The Psychopaths Running Wall Street...

[Penumbra]

Let's review. If "lame" is offensive, I'll retract it; but here's what I consider offensive propaganda to be posted without expecting to be challenged....and maybe you can show we where it says that this sub-forum and the Political World are not "particularly meant for debate." Does that mean any claim made gets to go unchallenged?

It means we can discuss things, but to trample in and go on all-out debate rhetoric without even knowing a thing about the person you're debating is out of bounds. You even quoted back to me a fact I pointed out four days before you in another thread; the fact about the top 400 billionaires owning as much as wealth as the bottom 50% of Americans:

The bottom 50% of Americans in terms of wealth, own less than 4% of total American wealth. The top 400 individuals in the US in terms of wealth, own approximately as much as the bottom 50% of the US households (57 million households) combined.

As to where it says that it's not meant for debate; it says it right under the title of the subforum.
"This is for Socialist discussion and ideas only. This is not for debate."

It's similar to one of the DIR areas, except for political positions. Since both of us have socialist political leanings, if you want to discuss things civilly, then let's do that.

I think you're making all sorts of assumptions about what my stances are or are not based on the fact that I'm not interested in shifting blame or fixing symptoms rather than causes.

Regardless! This is your statement which I find totally offensive, because it is a central part of the meme that wealth inequality and the worldwide banking collapse only has victims and no perpetrators:

Actually no, I'm not saying it only has victims. There were lots of victims. But the victims and the perpetrators are two sets that overlap in multiple places. There are people that were perpetrators, there were some people that were victims that assisted in what occurred, and some people that were victims caught in the crossfire.

Let's consider, for example, this recent financial collapse. What caused it? Economists could, have, and probably will continue to, write whole libraries on the answer to that question and we're not going to solve it on a random online forum. But there are some key aspects:

-In the 1980's, progressive taxation was greatly diminished. People voted for it, and bought into it, and many of them still love Reagan.
-There were free trade agreements in the 90's that were directly correlated with an increase in the trade deficit. Americans had the opportunity to call or write to their elected officials to oppose it. This wasn't good for job creation.
-There was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, by elected officials, that were intertwined with corporate leaders. The repeal of this allowed investment banks and commercial banks to merge. Americans had the opportunity to call or write to their elected officials to oppose it. Failing that, Americans had the more direct opportunity to withdraw all of their funds from, and stop doing business with, any bank that was involved.
-Banks offered silly mortgage terms. Things like "no down payment" or a tiny down payment, rather than the traditional down payment of 20% or more. It was greed.
-And here's the other end of the relationship: Consumers, in great numbers, agreed to the terms of those loans. They bought houses without down payments. They bought houses with tiny down payments. They refinanced their mortgages so that they could withdraw equity from their homes. Millions of people. It was greed.
-Other parts of the system endorsed it. Companies unwisely leveraged based on the assumption that these mortgages would be paid. Other companies insured against potential losses if, somehow, these mortgages were not paid. Other companies passed them off as having good credit ratings.
-Eventually it caught up, people couldn't pay mortgages, things unraveled, the leveraged financial firms collapsed, and the government bailed out the big financial companies and let the citizens suffer the consequences.
-Here's where the relationship continues: Hundreds of millions of people continue to do business with those banks. Wells Fargo has 70 million customers. Bank of America operates in all 50 states and has tens of millions of customers. Citigroup generates something like $10 billion per year in revenue from regional banking. The same is true for JP Morgan; they've got something like $2 trillion in assets, a good portion of which are from banking. Customers, by the millions, voluntarily continue to do business with them.

If a bank's too big to fail, one could argue it's too big to exist. So if it's too big to exist, people can stop doing business with them. This isn't just the fault of a few dozen or few hundred people. It involves 100+ million peopled that give capital to those dozens or hundreds of people, let it fail, and then keep giving them more capital.

"But that's why I don't see why executives should be viewed as scapegoats, and that's why I say I don't know what people expect.

"
And that came after a presentation that sounds suspiciously similar to Mitt Romney's: "these corporations are owned by institutions, and our pension funds are invested in those institutions, therefore we are all investors now.' Except that small fish like me, who have payed into a company-run pension plan for years, have no say over how it's invested, or how much the company borrows out of that pension fund on an IOU promissory note! So some "investors" are more equal than others in our new world where everyone's an investor and everyone who owns a business is a "job creator." Another line of BS that should be shot down every time it trips out of the mouth of some apologist for capitalism.....but that's another issue to take down on another occasion!

