WIP

I'm reminded again that Milton Friedman advised Ronald Reagan and his cabinet back in 1980..when the Dems controlled Congress to just go ahead and slash taxes without trying to fight Congress over spending..and just blow a hole through the deficit. Friedman's reasoning was that as debt levels increased, future presidents of either party would have no choice other than to cut spending on domestic priorities....and this has been a conservative strategy ever since!

Yeah, and those poll trackers worked so well for Hillary Clinton two years ago, didn't they? I still say today's post-Harper Conservatives have made so many enemies in the middle and on the left that no Tory candidates are trusted anymore! Especially when they promise virtually the same funding as the other two parties while cutting taxes and balancing the budget....like Doug Trump.

Too late! The Libs are sinking in quicksand and a last minute round of attack ads on the NDP will look like desperation! They gambled that Horvath and the NDP couldn't get their campaign running again this time and they lost! All of us who make keeping rightwing conservatives out of power the #1 priority will mostly have to pick the NDP candidate...depending on local voting patterns and poll numbers of course.

Yeah, if the top 1% and especially the top .01% most of them work for, are so hard done by, they wouldn't be the only ones increasing their wealth today!

The past never existed...live for today....got it!

Since I haven't lived in Alberta for many years, I have to ask: what the hell happened to that surplus fund from all the oil development that was supposed to keep Alberta safe for the future? What did the 'fiscal conservative' Tories do with the half a century they were managing Alberta's economy during the oil boom years?

And they're not the ones who lobby Ottawa and Queen's Park and relieve themselves of their tax burdens through creative bookkeeping and foreign tax shelters that allow capital to flow back and forth, while leaving someone else to pay for the costs of managing government, military and domestic obligations every civilized society has to deal with. So once again, I aim high before I fire/not low and shoot the ones with no power over me and may require assistance from the dwindling social safety net that's leaving more and more to fall through the cracks even without having US-style conservative government....yet!

Everyone has skin in the game, except for the superrich who don't feel they should pay any taxes! The only tax rebates I ever qualified for were the child tax benefits (a small portion because of my income). Nobody should be disenfranchised because of their income! It's an insult to try to argue the point! The poor should not be shamed in to silence and declining to vote!

LINK? That's a factual claim that needs to be proven...and fwiw, most claims that our distant ancestors had short lives are based on averaging high infant mortality statistics. But once a child reached age 5 in most ancient communities, they were just as likely to live on another 50 to 70 years like people today. Don't believe all the BS about modern medical miracles! Life expectancy has not changed much over the aeons. The difference today is that many people who would have succumbed to diseases are able to live on longer. And, aside from the northern latitudes, it's a dubious claim to make that most were hunter-gatherers and stayed that way until sailboats from Europe arrived on these shores. All across North America, people were planting and harvesting corn, beans and squash...usually grown close together, and population densities were ten times higher than most anthropologists were claiming a half century ago. In some regions that had unstable climates...like the Eastern Woodlands in the US for some reason, periodic frosts, droughts, heat waves and floods often decimated crops, causing starvation and mass migration. Archaeologists specializing in examining teeth from old burial sites noticed a pattern where people would resume hunter-gatherer living after a population crash and only resume farming when higher population levels made it necessary. So, it seems that gathering food was their first preference over farming! Our standards of obesity, cancer, heart disease, mental illness? 'Major media' is most interested in getting paid. And today they get their money churning out propaganda on behalf of their corporate overlords. Fascism is just late stage capitalism getting desperate...and it looks like we're almost there now. Fascism and communism are not interchangeable. I'm not a Marxist, though | agree with a lot of Karl's analysis of capitalism and desires for a better system that distributes benefits more evenly than our ridiculous age...where one man can be declared to have a net worth of over 120 billion!

If they pay sales taxes they have skin in the game especially if they're below the poverty line. The least amount of skin in the game are the fatcats who pay little or nothing in corporate and capital gains taxes because they're accountants find deductions us wage earners aren't entitled to! My gross income before taxes was over $85,000 last year...so I paid a lot in taxes, especially when everything else is added in. Nevertheless, I punch up/not down!

