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"One of the Corporate Scandals of Our Times": Shell Posts Record $10 Billion in Profits

 

“The British oil behemoth Shell reported a record $9.6 billion in first-quarter profits on Thursday and announced $4 billion in stock buybacks, prompting fury from environmentalists and progressive lawmakers who say the fossil fuel industry's profiteering is grotesque amid a worsening climate emergency and cost-of-living crises across Europe.

“Shell CEO Wael Sawan—who recently declared that the ‘world will need oil and gas for a long time to come’ and called fossil fuel production cuts ‘unhealthy’—hailed his company's ‘strong results and robust operational performance’ and touted the new share buyback program as ‘part of our commitment to deliver attractive shareholder returns.’

“Climate advocates reacted with disgust to Shell's earnings announcement, which came days after BP posted nearly $5 billion in profits for the first three months of 2023…

“British MP Jeremy Corbyn, an ex-Labour Party leader, echoed that message on Twitter, writing that political leaders face a straightforward choice: ‘Protect fossil fuel profits or protect the future of our planet. I choose the future of our planet. We need a Green New Deal that transforms our economy, creates secure jobs, and provides publicly owned renewable energy for all.’…”

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

The Contemporary Republican Party is becoming well known for its treatment of the LGBTQ+ community, people of color, and other minorities

 

“…Of course, some states have passed laws that could confuse someone trying to distinguish legislation enacted by the Nazis targeting Jews and legislation in the United States targeting those with different sexual orientation from the legislators enacting the laws in the United States.

“In Ohio, legislation has been passed that bans gender-affirming care for youth who have gender dysphoria and bans Ohio residents from going to another state for abortions.

“In Montana, a law was just signed that bans transgender care for minors and prohibits transitional hormone treatments and surgeries for transgender people under the age of 18.

“Idaho has just passed a law that criminalizes gender-affirming health care for youth who have gender dysphoria and bans puberty blockers and hormones for people under age 18.

“Since the first of the year more than a dozen states have passed legislation affecting the medical rights of their citizens. There are other areas in which apparent similarities are in fact not similarities…

“In Tennessee, legislators voted to expel two of their black members. (A third person who participated in the offensive conduct was not expelled. She was white.) Republican members of the Tennessee legislature were quick to explain that the legislators who were expelled were expelled because of their breach of decorum on the floor of the legislature and not because of the color of their skin or their sexual preferences…

“One of the Republicans who voted to expel his two black colleagues said the two had acted with ‘disrespect’ and showed ‘no remorse’ for their actions. He said they had conducted a ‘mutiny.’

“In Montana, Democratic lawmaker Zooey Zephyr is a transgender member of the Montana House of Representatives. Zooey was banned from attending or speaking during floor sessions of the House and will only be allowed to vote remotely during the last days of the session.

“That is because she spoke out against a bill passed by her colleagues that bans gender-affirming care. She is a transgender member of the legislature that can longer fully participate on behalf of her constituents…

“Although DeSantis has received the most publicity for banning books, Texas has in fact banned the most books. It has banned 800 books in 22 school districts. DeSantis comes in second best having banned 566 books in 21 of the state’s school districts. DeSantis has, among other things, banned books that deal with issues related to race…

“Like Florida, Pennsylvania has many book bans in place and in many counties has banned books that are centered on people of color…

“The United States is becoming well known for its treatment of the LGBTQ+ community, people of color, and other minorities.”

 

-Christopher Brauchli, Common Dreams

The Debt Ceiling Debate Is a Massive Deception of the American Public

 

Future historians will likely look back at the debt ceiling rituals being reenacted these days with a frustrated shaking of their heads. That otherwise reasonable people would be so readily deceived raises the question that will provoke those historians: How could this happen?

The U.S. Congress has imposed successive ceilings on the national debt, each one higher than the last. Ceilings were intended to limit the amount of federal borrowing. But the same U.S. Congress so managed its taxing and spending that it created ever more excesses of spending over tax revenues (deficits).

Those excesses required borrowing to cover them. The borrowings accumulated to hit successive ceilings. A highly political ritual of threats and counterthreats accompanied each rise of the ceiling required by the need to borrow to finance deficits.

It is elementary economics to note that if Congress raised more taxes or cut federal spending—or both—there would be no need to borrow and thus no ceiling on borrowing to worry about. The ceiling would become irrelevant or merely symbolic.

Further, if taxes were raised enough and spending cut enough, the existing U.S. national debt could be reduced. That situation has happened occasionally in U.S. history.

