Greetings babblers from Victoria
Hi babblers.
I've been reading for a few weeks and am really enjoying the hard left perspective of the forum.
Because I was lucky enough to work for decades in a strong union shop I'm a happy and comfy Victoria retiree.
I still hold to old timey socialist ideals - tax the rich and corporations at much higher rates - regulate the capitalists until they scream and then regulate some more - remove impediments to organizing in the workplace - scrap free-trade agreements so our workers can more easily protect hard won gains - and where the public good mandates it, nationalize key industries and sectors.
Tax - Regulate - Organize - Protect - Nationalize.
Thanks to the moderators and oraganizers of the site for providing such a useful platform for lefty expression and debate.
Welcome and I look forward to your contributions. Trust me I don't say that to every new poster.
Welcome, Saanich.
Hi Saanich West! Always good to grow babble's population out here on the best coast. Welcome, and I look forward to reading what you have to say--especially the "old timey socialist" ones!
Greetings, Saanich. I hope you have fun.
Saanich is close to Victoria and the Esquimalt graving docks is where Seaspan's Victoria Shipyards operates out of. However the main Seaspan headquarters and shipyard is in North Vancouver.
Thank you all.
Don't think any of the Tory ship building largess is coming our way. We have our subs to keep us busy.
Oh and a brand new helicopter mainanence facility. Hundreds of millions for that.
Sorry for the double post. I'm new ehh?
Are you sure you're in the right place?
We can't afford to even promise all that in one four-year term. It would be revealed to be a lie or political suicide whichever comes first.
Yes, there are some of us on the left who genuinely want to see it happen. And I think there are those who just want to see a certain opposition party make grandiose Liberal Party style promises they know full well could never be done within a four-year time frame. There are some who would love nothing better than for the first federal NDP government to really step in it big time. And socialism would be discredited for the record. Canada would become a bad precedent and case study in how not to implement socialism. It took 35 years to fuck things up so badly under the new liberal financial regime in this country beginning by 1975. It will take more than four years to fix it I'm afraid. For now we could do with sane government in general instead of the fiscal Frankensteins we've had since Mulroney and even before that.
I was only stating some fundamental ideals, not a platform I think a social democratic party like the NDP would run or govern on.
I would be surprised if a future hypothetical NDP government came close to enacting my pocket wish list.
If we were very lucky we might get somewhat more progressive taxation, tighter regs on banks(maybe) and polluters(probably), a chance to do something really good on the workplace organization front, but tearing up free trade agreements and nationalization are non-starters for the NDP of 2011.
They're also non-starters among most babblers, unfortunately.
Which was the reason for my rhetorical question.
It sounds like the poster who responded to you there was ordering you to stop dreaming. He shouldn't have said that.
You read far too much into it Gaian. Through Bageant's writings, for which you seem to have a particular flavour, he understood well enough to have described the junction between power and its subjects as being practically invisible, as it has been understood for some time.
In acknowledging that we maintain collectively everything deserving of revolt, which is another way of saying we are all implicated to one degree or another; varying levels of accountability to be sure; it should become logically apparent to anyone that the first target of revolution should be ourselves, followed up with practically anyone in the vicinity, and hasn't history repeated itself enough? Frankly there is too much to perform and demand.
On the other hand we're confronted with the fact that there is so much to do in order to escape this creation of ours, that permeates everything including our sleep at times, and still the argument persists that there is only one way of expression, one way of addressing the problems, and we'll persuade everyone outside the new boundaries we've set down once again with denunciations filtered through moral ambiguity.
If people speak against the imposition of peaceful organization everywhere its because we're in no position in the West to say how anyone should resist, here and elsewhere.
And welcome Saanich West. As for those 'old timey socialist' ideals, I'm afraid to have some rather bad news to pass along. They've been trying to create a civilized space for some time now, and so you'll find little of that here; at least not without a certain amount of ridicule attached.
"But what about ideas for a happy hour for ALL retirees, how to attain that Olympian state?"
Hardly a project of Olympian difficulty for a country as rich as Canada.
Redistribute some of the capitalist booty the gov recieves after the rich and corps are fairly taxed into a robust national retirement system. Leverage even more money from the capitalists for pensions by removing impendiments to organizing in the workplace and to collective bargaining once unionization has taken place.
By comfy, I mean I live in a beautiful part of the world and I have enouqh money every month to pay the bills, put food on the table, and occasionally indulge my hobbies - gun club not lawn bowling. It's a modest lifestyle, made possible because I worked for decades in a dreadful job for a company that made billions of dollars during my time with them. I was lucky enough to be represented by a powerful union that managed to leverage our collective power and direct some of that enormous profit into the long term benefit of myself and the other members of my shop.
You can hear a pin drop as everyone waits in shocked silence while Gaian prepares his withering retort...
In order to describe something as withering M. Spector, it should at least be capable of some accuracy.
"Withering" sometimes looks like this:
I dont know about that Sluberjack. For example, I only think the 'nationalize' part of that is terminaly passe. And I dont see myself as in the majority opinion on that around here.
And- IMO. there is a fair bit less ridicule around here than there used to be.