Right To Left

The free money is for the friends of the Federal Reserve and other central bankers around the world. These "job creators" get money at low or no interest because they are assumed to be using the money to generate economic activity that will help everybody........I'm glad this is working out so far! And what really happens is that the bankers loan out money at extortionist rates to any prospective borrowers they think may be desperate and have to pay it back at high interest rates( they own the payday lenders, so they don't have to smear their own names). If this is any different than the loansharking that mobsters carry out, I'd like to know! I just laugh when I get credit reports! If I'm not doing enough to have a high credit rating, I couldn't really give a crap! I can't think of a better example of debt tied to success than rightwing hero - Donald J. Trump! Around the time he got bounced out of office back in November, a prominent auditor tried to go through the public records available on his wealth and spending to determine approximately what Trump was really worth, and could only determine....largely because most of his wealth was in real estate, that he was either worth billions or he's already bankrupt. Forbes last ranked Trump at a net worth of 2.4 billion; Trump himself claimed to be worth $10 billion, and some who've gone through the record of his public debts and bankruptcies say he may not actually be worth anything at all! Just another real estate developer holding more debts than assets that have real value. By that rating, he would be typical of a lot of similar real estate moguls sitting on billions of dollars worth of commercial real estate with many properties facing foreclosure in the not so distant future. It was always assumed that Trump would try to advance his personal wealth while in the White House, but if anything, he may have actually lost money because of the decline in his hotel and casino holdings that most rich New Yorkers and Floridians no longer want to be seen in! It's possible that Donald Trump may be in a similar situation as many billionaire owners of shopping malls and office towers that cannot earn money as long as the pandemic drags on. If I'm looking for a source of the stories that Covid-19 is fake, I'll start with them! I'm just wondering what this world will look like in the near future, after the pandemic has died down a bit, and price discovery for real estate and stock and bond prices becomes a real thing again for the first time in a number of years. If there's a complete market meltdown, I'm not going to be too surprised! The value of my locked in pension funds will take hits because the last thing fund managers do is protect the assets of lowly investors who are stuck going down with the ship! But, I'll manage without them if we need to.

No, you missed my point again! Sure, African Americans who have been doing the crappy jobs for low money everyone hates have been further undercut when "illegal" migrants move in and take low money under even worse conditions, BUT the solution is not attacking them! It's going to the top and going after the people who are doing the hiring. If the "illegals" had the option to earn equal wages and had union representation and the right to collective bargaining, every worker, regardless of color or origins would be happy! Of course the cigar chomping capitalists wouldn't be so happy, but F*** them!!

I think we notice whenever some real estate knob cold-calling for listings in a what we're told is a hot real estate market tells us that our old wood-framed bungalows are worth over $800,000! How the f*** does that happen, and who's buying? Most young people can't afford to buy, while us "rich on paper" homeowners live in fear of Market Value Assessment and if we'll get slapped with a big property tax increase the next time the city needs more money to build a new arena or stadium or some other "worthy" cause!