The real issue then is that when borrowing approaches any ceiling, the policy choices are these three: raise the ceiling (to borrow more), raise taxes, or cut spending. Of course, combinations of them would also be possible.

In contrast to this reality, U.S. politics deceives by constricting its debate. Politicians, the mainstream media, and academics simply omit—basically by refusing to admit or consider—tax increases. The GOP demands spending cuts or else it will block raising the ceiling.

The Democrats insist that raising the ceiling is the better choice than cutting spending. Democrats threaten to blame the GOP for the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling. They paint those consequences in lurid colors depicting U.S. bondholders denied interest or repayment, Social Security recipients denied their pensions, and government employees denied their wages.

The unspoken agreement between the two major parties is to omit any serious discussion of raising taxes to avoid hitting the debt ceiling. That omission entails deception.

Here are some tax increases that could help solve the problem by avoiding any need to raise the debt ceiling. The social security tax could be applied to all wage and salary incomes, not only those of $160,000 or less as is now the case. The social security tax could be applied to nonwage income such as interest dividends, capital gains, and rents.

The corporate profits tax could be raised back to what it was a few decades ago: near or above 50 percent versus the current 37 percent rate. A property tax could be levied on property that takes the form of stocks and bonds.

The current property tax in the United States (levied mostly at the local level) includes land, houses, automobiles, and business inventories, while it excludes stocks and bonds. Perhaps that is because the richest 10 percent of Americans own roughly 80 percent of stocks and bonds. The current property tax system in the United States is very nice for that 10 percent.

Another logical candidate is the federal estate tax which a few years ago exempted under $1 million of an estate from the tax, but now exempts over $12 million per person (over $25 million per couple). That exemption makes a mockery of the idea that all Americans start or live their lives on a level playing field where merit counts more than inheritance. The U.S. could and should go back from that tax giveaway to the richest. There are many more possible tax increases.

Of course, there are strengths and weaknesses entailed in raising every tax, positive and negative consequences. But the exact same is true of raising the debt ceiling and thereby increasing the U.S. national debt. Likewise cutting spending has its pluses and minuses in terms of pain and gain.

There is no logical or reasonable basis for excluding tax increases from the national debate and discussion about raising the debt ceiling and thereby the national debt.

It is rather the shared political commitments of both major parties that require and motivate the exclusion. There is no reason for U.S. citizens to accept, tolerate, endorse, or otherwise validate the debt ceiling deception perpetrated against us.

Nor is the debt ceiling deception alone. The previous national debate over responding to inflation by having the Federal Reserve raise interest rates provides another quite parallel example. That debate proceeded by debating the pros and cons of interest rate increases as if no other anti-inflationary policy existed or was even worth mentioning.

Once again elementary economics teaches that wage-price freezes and rationing have been used against inflations in the past—including in the United States—as alternatives to raising interest rates or alongside them. U.S. President Nixon in 1971 used wage-price freezes. 

U.S. President Roosevelt used rationing during World War II. But the government, Federal Reserve, major media, and major academic leaders carried on their recent policy debates as if those other anti-inflationary tools did not exist or were not worth including in the debate.

Wage-price freezes and rationing have their strengths and weaknesses—just as tax increases do—but once again the same applies to raising interest rates. No justification exists for proceeding as if alternative options are not there. The U.S. national debate over fighting inflation was deceptive in the same way that the debate over the debt ceiling is.

Nor is the deception any less if it is covered by a claim of “realism.” Those who grasp elementary economics enough to know that tax increases could “solve” the debt ceiling issue become complicit in the deception by invoking “realism.” Since the two major parties are jointly subservient to corporations and the rich, they rule out tax increases on them.

It thus becomes “realistic” to exclude that option from the debt ceiling debate. What is best for corporations and the rich thus gets equated to what is “realistic.” It is worth remembering that throughout history ruling classes have discovered, to their shock and surprise, that the ruled can and often do quickly alter what is “realistic.”

The debt ceiling deceptions favor corporations over individuals and the richest individuals over the rest of us. In our thinking and speaking too, the nation’s class structure and class struggles exhibit their influential power. The mainstream debt ceiling debate deceives by lying by omission rather than commission.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.

 

The Fed, the Supreme Court, and Their Legitimacy

 

On Friday, the Federal Reserve released a thorough report documenting how, ahead of the crash of Silicon Valley Bank, its bank supervisors failed to notice obvious warning signs, and were prevented by their bosses from acting on what they did spot. As the Prospect’s David Dayen wrote, the Fed effectively publicized to the world its incompetence and disinterest in the basic work of regulation.