I'll bet you would care if it was a Liberal government that set up our money-losing privatization scheme! I care about history! So, even though I never feel a strong pull to vote Liberal, I'm sick of the Wynn Government getting blamed for decisions made by previous governments, and my impression was they were doing the best they could to manage a dysfunctional system that was already billions of dollars in debt.

I know! Even Hydro Quebec's James Bay Project couldn't pass an environmental assessment today. When they floated the idea of a 2nd James Bay plant 10 years after, it was soon realized to be impossible to clear regulatory hurdles....then again, how do pipeline builders do it? And there's also the land claims of Cree nations that were trampled over. But James Bay was built in a different time. My point was that at the time it was the smart thing to do both cost-wise and environmentally, since once it's built, it lasts virtually forever and requires no fuel....and then there's nuclear! Cost overruns, the ever-present threat of meltdown, the limited lifespan, the shortage of the right isotopes for fuel, what to do with nuclear wastes...even if you work at a nuclear plant, don't try to bullshit me about how wonderful it is! There are reasons why insurance companies won't touch nuclear, and the government has to assume the risk! While the trend on the latest Ipsos poll on Monday showed the NDP pulling ahead of the Conservatives, and today's rightwing conservatives...especially lightning rods like Ford face a riding by riding challenge every election because they are so distrusted their negatives are higher than the other parties. What this means in the real world is that many voters are anyone-but-conservative voters, and check their local riding polls before the election before deciding whether to throw down for the Libs or the NDP. And if they are in a safe NDP riding like I am, some of us are inclined to send a few votes to the Green Party, rather than pad the NDP's waistline. NDP tied with PCs as Ford’s Tories tumble in Ontario election: Ipsos poll

Remember back when Harris was Premier, and came up with that great idea of privatizing Ontario Hydro? That was supposed to fix all of power generation debt issues, instead the companies buying in have collected the profits and left the Province holding the bag on legacy debts. And, going a little further back, it was two successive previous...much more moderate Conservative governments which decided to borrow billions to build nuclear power stations in Ontario, rather than follow Quebec's example of investing in available hydro power from the rivers on our side of James Bay! And we've been paying for it ever since! I'm not a Wynne fan...I really don't have strong opinions one way or the other, but the legacy of provincial debt in Ontario was mostly piled up by over 40 years of successive PC rule, followed by Liberal, NDP and Conservative governments, and if Dougie wins I expect any budget balancing will be on backs of Ontario voters......and the good news today is that Andrea Horvath is closing in on 'Ford Nation!' There's a lot of Ontario voters who will go with either Liberal, NDP or Green Party as long as it keeps the Cons from applying their US-style rightwing government on us!