In the past....before vaccines were considered lucrative big money investments, it was believed that the worst diseases would eventually be eradicated entirely. I'm not sure if it's over or not, but lethal bacterias like one causing small pox were only being found in a few isolated communities in Pakistan and West Africa, and assumed would soon be eliminated by the vaccine. It is different with viruses...since they are capable of mutating and changing rapidly.....as we are already finding out with Covid-19, where yesterday's latest horror story was about a new "double mutant" variant of Covid-19 that is spreading fast and believed to be the main factor in new infections at a rate of almost 300,000 per day! And most government and medical officials believe the death rates are much higher than the Covid-19 death rates being reported so far; because of the very high numbers of cremations of people who did not have access to doctors or a hospital because of the ongoing pandemic! Non-stop cremations cast doubt on India's counting of COVID dead Gas and firewood furnaces at a crematorium in the western Indian state of Gujarat have been running so long without a break during the COVID-19 pandemic that metal parts have begun to melt. "We are working around the clock at 100% capacity to cremate bodies on time," Kamlesh Sailor, the president of the trust that runs the crematorium in the diamond-polishing city of Surat, told Reuters. And with hospitals full and oxygen and medicines in short supply in an already creaky health system, several major cities are reporting far larger numbers of cremations and burials under coronavirus protocols than official COVID-19 death tolls, according to crematorium and cemetery workers, media and a review of government data. India on Monday registered a record 273,810 new daily infections and 1,619 deaths. Its total number of cases now stands at more than 15 million, second only to the United States. Reliable data is at the heart of any government response to the pandemic, without which planning for hospital vacancies, oxygen and medicine becomes difficult, experts say. Government officials say the mismatch in death tallies may be caused by several factors, including over-caution. A senior state health official said the increase in numbers of cremations had been due to bodies being cremated using COVID protocols "even if there is 0.1% probability of the person being positive". "In many cases, patients come to hospital in an extremely critical condition and die before they are tested, and there are instances where patients are brought dead to hospital, and we do not know if they are positive or not," the official said. 'VERY IRKSOME' But Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Michigan, said many parts of India were in "data denial". "Everything is so muddy," she said. "It feels like nobody understands the situation very clearly, and that's very irksome." In Surat, Gujarat's second largest city, Sailor's Kurukshetra crematorium and a second crematorium known as Umra have cremated more than 100 bodies a day under COVID protocols over the last week, far in excess of the city's official daily COVID death toll of around 25, according to interviews with workers. Prashant Kabrawala, trustee of Narayan Trust, which manages a third city crematorium called Ashwinikumar, declined to provide the number of bodies received under COVID protocols, but said cremations there had tripled in recent weeks. "I have been regularly going to the crematorium since 1987, and been involved in its day-to-day functioning since 2005, but I haven't seen so many dead bodies coming for cremation in all these years," even during an outbreak of the bubonic plague in 1994 and floods in 2006. Government spokesmen in Gujarat did not respond to requests for comment. India is not the only country to have its coronavirus statistics questioned. But the testimony of workers and a growing body of academic literature suggest deaths in India are being underreported compared to other countries. Mukherjee's research of India's first wave concludes that there were 11 times more infections than were reported, in line with estimates from studies in other countries. There were also between two and five times as many deaths than were reported, far in excess of global averages. WORKING DAY AND NIGHT In Lucknow, capital of the populous northern state of Uttar Pradesh, data from the largest COVID-only crematorium, Baikunthdham, shows double the number of bodies arriving on six different days in April than government data on COVID deaths for the entire city. The figures do not take into account a second COVID-only crematorium in the city, or burials in the Muslim community that makes up a quarter of the city's population. Crematorium head Azad, who goes by only one name, said the number of cremations under COVID protocols had risen five-fold in recent weeks. "We are working day and night," he said. "The incinerators are running full time but still many people have to wait with the bodies for the last rites." A spokesman for the Uttar Pradesh government did not respond to a request for comment. Elsewhere, India Today reported two crematoriums in Bhopal, the capital of the central state of Madhya Pradesh, 187 bodies were cremated following COVID protocols in four days this month, while the official COVID death toll stood at five. Last week Sandesh, a Gujarati newspaper, counted 63 bodies leaving a single COVID-only hospital for burial in the state's largest city, Ahmedabad, on a day where government data showed 20 coronavirus deaths. The Lancet medical journal noted last year that four Indian states making up 65% of COVID fatalities nationally each registered 100% of their coronavirus deaths. But fewer than a quarter of deaths in India are medically certified, particularly in rural areas, meaning the true COVID death rate in many of India's 24 other states may never be known. "Most of the deaths are not registered so it's impossible to do a validation calculation," Mukherjee said.

I was listening to the liberal "Current Affairs" podcast this morning, and a little taken back by how a panel discussing MMT theory were having unusually heated arguments about theory and practice because of the ramifications of separating tax collection from government spending for both domestic and military programs. Unlike Keynsianism, so called "modern monetary theory" doesn't believe there are limits to how much new money can be created and spent...declaring that it's not inflationary as long as the central government is in control of its own money supply. So, with all of the central banks in the IMF trading block all collaborating together to increase their currencies, everything should carry on and taxes never need to be increased. So, why should there be any taxes for anyone to pay to begin with? And this is why all of a sudden, believers in MMT are hitting the panic button! If the USA for example can spend trillions creating a Medicare system that covers everyone...like other western nations have, and spend trillions on building new infrastructure and trillions to upgrade public education and public spending programs for the poor, along with the trillions more demanded by the military............ who gets the check for all of this at the end of the night?

