Right To Left

By my own interpretation of political ideology, I just wish 'Green Marxists' were infiltrating our governments, and putting an end to growth-at-all-costs capitalism, which only benefits the rich, while the rest of us tread water, trying to hold on to what we already have!

Take a good look at this picture! Now, tell me, WHERE is "the safest part of the realm" while the men (he-men like you I presume) hack each other to death! And fwiw, until we started putting together the barbaric "civilizations" like we have today, no human communities were fighting each other unless there was some calamity causing general food scarcities. Today, war and arming for war are profitable businesses, and cause death and destruction just to advance the interests and goals of ruling imperialists and their financial backers! Without empires, we should need no psychopath murderers running around hacking each other to death for the benefit of empire-building!

The only part I can agree with you on here is that individually we have no real power and are forced to cooperate with a capitalist system, even to a limited degree, if we can't live on a desert island or some uninhabited territory today, where our governments and economic systems haven't reached yet....if any such places actually still exist! I would say that, from a Marxist perspective, I feel an obligation to only buy essentials...or what I believe to be essentials, cause sometimes the boundaries are easily smeared. For example, up until a little less than 3 years ago, I hadn't owned a cell phone since my original 20 lb Motorola 1990 vintage was stolen from my car after it was broken into back in year 2000. It was a 2nd hand phone I picked up for $20 along with a couple of bikes at an annual police auction of bikes and other stolen properties that went unclaimed by any legitimate owners. At the time, my wife and I were already planning to move so I could be close to work....close enough not to need to drive to work every day and pay to keep two cars on the road! So, I just went without a phone...as did my wife, until one day when I was out on my bike in the middle of nowhere on a farm road on the Niagara Peninsula, I blew my 2nd and last innertube and had to walk my bike to civilization....which took at least two hours and had everybody worried that something had happened to me. I noticed also that every new store or plaza being built wasn't bothering to include payphones either. So, if you don't have a cell, you got no way of getting any messages or calling home if you need to! So, I forked out for a couple of the cheapest phones available for us, and I reject all of the idiotic offers to increase my data limits.....because I never use up all of my data on the original plan! So, I had to make a compromise with the modern world that tries to keep pushing more and more surveillance tech on us....but that was only grudgingly! I'm just a little more with it than the average tradiitional Mennonite who still dresses in blue and black like 300 years ago! And, long story short...if I have to go back to using the very convenient and horribly exploitative Amazon Borg, I'll do it, BUT only if I have no other choice!

So, Perfect World by that description means a return to societies like we had prior to the beginnings of agricultural patriarchies in the ME 4000 years ago, which have been sanctified by the equally most aggressive and exploitive religious traditions. And, as Marx and Engels noted 150 years ago, after capitalism had become entrenched in Europe and Europe's colonies, replacing the older, less competitive feudal systems as it spread, the promises of a better world made by the first generations of industrial capitalists in the 1790's were proven to be a nightmare as soon as the leaders of the French Revolution started chopping everyone's heads off after they had cleared through the royal family and the aristocrats, and made a mockery of the liberte, egalite, fraternite slogan that the revolutionaries marched on Paris with at the start of the revolution! Amazing how it was Robespierre and the Jacobins who ordered the abolition of the Catholic Church, all of its priest and an end to other forms of Christianity...which hardly existed in France after previous purges by the Catholic rulers, and yet, here you and other rightwing Christians are, worshiping and lauding the very economic system that represents the opposite of Christian moral and social principles, along with the extreme wealthy exploiters as the people who Christians should respect and venerate as modern day heroes! We live in an upside down world today!

I don't!

And that's why Conservatives here/and Republicans to our south, can't seem to take a clear stand on any actual domestic policy issues! They are just against whatever the Liberals or Democrats are doing, and tack their sailboats to the right of whatever the stated liberal position is. And that is why accusations of socialism and communism are so ridiculous today! We either get pure, 100 proof sink-or-swim capitalism, or the same thing with a few benefits thrown on for those at rock bottom! That's likely most of the reason why so many working people in the overtaxed middle aim their guns at liberals and leftists, rather than the people who have been their biggest burdens and causes of misery - the billionaires and their upper class professional helpers! And what we don't get is anything trying to put the money back into public programs that have been gutted or slowly starved for funding over the years!

