10 years. that's the waiting time for subsidized housing.

needless to say, i'll have to figure something else out.

for right now, i'm staying in this weekend; it's too cold to go out. so, i'm going to do a little cleaning, take a shower and get ready to do some real discography work.

do i have an opinion on trudeau's decision to cut tax loopholes for the upper middle class by preventing them from incorporating?

not really.

i mean, it's probably fair. but, it strikes me as more of a political ploy than a serious revenue generator. if they wanted to seriously generate revenue, they'd raise the corporate tax rate.

i wasn't supposed to put that together, though. and that was a part of the point of it.

i don't expect that many canadians will care much, either. nor will they forget about how low corporate taxes are.

....except for the bourgeoisie that's being affected, of course - which is actually the liberal party's fundraising base.

i read an article where gerald butts pats himself on the back, claiming that raising taxes on rich people is a kind of political license. i would rather expect to see it hurt the party's finances, and rather dramatically.

i'm ignoring this stuff for good reason, as it's insane. but, let's see what they found.

1) the ads did not include election content.
2) the ads were not targeted towards any election outcome.
3) the ads were not targeted towards any specific demographic.
4) the ads were not connected to any political party.

but...

5) the ads "probably" originated in russia because they were purchased in russian.

therefore, russia interfered in the election!

by that logic, budweiser is interfering in russian elections whenever it runs ads for beer in russia.

hey - they said trump wanted to bring the country back to the 50s. well, there you go, i guess.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/06/facebook-political-ads-russia-us-election-trump-clinton?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

if this was entirely political, i'd just ignore it as opportunistic - and concede it will probably work.

but, these arguments are not even close to being correct, they're in truth barely even formed, and should the case get to trial (which it probably wouldn't; these arguments are so bad that the case could and probably should be dismissed) they could have a devastating impact on the ability of future presidents to pass similar legislation.

the only possible outcome of this trial is to place future legal restrictions on what the president can't do.

migrant rights activists should be opposing this suit, due to the dangers of these unforeseen consequences. and, i will publicly call for these states to withdraw this response as poorly thought through, and even to apologize for putting the lives of migrants at risk.

this has to be dealt with in congress. you can find any number of clips by obama himself, pointing that out. and, it may perhaps be useful to get a recent statement on the topic from the former president, who has an opportunity for responsible civilian leadership in front of him.

it's been known for years that the votes exist in congress, but the congressional leaders couldn't put it to a vote. paul ryan, at the least, has changed his mind. the focus needs to be on targetting mitch mcconnell, to make sure he puts the legislation through.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/06/politics/daca-trump-states-lawsuits/index.html

i made it to the office late in the morning, but it's closed on wednesdays. oops.

at least the forms are printed and ready. i'll need to get them there in the morning.

i spent the rest of the afternoon doing grocery shopping for the month, as i didn't do it around the first. i'll need to pick up some fruit in a few days, but it should otherwise be a very cheap month, grocery-wise. that is good...

i was up around midnight and am getting back to inri026 just about right now.

some honest reporting from independent media on the left, which is so tied up in the cartoon villain narrative...

what is the actual discussion ahead of congress?

1) can you stay if you've committed a crime? well, it's not my country, but.....let's say you won't see me at the 'let the criminals stay' rally.
2) can you stay if you can't find a job? immigration law generally has rules about self-sufficiency. it's still not my country, but i'd be far more likely to go to the 'let the disabled stay' or 'let the unemployed stay' rally.

i posted elsewhere that nobody's getting deported, and i maybe spoke too soon: the congress could very well target people that live on social assistance. and, this is probably the real battle coming up.

but, if you came to the united states as a kid and you have a job then you should not expect a deportation order, so long as you educated yourself about what is happening. and, that is the real thing that the independent media on the left should be ashamed of: instead of disseminating information that these people need access to in order to avoid having their lives uprooted, it is scaremongering for click bait.

bravo to this guy for being honest and for being real.

i'll say this again: people are always like "i don't see any evidence that orwell is right. read huxley, instead.".

but orwell's primary argument was that you're all too stupid to see how right he is, that you're all a bunch of hopeless primates, in the end. if we were all able to understand what he said, and see his analysis, he would, in truth, actually be wrong.

and, it follows that you fucking plebs need people like me to explain to you how frighteningly right he actually was.

and, that you'll continue to deny it, too.

sorry, one more thing, in case you were confused.

adam smith was a capitalist. a middle of the road altruistic liberal that the contemporary right would despise, but a capitalist nonetheless.

david ricardo, however, was a socialist.

nafta is not built on the idea of comparative advantage, but on the idea of giving mexico an absolute advantage in the cost of labour. this is smith. this is capitalism. but, it is not free trade, which came from ricardo.

free trade is socialism.