“As the head of the government agency responsible for supervising SVB, [Federal Reserve Chair Jerome] Powell bears responsibility for the oversight failures that precipitated its collapse,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote at Project Syndicate last week.

Meanwhile, ProPublica’s three reports on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s extravagant gifts from right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow have inspired other reporting on ethics failures from the other Court conservatives, including Chief Justice John Roberts. 

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin called for Roberts to testify about the Court’s ethics regime, an invitation that Roberts point-blank refused, thumbing his nose at a co-equal branch of government. 

The Court destroyed Americans’ right to reproductive autonomy last year under nonsensical pretenses, and now has its sights trained on student debt relief under self-refuting arguments.

The Fed and the Court are the two least democratic, and arguably most powerful, branches of the federal government today. In both, we see demonstrations of one of America’s founding principles: Unchecked power wielded by unelected rulers breeds corruption, and ultimately, tyranny. The Fed is not there yet, but the Court certainly is. It is past time for our actually elected leaders, including President Biden, to say so.

Both the Fed and the Court have demonstrated material sloppiness at the basic functions of their institutions—the Fed through its regulatory failings, the Court through its nonsense arguments. Neither Powell nor Roberts was chosen by the American people. Both have low public approval.

To be sure, the depth and style of rot is different between the two institutions—the Court is now just an arm of the hardest-right parts of the conservative movement, while the Fed is enthralled to a less ideologically rigid, but still harmful, pro–ruling class project. 

In effect, the Roberts Court and the Powell Fed represent the two major wings of the Republican Party: reactionary bigotry on one hand, business libertarianism on the other.

However, the outcomes are similar: Both the Fed’s and the Supreme Court’s unelected leaders are sabotaging most Americans’ personal liberties to suit the preferences of their favored few. The Fed’s interest rate hikes are explicitly intended to destroy the bargaining power of full employment, especially for workers of color. The Supreme Court is systematically stripping away Americans’ rights and the federal government’s protections.

Both institutions’ leaders have behaved unethically in power. In 2021, the Fed faced a slew of alleged insider trading scandals, after which it gestured toward some (opaque) ethics reforms, which the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s inspector general said were insufficient last week. 

The Court justices, as we now know, have enjoyed opulent luxury from wealthy ideologues and legal institutions with business before them. The Fed’s alleged insider traders resigned, though none have faced a trial or formal investigation, and all are doing just fine for themselves—Vice Chair Richard Clarida is now a regular on CNBC. 

The Court conservatives face no immediate prospect of being removed, and Republican senators raged on their behalf at the thought of it in a hearing on Tuesday.

The chance for personal financial gain probably isn’t why the Fed undertook its (generally good) COVID-19 interventions, or why the Court is pursuing its (extremely bad) radical right-wing agenda. But causality is beside the point: These unelected, unaccountable leaders feel entitled to exploit their positions for material gain, while making life worse for everyone else in the process. 

Whether they’re just greedy cynics, or true believers in the virtue of inflicting pain on their fellow Americans, or (most likely) a bit of both, they evidently have no concept of honest public service.

These institutions need to change profoundly; not just their leadership (though that’s a starting point) but the actual powers they wield. As Dayen writes, the Fed should be stripped of its bank supervision powers since it does not take them seriously. (I support giving these duties over to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.) 

There’s also talk of stripping away Fed independence altogether. The rot at the Court, though, requires even deeper changes. The Prospect’s Ryan Cooper has argued, I think persuasively, against the power of judicial review. At the very least, as I argued the day ProPublica dropped its first story, Thomas must be investigated, tried, and if found guilty, impeached.

These institutions need to change profoundly; not just their leadership but the actual powers they wield.

Elites who work in and around these institutions often make the same argument against even considering any of these proposals: that it is absolutely essential to preserve both the Fed’s and the Court’s “legitimacy,” in an abstract sense, and any talk of reform imperils that legitimacy. 

Even in the face of material sloppiness, rank corruption, and direct public objection to their actions, questioning the Fed or the Court could (gasp!) weaken people’s willingness to accept the outcomes they dictate. To the institutionalists, that must be avoided at all costs.

It’s infuriating how powerful this argument has proven to the Biden administration and the mainstream media, since it’s such an obvious sham. For one, it is willfully ignorant of how power works in government. The Court and the Fed aren’t Tinkerbell. 

