has been so successful up until now at undermining the inalienable rights of us all.

But, IMO, for there to be a successful worldwide people's revolution 'we the people' everywhere must unite, must realize that we are all in this together and that we are allowing ourselves to be divided into right-left by those same capitialist powers for their own benefit. We each see only what we allow to pass through the veil of our paradigm. Each of us has a worldview, a paradigm, that is the result of our cultural conditioning. We must overcome the conditioning that so often forces us to see ourselves, metaphorically speaking, as seperate drops of water instead of as aspects of one sea.

Only this self-created illusion of seperateness allows us to act as greedy individuals. If/when we liberate ourselves from this illusion do we understand that individual greed is really suicide. With this understanding of our real nature we can understand the we are all anonymous, that we are legion, and that the forces of individual greed should expect us to rise like a tidal wave and flood the emipire with the sea of this new consciousness.

Let the motto "We are Anonymous. We are a legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us" come to be a symbol of a truely united vision that we, the flora, fauna, microbes, minerals, forces and fairies are all in this together.

Occupy the Outhouse - #OTO - and Turn it Upside Down