cannuck

Hate to have to tell you this, but "western democaracies" are just as inept and corrupt - just for more sophisticated at hiding it. What is important to realize is that the role of government in almost every country is to dispense "privilege" - in ways that are 100% tied to "reward" - usually in more sophisticated places after leaving elected or appointed office. The #1 rule of good government is to ELIMINATE privilege - and precious few elected, appointed or inherited government have ever risen to that level

Thats not populism, that is first hand experience of someone who has participated in investigations.

Have done a LOT of work for them. DEEPLY involved in a lot of corruption for many decades. Wildly top heavy and ineffective bureaucracy. With 3.4 Billion in unaccountable revenue, a lot of million$$ leak out of the cracks from and to many sources.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/federal-election-2025/party-platforms/article/liberals-promise-to-build-nearly-500000-homes-per-year-create-new-housing-entity/ Thought I had seen it all when a Wall Street insider sits as an unelected Prime Minister of Canada. Then this guy moves so far over to the left he makes the NDP look middle of the road. There is not a government owned or run business (or even their own programmes) that is anything but totally screwed up because of the pork barreling, ineptitude and outright corruption that is 100% guaranteed to cause every such effort to end in total collapse and massive losses. Meanwhile the billions that the Little Turd paid to the media ensures the Carnival Side Show Carney gets by without so much as a whimper from the press. Sadly: the other candidates are so devoid of intellectual prowess they haven't called him out either.

Carney and his fellowship have already succeeded in doing the first thing he must set out to do: get the ignorant voters to squabble about who is more or less "left", "right", "woke", etc. Partisanship is the very thing that keeps democracy from actually working. People have been duped into thinking he has been a "public servant" but in reality he was schooled in the real world by the same people who control and run the US economy = Goldman SUCKS. The job of every Wall Street alumnus is to seek to effect legislative, regulatory and enforcement of finance within each economy. If Canadians are stupid enough to elect him (and they probably are) the Hill will be controlled by the same people who now run what is within the Beltway. You see: they really are now "too big to fail".

The Donald thinks he is another Herbert Hoover. We (i.e. the world) has been there in 1930s when Smoot Hawley Tariffs brought on retaliatory tariffs around the world, deepening the Great Depression. Welcome to the dirty thirties - 5 years early.

In many cases it is to be profitable at all - i.e. to survive. I look at this through the eyes of one of the companies I work with in aerospace. We will NEVER produce within the US since to do so - or even try to do so in our little sector all but one company in the last 30 years that has tried to enter "through the FAA front door" has burned through tens of millions EACH and ended up bankrupt. Between government, insurance and lawyers it is simply not a place we could ever likely make our product, and if we were to be that one in a dozen that DID succeed, our pricing would be (just as with our one and only successful competitor in this space) ridiculously uncompetitive due not only to cost - but also engineering features locked in by the certification process. Now that reality TV has arrived back in the White House, we can all see how ridiculous what normally goes on from the back room can actually get. Seems nobody down there ever did HS history class and are blissfully unaware of what Smoot-Hawley did to deepen the last Great Depression - so are bound to repeat it once more. Worth noting the 2025 economy looks very much like that of 1925 - where speculative gain drove massive re-distribution of wealth leading to a total collapse of Main Street (where ALL wealth is created) under the thumb of the greediest SOBs on the planet.

Let me take a wild guess that you have never owned or operated a manufacturing business that has to compete internationally? If you were to do so, you would know that the costs of compliance with the myriad of regulations, and the insurance to protect you from the massive army of ambulance chasers and the management compensation to compete with the incredibly distorted industry standards means you simply can't compete from a US base. Add to that that in some industries, the talent pool to be effective is no longer there.

Put me square into the "cut them some slack" camp. The US is $37 trillion in debt - a debt that has to be serviced by a very broken economy. Wall Street speculators have taken over the government and economy and pay next to nothing in tax for the trillions they pocket. The government mechanism has bloated to the point of sinking the ship. Many industries left the country long ago and those that remain must bear the burden of oppressive regulation and enforcement that results in an army of lawyers and insurance execs bleeding of what little profit is left. Wealth is not being and can not be created by redistribution - whether under socialist or casino capitalist mechanisms - it can only come from actually producing goods and required services. IMHO the first signal that the status quo of government-by-finance-and-banking is going wrong was when Brexit took place. Handing off the legislative, regulatory and enforcement to masses of bureaucrats simply doesn't work. Nations have national cultures that MUST be observed and respected to survive. The US has become much more like an EU and wokism, illegal immigration, bloat of government, runaway drug dependence, and on, and on it goes make for a powder keg - and Donald Trump is lighting the fuse. Always remember - he was actually elected - unlike his personal hero in Moscow.

You realize you just described our entire cabinet over the last decade.? Trump's game has always been to play the media like a fiddle. It's slight of hand. We are all babbling about 51 state BS while he gets on with his real agenda.

Which is exactly not accepting the 2 state model.

I was what you describe as a "moderate" at the start of Gaza war but seeing Hamas continue to hide behind the civilian families of Gaza - using images of their losses for propaganda effect - and watching them hijack most of the aid supplies and hold those citizens hostage to pay for "aid" to fund their war made me a lot lest tolerant of Iran's interference. I still can't condone much of how Israel has rejected the 2 state model either.

government should be taxing speculative gain almost 100% to pay the bills from inflation. Any attempt or even ability of government to "stimulate" anything would be #1 a total screwup in result and #2 open yet another pathway for corrupt to direct the flow. The business of government should be limited to governing - that means legislate regulate and control to ALLOW enterprise (not choose winners and losers) Also to enforce and protection through civil and military authorities. Instead of striving for a level playing field we (globally) have allowed government to evolve to do little more than dispense privilege to entities willing to pay to play.

Here is a 10 year old assessment of the economy of Gaza https://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/MNA/Factsheet_Gaza_ENG.pdf Until the current war, I don't think anything changed. Essentially this place (and all of Palestine) lived on handouts from other countries as it produced next to nothing. The world simply paid the residents to produce more residents and then shelled out billions a year to house, feed and service them. They were a prime target for Iran to control, as they did, but what is the path forward to make this place truly sustainable????

No wings at all, so it should not be able to fly. The partisan political process survives because it keeps the ignorant population occupied thinking one or the other can do something or wants to do something that neither has ever done: find and fix the real problems. Our problem is similar to what has happened around the globe: we have given Bay Street/Wall Street/Casino Capitalism free reign to re-distribute wealth without adding any value - thus de-funding Main Street. How is that? Why would you want to take the risk of investing capital in developing new products and services that takes a lot of time and skill when you can instead take a bunch of "market money" and inflate the value of an equity by purchasing control and cashing in on an M&A deal in just a short time with near zero risk?