Like I said, Pfizer and Moderna can be carrying out a large global scale experiment with their designed vaccines and that doesn't mean Covid 19 isn't real or that real people aren't dying right now! You have to be pretty deep in denial to believe everything's a conspiracy and the only threat is having to take a vaccine in your arm!

You just answered your own question! This is how LA was ripped apart by black vs latino violence three decades ago, and the same thing happened in many other cities, because too many people just look for a scapegoat when they want vengeance. If they were thinking, they would understand that the reason for their loss of bottom level low wage jobs wasn't under the control of desperate migrants looking for a way out of even worse violence, deprivation and misery in the countries where they come from....the US/CIA backed despotic regimes in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in particular! A tiny group of white kleptocrats have free reign to ruthlessly oppress the majority of people in their countries and are satisfied by skimming a small share of the profits extracted by foreign mining and agribusiness operations that are allowed to plunder their resources. Left with no means to effectively fight back against oppression, most young people look to escape, and even taking dangerous, below minimum wage jobs in the worst parts of America is better than remaining and getting stopped by a death squad or narco gang in El Salvador or Honduras.....thanks again Hillary for that last one!

The problem here is you rightwingers see everything from the personal/ never society at large. People respond in different ways to social advantages and stresses around them. Some.... a few, excel and become the heroes of rightwing myth-making stories, while the majority end up in the gutter! Just as some from wealth and privilege live up to their families' expectations, while dimwits like Hunter Biden and Donnie Junior are a step down from the already diminished intellects and abilities of their fathers! So, you see your 'son's best friend's success or failure in life as being something wholly within his choices and having nothing to do with society at large....except for propaganda from evil liberals and democrats of course, that might lead him to a life of wickedness and debauchery. As for "the cops," they may either see him as a threat...because of his color and whatever circumstances at the time, OR a notch on the belt of a cop who needs an arrest. Who gives a shit about what any politician says, including Barack Obama on any subject. He also said "America is an exceptional nation," the same creed you worship, because he fully understood he was taking the reigns(at least symbolically) of the American Empire; and had to please the generals, Pentagon and CIA staffers who do the work of the empire around the world. This is how an idiot like Trump got f***ed over by these monsters! Trump thinks like they do, but he had no respect for them, and they demand that elected leaders of either party in office know their place and show deference to the members of permanent government in Washington! If cops are patrolling your neighborhood with guns drawn, avoiding getting shot is not always easy! A year ago, an NYPD officer patrolling the stairs of an apartment building shot a man who opened the door as the cop was walking down the next flight of stairs......all because the cop was scared, and was locked and loaded, and just shot an unarmed man who was taking the stairs cause the elevators weren't working. It took a lot to convict the cop of manslaughter, and even at that, a week after being sentenced to the minimum --- five years in prison, a judge reduced the sentence a week later to probation and community service. In other words, he got to walk away! Now try to tell me such a thing would happen if the sides were reversed! Anyone else would spend the rest of their lives in prison. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3547036/Ex-NYPD-officer-sentenced-stairwell-shooting.html The cop pretended to shoot a rifle? At who? The kids being fitted for suits?

