Fuel Ghoul

Corporate Halloween Hegemony

The Rise of Retail Helloween

Do you check the candy your child collects on Halloween? Would you let older children age 12+ go door to door unsupervised? Do you trust your neighbours?  Most people today don’t even know their neighbours, and they have no time or any desire to meet them. Those folks among us who advocate their children attend ‘safe schools’ with metal detectors and armed guards at the door, usually encourage little or no congress with neighbours between the two points. Halloween is an alien concept.

 

Every October, corporations challenge their marketing executives to extend their brand into a more logical position inside the lucrative Halloween holiday market. Just last year, the National Retail Federation of America found Halloween has become the sixth largest spending holiday in the United States behind Christmas ($457.4 billion US), Valentine's Day ($13.70 billion US), Easter ($12.63 billion US), Mother's Day ($13.80 billion US) and Father's Day ($9.01 billion US). The study found that Halloween sales have grown by about $2 billion since 2003, to just over $5 billion in 2006.

 

Fuel Ghoul can see that Halloween is growing in all the wrong places. Most folks living today don’t know anything about how the pumpkin came to become the ubiquitous welcome lantern at over 100 million homes across North America, or why October 31^st is sometimes called All Hallow’s Eve. The myth is being masticated by merchants in a sales trend called the ‘Christmas creep’.

 

Fuel Ghoul shudders with rage and conviction when he thinks about his own sister and her children; they won’t be frolicking down lamp lit residential lanes this year, they won’t be crossing dark streets or taking candy from strangers. They’ll be heading for the West Chester Mall, a shopping center near their home, to trick-or-treat among the stores there. “I’ll take them to Reggie and Carol’s and to Rob’s mom’s house, but we’re going to the mall,” She said to him, and when he asked why not meet some of the neighbours on her street she protested, saying that “the kids want to go to the mall. Its fun, convenient and most importantly it is safe.”

In Fuel Ghoul's opinion, it’s also fundamentally wrong. He loathes corporate ad bucks promoting retail trick-or-treating as a safe alternative to walking about your neighborhood. Shopping malls offer a stale, pedestrian-only, lights-on, shallow smile sales-clerk kind of experience. All spookiness has been exorcised -most shopping malls insist that no scary costumes or masks be worn.

Come to K-mart and get your free bag of Halloween candy on Oct31st. Retailers use candy to bait strangers. Sugar coated offerings lure potential new customers into a venue where they've never shopped before. And even if the families don’t buy anything on Halloween, they’ll remember the store when shopping for Christmas.

Corporate hegemony is hurting Halloween. Unwarranted issues of safety and morality are spiked home by media scares. Watch the papers the week before Halloween, there is at least one ‘it could be your neighbour’ story presented to plant seeds of doubt and sell more copy.

 
Yesterday, a ‘human interest’ story in an American newspaper advertised the fact that the SPCA would not allow black cats to be adopted in the month of October, fearing perhaps local residents might be tempted to use the creatures in Satanic rituals. I checked Toronto; it’s true. The Toronto Humane Society will not allow black cats to be released from their protective custody this month either. (I was actually going to write a piece on that, but then found myself on the wrong side of the media – a story like that would help foster the myth of fear away from neighbourhood trick or treating).

Beware the ‘razor blade in the apple’, and fear the possibility of eating adulterated candy is the message promoted by retailers, and this is the most pervasive of all corporate lies; there is little or no substance to this tenacious urban myth. Yes, it happened once in 1974: An 8 year old boy died from a cyanide-laced candy which he picked up at Halloween. Investigations revealed however that the boy’s own father had intentionally spread cyanide on the candy in order to kill his son. He wanted to collect the insurance. He was charged, tried, convicted and executed.

 
In 1982, fifteen kids and one adult became ill at a school Halloween party. It might have been caused by the candy and cakes that they ate. But the newspaper reports of the lab tests on the food are contradictory. Although nobody died, the story hasn’t been forgotten and is preserved by our fear of predators.

 
Fuel Ghoul is greatly discomfited by the general trend away from neighborhood-based trick-or-treating.  He would like to see consumers simplify their lives and buy fewer disposable goods, and he believes that trick-or-treating in shopping centers replaces community with commercialism, and soon children will begin to associate Halloween with local retailers, rather than with local friends and neighbours. As an alternative, FG suggests community-center costume parades, school carnivals and block parties. Can you find a destination where the myth and stories of Halloween can be shared? Yes he's sympathetic to parents’ concerns, but can you not celebrate Halloween safely without salespeople?

