Playing with fire - major Canadian banks back environmental extremists.

Peter Foster: "Look who’s demonizing Canadian oil"

 Next month, in Montreal, an organization called the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition, CYCC , is set to hold a “convergence” on pressuring institutions such as pension funds and university endowments to ditch their shares in Canadian oil and gas companies.

... the CYCC isn’t some Quixotic group of young idealists. Its divestment thrust is the offshoot of an international campaign — backed by big U.S. foundations ... part of the same movement that recently saw the Rockefeller Brothers Fund declare its intention to sell its fossil fuel interests.

Bizarrely, one of the most prominent Canadian agitators is Thomas Van Dyck, a senior executive in the Wealth Management division of the Royal Bank of Canada. CYCC has also been supported by TD Bank.

... Divest/Invest was inspired by American Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, which CYCC acknowledges as its partner in the “Fossil Free Canada” initiative. 

... In January of this year, Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Washington-based Wallace Global Fund – a major backer of radical environmental groups — launched Divest-Invest Philanthropy ...

I put in a call to RBC asking how one of their senior employees could so vigorously attack their clients. In an email, the bank responded that “Tom’s stated views are his own,”

Look, I know that these greedy weasel banks are playing both ends against the middle to make a buck but they are playing with a fire that could get out of control and seriously damage the entire economy.  Then where would their profits be?  And our standard of living? 

RBC's email response to Foster ( “Tom’s [Van Dyck's] stated views are his own”) was disingenuous to say the least.  In Moyers' interview with radical "divest leaders" Van Dyck and Dorsey Van Dyck is identified explicitly as a Senior VP with RBC wealth management and RBC's own web page touts his environmental activism and his eco-extremist connections:

"Van Dyck is the founder of As You Sow*, a shareholder advocacy foundation, and is active with environmental groups, including Rainforest Action Network, Baykeeper, Bioneers and Earth Rights International."

RBC is fully aware of Van Dyck's extreme views, connections and objectives which include the destruction of the fossil fuel industry.  It is easy to conclude that RBC is more than proud to have him on "the team".  And by employing Van Dyck in a senior wealth management role RBC has put him in a strong position to promote and advance his radical, economy destroying agenda.  RBC has implicitly endorsed that agenda.

If I were a major oil industry client of RBC I would be calling for Van Dyck's  head to roll, and failing that divesting myself of any business relationship with RBC.


FYC, Bill Moyers' interview with Thomas Van Dyck and Ellen Dorsey:

Justin Trudeau shamed into refunding charities he ripped off.

Justin Trudeau says he’ll compensate any charitable group that paid him a hefty speaking fee to participate in fundraising events.

Only two days ago he was refusing to refund any part of his fee.

Excellent work, Jason Kenney!

The financial crisis and corporate greed

Most MSM reporting on the on-going monster financial crisis in the U.S. points to a consensus that it’s entirely a result of the actions of greedy, reckless corporate executives. Anchors and pundits invariably point fingers in that direction. And the left is presenting the crisis as a failure of capitalism in general - backed up Thursday, for example, by a Wall Street protest by unions objecting to the proposed $700 billion taxpayer bailout as a bailout of greedy Wall Street executives.

It’s widely accepted that it’s the government’s responsibility to devise a rescue plan (and given the size of the problem this seems true). So there have been many, many interviews with politicians who, naturally, encourage the view that someone other than government (ie. themselves) is to blame. Both Obama and McCain are pointing fingers at Wall Street greed and calling for more government regulation including, as a sop to the vengeful masses, capping executive salaries. Almost no one asks what government’s role has been in causing the crisis.

One notable exception to this trend has been the Financial Post where Terence Corcoran, Peter Foster and William Watson have been pointing out a few inconvenient truths.

For example, here’s a list of relevant questions and answers from William Watson:

* Who inflated the housing bubble with 1% money in a strong economy? (The Greenspan Fed.)
* Who encouraged all sorts of low-income, high-risk borrowers to acquire mortgages and homes they were doomed to lose? (Government agencies of all stripes.)
* Who created the stock-option mania in big investment companies by capping tax deductions for executive salaries? (Congress, in the early 1990s.)
* Who prolonged the current crisis with continuing destructive ambiguity, still unresolved, about which institutions would be bailed out and which wouldn't be? (Today's regulators and policy-makers.)

Here’s Peter Foster on the calls for more government regulation:

There is almost universal "consensus" (a shudder-worthy concept) that the recent turmoil in U.S. financial markets must be due to insufficient regulation, or at least regulation of the "wrong" kind. So now we must have more and better regulation.
[...]
It seems beyond the conceptual abilities of most people that current problems might have been based on too much rather than too little regulation.
[...]
They have a blind spot to the role of government programs and policies in promoting the housing bubble, and of facilitating institutions, especially Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, that were widely perceived as being government backed (and ultimately were).
[...]
Wall Street’s recent difficulties have inevitably brought the usual anti-capitalist suspects from their lairs to claim Cassandra status, while in fact merely displaying their deeply embedded prejudices and historical amnesia. Take the CBC. .... Its doleful Washington correspondent, Michael Colton, declared that recent events were an embarrassment for "free enterprise." He then channeled a puzzled public’s lament: "Why can’t American business stand on its own feet?" One might well ask the same question of the CBC.

And here and here Mr. Foster points to lessons from the Great Depression:

...what made the Great Depression great was not its depth but its length, and what made it so long was lousy legislation based on misunderstandings of markets and demonization of capitalists. Similar legislation is now being proposed again.
[...]
FDR’s attempts to "correct" markets and counter capitalist greed led to such policy fallacies as believing that more unionization would force up wages and thus kick-start the economy. These and similar interventionist measures proved disastrous and prolonged the slump.
[...]
Lord Skidelsky implies that the Great Depression was a failure of laissez-faire capitalism, but as Milton Friedman pointed out, it should be more accurately laid at the door of government monetary manipulation, while the Depression’s depth and length were due to the uncertainty created by interventionist policies.

And on interference with executive compensation:

Attempts to control salaries have had perverse impacts before. There was uproar over executive incomes during the recession of the early 1990s. This led to restrictions that resulted in the flourishing of stock options, which were poorly accounted for, and in turn were blamed for the excesses of the dot-com boom and collapse of Enron and WorldCom.

More here and here from Terence Corcoron.

And there's an instructive thread here, of all places, at Climate Audit.

And finally, Mark Steyn’s observation:

... whenever anything goes wrong in the economy, the fault is always blamed on capitalism, red in tooth and claw. And in this case, both candidates tend to blame greed, untrammeled greed. Well, greed is writ in the human heart and is embedded in our DNA, and has been since the beginning of time. So clearly, greed itself is not the factor...

Amen.