NO, the life being 'nasty, brutish and short' narrative that started with Thomas Hobbes, is continually retreaded by modern liberal and conservative tech-worshiping propagandists to make the present age look better by comparison. The real truth that can be gathered from paleo research is that hunter-gatherers universally lived better than succeeding generations who slowly and gradually took up settled agriculture...starting about 5 or 6000 years ago. Whether you're looking at skeletal remains in Europe, North Africa, or throughout Asia, the evidence is clear that people lost height and became shorter, lost brain size, lost teeth at an early age and died much younger than their ancestors living in the forests. This is why hunter-gatherers chose to stay in the forests in Africa and South America rather than take up farming like the farmers they lived in close proximity to and traded with for centuries....until recent times, when clearing tropical forests has left them no place to live in the wild any longer. There are a variety of reasons why the Agricultural Revolution was a step backwards/not forwards, and it seems that full time farming wasn't adopted until population densities grew large enough to make it essential. It wasn't the first choice to be dragging a hand-plow and then an ox-driven plow across the land all day! When we get to the Industrial Revolution, it was a great leap in efficiency and profit...which went to the owners, while the peasants that had been forced into the cities to provide the mills abundant cheap labor lived hellish lives compared to when they were still living on the land. I never went to university, so this issue is not at the top of the list of my concerns. But, as former NY Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges has said a number of times: if your criticism goes beyond specific government or corporate policies to criticizing the system itself..especially capitalism, you soon find yourself on the outside looking in, as no mainstream media will invite you on their shows or review and discuss your books. Liberals who want to keep getting paid know where the limits are and stay within them! A real leftwing critic can never be too big not to be dropped and effectively blacklisted by the powers that run commercial and donor-sponsored public media. And of course the same thing happens to rightwing libertarians who take their critique of the state to the point that they're going past criticizing Gina Haspel to condemning and calling for the abolition of the CIA itself...as Ron Paul did yesterday in a post on his website that was re-posted on a few libertarian sites, but will never show up on Fox News, NY Post, or the Washington Times etc. And, before I forget...at the local level, I don't agree with this policy some college anti-racist and related anti- activists have created called "Deplatforming." It would be better to let everyone have their chance to speak...and their chance to get shouted down rather than rely on university administrators to protect their rights. One Marxist critic of this strategy I heard a month or so ago, said the problem is that after Reagan and the fall of the Soviet Union in the 90's, the left was in general disarray and dropped out of economic debates, while the post-modernist trendy social activists filled the void with social issues and identity politics that doesn't put food on the table, and doesn't even develop strategies to deal with rising tuitions and other costs of college education! Do a quick online search for "Chomsky." He appears to be busier than most men half...or less than half his age! Problem is none of his articles, interviews or reviews are on MSM sources. When I looked, I came up with: The Intercept, In These Times, Truthout, Alternet, Common Dreams and Open Democracy on the first page of links. Only mentions from regular sources was a local Phoenix daily reporting that Chomsky appeared somewhere with Daniel Ellsberg on a nuclear arms debate. Like I mentioned already, it depends whether the left is the domesticated left that doesn't challenge the system or is the radical left that threatens the system....same goes for some libertarian cranks on the other side!

Liberals have their own games to play...collecting together all the identity-based groups discarded by conservatives, along with some guilt-ridden whites shamed into "checking their privilege." I can't think of any examples where it adds up to a winning strategy. But, in an era when winning at politics requires lots of $$$ and currying favor of most of the same oligarchs as the other party, the costs of appealing to the great unwashed masses is too high when it includes loss of major donors...who also offer the greatest benefits to retired politicians for favors while in office!

It's also a fact-free claim of yours, since you're implying that a biological need...which is no more than a biological "urge," means that need includes a need to possess a woman.

Isn't it obvious from the 'manifestos' that they don't consider women as having their own minds? Just a means to an end!

I credit my father's bad example as a belligerent, controlling patriarch, and my mother's good example of standing up and refusing to be cowed by him, as the reason why I grew up with a strong belief in women's rights and have tried to practice equality in my home. After 30 years of official marriage, I still want my wife to be with me because she wants to be with me/not because of obligation or that I need a female to exploit!

NO, except for psychopaths or sociopaths, the past 200,000 or more years of modern human history has been small bands of hunter-gatherers more recently transitioning to small agricultural settlements and all of these people, no matter where in the world you were talking about, did not think of themselves as "individuals!' Instead, if you ask people in pre-industrial societies, they see themselves in relation to where they fit within their extended families and local communities. In that sense, industrial civilization and the oversized cities it has created were the first step along the way of creating a sociopathic culture...which celebrates individualism over community responsibility! As I see the race drama today, sowing and exacerbating racial divides is a strategy used by the major oppressors who are very, very small in number. Let's just say that ...at least according to last year's T-4's, my gross income of $85,000 doesn't provide me much opportunity to oppress or exploit others...especially considering that full time wage earners in my income bracket are the ones who get stuck paying the highest amount in REAL taxes...since business owners..especially rich business owners have so many escape hatches to hide and squirrel away their money!