Shopping mall trick-or-treating is scary because it’s hurting Halloween. Media fed urban myths propagate fear and destroy neighborly interaction, the very thing that makes the holiday such a great asset to society. Many people don’t realize the importance of knowing and trusting those who live near their residence. There may come a time when you need each other, whether its to mobilize together to face an environmental disaster, create a crime watch, find a baby sitter, or borrow a ladder - Halloween helps.

What's the Deal with Myanmar?

Fuel Ghoul wonders, what’s up with Myanmar? Even the country's name is controversial. The ruling junta calls their nation ‘Myanmar’, which is a close approximation of its 13th century name, while all others, including the USA still officially recognize the country as ‘Burma’ – the nation’s ruling generals changed the state name in 1989 and then promptly dissolved parliament before the change could be properly ratified by its people.

Exports of natural gas from Myanmar (which generates twenty percent of all electricity in Thailand and keeps the lights on in Bangkok) fuels one of the world’s most oppressive military governments. This valuable gas, and the $2.8 billion US dollars it costs Thailand, is the largest single contribution to Myanmar's otherwise impoverished economy. Largely because of the gas deal, Thailand is Myanmar's biggest trade partner, not China, as is widely reported. 

Thailand's natural gas deal highlights the dilemma facing China, India, Singapore and Malaysia, among other countries, as they vie for Burma's hardwoods, minerals, gems - and access to its market of 47 million people.

At a time of spiraling energy prices, the prospect of extracting such resources appears to override the ignominy of dealing with a despicable military government that has attracted world wide notoriety. The countries that have the most leverage over Burma seem the most reluctant to use it, Fuel Ghoul notes.

Fuel Ghoul understands exactly what’s going on here - from the perspective of Myanmar's leaders, the gas purchases by Thailand are only the beginning of what could be a massive infusion of cash; the country will soon announce the winner of a concession in the large Shwe gas fields off its western coast. Companies from India, China and South Korea have placed bids for those contracts.

The latest protests began Aug. 19 in response to sharp, unannounced fuel price increases of up to 500 percent, immediately raising the prices of goods and transportation.

They were led at first by former student protesters and other activists, but most of the leaders had been arrested or were in hiding when the monks began their protests last Tuesday. 

The monks were apparently motivated at first by an attack on a small demonstration at which security officers fired shots into the air and beat protesters with clubs.

 
At a recent academic seminar in Singapore, while his fellow Burmese reeled from the shock of fuel price increases of between 100 and 500 percent, Soe Myint waxed eloquently about Burma’s future as an energy “bridge.”

 
“We hope to become a sort of [energy] bridge between Southeast Asia and South Asia,” he told a select gathering at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in late August. “Our dream is that Myanmar will eventually become a major energy supplier in this region.”

Burma also plans to become a major biofuel producer and exporter, said Soe Myint. Without giving specific details, Soe Myint told the Singapore seminar that Burma has oil reserves of more than 500 million barrels and another 100 million barrels off shore.

Natural gas reserves are much higher, he said—about 16 trillion cubic feet.  If true, this would put
Burma among the world’s top 10 holders of known gas resources.

Unfortunately, the rich natural resources of the country are nowhere near helping fuel
Burma’s energy needs, or delivering hard currency income which could enable the government to import larger amounts of refined oil fuels at affordable domestic prices.

The A-1 and A-3 blocks of the Shwe field, about 60 kms off the Arakan coast near the port of Sittwe, hold as much as 7.7 trillion cubic feet (220 billion cubic meters) of recoverable gas, says South Korea’s Daewoo International, the main developer.

But behind-the-scenes political and financial wrangles over who will be allowed to buy this gas have been going on for more than a year, with at least five countries bidding for the rights. Both India and China want to build pipelines costing more than $1 billion to import the gas to power their growing economies.

“The signals coming out of the Burma government on this Shwe gas are very confused and not good for the international energy industry that might be looking to invest in the country,” said Bangkok commodities researcher Sar Watana. “Add to this Daewoo’s issuing statements that it is in charge of picking a buyer—it’s a mess.”

 
In the murky world of the Burmese government, it’s unclear who really has the final say on the Shwe gas field, although it is expected that the state owned and operated Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise will partner with whoever wins the prize.

 
Whatever the difficulties and risks of dealing with the junta, it clearly hasn’t discouraged a string of foreign investors from seeking a portion of Burma’s riches. A range of small, sometimes obscure companies, from Singapore to Russia, have also won both onshore and offshore exploratory drilling concessions.

 
Burma’s future role as a key energy supplier to Asian countries is not in doubt. The question is can the regime put together an efficient mechanism to exploit its natural resources in a way that truly benefits the Burmese people?