And that is why I see anarchism and anarchists as, at best, only good for ideology and rhetoric - and at worst, deliberately subversive forces, who have been proven in the past to have deliberately worked on behalf of and been paid by the worst capitalists out there and recruited by the CIA, FBI and other agents of evil, to sow confusion and divide working people looking for direction and relief, into hostile factions fighting with each other about race, gender, sexual orientation or how much or whether to work with capitalists! It's happened in the past and it certainly is still happening today! Well, by the historical timeline, FDR didn't take over as president until the middle of March, 1933, while RB Bennett was out in 1935, and replaced by FDR Canadian equivalent- MacKenzie King, who got the credit for turning the Canadian economy around. So, Bennett wasn't a contemporary of Roosevelt for very long! And there were two distinct 'new deals' brought in by Roosevelt in the US, with the first intended to sort out and reform the financial mess left by Wall Street bankers, so that people could trust putting their savings in bank accounts again. After a wave of bank failures, banks were starved for deposits, and people with money to save, were buying gold....which FDR outlawed and that stuck for several decades until Nixon unpegged the USD from a gold standard in 1973. It took a little while to get the public works projects funded and slowly up and running...back in that bygone era when economists and money experts actually believed that money should have intrinsic value! So, I was surprised to learn recently that one of Roosevelt's less publicized actions in his first term was to cut the Army and Navy budgets, so that money could be set aside for the PWA, rural electrification and relief programs for farmers who lost their land. Imagine anyone in Washington even suggesting cutting the misnamed "defense" budgets today for any reason!

