an empty can makes a lot of noise

Jane Goodall wrote of a chimpanzee who discovered by beating on an old empty discarded gasoline can with a stick he had gained power within his group.

The noise would drive the other chimps away.
Eventually the chimp group tired of his antics and were forced to drive him out by force. They may have been forced to kill him as he had become especially enamoured of the
power of his empty can and had a hard time

letting it go.....

dodo

The dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for.

- Will Cuppy, How to Become Extinct

And then there is the U.S. System

Maybe some of the promoters of private health care should view Michael Moore's "Sicko". I have not heard much in the way of facts-based counter arguments to the specific cases he raises. If you want that kind of a system that caters to the most greedy instincts in all of us, that might be the place to go. That's where the drum-beating chimps have gone. But don't get sick while you are there.

Private FOR Profit for who,

Private FOR Profit for who, those 1%-2% ultra rich selfish EDITED FOR OFFENSIVE LABEL (DEMEANS PEOPLE WITH MENTAL DISABILITIES -TYEE MODERATOR) who hold 98% of the worlds wealth and greedy shareholders? There isn't any profits in Universal Health Care for the simple reason all profits go directly back into the Health Care system.
Blaming the cost on labour is just lame.
Try big Pharma which is the biggest reason that Universal health care costs are going way up.

Brain

For profit means exactly what it says. Lefties use it to describe anything they don’t like about any system because profit is the epitome of evil in their eyes.

I represent the silent majority…taxpayers who are getting increasingly gouged by special interest groups like the writer, who merely support the status quo instead of intelligent discussion about solutions that put patients first.

Nothing personal nln

Simply an accurate reiteration of the facts.

Of course, you didn't read it. Everything you write on the subject indicates the lack of any comprehensive appreciation of the matter – something you could have addressed if you had been a little more interested in learning and a little less interested in libeling. Your whole approach from the beginning indicates a reluctance to engage with ideas and a complete lack of restraint when it comes to calling people names.

Your remarks above further indicate your complete lack of an appreciation of the scope of the problem and a simplistic notion about the role of profit especially in an area of universal public need. To you it is simply a matter of not ever wanting to pay taxes – and, in my opinion, your failure to appreciate the terms and obligations of a humane social contract.

Be as crude as you like - it only reflects on you. I always find sufficient grist in your own writing - as quoted above, for example - to obviate the necessity of a personal attack.

I find the fact that you always do revert to that sort of name calling points out the absolute bankruptcy of your ideas and your ideology both as regards my remarks and the work of others.

More socialist baloney

I have a friend, he's wealthy, when I've visited him or he me he's always out of bed and off working before dawn - even in summer. He works hard and deserves his money! When in Asia he goes to Thailand if he or his wife need care which he can afford anywhere. It's excellent care.

The only reason that Canada and particularly BC clings to the present health system is because of the unions. All the opposition is due to unions afraid of loosing cushy jobs. Meanwhile, we all suffer - except, of course, if you're a union worker and automatically jump to the front of the line!

More outdated class battles led by crusading socialist ideologues that couldn't care less about people as long as the impossible party line is maintained.

By the way GW, did you know that money doesn't buy happiness?

Oh REALLY!

"The only reason that Canada and particularly BC clings to the present health system is because of the unions" - (realisticman).

As I said, it's clear you haven’t' taken the time to do the difficult work of actually reading the more than 300 pages of the Romanow Report.

As for suffering, aren't you the one who's always posting material to these pages that allegedly proves everything is coming up roses in Campbell's capitalistic paradise?

You might want to check the kind of care Thai people - not westerners living in 4 star hotels - get when they're ill. I learned a long time ago who you want to emulate and I'm afraid I've come to the conclusion that it is not actually people who really do work for a living.

You might want to try and pull a few shifts for an ER nurse my friend. The fact of the matter is you're just fine with a system that is going to hell for anyone who isn't a member of your group.

Now that's what I call class warfare. When medical care is starting to be rationed on the basis of ability to pay rather than need then we're well on the road back to the bad old days.

Several of my relatives died at home, cared for by no one other than their family and suffering from eminently treatable conditions (at the time) because they couldn't afford medical care.

We're rapidly returning to that situation and, to tell the truth, I'll bet every one of them could outwork your business-class-flier friend. I'm glad though that you've finally revealed your TRUE colours for all to see. I'll keep that little aphorism handy to feed back to you at every future opportunity.

That one about it all 'being because of the unions'.

Can't see the forest

GW

How is it that in France's universal system one can chose their own doctor, there are no long wait lists for health-care and there is a multi-tiered system including user-pay.

You don't know much

As I said, read the Romanow Report if you want to understand what's going wrong here in Canada. An awful lot of our problems here in BC relate to a purposeful ignoring of the requirements of planning, organization and a dedication to ad hoc problem solving - all of which are extremely costly.

Many of these things were highlighted not all that long ago when the Deputy Minister of Health resigned and pointed them out. If you weren't so busy paying obeisance to Neil Reynolds you might have actually noticed.

The fact is, you don't appear to know much about the French system either and the last time you wrote in these pages on the subject of France it wasn't very complimentary. I suppose you wouldn’t be happy with Sarkozy if he started to gut the excellent system the French have managed to create for ALL of their people? My recollection of your support for his right-wing agenda was that it was pretty uncritical. Perhaps you’ve forgotten?

Pardon me if I don't take seriously anyone who suggests that unions are the root of the health care problems in this country.

Just as a refresher, I’ll include the following comment which was published at the time Dr Penny Ballem resigned:

VICTORIA - When the government's top health care manager quits in protest over Premier Gordon Campbell's "unsound" plans for health, the public deserves answers.
Dr. Penny Ballem isn't just another bureaucrat. Campbell recruited her to run the health ministry in 2001. Since then she's been at the centre of all the health care changes, with strong support from Campbell.
Until last week, when Ballem quit and went public with her concerns in a letter delivered to Campbell (and quickly leaked).
"As I have advised you, the plans that you and your deputy minister have established for the organization of the Ministry of Health are unsound and reflect a lack of confidence in my leadership on your part," Ballem wrote. "This, combined with the lack of satisfaction you have expressed in the work the ministry has brought forward to cabinet, has clarified for me that it is time I moved on."
It's a major attack on government health policies from a senior manager who has been steadfastly loyal. Ballem has taken the lead in defending the government's health policies, a job usually reserved for politicians.
Ballem's resignation raises important questions for the public. The premier's office apparently plans major health-care changes that Ballem believes are so "unsound" that she has no choice but to resign. What are they? (thx to Paul Willcocks) – you can find more here: http://willcocks.blogspot.com/2006/06/health-resignation-challenge-to.html

[I'm sorry the browser on this machine at work is so antique that I can't highlight the appropriate section from the quote - or use html tags either. But then, I'm not a master of the universe.]

G West is really Job!

Your patience (like Job) is amazing Mr. West. You probably waste your time and fingers trying to clarify issues to the likes of UnRealisticLump and old "I only have One Nut". The don't actually read, learn or think, they seem to simply regurgitate stuff they hear on reich wing radio or learn from Fraser Institute Propaganda.

Here in the Hurtland (the Inferior Health Authority) we lost more hospitals and wards etc. than any other area of the province. Of course the managers here managed to earn the top possible bonus for cost cutting, no coincidence.

The cool news from the Inferior Health Authority (not my name for the IHA, but that of a GP at Kelowna General, our hospital of last resort) this morning is that Kelowna will be losing it's only geriatric specialist in less than a month. She isn't retiring, she is just tired of watching the whole geriatric care ward be closed, funding for her out patient senior's clinic be terminated and watching as home support for the elderly in the Okanagan is reduced to those who can pay for it privately.

