Obtuse angles
I don’t know who “Katy Jean” is but she made my week with her nutty Saltwire column about Elon Musk’s first Canadian job.
The local angle is that Musk, while studying at Queen’s, was hired for the summer by a Nova Scotian working as principal assistant to the CEO of Scotiabank in Toronto at the time.
One of a group of photos auctioned off by Musk’s former girlfriend. (Source: People magazine)
(I have been amusing myself to no end imagining who the subject of the next article in this series might be: the Nova Scotian who told Coca-Cola to change its recipe? The Nova Scotian who green-lighted the Star Wars prequels?)
I’m not sure why Jean thinks Nova Scotians should be proud that a native son helped foist Musk onto an unsuspecting world, but my working theory is that she doesn’t actually know very much about Musk. Consider this sentence:
The weirder parts of his story, you probably know: putting a Tesla in orbit, telling managers at the car-maker to get back to the office or “pretend to work for somebody else” and a TMZ-worthy fight with Twitter staff who quit in droves.
Musk named two of his children X Æ A-12 and Exa Dark Sideræl. Musk promised to donate $6 billion to end world hunger then spent $44 billion buying Twitter instead. Musk admitted to talking up his “hyperloop” scheme to kill investments in high-speed trains. Musk claims he’s going to colonize Mars. And for the record, Musk FIRED Twitter workers “in droves.” I think Jean’s “weird” monitor needs calibrating. (And while she’s at it, she should buy a “gross” monitor so she’ll register items like racism in Musk’s assembly plants.)
But she was clearly thrilled to have a local hook to hang a story about “the world’s richest human” on, which makes it sad that two days after her piece was published, Musk, whose wealth has dropped by more than $100 billion this year, lost that title to France’s Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of luxury goods maker LVMH.
Let’s hope there’s a Nova Scotian out there who hired Arnault (“the wolf in cashmere“) to mow his lawn one summer.
Starr turn
I returned to Starr’s Point this week (the blog, not the place) and found author Richard Starr discussing the “[m]assive sums of COVID-19 economic benefits” that “went astray,” according to a recent report by Canada’s Auditor-General Karen Hogan.
The AG raised the possibility that as much as 15% of the federal pandemic relief was misdirected. That’s $32 billion of $210 billion—$110 billion of which went to individual Canadians through the Canadian Emergency Relief Benefit (CERB) and related programs, $100.7 billion of which went to businesses through the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS).
As Starr notes, much of the media attention turned to the $4.6 billion in overpayments to about 2.5 million individual recipients, particularly overpyaments of CERB, although the “misfires” included:
…1,522 CERB payments, worth $6.1 million, sent to people who were incarcerated and $1.2 million to 391 who were deceased – relative peanuts, pure gold to the critics.
Overall, though, the AG found that the government’s efforts to help people were successful.
Which brings Starr to his point, which is that when it came to CEWS, the AG was “unable to determine” whether it had “accomplished the goals set for it” and that $15.5 billion handed out to businesses should be investigated further.
The CEWS program subsidized 75 percent of employee wages for companies experiencing a revenue drop of at least 30 percent. The $15.5 billion in payouts the auditor says should be further investigated involved businesses which, based on sales tax filings, did not appear to experience the 30 percent revenue drop. As well, the Auditor suggests the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) should look for businesses inaccurately reporting the number and wage levels of employees, and employees who were also claiming individual benefits in addition to being paid by their employer through CEWS.
Karen Hogan
Starr quotes a UofT economist who says:
If CEWS funds are not saving many jobs, that means they end up in business profits.
Which brings me to my point, which is that Imperial Oil, the company that offered residents of Sydney’s North End $250 for their trouble after a gas leak at its tank farm forced them from their houses, received $120 million from CEWS while paying out $320 million in dividends.
It’s worth reading Starr’s comments in full, especially his scary conclusion in which he is forced to quote the only politician raising a fuss about CEWS—that great champion of the worker, Pierre Poilievre.
Working People
Speaking of workers, I’ve discovered Working People, “a podcast about working-class lives in 21st-century America.”
I found it through its host, Maximillian Alvarez, editor-in-chief at the Real News Network, who, along with reporter Mel Buer, has been on almost every other podcast I listen to in recent weeks discussing the rail strike that wasn’t in the US. Their appearance on Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson was particularly good:
Having listened to a half dozen interviews involving Alvarez, my next step was naturally to listen to his own podcast, and it was an absolute revelation. The interviews provide the same sort of insight into working people’s lives that I found, back in the day, in Studs Turkel’s books. (And it’s no coincidence, Alvarez cites Turkel as an influence.)
The episode below, for example, tells you things about the oil and gas industry that you will never read in an oil company’s annual report, thanks to James Hiatt, a former oil refinery worker in Louisiana; and Clarke, a veteran commercial diver with 15 years’ experience doing contract work with oil and gas companies in the Gulf of Mexico.
Neither man considers the industry to be sustainable, economically or environmentally, but as Hiatt says of Louisiana:
If you wanted to have a job that paid good enough that you didn’t need two jobs, the opportunities weren’t there except for in the refineries.
Hiatt’s father had worked in the refineries but at a time when the union had some clout and the shifts were eight hours long. By the time Hiatt entered the industry, Louisiana had passed “right to work” legislation eroding the strength of the union and allowing companies to introduce 12-hour shifts, which meant they could cut their staff. Hiatt said he’d once worked 22 straight days of 12-hour shifts without a break.
Clarke, the diver, described doing contract work for oil companies, living on a ship, pulling 12-hour shifts repairing pipelines under water, sometimes traveling from job to job for weeks (he said he’s done 160 days without coming home). But the flip side can be three to four months without work.
It’s a great conversation and pairs well with the Citations Needed discussion about the conditions under which rail workers labor and it really drove home for me the point that money isn’t everything when it comes to employment.
Blindsided
I left an eye-wear shop, which shall remain nameless, reeling this week, not because my vision has deteriorated so significantly (it hasn’t) but because between the money I paid for my eye exam ($135) and the money it was suggested I drop on a sty-preventing eye mask ($45) and the price I was quoted for glasses—I could buy one pair and get a second free but the first would cost me $930—I realized I could have dropped over $1,000 in the course of a 20-minute visit.
Dear reader, I declined.
I like to support local business, but $1,000 for eye glasses and a mask whose effects I can duplicate with a warm, damp face cloth seems unreasonable to me.
Of course, I am not this business’s target customer, which I realized after I was asked for the fourth time if I had insurance. (This becomes particularly interesting when you know that I interacted with just three people because, yes, one of them asked me twice if I had insurance.) I replied (four times) that I did not.
The only saving grace was that I was wearing a mask so no one could see my jaw dropping.
