Freedom

Freedom

 

In Alberta, truckers blockading a road that runs into Montana began voluntarily leaving on Tuesday. Marco Van Huigenbos, one of the protest’s organizers, claimed the blockade was “infiltrated by an extreme element” after Royal Canadian Mounted Police made 13 arrests Monday and seized firearms, body armor, and ammunition during a morning raid of three trailers that preceded the Emergencies Act invocation. “Our objective was to be here peacefully,” Huigenbos said. “To keep that message going, we want to peacefully leave [the border town] Coutts and return to our families.”

 

-       REPUBLICAN LAWMAKER TELLS PROTESTING CANADIAN TRUCKERS TO COME TO AMERICA AFTER TRUDEAU CRACKS DOWN – VANITY FAIR

 

The paw prints of malign actors like former Trump administration ideologue Steve Bannon are all over the occupation of Ottawa by the “Freedom Convoy” and disruptions of other Canadian cities and transportation corridors by far-right rent-a-mobs.

 

-       Canada Must Investigate the Convoy Money, The Tyee

By Gregg Wall (2-20-2022)

 

For anyone under any illusions as to what the so-called Freedom Convoy was all about, one need only look at its supporters in Canada and the United States, which included an inexhaustible list of far-right extremists.  From members of Canada’s conservative party, including Alberta’s Premier, Jason Kenney … all the way to the United States, where billionaires, Trump and Elon Musk, weighed in with enthusiastic support (and of course, the mouthpiece of twenty-first century fascism, Fox News).  Et al. 

 

The Washington Post did a piece on the hacking of the mob funding site, GiveSendGo, in support of the economy damaging blockade, and discovered approximately 40% of the money donated came from elite, white enclaves within the United States, mostly GOP leaning.  And perhaps while the protests may have started out innocently enough (that's a big maybe), the convoy was quickly hijacked by white supremacists, fringe members of the People’s Party (a party that won zero seats in the Canadian parliament, in the last election), and in Alberta, gun toting thugs. 

 

The Freedom – to spread disease – Convoy, of course, had antivaxxer origins and decried the Trudeau government’s vaccination and public health measures & policies (which have been overwhelmingly successful and have saved countless Canadian lives, vis-à-vis the U.S., where refrigerated morgue trucks had to be brought in to deal with almost a million dead Americans). But the mob quickly spun out of control with a list of demands, including – but not limited to – the overthrow of the Liberal government, which just won re-election.

 

All of this was reined in over the last week and into this weekend, when the Trudeau government issued orders, under the Emergencies Act, and quickly mopped up the menagerie (which was a threat to public health, the economy, and the freedom of everyone else in Ottawa to coexist peacefully). 

 

 

 

 

 

Lost in all this chaos was the fact that nearly 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated. The Canadian Teamsters weighed in and identified the Freedom Convoy for exactly what it was: a threat to the economy, jobs, opportunity, and truckers.  And a ‘despicable display of hate.’

 

Of course, the Convoy had similarities to the January 6^th coup attempt in the United States, where an increasingly shrinking white demographic has lashed out at anything resembling change, under the banner of freedom.  But for these Molotov cocktail throwers, and assorted anarcho-totalitarians, freedom always means one thing, living with: white rule, white rules, white supremacy, and white male patriarchy. 

 

In America, and as I mentioned in my last piece, Thirteenth Amendment, being free increasingly means - particularly for the disenfranchised - the right to be indentured at birth with $30 trillion in national debt, the right to be systemically price gouged by monopoly and cartel.  Freedom means bone crushing student debt.  And freedom increasingly means medical bankruptcy, and wage and price controls set by monopoly and Wall St.  Freedom in America means an opioid epidemic, ever-increasing childhood poverty, and the freedom to die early, with an ever-shrinking life expectancy.  

 

In American, freedom, increasingly, only exists for the one percent to prey upon the balance of the nation. 

 

Such irony, then, that the freedom these fringe Canadian groups cry out for exists far more so in Canada, than in the United States… where American workers, often, cannot quit work and start up a business, because they are all too often tethered to their existing employer for medical insurance (under a failed for-profit health care model).