Thus she has to deal with elderly patients suffering multiple diseases perhaps complicated by dementia in an already overcrowded ER with no where to put them for care other than a hallway or closet. This in Kelowna where 1 in every 5 residents is a senior citizen and likely will be over 1 in 4 soon. Yes Kelowna has a higher proportion of senior citizens than any city in Canada with a population over 100,000. A year ago this specialist informed the IHA that she would be seeking a new position elsewhere if no change in policy was forthcoming - to no response. Now she has tendered her resignation, again to no response and is moving to take a position in Toronto.

It seems that in it's wisdom the Inferior Health Authority figures a GP can handle any problems that old people have. I hope, if say, Mr. Campbell should find himself with a brain tumor, he will find a GP just as satisfactory as a neurologist or oncologist. A GP or para-medic should be adequate if he should have cadiac arrest as well. Of course here in the Hurtland cardiac arrest doesn't necessarily rate even a para-medic, even if they are less than five minutes away, doing drills, as evidenced by the recent death of a woman in Fruitvale.

private medicine

NoLeftNutter's name says it all for the politics of its owner. No point quoting that leftie, Roy Romanow, to him - he wouldn't hear a word. He's got his mind all made up already, so statistics mean nothing to him. Except for the amount of money he pays in taxes so that you can access some medical service without having to pay for the privilege. Horrors! He has to pay for your illness and you think it is "free!"

Next time you have to see your doctor for an unexplainable pain in the upper right quadrant or you have to be admitted to hospital for surgery, don't forget to send him a "Thank You!" note. Probably a nice tip for his assistance would also be much appreciated.

UK "evidence" is no evidence at all

This article says that UK "addressed" the problem caused by private health care by hiring 4000 more professionals. Unsaid is where they came from -- they came from offshore; poached by the UK health system from third world and developing countries.

In fact, didn't a few of them come from Iraq? What an opportunity for Mr Bin Laden.

What are you talking about Martin?

This article is about health care - not terrorism.

Although the way the campbell government is managing it in this province I do see similarities.

GW

Sorry, that’s your perspective. The Romanow report may be your sacred tome but for most of us it’s a Harry Potter novel……may as well be quoting the Dead Sea scrolls as the path to reform in the Health Care system.

I’m happy to engage ideas and you’re no slouch when it comes to slagging anyone with an alternative perspective.

From the nature of your posts you seem anxious to complicate and confuse the issue, I guess that makes you feel that your opinion is superior.

As for profit it the Health Care system, I’d be happy to hear your explanation of how every facet of the Health Care system can be managed by state owned enterprises, because when you blindly advocate for complete elimination of for-profit involvement in the Health Care system that’s what you are advocating for.

I understand the human social contract, I also recognize that it has a cost and as a taxpayer want to see responsible spending, not like the out of control increases over the past decade. Lefty elitists want to dictate how the rest of us should share our productivity for the common good, as long as it’s their idea of the common good.

Lastly, you don’t define the terms of the debate on this site, although at times you act like you own it. The Tyee gives me the privilege to post how and what I want.

NLN

Strangely enough, that is the line Harper, Bush, and Calderon are feeding us at the Montebello gab fest.

You are going to have to 'splain to us lesser beings what constitutes a "lefty"......

NLN

And you reached this lofty opinion without reading more than the executive summary, remember?

Wake me when you have something relevant to say on the basis of real knowledge and not personal prejudices, okay.

Last time I looked 80% of the families in this country were losing ground to the capitalist elites you're so fond of pandering to. Funny that we had a much fairer and more equitable society here 30 years ago when your "philosophy" took over the debate during the Reagan and Mulroney years. Oh and by the way, if you haven't given up reading altogether, you might find Jeff Simpson's column in today's G&M pretty interesting. And he's not even one of us doctrinaire and elitist lefties, by the way.

It's long past time for the real silent majority to speak up and shout people down who don't even have the intelligence to understand that Romanow NEVER called for all of health care to be turned into a public enterprise.

Would you like the link again so you can actually LEARN something?

If you want responsible anything, you have to take the trouble to actually spend the time necessary to comprehend the nature of the problem. You haven't done so, on this or any other issue, as confirmed by your own words time and time again. The last time I demonstrated it you promised not to come back here and you didn’t keep that agreement either.

You'd like it if someone like me fell into your neat little formulaic view of the world...but I don't. There is nothing wrong with commerce and profit - but they've had too many blind adherents of late and it's time for a little re-balancing. Not that I expect anyone whose perspective doesn't go beyond his or her tax statement to understand that.

GW

The best you can do is continue to flog dead horses and try and rewrite history. Is that your favourite 80% claim rearing its ugly head again? Remind me, is that the claim you made or the one you insisted that you didn’t make?

I didn’t say that Romanow called for Health Care to become a public enterprise, I was responding to this comment of yours –

I was simply asking you to justify your claim of the benefit of public enterprise in the Health Care system, but once again, you’re a little short of specifics.

You falsely claim that my “philosophy” caused the deterioration of our lifestyle over the past 30 years, ignoring that fact that the largest cause for the stagnation of our quality of life is the dramatic increase in government spending at all levels. A “philosophy” that you seem to support in spite of its inability to bridge the inequality between rich and poor.

You have no claim to being the only one that can comment on issues or that your perspective is more learned or more valid. I don’t think I’d like you under any circumstances, and I’m certainly not ready to acquiesce your view of the world.

What ARE you talking about NLN

This statement of yours:

"The profit motive exists in every element of the Health Care system, from design, construction, supplies, maintenance and on and on. It helps to keep costs in check and improve efficiency."

Is what I was responding to. I apologize for not being able to set if off with html tags.

As to your other remarks, you already admitted you don't read so why should I bother - it's an utter waste of time.

GW

Explaining your motivation for responding doesn’t justify the error of your response. You still haven’t explained the logic or proof behind this comment –

I do read, it’s just that I stopped reading fairy tales abut 40 years ago…….

Too bad you haven't stopped telling them

In health care the profit motive does exactly what I said it does - and if you prefer not to believe me, then you can read Mark Crawford above.

Competition for scare specialized resources - if they are made available to the highest bidder - in accordance with market economics - will draw practitioners from the public sector and into the private. Therefore, as should have been obvious, the availability of the scare specialized resource will be less in the public (non-profit) sphere and line-ups will get longer. Exactly what has happened when the DR Day model has been instituted elsewhere. Furthermore, private for profit practitioners will tend to cherry-pick those specialties that maximize profit relative to overhead and the public system will be left with the more cost-intensive and burdensome services.

There was no error in my response to your completely erroneous assertion. Even the cost of public financing for construction is a saving for public capital acquisitions so your profit fairy tale fits nowhere in the equation. In the pharmaceutical area the parameters are even more clearly drawn.

GW

You’re still trying to twist the meaning of comments, bad enough when you lose your grip trying to explain yourself. It’s almost embarrassing to read your attempts to rationalise your attacks on other’s opinions.

I’ll give you an opportunity to make a simple explanation of one question. Show me how the inclusion of General Motors or Ford in supplying vehicles that are used in the delivery of our Health Care have increased the costs beyond what a public supplier could provide.

I appreciate that it’s probably too simple for you, that’s why you usually don’t get it……..

Mais non -

I'm not surprised you're backing and filling to the point where all you have left is the trivial aspect of vehicles made by General Motors and Ford. You might want to read the story about Dave Wheaton Pontiac Buick and his 'respect' for customer satisfaction, proper pricing and freedom of the press. You can find the story here at Tyee if you're interested, as for the ability of the two companies you mention to actually turn a profit I think they've done it about one quarter out of the last half-dozen.