Marx created a particular brand of socialism...and also created his own version of history, since he was as much a product of enlightenment thinking as David Ricardo, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and the other early developers of economic theory. Like the capitalist market theorists, Marx had no respect for nature...viewing the natural world as just mere collections of raw materials to be utilized for human development. Marx was also a believer in technology, whereas the earlier socialist movements created by men of action/rather than educated thought(Fabians, Chartists, Luddites etc.) rightly viewed the new technologies as primarily tools of the owners of capital to use to enslave them to work long hours in factory sweatshops. Considering that the majority of the followers of Nathan Ludd and those who were able to read his tracts were tradesmen(and tradeswomen) who had or were in the process of developing skills that gave them bargaining power to determine where they live, what they would earn and how many hours they would work, they were out of step with the capitalists, the landowning aristocrats who wanted all the people on the commons to be cleared for commercial cattle and sheepraising, and then along came the Marxists who called them antiquated and relics of the past. The only difference between Marx and the capitalist vultures who went through the trouble of buying and developing steam engine-powered mills in dirty industrial cities, was that Marx wanted the economic benefits of the new industrialism to be shared by the workers...rather than the investors who controlled capital. A few days ago, I came across an indy radio(podcast) interview with 'Nathan Robinson' (editor of Current Affairs) who earlier this month wrote an important rebuttal to the BS about persecuted rightwingers on campus ...i.e. Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Christian Hoffs Somers, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin etc. etc. etc.. Robinson asks the simple, obvious question: how can a wimpy A-hole like our Jordan Peterson claim to be persecuted and shut out of debate when he earns an estimated $80,000 per month (US) speaking mostly on American college campuses and is all across the dial of corporate sponsored rightwing radio...not to mention frequently given a platform by self-proclaimed libertarians like Joe Rogan for example (who seems to think these guttersnipes have a point and give him cred with the alt-right). Pretty Loud For Being So Silenced Robinson also points out that you won't find long time left critics of US policies like Noam Chomsky being invited to speak at college campuses, nor does he get a chance to speak on any of the NPR or PBS shows he used to do years ago, and neither are younger generations of fellow leftists given a mike except on small independent media or foreign media...if you've noticed all the sqawking about RT and Radio Sputnik hosts and show guests since Clinton fumbled the 2016 coronation....I mean election. So much for all the lathering and bellyaching about SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS!

I don't know Andrea Horvath personally...though I do live in Hamilton, and like most NDP candidates who win federal and provincial office, she has been able to hold on to her seat by being a better than liberal-or-conservative constituency worker. So, most people who have talked or dealt with Andrea Horvath or people in her office have good things to say regardless of their political opinions. That said, I believe her political orientation is as far left as she believes she is able to take her party. Remember that the biggest problem she had as Ontario NDP leader last time around was the perceived shift she made to the center to appease the more centrist leaders of the Party. And Trudeau...I figured from the start, was an empty suit, who would say whatever he felt people wanted to hear. How else could he promise more pipelines to the oil interests out west/ while promising to honor all the treaties and conditions of land claims by first nations who didn't want pipelines running through their territories regardless of money being offered to throw at them to sweeten the pot? Obviously Trudeau had to disappoint someone...and by trying to play Solomon and split the baby....approving some pipelines and refusing others, he's made enemies with all sides! Isn't that what usually happens when a centrist narcissist has to show clear conviction...someone get Barack Obama on the line for confirmation!

