Guest Post: A Response To Be Careful What You Wish For

As I indicated in my last post, I have been having problems with readers' comments. I have not been receiving them. I have found a workaround the situation; although I am still not being notified of them, I went into the dashboard and looked under Comments Awaiting Moderation, where I found several. The following is one of them, a response from BM to my post, Be Careful What You Wish For:

Walmart has been pulling off the same manoeuvre for years. Come into an area just outside town to get cheap real estate, ruin local businesses with cheap prices, employ people at minimum wage so that municipalities and state/provincial governments end up effectively having to provide top-ups - and the ruin is complete. Of everybody and everything.

Amazon merely does it on an even lower cost base. Get stupid local governments to bid (can you imagine the utter stupidity of anyone actually "paying" for an Amazom warehouse?), then running a military operation of having people running around filling orders with no breaks for no money. There are many descriptions online of the hell it is, from the UK and US. Gernany has no Walmarts because they insisted on work standards that Sam's boys could not tolerate - don't know about Amazon.

Still your average modern twit sails blindly to their doom blissfully unaware that hailing Uber sends money to California instead of local taxi drivers. Money gaily sent off to a central collection house instead of being spent locally,the only rationale being it's a bit cheaper for you personally upfront. Gradually, all these centralized businesses hollow out local economies. Then you pay for more welfare as taxi firms go bust. Enjoy your cheap ride! Disruptors, these firms call themselves. Spot on.

The whole thing is an extension of the offshoring of jobs to China. Now the offshoring is to send money to some app developer in a place far away who is feted as a business hero.

And so we blindly march to the destruction of our societies apparently saving a loonie at a time, until eventually nobody can afford anything because we all work crap jobs. The rich get incredibly richer and the plebs stand around wondering what hit them.

And people slave to develop apps that will let them hit the hackpot, screw everyone else.

Nobody ever claimed the average dude or dudette wandering down the street glued to their phone actually had reasoning power, after all. They might have a PhD, but they're still terminally stupid, because they simply do not bother to think, and say "hang on a minute!". No, saving a nickel now means they regard themselves as smart.

And Bezos laughs at hundreds of millions of dummies, collects their data as well as money, and becomes a de facto emperor.

I buy local, I use the post office. I would not pay a dime for an Amazon warehouse in land or subsidies. Let the predator pay his own way.

UPDATED: Technical Problems

It has come to my attention via email that the comments function is not working properly. If you made a comment and I did not publish it, it is because I did not receive it. I understand that at least one other blog, Northern Reflections, is experiencing the same problem. I shall let you know when the issue is resolved.

In the interim, feel free to use the blogger contact form here to send along comments. Your anonymity, if you request it, I guarantee.

UPDATE: While I haven't found the source of the problem, I have found a workaround, so please feel free to start sending comments again.

The Power Of Real Communication

UPDATED: A True American Hero

Colin Kaepernick speaks a truth that, unfortunately, too many of his fellow Americans refuse to acknowledge.



UPDATE: Thanks to The Mound for the following which, I think you will agree, puts things into their proper perspective:

Careful What You Wish For

With so many cities, including Toronto, vying to become Amazon's second headquarters, they might be mindful of some basic truths about Jeff Bezos and his business practices:

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' wealth increases by $275 million every single day. Meanwhile, Amazon workers have to rely on food stamps and public assistance just to survive. This is what a rigged economy is all about. pic.twitter.com/Ty7ECxvOkl

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 22, 2018

Now what was that thing Jesus said about rich men, camels and eyes of needles?

Don't You Just Love It?

Of course, the rabid, insensate right will see no contradiction or hypocrisy here.

Rediscovering Democracy

Since I became eligible to vote many years ago, I have participated in every federal, provincial and municipal election that has been called. Even though it has become something of a cliché, the assertion that voting is a sacred duty has never been far from my mind.

And yet, for all of that, up to a few months ago, I was seriously considering doing something I had never done before: going to the polling station and officially declining my ballot. In that contemplation, I felt a righteous justification.

Why did I consider that option? First of all, of course, the Progressive Conservatives were never a consideration. Just like those who are gun-shy about the NDP after Bob Rae's Ontario premiership, I have never forgiven nor forgotten the depredations of the Harris years, an era when government sought to pit citizen against citizen, stigmatizing people according to socio-economic status and drastically cutting funding for an array of programs, an experience from which we have never fully recovered. And of course, there was the bone-headed move by these self-proclaimed fiscal masters of selling a 99-year lease on the lucrative highway 407 for a mere pittance.

Kathleen Wynne's Liberals were off my radar, having betrayed all Ontarians by the majority sell-off of Hydro One, the publicly-owned power transmission utility. Her justification? To broaden ownership and raise cash for green infrastructure, all without raising taxes. Of course, the first billion dollars was used to eliminate the government's deficit. Currently the government receives about one-third of the revenue from Hydro One it was receiving before privatization, and estimates are for the loss of billions over the longer-term, billions that government can ill-afford to surrender.

So that left the NDP for me to consider, and for the longest time I discounted offering them my support. The last election was triggered by Andrea Horwath's greed for power, despite the fact that the party held the balance of power over a minority Liberal government. And Horwath ran a campaign where the term small businesses was uttered regularly to the exclusion, if memory serves me, of any reference to the working class or working folks (the latter term seeming to have become part of today's political nomenclature). The closer they thought they were to power, the more to the right they tilted, the same error Thomas Mulcair made in the last federal election.

So prospects for voting seemed dim. What changed my mind? It was this column by the Star's Martin Regg Cohn, a journalist for whom I have a great deal of regard. Written at the end of February, it was a piece lamenting the increasingly low turnout in Ontario elections, a trend he sees as a real threat to democracy:

In the last two elections, barely half of Ontarians bothered to cast a ballot — an embarrassing 48 per cent voted in 2011, and a dispiriting 51 per cent turned out in 2014.

They were the worst showings by civic no-shows in our democratic history. And far worse turnouts than in any other provincial or federal election ever.

With the next election coming in roughly 100 days, Ontario’s democratic deficit is creating a crisis of confidence that no party can solve alone. No matter who wins on June 7, the worsening turnouts will prove a losing proposition for everyone — the politicians and the people.

This downward spiral undermines the very assumptions upon which democracy is based:

More than six in 10 Ontarians (62 per cent) believe that “the legitimacy of the government is called into question” if less than a majority of eligible votes are cast in a general election, according to the polling by Campaign Research.

I hope you will read Cohn's entire piece, plus other articles he has written within the past year on democracy. Simply go to the search function on The Star website and put in his name.

In closing, I cite his final sentence in the above-referenced article:

Democracy is an opportunity. Which is why a vote is a terrible thing to waste.