They don’t disappear if people stop believing in them. Their dictates are backed by the power of courts to enjoin, to confiscate property, and lock people up, as well as the most militarized police force in the Western world.

But more importantly, that “legitimacy” argument is exactly backwards. If it is so essential to maintain faith in the Fed and the Court, then both institutions must earn that faith from the people. Trust follows from an institution’s actions, not from silencing anyone who points out that the actions prove they are untrustworthy.

The Court is inventing absurd reasons to do the bidding of the conservative ideological movement, whose financial backers then reward the justices with wealth and vacations. This is not how a legitimate court works. It’s predetermining the outcomes it wants and then inventing fictions to justify them, not giving a good-faith, fact-based hearing to the issues.

The Fed is not as bad, but is on a dangerous path. It is ignoring both its full-employment mandate and its financial stability obligations, which are written into the law, by hiking rates while shrugging at bank supervision. Though it is meant to act in the interest of the nation as a whole, like the Court, the Fed’s history shows it has mostly worked at the behest of wealthy capital-owners, even when doing so was morally and materially wrong.

We are living through a true crisis of legitimacy for the Supreme Court. It is long overdue. Ideally, leaders at the Fed will see what is happening and ask some tough, introspective questions about their own powerful, cloistered institution. 

But the problems at both of these institutions are ultimately symptoms of a deeper, systemic issue: the lack of democracy across our governing bodies, from the Senate’s filibuster and disproportionality, to state elected officials being literally stripped of their ability to do the people’s work.

Biden claims frequently that he sees his presidency as a battle to restore the soul of our nation, and his foreign policy as an effort to prove that democracy is superior to authoritarianism. He endorsed reforming the filibuster and welcomed the “Tennessee Three” to the White House, for which he deserves praise. (No word on Montana Rep. Zooey Zephyr yet, though, at the same time that his administration senselessly triangulated on trans rights.)

But does he think unquestioned deference to a Court making nonsense, anti-democratic rulings—whose majority was appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote—advances either of these goals? What about letting the Fed sabotage his middle-out economic agenda with an induced recession just before re-election, without so much as a tongue-lashing?

The question is whether Biden thinks “democracy” means the set of institutions America has built over the centuries, or if it means the goal of a self-ruling public those institutions were intended to achieve. When an institution is abusing its powers to thwart that goal—when, moreover, its power directly incentivizes its leaders to do so—the institution must be reformed or abolished. 

Americans have done so plenty of times before. But we can only do so when we name our problems, clearly and courageously, no matter what the profiteers from those problems think.

The Declaration of Independence holds that governments derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed.” A government with no possibility of consent, whether it be an actual monarchy or a de facto judicial dictatorship, is a tyranny. It is time we remember that.

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Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-05-06/fed-supreme-court-and-their-legitimacy

Warren, Sanders, and Eight Others to Powell: Stop Hiking Rates or Risk Terrible Recession

 

Ten lawmakers including progressive Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders implored the Federal Reserve to impose a pause on interest rate hikes during its Wednesday meeting, warning that further financial tightening in the name of fighting inflation would risk a brutal, job-killing recession.

In a letter to Fed Chair Jerome Powell earlier this week, the members of Congress expressed deep concern that "the Fed risks throwing millions of Americans out of work in its drive to raise interest rates even higher—even as Fed staff have already projected a recession this year amid financial market headwinds and even as you have acknowledged that inflation can slow without destroying the labor market, that the most significant drivers of inflation are not demand-based, and that the economy has not yet experienced the full impact of its earlier rate increases."

"We strongly urge you to respect the Fed's dual mandate, pause your rate hikes, and avoid engineering a recession that destroys jobs and crushes small businesses," they wrote.

The letter was sent amid further evidence that the Fed's aggressive interest rate increases—which are aimed at curbing economic demand by making borrowing more expensive—are taking their toll on the economy, with wage and job growth slowing and layoffs increasing. Recent turmoil in the banking industry, including the failure of several mid-sized banks, has also been tied to the Fed's nine consecutive rate hikes.

On top of worsening economic conditions at home and abroad, the lawmakers wrote in their letter to Powell that "it is even more difficult to justify such aggressive rate hikes at the moment given that inflation over the past six months has already declined significantly, averaging just 3.6% at an annualized rate, compared to 6.4% for the previous six months."

"While the Fed should remain flexible to incoming data as it assesses the economy's progress toward achieving lower inflation, the evidence to date suggests that progress can continue to be made without slamming the brakes on the economy and costing millions of Americans their jobs," the lawmakers continued. "Your recent comments, however, suggest that you remain committed to the idea that millions of workers must lose their jobs in order to bring inflation to heel."