AND by buying crap from Amazon, you freely take advantage of our western slaves, who don't have time to go to a proper restroom and have to piss in bottles because they can't make their quotas otherwise! Empires are never perfect places...except for the ruling classes to gain most of the benefits. Even working classes were only allowed to advance into the 'middle class' range for a relatively short period of time after WWII - and which ended by 80's, when outsourcing production to foreign, cheap labour havens and the shifting of the tax burden from the "job creators" onto the middle and working classes became the norm, pretty much has gutted all of the gains made at the start of the post-war years. But after the end of the "threat" of communism, capitalist leaders feel they no longer have any need to curb or reign in their greed and demand for more and more profits! No shit Sherlock! "Nobody is guaranteed to be paid at a high level!" Well I wouldn't say "nobody" since the sons and daughters of CEO's have lots of guarantees in life...starting with the best education....and if they are too stupid to benefit from that, the old man still has to find some way to occupy the time of their deadbeat sons .... like Hunter Biden.... to make it look like the next generation is competent and actually a productive member of society! Is job training guaranteed? Or just if the student is willing and able to pay out a king's ransom and mortgage the rest of their lives for a university degree! And, we're free to move....well, I guess that's slightly better than feudal days. But during feudal times, the lords had an obligation to provide for all of their serfs and household staff during hard times. While the capitalist can just declare bankruptcy, close the mill and reopen somewhere else. Who really has freedom to move in today's globalized free trade world? People are met with immigration and entry restrictions, while capital and even most finished products are 'free' to move across borders with no taxes and duties! Now that's real freedom! And it needs to be noted that the 'poor' living in the colonies are not improving their lives through this international system of exploitation either! The leaders act as compensated point men for foreign capital and industries to move in, set up dirty industries with no safety...let alone environmental standards, and make sure that laws are set in place to criminalize workers who try to organize and bargain collectively with their employers....forming unions in other words is forbidden in capitalist paradise! In poor nations in Africa, Latin America and Asia, the people were living better before "civilization" arrived! Previously, their environments weren't toxic and polluted, they could drink clean water and grow quality foods for their own needs and sell off a surplus in good seasons to buy or trade for needs they didn't produce themselves. This was actually the life my father grew up with down east....so even in Canada and the US, it wasn't much more than 100 years ago, when the majority of people lived on small farms that had a little of everything and were not specialized....they were already doing what the "permaculture" organic gardeners talk about doing now...as if it's something nobody ever thought of before! BUT, all of this ended when their governments discovered capitalism...often at the point of a gun, or were carefully recruited by foreign colonialists who hand-picked a few locals and educated them in London or Paris or other universities of the Empire, where the future leaders of the colonies (after theoretical independence) would apply the same capitalist exploitive tactic that England pioneered over 2 centuries previously: Clearing The Commons! Regardless of the rightwing horseshit we are served up by both conservative and liberal propagandists, the majority of societies prior to the age of industrialization had large peasant farming populations which cooperated closely with their neighbors....communal agriculture in other words! Nobody could get rich this way! And their worst exploitation came from feudal ruling systems that rose up, with an entitled noble class of hereditary rulers who exploited the peasants and used the threat of invasion and war to keep them paying an onerous burden in tribute to their feudal rulers. Nevertheless, when feudalism started breaking down and the new, city-based ruling classes started taking power, and needing bodies to do simplified grunt work in the dirty, dangerous mills they were building in the cities, which replaced the middle skilled trades classes, peasants had to be forced off the land to take hellish jobs working in slavery conditions and hardly being able to afford the most meager low quality foods available to buy at the markets. And this system that started in England over 200 years ago is still slowly unending life around the world today...now focusing on the places left behind before...like Haiti. So, in our brave new world today, with declining resources and livable environments, the system of international exploitation that Amazon and Walmart and so many other corporations have benefited from, is closing in on itself! If all of our lives are poorer and more precarious in the future, I'm glad it will be so for the rich also! Except if there is an actual faint hope that Elon and Bill and Mark and the rest of the grifter gang can turn their dreams of escaping the hell they have turned this earth into, and flying to Mars...where they presumably can do it all over again! I certainly don't believe their space dreams are even remotely possible, but their attempts to escape the damage they've done are more evidence that know their greed and avarice and unwillingness to work towards good, as doomed life on planet earth in a matter of decades or certainly less than 2 centuries at the most! It may be slight consolation, but knowing that the evil psychopaths who have forced capitalism upon us, can't escape the harms it has caused with all their money and power, is at least slight consolation. Nobody wants to see the terrorists escape the ship they have sunk!

When did multimillionaire trust fund baby - Doug Ford become a socialist? Actual socialist nations have done better (even sanctioned, embargoed states like Cuba) at managing this crisis than the richer capitalist nations, which have more resources have been able to muster!

Anything good regarding Amazon is vastly outweighed by what they do to their employees! So, just out of principle, I have dropped my Amazon account...even though I had been buying nearly all of my books from Amazon for several years. And buying other stuff as well that was otherwise hard to find...such as new wheels for a somewhat expensive pair of rollerblades that I bought elsewhere several years back. It certainly is convenient having a source that has just about everything you could imagine buying, with one click of a tab online, but when I learn that their overworked, underpaid staff are forced to piss in bottles because of high and rising work and delivery quotas, while some warehouse operations don't even bother having available washrooms....just for managerial office staff only! Amazing that you consider Amazon an example of capitalism's superiority over socialism, when Amazon is effectively already a monopoly and like a few other near monopolies which have risen up in recent decades, functions as a socialist system within its operations! Except for sucking up most of the profits to reward shareholders....most of whom happen to be superrich owners of a majority of those stocks. There are no capitalist principles of competition within the divisions of any of these massive operations, and the few that do invoke internal competition for earnings and even supplies, end up going out of business - like Sears Canada, when internal 'competition' destabilized the whole company and led to theft, cheating and massive corruption, because the workplaces had turned toxic and nobody trusted anyone else inside!

