Day: March 6, 2025

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Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea will unveil a Poolside Escape cabana and The White Lotus Bar, inspired by the HBO® Original Series, The White Lotus. As the celebrated filming location of Season 1, Four Seasons Resort Maui invites guests to set-jet to paradise with these distinctive experiences at its iconic Adult Pool from March 14 to May 16, 2025.
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Written by: Regan Boychuk

Everyone knows the 2003 American invasion of Iraq was about oil, but no one can quite explain how?[1] And though time is quickly running out on a liveable future,[2] it is now possible to untangle one of history’s greatest crimes: The US invasion was not about stealing Iraq’s oil; it was about keeping Iraqi oil off the world market to maximize the value of 175 billion barrels of newly-‘proven’ Alberta bitumen, which became the fraudulent collateral predatorily lent as subprime mortgages that soon cheated millions of Americans out of their homes. Only by understanding this grand imperial bezzle[3] can we hope to thwart it before the clock runs out on our species’ prospects for sustainability.

 

Fraudulent Collateral & Private Lending

Something strange happened in the world of banking the same year the United States committed the supreme international crime of aggression, invading and occupying Iraq.[4]  Absent from the mainstream discussion of the resulting 2007-2008 housing market crash was any curiosity about why so few lenders went bankrupt while trillions in bad mortgages cheated Americans out of eight million homes.[5]

To solve these mysteries, we need an understanding of the imperial nature of Western banking and accounting: Whenever a bank makes a loan, it is thereby creating new money.[6] This is an incredible power, only shared by the full-faith-and-credit of the sovereign state. Private bankers operate in Canada based on letters from the British king and prefer to obscure the nature and unaccountability of their private power. To this day, neoclassical economists pretend that money and banking are not important parts of the economy: “Among the blind, the cross-eyed man is king”[7] is a phrase that may often remain true, but we are not obligated to wear the blinders of the imperial mandarins posing as economists. As former banker and historian Michael Hudson has repeatedly emphasized, banks extend most loans against existing real estate and securities.[8] This makes the shifting dynamic of legal collateral’s market-value especially consequential in an ever more financialized world.

Until the 1970s, oil reserves were not regarded as legal collateral. That changed with Alberta’s brief escape from the death grip of American empire and the end of the international gold standard in August 1971. Reflecting the imperial power involved, “The first institution to adopt asset based lending to the oil industry by securing hydrocarbon reserves seems to be lost in history”.[9] From this obscure birth came a disastrous idea: private banks lending to unaccountable (foreign) oil companies.

“Any convention of oilmen will result mainly in a desire on their part to have legalized some control which is illegal,” President Herbert Hoover wrote to his interior secretary in 1930, “otherwise they would do it themselves.”[10] John Rockefeller Jr. was honest enough in his 1941 PhD thesis at his father’s University of Chicago: “When the corporate form is used to facilitate monopoly control and financial gain through pseudo-legal manipulations, it leads to a wasteful use of resources from the social point of view, but the individual firm may be benefitted.”[11]

According a former banking regulator, it is neoclassical economic theory itself that optimizes criminogenic environments that produce or lead to crime.[12] Lending money to foreign oil companies creates money out of thin air and hands it to foreign shareholders, while Canadians repay the loans themselves with tomorrow’s locked-in carbon production. Canadians are robbed twice on the way to Armageddon: first they take the oil without paying for it and then borrow a fortune which Canadians must repay. This disastrous idea is rampant in Alberta and is set to kill us all.

On the eve of Alberta’s brief escape from the US empire’s clutches and the end of the gold standard, securities manipulation was so common in Canada that its unfavourable reputation posed its own threat to investment. Somehow, criminal prosecution of Canadian securities fraud faded even further after the US’ Watergate scandal[13] (it was an important imperial turning point, as we see below). By the 1980s, attempted reform sought to counter the fact that modern corporation had become “a weapon in white-collar crime”.[14] Leading economists soon recognized that something they called “Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations.”[15]

Much like compradors who exploit the natural tendency to assume the good faith of fellow citizens, “Control frauds exploit the naive belief that a controlling owner will not loot ‘his’ firm.”[16] Regulatory paladin Bill Black has since had his revolutionary Control Fraud Theory – tens of thousands of criminal referrals & 1,700 convicted banksters as a result – expanded by June Carbone to the even more wholistic Control Predation. Theirs is the proper frame for these crimes and a guide on how to thwart them.[17]

As the Brookings Institute warned after the Saving & Loan Crisis a generation ago, “If we learn from experience, history need not repeat itself.”[18] For selfish reasons, Western imperialists have not allowed anyone to learn those lessons – and in 2003, $9 trillion dollars in stolen Alberta bitumen became legal collateral for the Rockefellers’ use. Then-US Energy Secretary Edward Abraham told Alberta the same day Marines pulled down Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, ‘From now on, when the Americans talked oil, they would be counting the reserves sitting beneath the forests of northern Alberta.’[19]

175 billion barrels of newly proven bitumen reserves
@ $50/barrel* = $8.75 trillion USD

This is unleveraged pseudo-legal collateral without regulatory strings attached

(Canadian banks typically extend loans against half proven reserves;
in the US, banks lend up to 75 per cent and more.)

The real objective of the US invasion of Iraq was to keep their cheap production off the market to avoid tanking prices from the deluge of Alberta bitumen production coming onstream, a result of production ramping up since the late 1990s.[20] The same day Marines pulled down Saddam Hussein’s statue, completing the occupation, the US officially recognized 175 billion barrels of bitumen reserves as proven and thus legal collateral for private money creation: April 9, 2003. “There is no such thing in economic life as a nonfinancial event”, James Galbraith reminds us, so “Finance is the only way to understand the economy.” It is also true “Allowing the bubble is tantamount to enabling the subsequent crash” and “The point of regulation is to keep a potentially unstable system operating within safe limits so far as these can be known.”[21] “In the lead-up to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008,” nonetheless, “the US accumulated a gargantuan mountain of new mortgage debt, totalling $5 trillion.”[22]

The creation of trillions in new and free legal collateral was instantaneous on September 26, 2003, when NI 51-101 came into force. But it’s much worse than just a mere $9 trillion. Initially, much was spent building enormous bitumen projects, but now that the construction phase has ended, foreign borrowing has only increased. These loans roll over every 3-5 years and revolving lines of credit continue spinning as long as the carbon keeps getting dug up. Trillions in stolen collateral are repaid in a handful of years with Canadians’ own oil. “The primary aim of today’s commercial and central banking, especially since 2008,” Michael Hudson informs us, “has been to fuel capital gains by more credit/debt creation. The financial sector’s returns are best seen not as real wealth on the asset side of the balance sheet, but as overheads on the liabilities side.”[23]

Just like during the Saving & Loan Crisis, the game after 2003 was to make bad loans to drive up the price level of real estate and corporate stocks, to capture loot as capital gains. Within one year of the financialization of trillions in Alberta bitumen (highlights added):

“Rampant fraud in the [US] mortgage industry has increased so sharply that the FBI warned … of an ‘epidemic’ of financial crimes which, if not curtailed, could become ‘the next S&L crisis.’ Assistant FBI Director Chris Swecker said the booming mortgage market, fueled by low interest rates and soaring home values, has attracted unscrupulous professionals and criminal groups whose fraudulent activities could cause multibillion-dollar losses to financial institutions.”[24]

The domestic and international carnage of the 2008 global financial crisis was extensive. But hope was unexpectedly born in Alberta in 2015. That hope came when the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) was elected in a surprise backlash against Premier Jim Prentice calling an early election, after the leader of the opposition crossed the floor to join his government. “Once [NDP Premier Rachel] Notley came to power, though, it became increasingly clear that very little would change. Big Oil continued to rule the day.”[25]

During the Alberta NDP’s fraudulent 2015 royalty review, cleanup was not being accounted for by industry in its securities reporting,[26] banks were relaxing loan conditions across the board,[27] and industry was threatening mass bankruptcy: The November 2015 failure of Spyglass Resources was  “the first for a conventional Calgary-based oil and gas producer in the current downturn and raises questions about how the province will deal with well reclamation liabilities if the trend continues.”[28] Alberta Treasury Branches CEO and royalty review chair Dave Mowat threatened to go rogue in December 2015 if NDP government did not publish energy economist Peter Tertzakian’s fraudulent royalty report lowering the world’s lowest royalty rates even further.[29] To their eternal shame, the Alberta NDP published the fraudulent royalty review and then lowered royalties a couple more times that summer for good measure.[30]

What’s more, climate change means that most of the collateral against which banks lend to the oil industry cannot be responsibly produced within the limits of climate change.[31] Which is to say, most of the industry’s collateral is fraudulent. “Now that the reality that banks create money is acknowledged,” Steve Keen advises, “so too must be the role of the finance sector in creating asset price bubbles and financial crises, and in enabling the accumulation and concealment of wealth.” A proper understanding of the oil and gas and bitumen industries in real life requires the incorporation of private money creation – a tantalizing opportunity put within grasp by Keen’s system dynamics software Minsky.[32]

Even the most sophisticated critics of capitalism still assume “serious bankers will not finance industries that require expensive capital assets unless there is some believable guarantee that price will not fall to marginal cost”.[33] Unfortunately, as Nature has since reported, the “prevailing business culture in the banking industry favours dishonest behaviour”.[34] And the same could be said of other imperial industries like oil.  Recently, researchers inadvertently proved that banks lend to oil and gas companies without regard for cleanup.[35] It is that imperial impunity that inevitably results in economic crashes. According to the top study by a lifelong banker: “Private debt is key, and the story of financial crisis is, at heart, a story of private debt and runaway lending. Time and again it is a story of lending booms in which bankers and other lenders make far too many bad loans.”[36]

As the former president of the American Sociological Society, Edwin Sutherland, warned in his classic study (which did not dare mention the oil industry, but was nonetheless still censored for decades): “White Collar Crime Is Organized Crime”.[37] The same can be said for imperialism, which is largely a financial affair – in our case taking its loot in the form of capital gains fed by fraudulent loans built atop free collateral gifted by letters from the king.

 

Independence & Democracy

Genuine independence and democracy both presuppose popular control of resources, without which sovereignty is an illusion and politics merely the shadow cast by rentiers, bankers, and other imperialists.[38] Fortunately, imperialism’s secrecy and bad faith are also clues from which solutions to many of their unsolved crimes can be deduced: We rarely know what imperialists are up to at any given moment, but in hindsight it very soon becomes apparent they are most active on the anniversaries of prior achievements. This investigation of Canadian sovereignty begins with a single declassified document and a single logical assumption, from which its hypothesis will be proven or disproven by the historical record. If Imperialism happens on Anniversaries, as our hypothesis here proposes, then with enough episodes and the inspiration of Leo Tolstoy,[39] we may be able to derive enough glimpses of imperialist actions directly from logic and our definition to objectively describe important elements of secretive and slippery bad faith imperialism, and the related utilization of timing by the western world’s managers to send quiet political messages.

We begin our investigation with a Rosetta Stone of a declassified document, penned by Canada’s leading military historian, C.P. Stacey, the American-trained censor for the Canadian Army in 1954.  When it comes to the Ogdensburg Treaty signed by the United States and Canada August 18, 1940, “The dates of meetings … and other related details, must not be referred to in documents intended for publication unless and until formal clearance is received from the Sovereign or the Governor General”.[40] That date and treaty are this study’s starting point, a confirmed glimpse of imperialism.[41] By this study’s proposed definition, those involved are confirmed Imperialists and the content of their activity that Anniversary is confirmed Imperialism. From there, all that is required to test our hypothesis is the rule of logical deduction, modus ponens – Latin for “mode that by affirming affirms”.

Proving Imperialists did Imperialism on a given Anniversary helps prove other Imperialists did other Imperialism on other Anniversaries – by affirming Anniversaries, Imperialists affirm Imperialism and, by affirming Imperialists, Anniversaries affirm Imperialism, etc. Iteratively, this network of known dates and actors generate a factual record that spans a millennium and reveals obvious patterns centred around 29 important milestones in the evolution of the ultimate imperial conspiracy of avoiding debts, the rule of law, and democracy.(Appendix A – Imperial Anniversaries) The systematic study of official Canadian and US censorship of as it relates to these 29 obvious imperial Anniversaries produces more than four hundred episodes.(Appendix B – Differentiated Episodes) The sum of these findings is frightening (Appendix C – Chronology), but it also offers the prospect of increasing our understanding of how modern day imperialism is conducted, in the bid to defeat the worst outcomes imperialists have in store for us.

Editor’s note: The Canada Files does not vouch for the validity of the three appendixes, which have been submitted to a professional journal for peer-review.

 

The Odd Fellows Conspiracy

British elites established a secret society January 6, 1798, to further their aim of reuniting their white-skinned empire again after the American revolution. They called themselves Oddfellows, and by 1817, they had initiated the American Odd Fellows in Baltimore. Canada was the bountiful hinterland British Oddfellows were offering as dowry to the US Odd Fellows to seal their empires’ remarriage. By 1826, American agitation against the secret society spread to Canada, and despite the Oddfellows’ best efforts, legislation was passed outlawing the supposed fraternity. Unfortunately, the British king at the time was an Oddfellow himself and refused the Canadian legislation.[42]  Canada was not allowed to protect itself from the Anglo-American conspiracy, which continued apace.