Debate rhetoric rather than substantive discussion.

If you want to debate, you and I can start a thread elsewhere, such as the Political Debates area, or the One-on-One Debate area. Either start one and let me know, or send me a PM saying you'd like to debate this, and where, and I'll start one. That way we don't debate in a non-debate area or ruin Sunstone's thread. Or we could not post things about memes, BS, things being shot down, things tripping out of mouths, and a multitude of exclamation points, and talk civilly about some problems and solutions instead.

No, this isn't a natural historical cycle. The only facet of modern capitalism that is identical to Ancient Rome or with feudalistic societies in the Middle Ages are the gaps in wealth and income.

Doesn't this reinforce the concept that it's an ancient cycle by pointing that the gaps in wealth and income are identical to ancient Rome or feudalistic societies?

What do you believe the causes are if it's a trend that repeats itself again and again?

Debt-based financing and fractional reserve banking systems which have made continuous growth an imperative, are not a repeat of history. And for the record neither is the wealth gap that shows the top 1% of Americans owning 40% of the Nation's wealth! Awhile back, a group of historians did an analysis of available records of Ancient Rome and determined that Rome's wealth gap (even on a slave-labour based economy) was less than the U.S. and other Western nations:

To determine the size of the Roman economy and the distribution of income, historians Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen pored over papyri ledgers, previous scholarly estimates, imperial edicts, and Biblical passages. Their target was the state of the economy when the empire was at its population zenith, around 150 C.E. Schiedel and Friesen estimate that the top 1 percent of Roman society controlled 16 percent of the wealth, less than half of what America’s top 1 percent control.
To arrive at that number, they broke down Roman society into its established and implicit classes. Deriving income for the majority of plebeians required estimating the amount of wheat they might have consumed. From there, they could backtrack to daily wages based on wheat costs (most plebs did not have much, if any, discretionary income). Next they estimated the incomes of the “respectable” and “middling” sectors by multiplying the wages of the bottom class by a coefficient derived from a review of the literature. The few “respectable” and “middling” Romans enjoyed comfortable, but not lavish, lifestyles.

Income inequality in the Roman Empire « Per Square Mile
​

Pointing out that the same cycle repeats itself doesn't mean it follows the same numbers, with the same technologies, every time.

 

[Penumbra]

Which is why economic models need to be designed to equalize the trend towards inequality when it develops. That was the logic behind modern liberal capitalism of John Maynard Keynes and his proteges. An economic system that has shifted from simple supply and demand, to creating demand for novelty and new products through sophisticated manipulation of consumers, provides an incentive for people to attach their status to brand names and the acquiring of status symbols. The alternative is to scrap capitalism altogether, and design a socialist economic system that is responsive enough to local interests to avoid decline in output, and although the general will is to reform an existing system rather than scrap it and try something new, our world is fast reaching a point where growth-based economics is crashing into the natural limits of what the planet can provide for a growing human population.

My first question would be, which sort of socialism do you propose? Voluntary socialism? State-planned socialism? Communism? Social democracy? Who does the planning? What parts do the workers play? Who gets them to play their parts?

My second question is, what steps do you propose taking, for yourself and for others, to achieve and maintain the sort of socialism you propose?

Third, when you write above about the manipulation of consumers, and attaching status symbols to brand names and so forth, whose fault do you believe those things are? Do the consumers share a part of the blame, or are they blameless?

I agree that economic models need to be designed to equalize trends towards inequality, to a certain extent. But if a) people vote for the politicians that oppose that, b) want to receive the profits of hundreds of companies, want the convenience of doing business with those companies and giving them money, but don't want to have any responsibility in voting for and governing those companies, and c) are generally uninformed and uninterested, then I don't know how it's going to occur.

Socialism can begin in America when people stop fighting against it with every purchase, every vote, and every act of giving up their responsibilities.

Yes, but I had to cash in a lot of them when my wife had to stop working and to cover medical costs that weren't completely covered by health insurance and group benefits.

