Jason Prini .com

Yesterday China announced that it will be diverting much of it’s $1.4 trillion American dollar reserve into more stable currencies “such as the Euro or Canadian dollar“.

Peter Chilf, of Euro Pacific Capital sees the credit meltdown in the US as the beginning of a major overhaul of the American economy.

Much of Canada’s economy is build on “free” trade with the US. But the US seems to becoming more protectionist, and if their economy takes the nose-dive more and more people are predicting, where will that leave us?

I think we need a free trade agreement with the European Union. The EU is a market of nearly 500 million people (50% larger than the us), and their economies are of similar size (US GDP ~ $14T, EU GDP ~ $14.5T).

Canada has been slowly working on more trade with the European Union, but it seems to have stagnated.

While the EU economy is much less consumption driven than the US, the EU populations use less credit, which makes it seem like a much more sustainable trading partner to me. Canada has domestic experience dealing with multilingual markets, and if the north passage opens up, it could make for cheaper shipping to the EU.

I’m not saying cut off trade with the US. We should revisit NAFTA and see if we can’t make it better for everyone, and we should pursue more trade with South America. If the recent oil find in Brazil is as big as some predict, we could have a hungry Portuguese “Saudi-Arabia” down there looking to spend petro-dollars.

I subscribed to a new video feed in Miro last night and had my mind blown. The following video (mostly audio, as it’s a good PowerPoint presentation) stretched my understanding of the problem of money that’s threatening society in our current time.

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2171306322262202538&hl=en[/googlevideo]

Larry Lessig is a brilliant lawyer, that has a real gift concisely telling the story of hugely complex problems that seem to be changing every hour.

Naomi Klein writes a startling analysis of our current political situation in Canada. She reports on actions our government took at the recent Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) summit in Montebello, Quebec:

“The spokesperson for Prime Minister Harper explained that although protesters were herded into empty fields, the video-link meant that their right to political speech was protected. “Under the law, they need to be seen and heard, and they will be.” “

This is SO typical of the what many would call doublespeak coming out of the Harper government recently. She claims this is just the beginning of a sort of neo-facism, where our government works with big companies to run a massive and complex surveillance networks for profit. We’re told it’s for our safety, to combat terrorism. But is being already used to fine tune the sale of a newly defined version of democracy. One where we’re supposed to believe that 24/7 surveillance is so that the government can know what we want and need, and deliver faster and better.

The government doesn’t do whatever it takes to prevent every single murder from taking place. It’s called risk mitigation. I have a bigger chance of getting into a car accident than being a victim of terrorism; so why isn’t billions being spent on a road sensor network that would automatically monitor all traffic and take control of cars at the last millisecond to avoid accidents? That’s much more feasible that what they’re proposing to combat terrorism.

Yesterday was November 11th. Remembrance day. A day to not only remember the sacrifice our soldiers made to fight tyranny, but to remember so not to let tyranny rise again.