Shares of the Week: The Tragically Canadian Edition
Music at Work
As an immigrant, I wanted to understand Canada's fascination with the Tragically Hip. This is what I found - This is a great story of a newcomer's attempt at discovering what has made the Hip so positively Canadian for their over three decades on the scene.
Conservatives Gone Wild
Hydro’s $ 5 billion deals with Saskatchewan “deliberately covered up” - Former Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, who was hired by the Manitoba Progressive Conservative government to compile this report, lied to make the NDP look bad? In other news, water is wet.
Kenney and Moe slam federal carbon tax after Supreme Court rules it's constitutional - Since the inception of the free-market-based, federal price on carbon, provinces have had a chance to set up their own home-grown plans to fight carbon pollution, as long as they met the minimum standards. Only now that the Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government is well within their right to implement a price on carbon, after Scott Moe and his conservative friends in Alberta and Ontario lost their wasteful lawsuit fighting it, do these perpetual victims decide to forge their own path. How the fuck is anyone still falling for this shit?
The Columnist Who Covers Doug Ford for the Toronto Sun Lives with Doug Ford’s Press Secretary - Conservatives really hate the media. Unless that media has a direct link to them and will only give you positive coverage, of course.
Bonus: Mental Health and the Media - Speaking of the media: when you aren’t able to grift your way to the top using your political connections, it’s actually a pretty fucking tough job.
Twitter Unblocked Accounts That Criticized India’s Government. Now, Its Employees Are Being Threatened With Jail Time Unless It Blocks Them Again. - India is currently going thorough a far-right, Hindu nationalist movement which is threatening to make the already severely-unequal country even more lopsided towards the benefit of Indian elites. Indian Prime Minster Modi is to Hindu Indians as Trump is to Christian Americans, except Modi is actually competent and is well on his way in moving India backwards, now with this attempted censorship of the media.
Corporate Irresponsibility
The time is right for Ottawa to fix Canada’s disgraceful telecom system - Canada has some of the most dreadful mobile and internet services in the world and allowing Rogers and Shaw to merge is not going to fix that. But the federal government could use the proposal as an opportunity to right some of the wrongs that are holding back our country’s potential as a global high-tech superpower.
How Canada's Biggest Bank Is Funding the Global Climate Crisis - Canada’s largest bank and second largest company claims to be committing to “creating a positive social impact”, but how effective can that be when they continue to invest in oil, gas, and coal, linking their success with that of the very industries that are having a significantly-negative impact on our planet? Add to this their glaring contradictions on the issue of Indigenous rights, as this in-depth analysis goes into.
RBC Calls for Policy Response as Canadian Housing Market Becomes “National Concern” - When the banks are sounding the alarm before any political parties do, you know that we should probably start paying attention. I won’t hold my breath though waiting for parties vying for that suburban vote to do something that could make people’s 'hard-earned' wealth disappear before it likely happens organically anyways.
Mark Zuckerberg Just Asked Congress to Eliminate all of Facebook's Future Competition - Well this is one way to approach the future of tech. It’s also a good way to completely destroy both the free market and democracy at the same time. These billionaires truly are living in their own diabolical fantasyland.
Elite philanthropy mainly self-serving - Here is some more proof that philanthropreneurship is not a good way to solve social problems and that it only serves the interests of the rich.
Exploiting Workers
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Posts Letter From Amazon Admitting It Keeps Finding Urine in Bottles After Company Denials - What is amazing here is that we are living in a world where people are so desperate for work that they would choose to work a heavily-monitored and high-pressure job for barely livable wages and where they have no time for basic human activities. Is this really the future that we had hoped for?
'Getting Nervous'? Bezos Told Amazon Execs to Hit Back at Critics Amid Historic Union Drive - The great thing about Amazon warehouses is that they are prime for unionization as these facilities must be located near population centers and cannot just up and leave to a region where workers can be exploited easier. This fact has Jeff Bezos absolutely terrified and it should give workers the courage to keep fighting.
You’re Not Lazy — But Your Boss Wants You to Think You Are - Workers are tired of being exploited and seeing their wages stagnate and bills rise as the wealth of the ownership class grows, all in spite of overall productivity gains. This is perhaps why bosses are finding it less easy nowadays to convince their workers that if they just focus on their own individual goals and work hard, eventually the wealth will trickle down. Well, workers are starting to catch on to the lie.