In a "ramped up" decaying and declining economy, where the growing underclass are staring at long term unemployment, sickness, increasing debts that can't be escaped through bankruptcy court, and looming evictions, you never know what will the trigger to put unruly mobs out in the streets! The same pattern has gone on throughout history. Only difference was that in the past, most ruling elites tried to be a little more careful at extracting wealth from the poor and adding to their miseries. But, nowadays, elite liberals and conservatives hire expert statisticians and pollsters who think they can guess the public mood, and when they've pushed to the breaking point. And when they are rounded up and marched off to the guillotines in the town square, that's often their first indication that they pushed the people too far! * but trying to contend that this is the usual liberal vs. conservative/Democrat vs Republican BS that's gone on for decades is laughable at this point! This past presidential election was the first one in years where the Democrat challenger pulled in more corporate and foundation dollars than the Republican. This is why you rightwingers are in disarray! You all thought that pleasing and sucking up to the rich would give you some form of preferential treatment. BUT, you're finding out too late that the ruling oligarchs are sociopath/narcissists who only care about themselves and their short term needs! They only pretend to give a shit about others (including all the lackies who carry water for them), and they don't care about the future either! So, the weapons makers are happy to risk WW3 right now with both Russia and China because it gives them the opportunity to produce and sell more high tech planes, ships and missiles; and the "green" billionaires think they will survive the looming planetary extinction they are either pushing towards or not doing enough to stop, hiding in their underground luxury bunkers for a few weeks or months....as if it will all blow over when they come back up to the surface. This is how the people you idolize as heroes think about themselves, their supporters and the world around them!

Any chance France will get its military forces and corporate interests out of West Africa? Where these leeches haven't belonged for 300 years.

And this is why the US allies itself with the most extreme Islamists in the Arab World, who work against secular Arab states like Syria, which tries to keep religion of all types out of government.

You can pretend it's not, but the Krupp Family which owned Volkswagen and major steel production in Germany was producing the tanks and heavy guns for the German War Machine throughout the War, and in more profitable conditions: no strikes and even some munitions factories with concentration camp labor. And then there were all the bankers on both sides of the war, that were financing German and Allied war efforts. The Soviets, on the other hand, had to scrap their five year plans and shift most of their production to preparing for war when spies in Germany got word back that the Germans were intending to go east, rather than invade England after conquering France. And they managed to do it without having the moneylenders as a go between. And the best evidence that Nazism like all forms of fascism are more conducive to capitalism and less feared than communism, was that most western leaders except Churchill and Roosevelt wanted to make a deal with Hitler and attack the Soviet Union, even after Germany's aggressive invasions in central europe. They saw that they had things in common, and as soon as the war was being wrapped up, the US and England were smuggling Nazi scientists, engineers and government officials out of Germany at the end of WWII. The most valuable and dangerous of the lot-- like Martin Bormann and Adolph Eichmann, were given fake passports and sent to US unofficial colonies in South America -- Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, where they were given cover in some of the German expat communities down there. *when one older neighbor where I grew up, was being investigated as a Nazi war criminal during the 70's, I noticed that there were several others in Canada who were being tracked down for various crimes. My father (a WWII vet) always wondered how so many Nazis and Fascists, and fascist sympathizers got in to Canada, while he says he can't recall ever meeting a communist among the immigrants from Eastern Europe after the war. Many years later we learned that our governments were carefully going through lists of communist party members and affiliates, while giving a pass to many low ranking SS or Nazi collaborators! The Canadian Government, like the US and England...which claimed to have such a hard time detecting Nazis, seemed to be able to screen out everyone who might have been a communist coming over from Eastern Europe and Italy after the War for some reason!

As usual, the truth can be found somewhere in the middle of two extremes! The Sars Cov-2 virus is a highly contagious coronavirus...much more so than the lethal first coronavirus that went global 20 years ago, when we had the Sars scare going on. The Cov-1 had high casualty numbers among elderly, but did not transmit as easily as this version is doing. Point is that if covid was just made up, how do antivax deniers explain the prior coronavirus and its 10% fatality rates? But at the other end, the conspiracists do have a point about how Big Pharma has moved into the vaccine business after coming up with new, patented RNA vaccines. And then there are the 'satan's little helpers' like Bill Gates, who has his own scam running that he is trying to pretend is all about charity and humanitarian causes. The anti-vaxxers can't conceive that evil, duplicitous plans and actions by big drug companies and their friends are just adapting to a situation they expect to profit from. No need to make up a whole story about them creating a fake disease to begin with!

I've done some reading on the subject. It seems the National Socialist Party was not as high on the socialist part as they were on nationalism after WWI. Although they were popular with many trade unions. When Hitler and his henchmen took over, they deep-sixed the socialist part completely, since his first action after being named chancellor was to ban unions and strikes in Germany....not very socialistic on any scale!