 

And that’s probably the central point of this entire episode:  thanks to the pooling of resources -- by the taxpayer and via a strong, progressive government -- Canadians are free from a lifetime of worry about impending health care financial crisis & bankruptcy.  As a result, Canadians have the freedom to shift employment and even engage in entrepreneurship w/out medical worry.  Barring significant change in the United States, and a Biden administration that actually begins delivering on the progressive change it promised the American people, Canadians are - and will remain - far more freer than their American cousins.

 

That’s the primary reason why in Canada, the members of the so-called Freedom Convoy are the lunatic fringe, while in the United States, they are the Republican party.  A strong safety net, social contract, and a universal healthcare system helps ensure that right-wing radicalism remains on the fringes of Canadian society. 

 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2022

The Thirteenth Amendment

The Thirteenth Amendment

 

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

 

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

-       Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution 

 

By Gregg Wall (2-5-2022) 

 

Where are America’s great abolitionists?  And why have they forsaken us? 

 

The questions are not rhetorical, but an acknowledgement that all Americans are enslaved at birth, in the service of national debt that has largely been accumulated making the rich catastrophically wealthy.  Some place the national debt at $30 trillion, with every newborn American facing, presently, approximately $90,000 in debt hanging over their head the second they exit the womb.

 

The libertarian US economy means Americans are enslaved, indentured, cast into involuntary servitude in ways too numerous to count; but rest assured, by the end of this piece, we will enumerate some of the most egregious examples. 

 

First, what is slavery?  Contemporary definitions include, but are not limited to: Forced labor, Bonded labor (more traditionally, called indentured servitude, that is labor to repay a debt), Child labor, Descent-based slavery, Trafficking, and Early and forced marriage. 

 

The Thirteenth Amendment also refers to involuntary servitude… labor demanded under contract or peonage, generally, to repay a debt.  And here, indentured servitude would fit the bill. 

 

As America has little or no safety net, Americans are often forced to work in deplorable conditions, often at pay dictated – not by market forces, or via a living wage established by the government – but by monopolies and monopsony.  Moreover, globalization and technology means that an employer can shift jobs overseas the moment a monopolist feels labor is getting out of line or threatens to unionize. Technology has reached a point, where jobs often can be easily automated.  The Washington Post placed the number of Americans working for less than $15 an hour at 39 million. 

 

Somewhere between 33% and 40% of American workers are employed in the gig economy, which is only expected to grow.  That is to say, doing jobs with substandard pay and that are rife with wage theft.  And what is the foundation of the gig economy… the idea, basically, is to give employers control over employees, but then turn around and say they are contract labor, so employers can escape all manner of employee benefits, taxes, and scrutiny. 

 

And the outcome for the worker, who are paid a nonliving wage or engaged in gig work?  Often substandard living conditions, and greater and greater amounts of personal debt – on top of the aforementioned national debt – that compels them to keep grinding it out, in indentured servitude.  In short, workers cannot escape the debt and taxes that surround them, which has an impact on their mental and physical health and their family life. (Moreover, the US government uses the national debt to extract taxes from everyday Americans, at rates the wealthiest can’t be bothered to pay, if they pay anything; and then the government uses the same debt to enforce punitive austerity upon the American people.)

 

And with the consolidation of the US economy, into cartels and monopolies (thank you Private Equity & Wall Street), many workers simply do not have choices, particularly in regards who they work for. 

 

So we can see that tens of millions of Americans are enslaved by a system that is entirely rigged against them.  And our U.S. Congress?  They could afford greater worker protections and in fact, Dems have won office on promises to expand worker protections, like: a living wage, a child tax credit, and a Medicare for All health care option.  But our day traders in the Congress, once ensconced in power, have little appetite to curtail the profits associated with increasing their donors’ and big business interests’ greatest cost, employee wages. 

 

And so the cycle repeats and the number of Americans indentured, enslaved, by a failed libertarian economic model grows and expands. 

