Right To Left

Unfair comparison considering that the US has a collection of occupation forces there, under the auspices of the UN, but occupiers nonetheless. I would also like to know how well is the average Dominican doing on the eastern side of the island! It may not be as bad as Haiti, but from what I have heard, it's not a lot better for most people.

Capitalism is first and foremost an economic system, based on the private ownership of the means of production, and their operation for profit. The problems with capitalism were best spelled out and described by Karl Marx in his ground-breaking work - Das Kapital. Marx proposed that the motivational force of capitalism is the exploitation of the labor force. Make workers work harder and longer for less money and watch the profits grow. If the economy booms and there's a shortage of labor, that can be a problem. Workers will demand more money. Some employers will give in and fork out more money to pay their workers to keep producing. And that's when we get a look at the 'boom' and 'bust' cycles that plagued earlier capitalist systems especially in the last century. What Marx was also noticing though, was that some capitalists were buying out competitors...even cooperating with major competitors if it didn't look likely that they would be able to establish an outright monopoly for their products. In that case, oligopoly is almost as good. And they would rather go this route and keep the money in the rich man's club, than give more of their ill-gotten gains to the dirty unwashed masses working in the factories, mines, fields etc.. All of this was why governments had to put limits on capitalism. Left to their own devices, every capitalist economy would end up with just a few major corporations owning and controlling all of the wealth and production in the country. In our time, we are finding more reasons to question capitalism, starting with the harmful impacts capitalisms addiction to growth is having on the environment. Even in an era where birth rates are flatlining and populations are declining in most countries...even in the so called 'undeveloped' world, industrial and commercial production is more than compensating for the declines in numbers of people. Fewer people are still polluting the air, water and land at ever greater levels. More products are being created and filling store shelves, but average consumers lobotomized by advertising, promotion and just plain hype, can't even give a good reason why they need a lot of the crap they're buying! Anyway, now that I'm over 65 and retired, life moves at a slower pace than it did when I had to drive to work every day. First thing I noticed after I retired was that my wife and I could easily live on less than half of the income I thought was essential during my later working years. But, why can't we have an economy that works at a slower, more relaxed pace for everybody? We could make sure everyone gets enough to eat, has proper clothes...but not excessive, and has a little left over to buy household essentials. So, I guess my ideal economic system would be social anarchism/ certainly not capitalism!

Most of the foreigners havenèt been dogooders. The corporate owners send their minions to places like Haiti....they don't want to go themselves. All they want to know about Haiti is what wealth is available for exploitation, and how do they get ahold of it!

I can't take your poll question seriously, because the only difference between Dems and Repubs is regarding social issues...not the stuff that really counts...financial, military, foreign policy etc.. Stalin was an authoritarian leftist and not a real communist himself. Communists, and socialists of all kinds are going to be focused more on economic issues, especially income and wealth gaps.....not all the crap on trans rights blah blah blah. That's where Justin starts getting excited! As for Trumpy, I think the deep state in all of the 3 letter federal agencies and MSM have become so scared that he might actually win again next year that they are having to make their rigging of the system more and more obvious. If I make the mistake of tuning in to CNN, NBC or our crap up here, I feel deluged with one story after another about how evil Donald Trump is, and how he tried to fix the 2020 election....along with other supposed crimes, they just can't shut up about it. And the MSM talking heads are getting scared now that too many of us are ignoring all of their blather, and the average Americans will vote for him over Joe or Kamala or any other clown the Dems might try to front run as an emergency presidential candidate.

Am I just supposed to accept your judgment that poverty is not caused by capitalism? Even though capitalists make no bones about the fact that even during average normal times, capitalism creates winners and losers. When capitalists try to embellish their terminology with crap like "Creative Destruction," most of us can figure out that destruction....whether creative or not, will benefit some/but not others. First off, "leftist dogooders" are liberal capitalists/not socialists. Think George Soros/not Karl Marx. The liberal capitalist believes in charity and sometimes (but not so much today) that the rich should pay a little bit higher tax rates than poor and middle class. Most Haitians that I've met, just wanted the opportunity to grow their own food and decide what and what not to plant. NOT have some US, UK or Canadian agribusiness buy up all the land and set up modern day plantations growing cash crops for export, while turning former farmers into low paid workers. So, don't pretend that Haitians all of a sudden just couldn't make it on their own! The foreign aid has only become a necessity in our time because of the mess that foreign corporations have caused with their wealth extraction strategies.

