Dedicated to the Restoration of Progressive Democracy
Monday, June 29, 2015
Just When I Thought the Left Had Collapsed, This. A Must Read.
Many thanks for this from Emily Dee. Read it, take it all in, remember what we Canadians used to be, what we believed in, what once made us great. There is still hope.
Hey An interesting point of view. It has been a long time since a leading politician spoke up for the 'working class'.
But Hey, the $15/hour/min/wage meme and the raging battle around it (both here in Canada and the US) says a lot.
More and more of the former "middle class" (and especially their kids) are headed for the low wage ghetto.
Oh and the irony ... many of us in Tom's generation were desperate to leave boring Partridge-family middle class values behind and embrace the so called counter culture.
BTW .. here's a piece methinks you will like: http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/michael-laxer/2015/06/are-greens-progressive-party
Thanks for the link, NPoV. As a former member of the now extinct Liberal left I have found the Green policy platform much to my liking. I agree with Laxer that it's the most progressive party today. Interesting that Laxer didn't explore the Green foreign policy platform which is vastly more progressive than Mulcair's "which way is the wind blowing now?" policy. He also omitted the Green policy on restoring a free press in Canada.
One thing that's become clear as the Layton/Mulcair movement abandoned the Left to become a mildly conservative, centrist outfit is how many former devout socialists turned out to be just fine with their party's new digs.
The lesson I took from that is how deeply "badged" most Canadian voters really are. A party can change its stripes and it really doesn't matter. I suppose Harper knew that when he set about to shift Canada's political center well to the Right. To me it was a consummate act of political cowardice and betrayal when the Liberals but especially the NDP made Harper's dreams come true.
I was never an NDP voter but I sure respected them up until Layton took over. I think they're too far gone now to ever be trusted with the Left flank again. Maybe they'll be subsumed as the new left wing of the Liberal Party and we'll just have to invent another, truly progressive social democratic party.
What idealists (of any stripe) tend to forget is that people cheat. Back in the late 1980's the company I worked for introduced a program which imitated Japanese corporate structure. There was a lot of training of employees and decision making moved to work groups; at least that was the theory. The program was really well thought out and should have been good. What happened was that people looking for bonuses or under some sort of pressure or just plain lazy cheated. Ultimately, the finance boys and girls figured out that downsizing made their stock value go up for a month or two and most of the front line staff took early retirement, myself included.
Emily Dee's article reminded me of this with her talk of trickle down economics. We have had quite a number of Neo-Liberal zealots scratching their heads wondering why its not working. At the end Jim Flaherty was almost pleading with corporate leaders to spend more, hire more, to live up to their side of the bargain. Of course, no corporate leader is going to put the betterment of mankind, society or the planet ahead of those short term stock values or their personal portfolio.
Hey
ReplyDeleteAn interesting point of view. It has been a long time since a leading politician spoke up for the 'working class'.
But Hey, the $15/hour/min/wage meme and the raging battle around it (both here in Canada and the US) says a lot.
More and more of the former "middle class" (and especially their kids) are headed for the low wage ghetto.
Oh and the irony ... many of us in Tom's generation were desperate to leave boring Partridge-family middle class values behind and embrace the so called counter culture.
BTW .. here's a piece methinks you will like:
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/michael-laxer/2015/06/are-greens-progressive-party
Thanks for the link, NPoV. As a former member of the now extinct Liberal left I have found the Green policy platform much to my liking. I agree with Laxer that it's the most progressive party today. Interesting that Laxer didn't explore the Green foreign policy platform which is vastly more progressive than Mulcair's "which way is the wind blowing now?" policy. He also omitted the Green policy on restoring a free press in Canada.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that's become clear as the Layton/Mulcair movement abandoned the Left to become a mildly conservative, centrist outfit is how many former devout socialists turned out to be just fine with their party's new digs.
The lesson I took from that is how deeply "badged" most Canadian voters really are. A party can change its stripes and it really doesn't matter. I suppose Harper knew that when he set about to shift Canada's political center well to the Right. To me it was a consummate act of political cowardice and betrayal when the Liberals but especially the NDP made Harper's dreams come true.
I was never an NDP voter but I sure respected them up until Layton took over. I think they're too far gone now to ever be trusted with the Left flank again. Maybe they'll be subsumed as the new left wing of the Liberal Party and we'll just have to invent another, truly progressive social democratic party.
BTW, NPoV, I decided to incorporate Laxer's analysis in a separate blog post. Again, many thanks.
ReplyDeleteWhat idealists (of any stripe) tend to forget is that people cheat. Back in the late 1980's the company I worked for introduced a program which imitated Japanese corporate structure. There was a lot of training of employees and decision making moved to work groups; at least that was the theory. The program was really well thought out and should have been good. What happened was that people looking for bonuses or under some sort of pressure or just plain lazy cheated. Ultimately, the finance boys and girls figured out that downsizing made their stock value go up for a month or two and most of the front line staff took early retirement, myself included.
ReplyDeleteEmily Dee's article reminded me of this with her talk of trickle down economics. We have had quite a number of Neo-Liberal zealots scratching their heads wondering why its not working. At the end Jim Flaherty was almost pleading with corporate leaders to spend more, hire more, to live up to their side of the bargain. Of course, no corporate leader is going to put the betterment of mankind, society or the planet ahead of those short term stock values or their personal portfolio.