Common Sense of The Common People

90 per cent of Canadians don't think they're wealthy, survey finds

Well the majority ain't that's true, but 10% of these folks are lying to themselves if not to pollsters.

Butdespite all the whooping over the boom in capitalism from the boys on Bay Street and Wall Street, well folks don't feel it in their pocketbooks.

Salary concerns were a prime consideration for many respondents in the Mackenzie Investments study, with 40 per cent saying they expected their incomes to hover around the same mark over the next 10 years, dipping or rising marginally.

And for all the criticism of the Boomers they at least recognize that we are in a debt crisis, which government and business refuse to see.

According to the poll, 79 per cent of respondents said they feared that if shopping continued
to be viewed as a recreational activity, Canadians could face a crisis where they spend too much with little regard for the future.

"Overspending today but worrying about not having enough in the future is like waiting for your roof to fall in — it certainly isn't worth the wait," John Dale, executive vice-president of Mackenzie Investments, said in a release. "The 'haves and have-nots' in the future may be determined in part by the 'shop and shop-nots.' "

But their kids are shopoholics. It is the truimph of consumerism over productivity, the triumph of the American ideology of the lesiure class . Their parents had the middle class dream their kids live it. But it is still a dangerous myth.

But the study noted that more than any other demographic, young people tended to see shopping as a recreational pastime. About a third of respondents between the ages of 14 and 19 said they spent money as part of a larger socializing ritual, as compared with 13 per cent of all Canadians.

More than 92 per cent of young Canadians expect the same or more expensive lifestyles as their parents, it reported, suggesting their expectations may not be realistic.

See

Canadian Wealth

Wealth

Housing Crisis

Variable Capital


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The Ultimate Republican Team

This would be a chicken hawks ultimate fantasy dream team for the Republican entry in the 2008 Presidental race.

Tim Russert did not challenge Sen. John McCain's dubious claim that it is not "clear-cut" that the war is unpopular nationally because, if it were, Sen. Joe Lieberman "would not have been re-elected in the state of Connecticut."

Since both have experience being has beens in previous races.

John McCain, Republican, President

Joe Lieberman, Independent Yankee from Connecticut, Vice-President


McCain vehemently opposes the non-binding resolutions and the idea of putting a cap on the number of troops in Iraq.

The Arizona Republican got strong support in his use of the morale issue from his allies Sen. Joe Lieberman, independent Democrat from Connecticut and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

And, Lieberman asked, Senate passage of a resolution of disapproval of this new strategy in Iraq would give the enemy some encouragement?

“That’s correct,” replied Petraeus.

Lieberman said, “I want to make a plea to my colleagues” to not pass a resolution of disapproval of Bush’s troop surge. He urged them to consider Petraeus’s testimony about the effect on morale and to delay any move to pass a resolution of disapproval.

See

Richardson On The Ticket

Iraq


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Silent Tories

Another example of the Harpocrisy of the New Canadian Government.

While the Conservative Ministers of Finance and Industry were in China during the Chinese Satellite Weapons Test, this is all they said; Canada's New Government Focuses on Strategic Partnership with China

Now where was all that Conservative bombast and outrage that PM Harper mustered up and blasted the Chinese with when he was attending the APEC meeting? Why like most of the Tories Hot Air statements it's a blowin in the wind.

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Flaherty

China


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Arar Redux

So two days before Public Security Minister Stockwell Day visited the U.S. and in advance of the Leahy Senate Hearings, U.S. Homeland Security issued a letter to Canada saying that Arar was still considered a 'terrorist' by the United States.

Maybe Gonzales, who cosigned the letter, shouldn't have lied to Senator Patrick Leahy and just handed him this letter.

A letter that Stockwell Day said proved nothing.

Still waiting for the New Government of Canada to get tough with the U.S. on this...still waiting...yep waiting....waiting still....

See

Arar


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Scooby Secrets

File this under little known facts.

‘Scooby-Doo’ cartoonist dies at 81
Iwawo Takamoto said he created Scooby-Doo after talking with a Great Dane breeder and named him after Frank Sinatra’s final phrase in “Strangers in the Night.”

Actually Frank never said Scobby-doo it was "doo-be-doo-be-doo,"

This is another case of mis-hearing lyrics. I do it all the time so do most people.


See:

RIP

Comics

Obituary


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Animal Tales

Passport? Passport?! Skunks don't need no stinkin passport....