Certainly, carbon taxes are similar to sales taxes (which conservatives don't seem to object to, since it was Mulroo who brought us the GST to start with!) in that even the poorest people have to buy food, clothing and other necessities as well as paying rent, and all taxes on consumption are going to pull more money out of the pockets of lower income earners than richer people who...as we hear so often about the Filthy Rich - can only buy so many mansions, cars, yachts, private tropical islands etc. with their ill-gotten gains. Therefore consumer taxes take proportionately less from the rich than those in the lower income demographics. That was the only reason why the Feds sweetened the deal offering GST-now-HST rebates here in Ontario...which don't matter a crap if you're in the middle income levels and earn too much to qualify for rebates! But, as the CBC story notes, many of us who had spent years doing long commutes on the highway back n forth to work started feeling an incentive to give up driving 100 miles every day as we got older and the long drives started taking more out of us by way of sleep deprivation. That along with rising insurance costs, gas, vehicle maintenance and just having to go through buying a new or newer 2nd hand vehicle every 4 to 5 years was enough to push me to move closer to work, even if it meant having to drop one or both cars entirely! If you move into an urban center with good public transit access...not to mention if you don't mind riding a bike or running and walking a few miles each day, getting rid of the car is a pleasure...not to mention reducing carbon impacts of the vehicle and the carbon/resource costs of producing more and more cars! There was a time in Canada and the US when nobody had a car, and it wasn't until after the end of WWII that the majority of working adults were buying and driving their own cars. This move to the private automobile is presented as a personal consumer choice in our BS historical narratives, but according to my father...who grew up and came of age during the Depression and went to war along with so many others of that generation, he intended to get married, buy a house and do other things before thinking about buying a car...BUT he felt like he had no choice because cities and towns where he moved to (Niagara Peninsula) started ending bus service to factories, closing street car rail lines..like one that ran along the Welland Canal from Port Colbourne to St. Catharines, and scaling back local transit as well as between cities and towns. This all occurred at a time when the Feds borrowed billions from the Bank of Canada (then still printing the money, and having the power to loan money into existence..that was handed over to the chartered banks) all to build hundreds of miles of new highways across Ontario and across Canada. Like the building of the state highway system in the US, this all could be considered a free gift from the Governments to the Highway Lobby- the car companies, oil companies and their investors. Now, putting this all out there, I ask 'why can't we take it back in the other direction, now that we know the environmental crisis this world is headed for, as well as looming resource shortages and rising prices that continued car production will cause?' I think the real problem and likely futility of trying to deal with environmental crises is that most people want to save the future for the generations coming after us, PROVIDED it doesn't cost them any...even the slightest discomfort! Recently, a nationwide poll found that almost 80% of Canadians accept the standard narrative on GHG's causing global warming BUT, barely 20% are willing to spend more or receive less in benefits to deal with the crisis! To me, this tells me that liberals are the worst actors of all in this drama! Unlike conservatives, they don't live in denial of scientific evidence or could care less, but instead want to pretend to be doing something about it that will cost them very little....like turning out the lights on Earth Day! Now, I believe the only hope for survival of complex life on Planet Earth and the only fainter hope of human survival for more than another century is the total collapse and end of modern capitalist industrial civilization. At some point in the future of this crazy system, everything will be used up beyond the point of profitability and the exploitation of this world will end! I just hope that people can survive somewhere on this planet as it continues heating up over the next thousand years or so!

Who told him he has a right to "have" any woman? He doesn't see women as autonomous and deserving freedom to make their own decisions...and if he's not part of it...thems the breaks! There seems to be a lot of guys who share the same attitudes about women. It's pretty common among conservatives.

And this idiot quoted in the American Conservative is a prime example of what happens when all issues are only seen through the lens of identity politics! He self-identifies as white "lower middle class" and believes that his identity group is the one actually being persecuted/not those dark people who trend higher on poverty stats and all the other bad economic measures. So, he's going to fight for his share of the pie based on his white identity against those of other races. And the majority of the other colours see their struggle along racial lines. What neither group can see after decades of anti-communism BS and the constant repeated refrain from the disciples of Reagan and Thatcher regarding capitalism: TINA - There Is No Alternative, is that it doesn't matter what colour you are if you earn less than $30,000 per year in the US...like almost half of American working adults today, you are in poverty and are barely scraping by. If that half of the population earning less than 30,000 thought beyond identity politics, they would put their differences aside and refuse to be divided and set against each other for the benefit of the privileged minority who own most of the capital and decide how global economies will function for the rest of us.

Where to begin! As usual, your posts are a dog's breakfast of accusations and misplaced labels and identifications that need to be unraveled before they can be challenged. There is almost no Marxism left in any discussion of these issues unless you conflate everything you're against on the left as being part of the same category! Identity politics is a creation of modern liberalism...which uses capitalist economic theory btw, not anything marxist or even socialist or anti-capitalist. Capitalism works both sides of the aisle on these social issues and is compatible with racism like what's represented in your white pride screeds, and works equally well with the anti-racist side as long as it talks about affirmative action and equal opportunity for minorities, and not about about ending capitalism or working towards economic equality. So don't blame socialists for social justice activists who blather on endlessly about 'intersectionality' that has no room for economic class in the intersection!