Like most of the small fish in this investor class that you idealize, I have never tried to play the game of buying company shares directly,

So it's a game to buy companies that you know, but not a game to buy 500 companies you don't know with an index or mutual fund, and to receive the profits while forgoing the responsibilities? I'd say it's more of a game to own hundreds of businesses and not know their names, their bosses, their balance sheets, or to vote in anything they do.

It's very statistically likely, based on how funds almost always vote, that your personal wealth in equities was being used to vote in approval of executive compensation packages and against all or most shareholder proposals. So while arguing against them, you probably helped vote for them, statistically speaking. And whether that's the case or not, and it probably is, if you're not sure of how your own wealth voted, then I'd propose that's an issue right there.

and even if I did, corporate democracy awards votes by the number of shares owned, so what's your point?

My point is that people, as a whole, have the power to solve the problem. But it's a matter of motivation, knowledge, desire, etc. When millions of Americans across the country give up their voting rights and then point out that each of them is small, then I don't know what they want, or what they expect.

A few major players can control the corporation without having to control 50% of the stock, because the minions out there are all divided up into little marginalized votes.

Have you done research on how corporations are mostly owned in America? Generally speaking, it's little pieces all the way to the top. None of the four biggest banks, for instance, have a shareholder that owns more than 8% of the company. Most of the top shareholders own rather small percentages. And almost all of those top shareholders are themselves institutions, rather than individuals, which are broken up into millions of investors that voluntarily hand over their votes to the fund managers. Most votes for corporate governance are either dispassionately placed, or abstained from.

The "system is us" only in respects to the Joe-The-Plumber type fools who think the system will someday work for them. That used to work to keep real left movements from crashing the party in the American political system; but, as I pointed out on a different thread from the analysis of economist-Richard Wolfe, the reason for that confidence that capitalism would work for the average person existed because American history had witnessed a decade by decade increase in the average wage level from the 1820's to the 1970's.

People can either hope for the system to one day work for them, or take steps to get it to work for them.

Since the 80's, the trend has reversed; and wages have declined for most segments of the population, including skilled labour, because of outsourcing production and importing illegal workers that can be treated as a slave labour class.

I'm aware of that. You keep giving me figures as though I would disagree with them, probably because you are making incorrect assumptions about what my positions are. However, what I'm saying is that the causes are not quite as convenient as you might believe. Who voted in Reagan, and who still idolize him today? Who voted in Bush II? Who does business with all four of the big banks? Who owns index funds, mutual funds, and exchange traded funds, and voluntarily gives up billions of shares worth of voting rights? Who gave the Republican party a majority in The House of Representatives in 2010? Who buys from Procter and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, Coca Cola, General Electric, and Exxon Mobil?

Nowadays, with the era of the Cold War and the boogeyman of Communism becoming a distant memory for younger people, it is time for Americans, Canadians and Europeans to wake up and realize that there is no "double dip recession" that can be fixed through either liberal or conservative capitalist economic strategies. The new economy is going to have to follow some sort of socialist model that provides for the basic necessities of life, and discourages the consumer-driven desire for novelty and status-seeking that drives this system.

And my earlier question applies: which form do you propose, and how do you propose it be achieved?

 

[InformedIgnorance]

It is only a cycle if the strangle hold of the affluent can be broken; although it is more than a little conspiracy theorist to suggest as much - we are fast reaching a point where the masses even if roused to violence will not be capable of dislodging the affluent. The simple reason being the concentration not only of wealth but the creation of technology that largely circumvents weaponry that civilians have access to... at the same time, if we continue to expand the capabilities of unmanned weapon platforms such as drones, this replaces the need for the affluent to maintain control of the armed forces, instead all they need is to keep their factories churning.

Personally I prefer the Chinese model... sure the state owns most things; but hey, at least then the benefits are flowing to the state rather than those few affluent people (under capitalism it is those few affluent people who own most things and it is to them that the overwhelming majority of benefits flow - despite their only involvement being ownership).

 

[Penumbra]

BTW, Work in Progress. I checked your profile and it says you're from Canada. I'm speaking in regards to US institutions because that's where I'm from and the thread concerns Wall Street. Canadian banks managed to avoid a significant chunk of the damage caused to and by American banks, by avoiding some of the pitfalls, although the index funds, mutual funds, exchange traded funds, and various other systems, all work in very similar ways to what I described. Plus, a lot of Canadians own indexes that hold American equities.