NO, the difference is that, if I believe one side of an argument or debate is valid/and one is not, than I will take that side, and it has nothing to do with political party or ideology! I do not follow orders of any kind, just because someone says so. That's the primary reason why, after doing militia training in high school, I decided not to sign up for a five year stint with the Armed Forces, back at a time during the mid-70's when unemployment was very high at the time I finished high school. if I get good advice, I follow it/ if not, I don't! A word of warning - if you or anyone comes up and tells me to take off my mask, I'm going to tell them where to go! And if anyone tries to pull off my mask, as some assholes have been recorded doing on video, they will get a punch in the mouth, and worse if they persist!

My point was that Canada was set up as a colonial project extension of the British Empire, and later, as the American Empire gradually assumed control, shifted towards interlocking with the US Empire. I'm not prone to flag-waving appeals and nationalism of any form. I just want to stick with the facts and call it like it is!

My poiint on earlier generations of American leftists is that they were mostly deliberately or unintentionally coopted by malevolent forces, and whichever way it was, the end results were the same. Any movements they started up or pushed along, could not go very far before either collapsing or folding back into conventional liberal Democrat politics. Regarding Chomsky, my criticisms of him are that: first, he's an anarchist, not a practical socialist who might have some useful ideas on how to establish a socialist government. Anarchists, like the western Trotskyist followers are mainly impractical dreamers who live and work in academia, not on a factory floor/let alone a farm anywhere doing hard, blue collar work. So, the problem is that someone working in academia (though I can't say it's the same for the new breed of adjunct professors) are able to live easier lives and can ponder all of the ills of society without having to be part of a real struggle. As for Chomps: Actually, Manufacturing Consent was primarily authored by Edward Herman, with assistance by Noam Chomsky! But, Chomsky has had his name associated with the book, and he gets all the credit today...mostly because of the gift of longevity. First of all, why would the American Empire murder Chomsky when he was a largely ineffective, but somewhat useful tool for their purposes? Read this editorial Chomsky wrote for The Nation a little over 31 years ago about the collapse of 'Bolshevism' and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and though I was not all that educated about these matters at the time, university intellectuals like him were supposed to know what was going on and what the stakes were! Failure to discern how the much wealthier US imperial forces were using the collapse of communism and about to rush in and try to plunder and devour assets in Eastern Europe..and Russia also if the buffoon Yeltsin hadn't died and an extreme nationalist like Putin took power, had left evidence all over about what was going to happen, and it wasn't going to be Chomsky's airy fairy dreams of " revival of libertarian socialist and radical democratic ideals " If Chomsky can be forgiven for conflating the harms that can be caused by ruthless capitalist oppression and socialist authoritarianism, it was still well known at the start of the 80's, that the Soviet Union had been outmaneuvered by the rising monetary and military power of capitalist authorities in Washington and Europe. Just as they allowed their Muslim theocrat fascists on the Arabian Peninsula to spawn Jihadi mercenaries to attack Arab governments that had fallen into disfavor in the west, the lingering Nazis and homegrown fascists who were simmering and waiting for their chances for revenge behind the Iron Curtain, were also being encouraged by Washington and NATO to step forward and take over government in Poland, Hungary, the Baltic States, Romania, and Bulgaria. East Germany was carved up and gifted to West German bankers and foreign business, but Neonazi fascists have their primary base of support in the former DDR and with the demise of Merkel, are set to take over as the dominant party when the next German elections are held. So, Chomsky couldn't see this possibility of a rightwing backlash after the fall of the Soviet Union? His blathering "both sides do it" rhetoric sure hasn't held the test of time! Once the Soviet Union had collapsed in upon itself and it appeared that Mao's China was following a similar transition from communism to pure, unadulterated capitalism, then we started seeing the true face of capitalist empire! And now, Russia is resisting the western alliance tryiing to overrun their country with a nationalist, but still capitalist government, which wouldn't have a chance of survival except for their huge wealth of resources and remaining military power to make any attempts of foreign invasion prohibitive. While China has been trying to run a hybrid communist/capitalist power, which is largely run by capitalist forces, except for being barred from rising up the chain of command in the military and the Communist Party rulership. It will be a hard task to keep money power from taking control as it has over here, but as it stands, at least China and Russia right now, represent an oppositional force to the global empire that wants to control everything! In the final analysis, he was either an idiot or a traitor, and I don't care which it is!