- A stowaway skunk that ended up in Canada after traveling more than 3,500-kilometres (2,200 miles) shut in the back of a truck from California has found a ride home.

Do you think they were watching Happy Feet.

Sixty seals at a Dutch refuge took shelter from the devastating storm which

swept across Europe in a cinema.

Elmer Fudd has nothing on this duck hunter....

Duck shot by Florida hunter survives 2 days in refrigerator

Wildlife officials said the feathered Lazarus had been shot by a hunter and put into his refrigerator for two days. That's when the hunter's wife opened the door and the duck lifted his head, giving her a scare. The man's wife "was going to check on the refrigerator because it hadn't been working right and when she opened the door, it looked up at her," said Laina Whipple, a receptionist at Killearn Animal Hospital.

This gives new meaning to Blowin in the Wind....

The pilot of a TV news helicopter used wind from the aircraft's rotor to push a stranded deer to safety after it lost its footing on a frozen lake and could not get up.


You might not be cheering so loudly for Free Willy if you knew where he is ending up....Killer whales drawn to 'warm' Arctic

And this guy obviously was just not tasty enough....Diver 'swallowed' by shark survives

The hew and cry will be raised about the need to kill man eating sharks despite the fact that sharks continue to be endangered....

Conservationists worry about shark population
Experts point out attacks on humans are overblown and millions of the fish are being killed

Conservationists: C'mon, give sharks a break!

See

Endangered Species

Animals

Environment

Orca

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Save All The Bears

$30M forest pledge 'clear signal' of green Tories: Baird

This is a nice start, but in no way proves the Conservatives are Green since the promise for federal funding was made by the previous Liberal Government. And like all of this weeks announcements the Conservatives are recycling old Liberal policies on the environment.

Now If John Baird really wants to save the Bears and not just those in Spirit Bear Park, there are the polar bears in the Arctic, Black Bears and Grizzly Bears in Alberta and B.C. he could declare as endangered species.

Of course the last Conservative Environment Minister opposed declaring any species endangered, which is perhaps why her position became endangered.

See

Baird Pushes Aside Native Elder

Bears

Environment


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Profits Up Jobs Cut

Hmm whats wrong with this picture?

Pfizer to lay off 10000 to cut costs

Pfizer 4Q Profit Soars to $9.45 Billion

Falling rate of profit perhaps? Profit Disfunction?

Impotence-treatment Viagra posted quarterly sales of $450 million, a 5 percent gain, while revenue from allergy drug Zyrtec jumped 14 percent to $374

Of course a falling rate of profit does not mean profits decline it means that it takes more profit, gouged out of the working class, to keep running on the spot.

Labour being variable capital it is always expendable.....

Do the ‘deep roots’ of inflation lie in the falling rate of profit?

TWO apparently contradictory phenomena are manifest simultaneously in the American economic structure today; at least they appear contradictory in the terms by which they are often described – inflation and deflation. A vastly expanded credit system, with its mountains of fictitious capital, has debased the currency almost beyond recognition. Alongside of this, excess capacity of production shows up in idle plants, or partially operating plants, and the resultant large-scale unemployment.

Marx's Analysis of the Falling Rate of Profit on the First Version Of Volume III of Capital

If the ratio of the variable part of capital to the constant part…is large, …this
shows that all the means towards the development of the productivity of labour
have not been employed. …that therefore with a large quantity of labour little is
produced, whereas in the opposite case a (relatively) large amount is produced
with a small amount of labour. The development of fixed capital…is a particular symptom of the development of capitalist production.

Falling Rate of Pricing and Profit Over the Internet

Marx originally described a system-wide falling rate of profit crisis as part of his analysis of advanced capitalism. In Marx's model, the increasing use of machinery with a decreased use of human labor would ultimately so increase total production, that total consumption power would be too low to keep production recycling back into consumption. A great inventory bulge would lead businesses to lay of excess workers and the downward spiral of laid-off workers and decreasing sales would so affect sales, the profits would fall.

Miller-Must The Profit Rate Really Fall?

We live in an age in which the horror of a falling rate of profit increasingly permeates the consciousness of growing layers of capitalists throughout the world. While profit rates fluctuate widely from boom to bust, from one country to another, and from one business or branch of industry to another, the feeling that profits are not what they should be, or not what they used to be, grows.

