The CAW, government and strategic voting

Unless they screw up real bad, I dont think we'll see 1930's conditions repeated in the same way. It's true that personal savings rates in Canada are at a 1930's level, and Tories and Liberals have pared down UI/EI coverage to 1940's levels.

But we have too much socialist economy in place, believe it or not, since then to cushion the hard landing. Iow's, we cant crash like laissez-faire capitalism did in 1929, because laissez-faire capitalism was abandoned in the 1930's. Our governments in North America quietly adopted Soviet style soft budget constraints and much Keynesianism through the cold war. They have all kinds of tools at their disposal but choose socialism for the rich to near collapse. It's amazing how they can screw things up with socialism for the rich until the last dog is hung and still win phony majority governments with low voter turnouts.

The GM and union proposal is apparently a done deal, if the company isnt forced into bankruptcy by bond holders, which is likely.

Bankruptcy for GM has been pretty well the assumed outcome for at least a week. At any rate, the agreements with the CAW and UAW are crafted with bankruptcy filings in mind.

Lord Palmerston wrote:

Fidel I am curious of what your definition of "socialist" is.

Socialism is all around us. It's keeping western world capitalism from coming unglued. And our options are narrowing between socialism and barbarism.