I gave you a perfectly reasonable explanation - you've given me the usual bupkiss - not a single thing about how profit seeking as a guiding principle will make health care cheaper - not a single one. And that's simply because it won't. As a matter of fact the more services offered by and to the public at cost - such as cleaning and maintenance - the better: as the current situation in British Columbia has proved beyond question.

Not that I expected you'd be able to. Perhaps you and Realistic man should form a partnership - he says the problems of health care in BC are all just a result of unions...the two of you would make quite a couple. But, if you don’t care about how your tax dollars are being wasted! Well, so be it.

Over and out.

touche GW

You’re the one that ends up sucking and blowing at the end of the day. You can’t rationalise your attacks and you can’t answer simple questions. Just to remind you, this is my original quote –

And this is your response –

Sadly, you’ve failed once again prove your comments are accurate, and all the histrionics, back-pedalling and over the top rationalization in the world can’t stop you from looking bad.

Not at all my friend

GO drive your Ford - you haven't provided a single example of how taking extra profit out of the mix increases efficiency and keeps costs in check. I've given you several examples of the inverse but got back nada from you.

Anyway, that's it, I never expected anything from you and that's exactly what you've delivered. Even in the area of generic drugs manufacture the affordabiity of pharmaceuticals is enhanced by eliminating the profit motive and cutting out big pharma.

None of these people care about the consumer or the patient - all their interested in is the bottom line - just as all you're interested in nln is finding a way to lighten your tax load.

That isn't just looking bad, it's looking foolish and self-destructive. I hope there's still a decent universal health care system around when you need it - but I wouldn't count on it fella - too many folks have no idea what their attitudes have led and will lead to.

As for histrionics and name calling - that's your department.

GW

Mind if I call you Dubya? Posting on the Tyee is comic diversion for most of us. I’ve never understood why you have such an ugly, hall-monitor mentality about everyone that disagrees with you.

I laugh at your tirades and intensity at trying to get the rest of the world to conform to your view. If this is the best vehicle that you can find for trying to change the world in a positive fashion, you are indeed, a sad little man.

Get a grip GW, this is just the Tyee, and you don’t even own it……….

As nearly equal...

Both by our resident judge G West.

Thanks for telling what I didn't actually say, as usual.

Would you support a system where by union workers didn't jump to the front of the line, as they can do now, and allow our parents or children to stay at the front?

GW

Another thought: The student, on entering the halls of academia in pursuit of a medical education, has a decision to make. (S)he can subscribe to fully paid tuition and associated costs, in return for a (at a guess) 10 year commitment to public healthcare, anywhere the government deems fit to send sir or madam. Or not a cent in subsidies (all on his/her own tick), and the subsequent freedom to practice whereever.

As for NLN, I hope you are having a good chuckle over his(?) obfuscations.......at least your assertions are backed up with references and studies. Hmmmm......(s)he reminds me of another obfuscatory "personality" (and I use the word loosely) on another forum. But there are so many of "them" out there.........all grist for the rightista mill though, I suppose.

You'd care to have me quote

You'd care to have me quote what you DID say again? I don't ever have to put words in your mouth my friend - you provide me with sufficient material already.

I'm surprised - but I won't embarrass you further. In the context of a debate about private for fee clinics where your musings about wealthy folks using their 'hard-earned' cash to jump the queues by flying to Thailand as being an appropriate and useful remedy for them to avail themselves of I'd have thought the less said about your 'theories' relative to pushing to the head of the line the better.

Amusing and good suggestion RickW

And, Mark Crawford, as I mentioned earlier, I much concur with your thoughful words.

Keep swinging nutter, it's stuffy and humid here at my desk - the breeze is quite refreshing!

As I thought

Didn't expect you to answer West and you didn't surprise me either.

Actually, West, you're wrong yet again. My friends that go to Thailand for health-care are not jumping any queue because they not residents in suitable public providing country. They are citizens of the world at large and simply buying where the market suits them. World shoppers. Market globalization.

Well bully for them!

I'd only ask then why you'd bring them up as relevant to this discussion which they obviously aren't? You were just being arch and evasive – not that that surprises me much.

People like that are parasites on the whole world, not just one country, flying around aimlessly polluting the atmosphere and taking advantage of the poor workers in the countries they chose to stop at for a while just because they can on one of their pathetic shopping trips.

You may think they're lovely people - I'd suggest they are avatars of excess.

The point really is, like your offside remark toward unions, that you really don't have a point R/man.

What else is new?

I'd only ask then why you'd bring them up as relevant to this discussion which they obviously aren't? You were just being arch and evasive – not that that surprises me much.

People like that are practically parasites on the whole face of the earth, not just one country, flying around aimlessly polluting the atmosphere and taking advantage of poor workers in the countries they chose to stop at for a while just because they can. All in aid of one of their pathetic shopping trips. Global ignoramuses in my opinion. I recently did a study of working conditions at a Thai resort for Westerners. The local people employed by the corporate organization that ran the hotel and golf course were treated like the 21st century of slaves – and expected to be polite and deferential into the bargain.

You may think they're lovely people - I'd suggest they are avatars of excess.

The point really is, like your offside and disingenuous dig at unions, that you really don't have a point R/man.

What else is new?

Yes I do

Repeating yourself ad nauseum G West. Please try and reduce your redundant waste of energy. As I said before my friends are up before dawn and work for themselves. They love their work and I've never known them to take a holiday. When they travel they are working, not shopping. Your ideal of a slow system that is closed to innovation and operates like a failed socialist experiment drives patients and doctors away to other places while you dogmatically insist on the status quo. The world is becoming smaller and doctors will follow their patients and patients will follow the doctors to places where options are not grueling and treatment immediate. Refusal to change will result in the same situation where Canada becomes less of a player, as it has in much manufacturing. Your workers will be unemployed or gone somewhere else.

"Ten years ago, medical tourism was hardly large enough to be noticed. Today, more than 250,000 patients per year visit Singapore alone--nearly half of them from the Middle East. This year, approximately half a million foreign patients will travel to India for medical care, whereas in 2002, the number was only 150,000.

In monetary terms, experts estimate that medical tourism could bring India as much as $2.2 billion per year by 2012. Argentina, Costa Rica, Cuba, Jamaica, South Africa, Jordan, Malaysia, Hungary, Latvia and Estonia all have broken into this lucrative market as well, or are trying to do so, and more countries join the list every year. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism

Doesn't do a damn thing for anyone but the idle useless rich

Much like sex tourism - it's really all about selfish greed, self gratification and exploitation.
Globalism is a dead issue for a dying planet - innovation is in finding ways to make local communities work and thrive again.

You'll notice the Fed in the US hasn't got a handle on the melting economy yet my friend.

As for wikipedia - I'm sure the medical tourism corporate types are busy doing their pathetic self-congratulatory edits even as we discuss this.

You're just entirely too gullible. Here, have a look:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/technology/19wikipedia.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I could care less if Canada is a not a facile player in this deadly game. We should look after ourselves, stop wasting and robbing the world's resources for vanity's sake, and help other countries to help themselves.

Medical tourism is as irresponsible as any other kind of selfish tourism or executive travel in this day and age. Stay home and stop contributing to the problem - and tell your ridiculous globe trotting anachronistic friends to so the same - they're pathetic.

The whole notion of chasing the ever expanding and growing economy is the death rattle of a society going extinct: Time to wake up, smell the rot my friend, and quit trying to defend the indefensible.

Private clinics are no quick fix for anything...I'd sooner you supported the millions of small Polish farmers whose continued connections to the land are being threatened by the same corporate madness you blindly support as progressive.

Wake up man, before it's too late. You are following a compromised and false prophet.

