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.

England's banning of slavery had nothing to do with high-fallutin "enlightenment" values! It was a cold, calculated measure taken to reduce the likelihood that a British cash crop colony like Barbados or Jamaica would suffer the same fate as Haiti did after a slave revolt a few decades earlier ended French rule and former slaves killed off the white former plantation owners. These island colonies had large slave populations which could overrun slave plantation owners at any given time, if they could organize around an effective leader and had some guns. In the US, the slave population never exceeded one third of the total population of the southern states. So, whenever there were bloody uprisings, like the John Brown and Nat Turner revolts, plantation owners and state governors could round up enough slave patrol forces to put down the revolt, before it grew too large and threatened a takeover of government. And guess who most of the slave patrol forces were? Scotch-Irish lower class (non-slave owning) whites! MacDonald said a lot of shit that indicated he was a white supremacist....at least when he was drunk! But his treatment in history should be based on his actions, not whatever he happened to say in Parliament! As for Tecumseh, he did not see his alliance with the British as anything more than an alliance of convenience, because he considered the Americans to be a more zealous and dangerous opponent. He was already well aware of how many indigenous people the new Americans had forced out of the eastern states, and were attacking tribal groups on the other side of the Mississippi as they continued importing more white immigrants from Europe and giving them land if they would push out natives. Sounds similar to what modern US ally, and settler colonial state - Israel is doing today! Enlightenment values is what has made this world a hellscape that is today! Continual expansion till it collapses into an environmental or nuclear apocalypse!

Canada's nose is securely stuck up the ass of the greatest human rights abuser in the world, and won't say boo about the thousands of Yemenis slaughtered by America's proxy - Saudi land! Same with the continual occupation and killings in Gaza, where the Israeli "ally" is hard at work ethnically cleansing more territory so more New York Jews can move in and become instant Israelis. And while they've been hard at work, even during pandemic year, trying to stir up a major war with Russia and China, it shouldn't be a surprise that Chinese or Russian leaders take the opportunity to bite back at America's little brother over our collective hypocrisy! Justin's lame excuses.....I'm on another one of my apology tours now, cause we've found some of the bodies, and we'll continue blaming you for the Uygur massacres we've made up and have no actual evidence for....just doesn't cut it anymore!

My own reading and research on earth sciences and economic forces, leads me to agree with the pessimists or doomers who see our general condition today as living in "late stage" capitalism. Meaning that up until now, every time capitalist systems have been running short of energy or essential resource building blocks to make stuff with, someone manages to pull a rabbit out of the hat, and find enough alternative sources to keep capitalism functioning, though doing less and less for lower classes as the years drag on. A quick example of diminishing returns would be the declines in EROEI (energy return on energy invested) for oil as the years and decades have dragged on. It started at 100 to one for recovery costs. As typically happens with resource exploitation, developers began many years ago, exploiting deposits closest to the surface and therefore, cheapest to exploit and develop for market. So,, with oil, the first oil wells to be set up were in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where easy to access near-surface deposits were being pumped out and shipped to market. When those reserves started running low, and deeper wells had to be drilled, it was time for many of the first oil companies to move on to Texas and Oklahoma, where large oil deposits could be exploited. But, even as far back as the 1920's, it was recognized that those reserves were limited, and that's when some of the major oil companies started setting up in Arabia and the Persian Gulf...where petroleum was believed to be virtually inexhaustible, and cheap, with the major costs being shipping to markets in the west. Now, even the Sauds have to acknowledge that they have already pumped out at least half of their reserves. As the oilfields are pumped down, whether in Texas, Saudi Arabia or Alberta, it becomes more and more expensive, and that's how we ended up scooping up tarsands deposits and cooking them down for heavy, poor grade oil at an energy return of 5 to 1, that's only affordable as long as oil prices are high enough to justify the costs. What has been a continual pattern in the past few decades is for economic growth to be slowed or stopped whenever oil prices rise to high for easy growth to continue. So, we're in a series of diminishing returns caused largely by increasing energy costs. And I am highly skeptical of claims that "green renewable energy" is going to both save the environment and maintain economic growth. The only thing that is actually growing today is inflation! And that is a sign of declining currency values, not increasing actual wealth. This is why the owners and controllers of capital are even more desperate and ruthless about maintaining economic gains for those at the top of pyramid, and diminishing returns for everyone actually working for a living. And this is why I believe, the people who are really in charge of the system are so hell-bent on keeping us all in the dark about just how bad our predicament is today. It is an empty facade, and if most people really find out how bad things are today, this system that almost collapsed back in 2011, when OWS demonstrations were going on, will collapse under its own weight of unpaid or unpayable debts!

