Daisy Kinsella

So big bad nasty Warren Kinsella has gone off on his own with some pals and created a new consulting firm called...wait for it...Daisy.

Actually it should probably should have been called Daisy Chain.

A rose by any other name...?
Really Daisy?!

Kinda of whimpy name for folks who claim to be able to do all this and leap buildings in a single bound.

• Need someone to improve a government decision
• Need someone to protect your reputation
• Need someone to move public opinion
• Need someone to help face a crisis

After all Kinsella is no Spring Daisy (think geriatric punk rocker) and he certainly ain't no wilting daisy when it comes to selling out.


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Kinsella

May Day Redux

Rabble.ca has published an excellent essay on May Day versus Labour Day, by Canadian Marxist Leo Panitch. He refer's to Bryan Palmers book; Cultures of Darkness:

Palmer was a student of E.P.Thompson's (The Making of the English Working Class) and is a leading Canadian Labour Historian. Panitch sums up Palmers thesis which coincides with mine, click on the title to read it.

Debate on the origins of May Day is conducted in the truncated Babble.ca


What Palmer says about May Day fits well with my Origins and Traditions of May Day

This radical May Day tradition is nowhere better captured than in Bryan Palmer's monumental book, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression [From Medieval to Modern] (Monthly Review Press, 2000). Palmer, one of Canada's foremost Marxist labour historians, has done more than anyone to recover and analyze the cultures of resistance that working people developed in practicing class struggle from below. He's strongly critical of labour-movement leaders who've appealed to those elements of working-class culture that crave ersatz bourgeois respectability.

Set amid chapters on peasants and witches in late feudalism, on pirates and slaves during the rise of mercantile imperialism, on fraternal lodge members and anarchists in the new cities of industrial capitalism, on lesbians, homosexuals and communists under fascism, and on the mafia, youth gangs and race riots, jazz, beats and bohemians in modern U.S. capitalism, are two chapters that brilliantly tell the story of May Day.

One locates Haymarket in the context of the Victorian bourgeoisie's fears of what they called the “dangerous classes.” This account confirms the central role of the “anarcho-communist movement in Chicago [which] was blessed with talented leaders, dedicated ranks and the most active left-wing press in the country. The dangerous classes were becoming truly dangerous.”

The other chapter, a survey of “Festivals of Revolution,” locates “the celebratory May Day, a festive seizure of working-class initiative that encompassed demands for shorter hours, improvement in conditions, and socialist agitation and organization” against the backdrop of the traditional spring calendar of class confrontation.

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rabble.ca, Panitch, Palmer, Thompson, MayDay

Tories Are Boozers

I don't klnow what it is about the Tories but they seem to have an inordinate fondness for booze, take King Ralph. Well in the new Federal Budget they made a big deal out of dropping excise taxes for Canadian wineries and Beer Microbreweries. Just in time for Canada Day, hic.

— Effective July 1st, 100-per-cent Canadian wine produced by small vintners will be exempt from duty.

— Effective July 1st, the rate of excise duty on beer produced by small brewers will be reduced.

Text of James Flaherty's budget speech

So I guess that makes the Liberals and NDP Pot Heads.



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The Man Who Would Be King

A tip o' the blog Steve Janke for this. It gives new meaning to that old conservative phrase; For King and Country. Well we know he is an autarch.

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Harper, PM, PMO, Canada, politics, conservatives, government

Tories Good News Budget

They kept their promises even the ones that we don't like. But over all the budget aimed its tax cuts at the working class, the first budget in twenty years, yes including the Mulroney years, to do so.

As I predicted the BQ will back the Tories on the budget.

Honk For Public Day Care

Harper Plays Charest

They will hold their noses as Duceppe says and vote for the Budget, which the Liberals and NDP will oppose.

The budget gives tax breaks to workers with all of us getting a $1000 tax credit for home purchases of computers etc. apprenticeship tax breaks, tool tax breaks, child athletics/sports tax break, etc. The savings to workers, pensioners, and even small business offset the corporate tax cuts in the budget. It also cut off low income earners from income tax, As a result, about 655,000 low-income Canadians will be removed from the tax rolls altogether.

It is a blue collar budget, not a champagne budget, one aimed at staying in power for the rest of the year. The Liberals call it a political budget, which it is,there is something for everyone, a chicken in every pot, a way of forstalling another election. It is not so much a Conservative budget as a populist one. Expect the Tories poll numbers to jump accordingly.

The real Conservative budget will be revealed next year. For now we can celebrate a budget that gives us back some of our money, while surpluses remain for social spending.

That issue will be the fight the Conservatives will face over the next year, how to spend the surplus on social programs, and which social programs. How they will deal with the environment and with the fiscal imbalance.

On childcare they have sweetened the pot by claiming they will look at funding daycare spaces, how well that is still to be determined, and so the public pressure has to continue, they have weakened already on their corporate tax credit for daycare by saying this.

As for the Liberals promises, well they weren't worth the paper they were written on once the election was called.



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Canada, Budget, Federal, goverment, Conservatives, Flaherty, tax-breaks