On the eve of the US Civil War, the second most important member of the American Democratic Party, Secretary of State William Seward met with Abraham Lincoln, while the New York Times held its front page for the president’s response.[43] Seward’s April 1, 1861, memorandum suggested foreign conquest instead of civil war – but the US president chose to vanquish the southern states first. The infamous memo remained a secret until February 1888, a few months before Cecil Rhodes started DeBeers Mining and the Canadian Senate heard evidence of the world’s largest oilfield in what would become northern Alberta on May 2, 1888. By then, the South Improvement Company conspiracy that began February 26, 1872, had made Standard Oil’s John D. Rockefeller the most powerful man in the world and arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes (who founded the De Beers diamond monopoly with Rothschild financing) had begun funding a second UK-US conspiracy to federate their empires under American leadership: The Round Table Conspiracy was born September 19, 1877. By April 1898, Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier’s Liberal Party had secretly enabled the sale of Imperial Oil to the Rockefellers, by 1902 the Canadian prime minister was asserting America’s Monroe Doctrine had already been applied, and by 1917 Laurier lamented that “Canada is now governed by a junta sitting at London, known as “The Round Table””.[44]

 

The Round Table Conspiracy

The First World War brought censorship August 22, 1914 – an essential component of foreign control that was vigorously imposed by Canada’s first official censor, previously managing editor and publisher of the Calgary Herald.[45] In what would become a common theme in Canadian history, Canada’s longest-serving prime minister (1921-30 and 1935-48), William Mackenzie King, was re-installed into the Liberal Party at a new-style leadership convention August 7, 1919 – shortly after returning to Canada from five years in the employ of the Rockefellers.[46] John Brownlee was also installed as Alberta premier in a “well-mannered backstairs revolt” on November 23, 1925. Canada’s other major political party, the Conservatives, was captured by the Americans in another new-style leadership convention October 12, 1927, that installed Rockefeller executive in Calgary, Richard B. Bennett, who had mentored a young Brownlee 15 years earlier and would serve as Prime Minister in Mackenzie King’s stead (1930-35, creating the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC] and Bank of Canada).[47]

Ernest Manning was a 24-year-old bible college graduate – no members of the Social Credit party Manning organized had previously been members of legislature – installed as Alberta’s acting premier on August 22, 1935, after premier Brownlee resigned amidst a fake scandal breathlessly embellished by a deeply yellow Alberta press.[48] As thanks, dozens of Albertan newspapers received the only Pulitzers ever given outside the US on May 3, 1938.[49] Imperialism and honest journalism are obviously incompatible. That yellow press also enabled Americans to lock in their gains. After a special session of the provincial legislature, Alberta’s new American-staffed oil and gas regulator was placed above the law November 22, 1938: the regulator did not have to hold hearings, or even publish its decisions, and could not be appealed to any court.[50] Before entering the Second World War, the US had quietly secured control of the world’s largest oilfield.

It did not go unnoticed by locals but was soon entrenched nonetheless, with the help of the also foreign-controlled federal government. A commission of inquiry had been announced in October 1938 into Alberta’s new oil and gas regulator, but its author (Alberta Supreme Court Chief Justice Alexander McGillivray) was assassinated December 12, 1940, after Imperial Oil had published his sage inquiry June 14, 1940.[51] The US then cemented their control over Alberta’s oil by treaty. Two years to the day of receiving an honourary degree from Mackenzie King, Franklin Roosevelt invited the prime minister alone to Ogdensburg, New York, where the US President and his secretary of war had been drilling 100,000 troops on the Canadian border. Mackenzie King signed a treaty permanently subordinating Canada to the US on August 18, 1940, without any contact with the remainder of his cabinet or government.

In case there were any lingering doubts about the actual meaning of the Ogdensburg Treaty, it was signed a second time the day before Alberta’s largest oil discovery, Leduc #1, on February 12, 1947.[52]

In his last press interview, Leon Trotsky warned “North American militarism will be the most grandiose in all history” and “It will begin by inheriting the British Empire.”[53] Trotsky was assassinated a few days after Ogdensburg by the Canadian boyfriend of one of Trotsky’s New York friends who had walked past the American bodyguards with a mountaineering axe under a folded trench-coat, despite the nice weather.[54] Within weeks of Manning’s installation in 1935, President Roosevelt’s heir apparent, Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long, similarly met his end in a hail of bullets September 8, 1935 – despite having declared from the Senate floor that the American President promised to pardon whoever killed him. Long’s assassination has remained unsolved.[55]

 

The Second World War & Its Aftermath

The British had lured the United States into the First World War with a supposedly intercepted cable (more likely forged) on the imperial anniversary January 19, 1917. But things were different the second time around. Britain’s top spy had learned of Japan’s plans to attack Pearl Harbor and tried to warn the FBI’s Herbert Hoover, who informed the British he did not need any help.[56] A few weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Alberta’s only bitumen project burned to the ground, and a few weeks after imperial Japan’s attack, 40,000 US troops occupied Western Canada until premier Manning finally perfected US control on January 26, 1949, after the Atlantic #3 disaster of March-September 1948.

What would later become Alberta’s New Democratic Party (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation), appeared to blow the whistle March 2, 1948, declaring “when God placed beneath our feet these great pools of wealth for the enjoyment of us all, he did not put up a sign “Reserved for the Imperial Oil.”” Manning’s government lost a confidence vote the next day, but instead of reform, Albertans got the largest onshore oil spill in Canadian history a few days later. Within weeks, Manning had promised Alberta would never collect more than one-sixth of the revenue of our oil and gas.[57] As if aided by some higher power, Ernest Manning’s 1948 promise somehow still remains true today:

That precipitous climb in locals’ share of royalty revenue during Lougheed’s 1970s illustrates the tragedy that struck the American empire in August 1971 with the opening of a small window of political independence for Alberta. Peter Lougheed had announced his candidacy for leadership of Alberta’s Progressive Conservative Party on February 9, 1965, and negotiations to swallow Lougheed’s party into Manning’s Social Credit failed in December 1966.[59] With a local billionaire patron of his own (the Mannix family), Peter Lougheed could not be beaten in a fair fight, so the Rockefellers’ lacky Ernest Manning retired to start a consulting agency with his second son, Preston Manning, on December 16, 1967. Before the Social Credit era ended, however, the Mannings and their American patrons placed John Nichol at Alberta’s oil and gas regulator as a trojan horse in 1970 overseeing minimal drilling standards.[60]

 

Alberta’s Window of Democracy & Rule of Law, 1971-85

Though imperial forces in the US were under increased scrutiny with the New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers beginning June 13, 1971,[61] the integration of imperial forces into the US state apparatus after WWII began to be unwound. Imperialism was in the process of being privatized again. On the 753rd anniversary of Magna Carta coming into force September 11, 1970, a former head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Frank McCone, offered $1 million from the corporation he now ran to help overthrow the elected government in Chile.[62] On September 11, 1971, the FBI informant that would set off the fake Watergate scandal gave his first media interviews to pose as an heir to the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and increase the credibility of his future leaks.[63] The coup in Chile took place September 11, 1973, demonstrating the American imperial state’s distaste for Magna Carta. Getting out while the getting was good, Nelson Rockefeller resigned from 15 years as New York Governor on December 12, 1973[64] – marking another imperial anniversary.

Four days after US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger received his requested intelligence review of Australia in preparation for a second coup against Western nations, President Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. President Gerald Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller vice president on August 20, 1974. So, when Ford pardoned Nixon on September 8, 1974, it extended to Mr. Rockefeller. And that just happened to fulfill the Senator Huey Long’s prophesied fate on the anniversary of his own demise.[65] By the next year, the Canadian government had been stripped of control of the Bank of Canada and finance minister John Turner resigned cabinet along with his parliamentary seat September 11, 1975. Not long afterwards, the elected government in Australia was replaced by the British Governor General invoking the king’s ancient reserve powers that had been re-affirmed on November 22, 1926. So that no one would forget, the coup took place in Australia on Remembrance Day of 1975, as its architects watched from the safety of pardoned retirement.[66]

In the lead up to its 1982 election, Alberta had another ‘accident’. On October 17, 1982, a sour well blew dangerously out of control, killing two, injuring 16, and burning for 68 days (through the remainder of the election campaign). Lougheed still won 75 of 78 seats in the provincial legislature on November 2, 1982, and the sour well was finally extinguished by American contractors on December 23, 1982. A month later, computer delays wreaked havoc at the Progressive Conservative national leadership convention, but former Lougheed ally Joe Clark still won the vote handily on January 26, 1983. Inexplicably Clark resigned anyway, making way for the Americans’ preferred candidate, Brian Mulroney. Meanwhile, US pressure continued to escalate.[67]

Next, Canada’s Chief Justice Bora Laskin died on March 26, 1984. And on September 4, 1984, Mulroney led the Progressive Conservative Party to the largest ever majority in Canadian Parliament. The leader of Alberta’s comprador NDP party was assassinated in a plane crash October 19, 1984, and Alberta Chief Justice William McGillivray was assassinated on December 16, 1984 – almost the same day his fellow Chief Justice father had been killed in 1940. Lougheed initially resisted calls from the yellow press to resign, but eventually announced his retirement June 26, 1985. The window of Alberta independence was now closed; the real looting could now begin.

 

The $9 Trillion Crime, 1985-2007

Thrust onto the national stage for the first time by his American bosses during the 1983 Conservative Party leadership race after Clark quit, Quebec mining executive Brian Mulroney proved himself a bad faith comprador sent to realign Canada with the American orbit.[68] “In retrospect,” columnist Linda McQuaig lamented, “it may seem inevitable that Canada would follow the lead of US President Ronald Reagan who was aggressively promoting corporate interests south of the border. But Canada had a different political tradition”, however fleetingly, but especially under Trudeau and Lougheed. Under the US-installed Mulroney (1984-93) and Alberta premier Don Getty (1985-92), curious things began happening to Canadian banking. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) was established in July 1987.[69] 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.”[70]

By the mid-1990s, imperialism’s Canadian banking friends had arranged a system ripe for looting and focus shifted to securities regulation. In June 1998, the Alberta Securities Commission appointed a seven-member taskforce to guide new oilfield disclosure rules. On January 24, 2001, the ASC Taskforce report was released the same day the Canadian oil lobby called for cleanup reforms to be delayed and a prominent set of compradors published an open letter to quisling premier Ralph Klein calling for increasing Alberta independence from the rest of Canada.[71] When the ASC produced a draft of National Instrument 51-101: Standards of Disclosure for Oil and Gas Activities the next fall, its former chief accountant resigned. “I’m worried that if it goes through that way, I don’t want to be associated with it,” said Henry Lawrie. He said oil and gas companies should be required to adhere to a much more stringent set of requirements before reserves can be booked as “proved”.[72]

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 9, 2003. That also happened to be the day Washington 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 (most Canadian companies are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange, but other provincial stock exchanges soon followed) conjured almost $9 trillion dollars in new legal collateral on September 26, 2003. In less than a year, the FBI warned publicly of an “epidemic” of financial crimes that could become “the next S&L crisis.” That was stolen Alberta collateral flooding America as its imperial troops held Iraqi production down and prices up, to maximize the value of Wall Street’s loot.

The summer before NI 51-101, on June 28, 2003, personal liability for cleanup was lifted for Alberta oilpatch executives. Then, on the Rockefellers’ favorite anniversary, August 19, 2003, it was reported that wellsites in Alberta were no longer going to be inspected before being certified as reclaimed by Alberta ‘regulators’ – blindly releasing industry from liability and ensuring citizens will be saddled with the inevitable expenses.[73] Financially speaking, Alberta oil was now as good as gold – and in American hands. Without having to worry about royalties or cleanup, the billions of barrels of bitumen US-installed leaders gave away to foreigners has joined gold as the only liability-less assets. This has been of no small consequence to subsequent world events.

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 is no double-entry bookkeeping in Canadian finance.[74] By 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 from the early 2000s, industry borrowing has consistently been in the $100 billion range. Quisling Alberta premier Jason Kenney dismantled the last of Alberta’s oilfield liability management regime[75] 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’s annual borrowing exploded 40 per cent to $140 billion; total theft from Canadian banks since the 2015 Paris climate agreement now exceeds $1.2 trillion CAD.[76]

 

Past as Predicate? Alaska and Greenland

To send an imperial message about their displeasure at Canadian steps towards independence, the United States paid 25 times more than necessary to purchase Alaska from Russia the day after British legislation created a new Dominion on March 30, 1867 (though the country didn’t formally came into existence until Canada Day: July 1, 1867).[77] Pearl Harbor offered the opportunity to make good on age-old American threats of continental conquest, and US occupation has continued quietly in one form or another since. In the 1920s, the US share of foreign capital invested in Canada more than tripled at the expense of the British. As a prominent American journalist put it, “We shall not make Britain’s mistake. Too wise to try to govern the world, we shall merely own it. Nothing can stop us. Nothing until our financial empire rots at its heart, as empires have a way of doing.”[78]

Just before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Alberta’s only commercial bitumen project burned down in November 1941. The Abasand project was rebuilt again with the federal taxpayer funds but razed again on the 728th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta on June 15, 1945. The federal government got the message and returned the licenses for 175 billion barrels of oil for premier Ernest Manning to disperse to his American patrons for free.[79] With American interests again in ascendency in Canada today, more Canadian production is both desired by the US and offered by its local quislings like premier Danielle Smith, who promised to double Alberta production the same day Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resigned under US pressure[80] – leaving the next election an appealing situation for the US’ preferred candidate, fellow Manning family-creation Pierre Poilievre.

If Mr. Poilievre does not win Canada’s next federal election, there is very good reason to expect US President Donald Trump to purchase Greenland to register his displeasure. “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World,” Trump announced on Christmas Eve of 2024, “the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”[81]

The truth about Canada is dark, but it has a silver lining: Understanding the scale of the theft ends forever the question of how to pay for needed reforms. The answer is popular control of resource rent. That would also seriously hamper many imperialist machinations. Even as the American boot grows heavier on Canadian necks, Peter Lougheed pioneered a path to follow towards double-entry bookkeeping, meaningful democracy, and a decent future. It is long-past time to euthanize rentiers and other imperialists once and for all.[82] Otherwise, it will soon be too late for a liveable future. Fortunately, system dynamics could be an incredibly powerful tool for navigating a carbon budget, understanding banking, and thwarting financial imperialism.