And R/man

You might want to decide just exactly what your globe trotting friends really are up to.

This is what you initially wrote:

And now you say this:

Have you been tipping the jar a little tonight? Because it looks to me as though you're not really sure exactly what these globe-trotting avatars of yours 'are' doing.

One thing's for sure, they'd do the environment a damn site less harm if they just settled down somewhere and cooled their heels for a while. You'll pardon me, but they sound a bit to me like wastrels of the first water.

He's got your number, Slim....

I toured the Apollo hospital's chain particularly in Delhi; and a community hospital in Chennai where the orderlies would steal the gold teeth out of your mouth if your family wasn't around to cook for you and protect you while you were recovering freom you amputation for your poorly-managed diabetes that required only a few injections to cure. Never was the difference between those with money and those without more profoundly barbed into me - and this in the Marxist country that India was in 1997.

Medical tourism acts like it has no cost. It does - and a big one. So do shut up and pick another topic, R'man.

Vanisle

I'm surprised to hear about Finland. So's my aunt. Any backup information for your thoughts? You might also want to amend the Wikipedia entry for Finnish medical care.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_system

Good Health for everyone

Pastor GWest, your constant preaching that everyone should abstain from travel and purchasing is sounding a mite parsimonious.

$2.2 billion a year for the Indian economy from Medical Tourists is not chump change. Judging from your anger it seems that you feel that Indians shouldn't be allowed to earn this money. You want to keep them down, don't you? This is pertinent because the world is smaller than ever and those that need health care will get it wherever they have to go for it. Many Indian and Thai doctors are trained in Canada; ie. they bring tuition money into our economy.

As for my artists friends that go to Thailand, quite untypical consumers; I explained that they are 'shopping' for health-care. Since their work in commercial and fine visual arts takes them all over the world they pass through Bangkok frequently. They might settle down somewhere, one day, meanwhile they are both of mixed race and family, and friends, all over the place. Home is wherever they are.

Anyone that cannot or will not see that the world is changing, rapidly, and that will not or cannot bring themselves to embrace these transformative changes will quickly become known as dinosaurs.

quite simply

I don't think your friends are doing anything positive for anyone BUT THEMSELVES hurting the majority of the population of the countries they ‘play in’ into the bargain.

We've soiled our nest and refuse to clean it - and now, even in such a backward place as North America, there is a tiny glimmer of recognition. This morning, in a compromised CanWest organ I came across this:

Free trade headed for 'backlash'

Workers must share in the benefits, say top U.S. economists

Kelly Patterson,
CanWest News Service
Published: Wednesday, August 22, 2007

OTTAWA -- Soaring levels of inequality have put the future of free trade in jeopardy, warn two of America's most powerful pushers of globalization.

If the U.S. doesn't take steps to make sure more workers share in the benefits of free trade, a "protectionist backlash" will bring globalization to a grinding halt, warn Yale University Prof. Kenneth Scheve and Matthew Slaughter, an economic adviser to the White House for the past two years.

Slaughter is also a fellow of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, whose members include Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

"Inequality is greater now than at any other time in the past 70 years," Scheve and Slaughter write in this month's issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

"The time has come for a New Deal for globalization," they urge, referring to former president Franklin Roosevelt's social programs during the Depression.

The startling article came out just weeks before the leaders of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico converged on Montebello, Que., for a summit to discuss ways to promote free trade.

It details a gap between the very rich and everyone else -- including the middle class -- that has accelerated dramatically in recent years in the U.S.

Only four per cent of Americans -- those with doctorates and professional graduate degrees -- saw their mean real money earnings rise from 2000 to 2005, they note. Earnings fell for the other 96 per cent.

"The numbers are stark," write Scheve and Slaughter.

Like Canada, the U.S. is near full-employment levels, but wages over a long period of time "have stagnated for most of the labour force," said Scheve.

The inequality has been growing since the 1970s, the article notes. For example, the median real income grew just 11 per cent, versus 121 per cent for those in the 99th percentile, from 1966 to 2001.

When a 'news' source as terrible as the Vancouver Province prints that I think it's time you stopped pushing the lie that everything's coming up roses. Even dinosaurs probably tried to save themselves. You might want to think about changing your attitudes which, as others have noted, would not be out of place in Dickens's time.

You’re actually sounding a lot like Dr Pangloss these days R/man. When the best you can sputter is that I’m ‘preaching’ you really are laid very low.

[bold text is, of course, mine]

Ideology and Greed drive the Debate!

Realistic Man and the man with one nut miss the point pretty much constantly and whenever they assert anything other than a regurgitation of reich wing/Dr. Day memes, they exhibit their self centered and very limited view of the world.

While singing the praises of Health Care for Profit why don't you explain how well that works in the paradise of private health - GeeDubya the Draft-Dodger-in-Chief's Amerika. The USA spends more per capita than any jurisdiction in the world on health care, yet only the rich elites can count on decent care - and I will admit theirs is to die for (in fact many other non-elite Americans do die for it, on a daily basis).

Over 50,000,000 Americans have no coverage at all, and in a general sense the outcomes (lets talk about "accountability" and "performance") are so poor they barely make the top 50 in the world in many categories like life-expectancy, infant-mortality and most other measurable benchmarks.

Of course the fact that approximately 1/3 of the total dollars spent on "healthcare" in the US are spent mostly on trying to decide who pays doesn't add much value to the "healthcare." Yep, 1/3 of the total is spent on lawyers and other costs as insurance companies fight over who pays, and that is only after they are unsuccessful at finding some reason to cancel coverage due to "pre-existing condition" or because they think a bone marrow transplant for leukemia is too "experimental."

As to the medical tourism, that as G. West accurately points out is exploitation on the level of sex tourism. The small amount added to the GDP of Thailand or India hardly makes up for the Thais and Indians that forego medical treatment so THEIR doctors can make more money serving Westerners with more money than ethics.

Tommy Douglas and the CCF started something that most Canadians treasure, especially when they hear horror stories from their relatives and friends down in the Empire to the south. The only motivation of people like our own Campbell Crime Family or Dr. Day (who thankfully doesn't represent the views of most CMA members) to push for more privatization of Healthcare is either ideology or greed - most likely a mixture of both.

Oh, and by the way Thanks

I'm not at all angry - in fact I'm very pleased that, because of the existence of a place like the Tyee, I have a chance to actually confront the hollow lies and false promises of your generation and thereby point out to a widening audience exactly how wrong you and your ideas are and how deadly and mind-numbing and utterly fatal will be a continuing adherence to what you represent. Putting responsibility where it really belongs is a very liberating experience and I'm enjoying it immensely.

Far from being angry, I'm overjoyed - it's an extremely satisfying thing to get you and the masters of the universe in a position where you actually reveal the bankruptcy of your 'philosophy' of carnal greed and overweening self-regard in a public way. Mr. Harper is far too smart to actually put his ideas up for debate he knows that lies are better kept private and close to the chest - thank heaven his disciples aren't that clever too – they actually believe the lies and aren’t afraid to spout them in public in a place like this.

Big mistake.

But keep on coming back and providing such an inviting target, or change and turn your efforts toward something better and more responsible; the choice is up to you. In my opinion, you've served a very useful purpose.

So thanks to you and all my other right-wing interlocutors sincerely: we couldn't do it without you.

Can't stop evolution

A small clutch of aging socialist radicals will not stop other countries from expanding their knowledge and competency bases, and providing health-care to anyone that wishes to have it, quickly. Particularly if Canada clings to an unworkable system that has one elite group - workers injured on the job.

The spreading of the wealth is always cried for but when it goes to third-world countries the socialists want to stop it. Reduce free-trading blocks and imports and stop exporting jobs.