Well, for the most part, "public discourse" is completely captured by the same rich forces who have been grabbing the lion's share of the covid relief. I gag every time I see references to "The Left" in American politics these days! Whether it's from rightwingers looking for an enemy, or centrist corporate Democrats, they want all of the debate and arguments to be over identity politics issues and NOT economic class issues, because the political parties, mainstream media, along with hand-picked and promoted voices in social media, rarely if ever, venture in to asking questions about the wealth and income divides, growing debt levels, poverty, let alone interrogating the often repeated assumption of the Wall Street pundits...are you really certain that inflation will drop after the pandemic ends?

Do we really live in "the days of reconciliation? Or are federal and provincial governments (along with their corporate donors and benefactors) just trying to figure out what the price is they have to pay to get all of native land claims settled? What all of the first nations have in common are holistic beliefs that everything material and spiritual are part of one, integrated reality, with humans just being part of the creation, and NOT special, favored creatures of a divine overlord who rules over and is separate from his creation. So, this was the big stumbling block in the way between native thinking and later European settler colonists, whose presumptions of cosmology and philosophy were based on thinking of themselves as separate from nature, and given some divine right to "subdue" and plunder nature for whatever they could extract that would be useful for making products. That plus placing land on the lists of commodities to be bought and sold, is still an insurmountable obstacle in traditional indigenous and modern "civilized" thinking.

Wasn't that the intention behind a thread titled "Islamification of Toronto" in the first place?

Thank you Mr. Shapiro! Got any more slogans you've stolen from the rightwing thought leaders who implant their propaganda in your head? Ben Shapiro may be too much of a psychopath to recognize it, but FACTS or what are claimed to be 'facts' do depend on feelings, and that's why they come wrapped in emotional rhetoric, and why fascists, empire-builders and beneficiaries of war industries keep trying to scare the public with bullshit propaganda! And, using percentage of GDP as an excuse to increase military and surveillance agency budgets is bullshit pure and simple! Not only because GDP is an inexact measure of economic productivity and development, but also because this trope was created and is being used to justify the notion that shoveling money into a military-industrial complex = security and safety from attack. Total horseshit!

I have no interest in reading the tealeaves and trying to figure out who is most 'murderous' of today's most powerful nations. What is clear is that one and ONE only of those nations has had overwhelming military, economic and political power over all other nations in the world, and no longer even tries to pretend that it all happened by an accident of circumstances, or because of the failures of Russia, China and even supposed allies in Europe to rise to equivalent power of the US Empire. Does Russia or China seek to replace the US as the hegemonic "exceptional nation" in a unipolar world, as fake, disingenuous liberals are forced to admit now? I don't know how many times Putin or other Russian leaders have commented on US hegemony, aside from contentious issues like trade and energy development, but Russia does not have the economic capacity to take over as world economic or military power today. Russia's economy is still primarily dependent on energy and natural resource extraction, and regardless of the propaganda we are fed with, its military is less than 10% of the bloated US expanse of Army, Navy, Air Force and more than 800 military bases on foreign soil. All that crap is bankrupting the US now, and Russia has been smart enough to focus their military spending on stuff like missiles....which can demolish carrier fleets and land-based equivalents needed for large offensive operations. If Iran is now being considered a 'hard' target, with costs to invade that outweigh the advantages, it's no surprise that US policy makers turned to economic warfare - sanctions, tariffs, embargoes, even blockades, to squeeze its enemies instead of military attacks. But, recent evidence from this past year, under the glorious new Biden Administration indicates that the US has reached too far by creating too much debt, and is now being faced with a declining Dollar (that's why the Cdn Dollar has increased value lately...not anything good actually happening here), and losing more and more of its share of "special drawing rights" - SDR's - representing the share of foreign exchange reserves at the IMF. IF the US cannot control the IMF, then it can no longer be the great global hegemon that feeds off the rest of the world by forcing other nations to accept its declining currency! Now, Russia and China say they want a return to a "multipolar" world, where no one nation can dictate terms to the rest of the world! Whether good or evil, there are good reasons to believe that neither Russia or China want to take America's crown and fill the same role in global affairs! Russia has no realistic option for becoming supreme world power, and China's economy may be becoming more developed, but it is still largely dependent on manufacturing exports. So, the last thing China would want (just like Japan in a similar situation 40 years ago) is to have their currencies go through a rapid appreciation in value...which would come as part of assuming reserve currency status, and make their exports too expensive for foreign buyers. So, the question is still 'will the US shrink and fade away slowly and gradually like the UK started doing over 50 years ago, or will they threaten total extinction for everyone by going out with a bang? Declaring a big, global war with one of their many chosen enemies that will provide the excuse to unleash the nukes! Right now, who knows! Because aside from the British Empire, most empires become too arrogant, too calcified and to bankrupt for ideas to try anything new. So, where will everything go from here? Who knows! It all depends on who is ultimately in charge in Washington. And the only thing for sure is that it's not the dimwitted/now senile 80 year old who was placed in the White House as a place-holder because inside powers of the Democratic Party couldn't get their voters to select one of the candidates they wanted. So, they made sure one of them was named Veep, and will take over when the senile old clown kicks the bucket some time in the near future, or becomes too infirm that aides (including his power hungry wife) can pretend he's actually in control of government!