All righty then! I'm about as far left as anybody can go (certainly on this board) and I've just recently retired debt and mortgage free. Though that doesn't stop ads and telemarketers trying to talk me into taking on loans (for unexpected costs). I'm thinking maybe most people today haven't got everything in order before they retired, as used to be the standard until a few decades ago. Although my credit rating determines that I am not doing my part to "drive the economy" anymore! Twenty or 30 years ago, when I was carrying full mortgage and several thousand in higher interest debt, I was being told I had an excellent rating. But, after I paid off the mortgage, my last car and keep my last remaining credit card at a zero balance every month, now my score is barely 700. This is the problem with capitalist economics! You're not productive if you're not also in debt!

Herd immunity with vaccines may be impossible also, since the Sars-Cov-2 virus is showing itself to be quickly adaptable and fast mutating. I'm wondering if recent Pfizer exec's talk of 'everyone needing six month booster shots for Covid-19 is another signal that this will be an endemic disease we may never get rid of!

Funny that the most "essential" workers are also the most unprotected and the least likely to be compensated for the risks they take by going to work every day!

Bullshit! Pure and simple! If you watched the video, how can you pretend that Chauvin should have been acquitted for his actions? The jurors watched all the video evidence available, and I knew Chauvin was cooked when they deliberated for such a brief time before coming back to court with their verdict. And all of the expert witnesses were lined up for the prosecution side. All Chauvin's lawyer had was one crank who tried to pull up a lame excuse that there was little or no evidence of strangulation....WHICH WASN'T HOW THE PROSECUTION CLAIMED HE DIED. Chauvin wasn't choking Floyd, he was cutting off the blood flow to his brain, by pressing down hard on the side of his neck for so long. Chauvin was shifting his weight around for maximum impact, and acting in a deliberate manner! If anyone else had done something like this, they would have been charged with First degree murder, not second! But, even prior to that...during the trial, there were so many cops and police experts throwing Derek Chauvin under the bus, it looked like he would have had to beat tall odds to get away with it, as so many of his brothers have over the years. A lot of police decided that This Time, they had to draw the line and not let Chauvin off the hook.

Of course developers are going to want the cheapest property. But the developers have too many friends on city council helping them, by methods like already mentioned constricting services or refusing to do more modest upgrades with local roads and services until they've driven property values down low enough as they force most people to sell cheap. *things may be a little different at the moment, because of the insanity created by central banks creating $Trillions out of thin air recently driving up land prices and property values almost everywhere...at least until all our artificially inflated money crashes back to earth again! I'll agree that Democrats (and Liberals in Canada) are crap, but you're really off the lunatic fringe with this one. If Derek Chauvin...the senior officer in charge on the scene, wasn't a murderous psychopath, George Floyd would still be alive today. He may have been in lockup, but he'd be among the living. It has been reported since this turned into an international story that Chauvin and Floyd already knew each other, and it would have been interesting if either the prosecution or the defense found it relevant. More likely Chauvin was holding some kind of grudge and used that takedown as a chance to either kill Floyd or cripple him....since causing him to black out by constricting the blood flow for too long would have either been fatal or caused brain damage. Chauvin just assumed that he would get away with it, cause he never had to account for past abuses, and so many other cops have killed suspects in questionable circumstances, that without millions of people watching that 9 minute video, he would not have faced charges for his actions.

Wasn't Hitler a typical capitalist by your standard?

The rich would really be in a panic if they couldn't hire propagandists who create the rhetoric justifying and even sanctifying their unearned wealth, and so, are able to string along enough useful idiots to assist them...usually thinking that they will one day get rich too...just like it says on the stupid lottery commercials! I don't know if it does any good to post the research, but I have in the past posted articles and book excerpts by sociologists and psychologists studying the effects of wealth inequality....which surprisingly doesn't make even the richest people happy either! Likely because they fear loss of wealth more than others, and in an increasingly income stratified society, their country club 'peer' shrink to fewer numbers. Someone like Donald Trump would be a prime example of someone who doesn't trust hardly anybody....except possibly for some family members. Because everyone else he comes in contact with, is either an employee or providing a temporary service, or is a potential competitor in the game of wealth accumulation. It is also noted that poorer people are actually more generous than those with higher incomes and greater ability to give donations to the poor. The rich (like Trump again) have elevated opinions of themselves, and are less inclined to be charitable unless they have no other choice.