System dynamics has also been imperialists’ single greatest tool ever since it was discovered by the US navy in 1902; Britain revealed its knowledge of system dynamics as soon as the First World War began and Russia soon followed suit.[83] System dynamics has been used ever since by imperialists to maximize their power through efficiently maximizing resource production, instead of conserving within the bounds of climate change.[84] System dynamics is also the core of artificial intelligence, which has recently been foisted upon the wider public. Silicon Valley and AI enabled the latest episode of colonial genocide in Palestine.[85] Going forward, the US empire plans AI powered by free Alberta energy as its competitive advantage as American imperialists run civilization off the climate cliff.[86] The hour is late, but our last chance to salvage a decent future may yet remain.

References & Excerpts

[1] Greenspan 2007_pp. 462-63: “It should be obvious that as long as the United States is beholden to potentially unfriendly sources of oil and gas, we are vulnerable to economic crises over which we have little control. … all credible longer-term forecasts conclude that to continue on the path of world growth over the next quarter century at rates commensurate with those of the past quarter century will require between one-fourth and two-fifths more oil than we use today. Most of this oil will have to come from politically volatile regions because, as we have seen, that is where most of the readily extractable oil resides. … whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy. I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Former Federal Reserve Chairman (1987-2006) Alan Greenspan The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a new world New York: Penguin 2007;

   Muttit 2018_pp. 333-34: “The evidence shows rather that the US and UK interest was in enabling foreign investment in Iraq’s under-developed oilfields to increase global supplies and contain the oil price, without leaving Saddam Hussein’s hand on the tap. … in terms of outcomes, the record of success is decidedly mixed … primary oil objective … was ultimately achieved, albeit … non-optimally from the US/UK perspective … a larger share of contracts went to Chinese and other non-western companies” Oil Change International Senior Advisor Greg Muttit “No blood for oil, revisited: The strategic role of oil in the 2003 Iraq War” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies v12#3 (September 2018): 319-39;

   Muttit 2012 Greg Muttit Fuel on the Fire: Oil and politics in occupied Iraq New York: New Press 2012

[2] Hegel 1820_pp. 23, 392n31: “the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk” … ‘The owl is the sacred bird of Minerva (Greek: Athena), goddess of wisdom. The apparent meaning of this famous saying is that a culture’s philosophical understanding reaches its peak only when the culture enters its decline.’ … “Philosophy always comes too late to issue instructions on how the world ought to be.” Georg W.F. Hegel (trans.) Allen W. Wood Elements of the Philosophy of Right (ed.) H.B. Nisbet (1820; Cambridge: Cambridge University 1991)

[3] NP 30/11/19: “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.”” Tom Bradley “Beware the ‘bezzle’” National Post (30 November 2019): FP6;

   Mint 19/11/18: “in colonial era, most of India’s sizeable foreign exchange earnings went straight to London severely hampering the country’s ability to import machinery & technology to embark on modernisation” Ajai Sreevatsan “British Raj siphoned out $45 trillion from India: Utsa Patnaik” Mint (19 November 2018);

   Al Jazeera 19/12/18 Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts Professor Jason Hickel “How Britain stole $45 trillion from India: And lied about it” Al Jazeera (19 December 2018);

   Collins DictionaryBritish Bill of Goods: “something that is fraudulently represented”

[4] Kramer, Michalowski & Roth 2005 Ronald Kramer, Raymond Michalowski and Dawn Roth “”The Supreme International Crime”: How the US war in Iraq threatens the rule of law” Social Justice v32#2 (2005): 52-81

[5] NPR 23/1/20: 10 or 16 million Americans “lost their homes — but those houses and apartments didn’t disappear into thin air. Journalist Aaron Glantz studied what happened after the crash for his book: Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream … “You have 8 million homes that were lost during the foreclosure crisis and they didn’t just disappear,” Glantz said. “When you look at the people who bought these homes, you’re not necessarily talking about mom and pop landlords here. Oftentimes, you’re talking about major speculative interests from Wall Street.” Glantz said the rise of this new corporate class of homeowners is unprecedented in the US. “We have three million homes and more than 10 million apartment units in America that are owned by LLC, LLP and shell companies,” he said. “Back in the 90s, well over 90% of homes were owned by people. This is no longer the case.”” Courtney Collins “What happened to all the homes lost during the foreclosure crisis?” North Texas National Public Radio Kera News (23 January 2020)

[6] McLeay, Radia & Thomas 2014p. 14 Michael McLeay, Amar Radia and Ryland Thomas “Money creation in the modern economy” Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1 (14 March 2014): 14-27

[7] Erasmus 1536 Desiderius Erasmus Adagia (III, IV, 96) in William Barker (ed.) The Adages of Erasmus (1500-36; Toronto: University of Toronto 2001): 276-77

[8] Hudson 2012_pp. 4, 7: “Most loans are for mortgages to inflate land prices. … Despite the transformative role that finance has played … mainstream economists treat markets as if most money is paid for goods and services, not real estate, bonds, stocks, or other assets.” Michael Hudson “Veblen’s institutionalist elaboration of rent theory” Bard College Levy Economics Institute Working Paper #729 (August 2012): 23pp

[9] Fox, Gonsoulin & Price 2014_pp. 3-4: “the US upstream finance market started much earlier than its international counterpart. … The first institution to adopt asset based lending to the oil industry by securing hydrocarbon reserves seems to be lost in history … Critical to the development of reserve based lending in the US was the ability of banks to have asset-level perfected security through a mortgage on the underlying field because of the unusual circumstance that it is generally possible for the debtor to own the hydrocarbons outright. … The US market expanded significantly in the 1970s as oil prices increased. … lenders would loan to an entity that had a specific set of producing assets that generated cash flow that would be paid directly to the lender. In the early 1980s, however, lenders became more competitive and the modern day borrowing base structure emerged. Borrowers were now allowed to receive their production proceeds directly and revolving lines of credit became the norm.” Jason Fox, Dewey Gonsoulin and Kevin Price “A tale of two markets” pt1 of “Reserve based finance” Oil & Gas Financial Journal (January 2014): 6pp

[10] Hoover 6/12/30 President Herbert Hoover to Secretary of the Interior Ray Wilbur (6 December 1930) cited in Kendrick A. Clements “Herbert Hoover and conservation, 1921-33” American Historical Review v89#1 (February 1984): 79n34

[11] Rockefeller 1941_p. 99 David Rockefeller Unused Resources and Economic Waste 1941University of Chicago PhD Thesis

[12] Bill Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, senior VP and General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and Senior Deputy Chief Counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. Black 2011 William K. Black “Neo-classical economic theories, methodology, and praxis optimize criminogenic environments and produce recurrent, intensifying crises” Creighton Law Review v44#3 (June 2011): 597-645

[13] Hagan & Parker 1985_pp. 303, 312-13: “So common that by the mid-1960s Canada had earned an unfavorable international reputation for securities manipulation that itself posed a threat to investment (La Prairie, 1979). This led to a strengthening of enforcement efforts, including passage of the Ontario Securities Act of 1966 (see Johnston, 1977). These efforts have in the last year included an investigation by the Ontario Securities Commission of Conrad Black, Chairman of the giant Argus Corporation and reputedly the most powerful corporate entrepreneur in Canada (Newman, 1982); as well as an investigation of the multinational participants in a set of real-estate transactions involving the block sale of over 10,000 Toronto apartments eventually valued at over a half billion dollars. Although neither of these investigations has led to a criminal conviction, both have attracted the attention of the national (Globe and Mail, 1983a, 1983b) and international press (Wall Street Journal, 1983a, 1983b, 1983c) and helped stimulate the current research. … Employers are instead more likely to be charged with Securities Act violations that carry less stigma and lower sentence exposure. Subsequent analyses revealed that these patterns were most noticeable following Watergate. This was an era in which the enforcement of securities laws increased, with a new emphasis on large, organized offenses committed by managers as well as employers. Employers apparently were spared some of the consequences of this increased prosecution through the use of Securities Act rather than Criminal Code charges.” University of Toronto Professor Emeritus of Law and Sociology John Hagan and University of Toronto Faculty of Law Senior Research Associate Patricia Parker “White-collar crime and punishment: The class structure and legal sanctioning of securities violations” American Sociological Review v50#3 (June 1985): 302-316

[14] Wheeler & Rothman 1982_pp. 1406, 1422: “the [corporation], size and profitably notwithstanding, is for white-collar criminals what the gun or knife is for the common criminal—a tool to obtain money from victims. … the organizational form itself, and public perceptions warped by image-making, combine to give the organization a heightened sense of legitimacy.” Stanton Wheeler and Mitchell L. Rothman “The organization as a weapon in white-collar crime” Michigan Law Review v80#7 (June 1982): 1403-26;

     Howcroft 1986 Nigel J. Howcroft “Scope of fraudulent conveyances and fraudulent preferences legislation in Alberta” Alberta Law Review v24#3 (February 1986): 496-509

[15] Akerlof & Romer 1993_p. 2: “Our theoretical analysis shows that an economic underground can come to life if firms have an incentive to go broke for profit at society’s expense (to loot) instead of to go for broke (to gamble on success).” 2001 ‘Nobel’-economist George A. Akerlof and 2018 ‘Nobel’-economist Paul R. Romer “Looting: The economic underworld of bankruptcy for profit” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity v24#2 (1993): 1-73;

    McMahon 2014 Craig McMahon “Fraud and bankruptcy” Legal Education Society of Alberta (January 2014): 32pp [excerpt]

[16] Black 2003_pp. 26, 31-35: “The ability to secure extraordinary political power can be one of the most pernicious aspects of control frauds. … Voluntarily taking on a net liability is irrational … unless the purpose is to gain a vehicle for control fraud. … George Akerlof and Paul Romer provided the first formal economic model of when the wealth-optimizing strategy for the controlling owner-CEO was to loot the firm. Unsurprisingly, it was when the firm had little, or negative, capital … Control frauds exploit the naive belief that a controlling owner will not loot “his” firm. … Control frauds increase outstanding debt because they are defrauding the creditors as well as the shareholders and because a ponzi scheme must grow or die.” William K. Black “Reexamining the law-and-economics theory of corporate governance” Challenge v46#2 (March/April 2003): 22-40

[17] Black 2005b_pp. 299-300: “My book explains how to conduct effective regulation and supervision and how to prosecute successfully the most elite financial criminals. It is a book about regulatory courage in the face of brutal, powerful opposition that goes far beyond making regulation “really hard.” It is an inspiring tale. A regulatory race to the bottom will generate regulatory leaders who are bottom feeders that lack the competence, integrity, and courage to take on control frauds and their political allies. We need a competition in integrity. … Teams of apolitical regulators of great competence and integrity can be recruited by worthy leaders in this nation within weeks. We ran a real world test of whether regulators or markets were most effective against control frauds. Regulators were vastly superior. … It is long past time to end the war on effective financial regulation and regulators that produces a self-fulfilling prophecy of regulatory failure. We cannot afford to continue to produce the toxic mix of the three D’s and modern executive compensation, a mix that creates a fraud-friendly environment and produces epidemics of control fraud that drive our continuing, intensifying financial crises.” William K. Black The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How corporate executives and politicians looted the S&L industry updated edn. (2005; Austin: University of Texas 2013);

    Black 2006_pp. 248-49: “George Akerlof, the Nobel Laureate in Economics (2001) has opined that my book [Black 2005b] will be “a classic” because of its importance for economic theory and praxis. He concluded that control fraud theory overturned the conventional economic wisdom about the S&L debacle and had general applicability to explain waves of fraud in other nations. He believes such waves can cause bubbles to hyper inflate. … Two leading white-collar criminologists, Gil Geis and John Braithwaite, have praised control fraud theory for advancing our discipline” William K. Black “Control fraud theory v. the protocols” Crime, Law & Social Change v45#3 (April 2006): 241-58;

    Carbone & Black 2020_Abstract: “Both corporate theory and sex discrimination law start with presumptions that CEOs seek to advance legitimate ends and design the internal organization of business enterprises to achieve such ends. Yet, a growing literature questions why CEOs and boards of directors nonetheless select for Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and toxic masculinity, despite the downsides associated with these traits. Three scholarly literatures—economics, criminology, and gender theory—draw on advances in psychology to shed new light on the construction of seemingly dysfunctional corporate cultures. They start by questioning the assumption that CEOs—even CEOs of seemingly mainstream businesses—necessarily seek to advance “legitimate” ends. Instead, they suggest that a persistent issue is predation: the exploitation of asymmetries in information and power to the disadvantage of shareholders, creditors, customers, or employees. These literatures then explore how such CEOs may rationally choose to employ seemingly dysfunctional practices, such as “masculinity contests,” which reward employees more likely to buy into ethically dubious activities that range from predatory lending to sexual harassment. This Article maintains that questioning the presumption of legitimacy has profound and largely unexplored implications for corporate theory and anti-discrimination law. It extends the theory of “control fraud” central to white-collar criminology to a new concept of “control predation” that includes conduct that is ethically objectionable, if not necessarily illegal. This Article concludes that only by questioning the legitimacy of these practices in business terms can gender theory adequately address women’s workplace equality” June Carbone and William K. Black “The problem with predators” Seattle University Law Review v43#2 (Winter 2020): 441-96

[18] Akerlof & Romer 1993p. 60 2001 ‘Nobel’-economist George A. Akerlof and 2018 ‘Nobel’-economist Paul R. Romer “Looting: The economic underworld of bankruptcy for profit” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity v24#2 (1993): 1-73