Seems like the language police have a rightwing edition these days. What's far worse than what you call people is how you treat them! If you weren't aware, even societies we would consider primitive today had to have developed property ownership, requiring at least settled agriculture to set up systems of slavery. Just sayin that early hunter-gatherer societies that made up most of the people living all over the world until things started changing about 5000 years ago in the Middle East, were constantly travelling and setting up temporary camps throughout the year. And no hunter-gatherers....even if they lived in more fertile territories could continue living in the same place year-round. The people who started herding livestock around the same time, had to keep their animals moving, so they didn't stay in one place either. So, by your own example, the indigenous tribes who were practicing slavery when white men first arrived on our eastern shores, were the most technologically developed and therefore 'civilized' of the inhabitants of the Americas. That and the other insulting pejoratives you mentioned.....can't hold their liquor, sold women for horses, warring with other tribes etc. etc. etc. are pejoratives that the Spanish, French and English invaders labelled them with, because they may have felt some guilt for committing genocides and forcing people off of their land. So, they felt a need to denigrate the natives living here as something subhuman, and undeserving of the lands they were living on.

Ahem, shouldn't the terms "colonizers" and "settlers" be pejoratives? Assuming you're colonizing and settling someone else's land without any permission of course. I'm sure you're just trying to dodge any moral culpability for your ancestors with the 'both sides do it' dodge! But, in actual fact, a careful study of anthropology will reveal that civilization has made us all worse....to each other, and especially to strangers. When Columbus sailed across the Atlantic over 5 centuries ago and landed on the small Caribbean island of San Salvador, he remarked to his patrons - Ferdinand and Isabella about how generous, gentle and peaceful the islanders were....and that all he would need would be about another 80 men and "I could enslave them all!" So, who were the savages again?

Same in Canada, our popluation is aging out too. But, then again, according to population demographic stats all over the world (even Africa and Latin America) their populations are aging also! As noted from the article you quoted, economic growth is closely tied with age and where people are in their lives. So if they are not raising young children, they don't need a bigger house or possibly even another car. And are likely buying less stuff also. Most people waste too much money buying too much crap....but that's what keeps the wheels of our ever-increasing capitalist system growing! I don't know if you've considered it, but why are we still allowing the class of super-rich (who benefit the most from hyper-capitalism) to set the rules and try to force us all to follow the rules of demand-driven economics? Add in that most of the demand is artifically created, and it explains everything we need to know about why our planet earth today is turning into a toxic waste dump with ever-dwindling resources. We should be thankful that we have an aging population, and that there will be fewer people all over the world having large families and driving up the demand for more and more manufactured products.

Keep in mind that unless you are one of these suckers who buys a pet insurance policy, you're paying out of pocket for the doctor's care for your cat or dog. I told my wife over a year ago that, after I had to take our loveable old Maine Coon Cat to the vet for the last time that I didn't want to have any more pets! I have always loved cats and dogs. But, providing proper care (like after the vet finds something wrong with them during a checkup) is just too much money, and too stressful for the animals also. I noticed while looking at a few pictures in an album of our old dog- Toby, that I could tell even by the pictures that he was in pain and unhapppy in the last two years of his life....he had arthritis in three legs, and later cancer - was the final straw! All four of our cats and dogs lived long...usually healthy lives, but unfortunatelly both cats and dogs have much shorter life cycles than humans do. So, at 66 and retired, I have lots of time for pets, but don't want to watch them aging out and dying at a time in life when we'll be going through the same thing. *it's a shame that access to euthanasia for us is so limited and mired with red tape and pointless rules! Most people don't seem to enjoy being alive either, when they are old and sick! It's fine when you are still young and healthy enough...even now at 66, I don't feel the aches and pains a lot of people my age complain about...as for my wife...well, that's another story! If I find myself at a stage in life where I'm suffering from chronic pain, and I know it will never go away, and I can't enjoy doing the things I do now....I may join some campaign for euthanasia, so that I can just go in, get a needle and say goodbye to my wife and any of our kids who may want to see me before I go lights out!