So who was arguing anything different here? I'll take your word about the fascism thing, cause I know most of the republican leaders were fascist sympathizers, and at least FDR, like Churchill, was able to recognize that Hitler was a greater threat to the west than Stalin. And that's why they chose to work with the Soviets, rather than the Nazis, as I suppose you and other fascist sympathizers would have preferred. Give me a chart with actual numbers on it! Not this bullshit % of GDP that war grifters use to keep feeding off tax dollars! That is why our world has never been more dangerous than it is today! For decades, even a glitch in programming could set off a massive launch of ICBM's that would result in all life on earth being destroyed! But, nukes and their missile carriers are a very lucrative business. And that is why Obama signed on to a more than a $Trillion nuclear arms refurbishing plan, and Trump actually threw more money on the pile during his term in the White House! A pox on all of their houses!

Okay, now that I've had time to think about and do some reading.................. That Nation article was archived. So I assumed it's simply burying in plain sight, because they know very few these days will go through the effort of trying to find it! But it was posted on the Nation's website years ago! And this isn't a matter of not being able to agree on everything! It's a question of whether those who make a claim of having ideological principles act on those principles consistently or toss them aside when convenient or profitable to do so! I said in my post that the change in tactics was operational and not likely a change in ideology, that was almost certainly just below the surface.....like a crocodile waiting for the right time to attack! The obvious reasons why Cold War US regimes were tolerant of union...especially large unions and their leaders was because they knew the leaders were already coopted somewhat...certainly anti-communist, and acting ruthlessly against workers as both parties do today would have raised the risk that, with just a little funding, the Soviets or the Chinese could have helped real leftist anticapitalist organizers. So they acted with caution when it was essential to do so. Many geopolitical analysts on left and right have stated that the differences between the way the US deals with Russia and China today, compared to the Cold War era, shows a complete lack of respect... for instance: their bullshit "Rules-Based Order" directives they are expecting all other nations to follow! The US doesn't follow international law or even the shit they declare others need to follow, and yet our useless MSM will repeat these calls from Blinky and Joe every time they open their stupid mouths! The good thing is that, as time goes on, and the US becomes more and more trapped by the debt it is creating to keep up with budgetary demands, its Empire will slowly recede from view and be disregarded by Russia and China and Iran and others....being considered little more than a barking dog! Because the US is having to withdraw from the warzones it has created whether it wants to or not, and all it has been able to accomplish in the wars it has been causing in Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, is (like proxy Israel) to keep bombing the shit out of them and pay for any mercenaries to go in and ruin lives of people there. So, I for one believe US hegemony is far worse than the multipolar world order both Russia and China are trying to work towards. I am not buying US exploitation, so I will have no remorse whoever or whatever takes its place! It's a toxic world order that endangers most of the people in this world, and only benefits the "dark triad" thinking billionaires who feed off misery and exploitation, and don't respect any limits to their greed and self-aggrandizement! If I have to choose between a left that's comfortable with the system we have now, or any radical antiwar activists on the left or the right, I'll take the latter!