YOu forgot to mention War Criminal- Henry Kissinger won a Peace Prize for his negotiations with North Vietnam back in the 70's too. I didn't vote in the poll, because NO, I don't think Trump deserves a peace prize, but give him one anyway if it removes one of the many potential war zones from erupting into an epic disaster.

better late than never I guess! Back when Trump announced steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada, Doug Trump and others were trying to blame Trudeau's negotiating skills. We should bite the bullet and hit back hard against further US sanctions. Raise the price of oil shipments south back to world market levels...same with essential resources needed for manufacturing. No point hitching our wagons to a dying empire now.

The difference is Canadian liberals, social democrats, socialists etc. don't define their political ideology through being American and expanding trade ties and US ownership of our economy! Canada's conservatives are in a jam now, because Trump and their rhetorical leaders are directly attacking this country, and they've gone quiet all of a sudden. Sun Media newspapers and other US lapdogs are trying to play down the problem as a "Trade Tiff." They're in a panic because they don't have a way to define being conservative without their usual US reference point.

I haven't been paying attention to this forum for a few days cause I didn't see much worth commenting on and I wanted to wait until after the dust settled from the election of Doug Trump jr. here in Ontario and whether or not Trump would wreck the G-7 Summit...which it looks like he did! Having a thread started by a doctrinaire conservative that reposts US conservative propaganda about this moral and intellectual failure- Donald Trump tells me that Canadian conservatives have no real loyalty to Canada. Not that we didn't know this already after getting American-style conservatism with Mulroney...setting the course for NAFTA and selling us out to the US economy...and then came Harper and his Republican advisers trying to finish the job of making Canada a vassal state of the US, but I wonder: what's in it for so called conservatives in this country? Are you or your organizations being promised some kind of jobs as local reps of our overlords south of the border? Otherwise, your genuflecting to stupid, unpredictable, morally bankrupt creeps like Trump and company makes no sense at all! And you rightwingers up here have just ridden your ideological rhetoric right into a dead end street!

Yes, paying line workers 50 cents an hour with no benefits can really lower the cost of production! Looking at the big picture, the problem begins with using GDP as the be all and end all for trying to quantify prosperity. First big problem is it based on standard practice of post-enlightenment materialist thought that applies no value to nature, except as raw materials for economic production! So, it shouldn't be a mystery to anyone why natural habitats are destroyed at increasing rates, and more than half of the world's known animal species are facing collapse and extinction....including the human animals who will see food production crash in a couple of decades due to destruction of topsoil, freshwater supplies etc. The almost two century-long process of "clearing the commons"---- forcing peasants and woodland dwellers off the land by creating private ownership of land and all the resources contained therein...including underground, while those forced out by landowners and government forces had no choice other than move into already growing and overcrowded slum cities to look for work as sweatshop laborers. And this process...which started in England after the invention of steam engines has continued all around the world and now, the capitalists who search for the cheapest labor are running out of these opportunities and turning more and more to outright slavery! With that, the increasing growth in income gaps isn't reflected in the GDP numbers which average out everyone's incomes. So, when certain CEO's are making 4000 times as much as their lowest paid employees, an increase in GDP won't tell us if the majority of workers are better or worse off!

Sure you do! So why do you prefer Coke to Pepsi? Why do buy Nike instead of Reebok or Adidas?

I said before that I don't accept compartmentalizing these issues cause they all impact each other, and how much real freedom we will have personally and as a nation.

When most consumers have to step back and explain their purchasing decisions, they have to admit that a large chunk of what they buy, they can't really explain why they bought it! And this makes sense in our consumer-driven capitalism where advertisers apply psychological manipulation to motivate potential consumers to buy on impulse/rather than need. So, besides the environmental consequences and increased demand on resources, cheap consumer products does NOT necessarily equal a better world for all! And then we factor in costs that have increased faster than inflation...like real estate..almost everywhere. The lower your income, the greater the likelihood you are a renter rather than a homeowner, so the poor who get the benefit of the ten dollar shirts lose all those benefits in stagnant wages and rising rents! And then we get to the stratification of income and wealth that has increased under the brave new world of free trade since the 80's everywhere.

The Canadian economy used to be run for the benefit of Canada/not begging for better terms from the US! Once again, conservatives show they are the real traitors of this country!

That's what I've been thinking too! For years, we've had rightwing radio and crap like Sun Media running their Republican playbooks, and they could have gotten away with it except for the fact that when their primary loyalties are to the US and not Canada...or the part of Canada that we should owe our allegiances to, they reveal themselves to be the real traitors...as Andrew Scheer and Stephen Harper have done in their desperate game of trying to find wiggle room around condemning US policy and trying to tell us that JT must have done something wrong...like being insufficiently obsequious to our American overlords!

I am neither a liberal nor a conservative, so I see NO benefits to open trade for us! What we get by the way of cheap slave-produced GMO produce from Florida etc. and $10.00 shirts from the worst sweatshops in the world is the tradeoff of losing our own productive capacity (did you know we used have textile industries here and a lot, lot more fruit farms before "free trade!" And the specialization of economies does not make them more efficient! It stretches supply chains and adds to both economic and environmental costs, but BIg BIz doesn't care, because it produces either monopolies or near monopolies for the operations they own or hold majority shares in. So, what are the benefits? And I mean except for Wall Street, London and the leading transnational capitalist class who've been the only segment of societies around the world to get richer under 'free trade?' Just count up the number of billionaires in the world for proof....every country in the world...even the most destitute...now have their own billionaire class who make sure this toxic capitalist system that's out of control keeps on running!

Since this Mideast mess is usually measured from 1967 as the starting line now, we need to go back and make the point that most of the land in 1948-1967 Israel was expropriated from Palestinian Arabs living there. One of the fascinating factoids that popped up during Israel's latest crimes against humanity in Gaza was a reminder that approx. 70% of Gaza residents are refugees...or is more likely the case after this length of time...descendents of refugees from Israel because of the Nakba in 1948! Prior to the Six Day War in 1967 and that massive land grab, the main issue regarding Israel/Palestine in the west was how these and other Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon would be resettled and/or compensated for their losses. After 1967, this issue was completely forgotten about, and virtually everyone in the west who considers themselves liberals or conservatives seems to believe that the 1948 State of Israel represents some sort of natural rights and boundaries....and it doesn't fwiw!

And those businesses were mostly owned and controlled locally...or at least more locally than they are today...by nameless, faceless hedge funds. Most of us lost under so called free trade! The 'Rust Belt' was allowed to crash and just hollow out entire cities, our businesses...especially branch plants that American producers used to have to open for a Canadian retail market also closed, and Mexico saw millions of farmers forced off the land by one of the major benefactors of this regime: Big Ag business that mass produces cheap grains and soybeans on large tracts of land (irrigated with water they rarely pay for) have made billions producing the cheap carb products that make people obese and give them type two diabetes.....win, win!

Yes, the elite big business owners with capital win, while everyone else loses....depending on their own income levels.