Why do the Liberals and NDP still act as though there was something remotely controversial about anthropogenic global warming or the threat to our society from growing inequality of incomes, wealth and opportunity?
These are two enormous threats to the Canadian people, today and for generations to come, and both require progressive solutions.
As a major, per capita emitter, Canada is among the handful of nations under the greatest moral duty to act to arrest climate change. We are full members in a select club of major emitters who have an obligation to lead the world in decarbonizing our economies and our societies. Yet there doesn't appear to be even one of those currently in party leadership positions or vying for a leadership spot who will stand on the principle of what Canada, already a well-deserved pariah state, must do.
And then there's the social cancer that threatens to consume our middle class, inequality. It seems to be conventional political wisdom that Canada's economy is so integrated with America's that attacking inequality is too dangerous, fraught with enormous consequences for the Canadian economy.
Are we really doomed to fly wingman to America as it spins out of control? In several respects America is on its way down and on its way out. It has become the corporatist state sans pareil, the most powerful permanent warfare state perhaps since Rome and a boiling cauldron of spreading inequality and ascendant oligarchy. Must we tie ourselves to that? Can we not imagine something better for our people than what they would inflict on theirs? Are we really that fearful of a better future?
There was a time when the New Democrats would be demanding these very things for the Canadian people. There was a time when they would be standing and loudly shaming the government of the day for this sort of thing. Now they stand mute, silenced, seeking to become what they for so long reviled. The duct tape across their mouths is their own.
"And then there's the social cancer that threatens to consume our middle class, inequality."
ReplyDeleteI find it a bit troubling that you don't reference the cancer that is also consuming the poor, homeless and the destitute. Only the 'middle-class' is entitled to equality?
I'll stand with Chris Hedges on this one. The entire political system is corrupt. Voting is pointless. But there is a train a coming. It could be progressive, it could be proto-fascist. You know, 50-50.
Flip a coin.
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ReplyDeleteCorrection. He approved the Nexxan deal. That's more depressing.
ReplyDelete@ Anon 10:34. The reason I tie the inequality problem to the middle class is that is where the great wealth is being siphoned away to the ultra rich. It is also the middle class that, when robust and healthy, is the vehicle to life people out of poverty and into a better life. And it is a healthy, broad-based and prosperous middle class that underwrites the social safety net without which the poor are truly hooped.
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