[19] G&M 26/1/8: “Murray Smith remembers what happened on the morning of April 9, 2003, the way other Canadians remember Paul Henderson’s miracle goal against the Russians [in 1972]. For Mr. Smith, then Alberta’s energy minister, the big score was a letter from his federal counterpart south of the border. It was about the oil sands – a resource that had long been underestimated at home and almost ignored internationally. No more, US energy secretary Spencer Abraham wrote.” Erin Anderssen, Shawn McCarthy and Eric Reguly “An empire from a tub of goo: How did the quest to retrieve the treasure hidden beneath huge swaths of northern Alberta go from fool’s errand to monumentous payoff?” pt1 of “Shifting sands: How Alberta’s oil boom changed Canada forever” Globe and Mail (26 January 2008): F1, F4-5;

     Atkins & MacFadyen 2008 Frank J. Atkins and Alan J. MacFadyen “A resource whose time has come? The Alberta oil sands as an economic resource” Energy Journal v29 (special issue 2008): 77-98

[20] Boychuk 2010bp. 31: Regan Boychuk “Misplaced generosity: Extraordinary profits in Alberta’s oil and gas industry” University of Alberta Parkland Institute (November 2010): 52pp

[21] Galbraith 2014_pp. 87-92, 81, 150, 153-54, 167: “consider the millions of documents labeled “mortgages” that were issued in the 2000s … loans with teaser rates, option adjustable rate mortgages, low-doc and no-doc (liar’s) loans, and loans with exaggerated appraisals. Were they mortgages in any normal sense of the word? If a mortgage loan is understood to be a long-term loan that is self-amortizing and backed by real property, they were not. What were they then? Counterfeits is an entirely plausible term. In November 2007 Fitch Ratings issued a report on the matter entitled The Impact of Poor Underwriting Practices and Fraud in Subprime RMBS Performance … following a much larger survey that suggested that fraud played an important part in subprime mortgage defaults: “Base-Point Analytics, LLC, a recognized fraud analytics and consulting firm, analyzed over 3 million loans … Their research found that as much as 70% of early payment default loans contained fraud misrepresentations on the application.” … Yet a peculiar feature of crisis discussions by economists is that the topic of fraud rarely comes up.” University of Texas (Austin) Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs chair in government/business relations James K. Galbraith The End of Normal: The great crisis and the future of growth New York: Simon & Schuster 2014

[22] Vague 2023_pp. 58-59: ‘It’s no coincidence that unrestrained, ill-advised real estate lending preceded the banking crises of 1929 [the Great Depression], the late 1980s [the Savings & Loan Debacle], and 2008 [the Global Financial Crisis] … In the lead-up to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the US accumulated a gargantuan mountain of new mortgage debt, totalling $5 trillion. This debt was so large it was practically impossible to miss — except that most economists did miss it entirely, and therefore failed to predict the financial crisis. … real estate-related lending was by far the largest component of private sector debt, comprising half of all private debt. With lending of that volume, an adverse trend in the credit quality of real estate loans can disrupt the entire US economy.’ Secretary of Banking and Securities for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Richard Vague The Paradox of Debt: A new path to prosperity without crisis Croydon: Forum 2023

[23] Hudson 2021b_p. 438 Michael Hudson “Rent-seeking and asset-price inflation: A total-returns profile of economic polarization in America” Review of Keynesian Economics v9#4 (October 2021): 435-460;

    Lazonick 2014 William Lazonick “Profits without prosperity: Stock buybacks manipulate the market and leave most Americans worse off” Harvard Business Review (September 2014): 46-55;

    Lazonick & Shin 2020 William Lazonick and Jang-Sup Shin Predatory Value Extraction: How the looting of the business corporation became the US norm and how sustainable prosperity can be restored Oxford: Oxford University 2020;

    Lazonick 2023: (96% S&P net revenue looted) “In 2012-2021, the 474 corporations included in the S&P 500 Index in January 2022 that were listed throughout the decade funneled $5.7 trillion into the stock market as buybacks, equal to 55% of their combined net income, and paid $4.2 trillion to shareholders as dividends, another 41% of net income.” William Lazonick “The scourge of corporate financialization: Income inequity, employment instability, productive fragility” Institute for New Economic Thinking (21 August 2023)

[24] CNN 17/9/4: “”It has the potential to be an epidemic,” said Swecker, who heads the Criminal Division at FBI headquarters in Washington. “We think we can prevent a problem that could have as much impact as the S&L crisis,” he said.” Terry Frieden “FBI warns of mortgage fraud ‘epidemic’” Cable News Network (17 September 2004);

     Tillman, Pontell & Black 2020_p. 113n2: “In the aftermath of the financial crisis that began in 2008, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission began sifting through the wreckage of failed institutions and spectacularly bad deals looking for causes. … How, they asked, could the employees at these [non-prime mortgage] firms assemble these products and offer them for sale /knowing/ they were likely vastly overpriced? The answer… was a common cultural attitude that had an acronym IBGYBG, which stood for “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.” … In other words: “Take what you want today, get rich, and don’t worry about what happens in the future.” … Economist Robert Kuttner describes IBGYBG as meaning: “Let’s do this deal before the rubes figure out the game, then quickly cash in and get out before it collapses.”” Robert H. Tillman, Henry N. Pontell and William K. Black Financial Crime and Crises in the Era of False Profits Oxford: Oxford University 2020

[25] CBC 17/12/14: “9 Wildrose MLAs, including Danielle Smith, cross to Alberta Tories: Progressive Conservative members say they’re willing to look beyond past grievances” CBC News (17 December 2014);

    CBC 5/5/15: ;

    Appel 2024_p. 147 (Big Oil’s cont’d rule) Jeremy Appel Kenneyism: Jason Kenney’s pursuit of power Toronto: Dundurn 2024

[26] CSA 2015_pp. 1-2: “This Staff Notice is published in response to numerous inquiries concerning disclosure requirements for abandonment and reclamation costs in National Instrument 51-101 Standards of Disclosure for Oil and Gas Activities (NI 51-101) and its related forms. Some of these inquiries relate to amendments to NI 51-101 and its related forms that were effective July 1, 2015. Reporting issuers engaged in oil and gas activities are reminded that publicly disclosed estimates of future net revenue must be net of abandonment and reclamation costs.” Canadian Securities Administrators “Disclosure of abandonment and reclamation costs in National Instrument 51-101 Standards of Disclosure for Oil and Gas Activities and Related Forms” CSA Staff Notice #51-345 (5 November 2015): 2pp

[27] DOB 24/11/15: “But the outlook has since worsened. A basket of oil reserves on Oct. 1 of this year is worth about 40 per cent less, on average, than a year ago, based solely on the forward strip for oil prices, Edgelow told the Chartered Professional Accountants Canada oil and gas conference in Calgary on Monday. Oil reserve valuations fell by about 20-25 per cent from the second quarter to the third quarter of this year, he said. Lenders are now being much more specific about what companies need to do, and how quickly. Edgelow cited Spyglass Resources Corp. as an example of where there was a wide gap between the value of the reserves in the spring of 2015 and the valuation under which the producer’s borrowing base had been granted by a group of lenders. … the value of the company’s reserves, based on the forward strip, was now only half of its assigned borrowing base. “So we had $100 million that was conforming and $100 million that was not conforming, and we asked them to have it paid by a set date in March 2016, and we wanted to get a sense of how they were going to do that through different time thresholds,” Edgelow explained. Spyglass’s asset dispositions since the fourth quarter of 2014 totaled $120.1 million. … he said lenders are going approached “almost weekly” by oilfield service companies seeking debt covenant relaxation.” Pat Roche “Dismal oil price outlook throwing borrowing base out of whack” Daily Oil Bulletin (24 November 2015)

[28] CH 27/11/15: “In a filing Nov. 10, Spyglass said it estimates it will incur decommissioning costs of $357 million over time to abandon and reclaim well sites, gathering systems and processing facilities as wells are depleted and retired. Alberta Energy Regulator spokesman Ryan Bartlett said Thursday the question of who inherits liability in the event of insolvency is being discussed now in a Court of Queen’s Bench case involving ATB Financial and Redwater Energy Corp., a small oil and gas producer headquartered in Okotoks that went into receivership in May. … The company agreed to make a series of payments to reduce debt when it renegotiated with its banking syndicate in June. It was placed in receivership when it became clear it would not be able to make a $35-million payment as required by Monday. It said net debt at Sept. 30 was $175 million, made up of $168 million of bank debt and a working capital deficit of $6.4 million.” Dan Healing “Spyglass Resources receivership raises well abandonment liability questions” Calgary Herald (27 November 2015): B4

[29] Boychuk 2023e_p. 30: “I know the flaws of that 2015 review, because I served on its oil sands expert group. Mr. Brunnen knows too; he was the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers’ VP for bitumen at the time. The NDP outsourced its royalty analysis to walking-conflict-of-interest Peter Tertzakian, an executive at Canada’s largest oil and gas investment bank. A fellow conflict of interest—the affable ATB Financial president Dave Mowat—chose Tertzakian. And then Mowat stacked the deck even further. These energy investment bankers weren’t fact-checked by public-servant experts from Alberta Energy but by Blake Shaffer—a U of C grad student and former New York City energy trader. Mowat introduced Shaffer to the expert group as “Blake, the Certifier.” The 2016 royalty report misled the public starting with Fig. 1, which misleadingly included bitumen and didn’t adjust figures for decades of inflation. The numbers lacked proper context: the public’s declining share of total revenue, or our declining revenue per barrel. And it went downhill from there. But a ripoff was inevitable, because no legitimate case can be made for further lowering rock-bottom royalty rates.” Regan Boychuk and former Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers vice president Ben Brunnen “Should Alberta increase oil royalties: A dialogue between Regan Boychuk and Ben Brunnen” Alberta Views v19#10 (December 2023);

    Melnyk 1/3/16 (Dave Mowat’s threat) Mandy Melnyk Comment to Council of Canadians meeting hosting Regan Boychuk to talk about royalties and oilfield cleanup (Calgary: 16th Ave NW Unitarian Church 1 March 2016)

[30] Boychuk 2016a Regan Boychuk “Royalty decision compounds past mistakes” Edmonton Journal (7 February 2016): A7;

    Boychuk 2016b Regan Boychuk “Alberta NDP’s royalty review was scandalous, and they just made it worse” National Observer (13 July 2016)

[31] OCI 2023_p. 2: “Using updated 2023 data, the proportion of coal, oil, and gas reserves that must remain unextracted to meet the 1.5°C limit has increased from nearly 40% in 2018 to almost 60% in 2023.” Kelly Trout “Sky’s the Limit data update: Shut down 60% of existing fossil fuel extraction to keep 1.5°C in reach” Oil Change International Briefing (16 August 2023): 6pp;

     OCI 2022 Kelly Trout, Greg Muttitt, Dimitri Lafleur, Thijs Van de Graaf, Roman Mendelevitch, Lan Mei and Malte Meinshausen “Existing fossil fuel extraction would warm the world beyond 1.5°C” Environmental Research Letters v17#6 (June 2022) #064010: 12pp

[32] Keen 2022_pp. 141-42 (must acknowledge finance sector’s role), 147-49: “Today, system dynamics is commonplace in engineering and management, but it has never developed a strong following in economics. This is not despite the fact that it was first developed in response to shortcomings in economic modelling, but because of it. System dynamics was perceived as a fundamental challenge to the equilibrium-obsessed methodology of Neoclassical economics, and its challenge was effectively repulsed. The attack … was led by none other than William Nordhaus (Nordhaus 1973). You should appreciate the irony, given how Nordhaus has used obvious fallacies to make up his own numbers on climate change, that his main critique of [pioneering computer engineer and system dynamics developer Jay] Forrester’s work was its poor attention to data. Forrester’s rebuttal of Nordhaus was in summary that “each point made by Nordhaus rests on a misunderstanding of World Dynamics, a misuse of empirical data, or an inability to analyze properly the dynamic behavior of the model by static equilibrium methods.” (Forrester et al. 1974, p. 169; Bardi 2018). Forrester was right and Nordhaus was wrong, but the damage was done. … the technology itself was ridiculed out of contention in economics. Consequently, while system dynamics technology has progressed enormously in engineering, outside the work of enthusiasts … its application in even non-Neoclassical economics is almost non-existent. Minsky is intended to address the deficiencies of existing programs for economic modelling, and to overcome their interface shortcomings as well. … the unique feature of “Godley Tables” … make it far easier to model financial flows.” Steve Keen The New Economics: A manifesto Medford: Polity 2022;

Nordhaus 1973 William D. Nordhaus “World Dynamics: Measurement without data” London Royal Economic Society Economic Journal v83#332 (December 1973): 1156-83;

Forrester, Low & Mass 1974_p. 190: “Nordhaus appears to have misread both World Dynamics and Malthus. The issues surrounding the possibilities of growth in a finite world are subtle, important, and deeply interrelated. The insights given us by Malthus are remarkably clear and penetrating as we evaluate them nearly 200 years later in the light of computer simulation of the interactions that he drew from direct observation of real life.” Jay W. Forrester, Gilbert W. Low and Nathaniel J. Mass “The debate on World Dynamics: A response to Nordhaus” Policy Sciences v5#2 (June 1974): 169-90;

Malthus 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society: With remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet and other writers London: J. Johnson 1798;

    Keen 2021b Steve Keen Modelling with Minsky (October 2021): 195pp;

