Shares of the Week: The Free Market Isn't God Edition
The Heroes We Need
‘No one ever gets to silence us again’: Teen’s TikTok campaign aims to strengthen teachings on consent in Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum - What do you do when you’re a teenager who is being let down by the adults in charge? You take matters into your own hands like the brave and brilliant Emily Webb is doing. She gives me hope for a better future that is based on reason and compassion over fear and oppression.
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. replaces banned weed, LGBTQ rights flags — with bigger ones - This man is truly an inspiration and will hopefully set a standard for a new, modern politician: one that has real, human values and doesn’t prostitute themselves to the highest bidder.
Misappropriated Funds
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Condemns NYPD Test Deployment of K-9 Robot in Bronx Home - $15 minimum wage? Nah. Medicare-for-all? Nah. Free public college for all? Nah. School counseling for children? Nah. Housing for people living on the streets? Nah. Police robots! Hell ya! (This is what defund the police is all about.)
'A harsh reality': 22 staff laid off as Lighthouse North Battleford shelter forced to close - This is also what defund the police is all about. These kind of facilities are absolutely necessary in helping keep people from harming themselves or others, and it is yet another example of how cruel and twisted our priorities are.
Alberta cuts postsecondary funding in new provincial budget - Some of Alberta’s best hope to move away from a fossil fuel-based economy is by investing in the education of their people and in the research done at universities. Instead, it seems that conservative politicians would rather make it harder for the people they serve to gain an education, and instead create a pool of undereducated and cheap labour. This is good for short term profits in a resource-based economy but absolutely terrible for the future of a province that has squandered away every last penny of the immense wealth that came from the finite resources they lucked themselves into. The rapid downfall of Alberta continues.
The Cost of the Free Market
Trudeau Liberals block NDP pharmacare plan in the middle of a pandemic - Another day, another Liberal promise broken because it is 'too hard' to do. It is clear that Canada’s ruling neoliberal party is only progressive when they absolutely have to be. It is time for Canadians to gather the courage to see past the myth that the Conservatives are the more-realistic and less-extreme alternative to the Liberals. This country needs a truly-progressive party that isn’t afraid to go against an ownership class that would prefer to maintain the 'free market' status quo of outrageous drug prices.
Texas’s Energy Crisis Shows Why We Need to Reform Our Privatized Energy System - Energy should be a human right in a wealthy country like America and it should be provided based on consumers' needs and not the needs of profiteers. It might be a lucky coincidence but guess which is the only Canadian energy producer that got credit from the White House for sending power down to Texas? That’s right, Saskatchewan’s publicly-owned electric utility, SaskPower. I guess 'socialist' energy sources aren’t bad when you're facing disaster.
Bonus: Republicans defend energy deregulation as new report says Texas consumers overpay by $28 billion for power - Deregulation was never about making things cheaper or better for people, and was always about putting more money into the hands of others who already have enough of it.
A Free Market Won’t Self-Correct the Disinformation Problem - If there is one glaring fault in the free market today, it is in its inability to root out misleading information and outright lies. In fact, the free market incentivizes conspiracy thinking and echo chambers as clicks are the currency of the web, where we now get most of our news and information. Finding quality, factual reporting is going to get even harder as media consolidation and technology moves much faster than government regulations and human evolution. This story is about American media but it is even worse in Canada which has far less competition in the industry, which is what outlets like Canadaland attempt to expose.
Bonus: Sinclair Broadcast Group: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) - Here is an old, but still relevant segment that John Oliver did on Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has a massive monopoly over local news in the U.S.
The Cult of Ignorance
Trump will never stop lying about the 2020 election. His CPAC speech proved it. - For those of you who think Trump would go away after his recent election loss, you would be sorely mistaken. Republicans are solidly behind him in their quest for absolute power, which will get even more brazen as they continue to avoid consequences for their actions.
Bonus: Opinion: The worst-kept secret: Conservatism has no value(s) - “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” - John Kenneth Galbraith
Bonus 2: CPAC gathering a horror show of Christian nationalism - No wonder America is such a shit show right now: 'God is in control', as was declared at CPAC.
“Cancel culture” is just a Republican ploy to justify oppression & racism - 'Cancel culture' is all about conservatives attempting to cancel any kind of consequences for their hateful and irrational beliefs, while reserving the right to cancel anyone who falls outside their white-nationalist brand of patriotism. Here is some evidence.
Exploiting Workers
Revealed: 6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since World Cup awarded - The next World Cup, like the country it is in, was built with slave labour. Instead of taking knees for Black Lives Matter, FIFA clubs could instead do something more effective like pull out of the tournament altogether. But we know that won't happen because money is more important than human lives.
Trading Freedom for Insecurity
Chinese spyware code was copied from America's NSA: researchers - This is what happens when backdoors are put into encryption. All this does is makes it easier for bad actors to compromise well-intentioned, innocent individuals who are deserved freedom, privacy, and security. Once a bad actor gets access to a backdoor, suddenly that all goes out the door, and everyone, good or bad, is compromised.