And your point is ???

I notice you posted military mfg as a % of GDP but not automotive or any other sectors for some reason. Could it be because a rising US Dollar priced US auto manufacturing out of the game, while military procurements have one primary buyer - the US Government, where price is no object! So, to keep the money flowing in to build more ships, planes and missiles, most of the manufacturing has been kept within US boundaries and the large arms makers are smart and cagey enough to make sure they have some small branch plant in all of the lower 48 states. That way, any senator or House member who doesn't jump when they want more money stoked into the "Defense" spending fire will be singled out and even smeared by local media as 'being weak on defense' and 'not protecting jobs in our district.' That's usually quite enough to make any budget hawk fold! I don't know if you want to delve into the details further, but the reason why we still have an automotive industry up here in spite of NAFTA rigging favoring US manufacturing, was because our Dollar was always undervalued, so wages were comparatively lower, providing an advantage of saving jobs/though lower paid jobs, until the modern era when someone like Obama could get credited for saving jobs in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana by talking UAW leaders into signing the contract demanded by GM that cut starting wages in half! As for the misnamed "defense" spending, I wouldn't mind taking a peek under the hood to see if it includes production of ICBM's and nuclear hardware, which are squirreled away under the Energy Dept. to hide their impact on military spending bumping up close to the $Trillion mark now. And all of your attempts at hairsplitting don't hide the fact that by shifting the US economy from industry to supporting a petrodollar, and that makes the US an empire dependent on an overpowering military force needed to leverage using its overvalued currency as a reserve currency, able to continue extracting wealth from nations which supply resources and mfg goods to US consumers. If, or should I say WHEN this system that other nations are gradually breaking away from loses its dollar power completely, then the American empire turns into British empire of 50 years ago, with a devaluing currency, and a shrunken ability to hold on to colonial projects it had depended on for so much of its wealth. Difference is that the collapsing American empire will be a much more angry, aggressive and dangerous member of the global community now than the British empire was a half century ago during its decline!

Good point! First capitalism developed...or was invented as feudalism withered and decayed, and then government institutions had to regulate it or capitalism would have devolved into monopoly capitalism, and then everybody would have been working for Amazon or some other blood-sucking corporate vampire! The legend according to a later biography is that during the Depression, FDR read the riot act to his eastern elite brethren when he wanted to start the New Deal programs to build new public infrastructure and more controversial - fund make work projects for unemployed farmers, blue collar workers and even artists, on public works projects that the right spends so much time deriding and holding in contempt today. If legend is at all accurate, FDR said: I'm the only one in between you and the mobs out there who want to string you up and hang you.....or words to that effect! I recall that back in my younger days, the liberal reforms by FDR and the smaller scale versions by Mackenzie King up here were viewed through the prism of progress, and believed that they were permanent reforms and improvements made possible by a mixed economy of controlled capitalism. It was not suspected that the purveyors of pure, unadulterated capitalism had not given up and were just waiting for a time of turmoil (like the 1970's) when enough people would back an extreme rightwing economic prescription that the rich elite ruling classes who always felt entitled to rule through control of money, would rise again and gut the systems created to smooth off the rough edges of capitalism. And, here we are!