    Keen 2020_p. 62: “Minsky and system dynamics … provide the foundations for a paradigmatic challenge to Neoclassical economics, whose development has been driven by the obsession with finding sound micro-foundations for macroeconomics, all the while ignoring results that showed this was impossible (Gorman 1953; Anderson 1972; Sonnenschein 1972, 1973). Macro-foundations, far-from equilibrium complex systems dynamics, and monetary analysis — the polar opposites of the Neoclassical obsessions with micro-foundations, equilibrium and barter — are the proper bases for economic theory.” Steve Keen “Emergent macroeconomics: Deriving Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis directly from macroeconomic definitions” Review of Political Economy v32#3 (2020): 342-70

[33] Ferri & Minsky 1991_pp. 12: “thwarting systems are analogous to homeostatic mechanisms which may prevent a system from exploding”, 16: “serious bankers will not finance industries that require expensive capital assets unless there is some believable guarantee that price will not fall to marginal cost”, 24: “endogenous instability view of the economy literally stands Lucas on his head: Apt intervention & institutional structures are necessary for market economies to be successful” Piero Ferri and Hyman P. Minsky “Market processes and thwarting systems” Bard College Levy Economics Institute Working Paper #64 (November 1991): 31pp

[34] Cohn, Fehr & Maréchal 2014_p. 88 Alain Cohn, Ernst Fehr and Michel André Maréchal “Business culture and dishonesty in the banking industry” Nature v516#7529 (19 November 2014): 86-89

[35] Gasparini, Ives, Carr, Fry & Beinhocker 2024: “a largely neglected question in this literature and among policymakers is whether existing financial regulations could be negatively contributing to the net-zero carbon transition … Our empirical analysis allows us to observe that model-based estimates of risk are lower for high-carbon sectors compared with low-carbon ones. … active divestment from high-carbon assets could be costly for banks. We argue that this, in turn, could create perverse incentives impairing the shift of financial resources from high-carbon to low-carbon assets … The decision to divest from high-carbon assets could lead to more than doubling of provisions for some banks in our sample and could thus have material impacts on the bank’s stock market valuations.  … could weigh substantially on banks’ net profits. … We estimate that for some banks, the transition could cost as much as 5 years of profits over the divestment horizon and, on an outstanding loan weighted average basis, 15% of the previous 5 years of profits … This phenomenon might arguably limit investments in green assets if their past risk estimates have been relatively high.” Matteo Gasparini, Matthew C. Ives, Ben Carr, Sophie Fry and Eric Beinhocker “Model-based financial regulations impair the transition to net-zero carbon emissions” Nature Climate Change (2 April 2024): 8pp + “Supplemental Notes #1-5”: 15pp

[36] Vague 2019_pp. 6-8 (italics in original): ‘Time and again, a financial crisis emerges directly not just from ambition but also from this capacity for self-delusion and deceit, intended or unintended, official or unofficial. Time and again, lending is the platform for that delusion. This intense ambition is impossible to overestimate and crucial to understanding business and economics in general, not just booms and crises. … financial crises recur so frequently … that we have to wonder why lending booms happen at all. The answer is this: growth in lending is what brings lenders higher compensation, advancement, and recognition. Until a crisis point is reached, rapid lending growth can bring euphoria and staggering wealth … Lending booms are driven by competition, inevitably accompanied by the fear of falling behind or missing out … Having spent a lifetime in the industry, I can report that there is almost always the desire to grow loans aggressively and increase wealth … So the better and more profound question is, why are there periods in which loan growth isn’t booming? … when lenders are chastened — often in the years following a crisis.’ Secretary of Banking and Securities for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Richard Vague A Brief History of Doom: Two hundred years of financial crises Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania 2019

[37] Sutherland 1949_ch. 14 29th president of American Sociological Society Edwin H. Sutherland White Collar Crime: The uncut version (1949; New Haven: Yale University 1983)

[38] Dewey 1931: “We have long been told that politics is unimportant, that government is merely a drag and an interference; that the captains of industry and finance are the wise ones, the leaders in whose hands the fortunes of the country are safely entrusted. The persons who keep reiterating such sayings forget, they try to conceal from view, that the confusion, the perplexity, the triviality, the irrelevance, of politics at Washington merely reflect the bankruptcy of industrial “leadership”, just as politics in general is an echo, except when it is an accomplice, of the interests of big business. The deadlocks and the impotence of Congress are definitively the mirror of the demonstrated incapacity of the captains of industry and finance to conduct the affairs of the country prosperously as an incident of the process of feathering their own nests. It would be ludicrous, were it not tragic, to believe that an appeal to the unregulated activities of those who have got us into the present crisis will get us out of it, provided they are relived from the incubus of political action. The magic of eating a hair of the dog which bit you in order to cure hydrophobia is as nothing to the magic involved in the belief that those who have privilege and power will remedy the breakdown they have created. As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance. The only remedy is new political action based on social interests and realities.” John Dewey “The breakdown of the old order” New Republic v66 (25 March 1931): 115-16 in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953 v6:1931-1932 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University 2006): 161-64

[39] Tolstoy 1869_bk14, ch2: “Momentum (quantity of motion) is the product of mass and velocity. In military affairs the strength of an army is the product of its mass and some unknown x. Military science, seeing in history innumerable instances of the fact that the size of any army does not coincide with its strength and that small detachments defeat larger ones, obscurely admits the existence of this unknown factor and tries to discover it—now in a geometric formation, now in the equipment employed, now, and most usually, in the genius of the commanders. But the assignment of these various meanings to the factor does not yield results which accord with the historic facts. Yet it is only necessary to abandon the false view (adopted to gratify the “heroes”) of the efficacy of the directions issued in wartime by commanders, in order to find this unknown quantity. That unknown quantity is the spirit of the army, that is to say, the greater or lesser readiness to fight and face danger felt by all the men composing an army, quite independently of whether they are, or are not, fighting under the command of a genius, in two or three-line formation, with cudgels or with rifles that repeat thirty times a minute. Men who want to fight will always put themselves in the most advantageous conditions for fighting. The spirit of an army is the factor which multiplied by the mass gives the resulting force. To define and express the significance of this unknown factor—the spirit of an army—is a problem for science. This problem is only solvable if we cease arbitrarily to substitute for the unknown x itself the conditions under which that force becomes apparent—such as the commands of the general, the equipment employed, and so on—mistaking these for the real significance of the factor, and if we recognize this unknown quantity in its entirety as being the greater or lesser desire to fight and to face danger. Only then, expressing known historic facts by equations and comparing the relative significance of this factor, can we hope to define the unknown. Ten men, battalions, or divisions, fighting fifteen men, battalions, or divisions, conquer—that is, kill or take captive—all the others, while themselves losing four, so that on the one side four and on the other fifteen were lost. Consequently the four were equal to the fifteen, and therefore 4x = 15y. Consequently x/y = 15/4. This equation does not give us the value of the unknown factor but gives us a ratio between two unknowns. And by bringing variously selected historic units (battles, campaigns, periods of war) into such equations, a series of numbers could be obtained in which certain laws should exist and might be discovered.” Leo Tolstoy (trans.) Louise and Aylmer Maude War and Peace (1865-69) Project Gutenberg 

[40] Stacey 1954b_p. 3 Army Headquarters historical section director Colonel Charles Percy Stacey “The Canadian-American Permanent Joint Board of Defence, 1940-1945” Report #70 {CONFIDENTIAL} (24 June 1954; declassified 13 November 1986): 40pp

[41] Granatstein 1974_pp. 8, 4: Ogdensburg “marked the shift of Canada from a British Dominion to Canada as an American protectorate … Some people realized this at the time, but … only the very foolish felt obliged to say so in public. … For the ordinary-sized, relations with giants must always be careful” Council for Canadian Security in the 21st Century Chair (2001-4) Jack L. Granatstein “Getting on with the Americans: Changing Canadian perceptions of the United States, 1939-1945” Canadian Review of American Studies v5#1 (March 1974): 3-17;

     Granatstein 1967 Jack L. Granatstein “The Conservative Party and the Ogdensburg Agreement” International Journal v22#1 (March 1967): 73-76 

[42] Tellingly, US legislation banning foreign interference was not passed until 1938 and has recently been rescinded. CRS 2025 “Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA): An overview” Congressional Research Service In Focus (5 January 2025): 2pp;

    IOOF Sovereign Grand LodgeHistory: Prince of Wales George Augustus Frederick, later King George IV (r. 1820-30), admitted to the Order of Oddfellows around 1780;

     Odd Fellowship 1897_p. 426: “The bill, however, passed, but was disallowed by the British Government.” Past Grand Sire Cl. T. Campbell “British North America” in Henry Leonard Stillson (ed.) The Official History of the Odd Fellowship: The three-link fraternity: The antiquities, creative period, and golden age of friendship, love, and truth revised edn. (1897; Boston: Fraternity 1898): 419-75

[43] Sowle 1967_p. 235: “Seward, his old friend Thurlow Weed of the Albany Evening Journal, and Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, planned to publish the memorandum together with Lincoln’s reply, which they anticipated would endorse the Secretary’s proposals. Weed and Raymond would launch a newspaper campaign to support the new policy advocated by Seward and now endorsed by Lincoln. They hoped to create the necessary public support for Lincoln to abandon Fort Sumter and to adopt Seward’s plans for cultivating Southern Union sentiment as the first step toward peaceful reunification.” Patrick Sowle “A reappraisal of Seward’s memorandum of April 1, 1861, to Lincoln” Journal of Southern History v33#2 (May 1967): 234-39

[44] Laurier 15/5/17: “Toryism has obtained an enormous influence in Ontario. In fact, Ontario is no longer Ontario: it is again the old small province of Upper Canada, and again governed from London. There is only one difference and the difference is only in the name. Upper Canada was governed from Downing Street with the instrumentality of the Family Compact sitting at York, now Toronto. Canada is now governed by a junta sitting at London, known as “The Round Table” with ramifications in Toronto, in Winnipeg, in Victoria, with Tories and Grits receiving their ideas from London, and insidiously forcing them on their respective parties. As to the Tories, I am not surprised, they are in their element, true to the instincts of their nature, to the traditions of their ancestors, but for the Grits, oh! for the old spirit of sturdy Liberalism which still prevailed in my youth! Truly, I have lived too long.” Letter from former prime minister Sir Henri Charles Wilfred Laurier to Sir Allen Aylesworth (15 May 1917) in Oscar Douglas Skelton Life and Letters of Sir Wilfred Laurier (New York: Century 1922)v2: 510

[45] Immerwahr 2019_p. 7: “At the turn of the twentieth century, when many were acquired (Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Hawai’i, Wake), their status was clear. They were, as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson unabashedly called them, colonies. Yet that spirit of forthright imperialism didn’t last. Within a decade or two, after passions had cooled, the c-word became taboo. “The word colony must not be used to express the relationship which exists between our government and its dependent peoples,” an official admonished in 1914.” Daniel Immerwahr How to Hide an Empire: A history of the greater United States (2019; New York: Picador 2020);

     Miller & Dinan 2007_p. 11: “PR pioneer Ivy Lee … believed in the necessity of “courtiers” to “flatter and caress” the crowd. The courtiers were the PR professionals, like himself.” David Miller and William Dinan “Public relations and the subversion of democracy” ch1 in William Dinan and David Miller (eds.) Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy: Corporate PR and the assault on democracy (London: Pluto 2007): 11-20;

     Keshen 2003: “Like his brother Edward Thomas Davies, [Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest John Chambers] became a journalist. As a field correspondent for the Montreal Daily Star, he traveled west in 1885 to cover Major-General Frederick Dobson Middleton’s drive to suppress the Métis uprising. He was a volunteer galloper at the battles of Fish Creek and Batoche (Sask.), and contributed to the operations against Big Bear [Mistahimaskwa], for which efforts he was decorated. In 1888-89 he was managing editor and publisher of the Calgary Herald.” Jeffrey A. Keshen “Chambers, Ernest John” Dictionary of Canadian Biography: 1921-1930 v15 (2003);

     Keshen 1996_p. 65: “made retroactive until 4 August, [Canada’s War Measures Act] … provided for “censorship and control and suppression of publications, writings, maps, plans, photographs, communication and means of communication.” … contrary to traditional Common Law practice, once charged, the onus of proof lay with the accused to demonstrate innocence.” Jeffrey A. Keshen Propaganda and Censorship During Canada’s Great War (PhD supervisor: J.L. Granatstein) Edmonton: University of Alberta 1996

[46] Schumacher 1993_p. 7: “For the first time, the extra-parliamentary wing of a national party played a pivotal role in the selection of a leader.” Stan Schumacher in MLA Paul MacEwan, MLA Stan Schumacher, MLA Tony Whitford, MLA Gary Farrell-Collins, MHA Len Sims and MLA Doreen Hamilton “Reforming the leadership convention process: A roundtable discussion” Canadian Parliamentary Review v16#3 (Autumn 1993): 7-9

[47] Kaufeld 2024: “Following pressure from [United Farmers of Alberta and its members of provincial legislature] and supporters, including Henry Wise Wood, [John] Brownlee accepted the leadership position and became Premier” Stacey F. Kaufeld “Born unequal: Alberta and the Natural Resources Transfer Agreement” (26 February 2024) Legal Archives Society of Alberta (21 March 2024) [speech to Calgary Association of Lifelong Learners];

     Foster 2008: “a well-mannered backstairs revolt” Franklin L. Foster “John Edward Brownlee” Canadian Encyclopedia (2008; 4 March 2015);

     Foster 2004_p. 83: “some stalwart UFA MLAs broached the idea of a leadership change to Brownlee. He rejected any possibility of disloyalty, so Henry Wise Wood was recruited to again urge the premiership on Brownlee. … only when [Premier] Greenfield himself declared he would bare no grudge did Brownlee accept.” Franklin L. Foster “John Edward Brownlee, 1925-34” in Bradford J. Rennie (ed.) Alberta Premiers of the Twentieth Century (Regina: University of Regina 2004): 77-106;