 

 

 

 

But the fun doesn’t stop there.  Americans are not only indentured by the Federal government, that they have little or no say in, but they are indentured by the concentration of wealth.  We’ve all read the statistics, the wealthiest ten percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans.  That wealth seeks a home, and that home is usually in businesses and opportunities that prey upon and indenture Americans even further.  Rather than compete, create jobs, start up a business, capital in America, as often as not, engages in rent seeking behavior and the easiest means of rent extraction is in debt and debt service fees. 

 

Payday lenders serve the underbanked with usury. 

 

For-profit medical care means indentured workers often forego critical medical care and medicine they need, so as mitigate or prevent going deeper into debt.  Which makes for an unsafe labor force and ever rising medical bankruptcies, as workers often wait until it's too late to seek treatment. 

 

Student debt…  in the land of the enslaved, home of the indentured… has climbed to 1.7 trillion dollars and counting.  So that rather than encourage education, the cornerstone of any healthy democracy, America has created yet another stop sign or barrier to entry (which precludes Americans from escaping what has become a caste system in the land of systemic racism). 

 

Commercial financial interests, private equity & investors – fueled by the Federal Reserve’s easy money policies – have piled into residential housing.  In yet, the latest move to jack up rents and remove the American dream, home ownership, out of the grasp of tens of millions of Americans. Homelessness and evictions are on the rise. 

 

In today’s headlines, inflation is often written about… but what is inflation?  Given record profits, inflation is little more than rent seeking by America’s monopolies and utilities in the form of consumer price gouging.  Just one more way, for those in power, to keep workers indentured, on the precipice of household disaster, and easily enslaved.

 

And what does all this do to American children?  The US ranks near the bottom of advanced nations in child wellness, per UNICEFF.  Shockers, Scandinavian countries, w/ healthy mixed economies and social safety nets, ranked at the top of child wellbeing.  Per the Washington Post: Of 41 nations ranked on child poverty, the United States was fourth from the bottom.

 

Meanwhile, the ten wealthiest billionaires (almost all Americans) saw their wealth double during the pandemic, in a US economy and by a government that is entirely rigged in their favor.  And aside from a plutocratic tax code, and a juiced stock market, the next biggest way to increase one’s wealth is to exploit business’ largest expense, labor. 

 

It’s no exaggeration to say that tens of millions of Americans are indentured and therefore, enslaved, in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment.  And this piece just scratches the surface on the numerous ways Americans are caught in debt traps, that all but ensure their lives, their children’s lives, are made a living hell with little or no way out. 

 

So that increasingly, what it means to be ‘free’ in America means to be indentured and enslaved. 

 

It’s time, long past time, for the abolition of slavery, and the creation of an economy and a government that works for all Americans, not merely those holding the reins of power.  For just as the economy can be financially engineered to exponentially increase the wealth of a privileged few, the US economy can also be engineered to work for all Americans.  

 

There is no social justice without economic justice.  And as POTUS Kennedy said, Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.  And to take that a step further, economic & social freedoms are indivisible, and when one American is impoverished, all Americans are impoverished... a shadow of their lesser selves & a diminishment of America's potential greatness. 

 

And so the questions arise again: Where are America’s great abolitionists?  Where are our congresswomen and congressmen?   Where is the president, and what of his unfulfilled promises to the American people? 

 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2022

A government of, by, and for the people…

A government of, by, and for the people… 

  

The Canadian government announced Tuesday that it had reached what it called the largest settlement in Canada’s history, paying $31.5 billion to fix the nation’s discriminatory child welfare system and compensate the Indigenous people harmed by it.

 

-       Canada Pledges $31.5 Billion to Settle Fight Over Indigenous Child Welfare System, NY Times

 

The bill banning conversion therapy in Canada received royal assent on Wednesday, making it into law.

Bill C-4 makes providing, promoting or advertising conversion therapy a criminal offence.

 

The bill defines conversion therapy as the “practice, treatment or service designed to change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual, or to change a person’s gender identity to cisgender.”

-       Conversion therapy ban receives royal assent, now law in Canada, Global News

  

By Gregg Wall (1-22-2022)

 

Close your eyes and imagine a government of, by, and for the people. Imagine, if you will, a democracy that actually functions… that delivers for its citizens and protects them, not only from pandemic but economic deprivation.  A government that respects not only the liberties of conservative Christians, but the freedoms surrounding bodily autonomy, personal identity within the LGBTQ community, and reproductive rights & health care for women.  Imagine a multiparty system that gives voters a wide range of choices and a parliamentary democracy that actually follows through - and delivers - upon the winning candidate’s mandate. 