During the 60's, an 'Uncle Tom' sellout like OJ Simpson would not have had defenders in black communities across America, because he left his people behind to enjoy the good life in the opulent white suburbs of LA. He married a white woman, played golf at a white members-only country club with the likes of other rich celebs, executives, lawyers (like Robert Kardashian)...if not for that asshole, his skank, grifter ex-wife and daughters would have had to marry well or latch on to rich husbands! Anyway, OJ did not have a word to say about any issues of Black America and the only African American he associated with, was his main guard while playing for the Bills - Al Cowling, who he hired as his personal chauffeur. But, all this crap that positions Identity group - race, gender, sexual orientation etc. and has nothing to say about economic class, is why race issues are in such a mess in America today! The young people being shot by cops in ever-greater numbers in recent years, are being profiled, harassed and targeted by police because That's What They're Trained To Do! The trend in urban America (and Canada) over the past 30 or so years, has been 'gentrification' of old, decrepit city neighborhoods-- tearing down old public housing and private residences that have lost value because of local government policy -- like refusing to invest the same money into rebuilding roads and upgrading water and sewer lines, that are expected by residents who've bought newer homes in 'better' neighborhoods. Schools are closed, and kids are bussed miles away, even in neighborhoods like mine, where a significant number of younger families with kids have moved in. The few who try to hang on in the old neighborhood that's slated for "redevelopment" will get a buyout offer from the city and have to move on. Once the neighborhood is being gentrified, new buildings are going up all over the place; new houses are built, and all of a sudden, the streets of the formerly decrepit downtown areas are filled with cops and private security forces (same damn thing) patrolling around. This was something I first noticed over 20 years ago, while visiting a cousin who was living and working in NYC. It seemed like there were cops all over the place. But my cousin was already taken it as a given...otherwise he wouldn't have moved there! The difference between police working in the 'better' neighborhoods and the ghettoes is a stark contrast. The cops working the ghettoes don't even see crime-fighting as one of their priorities. They're told to keep the pressure on, keep local youths contained and not venturing out of their blighted neighborhoods. There are no Stop And Frisk policies in the suburbs....unless someone who 'looks like they don't belong' wanders through and immediately draws suspicion. But, even though poverty is gets darker as it becomes more extreme, and money is whiter at the other end. These social conditions are established and enforced by law because of economic class/ not race! If someone is black and rich, they earn themselves an honorary white pass, and the cops will apologize for pulling them over before they have a chance to speed dial their lawyers. While white kids who are more likely to live in rural than urban poverty, are almost as likely to die from a policeman's bullets than a black kid! The differences between white and black regarding police harassment, arrest, incarceration, assault and murder are not as different as BLM and professional liberals with lots of media access would like us to believe! Where do many Latinos fall in a black or white race scale? Latinos are identified as "brown" by our media in their "black and brown" discrimination narratives. But if anyone was looking closely when they watched the video of the 13 year old shot and killed several days ago, the first thing that I was thinking was that they shot a white boy! Because Adam Toledo was pretty light if skin color was the only determining factor. In the final analysis, it's about where you stand in an increasingly stratified economic hierarchy!