     Schumacher 1993_p. 7: Another new-style leadership convention, October 1927: “the Conservative Party held a national delegate convention to elect Richard Bedford Bennett as leader. Since then, national conventions have been used to select national party leaders” Stan Schumacher in MLA Paul MacEwan, MLA Stan Schumacher, MLA Tony Whitford, MLA Gary Farrell-Collins, MHA Len Sims and MLA Doreen Hamilton “Reforming the leadership convention process: A roundtable discussion” Canadian Parliamentary Review v16#3 (Autumn 1993): 7-9

[48] Upton Sinclair self-published his study of bad faith, yellow journalism in the United States and later remarked on the nefarious role of oiligarch foundations in his study of education. Sinclair 1919_p. 436: “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. And down in the counting-room below sits the “madame” who profits by your shame; unless, perchance, she is off at Palm Beach or Newport, flaunting her jewels and her feathers. Please do not think that I am just slinging ugly words. Off and on for years I have thought about this book, and figured over the title, and what it means ; I assert that the Brass Check which serves in the house of ill-fame as “the price of a woman’s shame” is, both in its moral implications and in its social effect, precisely and identically the same as the gold and silver coins and pieces of written paper that are found every week in the pay-envelopes of those who write and print and distribute capitalist publications.” Upton Sinclair The Brass Check: A study of American journalism Pasadena: [self-published] 1919;

    Myers 1908_pp. 199-200: “Rockefeller, ruminating in his small refinery at Cleveland, Ohio, had conceived the revolutionary idea of getting a monopoly of the production and distribution of oil, obliterating the middleman, and systematizing and centralizing the whole business. Then and there was the modern trust born; and from the very inception of the Standard Oil Company Rockefeller and his associates tenaciously pursued their design with a combined ability and unscrupulousness such as had never before been known since the rise of capitalism. One railroad after another was persuaded or forced into granting them secret rates and rebates against which it was impossible to compete. The railroad magnates — William H. Vanderbilt, for instance — were taken in the fold of the Standard Oil Company by being made stockholders. With these secret rates the Standard Oil Company was enabled to crush out absolutely a myriad of competitors and middlemen, and control the petroleum trade not only of the United States but of almost the entire world. Such fabulous profits accumulated that in the course of forty years, after one unending career of industrial construction on the one hand, and crime on the other, the Standard Oil Company was easily able to become owners of prodigious railroad and other systems, and completely supplant the scions of the magnates whom three or four decades before they had wheedled or browbeaten into favoring them with discriminations.” Gustavus Myers Great Fortunes from Railroads v2 of The History of the Great American Fortunes Chicago: Charles H. Kerr 1908;

    Sinclair 1923_p. 409: A “great benefactor of our educational system was Mr. John D. Rockefeller, who has given one or two hundred millions of dollars to a foundation for the purpose of improving our schools and colleges according to Standard Oil ideals. The General Education Board has millions to give to those educational institutions which conform, and it holds over the head of every college and university president a perpetual bribe to sell out the interests of the people.” Upton Sinclair The Goose-Step: A study in American education Pasadena: [self-published] 1923;

    Brode 2010_pp. 164, 172-73: “Vivian’s story was completely uncorroborated by any supporting evidence. … Brownlee’s defence, on the other hand, was supported by many witnesses and moreover “… no one … over a period of three years … in any way gave them ground for a suspicious thought. It may be possible, but is it probable?” … based upon the plaintiff’s evidence, the case was not proven. Much of her evidence was contradictory, disproved by other facts, or unsupported by any corroborative evidence. … In other provincial histories, details of the scandal are inaccurately reported, or it is presumed without question that Brownlee was guilty. His death was not widely noted in Alberta” Patrick Brode “MacMillan v. Brownlee” ch10 in Courted and Abandoned: Seduction in Canadian law (Toronto: Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History 2010): 149-73, 235-37;

    Savage-Hughes & Taras 1992_p. 200: “The Calgary Herald and the Edmonton Journal were also instrumental in the [1935] demise of the [United Farmers of Alberta] government. … The ferocity of their opposition became evident in extensive coverage, often 4 pages a day, given to a [fake] sexual misconduct suit … The controversies that resulted from this sensational [yellow] reporting did irreparable damage to the UFA, which was subsequently defeated in 1935.” Denise Savage-Hughes and University of Calgary Ernest C. Manning Chair in Canadian Studies David Taras “The mass media and modern Alberta politics” in Allan Tupper and Roger Gibbons (eds.) Government and Politics in Alberta (Edmonton: University of Alberta 1992): 197-217

[49] CP 3/5/38: “first ever … Pulitzer awards … ever made outside the realm of the United States press … The proceedings were carried throughout Canada and the United States over National radio hookups. … presenting [was dean of Columbia Journalism School Carl Akerman] … The presiding justice of the [Canadian] Supreme Court … said “The freedom of the press is essential to public opinion and public discussion, which in turn are necessary to parliamentary government.”” Canadian Press “Alberta papers lauded in fight for free press: Edmonton Journal awarded Pulitzer plaque: ‘Dictatorship’” Calgary Herald (3 May 1938): 8

[50] Breen 1993pp. 145-47 David H. Breen Alberta’s Petroleum Industry and the Conservation Board Edmonton: University of Alberta and the Energy Resources Conservation Board 1993;

    GoA 1938pp. 13-14 (sections 44 + 46) Government of Alberta An Act for the Conservation of the Oil and Gas Resources of the Province of Alberta 2nd session of 8th Legislature (agreed 20 November 1938; assented 22 November 1938): 18pp;

    Brennan 2008_p. 111: “Manning … government … developed regulatory policy in conjunction with the American companies operating in the Alberta oil patch.” Brian Brennan The Good Steward: The Ernest C. Manning story Calgary: Fifth House 2008

[51] Breen 1993_pp. 139-40 David H. Breen Alberta’s Petroleum Industry and the Conservation Board Edmonton: University of Alberta and the Energy Resources Conservation Board 1993;

    CP 11/10/38 Canadian Press “Two to probe oil industry: Alberta names commission to investigate costs and prices” Globe and Mail (12 October 1938): 7;

    Knafla & Klumpenhouwer 1997a: “McGillivray … studied the subject so thoroughly that in the end he was able to understand and describe the intricacies of petroleum engineering.” Louis Knafla and Richard Klumpenhouwer “McGillivray, Alexander Andrew” in Lords of the Western Bench: A biographical history of the supreme and district courts of Alberta, 1876-1990 (Calgary: Legal Archives Society of Alberta 1997): 120-21;

    McGillivray & Lipsett 1940 Alberta Supreme Court Chief Justice Alexander A. McGillivray and Major L.R. Lipsett Alberta’s Oil Industry: The report of a Royal Commission appointed by the Government of the Province of Alberta under the Public Inquiries Act to inquire into matters connected with petroleum and petroleum products Calgary: Imperial Oil 1940;

    CH 14/6/40 “Gasoline price fixing opposed: Report finds consumer goods safeguarded: Gov’t should not compete with ‘own people’ in oil industry” Calgary Herald (14 June 1940): 1-3, 11;

    CH 12/12/40 “Death of Mr. Justice McGillivray seen as great loss to province: Tribute paid to brilliant jurist” Calgary Herald (12 December 1940): 11;

    CH 13/12/40 “Reserve oil fields essential to Alberta: Oilmen hear five-point plan” Calgary Herald (13 December 1940): 23

[52] G&M 19/8/38pp. 1-3 + NYT 19/8/38pp. 1-3 (yellow coverage of `38 honourary degree, see bibliography to Appendix C);

    Stacey 1954_pp. 112-13: “the two statesmen issued to the press the now celebrated statement announcing the formation of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence. Mr. Roosevelt had been accompanied by Mr. Stimson, the Secretary of War, who took part in the conversations. … No paper was signed, and the [110-word] release remained the basis of the new board. Canada published its text in her Treaty Series and included it in an order in council. The United States regarded it as an executive agreement not subject to ratification by the Senate, and it was never submitted to that body. No international arrangement of comparable importance has ever been concluded more informally. Mr. King appears to have had no opportunity of consulting his ministerial colleagues before his interview with the President, and it seems likely that he did not know in advance precisely what proposal Roosevelt intended to lay before him.” Colonel C.P. Stacey “The Canadian-American Permanent Joint Board of Defence, 1940-1945” International Journal v9#2 (Spring 1954): 107-24;

    Canada 1940 “Declaration by the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of the United States of America Regarding the Establishing of a Permanent Joint Board of Defence” Canada Treaty Series 1940 #14 (18 August 1940): 1p;

    Canada 1947 “Joint Statement by the Governments of Canada and of the United States of America Regarding Defence Co-operation Between the Two Countries” Canada Treaty Series 1947 #16 (12 February 1947) [only available online without including date signed separately at Washington and Ottawa]

[53] Brebner 1940_p. 20 (Trotsky’s last interview) John Bartlett Brebner “Ogdensburg: A turn in Canadian-American relations” Inter-American Quarterly v2#4 (October 1940): 18-28;

    Pollock 1981_p. 219: “Like a magician working with mirrors, Roosevelt hid the reality of his aims with a series of plausible actions. Those who argue that historians can deduce motives from the public statements of leaders are not proven wrong—the president consistently brought up the issue of the disposition of the British fleet. But with Franklin Roosevelt, who so carefully kept his own counsel, actions must guide us to the words that count.” Fred E. Pollock “Roosevelt, the Ogdensburg Agreement, and the British fleet: All done with mirrors” Diplomatic History v5#3 (July 1981): 203-19

[54] Soto-Pérez-de-Celis 2010 Enrique Soto-Pérez-de-Celis “The death of Leon Trotsky” Neurosurgery v67#2 (August 2010): 417-23

[55] Deutsch 1963_pp. 2-3: “One could go down a long list of political assassinations throughout the world during the past century, and find that almost without exception the identity of the extroverted killer was not a matter of the slightest doubt. … In modern history, however, one political assassination is still being hotly debated, not merely as to the motives which prompted the deed, but as to the identity of the one whose bullet inflicted the fatal wound. This was the killing of Huey P. Long, self-proclaimed “Kingfish” of Louisiana, who was on the very threshold of a bold attempt to extend his dominion to the limits of the United States via the White House” Hermann B. Deutsch The Huey Long Murder Case Garden City: Doubleday 1963

[56] Ronald 2023_pp. 355, 358-65: “Although the British had made the significance of Popov’s mission abundantly clear and sent ahead a report … nothing had been forwarded to [J. Edgar] Hoover. An angry and sullen Popov was summoned to meet Hoover at Rockefeller Center a few days later.”; “”I can catch spies without your or anybody else’s help,” FBI’s Hoover fulminated … “good riddance.”” Susan Ronald Hitler’s Aristocrats: The secret power players in Britain and America who supported the Nazis, 1923–1941 New York: St. Martin’s 2023 [excerpt]

[57] Breen 1993_p. 280: “In March, after discussions with the industry, the government accepted to the request to set a royalty ceiling that it was bound not to exceed [16.7%].” David H. Breen Alberta’s Petroleum Industry and the Conservation Board Edmonton: University of Alberta and the Energy Resources Conservation Board 1993

[58] Boychuk 2023c: (Cumulative royalties  value of cumulative production: 1947-2018) Regan Boychuk “On May 29th, Alberta can slip its American noose” pt4 of “Alberta’s Rockefeller coups” York University Capital-as-Power blog (23 May 2023) citing Tables 4.3b + 4.19b in CAPP 2020 Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers “Statistical handbook for Canada’s upstream petroleum industry” Technical Report #2019-9999 (February 2020): 204pp

[59] Bratt & Foster 2020_pp. 22-23: “It was remarkable that the secret negotiations never got out into the public domain. There was not a single media reference. … even when the document’s details were provided to the Social Credit caucus and to the senior leadership of the PCs, they were never leaked; neither at the time nor for decades hence.” Duane Bratt and Bruce Foster “The attempted takeover of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta” Alberta History v68#2 (Spring 2020): 20-26;

     Manning 2017 Preston Manning “This isn’t the first time Albertans have grappled with uniting the right” Calgary Herald (3 February 2017): A11

[60] AEAP 1996_p. 12: John Nichol joins the Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board in 1970 “in various regulatory functions involving oil and gas drilling and production.” Alberta Environmental Appeal Board Sarg Oils Ltd. and Sergius Mankow v. Director of Land Reclamation Alberta Environmental Protection Hearing for Appeal #94-011 (5-6 November 1996) Report and Recommendations (5 December 1996): 25pp

[61] NYT 13/6/71: “Three pages of documentary material from the Pentagon study begin on Page 35.” Neil Sheehan “Vietnam archive: Pentagon study traces 3 decades of growing US involvement” New York Times (13 June 1971): 1, 35-38;

    Risen 2023: James Risen “The secret history: How Neil Sheehan really got the Pentagon Papers” Intercept (7 October 2023)

[62] Kornbluh 2003_pp. 9-10, 18 + ch1 docs #4-6: Former CIA director Frank McCone “offered $1 million “for the purpose of assisting any [US] government plan … to stop Allende.”” Peter Kornbluh The Pinochet File: A declassified dossier on atrocity and accountability New York: New Press 2003;

    National Security Archive 2023doc 2.1: National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to Secretary of State William Rogers: “we want to be sure the paper record doesn’t look bad. No matter what we do it will probably end up dismal. So our paper work should be done carefully.” Peter Kornbluh, William Burr and Tom Blanton (eds.) “Kissinger and Chile” pt2 of “Henry Kissinger: The declassified obituary: The primary sources on Kissinger’s controversial legacy” George Washington University National Security Archive Briefing Book #848 (29 November 2023): 9 docs