 

When I moved to Canada two years ago many Americans warned me about the pitfalls of socialized medicine, but I’ve encountered none of that.  Canada has excellent health care system, with a per capita cost of approximately $7,000 (Canadian), versus $11,000 (U.S.). Factoring the exchange rate… that’s half the cost.  Are my taxes higher in Canada?  Absolutely, but when you load up my U.S. taxes with health care insurance, copays, deductibles, and ever skyrocketing pharmacy & medicine costs, Canada runs a healthier medical system at a fraction of the cost.  Adjusted for health care expense, my Canadian tax rate is far lower than my U.S. tax rate… thanks again, to American health care monopolies & Big Pharma and their unseemly taxation.

 

Nor does the steady diet of libertarian & neoliberal claptrap, we are fed in America, play out.  Socialized medicine and price controls are supposed to yield shortages of medical care and inferior medicine.  But the only shortages I’ve witnessed, in Canada, is when the antivaxxer community insists upon their freedom to become ill, with self-inflicted COVID; and then, subsequently, clog up emergency rooms and ICUs (depriving children and patients – who took the vaccine - of the care they so richly deserve). 

 

These privileges and rights Canadians enjoy are also very much desired by the American people… PM Trudeau, Liberals, and the NDP have passed gun control, and with the help of Canadian Conservatives, in December, gay conversion therapy/torture was made illegal.  Yes, you read that correctly, with the help of Canadian Conservatives.  In Canada, abortion isn’t subjected to the vagaries & whims of nine unelected, unaccountable politicians dressed up in black frocks, and installed by billionaires (as women’s health care is within the United States).

 

The American people are overwhelmingly supportive of all these things: Medicare for All; a woman’s right to choose her own reproductive destiny; responsible caps on price gouging from Big Pharma monopolies; a fifteen dollar minimum wage; cannabis legalization; and substantive gun control laws.  And yet, the U.S. congress run by a failed duopoly - controlled by billionaires and multinationals – consistently defies the will of the American people and fails to deliver.  To such an extent, that what we call American democracy is clearly little more than kleptocracy, oligarchy, and day traders engaged in role play.  And as an art form, American politicians suck at it. 

 

What a shock to the senses to watch the American experiment break down into petty squabbling, while the connected and the powerful buy the Congress and loot the Federal government. Fiscally, the United States is in free fall, with thirty trillion in national debt.  While Canada -- what the American GOP would call a socialist state -- is thriving, with a national debt to GDP ratio that is the envy of the West.  

 

So yes, I thank my Goddess that I live north of the 49^th parallel. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

None of this is to say, Canada is perfect, but it’s continually advancing, w/ the government solving problems that the private sector simply is not equipped to, or would rather not, solve.   Take for instance, $10 a day childcare or stepping up on reparations for First Nation’s children.

 

The U.S. cannot even pass -- wildly popular -- simple economic & social backstops for the American people and positive green legislation, under BBB… let alone legislate protective democratic safeguards.  And yet, Wall Street needs another bailout, America needs endless war funding… and the two parties swing into bipartisan action & comity, but only after realigning their stock portfolios.

 

Canada presents us with a working example of an exceptional democracy & hope, America… but first we need to pry away the wealthy’s stranglehold over the U.S. economy and government and introduce more political parties.  And the structural economic and political defects must be addressed, like eliminating the Senate.  In Canada, the Senate is the upper house, and they serve merely, in an advisory capacity.  A lesson for the U.S.?  

 

Why not take a page from private equity: save some money, downsize, eliminate the U.S. Senate, and go unicameral?  And offload this failed body, the U.S. Senate.  Good luck finding a buyer. 

 

I share these things with all who care to read them, not to gloat; but to give thanks for a democracy that delivers, that actually governs.  

 

A Canadian government, as Mr. Lincoln wished …  of, by, and for the people. 

 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2022