The letter cites Powell's claim during a recent press conference that the economy can't "have a sustainable return to 2% inflation"—the Fed's arbitrary target—"without a better balance in the labor market," Fed-speak for more layoffs.

Powell has suggested that the Fed can prevent unemployment from rising to disastrous levels, but experts have warned that it is difficult to prevent mass layoffs from spreading once they begin.

The members of Congress echoed that fear in their letter to Powell, writing that "history casts doubt on the Fed's ability to engineer an unemployment rate that just 'rise[s] a bit.'"

"Since World War II, the unemployment rate has never increased by one percentage point within a year outside of a recession: the unemployment rate has increased by one percentage point 12 times since 1945, and in all 12 times that increase has been in the context of a recession," they noted. "

And every time the unemployment rate increased by a full percentage point, it continued to increase far beyond that level. The Fed's projections that unemployment will essentially stay level in 2024 after pushing the economy into a recession in 2023, warns an economist concerned with maintaining full employment, 'amounts to a convenient delusion.'"

Warren (D-Mass.), Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), and the other letter signatories argued that rate hikes are not the solution to inflationary pressures caused by many factors beyond excessive economic demand—including supply chain shocks and corporate profiteering.

"Continuing to raise interest rates," they wrote, "would be an abandonment of the Fed's dual mandate to achieve both maximum employment and price stability and show little regard for the small businesses and working families that will get caught in the wreckage."

Despite such urgent warnings, the Fed is widely expected to raise interest rates by 25 basis points on Wednesday.

"At the end of its two-day gathering," the Financial Times reported Tuesday, "the Federal Open Market Committee is expected to raise its benchmark policy rate to a new target range of 5-5.25%, the highest level since mid-2007."

Fed-induced economic fears have been compounded by House Republicans' refusal to lift the debt ceiling, obstruction that is pushing the U.S. and global economies to the brink of a devastating crisis.

Rakeen Mabud, chief economist of the Groundwork Collaborative, said Tuesday that "Chair Powell and the Fed have made it clear that high interest rates are here to stay, even if it means trampling on one of the strongest labor markets in history."

"The Fed's actions are heightening the risk of a painful recession and causing instability in financial markets," said Mabud. "If the Fed insists on raising rates again this week, it is jeopardizing the progress we have made towards building a healthier and more inclusive economy for all."  

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

 

Gordon Lightfoot (November 17, 1938 - May 1, 2023)

 

GORDON LIGHTFOOT — a genius-level Canadian singer/songwriter whose most enduring works include “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” “Early Morning Rain,” and “Rainy Day People” — died on Monday [May 1st] the CBC confirmed. He was 84.

Lightfoot’s deceptively simple songs, which fused folk with pop and country rock, have been covered by everyone from Bob Dylan and Neil Young to Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, the Grateful Dead, and Barbra Streisand, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Buffett, and the Replacements.

He scored a series of hits in his native Canada throughout the Sixties, but most Americans first heard his work in 1970 when “If You Could Read My Mind” reached Number Five on the Hot 100. The deeply personal song chronicles the agonizing breakdown of his marriage, casting much of the blame on himself. “I never thought I could act this way,” he wrote. “And I’ve got to say that I just don’t get it/I don’t know where we went wrong/But the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back.”

“I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like,” Bob Dylan said. “Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever.”

Lightfoot was born November 17, 1938 in Orillia, Ontario. His parents recognized his singing ability at a young age and placed him in Orillia’s St. Paul’s United Church. He eventually taught himself piano and guitar, playing in large-ensemble pop-folk groups across Canada. After a stint at the Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles, he began playing in folk clubs around Canada. He released two singles in 1962 (“It’s Too Late, He Wins” and “(Remember Me) I’m the One”) that charted regionally, and his profile grew considerably when Ian and Sylvia, the Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary, and Judy Collins turned his songs — most notably “Earning Morning Rain” — into hits.

He signed a management contract with Albert Grossman in 1965, helping land him spots on The Tonight Show and the Newport Folk Festival. He played an acoustic set shortly before Dylan made history by playing his first electric set. “I remember Albert and the musicologist Alan Lomax getting into a wrestling match in the afternoon of that day,” Lightfoot told Rolling Stone in 2019. “Joan Baez, Donovan and I, we all stood around and watched. It was over the drum kit. They were trying to stay traditional, and somebody brought the drum kit onstage for the first time. It was quite a kerfuffle over it. It was a hot day in Newport. And a dry day. And I remember the dust was flying.”