For the capitalists, and the economists who try to serve them, the shifts in profits that occur on the balance sheets of banks and corporations are not, nor can they be, manifestations of an underlying tendency rooted in the basic character of the capitalist mode of production. If a squeeze on profits becomes apparent, any number of immediate or indirect causes can be pointed to: interest rates, taxes, wages, environmental and other regulations, etc. Instead of probing the inner structure of capital, and the laws of its evolution, they are restricted to examining this mulitplicity of conflicting forces that forms the outward appearance of economic relations. As Marx commented about the capitalists and their theoretical spokepersons:

"...it is just as natural for the actual agents of production to feel completely at home in these estranged and irrational forms of capital–interest, land–rent, labor–wages, since these are precisely the forms of illusion in which they move about and find their daily occupation. It is therefore just as natural that vulgar economy, which is no more than a didactic, more or less dogmatic, translation of everyday conceptions of the actual agents of production, and which arranges them in a certain rational order, should see precisely in this trinity, which is devoid of all inner connection, the natural and indubitable lofty basis for its shallow pompousness." (Marx, 1962, p. 809)

The Decline in the Rate of Profit and The Theory of Crises. Raya Dunayevskaya

The constant revolutions in production and the constant expansion of constant capital necessitate, of course, an extension of the market. But the enlargement of the market in a capitalist nation has very precise limits. The consumption goods of a capitalist nation are limited by the luxuries of the capitalists and the necessities of the workers when paid at value. The market for consumption goods is just sufficient to allow the capitalist to continue his search for greater value. IT CANNOT BE LARGER.

This is the supreme manifestation of Marx’s simplifying assumption that the worker is paid at value. The innermost cause of crises, according to Marx, is that labor power IN THE PROCESS OF PRODUCTION AND NOT IN THE MARKET, creates a value greater than it itself is. The worker is a producer of overproduction. It cannot be otherwise in a value-producing society where the means of consumption, being but a moment in the reproduction of labor power, cannot be bigger than the needs of capital for labor power. This is the fatal defect of capitalist production. On the one hand, the capitalist must increase his market. On the other hand, it cannot be larger. This is what Marx calls THE GENERAL LAW OF CAPITALISM which cannot be overcome other than by the abrogation of the law of value.

The only “market” that enlarges beyond the limits of the working population paid at value is the capital market. But there too the constant technological revolutions make the time necessary to REPRODUCE a product tomorrow less than the time to PRODUCE it today. Hence there comes a time when all commodities, including labor power, are “overpaid.”

See

Big Pharma

Capitalism

Labour




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Being Right, Again

Yeah I know it's difficult to be humble when you get it right....


Weapons in space

Published: Friday, January 19, 2007

PART I
Going ballistic: Twenty years after he announced it, Reagan's missile defence legacy lives on in the U.S. -- and Canada. David Pugliese investigates.

Xia Liping, a People's Liberation Army (PLA) officer and professor at the Shanghai Institute for International Strategic Studies, said Beijing did not want an arms race in space. But the reported test may have been intended to push Washington towards international talks aimed at preventing a race, he suggested.

"The weaponisation of space would be very dangerous; it could lead to a new arms race," said Xia, who stressed he had no firm knowledge of any test. "I would say, though, that in the history of arms control the rule is that the United States is willing to ban a military capability only when other countries possess it."

In October, the White House finally released its new U.S. National Space Policy (NSP). This came after years of dithering and bureaucratic infighting as to what it would include and how far it would stretch the boundaries from the previous policy, last updated during the Clinton administration in 1996. The new NSP at first glance doesn’t indicate many obvious differences. However, a closer reading reveals that this, like everything else coming out of the Bush White House, contains a unilateralist and militaristic bent that could prove quite dangerous.

This policy heavily promotes “unhindered” access to space for the United States, while the previous one pushed for access to space for all countries. The new NSP also contains a distrust of international institutions that falls in line with much of the administration’s prior actions. See: Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, abrogation of; Kyoto Treaty, dismissal of; International Criminal Court, continued opposition to.

See

BMD

North Korea

China

Space

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Baird Pushes Aside Native Elder

As seen on TV. In his rush to shake hands with the Premier of B.C., gotta get that photo op , Federal Conservative Environment Minister John Baird pushed aside the outstretched hand of the Haida Elder and ignored him through out this announcement;Ottawa vows $30-million to protect Great Bear

And just to clear the air, how much are they giving? Canada To Spend $25m On Rainforest Plan

Hmm it seems there is some conflict over how much that cheque was for....

Groundbreaking Great Bear Rainforest Agreement Secures $120 Million

Canada gives $100m to save Spirit Bear Rainforest



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Environment


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