I actually have to agree with you, and Andrew Coyne of course, on this one. All forms of deficit spending -- whether based on liberal left economic theory (Keynsianism rebranded as MMT over the past 10 years or so) or the rightwing varieties like supply side economics -- cut taxes (especially business, investment and estate taxes) so low that governments can't pay for essential services (except military procurements of course) and in both the left and right sides of standard economic theory, future economic growth is supposed to take care of everything, and shrink those deficits! In reality, the ballooning deficits we are creating today, may indeed be excused by trying to maintain economic activity in the midst of the worst disease pandemic in a century. But, nevertheless, all of the red ink being written every day now by all levels of government, business and personal debt of the vast majority of people today, all of these debts have to be paid back in the future OR our currency along with the USD, the LB and the Euro will end up insolvent when the time comes that a consensus of debtholders start believing that they won't get paid back in the future, or will only be paid back a fraction of what they are owed. I'm expecting this from two "guaranteed" pension funds I've just started collecting on, aside from the modest CPP....which I don't believe will be indexed to future inflation levels either. So, I'm hoping that my modest private holdings, property values, and so far at least -- continued good health will make it possible for me to continue working in the future if and when I need to. I'm not expecting the good times to continue rolling on now as the shit starts to really hit the fan in the future! So, my thinking is about as nihilistic as most millennial kids.. like my two sons who still don't see a point to saving for retirement off in some distant future that looks impossible to most young people today. Whether we consider ourselves communitarian socialists or rightwing individualists, we have to deep six all fanciful notions that the future will pay for the greed and plundering of resources and fouling up the environment we do today. Our political, business and thought leaders all seem to acting on the presumption that we can just continue borrowing from the future and leaving a more indebted and unlivable world for those who come after us. Our primitive ancestors who had to try to understand and try to live in harmony with the conditions of their local environments, all seemed to share beliefs that there were limits to how much game they could hunt, fish, or burn tracts of forests for both hunting and planting favorite foods. If they exceeded whatever the elders determined to be the "limits to growth," it was time to divide the community, and at least some of the people had to move on to new lands. But as things got more crowded, that became increasingly difficult and led to wars over territory. And then clueless Euro's arrived on these shores who, after leaving their diseased, crowded, and warring homelands, thought they arrived in a big, bountiful candy store and just had to kill off enough of the locals to lay claim to pristine new lands that would provide evermore bountiful harvests for everyone till time immemorial. Now, it's time to end this way of thinking entirely and make all nations of the world live within resource and ecological limits of this planet...that's running out of non-renewable resources right now, barely 200 years into the "industrial revolution." And this is where all talk of money, debt and economic theory has to intersect with the real world of resources and resource limits, no matter what worldview and set of theories you want to work with!

Be honest here! Are you conflating two different shooting events, or trying to tell us that the 13 year old boy fatally shot after being chased by a cop on foot patrol had fired a gun FIVE times! According to a Chicago Police statement, they claim a 21 year old man had fired the gun in question at a car in the neighborhood. But, I wouldn't even take their word for it on those details, since these same lying bastards are still claiming that the boy (Adam Toledo) had a gun in his right hand when the cop shot him dead that night. If you look at screen captures of his bodycam video that was released to the public over the weekend, you can plainly see that the boy has nothing in either hand when he turned around! And according to other police statements, accompanied by bodycam and security cam video, the boy was with a 21 year old 'Ruben Roman' when police encountered them and ordered them to stop...but both fled down the dark alley. My guess would be that Roman was using the boy as an accomplice; and since he wasn't found holding a gun when he was found later, there was only one gun and he handed it off to a 13 year old because of his apparently lengthy arrest record. It's possible that Adam Toledo carried the gun and dropped the gun before he turned around, but that's difficult to say because of the lack of lighting. It's even impossible to determine if the kid he's chasing has anything in his hands. Begs the question: why would he want to get so close to someone carrying a gun, when that would only leave him with the option of shoot-to-kill if he believed the suspect could shoot at him? Regardless, the first pictures of Adam Toledo before being shot, show nothing! Later in the cop's bodycam video, you can see that he is distraught..no doubt realizing he fucked up and fatally shot a kid. He's telling him to "stay with me," "keep breathing," but that's impossible after seeing that surge of blood high in the chest or low in the neck, severed the boy's windpipe.....in a similar manner as the Jan. 6 shooting of Ashli Babbitt showed the same surge of blood from a shot to the neck. Too late! It does put him in a higher category than the murderous mercenary - Derek Chauvin at least!

And that's why I moved back to Canada a little over 30 years ago! I was bamboozled by the BS of so many propagandists....even repeated often by at least two of my uncles that USA was the place for a young man to go to be a success. But, just as everything you buy today has warning labels, you have to check the label or check under the hood to find out if its all really worth it! The only people who see America as a 'land of promise' today it seems, are the desperate poor coming as refugees from southern nations impoverished by US exploitation. May as well go to the place where all the money ends up.....even if you have to live on slave wages!