 

[work in progress]

BTW, Work in Progress. I checked your profile and it says you're from Canada. I'm speaking in regards to US institutions because that's where I'm from and the thread concerns Wall Street. Canadian banks managed to avoid a significant chunk of the damage caused to and by American banks, by avoiding some of the pitfalls, although the index funds, mutual funds, exchange traded funds, and various other systems, all work in very similar ways to what I described. Plus, a lot of Canadians own indexes that hold American equities.

Canadian bank bailout total touches $186 billion

2 December 2010
News item: Big Five banks tapped Fed for $111 billion funds during financial crisis

Read more: Wellington Financial Blog – News, Views & Purviews » Blog Archives » Canadian bank bailout total touches $186 billion
​

 

[work in progress]

My first question would be, which sort of socialism do you propose? Voluntary socialism? State-planned socialism? Communism? Social democracy? Who does the planning? What parts do the workers play? Who gets them to play their parts?

My second question is, what steps do you propose taking, for yourself and for others, to achieve and maintain the sort of socialism you propose?

This sounds similar to the arguments against occupiers in the OWS protests: "what's YOUR solution." Well, I do have some ideas, but I make things with my hands, not play funny money games or create new economic models. I've read some stuff from economists who are trying to change our system to adapt to a no-growth reality, but your questions obfuscate the most important point: the present system is broken, it will collapse completely within the next 20 years, so challenging opposing ideas is the same as someone on the Titanic arguing about lifeboats!

Third, when you write above about the manipulation of consumers, and attaching status symbols to brand names and so forth, whose fault do you believe those things are? Do the consumers share a part of the blame, or are they blameless?

The modern era of advertising began in the late 50's, and is idealized in shows like Mad Men. If we consider that the malaise of the Great Depression was largely due to the inability of capitalism to generate growth, we realize that during that time the corporations did much less advertising, and were not even close to the sophistication they currently have today, where they focus on our emotions and impulses, rather than try to list off as many positive features about their product as they can. So, the problem of consumer-driven demand was created at the top of corporate decision-making, and done without the awareness of the general public.

And I should point out that when I was young, there was much more consumer awareness of product safety and misleading advertising than there is now. Ever hear of Ralph Nader of late? Or has any other consumer advocate managed to rise up in his place and have a regular voice on TV and radio? Not with the collapse of the Fairness Doctrine and the deregulation of media ownership. So, blaming consumers for being unaware of of their manipulation, is equivalent to blaming someone who is sick for being poisoned by the runoff of a chemical plant upstream from them.

I agree that economic models need to be designed to equalize trends towards inequality, to a certain extent.

Which describes liberalism, not socialism.

But if a) people vote for the politicians that oppose that, b) want to receive the profits of hundreds of companies, want the convenience of doing business with those companies and giving them money, but don't want to have any responsibility in voting for and governing those companies, and c) are generally uninformed and uninterested, then I don't know how it's going to occur.

Socialism can begin in America when people stop fighting against it with every purchase, every vote, and every act of giving up their responsibilities.

Well, let's cut to the chase: revolutions do not happen when people are either prospering or desperately trying to keep up with their expected living standard. That's the reason for the huge runup in consumer debt over the last 10 years. Revolutions happen when an increasing number of people discover that they've been lied to, and that the system cannot work for them.

Have you done research on how corporations are mostly owned in America? Generally speaking, it's little pieces all the way to the top. None of the four biggest banks, for instance, have a shareholder that owns more than 8% of the company. Most of the top shareholders own rather small percentages. And almost all of those top shareholders are themselves institutions, rather than individuals, which are broken up into millions of investors that voluntarily hand over their votes to the fund managers. Most votes for corporate governance are either dispassionately placed, or abstained from.

I think I already covered that before. A shareholder with 8% of a major corporation has 8% of the votes for the board of directors, and he, and a small cabal of insiders are the only ones who know the difference between one ceo and another. Those of us who are "represented" in this system through large pension plans, have no control over how are plans are managed, let alone where the plan managers choose to invest. Our pension fund manager was even proposing buying a controlling interest in CANDU - the Canadian maker of nuclear reactors that nobody seems to want to buy without a Canadian Government subsidy! Fortunately, Fukishima came along and took that great idea off the table.