I want to get back to this later, but for now, when I say fake leftists, I'm talking about those who have been co-opted by the CIA and other agencies, which began directly in the 50's and 60's, as believe it or not, Gloria Steinem admitted in her confessional biography a few years ago that YES she had been a CIA informant back in the 60's when she and a few other grifters transformed the original 'Women's Liberation Movement' into a bland 'Feminist Movement' of wealthier professional women who no longer had any message on classism! Everything would be about sex and gender and why men are bad wherever they appear on political and economic spectrums. It was the same way that George Meany became the primary agent of destruction of organized labour when he became chairman of the AFL-CIO, and allowed the Taft-Hartley Act to make further union organizing more difficult, and told union leaders that they risked the continued welfare of unions and the labor movement if they didn't identify and remove communists from their memberships. In more recent times, the CIA and FBI have preferred the indirect route of setting up NGO's to be the go-betweens handing out the money to fake leftist media and organizations. Before the ISO was discovered to have been a fraud...because of their questionable positions on US sponsored wars, and being on the wrong side every time in Latin America (such as against the Sandinista Party in Nicaragua when the US was trying to sow unrest there) they had already been found out, and most of their members were making their way to the more useful DSA as an organizing tool. Chomsky, since this old fool is still taken as an ideological hero of the nebulous left, in spite of his dubious political advice....always lining up with the Democratic Party, regardless of whatever criticism he gives them, I am reminded that Chomps could never find a real revolutionary group he liked, or didn't support more than CIA-sponsored groups. I can't say he held malevolent intentions, but by being among the cheering section when the Wall fell in Berlin 30 years ago, he had long failed to mention that the old Soviet Union had been the only ones offering education and monetary assistance to revolutionary groups around the world for decades. With the Soviet Union gone, the US Empire has really been able to show its teeth in recent decades and unabashedly apply deadly military power for strategic and financial gain around the world. America's main industry today (which we are part of also) is WAR. It is the only significant industrial sector left in US manufacturing because it is the essential tool for an empire to maintain its power and exploit the weaker nations. If Chomsky, with alll of his education and credentials, wasn't aware of what might happen if you crawl into your anarchist shell and pretend the Soviets or Mao's China served no purpose for left movements in America, he only fooled himself and his followers!

The point is They Are! DeSantis and that crippled feeb who runs Texas are both paying for vaccines with their own state funding. If they bought into the bullshit vaccine passports that Dems have bought on to, they know they would be politically dead! But, making them free and telling their public health officials to get vaccination centers set up with certain friendly businesses, they can have it both ways. Now if they were spouting the crap the anti-vaxxers are about vaccines, then they would be screwed! Because infection, hospitalization and death rates would all be rising again. Does Foxnews have a clear, coherent message on vaccines? Maybe it depends whether the host is Tucker or helmet head Hannity!