In 1966, he released his debut LP Lightfoot!, which he followed up the next year with The Way I Feel. The latter album featured drummer Kenny Buttrey and guitarist/bassist/harmonica player Charlie McCoy. Later that year, Dylan used them as his backing band on John Wesley Harding. “I heard the sound that Gordon Lightfoot was getting,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1969. “I figured if he could get that sound, I could. But we couldn’t get it.”

The success of “If You Could Read My Mind” in 1970 was the start of a stunning run of hits, including “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” and “Rainy Day People.” The biggest came in 1976 after he read an article in Newsweek about the the sinking of the bulk carrier SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. He called the epic maritime disaster song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

“It was quite an undertaking to do that,” he said in a Reddit AMA. “I went and bought all of the old newspapers, got everything in chronological order, and went ahead and did it because I already had a melody in my mind and it was from an old Irish dirge that I heard when I was about three and a half years old….I think it was one of the first pieces of music that registered to me as being a piece of music.”

Despite the huge success he had as a recording artist, many of his songs are best known by their cover versions. Bob Dylan included his own rendition of “Early Morning Rain” on his 1970 LP Self Portrait, and Elvis Presley covered the same song two years later. “I was really impressed with the recording,” Lightfoot said in 2015. “It was probably the most important recording that I have by another artist.”

Lightfoot developed a severe drinking problem in the late Seventies that took a tremendous toll on his personal life and career. “I was either writing, recording, touring, or doing television,” Lightfoot told Low Country Today. “I drank way too much. But I gave that up in 1982 thanks to the help of my sister and a bad breakup. I knew I had to quit too keep myself sharp and stay in the game.”

By the time he sobered up, MTV was ascendent and his album sales took a major shift downward. But he continued to tour and record heavily. He was back in the news in 1986 when he noticed that Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” was melodically very similar to “If You Could Read My Mind.”

“The first time I heard [“The Greatest Love of All”] was on an elevator,” he told Alabama.com in 2015. “What I finally figured out was there was a total of about 24 bars that were just really, really … It was really obvious and I noticed it. So what I did was I actually initiated a lawsuit for plagiarism but three weeks later I let it go because I understood that it was affecting Whitney Houston who had an appearance coming up at the Grammy Awards and the suit wasn’t anything to do with her. The suit was against her producer (and the song’s cowriter), Michael Masser. Now they’re dragging Whitney into this and I withdrew it. I said, ‘Forget it. We’re withdrawing this.'”

In 2002, Lightfoot suffered an abdominal aortic aneurysm and spent six weeks in a coma. He eventually recovered after four surgeries. “I was ashamed at the amount of blood they went through,” he told Rolling Stone. “It would have been better off if I had died. I think it was 28 units.”

Doctors performed a tracheotomy on him during his hospital stay, causing vocal cord damage that greatly weakened his singing voice, but he was back onstage by 2004. “I wanted to recover, I wanted to sing again,” he told the State Journal-Register. “I wasn’t sure — they had to take a lot of muscles out of my stomach and I wasn’t sure if I would have the kind of breathing control that I would need. But gradually it worked back and I started practicing.”

In 2019, he was the subject of the documentary Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind. Around that time, he celebrated his 80th birthday with an extensive tour that wrapped up Oct. 30, 2022 at the Club Regent Casino in Winnipeg. He was due to return to the road in April 2023, but canceled at the last minute due to unspecific health problems. “We thank you for respecting his privacy,” his team wrote in a statement. “He continues to focus on his recovery.”

-Rolling Stone

Some of My Favorite Gordon Lightfoot Songs:
 
Early Morning Rain
Cold on the Shoulder
Sundown
Baby Step Back
High and Dry
Carefree Highway
The Watchman’s Game
Don Quixote
Minstrel of the Dawn
Rainy Day People
If You Could Read My Mind
Miguel
Song for a Winter’s Night
Canadian Railroad Trilogy
For Lovin’ Me/Did She Mention My Name
I’m Not Sayin’/Ribbon of Darkness
Beautiful
Summer Side of Life
Cotton Jenny
Circle of Steel
The Pony Man
Sit Down Yong Stranger
The Way I Feel
I’ll Tag Along
Affair on 8^th Avenue
The Last Time I Saw Her
Your Love’s Return
Talking in Your Sleep
The House You Live In
Seven Island Suite
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Ballad of Yarmouth Castle (Live)