[63] FBI 1941-78_pp. 3, 1, 19, 21, 29-30, 14, 12-13 Mohr 1/7/71p. 3 + Hoover 8/7/71p. 1 + Felt 19/11/71p. 19 + Hoover 26/1/72p. 21 + Hoover 3/3/72p. 29 + Gray 30/5/72p. 30 + Jones 1/9/71p. 14 + Felt 14/9/71pp. 12-13 in Federal Bureau of Investigation “Mark Felt” pt. 9 of Personnel File 67E-HQ-276576 (1941-1978): 44pp

[64] NYT 12/12/73: “The Governor has also set up a virtual second state government consisting of semi‐autonomous agencies, such as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Urban Development Corporation, the Housing Finance Agency and the State University Construction Fund. These agencies borrowed and spent billions of dollars with little or no legislative supervision, often without voter approval. “The greatest system ever invented,” the Governor has said. The agencies’ debt is $66.7‐billion—double the regular state debt” “Rockefeller’s 15 years as governor reflect achievement, growth and controversy” New York Times (12 December 1973): 53

[65] Long 1935_pp. 12787, 12789-90: Senator Long reading a transcript into the Congressional Record: “Here is Oscar Whilden, who is the head of the Square Deal League, who is apparently presiding: WHILDEN. “I am out to murder, kill, bulldoze, steal, or anything else to win this election.” I wonder if the President’s representatives dissented to this? … Voice. “I would draw in a lottery to go out and kill Long. It would only take 1 man, 1 gun, and 1 bullet.” … They never were able to identify who this was— … Voice. “I haven’t the slightest doubt but that Roosevelt would pardon anyone who killed Long”” Louisiana Governor (1928-32) and US Senator (1932-35) Huey Pierce Long Jr. “The plan of robbery, murder, blackmail, or theft” Congressional Record: Senate v79pt12 (9 August 1935): 12786-91

[66] Valkoun 2020 (22/11/26 imperial veto) Jaroslav Valkoun “William Lyon Mackenzie King and the question of the institutional status of governors-general at the Imperial Conference, 1926” West Bohemian Historical Review v2020#2 (2020): 189-99;

    Pilger 2020: “There is historical amnesia among Australia’s polite society about the catastrophic events of 1975. An Anglo-American coup overthrew a democratically elected ally in a demeaning scandal in which sections of the Australian elite colluded. This is largely unmentionable.” John Pilger “The forgotten coup against ‘the most loyal ally’” Independent Australia (5 June 2020);

    Hocking 2020: “the Palace letters have shattered claims of royal neutrality and non-involvement, revealing the intensely political nature of the correspondence – none more so than on the existence and use of reserve powers … lingering colonial entanglements of the imperial aftermath mean the circumstances allowing the 1975 coup remain unchanged today” Jenny Hocking “’For the sake of the monarchy’” ch12 of The Palace Papers: The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam (Melbourne: Scribe 2020): 221-31

[67] Brennan 2008_p. 156: The Mannings “initiated a series of top-secret talks aimed at uniting the aging Social Credit party with the revitalized [Alberta Progressive] Conservatives. … [PC leader Peter] Lougheed found it strange that a party holding sixty of the sixty-three seats in the legislature would approach a party that then had no seats. But he gave the project his guarded approval anyhow. So did Premier Manning. The “gang of four,” as Preston dubbed them, were Preston and a sociology graduate student named Erick Schmidt representing the Socreds, and future prime minister Joe Clark (then one of Lougheed’s executive assistants) and future provincial energy minister Merv Leitch representing the Conservatives. … When the draft plan was presented, however, neither side wanted to adopt it.” Brian Brennan The Good Steward: The Ernest C. Manning story Calgary: Fifth House 2008;

    UPI 26/1/83: “Hundreds of delegates to the Conservative convention fumed Wednesday while they queued up for about two hours to register for the meeting that will decide Joe Clark’s leadership. … It was the first time organizers had used computers in the hopes of avoiding the long delays experienced in the past.” “Hundreds of delegates to the Conservative convention fumed Wednesday…” United Press International (26 January 1983);

    Paikin 2013: “the old Progressive Conservative Party tossed out as leader a former prime minister, in favour of a man who’d never been elected to anything. Strange but true. In fact, that the leadership convention happened at all was bizarre. … Fully 66.9 per cent of delegates endorsed Clark’s leadership, and yet inexplicably, the leader thought that level of support wasn’t good enough. He resigned, called for another leadership convention to put the issue of who should lead the party to rest once and for all.” Steve Paikin “The leadership convention that changed history” TVOntario Today (4 June 2013);

    Ascah 1999_p. xii: “During the period from 1982 to May 1998, credit rating agencies (Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, Canadian Bond Rating Service, and Dominion Bond Rating Service) downgraded the provinces’ ratings 65 times with upgrades occurring 14 times. From 1993 to 1998, the Government of Canada had been downgraded at least once by major agencies and twice in the case of Moody’s. … Clearly the government policy-makers are coming under increasing pressure from the media and financial community to do something about rising public debt.” Robert L. Ascah Politics and Public Debt: The Dominion, the banks and Alberta’s Social Credit Edmonton: University of Alberta 1999

[68] McQuaig 2024: Feb`83 was “The first real glimpse Canadians got of Brian Mulroney … he was the front-runner in the Progressive Conservative party’s leadership race. He was also the president of the Iron Ore Company of Canada, and his assignment from the company’s US bosses was to shut down the company’s mining operations in Schefferville, Quebec, turning the once-thriving remote northern community into a ghost town. With the national media camped out in Schefferville to see Mulroney perform, the aspiring prime minister announced generous severance packages for the hundreds of terminated employees, turning the potential disaster into a political triumph.” Linda McQuaig “Brian Mulroney delivered for corporate bosses, leaving workers in the snowbanks: Mulroney transformed the political and economic landscape, partly through his free trade deal with the US that weakened labour” Toronto Star (21 March 2024);

    CPAC 1983: “Brian Mulroney ran for the second time, taking aim at Clark and Crosbie before the convention and highlighting the party’s weakness among francophone and immigrant voters. But he had never held elected office. Mulroney promised to include all opponents on his team after winning. He also pledged more private-sector growth and foreign investment but expressed skepticism of free trade.” “1983 Progressive Conservative leadership” Cable Public Affairs Channel (11 June 1983);

    Nelson 1989_p. 146: ‘the Prime Minister of Canada received special recognition from the International Chamber of Commerce for his “environmental achievements”. Casting back over the Mulroney years, it is difficult to think of what the ICC had in mind unless it was Mulroney’s supreme efforts to create that necessary “favourable business environment” through the free trade deal. Most recently, the Mulroney government had budgeted $5.1 billion in 1989 for loans and grants to extract fossil fuel resources in Canada over a period of five years, while budgeting only $160 million for alternative energy sources for the same period.’ Joyce Nelson Sultans of Sleaze: Public relations and the media Montréal: Between the Lines 1989;

    CBC 31/10/7  Linden MacIntyre “Mulroney tried to cover up cash payments he received in hotel rooms: Former prime minister Brian Mulroney attempted to cover up cash payments of $300,000 he received from a secret account, Karlheinz Schreiber told CBC’s The Fifth Estate” CBC News (31 October 2007)

[69] Thompson 2024: OSFI claims to be “an independent federal government agency dedicated to fostering public confidence in the Canadian financial system.” Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions National Security Sector Assistant Superintendent Kathy Thompson “Keynote speech” Anti-money Laundering and Financial Crime Annual Canadian Forum (5 June 2024)

[70] Lavoie 2019_pp. 2-3 Marc Lavoie “A system with zero reserves and with clearing outside of the central bank: The Canadian case” Review of Political Economy v31#2 (2019): 145-58

[71] ASC 2001 Alberta Securities Commission Oil & Gas Securities Taskforce Report (24 January 2001): 32pp;

    DOB 24/1/1 Elsie Ross “CAPP calls for deferral of changes to orphan fund” Daily Oil Bulletin (24 January 2001);

    Harper, Flanagan, Morton, Knopff, Crooks & Boessenkool 2001 National Citizens’ Coalition President Stephen Harper, professor of political science and former Reform Party of Canada director of research Tom Flanagan, professor of political science and Alberta Senator-elect Ted Morton, professor of political science Rainer Knopff, Canadian Taxpayers Federation Chairman Andrew Crooks, former policy adviser to Alberta Treasurer (Stockwell Day) Ken Boessenkool “An open letter to Ralph Klein: Re: The Alberta agenda” National Post (24 January 2001): A14

[72] NP 10/9/2 Paul Haavardsrud “ASC task force chairman resigns” National Post (10 September 2002): FP1ff

[73] Brezina & Gilmour 2003_pp. 32, 39: “Section 20.1 was repealed with the amendments, so under the amended OGCA there does not appear to be any direct risk of liability to directors, officers or controlling shareholders for the abandonment liabilities of the corporation. … Under the amended OGCA, directors and officers have no direct personal liability for suspension or abandonment costs” Danielle Brezina and Bradley Gilmour “Protecting and supporting the Orphan Fund: Recent legislative changes and AEUB policy amendments designed to address unfunded liabilities of oil and gas facilities in Alberta” Alberta Law Review v41#1 (July 2003): 29-47;

    DOB 19/8/3 “Alberta environment revising reclamation certificate procedures” Daily Oil Bulletin (19 August 2003)

[74] All mathematical proofs balance both sides of the equation. The fundamental accounting equation, also called the balance sheet equation, requires that Assets minus Liabilities minus Equity must equal Zero. Without central clearing of all transactions through the central bank, there is no way to know when or whether the national sheet balances, or whether we are being drained of untold trillions like a colony. FASB 2010_pp. 3, 13-14 (paras. OB12, BC1.33): “General purpose financial reports provide information about the financial position of a reporting entity, which is information about the entity’s economic resources and the claims against the reporting entity. … In discussing the financial position of an entity, the Exposure Draft referred to economic resources and claims on them. The chapter uses the phrase economic resources of the reporting entity and the claims against the reporting entity (see paragraph OB12). The reason for the change is that, in many cases, claims against an entity are not claims on specific resources. In addition, many claims will be satisfied using resources that will result from future net cash inflows. Thus, while all claims are claims against the entity, not all are claims against the entity’s existing resources.” Financial Accounting Standards Board of the Financial Accounting Foundation “The objective of general purpose financial reporting” ch1 in Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting: Statement of Financial Accounting Concepts #8 (September 2010): 22pp;

    Warsono 2017_pp. 22-23: “The FASB (2010) and [International Accounting Standards Board] (2010) … explicitly state that the accounting equation does not have to balance. … Such standard board statements have substantial consequences. Not only do the standard boards ignore DEB [double-entry bookkeeping], which retains a balance between the left and right sides of the equation, but the standard boards (regardless of their awareness of such) also defy universal laws, such as the laws of mathematics, thus far always expressed in equilibrium. The standard boards do not provide a sufficient explanation for this inequality, except for a brief statement that must still be discussed.” Sony Warsono Accounting and Mathematics: Revisiting the theory of double-entry Bolton: Lambert Academic 2017=Bottom of Form

[75] Boychuk 2019b Regan Boychuk “Kenney already facing Alberta’s reckoning over mismanaged oilfield cleanup” National Observer (2 May 2019);

    Boychuk 2020a Regan Boychuk “Alberta stumbling in the dark in sunset of conventional oil and gas” Calgary Herald (1 February 2020): A14;

    Boychuk 2020b Regan Boychuk “On orphan wells, dine-and-dash should not be the business model” CBC Opinion (12 April 2020);

    Boychuk 2020c Regan Boychuk “Alberta insults taxpayers, shreds polluter pays and shorts workers” National Observer (7 May 2020);

    Boychuk 2020d Regan Boychuk “The liabilities of profit: The sunset economics of oil and gas in Alberta” Economic Society of Northern Alberta invited presentation (7 October 2020): 106mins + 19 slides;

    Boychuk 2021a Regan Boychuk “Looting the dregs: SanLing Energy’s suspension is a sign of oilpatch rot” Progress Report (5 March 2021)Top of Form=Bottom of Form

[76] Lavoie 2019 (“Clearing Outside Central Bank” = no double-entry bookkeeping) Marc Lavoie “A system with zero reserves and with clearing outside of the central bank: The Canadian case” Review of Political Economy v31#2 (2019): 145-58;

    National Observer 14/5/24: “Last year, RBC, Scotiabank, TD, BMO and CIBC collectively financed fossil fuel companies to the tune of at least $140 billion, according to a report published Monday. Despite the towering sum, it’s a step down from the banks’ financing in 2022, which reached approximately $163 billion. Since the Paris Agreement was signed in late 2015, the Big 5 banks have pumped approximately $1.2 trillion into fossil fuel companies like Enbridge, TC Energy and Trans Mountain.” John Woodside “Canadian banks still huge fossil fuel investors” National Observer (14 May 2024)Top of Form=Bottom of Form

[77] NY Tribune 8/4/67: “It has become known that Russia would at anytime in years past have been very glad to get rid of her icy American desert for two millions of rubbles. … The unprecedented and suspicious hurry to get this treaty through the Senate, without letting the people see its terms … purchased at a price twenty-five times greater than the sum he could have bought it for … is now explained. If it was published, it would be killed stone dead.” “Washington: The Russian treaty” New York Tribune (8 April 1867): 1;

    Canadian Encyclopedia_Confederation: 29 March 1867;

    Library of Congress_Alaska Purchase Treaty: “Opposition to the purchase of Alaska subsided with the Klondike Gold Strike 1896.”Top of Form=Bottom of Form

