Travelling the world recently again, I am struck by the staggering ignorance among the great majority of people in the world, as to what Canada is like today. All of them, with rare exceptions, seem to think this is 1974. They think of Canada as a rich, First World country,
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Writings of J. Todd Ring: The Collapse Of The West: Chapter One: The Global Tectonic Shift
By J. Todd Ring Preface: I wrote this essay in January of 2020, then the covid crisis hit, and it was shelved for over a year. The macro-scale patterns have not changed fundamentally since then, although the slow-motion collapse of the US, and the West more broadly, has accelerated. I
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Freedom of Speech: What Is To Be Done?
What is to be done about the issue of freedom of speech, and the current, deeply ominous trend of the closing down of Western society, and the inevitably linked rise of authoritarianism? The first thing to be done is to remind the people that there are, as Chomsky has said,
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: From Bankers Ruling The World, To The People Ruling The Bankers
(And Rebuilding And Healing The World In The Process) “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.” – Thomas Jefferson “I pray we shall crush the moneyed aristocracy in its infancy, for already it bids defiance to our laws and seeks a contest
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Seven Virtues To Liberate and Heal The World
The following is a seed thought, a note to myself, for further elaboration in the future, and it is a note I will share with others, because it is a seed thought which is powerful, healing, and liberating. I will not go into any lengthy discussion, meditation or exposition of
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Freedom & Power
I am, for the record, perfectly comfortable with where and how I have positioned myself. I am passionately and steadfastly in favour of freedom, democracy, constitutional rule and human rights; liberty, equality and solidarity; and of course, as a result, I am passionately and steadfastly in favour of freedom of
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Bernie, Plutocracy, and Plutocracy’s Iron Heel
#Coronavirus.hype=fascist.machinations See my blog, and Trends Journal Bernie is great. But the big picture needs to be seen. He and we are up against fascism now: not just plutocracy, but plutocracy’s iron heel. JTR, March 18, 2020
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Importing From China: A Virus? Or A Totalitarian Model Of Elite Control?
Someone prescient once said, “Those who would sacrifice a little freedom for a little security, deserve neither, and will lose both.” We would do well to remember those words now. And we are most definitely in the process of losing both, as we speak. But maybe we aspire to be
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Coronavirus Update – Panic or Propaganda? Both? Or Simply Mass Insanity? All The Above
As of today, the mass media hype and hysteria over the latest exotic virus continues to spread, unabated. In its wake, mass insanity is spreading nearly as fast. Let’s step back, and look at the figures, to try and gain some much-needed perspective. As of today, 3,200 people have died
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Liberal Democracy Cannot Survive Undefended.
Since the advent of the neoliberal era, the reign of Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney, liberal democracy has been left to its own devices. The warning sign, the red flag, was the extinction of any meaningful vestige of progressivism from the body politic. The last defender of liberal democracy we knew
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Prospects for America: Sanders vs Civil War
(And that is not a threat, of course, but a prediction) An analysis of the present state of future prospects of the nation ~ An open letter in response to Daily Kos, and to anyone concerned with either justice, or peace The article I recently wrote and…
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Be Wary of “Liberal” Policies – The Unerring March of Corporatism
Well we can’t be posting sunshine everyday here at DWR. A small reminder of what the people of our nations are up against. From the essay titled Revolution and American Empire by Rob Urie. “Liberal economists have ‘fought the good fight’ for nominally populist economic programs for the last
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: About that "Of the People, By the People, For the People" Business? Forget About It.
Proof positive that America is a corporatist state saddled with a “bought and paid for” Congress. The big US banks have given the Democrats an ultimatum – silence progressives like Elizabeth Warren or we’ll cut off our funding. Salon.com calls it “Wall Street’s political shakedown.“ If ever you doubted that our
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Branko Milanovic on inequality and the new global plutocracy
Last week I interviewed Branko Milanovic, one of the world’s foremost authorities on inequality. Our conversation moved freely from global trends in inequality over the past quarter-century to the rise of a new plutocracy and the threat it poses to democratic governance. I thought it worthwhile to transcribe our chat in full. A bit more about Branko:
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Podcast: Inequality, global and Canadian
https://politicalehconomy.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/podcast150320-inequality.mp3 I have two guests to talking about inequality today. First up is Branko Milanovic, who speaks with me about global inequality as well as the rise of a global plutocracy. One of the world’s foremost experts on inequality, Branko is professor at the CUNY Graduate Centre, where he also heads
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Capitalism Off the Rails
Those at the very top of today’s neoliberal, free-market capitalist, global economy see the writing on the wall – capitalism has just about run its course. It’s hard to get your head around the idea, isn’t it? It sure is for me. Imagine, the economic model around which our society
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: A Guest Post From The Mound Of Sound
I have missed reading the Mound of Sound since he put his blog, The Disaffected Lib, on hiatus about five weeks ago. A man of wide-ranging interests and passions, his posts on climate change and politics never failed to catch my attention and stimulate my own reading and research. Yesterday
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Monbiot – You Can’t Win on Climate Change Without First Vanquishing Plutocracy
Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, took the arrival of a recrod, 400 ppm concentration of atmospheric CO2 to deliver a few thoughts on our losing battle against climate change and what really stands in the way of our hope for progress. “The data go back 800,000 years: that’s the age of
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: They Are Not Of Us
An interesting essay from George Monbiot today on the grooming of oligarchs and why, even though they govern in our name, they don’t rule on our behalf. They rule as they were born and raised to rule. An excerpt. In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains that the nobles
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The Precariat – Where we are going to…
Finding a way out of the the seemingly permanent global economic crisis is going to require looking at the factors that got us there. Noam Chomsky opines that the downfall really started in the 1970′s and has been on an ever increasing spiral of ruin ever since. One of
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