the federal government says it wants to keep pot taxes low to fight the black market. that's a necessary but not a sufficient condition. i'm running into more and more medical on the street, and i'm learning that it smells terrible and gives you a headache. as of right now, i wouldn't expect that the government product will compete with the street product because - perhaps counter-intuitively - it seems like the government is spraying it with something.

to me, the bigger question is about who we're taxing. and, cities need to tax - they can't print money. do we want sin taxes that primarily penalize the poor? you would expect a conservative like john tory to push for that. i'd rather tax property, so that we're redistributing wealth from the top down.

so, when i tell the guy to tax property, it's not a 'keep your hands off my stash' type thing. it's a broader social question. sin taxes mostly target poor people, and are consequently deeply regressive. i don't know if john tory still pretends he's a progressive conservative or not, but he should live up to the title and push more for progressive taxation over property - which is the actual power that he has, as mayor and head of city council.

he should raise property taxes.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/pot-tax-debate-1.4216883

democrats stand up for the corporate interests that push for cheap labour. they directly represent capital, and it's bourgeois class (which identifies with "progressive values", including the idea that challenging the status quo of cheap racialized labour is racist).

republicans create a distraction for disaffected workers, which prevents them from revolting against capital and feeds into the progressive narrative. they blame everything on brown people, which divides the working class against itself.

so, they work together, rather than against each other.

there is not a mainstream option that has the interests of workers - migrant or native - in mind.

this is the actual correct analysis.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/opinion/no-crackdown-on-illegal-employers.html

i've actually been pretty clear that i support amnesty for illegal immigration. it's legal migration that i think needs some stricter boundaries put around it, particularly regarding refugee inflows and temporary workers.

i will repeat that because it's counter-intuitive: i support illegal immigration, but i think we need stricter boundaries around legal migrants.

there's a caveat, though: we need to better enforce labour laws. that's the bit that gets lost in the immigration debate. immigration isn't really about immigration, it's about the labour department refusing to enforce labour laws - or even creating new categories to evade them. if the labour laws were enforced, nobody would get undercut.

this is why i don't key in on illegal immigrants. i took economics 101; i know that an influx of cheap labour is going to decrease wages. but, i know better than to blame the proletariat, who are just looking to survive. if you just enforced the fucking laws already, you wouldn't have this race to the bottom.

of course, it's not a coincidence that the media sets you at the workers rather than capital. and, it's a sad scene to see the lack of class consciousness that allows these workers to go after the comrades they need to organize with, because the real villains - the bankers, the politicians - have brainwashed them all into fighting each other.

if you want to get behind a concrete political position that will actually address the root causes of the problem, it isn't amnesty and it isn't immigration reform - legal or illegal. it's fighting for the enforcement of labour laws. that means making sure that the law says that all workers deserve a minimum wage and then taking down business owners that refuse to pay it out.  it also means shutting down state-operated programs that are designed to circumvent labour laws.

it means actual socialism, not this do-gooder christian capitalist progressivism that ultimately just upholds the interests of the upper middle classes.

but, i mean, i've read the grapes of wrath. recently, even. you don't need this fancy gramscian machinery. i get it.

this serbian-russian thing has legs.

ask the archduke.

https://sputniknews.com/military/201707211055753931-russia-serbia-s-300-nato/

i'd never heard this story before.

if you need to go, this is how you do it.

http://thejns.org/doi/10.3171/2015.4.FOCUS15106