Surely a $5,000 bounty can't be far behind. Let's watch.
JUXTAPOSE! Canada's self-described champion of freedom, liberty, liberty and freedom will now shriek in outrage over the freedom of a corporation to deal with whoever they please.
P.S. I'm fascinated by how Ezra apparently made no attempt to get a mortgage through another bank; rather, he went straight to panhandling. It's almost as if he knew what the result of this choreography was going to be.
But that's just a guess.
7 comments:
Ezra is flying awfully close to the sun here. Is there a chance that Mr. Stackhouse and/or RBC might see Ezra's remarks as libelous?
One wonders what actual equity or assets the Rebel has to offer a collateral for a mortgage.
- Given that earlier this year their moochers were forced to go begging to the public for money to buy a laptop and bus fare to Montreal, it ain’t retained earnings.
- the Rebel’s production equipment is rudimentary to start with, and typically becomes obsolete within a year or two of purchase, so it ain’t capital assets.
- their intellectual property (collected videos and program inventories, including a string of dreadful home movies they called “documentaries” that no-on ever, ever watched) has no resale value whatsoever.
-Goodwill? Bwahahahahahaha…. No, but seriously, the “Rebel” brand is utterly toxic.
Add to all that the actual and potential liabilities - lawsuits and court actions, collapsing readership, and potentially some interesting questions from CRA about flow of funds between the Rebel and the Democracy Fund - and you have a score of F- on any credit evaluation criteria sheet I can conceive.
Dear Ezra: Meet the consequences of your actions. Consequences, Ezra.
Of course he went straight to panhandling. It's actually an excellent idea from his perspective.
The well has pretty much dried up on "Fight the Fines" - that was always a one-donation-and-forget-it project for donors (excluding the larger political benefactors), and in any case the meager trickle of charges dismissed on technicalities hardly justified the million or so bucks they raised for Ezra's pet lawyers. With that cash cow milked to extinction, Ezra needs a new infusion, and capital projects like this are just perfect.
- They can drag on forever, but present a pleasing illusion of progress. Look forward to lots of cute graphics.
- They can accommodate massive anonymous donations from corporate or political sponsors that choose to remain unidentified, including the big American Republican funding networks Ezra and alumni been cozying up to.
One does wonder how serious Ezra's pitch to RBC really was. As noted in a previous comment, the Rebel is terrible investment by any measure, and Ezra himself would be an absolute nightmare of a client. Seems to me Ezra's request may well have been a strategic move, If RBC had said yes, great; the fact that they've said no for perfectly sound business reasons now turns this into another War Against The Oppression of the Masses by the Elites. Never mind that casting RBC as a champion of Liberal values places Ezra solidly in Ionesco country - the remaining readership is too dumb to even see the irony. RBC is more useful as an enemy (who doesn't hate bankers) than as funder.
Does Ezra actually expect this to work? No, but that's not the point. This is the latest in a long series of half-baked fundraising schemes (anyone remember Ezra's Union of Bloggers? Ezra's half million dollar project to Revive Canadian Conservatism? Ezra's disastrous Rebel Investment Fund (which coincidentally promised investors exactly the same 5% rate of return before it folded?) For both the business world and the production community, the days of centralized facilities and office complexes are finished, and Ezra is not, in fact, going to buy a building. But a lot of money will flow into Rebel coffers in a very short time (these initiatives always peak immediately, then quickly fade away), and the donors will no doubt discover a rider on the contribution page that specifies that Ezra can actually spend the money on anything "related" to the project.
So how quickly, and by what mechanism, will Ezra figure out a scam to route donations through the "Democracy Fund" for charitable receipts?
Anon @3:02: I was just pondering that very thing -- TDF's mandate most emphatically does not include handing out tax receipts for donations used for real estate investments. So one wonders how they're going to re-define their mandate.
Prediction: This will morph into a "Fight The Banks" campaign run through TDF, with The Rebel playing the victim card (hard) as the aggrieved party in a "strategic" discrimination lawsuit ... and presto, Ezra's chief money-making grift moves over to TDF which magically gives out tax receipts, while the money itself disappears into various people's pockets (including Ezra).
TDF becomes a "part owner" of the proposed building, and Ezra and his buddies make off like bandits on the backs of the same rubes that ultimately ended up underwriting his home.
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