Open the door to fee-based care and the floodgates will open. A bit like the 'smoke a joint and you'll be addicted to heroin' campaign.

Hypocrisy.

Sorry bud - I think you've totally lost it!

The only elite group (the guys who’ve bought their way into power by stealing from the 80 – 90 percent of the people who actually work for a living) is the bunch of cranks you worship - not me. So clean up your own house before you try to sell anyone on the idiotic idea that 2.2 billion bucks per annum in a country of more than a billion is doing any good for anyone but the INDIAN elite counterparts of the fellas who are in the middle of ruining this country through lies, cheating and theft. I read recently that one of the top ten richest people in the world is now an Indian who's building some absurd monstrosity of a house:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/06/05/indian-billionaires-hous_n_50712.html

Perhaps you can tell us more about that while you're at it. Pretty artistic, I suppose – I’ll bet he’s a patron of the arts too.

If you think injured workers are an elite group you know even less than your posts here indicate and you know absolutely nothing about the way health care is delivered - very well against the odds and the best efforts of the Campbell government to ruin it – in this province.

Spend some time in a REAL third world hospital before you make an even bigger fool of yourself.

DO you never read anything that isn't written by that puppet Neil Reynolds?

And thanks

Keep setting up those targets. This is turning out to be as good a day for truth and openness as yesterday was.

Where are these socialist radicals who've been in charge for the last 30 years R/man?

It's your buddies who wear the albatross for this mess - not mine - the right wing has become the 'definition' of hypocrisy my friend.

Keep it coming! The stench must be almost overpowering by this point and yet it'll probably hang there around your neck - and Stephen Harper's and Gordon Campbell's for a few more years before all of us are released from the curse you and yours have cast on the world.

Keep it coming, it's such a pleasure when the leopard stops trying to scrub off the spots my friend, such a pleasure to see.

I see that CN has managed to prove again this morning that all the spin about their safety record was just nonsense too. God what a crime - a once great Canadian PUBLIC company reduced to spin and fakery - incapable even of keeping its cars on the track anymore. Another derailment in Quesnel....

Just more grist for the mill.

Elite Groups?

UnRealisticLump this statement certainly shows not only your ignorance but your anti-union/working man bias.

Now the rich, who get treatment where and whenever they choose at any cost, or the MLA's, MP's and other folks who enjoy gold plated pension and health benefits at the tax-paying working elite's expense aren't elite at all - just poor rich spoiled folks, left behind behind by the elite injured workers of our increasingly Dickensian economy.

It is no secret to anyone with actual experience in the woods, mines or construction that health and safty standards all over North America have been declining thanks to the reich wing/corporate lackey governments of Mulroney, Reagan, the Bush creatures and Stephen Harper, not to mention their minor league cohorts in Victoria or the legacy of that sorry excuse for a human - Mike Harris in Ontario.

You might pay attention to the ongoing bull waste coming out of Utah where the media paints the union-busting, exploitive Crandall Mine Owner as some concerned grandfatherly figure, in spite of the fact his mine has been cited for safty regulations well over 300 times - and they even buy into his fiction that the collapses were caused by "seismic" activity, in spite of denials by any actual seismic geologist not on the payroll. Try working in a meat processing plant, or perhaps a frozen food distribution center - or talk to the widow of a BC Faller and tell me how elite these folks are.

Some of the bull waste you and your colleagues like NLN and IAMClueless are so mis-informed, self serving and plain wrong that I am glad we are having this discussion on line, it really saves on lawyer fees defending myself from assault charges.

I'm surprised you aren't embarrassed to use the words Hypocrisy and/or Hyperbole. I would think you would feel a tinge of self description.

rm you and a couple others

rm you and a couple others are but a very small percentage 1%-2% of self elitists who are becomming ex-stink like Hollywoods self-rightious peones who ride up in their limos and put out the red carpet to give themselves idols!
Hollywood is dying because of greed and the sooner the better!
Private for profit get rid of the corruption in our Fed, Prov and Reginal gvernments along with all the Corrupt Corporations and bring back the Bank of Canada to the people as it was before B Mulroney screwed us on that one. He also screwed us with NAFTA, traitor.
Now J Chreatian, P Martin and now S Harper with SPP's a total sell out to big biz.
Anyway enough from me, as I go out and enjoy this great weather!

ok I forgot to spell check

ok I forgot to spell check

This guy is not a Canadian?

This guy is not a Canadian?
http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2007/07/18/why-is-harper-privatizing-federal-office-towers/
"If the citizens neglect their Duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the Laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded.": Noah Webster - (1758-1843) American patriot and scholar, author of the 1806 edition of the dictionary that bears his name, the first dictionary of American English usage.
This is also true in Canada.

Is it just me

or ..has anyone else noticed...the doctors don`t really all seem to be what they`re cracked up to be...I mean at diagnosing...for instance..there seems to be a lot of stuff they " don`t really know a lot about this yet"...they don`t seem to want to take the time to really dig.. to do the work.. to find and treat what it is you got..

time is money I guess...as they say..

The Weasel Day....

...steers well clear of the simple fact that one American goes bankrupt every 30 second, 24/7, through an inability to pay medical costs.

As a matter of fact, the cheerleading squad for privatization on this here thread steers clear of this as well.

That in itself makes private healthcare akin to the Titanic, right after it hit the iceberg of reality.

"...free enterprise, [is] a

"...free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich." : Noam Chomsky

Once more let me remind you

Once more let me remind you what fascism is. It need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt - it may even wear a dress shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing that peoplemay use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.
T.C.Douglas
A true Canadian "For The People By The People" we are 30 million strong just buy local, look for a "Farmers Market" usually on Sunday near you!

look for a "Farmers Market" usually on Sunday near you!

Just ask Ed Deak about the restrictive inroads governments are beginning to make into the free-market system regarding small, independent entrepreneurs................

Spreading it how far?

"The spreading of the wealth is always cried for but when it goes to third-world countries the socialists want to stop it."

I believe this is a genuine head-butting unresolvable disagreement you here identify. It is, namely, about whether the national state and the local community counts for anything or not. It is about the so-called social contract. You want to abolish it? Think carefully now. You can do away with anyone paying their taxes for roads you drive on and facilities you might need. I know some people on the same end of the politcal spectrum as you have ingenious ways of not 'spreading their wealth', and maybe they don't count for that much on the tax roster. The majority consists of miserable, middle-income 'pinkos' who might mount a tax revolt, if the community they thought they paid into use its 'unspread wealth' not for hot-tubs but for baby-factories churning out competitors overseas. You can also do away with organized labour who can be commandeered back to work by way of legislation, and with the notion of 'insubordination', we'll all be royally insubordinate. I wonder if you can even imagine that. Do you know, how much in your daily life only 'works' because of the grace you receive from the 'socialists' around you? And do you know they/we could choose otherwise? Then step softly, rather than pour contempt over other people's heads. You don't offer any sound argument as to how your own social plan will benefit the whole community, you just bicker at people who don't agree with you, and who offer ideas that could get in the way of limitless greed and expansion of 'markets'.

We are not alone.

I hope you all read Norman Spector's article in the Globe today, confirming my supposition.

dorothy

Left leaning posters here constantly rail against trade agreements claiming these will reduce employment as bad corporations seek cheaper sources of products and services. Health-care is one example although West claims that increased service provided in India, Thailand, etc. does nothing for the general population, although billions are going into that economy alone. Briefly, what I say is that trade deals will raise the wealth of those in poorer countries and it's up to us to modernize and innovate.