Once again, you post up another comment that's all scatter shot and goes all over the place! If I can reign it in a bit, the reason why inequality and hatred of the extreme rich has broken through as an MSM story after some 30 odd years of 'TINA' or perhaps liberals falling back to a fudging around the boundaries position (which is what $15 per hour is!) is because most people in the middle and closer to the bottom still believed that if they work hard enough, they will be able to buy that house and a few luxuries to show off to friends (and virtual friends in the Facebook era), so if MSM didn't say bad things about the new tech billionaires, everybody believed the bullshit about Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos...new kid on the block - Elon, and let's not forget the comparatively more secretive banking oligarchs like Jamie Dimon, who are part of a cabal who rig the rules of the money game by handing the politicos of both parties a shockingly small cut of the action....compared to the services they provide for Wall Street! All of Gates's PR fluffing of his image with bullshit story after story about the fake benevolence of the Foundation that bears the names of him and his wife, came crashing down in recent months as details leaked out about their divorce and how much actual charity they do. And worse, Gates would have been under rightwing attack automatically for being on the vanguard of the international vaccination campaign...which has really been about privatizing and profiting from vaccine research, development and production. When Gates gets up on stage and spews talking points about why patent 'rights' are more important than people's lives, it gets harder and harder for his PR team to spin his bullshit in a positive direction....even with all of the MSM and Democratic Party help available! At the base of the pyramid, there may not be as much focus on what the superrich minority who run the world are doing to the rest of us, but when people already struggling with minimum pay jobs find that they can no longer earn enough to afford rising rents pushed up by tons of free money sloshing around in the economy and worried about ending up out on the street with the growing army of homeless living in tents and pushing their belongings around in shopping carts! Bad enough if you're single, but what of the mothers and families with children, who have been evicted? Once the Biden and Trudeau celebrations of "beating the pandemic" are over, there are millions living in Canada and the United States who have been watching their debt levels increase and will have no chance of paying backrent owed or moving in to a different apartment. And then there's medical, student debt also that's hainging over a lot of people's heads! So, all in all, this is why there are revolutions every so often in history in the past 500 years or so! In earlier feudal times, when economies were static and people stayed in place...literally and figuratively, it was taken as a given that the more privileged nobles who occupied the manor houses and had servants looking after their needs, deserved or didn't deserve their privileges, BUT that's where they were and would stay, while the rest of us would stay in our small houses, and plowing the fields, along with doing other work demanded, and just hoping and praying to grow enough food each season to feed our families and provide the 'tax' assessed by the lord of the manor. Since the peasants were 'subjects' of the manor, the lords had a reciprocal set of obligations to provide for the necessities of all of the people under their rule. When that part of the agreement started breaking down in the middle ages, due to the Plague, the rise of the independent tradesmen and women as the first 'middle' class, or invasions, then peasants started demanding a better return for their work. The first rebellions in England were anarchist or libertarian - by The Diggers and Levelers more broadly - peasants who demanded the right to unused land and to set up independent cooperative farms with their fellows, instead of having their produce taxed away by someone claiming the right to rule over them. It was a few centuries later, before middle class educated men like Marx, Engels and many other philosophers started trying to develop theories on how economies should be managed. And like it or not, when Karl Marx studied the principles of how the newer economic system of capitalism actually functioned, he was able to explain that capitalists work towards creating monopolies in their sectors, with cooperation if they decide it is better to team up with one or two other enterprising oligarchs. So without a political system to reign in the power of the oligarchs....which is what the Right has been trying to establish for the past 40 years with centrist liberal assistance, there will be riots and eventually revolutions, just as there was 100 to 150 years ago! So, in your rant, you rattled off a bunch of news and statistics on stuff that is bad today, like rising commodity prices, without attempting to connect it with favorite rightwing hobby horses like non-white immigrants, rather than connecting rising real estate, rents and commodity prices with the simple fact that if our idiot leaders, like the one in the White House right now, are allowed to create $Trillions in fake, brand new money that never existed before, the bankers who are first to get their hands on this new money in the form of Treasury Bills, and everyone else down the line who gets a cut of the action, is going to try to put that fake created wealth into buying up real assets. So it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that people at the top and near the top, will buy up condominiums without giving more than a second thought to how they are going to fill them and what they will sell units for! Even if they sit empty, someone who has received free money from on high knows that they will still benefit much more than if they leave cash lying around that could end up worse tomorrow if a few banking runs put the US Dollar and satellite currencies (like ours) in jeopardy! But, in the end, I want to take out my frustrations and anger on those at the top of the pyramid, rather than further abuse those at the bottom, like many recent refugees and immigrants who have had to flee their homelands because of what US foreign policy has made their homes unlivable today. The present US administration is doing exactly what the last one did! The only difference is that this stupid old bastard - Biden, has to put on a fake act of benevolence, whereas Trump could let his freak flag fly, and advocate repression and murder directly and unfiltered. And I'll leave it there. I'm starting to forget how I got started on this post anyway!

Well, since Doug Ford is on your shitlist now, that explains all of the gnashing and flailing! Who is on your side? Even the Republican governors in the US, who want to keep everything open, are trying to push everyone in line for state-subsidized vaccines.