[78] Denny 1930_pp. 407 (too wise to try to govern world), 117-19 (share of Cdn foreign capital): “There is recurring fear in Canada that financial penetration will mean increasing Yankee control of the country. Admittedly such control is now exercised in large measure in the economic field, but less in the way of political interference. … Dr. Hugh L. Keenleyside of the Canadian Department of External Affairs, in his recent book, Canada and the United States … repeats the rather general belief that: “If Canada were to undertake any radical measure of social reform, it is unquestionable that the United States would hesitate to underwrite Canadian loans.”” European correspondent for The Nation, then Indianapolis Times editor and Scripps-Howard’s chief editorial writer Ludwell Denny America Conquers Britain: A record of economic war New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1930=Bottom of Form

[79] Breen 1993_pp. 441-43 (Abasand 1&2) David H. Breen Alberta’s Petroleum Industry and the Conservation Board Edmonton: University of Alberta and the Energy Resources Conservation Board 1993=Bottom of Form

[80] GoA 2025a Government of Alberta “Taking action to double Alberta’s oil production: The Government of Alberta is working with partners to increase pipeline capacity in pursuit of its goal to double crude oil production and increase exports to the United States” (6 January 2025);=Bottom of Form

    Trudeau 2025 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Resignation speech CBC News (6 January 2025)

[81] Trump 2024 US President-elect Donald Trump “Announcing the nomination of Ken Howery as Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark” (24 December 2024) American Presidency Project online;=Bottom of Form

    Trump 2025c: “we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer. … Today, I will sign a series of historic executive orders.  With these actions, we will begin the complete restoration of America … America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world. … The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory … Ambition is the lifeblood of a great nation, and, right now, our nation is more ambitious than any other. … The future is ours, and our golden age has just begun.” US President Donald J. Trump “The inaugural address” (20 January 2025)=Bottom of Form

[82] Levellers 1649_p. 270: “you and your Ancestors got your Property by murther and theft, and you keep it by the same power from us” Gerrard Winstanley et al. “A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England” (20 January 1649) in George H. Sabine (ed.) The Works of Gerrard Winstanley: With an appendix of documents relating to the Digger movement (Ithaca: Cornell University 1941): 269-77;

    Fox n.d. Jim Fox “1642-52: The Diggers and the Levellers” Revolutions Per Minute via libcom.org (no date): 5pp;

    Baker & Vernon 2012 Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon “The history and the historiography of the Agreements of the People” introduction to Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon (eds.) The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2012): 1-27;

    Smith 1776_bk1, ch11, v1, p. 276: “There are three parts of produce and three original orders of society.  The whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country … naturally divides itself … into three parts; the rent of land, the wages of labour, and the profits of stock; and constitutes a revenue to three different orders of people; to those who live by rent, to those who live by wages, and to those who live by profit. These are the three great, original and constituent orders of every civilized society, from whose revenue that of every other order is ultimately derived.” Adam Smith An Inquiry into the Causes of the Wealth of Nations 5th edn. (ed.) Edwin Canaan (1789; Chicago: University of Chicago 1976);

    Patten 1892 Simon N. Patten “Burdenless taxation” ch16 in The Theory of Dynamic Economics University of Pennsylvania Political Economy and Public Law Series v3#3 (1892): 103-10 [excerpt];

    Debs 1905: “the capitalists, manufacturers, and employers generally have organized for economic and political action in the interest of their class and they are so conscious of their class interests and so responsive to them in every hour of trial that when there is a battle on they move with the precision of a well-drilled army and not the slightest friction prevents complete unity of action; and this is why they are uniformly successful in sweeping the field and leaving their adversaries, the poorly organized and class-unconscious workers, a routed and demoralized mob, with their best fighters stark and dead where they fell in their tracks. There can be no true and lasting working class unity that is not based upon sound principles and that does not express sound working class economics.” Eugene V. Debs “Working class unity” Labor Day speech in Chicago Socialist v6#340 (9 September 1905): 1;

    Solidarity 2/9/11 (Wobblies fight police to protect freedom of speech) A fellow worker “IWW defies police: Attempt to regulate length of meetings successfully resisted in Philadelphia” Industrial Workers of the World Solidarity v2#38 (2 September 1911): 1;

    Daily Worker 30/5/32 “Workers fight back cops in eviction fight: Police swing clubs, jail two: Unemployed council leads fight” US Communist Party Daily Worker v9#128 (30 May 1932): 2

    Keynes 1936_bk6, ch24, pp. 375-76: ‘I feel sure that the demand for capital is strictly limited in the sense that it would not be difficult to the increase the stock of capital up to a point where its marginal efficiency had fallen to a very low figure. … Now, though this state of affairs would be quite compatible with some measure of individualism, yet it would mean the euthanasia of the rentier, and, consequently, the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist to exploit the scarcity-value of capital. Interest today rewards no genuine sacrifice, any more than does rent for land [or resources].’  John Maynard Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money London: Macmillan 1936;

    Pollin 1997 Robert Pollin “’Socialization of investment’ and ‘euthanasia of the rentier’: The relevance of Keynesian policy ideas for the contemporary US economy” ch3 in Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer (eds.) The Relevance of Keynesian Economic Policies Today (London: Macmillan 1997): 57-77 [excerpt]=Bottom of Form

[83] Lane & Sterman 2011 David C. Lane and John D. Sterman “Jay Wright Forrester” ch20 in S. Gass and A. Assad (eds.) Profiles in Operations Research: Pioneers and innovators (New York: Springer 2011): 363-86;

    Pool 1992 Robert Pool “The third branch of science debuts: Computer simulation has opened a new eye on the world, giving scientists in fields from biology to high-energy physics a way to perform experiments that would be otherwise impossible” Science v256#5053 (3 April 1992): 44-47 =Bottom of Form

[84] Chase 1902 + Fiske 1905: (US discovers system dynamics for navy) Admiral J.V. Chase “Sea fights: A mathematical investigation of the effect of superiority of force in combats upon the sea” US Naval War College (1902) + Rear Admiral Bradley Allen Fiske “American naval policy” US Naval Institute (April 1905) discussed in Fiske 1916pp. 283-89 The Navy as a Fighting Machine New York: C. Scribner’s 1916;

    Lanchester 1914 (Britain reveals system dynamics for air force) Frederick William Lanchester “Aircraft in warfare: The dawn of the fourth arm” 14pts Engineering v18 (September-December 1914): 312-13ff reprinted in James R. Newman (ed.) The World of Mathematics (1956; New York: Dover 2000)v4: 2138-57;

    Osipov 1915 (Russia reveals system dynamics for army) Military-topographic section chief (Turkestan) Colonel Mikhail Pavlovich Osipov “The influence of the numerical strength of engaged forces in their casualties” Russian War Ministry Military Digest [Voenniy Sbornik] #6-10 (June-October 1915) Robert L. Helmbold and Allan S. Relm (trans.) Naval Research Logistics v42#3 (April 1995): 435-90;=Bottom of Form

    Forrester 1971 (system dynamics’ public-facing originator) Jay W. Forrester World Dynamics (18 February 1971) manuscript in Jay Wright Forrester Papers (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): 220pp;

    Nordhaus 1971 (system dynamics’ bad faith critic) Yale University Sterling Professor of Economics William D. Nordhaus “World Dynamics: Measurement without data” CF-20510 (May 1971);

    Meadows, Meadows, Randers & Behrens 1972_pp. 150-53: “Applying technology to the natural pressures that the environment exerts against any growth process has been so successful in the past that a whole culture has evolved around the principle of fighting against limits rather than learning to live with them. This culture has been reinforced by the apparent immensity of the earth and its resources and by the relative smallness of man and his activities. But the relationship between the earth’s limits and man’s activities is changing. The exponential growth curves are adding millions of people and billions of tons of pollutants to the ecosystem each year. … Yet man does not seem to learn by running into the earth’s obvious limits. … The basic choice … Is it better to try to live within that limit by accepting a self-imposed restriction on growth? Or is it to preferable to go on growing until some other natural limit arises, in the hope that at that time another technological leap will allow growth to continue still longer? For the last several hundred years human society has followed the second course so consistently and successfully that the first choice has been all but forgotten.” Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William W. Behrens III The Limits to Growth: A report for the Club of Rome’s project on the predicament of mankind New York: Universe March 1972; see further endnote 32;

    Forrester 1973 Jay W. Forrester “Response to a paper on World Dynamics by Nordhaus” (26 February 1973): 46pp in “Nordhaus, 1972-1975” Jay Wright Forrester Papers (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): 145-91

[85] Collier & Horowitz 1976_pp. 305-6: In 1953, the Ford Foundation convened “a Midcentury Conference on Resources for the Future. After President Eisenhower had greeted the 1,600 delegates, a working paper prepared by the Brookings Institution was passed around. … One of the results of the conference was Ford’s decision to underwrite an ongoing organization to develop policy on resource issues and then make sure that this policy stayed in the front lobe of Washington’s consciousness. Resources For the Future (as the organization was called) provided a think-tank atmosphere where social scientists could discuss pollution … one day and the extraction of raw materials from Southeast Asia the next. … Resources For the Future was also the locus for an almost incestuous intermingling of the men who made up the Rockefellers’ conservation family.” Peter Collier and David Horowitz The Rockefellers: An American dynasty (1976; New York: Signet 1977);

    AIME 1968: “since 1954 Sam H. Schurr has been director of Energy & Mineral Resources program of Resources for the Future Inc. …  Mr. Schurr’s many years of gov service began with his wartime employment in the Office of Strategic Services. From 1950-53 he was chief economist for the US Bureau of Mines” American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers “AIME mineral economics award: Sam H. Schurr” (1968);

    Zimmerman 1957_pp. 25, 31-32: “Conservation was viewed as a restraining force which had to be placed on private enterprise for the sake of protecting the common weal. … In fact, there is a definite antibusiness tinge attached to the traditional concept of conservation. How is it to be explained, then, that the petroleum conservation program was sponsored largely by private enterprise and to this day enjoys the support of many in the industry? That is precisely where semantics comes in. … There happens to be “something singular” about petroleum, because of which society has decided it cannot afford to rely exclusively on the free play of market forces maximizing present economic values but must instead practice conservation, because of which in almost every oil-producing state in this country constitutional amendments or conservation laws or both have been passed which have lifted petroleum out of the general category of those goods having a production schedule use rate that can be left to the discretion of private planning agents, and have subjected it to public rules and regulations requiring different use rates. … It is the legitimate function, indeed the duty, of the economist to point out what action appears economically sound and unsound to him. But he is not the sole judge and final arbiter of policies society may adopt in matters other than purely economic. … The fact is, by an overwhelming vote society seems to have been decided not to tolerate waste of petroleum even if some private entrepreneurs may find that such waste helps them to maximize the present value of the flow of (expected) net revenues.” University of Texas professor of economics and resources Erich Walter Zimmermann Conservation in the Production of Petroleum: A study in industrial control New Haven: Yale University 1957 [series sponsored by American Petroleum Institute];=Bottom of Form

Blair 1976_pp. 99-101 (Proves 7 Sisters rigged oil markets w/ system dynamics):

“The measure of the “closeness of fit” of the regression line to the actual observations (the “coefficient of determination”) is an astonishing 99.9 percent. … Somehow the major oil companies have been able to “orchestrate” these and other aberrations into a smooth and uninterrupted upward trend in overall supply.” John M. Blair The Control of Oil New York: Pantheon 1976;

    NYT 23/12/76: “chief economist of the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly of the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1957 to 1970, died Tuesday at his home. He was 62 years old. Dr. Blair, who was a professor of economics in the University of South Florida at Tampa at his death, had just completed a book, “The Control of Oil,” published by Pantheon Books. It deals with cartels and practices.” “Dr. John M. Blair, 62: US ex-economist: Long served Senate antitrust group before teaching in Florida” New York Times (23 December 1976): 20;

    Time 28/2/77: “shortly after completing the marathon grind of writing Control (it contains 789 explanatory notes), he died at 62 of a heart attack at his Florida home.” “Spanking the sisters” Time v109#9 (28 February 1977): 47-48

[86] Bamford 2024 James Bamford “How US intelligence and an American company feed Israel’s killing machine in Gaza: Because it isn’t so much the bombs that kill but the list that puts civilians in the way of the bombs” The Nation (12 April 2024);=Bottom of Form

    AP 18/2/25: “US tech giants have quietly empowered Israel to track and kill many more alleged militants more quickly in Gaza and Lebanon through a sharp spike in artificial intelligence and computing services. But the number of civilians killed has also soared, fueling fears that these tools are contributing to the deaths of innocent people. … After a deadly surprise attack by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, 2023, its use of Microsoft and OpenAI technology skyrocketed, an Associated Press investigation found. The investigation also revealed new details of how AI systems select targets and ways they can go wrong, including faulty data or flawed algorithms. It was based on internal documents, data and exclusive interviews with current and former Israeli officials and company employees.” Michael Biesecker, Sam Mednick and Garance Burke “As Israel uses US-made AI models in war, concerns arise about tech’s role in who lives and who dies” Associated Press (18 February 2025)

[87] BOE Report 11/12/24 Terry Etam “Proposed $70 billion AI data centre in MD of Greenview could launch an incredible new chapter for western Canadian energy” BOE Report (11 December 2024);

    Varcoe 22/2/25: “New data from the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) shows more than 10,000 megawatts of potential demand for proposed data centre projects have now applied to connect to the provincial transmission system.” Energy columnist Chris Varcoe “Two promising signs for Alberta’s economy? 15 proposed data centres and billions raised by tech sector: ‘The Alberta economy is a door—and it’s widening and more is spinning through it now’”Calgary Herald (22 February 2025)

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Regan Boychuk is an independent researcher and political economist born and raised in Alberta. He has founded numerous public interest projects that have been defunded, including Reclaim Alberta, the Alberta Liability Disclosure Project, Carbon Tracker North America (2x) and the Polluter Pay Federation.

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