Now, even the small investor, who decides to pay the commissions and fees to a broker to invest some money directly, is not going to be privy to the insider trading and machine trades that are done by fast, sophisticated computers owned by the hedge fund managers. Any small investor who makes money on Wall Street is working against similar odds as someone who just goes out and buys a lottery ticket.

 

[work in progress]

It means we can discuss things, but to trample in and go on all-out debate rhetoric without even knowing a thing about the person you're debating is out of bounds. You even quoted back to me a fact I pointed out four days before you in another thread; the fact about the top 400 billionaires owning as much as wealth as the bottom 50% of Americans:



As to where it says that it's not meant for debate; it says it right under the title of the subforum.
"This is for Socialist discussion and ideas only. This is not for debate."

Which I interpreted as meaning that trying to introduce opposing ideas from conservatism or liberalism was not allowed. If it means that anything can be expressed if it is called socialism, then I'm in the wrong forum and will just ignore this subforum in the future.

 

[Penumbra]

This sounds similar to the arguments against occupiers in the OWS protests: "what's YOUR solution." Well, I do have some ideas, but I make things with my hands, not play funny money games or create new economic models. I've read some stuff from economists who are trying to change our system to adapt to a no-growth reality, but your questions obfuscate the most important point: the present system is broken, it will collapse completely within the next 20 years, so challenging opposing ideas is the same as someone on the Titanic arguing about lifeboats!

I work with my hands as well, rather often.

Me questioning what your proposed solutions and political positions are obfuscates the point? What would you rather discuss in the socialism area besides socialism?

Which opposing idea are you under the impression that I have challenged? The only idea I've been primarily challenging is the idea that it's somehow not our fault, that it's someone else's fault.

So, blaming consumers for being unaware of of their manipulation, is equivalent to blaming someone who is sick for being poisoned by the runoff of a chemical plant upstream from them.

So consumers shouldn't take responsibility for their own views?

How many people do you believe have done a degree of serious research into their diet? What percentage of people, would you suggest, check to see what country most of their products are coming from? How many people would you say have a rather high degree of understanding of where their national government brings in money from, and where it spends it?

I believe the government should play a role in increasing transparency. The FDA, for instance, regulates health claims that can be made on food. I assume Canada has an equivalent. And people like Nadar, as well as a variety of environmental, consumer, and various protection groups are out there doing a good job of posting information to warn people about things and blow whistles on problems.

Which describes liberalism, not socialism.

You brought it up, not me. That was me agreeing with you. Our words:

You: Which is why economic models need to be designed to equalize the trend towards inequality when it develops.
Me: I agree that economic models need to be designed to equalize trends towards inequality, to a certain extent.

Socialism is when the workers own the means of production, and it's a very broad set of political positions ranging from centrally-planned state economies to anarcho-socialistic positions.

I propose that the workers should own the means of production. I propose a rather significant degree of wealth redistribution, but only in rational ways. I don't propose, however, that an economy should be primarily centrally-planned or state planned (as some argue that such economies even fail to be socialism and at that point and instead operate more like a giant national corporation headed by a select few). I think any realistic and sustainable form of socialism has to come voluntarily from the ground up, from a genuine cultural shift. Political votes can be used to make the situation more possible by utilizing social democracy or some other form of mixed economy to assist in the role of wealth redistribution.

Well, let's cut to the chase: revolutions do not happen when people are either prospering or desperately trying to keep up with their expected living standard. That's the reason for the huge runup in consumer debt over the last 10 years. Revolutions happen when an increasing number of people discover that they've been lied to, and that the system cannot work for them.

Revolutions can occur in multiple ways. Things reach tipping points. If wealth concentration continues, it may shift from mere protests to actual revolution, although there may be boom cycles along the way that temporarily distract people.

I think I already covered that before. A shareholder with 8% of a major corporation has 8% of the votes for the board of directors, and he, and a small cabal of insiders are the only ones who know the difference between one ceo and another. Those of us who are "represented" in this system through large pension plans, have no control over how are plans are managed, let alone where the plan managers choose to invest. Our pension fund manager was even proposing buying a controlling interest in CANDU - the Canadian maker of nuclear reactors that nobody seems to want to buy without a Canadian Government subsidy! Fortunately, Fukishima came along and took that great idea off the table.

I think you didn't read all that I wrote there. I said that even those large shareholders, are themselves usually just collections of smaller shareholders that voluntarily gave over their voting rights.

