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Next you'll be telling us revolutions happened because some intellectual published a clever pamphlet, not because people were hungry.

Last edited by uziq (2020-11-12 13:04:33)

Last edited by uziq (2020-11-12 13:15:27)

"I come here with a message," Mr O'Toole said.
"I want to tell you that everything is not OK. Real wages have not risen in Canada since the 1970s.
"Millions of workers have lost their jobs. In fact, Canada has the highest unemployment rate in the G7.
"Even before the pandemic hit, half of Canadian families were just $200 away from insolvency.
"Middle class Canada has been betrayed by the elites, on every level: political elites, financial elites, cultural elites."

Private sector union membership has collapsed," he said.
"In the 1950s, one in three private sector workers were union members. Today, it's closer to one in 25.
"It may surprise you to hear a conservative bemoan the decline of private sector union membership.
"But this was an essential part of the balance between what was good for business and what was good for employees.
"Today, that balance is dangerously disappearing.
"Too much power is in the hands of a few corporate and financial elites who have been only too happy to outsource jobs abroad.
"It's now expected of a shareholder to ask a CEO 'why are we paying a worker in Oshawa $30 an hour when we could be paying one in China 50 cents an hour?' and while that shareholder may see gains, Canada gets poorer."

"Full-time employment, a regular, steady salary, a pension. These sound straight out of a bygone era," he said.
"A generation ago, married couples with steady jobs and with homes they paid off before they retired, assumed their kids would flourish.
"Now we've come to accept those as quaint notions from a distant past.
"Many parents I speak with worry that their children, particularly in the Toronto area, will never own their own home.
"It used to be that a job was the gateway into the middle class.

"Increasingly — especially for younger people — a job can be a dead end, an endless cycle of contract work with no benefits, no security, no obligations on the part of the employers.
"Do we really want a nation of Uber drivers? Do we really want to abandon a generation of Canadians to some form of Darwinian struggle? A future without the possibility of home ownership? A sense of inevitability?

"While some benefit, millions are losing hope and resentment is growing."

Mr O'Toole said he was from a traditional conservative background that valued low taxes, small government, personal freedom and responsibility, helping one's neighbour and free markets.

"But I also grew up in a working-class community," he said.
"My hometown of Bowmanville, Ontario, is a [General Motors] town. My dad worked there. Our neighbours were auto workers. There was a sense of loyalty to the hometown. It's ingrained in me.
"Over the last couple of decades, I've seen parts of my hometown and the region hollowed out. Jobs left and never came back for some families."
'It's time to take inequality seriously'
He then spent a few minutes criticising the Trudeau Government for moving too quickly on climate change.

But then he changed tack.

"It's time conservatives and Canadians took inequality seriously," he said.
"We made a mistake in allowing ourselves to de-industrialise totally.
"Thirty years ago, the Western world's political, financial and business elite made a bet — we would allow China to have unfair access to our market while they protected their own.
"Then, China was poor, underdeveloped and largely disconnected from the world.
"Once it became a rich and prosperous country, we hoped it would turn into a good actor who would democratise, take human rights seriously, liberalise, and play by global rules.

"We all know that this has not happened.

"State-owned juggernauts, Orwellian surveillance technology, cyber theft on an industrial scale, hostage diplomacy and increasing human rights abuses within its borders, and increasingly with its wider sphere of influence."
He said he was a firm believer in capitalism and "free enterprise" because they always led to the "most-efficient outcome", but sometimes the most-efficient outcome "does not always perfectly align with our national interest".
"It is more efficient and affordable to make masks, ventilators and gowns in China," he said.
"But as we have learned, to our cost, it is not in our national interest to make those things in China.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-11-14 22:26:11)

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-11-14 23:24:11)

SuperJail Warden wrote:

English speaking conservative parties rebranding themselves as the "party of workers" are trying to run a scam on low education/blue collar people. They want them to think they are on their side in a great war against "the elites" which means different things in different imaginations. Most often "The elites" are Social Justice Warriors, the Jews, college students, hipsters, and gay people especially upscale ones.

uziq wrote:

as for dilbert’s ‘this is cool’ post, wow man. welcome to what every single fucking left-wing thinker and book have been saying for about 50 years. if you weren’t so sniffy about reading then you’d be very au fait with these arguments. the left wing hasn’t shut up about ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘late capitalism’ since the 1980s. but instead you make disparaging remarks about ‘cultural marxism’ and echo the lame dipshit rhetoric of right-wing tabloid pundits instead.

i linked a long LRB essay here about 3 months ago that re-assessed the history of western elites’/big businesses’ relationship with china from the 1980s onwards.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-11-15 01:07:30)