The centre-left government of Chile is another example;

After two years of negotiations, the United States and Chile signed an agreement in June 2003 that will lead to completely duty-free bilateral trade within 12 years. The U.S.-Chile FTA entered into force January 1, 2004 following approval by the U.S. and Chilean congresses. The bilateral FTA has inaugurated greatly expanded U.S.-Chilean trade ties, with total bilateral trade jumping by 154% during the FTA’s first three years.

Chile unilaterally lowered its across-the-board import tariff for all countries with which it does not have a trade agreement to 6% in 2003. Higher effective tariffs are charged only on imports of wheat, wheat flour, and sugar as a result of a system of import price bands. The price bands were ruled inconsistent with Chile's World Trade Organization (WTO) obligations in 2002, and the government has introduced legislation to modify them. Under the terms of the U.S.-Chile FTA, the price bands will be completely phased out for U.S. imports of wheat, wheat flour, and sugar within 12 years.

Chile is a strong proponent of pressing ahead on negotiations for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and is active in the WTO’s Doha round of negotiations, principally through its membership in the G-20 and Cairns Group.

Spector's piece

http://members.shaw.ca./nspector3/globe301.htm

Norman Spector????

You've now reached the bottom of the barrel Realisticman. I expect you'll soon come out the other end of the telescope as a Maoist or a strident Marxist-Leninist.

Perhaps you'd like to give us a little lecture on the 'bitch' theory of human relations according to Norman. Nice fellow though - interesting that he's never stayed at a single job for more than a handful of years...if you'd ever worked with him you'd understand why...I actually much preferred his colleague Mark Krasnick (RIP).

Spector used to post to Tyee from time to time...and always got really upset when he wasn't afforded the appropriate respect by other writers here. Big surprise everything he ever writes or says is all about 'him'.

And the notion that the 'left' created Dr Day - perhaps you could let Dr Day know about "that" delivery - after you contact both Jean Chretien and his then-finance minister Paul Martin..I'm sure they'll appreciate being let off the hook for defunding health and social transfers to the provinces as well.

Oh, and while you're looking at Chile, you might want to analyze what a 'great' success their privatized pensions have been. I can provide you with copies of adulatory columns from places like the WSJ when that whole cock-up began AND the subsequent sad recitiation about what has actually happened to retirees incomes in Chile.

And you still haven't explained how that 2.2 billion beans gets trickled down to more than 1 billion Indians - the majority of them peasants who'll never see the inside of one of those medical-tourism hospital-cum-spas. And you know why - because it doesn't get trickled down - it goes direct into the pockets of the Indian masters of the universe who are just as compromised, if not more so, as the counterparts you love here in North America.

I take it back - Norman's not quite the bottom of the barrel - you could have quoted Mark Steyn. Gotta give you and C+ for consistency, you are really riding this anti-union hobby horse for broke.

Ever read D. H. Lawrence's "The Rocking Horse Winner"?

Certain elements of your campaign for the broken-down nag of globalization bring home the fact that the latest chin-wag in Quebec has pretty much exposed those turkeys for what they've been up to all along...just like the G8 and their false promises. Nothing but a bunch of guys in radical drag with rocks in their hands trying to foment a kerfuffle and ending up making their masters look even worse than before. How can you not see it? What price do they pay you to look the other way and ignore the mess around your ankles? Knees? Perhaps higher.

Did you see the extensive report on pollution in China in the New York Times on the weekend? I'll provide a link for you later if you're interested.

tick, tick, tick....

Just because Norman

gets along with and often agrees with Bill Tielman, as well as compliments Carole James, you don't have to be too hard on him.

I'm also surprised that after the Centre-Left winning in Chile you would be so upset with them. Isn't that a socialist styled government you're so in rapture with? Is it actually you that's squeezing out the barrel's other end? I know you like to quote the Factbook: "Sound economic policies, maintained consistently since the 1980s, have contributed to steady growth, reduced poverty rates by over half,".

As for India, they say, "The economy has posted an average growth rate of more than 7% in the decade since 1996, reducing poverty by about 10 percentage points."

Do you honestly think that the influx of all that money providing services to visitors actually goes into some cargo hold and that none of it helps expand the domestic economy? Strange. Are you sure you wouldn't really prefer that they stay agrarian folk?

Of course some of it does

Do you honestly think that the workers extracting Guar gum from bushes in India for industrial food manufacturers here in North American can get into any of the health tourism spa locations? And those are people with jobs.

As far as poverty is concerned in India I suggest you look at what's actually happened to the 'green' revolution that was supposedly going to make India self-sufficient in food: That was the big promise 10 - 20 years ago R/man. It's a bust man!

I'd prefer to transfer the excess profits sloshing around the economy that multi-national companies play with on the stock market in hedge-fund financed leveraged buyouts to actually helping Indian poverty or ending starvation in the Horn of Africa... In fact, about all globalization has done is make the situation for intellectuals in China about as bad as it was during the cultural revolution, raised the status of industrial kingpins and crooks to that of capos in the Chinese bureaucracy and made the countryside so toxic it's practically unliveable. And created a situation where you have to look at 'where' everything you buy was manufactured in the vain hope that it 'wasn't' in China.

Great progress!

Remember those scenes from Manufactured Landscapes R/Man? That's the system you worship and it is a crock, a lie and a crime - little more than the play-toy of the masters of the universe who couldn't care less about the effects of their lifestyles on real people and their families.

They're too busy flying the world being global citizens.

I happen to know that millions of Polish farmers (for example) really DO prefer to continue to live and prosper on the land - despite the efforts of big business to move them off their few hectares so factory farms can take over.

The world hasn't come close to meeting its food needs during the last several years (did you know that R/man?)- and strategic reserves are being inexorably drawn down. Soon it isn't just going to be malnutrition we're looking at, it is going to be mass starvation.

Are you sure you want all those agricultural workers moving into the city; all that ALR land turned into parking lot? All those workers turned into wage slaves making garbage for a global economy? Maybe it is you Realisticman, who aren't really very realistic at all.

Just close your eyes and keep smiling - everything's fine....and this really isn't on topic

tick, tick, tick...

and a bit more for you - also a long way from the topic

in support of what I've been saying about India:

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=9084

Yack, yack, yack.

Are you the guy with the sandwich board. "The End is Neigh"?

I hate to upset you but the FAO based in Rome says this:

World population will grow from around 6 billion people today to 8.3 billion people in 2030. Population growth will be growing at an average of 1.1 percent a year up to 2030, compared to 1.7 percent annually over the past 30 years. At the same time, an ever increasing share of the world's population is well-fed. As a result, the growth in world demand for agricultural products is expected to slow further, from an average 2.2 percent annually over the past 30 years to 1.5 percent per year until 2030. In developing countries, the slowdown will be more dramatic, from 3.7 percent for the past 30 years to an average of 2 percent until 2030.

However, the developing countries with low to medium levels of consumption, accounting for about half of the population in developing countries, would see demand growth slowing only from 2.9 to 2.5 percent per year, and per caput consumption increasing.

The world population will be increasingly well-fed by 2030, with 3050 kilocalories (kcal) available per person, compared to 2360 kcal per person per day in the mid-1960s and 2800 kcal today. This change reflects above all the rising consumption in many developing countries whose average will be close to 3000 kcal in 2030.

The number of hungry people in developing countries is expected to decline from 777 million today to about 440 million in 2030. This means, that the target of the World Food Summit in 1996, to reduce the number of hungry by half from its level in 1990-92 (815 million) by 2015, will not even be met by 2030. Sub-Saharan Africa is cause for serious concern, because the number of chronically undernourished people will only decrease from 194 to 183 million.

So what are you saying? India shouldn't improve it's skills and economy, and the trickle-down benefits of providing services to foreign companies and people but should close it's borders and raise tariffs on exports, and imports from India should be stopped because any benefits only go to globe-trotting millionaires that don't care about the ordinary family in India?