Cynic that I am, I think the reason why the US has finally been talked into contributing F-16's to the Ukrainian war effort is because the US somehow thinks they may be able to convert this from a ground war(which the US is totally inept at fighting...especially today) to an air war, and so, all of the surplus jets (they're not giving away the new F-16's or similar fighter jets for the Ukes to practice crash landings with) may actually turn this quagmire into NATO's favor...we'll see how that goes. My hunch is that US and other NATO suppliers of F-16's will just provide more targets for the Russians to fire missiles at once they're on Ukrainian territory.

"So called native Indians?" That was the early colonizers from Europe...who thought they had landed in India and 'Cathay' or China, because they didn't consider that there might be continents and people living on them in between Europe and East Asia. But, once the name stuck, the colonizers were reluctant to give up on it. Of the thousands of different nations who lived in the Americas, none of them called themselves "Indians." But, you don't really care anyway, so why mention it in the first place! Do gooders....don't do much good anyway! The earliest ones were the guys wearing black robes, who just cared more about making converts to their religion than they did about making money. But, they were as good as it would ever get for the indigenous peoples of the "new world." In Haiti, if you are unaware of history, Haiti is the only place in the Americas where the slave-owning colonizers were overthrown by a slave revolt! But, because none of the other Euro descendant nations cared one iota about Haiti or its people, they (Great Britain, and self-proclaimed 'Land of Liberty' the USA) ruled that the newly independent slaves in Haiti, were still obliged to pay their former oppressors in France all of the money that France and French bankers claimed to have lost because of the slave revolt. It goes almost completely unmentioned today, but because the newly independent nation of Haiti was obligated to pay 'reparations' to France (equivalent to $30 billion USD in today's dollars) the onerous burden left them indebted until very recent times, and unable to do much of any development to improve their lot in life. It's not likely that newly independent Haitians expected much from France, but their self-proclaimed adversaries in Great Britain, wouldn't open trade or banking with Haiti either. What was most shocking to the first generation of Haitian leaders was that the recently freed former colonies that created the USA, wouldn't help them or do business with them either! The only thing that is shocking today is that you and other uber capitalists, who consider all poverty a matter of individual failings, are still blaming the Haitians for their high rates of crime, poverty and malnutrition to this day!

And how do you detach Haiti's poverty from the powerful foreign (US, Cdn. and French) corporations who are profiting from agribusiness and sweatshop industries that have been set up to take advantage of the poorest people in the western hemisphere? Whenever Haiti gets a government that has any concern for the helping the poor, they get couped by the CIA at the behest of foreign capital. If they all left, Haiti would be better off, because then Haitians could be producing their own food for their own population, rather than working as slaves for foreign interests! And who ordered the hit?

I voted for 'send funds', but I'd really like to say Tell Former Colonial masters - France to pay back all the money they stole from Haiti after they were forced to give up this colony, and were preaching that slaveowners deserve reparations for their 'property' taken away from them. The money they stole...with accumulated interest over the years, would be in the $billions and give Haiti the chance they never had to establish themselves as an independent nation!

I'm assuming that Russell Brand rehearsed a short speech that he intended to get through past the MSM clutter and BS from Maher and his bald, pointy headed guest. There is a thing or two to learn from Brand (like him or not), but what new or even interesting takes are going to come from MSM toadies complaining about division and calling for more bipartisanship??. They are just servants of the rich, ruling classes and nothing more!

Just like the MMIW scandal, there have been many families stuck on reserves who were less than satisfied by the stories they were given by authorities about how or why their children didn't come home. So, the scandal of hundreds of bodies buried of children who had attended this particular school, isn't a complete surprise! It's just shocking how close the graveyard was to that Kamloops school. It's as if they did not expect anyone to follow up and demand a fuller investigation.