the next could be another Trump

E.g. Prez Tucker Carlson on an anti-Israel + pro-deportations ticket

Yeah the sockpuppet can only operate on boolean logic and when something doesn’t neatly fit, like the US-Israel war on Iran which obviously helps Russia, it twists into a pretzel and starts throwing exceptions.

There’s probably going to be some reversal in such a scenario but I think this time it goes deeper than that. People see it’s not just the clowns in the White House, it’s also all major American corporations and their owners. Those won’t change with the coming of Obama v2, and they’re not about to start exracting less from us. Meanwhile China’s gonna keep taking more and more mindshare by delivering more and more high and low tech products in people’s lives. I think a significant reversal that puts the US above China would only occur under an FDR-like figure that curbstomps the whole US oligarchy.

Well, they’ll have to somehow hide the bodies if they’re to keep up the pretense they did not commit genocide, including before their own society.

It’s so over:

The king has no clothes.

You won’t see me disagreeing with that. I’ve been following the AC, CP, CN strikes and I saw what you observed. I think it’s not even primarily for foreign investment, although that probably is a downstrean effect. I think it’s primarily for our own corporations’ owners benefit. They have significant lobbying power, and at least two of the major parties ideologically support firms over workers as many of them still believe in some form of trickle-down free-market economics. It’s bad. There’s been no positive change in direction towards organized labour from the Carney gov’t. I think they’re going to discover that their promises of higher wages would fall flat without strengthening org labour. Perhaps it’s a delayed tactic, an attempt to shore up the economy in these times before they let labour have its share, but that ignores that (sovereign) economic strength largely comes from robust domestic demand, which means higher wages. And I don’t believe it’s a delay tactic anyway. The simpler explanation is the more obvious one.

A defeated (likely failed state) Iran would be bad for Russia, so Russia helps. A resisting Iran also means higher oil revenues for Russia, so Russia helps. There’s more reasons but these are probably enough.

Drivers tend to drive with the speed that feels safe for the given street. Sometimes thats over the limit, other times it’s under. Perhaps that’s what’s going on.

They should make the pertinent conclusion that US bases don’t protect them, that US is only standing by Israel.

That’s like threatening a dog with a weiner.

Nice, we made 4 out of 20!

No I wouldn’t. I would say unionization is eroded through various union busting strategies as practiced going as far back as the 19th century. The incentives to bust unions operates on individual firm level and does not require any other macro level phenomena to explain. Firms bust unions because unions increase wages and higher wages reduce profits.

Nice theory you got there, shame it doesn’t bear out in practice. In normal labour conditions workers have no leverage over employers to demand higher wages because workers have to take any job available in order to avoid homelessness and hunger. Workers demand for jobs is inelastic. Only in labour shortage scenarios workers have leverage to demand higher wages. But even then industry consolidation counteracts that because large corporations not only have price setting market power in the consumer market but also in the labour market. This is why the only consistent way to create similar leverage for worker in the labour market is unionization. Wages have never grown significantly enough to chip away wealth inequality except in the presence of strong and wide unionization. This is the main reason why increased labour productivity decoupled from wage increases since the 70s and 80s, when union busting started picking up around the world.

Rapidly increasing labour supply can make wages worse but that’s not the main driver as there have been periods where wages have both been increasing with significant immigration and also others where wages were stagnant without significant immigration.

Wait, I think I’ve seen this one somewhere.

Fren, cross the rubicon, it’s a lot more fun over here, I promise.

There are special occasions. E.g, going to work when you’d have a meeting with MS reps.

Mysterious are the ways to learning the workings of capitalism.

If that were the only thing PP planned, me and my friends would not have spent money on defeating him. More like privatizing the CBC which would put all TV media under corporate ownership. And we know what effects on democracy that has.

The presence is necessary but not sufficient.

For sure. Some are already doing that.