Cheer up old chap.

Well, I hate to disabuse you about that

I'm afraid your figures are out to lunch R-man.
Let me refer you to the following from no less an authority than Niall Ferguson. You know Niall don't you? Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford and currently lecturing at Harvard. This is fairly long, so it may require two posts.

Malthusian misery's comeback
With the world population growth outpacing food supply, say goodbye to the era of unlimited improvement.
Niall Ferguson

July 30, 2007

The great demographer and economist Thomas Malthus was 23 years old the last time a British summer was this rain-soaked, which was in 1789. The consequences of excessive rainfall in the late 18th century were predictable. Crops would fail, the harvest would be dismal, food prices would rise and some people would starve. It was no coincidence that the French Revolution broke out the same year.

Nine years after that summer, Malthus published his "Essay on the Principle of Population." We would do well to reread it today. Malthus' key insight was simple but devastating. "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio," he observed. But "subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio." In other words, humanity can increase like the number sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16

, whereas our food supply can increase no faster than the number sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

We are, quite simply, much better at reproducing than feeding ourselves.

Malthus concluded that there must be "a strong and constantly operating check on population." This would take two forms: "misery" and "vice," by which he meant not only alcohol abuse but also contraception and abortion (he was, after all, an Anglican minister).

I wish I could have a free lunch for every time I've heard someone declare "Malthus was wrong." Superficially, it is true, mankind seems to have broken free of the Malthusian trap. The world's population has increased by a factor of more than six since Malthus' time. Yet the global average daily supply of calories consumed has also gone up on a per capita basis, exceeding 2,700 in the 1990s. In France on the eve of the revolution it was just 1,848.

The conventional explanation for this is the succession of revolutions in global agriculture, culminating in the postwar "green revolution" and the current wave of genetically modified crops. Since the 1950s, the area of the world under cultivation has increased by roughly 11%, while yields per hectare (about 2 1/2 acres) have increased by 120%. Yet these statistics don't disprove Malthus. As he said, food production could increase only at an arithmetical rate, and a chart of world cereal yields since 1960 shows just such a linear progression, from below 1 1/2 metric tons to around 3.

(continued below)

here's the res of it.

Meanwhile, vice and misery have been operating just as Malthus foresaw. Contraception and abortion have been employed to reduce family sizes. And wars, epidemics, disasters and famines have significantly increased mortality. Together, vice and misery have managed to reduce the rate of population growth from 2.2% annually in the early 1960s to about 1.1% today.

The real question is whether we could now be approaching a new era of misery. The United Nations expects the world's population to pass the 9 billion mark by 2050. But can world food production keep pace? Plant physiologist Lloyd T. Evans has estimated that "we must reach an average yield of 4 tons per hectare to support a population of 8 billion." Yields now are just 3 tons per hectare, and a world of 8 billion people may be less than 20 years away.

Meanwhile, man-made forces are conspiring to put a ceiling on food production. Global warming and the resulting climate change may well be increasing the incidence of extreme weather events, as well as inflicting permanent damage on some farming regions. At the same time, our effort to slow global warming by switching from fossil fuels to biofuels is taking large tracts of land out of food production.

Some people worry about peak oil -- when we reach the peak of petroleum production. I worry about peak grain. World per capita cereal production has already passed its peak -- in the mid-1980s -- not least because of collapsing production in the former Soviet Union and sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, rising incomes in Asia are causing a worldwide surge in food demand.

Already, the symptoms of the coming food shortage are detectable. The International Monetary Fund recorded a 23% rise in world food prices during the last 18 months. Of course, we're not supposed to notice that prices are going up. In the U.S., the monetary authorities insist that we should focus on the "core" consumer price index, which excludes the cost of food and fuel, and has the annual U.S. inflation rate at just 2.2%. But food inflation is roughly double that.

When I wanted a Philly cheese steak last week, I had to pay through the nose. That's because cheese inflation is 4%, steak inflation is 6% and bread inflation is 10%. Steak is now 53% dearer than it was 10 years ago.

"The great question is now at issue," Malthus asked more than 200 years ago, "whether man shall henceforth start forwards with accelerated velocity toward illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement, or be condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery?"

For a long time, we have deluded ourselves that "illimitable improvement" was attainable. As the world approaches a new era of dearth, misery and its old companion, vice, are set to make a mighty Malthusian comeback.

Now you cheer up old chap!

And if that doesn't get you smiling

You might care to spend some time reading and analyzing this:
http://www.ifpri.org/2020/briefs/number30.htm

And pay particular attention to the section near the end that includes the following:
The Effects of Rising Prices on Food Security in Low-income Countries

Rising prices can quickly put food out of reach of the 1.1 billion people in the developing world who live on a dollar a day or less. Many poor people in low-income countries spend more than half their income on food, and food price increases are detrimental to their well-being. However, many of the poorest people in low-income countries depend on agriculture--directly or indirectly--for their livelihoods, and rising crop prices may actually increase their incomes. Public policies to deal with rising prices must not harm poor producers while helping poor consumers.

Some analysts think that grain fed to livestock can buffer price rises. As grain prices go up, meat prices will too. Meat demand will decline, freeing up grain for direct consumption. As the gap between rich and poor widens, however, wealthier consumers may not reduce their consumption of meat much, even at higher prices, and the burden of reducing grain demand to the level of supply may fall mostly on the poor.

The international community and individual countries can take action to dampen price rises or alleviate their negative effects. Industrial and exporting countries can continue to hold sufficient grain stocks or join together to create a new global grain reserve to increase supplies when prices rise and dampen price shocks. However, as agricultural price subsidies in industrial countries are reduced, these nations have little incentive to hold stocks or support reserves of the required magnitude.

Still sure it's such a great idea to get all those Indian peasants off the land?

Especially as more and more grain stocks are diverted into ethanol production. My friend, once again, you simply have not done your homework.

Perhaps you should talk to those globetrotting globalizing heroes of yours! Maybe you could convince them their lifestyle is actually killing people, eh?

out to lunch R-man.

Oh you are a good punster!

Interesting man Ferguson. Prolific writer, historian and journalist. I presume you agree with his quote, "The United States does not take on nearly enough. It does not commit sufficient resources to the military operations that will be needed to encourage democracy and peace, operations that only the United States can undertake (with the help of others)."

But, it's just one man's opinion. Perhaps you're not familiar with the FAO. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Serving both developed and developing countries, FAO acts as a neutral forum where all nations meet as equals to negotiate agreements and debate policy. FAO is also a source of knowledge and information. We help developing countries and countries in transition modernize and improve agriculture, forestry and fisheries practices and ensure good nutrition for all. Since our founding in 1945, we have focused special attention on developing rural areas, home to 70 percent of the world's poor and hungry people. FAO's activities comprise four main areas:

Putting information within reach.
Sharing policy expertise.
Providing a meeting place for nations.
Bringing knowledge to the field.

FAO employs more than 3 600 staff members � about 1600 professional and 2 000 general service staff � and currently maintains five regional offices, nine subregional offices, five liaison offices and 74 fully-fledged country offices (excluding those hosted in Regional and Subregional Offices), in addition to its headquarters in Rome.

Substantially more research capabilities than just one man; and his opinions. I prefer to defer to them.

While I don't expect to convince you of anything, since you continually make it abundantly clear that you will not be swayed from your subjective views, I do try to introduce objectivity into your arguments.

Because I think

Because I think some of what Ferguson says is a lot of bollocks doesn't mean he isn't raising the appropriate red flags in this case...and in my opinion he, and the other sources - of which there are a plethora - on this question are the OBJECTIVE ones.