...and, that's exactly why they sold it to you as capitalism.

get it, yet?

one more thing: if the economics are so obvious, why do the governments in canada and the united states keep doing this?

because they don't work for you. they work for capital. they told you it would trickle down, but they didn't actually believe it. that's how capitalism works: big money buys influence and the rest of us can die in the street.

unless we fight back. it's a pressure point, perhaps - a way to save the system rather than topple it - but it's there, and we've stopped using it.

here's the thing: i don't sound like trump. trump sounds like me. trump sounds like thousands of unnamed leftist free trade protestors in the 80s and 90s. he somehow ended up representing this radical right coalition that opposes nafta because they think it's some kind of move towards world government - it's the old quasi-fascist john birch society narrative. but, he himself actually sounds like a socialist when you hear him talk about this.

i don't mind get attacked by the fraser institute or the cato institute or whatever other market fundamentalist you want to throw at me. in fact, i think it's imperative that the left does not get lost in a common front, or allow the capitalist press to gloss over the differences. we're not going to get very far in fighting against capitalism if we ended up co-opted by it. i don't want to be on the same side as these people.

i didn't initially take him seriously. but, i told you this: if i thought i could take him seriously on trade (and on foreign policy), i'd endorse him over clinton (who we all know is horrific on trade) and because i'm a socialist rather than in spite of it. it makes sense to hear liberals and conservatives push back against trump on trade, but it makes a lot less sense to hear anarchists and socialists do it, considering he's saying so much of what any of us would want him to say.

i'm not there yet, though. he's mixing socialist rhetoric with imperialist decrees, and everybody should expect the imperialist decrees to win out. but, we haven't had a discussion like this around trade in a long time and we should really be taking advantage of it.

if we don't, capital will win in the end - as it always seems to.

put very simply - a nation does not generate wealth by buying things at the lowest price it can find, but by selling things at the highest price that can be found. an economic model designed to keep consumer prices low at the expense of producing and selling items, which is what nafta is, is consequently a recipe for extreme wealth disparity and mass impoverishment.

as much as i rail against the oil industry, nafta would have left canada flat out bankrupt if it weren't for oil coming in and saving the day. the smart analysis is to realize that the effects of oil production on the economy are actually masking the damage that nafta has done.

ok, ok - i should clarify that last point about not trading with countries that have an absolute advantage, as it seems like i'm ignoring an opportunity cost. but, i actually addressed that in my bit about mercantilism.

if you're the king of portugal, you need to make such decisions as you're trading with the queen of england. things are a little different in a modern nation state, which doesn't have that kind of centralized economic decision making.

the idea of an opportunity cost allows for a second-best answer as an optimal use of resources. so, if one country is better at doing both things, but so much better at doing one thing that everybody loses out if it does both, then it should focus it's resources on the thing it does the best and let the other country do the other thing.

the reality in nafta is that you can't even derive a thing of the sort, because mexico has that absolute advantage in labour costs and more than sufficient amounts of labour to produce anything at all. the caveat in the argument for a comparative advantage doesn't hold, and isn't going to hold in any situation where the dominant input is labour due to it being kept artificially low. it blows up the whole theory. no, we don't have to make these choices about offsetting things: we can just produce everything in mexico and exploit that absolute advantage. if you do the math with the opportunity costs, that is what you will see.

if mexico had a smaller labour force, as one example, that wouldn't work. another reason it wouldn't work is if there were restrictions on foreign investment. then, you can bring in the theory of comparative advantage. but, these are precisely the things that nafta is designed to abolish - because the purpose was to establish the absolute advantage.

and, yes, you can make the same points about china - and about how a similar trade agreement with china would turn the continent into a captured market of the chinese empire. it would be quite similar to what the british did to the indians. why did the rich country of india become impoverished? imperialism is an answer, but the economic mechanism was that it was turned into a market and not allowed or able to produce anything. in that way, the wealth flowed out but did not come back in.

if mexico has an absolute advantage in production due to artificially low labour costs, and no restrictions on utilizing it, there is no comparative advantage in trading with them - and you should indeed not do so because what you will get is that race to the bottom to undercut the mexican police force, and the inevitable eventual impoverishment of everybody except mexican producers, who end up just sucking all the wealth out.

there was a time, recently, when the wealthiest person in the world was a mexican capitalist. that is nafta at work.

but, i want to be a little bit careful: let's remember that it is largely american companies moving into mexico to take advantage of the absolute advantage in labour costs. these things are most profitable when scaled.