Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Christmas in Winnipeg



Well for employees at Canada Post Christmas in Winnipeg was not a pleasant experience and it is clearly a foreshadow of what's to come for employees across the country. We already talked about how Moya Greene turned a viable profit making dividend paying corporation into a toxic nightmare $2.5 billion in debt with one wave of her magic wand or rather one foul swoop of her misguided axe. Let's face it, you don't prune a tree with an axe. Explain that to Moya Greene. Postal workers will be reeling in her chaos struggling to pay her debt for generations to come.

Moya Greene had no successful experience in service based industries before coming to Canada Post. She was instrumental at crashing Bombardier's stock and derailing CN. Yet she was given a blank cheque to wreck havoc at will. Closing the Quebec City post office so business mail going across the street was shipped to Montreal then back to Quebec delayed the mail and increased fuel and transportation costs. Not picking up the mail including priority post on the weekends saw the company fall behind the competition. These aren't concerns from a fat union that opposes profit. These are real life concerns from a viable business perspective. Cutting jobs in one thing but why kill profits?

It all boils down to a dark political agenda that opposes public accountability. They will destroy a profit making company on purpose as an act of sabotage. After destroying it they will say "See profits are down, now we have to make some serious cuts." Their real agenda isn't just cutting jobs, it's removing public accountability. They want to privatize everything. Privatization isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's just the way they do it and the reason why they do it that is bad.

Their primary purpose is to remove public accountability. Moya Greene publicly declared that the private sector sees the public as stupid in the area of downsizing and don't want to be told anything by them. Her mandate is to remove public accountability because she knows best. Which is somewhat ironic given her air head persona. After all she is no Maggie Thatcher. She's a former lawyer from Newfoundland.

Winnipeg made the news because of their recent walk out over the insanity of how the new system is being implemented. Finding machines that will sort mail line of travel will no doubt save money in the long run even through it will take generations to pay back that debt which means generations without the tax revenue the company was previously paying to the government.

The problem is the flats and letters come separate. Which means as a letter carrier walks, they have to hold one bundle of flats in one hand and one bundle of letters in the other while they flip through each to pull out the mail for the next call. Only there's a third bundle as well. It's the turn around mail that didn't have time to be sorted by the new machines. That has to be sorted by the carrier in a case at the depot. So now we have three separate bundles that a carrier has to juggle while walking quickly so they don't run into overtime and somehow they have to shuffle several more bundles of flyers while they multitask on route since they are forbidden to pull out the mail for the next call at the door or while they have stopped moving.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that juggling and sorting through three different bundles of mail while you are walking is nonsense. Any child can see that juggling three different bundles of mail while juggling six sets of flyers that can't be stuffed together is insanity at best. So here's the clincher. A guy in Winnipeg gets a brainstorm. He has to sort his turn around mail anyways. So he runs the short and long in together so he just has one bundle to sort through while he walks which greatly speeds up his delivery time and they suspend him for doing so.

Clearly they are on crack. A guy uses his brain where they failed to do so and they suspend him for it. How Moya Greene. That is the legacy she has left Canada with and that is the legacy she is bringing to England simply because some politicians in England want to privatize the Royal Mail at all costs. It is a shameful plague of injustice.

Giving her a pay raise to implement this dark deed and crush working family wages while creating chaos on the workfloor and huge work loads is indeed a cruel plague that is sweeping the earth in the name of globalization. Say hello to the new beast. Same as the old beast. It's name is greed. So thanks Moya. She spent $2.5 billion on machines that don't work and left.

Moya Greene is indeed the STD Queen. (Her Short Term Disability program robbed Canadian Postal workers of their sick leave.) God save the real Queen and hang the real traitor out to dry. It doesn't take a mathematician to realize the American postal model is not a good one while the Canadian postal model was. In 2009 Canada Post reported coming out of a recession reporting it's 15th consecutive year of profits. Moya Greene killed that legacy. Remember remember the 5th of November.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Afghanistan pledges troops to secure major pipeline



Surprise, surprise. This is what the invasion of Afghanistan was really about. Afghanistan will deploy up to 7,000 troops to secure a major transnational gas pipeline slated to run through some of the most dangerous parts of the war-torn country, an official said Sunday.

The pledge comes a day after Turkmenistan signed broad agreements with Afghanistan, India and Pakistan at a summit in its capital Ashgabat on the ambitious venture.

The 1,700-kilometre TAPI pipeline, Ashgabat's dream project that first appeared in 1995, has been on hold for many years due to the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. (The Taliban gave the contract for the pipeleine to an Argenteena firm instead of an American one.)

The pipeline aims to transport more than 30 billion cubic metres of gas annually from the Dauletabad gas fields in southeast Turkmenistan and could turn into a cash cow for Afghanistan in transit fees.

Wow, the oil company is even gonna give Afghanistan 8% of the oil revenue. Sounds like a little Iranian Deja Vue. In fact, they're going right around Iran this time. That's only half of what they initially gave the Shaw before they were forced to raise the percentage. It's all about the money.

Obviously, Afghanistan wouldn't get as much as Turkmenistan since the oil is just passing through Afghanistan it's not drilled and refined there.

Yet if 8% of the oil revenue would be a cash cow for the Afghan government, which is alleged to be corrupt, then controlling interest in those oil revenues would indeed be a fortune. Why that would be enough blood money to fund a war. England and BP were the ones that started the war for oil. They're the ones that convinced the Americans to get involved in it.