as much as i've criticized her, elizabeth may needs to take some leadership over the ndp caucus, and maybe parts of the liberal caucus, in very carefully examining the new regulatory legislation. if there's a principled opposition, and constructive suggestions, it will come from elizabeth may. but, she's completely powerless without some kind of coalition with the ndp - who may be of two minds on this.

she has no technical power but she has great sway, because she has respect from her colleagues.

i don't know, really. i think the process should always be open to modification, and that regulatory overhaul should really be a recurrent process. i've seen some upsides and some downsides. so, it probably needs to be studied and amended, where necessary.

what i'm getting at is that the parliament is going to have to find a leftist front to amend this, or slow it down in the face of entrenchment.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard

i want to clarify something.

the end of quantitative easing shouldn't produce a single crash, so much as it should produce a series of stutters. the market will have good days and bad days over the next few months, but the trajectory will be downwards, until all of the fake money that was pumped into the system finds  it's way out of it.

you can think of the stock market like a balloon. what quantitative easing does is it allows the balloon to fill up. what ending quantitative easing does is it lets the air out. unfortunately, however, a lot of otherwise intelligent people think that if you blow the balloon up, it will stay inflated, even after you remove quantitative easing. this is really an article of faith, and very much at the crux of the term market fundamentalist.

the balloon will never hold air. it will always deflate. so, if you want a full balloon, you must provide a constant flow of air. there is no "equilibrium".

but, i'm not going to make a personal prediction. i'm just going to point out what the expected effects of ending quantitative easing would be:

1) you would have a delayed reaction, to start, as the last bit of easing would need to take some time to work through the system.
2) as the effects of the end of easing become felt, you would slowly see what amounts to a simple divestment of money in the market. this money doesn't show up anywhere else. it just goes into accounts, and out to pay "bills", in whatever abstraction.
3) eventually, this divestment becomes recessionary, as the money slowly dries up.
4) there is no equilibrium point to reach, in the modern economy. there is simply rock bottom, when debt pyramids begin unravelling to expose there's nothing there.

so, in the end, you go back to easing - after you've stunted the economy for however long you've decided to stunt it for..

i don't know how long this takes. but, it's not a situation where you expect the balloon to burst, so much as it is a situation where you expect the balloon to slowly lose it's air. that's because the stock market devaluation, in this context, is an effect rather than a cause. the economy doesn't suffer because of the market crash; rather, the market crashes because the economy isn't generating enough investment, which is what you need the easing for.

it's access to capital. you need capital for capitalism, or it just stops working.

so, if you own stocks, what do you do?

you wait. and, you resolve to sell at the end of the next cycle, when you hear the announcement coming

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

i would have probably used the term "humankind" rather than "peoplekind", but i tend to argue that woman is less a diminutive of man and more that both are equal subsets of 'human'. so, something like womyn strikes me as rooted in an etymologically confused argument.

but, if you sort through this space, you'll see i pretty exclusively use people as a sub for a gendered suffix - mail-people is one example i know i've used, although when pressed for examples i'm finding i tend to avoid it altogether: police officers, firefighters, etc.

what trudeau was doing was deflecting from the question. and, it's hard to see what the point of the town halls is, if he's deflecting questions and generating bad press; i'd expect these to end, soon.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

everybody in bc and alberta should both watch the monorail episode, because that is what rachel notley is trying to sell you both: a monorail.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6dwvc6

* this analogy is in no way meant to impugn on the reputation of the local transportation network in the rather larger city of vancouver, which i navigated once with a backpack on my way to camp on the beach in tofino. the skytrain appeared to serve a number of useful functions for the city.

http://www.netnewsledger.com/2018/02/07/kinsella-can-doug-ford-win-ontario-pc-race-damn-right-can/

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.

so, what is doug ford?

well, he's not donald trump. and, by that, i mean he's not going to come out hard against immigration, or fight against trade agreements. that's not what doug ford is.

to begin with, the fords actually come out of a fairly migrant-heavy area of toronto, and have always relied fairly heavily on the votes of brown and yellow people to gain office. there were some racist anecdotes attributed to rob ford when he was alive, but the fords, as a family, have actually gone out of their way to appeal to a sense of disenfranchisement amongst the first-generation migrant poor in the areas that they have represented in city council. further, doug has always been seen as the less stupid of the two, and he is no doubt well aware of the need to appeal to non-white voters in order to win an election in toronto, and by extension in ontario.

so, doug ford is not going to run on immigration (which is largely a federal concern) or xenophobia; to the contrary, expect him to run a fairly inclusive campaign that reaches out to minorities along conservative cultural grounds, to the exclusion primarily of the queer community. following a strategy engineered by jason kenney, and that is becoming standard amongst conservatives across the country, he is actually going to try to tap into conservative sentiment in the various religious minorities. one of the ways he's going to do that is to push looking into the sex-ed curriculum in ontario schools, which has substantial opposition from various christian and non-christian religious groups. america may actually want to look at this carefully, as doug ford is actually quite likely to succeed in building coalitions between christian, muslim and other religious groups to enforce more of a classical right-wing social agenda.

but, again following the harper model, the intent is just to string them along - there's not going to be a change in the sex ed curriculum, or provincial laws against abortion, or any of the other wild fantasies that keep money pouring into the party.

and, this campaign will be targeted, and probably actually kept a little bit quiet. one of the tricks that conservatives have used in the past is to run ads for religious minorities in the languages they speak, so the white majority doesn't catch wind of it.

what doug ford is going to run on is a classic economic libertarian policy - cutting red tape, reducing government waste, lowering business taxes, that kind of thing. it will be a classic business conservative campaign, free of open dog whistling or white supremacist race-baiting.

and, when you look for the dog whistles and do find them, buried, you'll be surprised to see what they are, to the point that you'll have to ask an ontarian to make sense of them.

i know the fords get some coverage outside of the country. doug ford isn't going to get caught smoking crack at an unrequited high school sweatheart's town house. his statements are not likely to be nearly as gauche, either. but, this is still a race worth watching.

the pc election is at the beginning of march. the provincial election is at the beginning of june.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.