1. never mind raising taxes! Why not roll back the rights of corporate personhood to where they were when America became a nation: Corporate charters had to be renewed every five to 10 years, and demonstrate that they have been acting in the public interest (that would be a high hurdle for most of them today); until 1886, corporations did not have rights under the "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment...which was originally intended for freed slaves..not artificial persons! 2. Besides, raise corporate and investment taxes, not income taxes on earnings....that's what hammers most wage earners, not taxes on investment income that only a minority of stock market players are part of the game.

Still trying to peddle the same BS! We've been over this before many times...our Conservative Prime Minister - Brian Mulroney..the one who did the most to push through NAFTA and hitch us directly to the US economy, was the one who ordered the sell-off of the only advanced labs up here who could have done the research and development for new vaccine technologies. After that, it was just order them from the US and Euro suppliers....which up till now, has been sufficient, BUT we didn't have a global pandemic before! Or at least not for more than 100 years. But, now we do! The deep state controllers of the universe mostly work behind the scenes....quietly talking, cajoling, threatening...off the record, Unless one of the colonies steps out and refuses to follow orders. This happened with Finland, which had developed a patent-free Covid-19 vaccine a year ago, but someone forced the Finnish Government to shelve it and buy the Big Pharma vaccines instead! So, as if the same damned thing wouldn't have happened to us if we stood in the way of integrating our medical industries with the US and Euro operators!

So, what's your judgement of the Republican governors of Texas and Florida, who say that because more than 50% of the people in their states have been vaccinated, it is safe to reopen everything with no restrictions? Are they part of the great reset plot too?

This response makes no sense! Who realized income inequality was a bullshit response? Income inequality is at the root of every social crisis going on in America today, including increased violence and gun crimes, suicide, increased cancer and heart disease and mortality, mental stress and mental illness, rising drug dependence....everything bad increases the more economically unequal a society becomes! And that site is focused on the US specifically, but the same trends show nations with rising levels of neoliberal-caused inequality are making Canada, Europe and various third world nations under the sway of neoliberal policy goals share the same dysfunctions! It should have been expected! How can you expect any nation or society to have a sense of cohesion or common purpose if the population is atomized and subdivided into smaller and smaller groups measured by wealth and income? That ma be why rightwingers try to fake it with all their flags and attempts to project patriotism. Same shit goes on at football or even hockey and baseball games...which I have never made sense of even when I watched a lot more sports than now. Why should I give a crap about whether the local team wins the Cup or the Superbowl? Rarely are any of the players from the same town or even area; and the team is owned by a multibillionaire whose only option to feel like one of the jocks and get interviewed like he's part of the winning team, is to put down his money and buy it! So, income inequality is not only important...it outweighs everything else on every list of what can be good or bad about any society!

And what of the rightwingers who want to gut government completely of services for the people, while keeping that 'system for civility' you describe! How civil is it to allow a system of government that freely allows itself to be coopted and used by rich and powerful forces, while allowing those who are unemployed or unemployable (them too) to live short lives and die on the streets? Recall that all forms of leftist movements from the start of the Levelers and Diggers during 1640's England that had been divided by a civil war between Cromwell's Republicans and the Monarchists who were loyal to the King. The message from the Diggers...the most radical wing of the peasant uprising was in so many words 'we couldn't give a flying F about your war over whether rich landowners should rule or whether a king has divine sanction to rule the people, we got our own plan: The Diggers [or ‘True Levellers’] were led by William Everard who had served in the New Model Army. As the name implies, the diggers aimed to use the earth to reclaim the freedom that they felt had been lost partly through the Norman Conquest; by seizing the land and owning it ‘in common’ they would challenge what they considered to be the slavery of property. They were opposed to the use of force and believed that they could create a classless society simply through seizing land and holding it in the ‘common good’. Unfortunately, just as with today's pacifists, it was probably a mistake to figure that a path of non-violence will work against the rule of rich sociopaths who don't give a crap about people anyway! And back to the here and now, by trying to foist the blame on all kinds of 'progressives' however you define them, you are blaming the people who are reacting to oppression for not accepting it quietly and trying to rise up against those who have a foot (or knee) on their necks! Yeah, why not keep repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again!