So... let us go through it by the income interests.

The ONDP and its defenders on the issue of the very recently passed Ontario budget have been quick to talk of  "making parliament work" and of being "responsible." The Liberals, obviously, have embraced this.

But make parliament work for who, exactly?

Many have applauded the so-called ONDP tax that applies to almost no one. The miniscule charge on the ULTRA wealthy that only comes into effect on over $500,000 in income, non-inclusive! A tax that McGuinty has already said will be used to pay off capitalist creditors... making it, for what it is, a tax from the very rich to the very rich.

So, it's official. No matter what happens, Ontario is getting austerity.

The "brinkmanship" around the McGuinty budget has made this clear.

There is the Hudak slash and burn version that seeks to implement the full Drummond Report; a virtually guaranteed way to greatly exacerbate inequality and to drive Ontario back into recession.

There is the McGuinty version, which seeks to balance the books directly on the backs of labour, workers and the poor, while, perhaps intentionally from the start, trying to appear moderate by not bringing, for now, the full Drummond Report apocalypse that they themselves commissioned.

In his opening paragraphs to the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx noted that people "make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."

It is one of the most basic and fundamental insights into the way our society, its politics and its mass thinking work, and yet its meaning is often forgotten or ignored.

We, as people exist in a context, and that context shapes the way we think and the way we act. That context is sometimes of our own making, in part or in whole, but regardless, it is inescapable and it frames the way we think, react and act as a society, often imperceptibly.

A friend of mine is fond of saying that if you need evidence of patriarchy, you need look no further than high-heeled shoes.

It's that thinking that spawned yesterday's Walk a Mile in her Shoes action, in which feminist-friendly men strapped on a pair of pumps at Younge and Dundas in Toronto and teetered painfully down the street in solidarity with ending violence against women.