Use Bank of America as an example.
The five largest funds that own the bank, as a percentage of ownership, are Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, Fairholme Investments (mutual funds), SPDR S&P 500, Vanguard 500 Investor Index, and Vanguard Institutional Index. The five largest institutions that own the bank, as a percentage of ownership, are Bank of America 401(k) plan, State Street Corp, Vanguard Group, Blackrock Trust, and Bank of America pension plan.

All of those consist of tons of individual investors. Most of them consist of both large and small investors. Vanguard, for instance, serves countless people with their index funds, both small investors and large investors alike (over a trillion and a half dollars worth). They don't care too much about voting. The image of a large single investor, or a tiny cabal of investors, is largely inaccurate. These are millions and millions of shareholders that have elected to give up their voting rights to the fund managers. Funds usually just vote in routine ways; nine times out of ten they'll just vote in line with what the board of that company wants. If they own hundreds of companies or more, voting is time consuming and they don't care. You can look through large company after large company, including most financial firms, and with few exceptions, you'll see that the largest shareholders each usually own a small percentage of the company, and that almost all of the large shareholders are themselves just funds, just custodial holding of others' wealth.

So it's not surprising to me that when basically nobody, even the largest investors (which are usually just pass-through holdings of huge numbers of smaller investors), are taking an interest in their company, that psychopaths would work their way up to the top position. It's not a small cabal of investors with nefarious plans, it's us, as citizens and owners, not paying attention, volunteering away our rights to have a voice in companies that we buy from and work for.

Depending on when you owned equities, and to what degree you owned American equities, it's quite plausible that my wealth and your wealth were voting against each other in regards to how to run certain corporations. Usually shareholder proposals that most people would agree with get voted down because nobody cares. The largest fund holders are not activists; they have little interest in voting.

Now, even the small investor, who decides to pay the commissions and fees to a broker to invest some money directly, is not going to be privy to the insider trading and machine trades that are done by fast, sophisticated computers owned by the hedge fund managers. Any small investor who makes money on Wall Street is working against similar odds as someone who just goes out and buys a lottery ticket.

What leads you to believe any of that is necessary? Why do you need to be privy to insider trading or machine trades?

You talked before about the age of advertising and consumers being unaware of their manipulation. Have you considered the possibility that this is one of the ideas that has been marketed to you by people that would, instead, prefer you to pay them for management of your finances?

Which I interpreted as meaning that trying to introduce opposing ideas from conservatism or liberalism was not allowed. If it means that anything can be expressed if it is called socialism, then I'm in the wrong forum and will just ignore this subforum in the future.

Which ideas from conservatism or liberalism were introduced? The one you called out, was me agreeing with a statement you provided.

The political areas mean no debating is allowed in general here, even between people who can post here. That's why I suggested that, if we would like to debate, we should do so in a debates area. I haven't used any rhetoric, but you called my analysis lame, BS, offensive, a meme, suspicious, etc.

Rather than just go "yeah, those lame psychopaths, it's their fault" and have a number of various agreement posts (these political "only" areas are rather barren of posts in terms of quantity, for the most part), I attempted to actually discuss what I consider the reasons behind it, and wouldn't mind discussing solutions. Sunstone presented a good article, so in my view, good posts would be along the lines of "how does this come to be?" or, "how can we address that?"

 

[Penumbra]

Canadian bank bailout total touches $186 billion

2 December 2010
News item: Big Five banks tapped Fed for $111 billion funds during financial crisis

Read more: Wellington Financial Blog – News, Views & Purviews » Blog Archives » Canadian bank bailout total touches $186 billion
​

I didn't say they avoided the problem entirely. They messed up too. But compare them to the systematic problems of the four big US banks, and it's not to the same degree.

The reason I made that little end post there was that I was operating under the assumption that you were American, since the thread is about Wall Street and you were posting statistics on American wealth inequality. So after seeing in your profile that you were Canadian, I was pointing out that, although Canadian banks didn't fail quite as hard as US banks, that all of my descriptions of things about America (corporations, politicians, citizens routinely giving up their power), in general, apply to Canada as well. So that wasn't me defending Canadian banks; quite the opposite. It was me saying that all of my statements about how the systems work, apply pretty much to Canada as well as the US.