Ferguson's not a primary researcher anyway - and for that reason I posted additional information and data that had no subjective content. And I can post a lot more.

How about this:
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update31.htm

But really, what’s the point – evidence and facts have no effect on your ‘belief system’.

I'm not in any way denigrating the work of FAO - but in my opinion you're hiding your head in the sand if you can ignore the growing problem of international food availability and cost. The fact that they are trying their best to see that there is enough food for the world’s poor – the couple of billion who live on around a dollar a day – is to their credit; but no matter how hard they work, they cannot change the fact that the earth’s agricultural production is NOT MEETING ITS FOOD REQUIREMENTS NOW and hasn’t done so regularly since the end of the century. This is not just a question of what will happen 20 years down the road when there are many million more mouths to feed – although that’s important – it is about what’s going on right now – a situation for which your avatars and your system have helped create and are failing to address. Moving peasants off the land – your theory – and into urban ghettoes where they will no longer be able even to feed themselves is a disaster. PERIOD

And because I refuse to ignore the obvious failures and shortcomings of the system you worship R/man - and its absolute refusal to actually come to grips with anything that doesn't fit your narrow and compromised view of the world an its problems I do not think that makes my analysis un-objective.

As far as I can remember from reading you R/man the only time you were objective was when you were quoting the dictionary.

Too bad really. I guess your nominal hatred of working people and disrespect for your fellow citizens who haven't got the money and status you covet and who organize to counteract and understand the overweening power of the forces you kow tow to becomes the sine qua non of one's intellectual life - well that's what happens.

You’ll also note that I try, as much as possible, to make statements (supported by facts and data) which are carefully qualified and conditional. Usually, consequently, qualified by terms such as ‘in my view’, ‘think’, ‘in my opinion’ – it’s something you might care to consider as a debating tactic my friend. It wouldn’t leave you so red-faced and embarrassed so often.

tick...tick....tick.

Objectively speaking

Volume of food is not the problem.
Notes;

While half the world starves, Europe has food surpluses, with warehouses in every major city filled with beef, wine, cheese, milk powder etc.

A bumper harvest across Eastern Europe has forced the European Commission to intervene, buying up and moving large amounts of surplus stocks from growers across the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to prevent serious market disturbance, reports Chris Mercer.

EU cereal stocks are now at their highest for a decade after the region produced 290 million tons in 2004, up a quarter from 2003 and largely driven by a 40 per cent increase across the ten new member states.

The problem is now, literally, where to put it all. The EU has already committed to buying up 13.5 million tons as 'intervention stocks', taking these stocks to their highest levels for six years, with about 60 per cent of this coming from the new states.

The situation is particularly acute in Eastern Europe where "producers in landlocked Hungary and the Czech Republic face falling prices because of weak, inelastic demand, inadequate private storage facilities and an inefficient and costly transportation system to export markets", says a circular from the US Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service.

Hungary increased its cereal harvest by 89 per cent to more than 16 million tons during 2004, while Poland's went up by a quarter to 29 million and the Czech Republic's by 54 per cent to 8.8 million. France and Germany remain head and shoulders above the rest on almost 70 million and 51 million tons respectively.

The EU has tried to solve the surplus issue by increasing export subsidies on the free market from €4 to €10 per ton in recent weeks, covering around 1.2 million tons of wheat.

Politics and subsidies cause both surpluses of food and shortages. Until recently Somalia was self-sufficient (you mentioned the Horn). The Russians and the US were active in the Horn of Africa, with sides changing so rapidly that at one point the pro USSR side was fighting the pro USA side with US supplied weapons, and vice versa, having switched allegiances. Transportation is also a significant and perhaps the greatest obstacle; ask Oxfam.

By the way Mr. West

Comments like this aren't really necessary. Are you just goading me to respond in kind?

As a matter of fact I have been to Oxford and had meetings at Oxfam.

SO what?

I think it's pretty clear which side of the fence you're on R'man. The real story is that the facts and the data don't support your sanguine view of things and YOU don't like it being pointed out to you.

I think you do covet the status of the people you promote. As for unnecessary comments, I agree, have a look back at what you posted. No don't bother, here it is:

...you will not be swayed from your subjective views, I do try to introduce objectivity into your arguments.

I said and still say the exact reciprocal of your practice is what you've alleged is true of me - so let's not get too shirty about it. A lot of the people I know from Oxford are considerably more objective than you are about aid, globalization and taking responsibility for the mess we're in.

I'm sorry you didn't learn anything more there but name-dropping. Mind you, it certainly fits your elitist view of the world and its problems.

If you don't like being called on your attitude - try changing it! I'll take no stick from you when it comes to bad manners.

" the facts and the data don't support your

don't support your sanguine view of things"

A neutral organization that was established within the UN over 60 years ago, including over 1,600 professionals in it's over 3,600 staff with 74 fully-fledged field offices, with the specific mandate to defeat world hunger says that the number of hungry people in developing countries is expected to decline from 777 million today to about 440 million in 2030.

Mr. West says that an opinion here, based on solid research - but still an opinion. An eleven (11) year out of date study from IFPRI on grain prices. Bolstered by a comment from the, well meaning but terribly tepid Earth Policy Institute, who are not unbiased as is the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations but are specifically for perpetuating one idea that is fixed in their brain - ergo, Eco's cocked up and we're all gonna croak tomorrow so panic now and roll up yur tent! Meanwhile, compost your poo-poo and please buy the bumper sticker for your "one less car" bike.

Please Garth, these are facts? This is a bit like buying someone the Boston Pops for Christmas after they tell you they enjoy classical music!

The fact an organization was

established 60 years ago and can't understand the critical consequences of looming food shortages - during the last 7 years - as a result of the earth being unable to meet its current needs without drawing down reserves - and that's not old data - or the only thing I referred to.

These are facts although you don't want to acknowledge them. Furthermore, this whole argument started out by you lauding the concept of moving self-sufficient Indian peasants off the land - remember?

And still no comeback but insults - I'm beginning to think you must be a believer in the 'secret'(that new age claptrap of Oprah Winfrey fame) because about all you've got going for you is positive thinking.

As for defeating hunger...how's that little project going? Wanna compare notes?

Red Herring alert

No GWest I don't remember. Furthermore, I never suggested or even hinted such.

Attempting to bolster your doomsday ideas with previously slanted conclusions that you yourself made is unworthy of comment. Particularly when when your suppositions are confounded with profound research that you simply dismiss as 'wrong'.

As I have said, your mind is made up and you will not be confused with the facts.

Well

If this isn't directly saying that then it is as close as Damn is to swearing. Your words - directed to ME - on this thread one day ago.

And yes, I really do think that the benefits of global trade and investment are not trickling DOWN to anyone. There simply is no evidence that the benefits of this kind of economic imperialism does anything except for a tiny elite. The circumstances of the overwhelming majority are not improved at all.

Mohammed Unis and The Poor Bank do more for the poor and downtrodden of the world than Bill Gates, Bono and Warren Buffett - including all the self-serving efforts of their global partners - combined.

The pith and substance of your construction - couched as always in a snide and personal way, R/man, is that YOU DO think there's something wrong with Indian peasants staying on the land.

For a man who pretends to kindness and compassion, you come across as, well, elitist and blind to reality. Sorry, that's the way I see it - the fact some wealthy person is a patron of the arts seems to make a bigger impression on you than the starving orphans of Darfur..

Of course, I don't expect you to acknowledge that any more than I expect you to admit you haven't advanced a single iota of evidence that food production is already NOT meeting current world needs. You haven't done that because YOU can't do it. The truth of the matter is not in dispute and, as the effects of global warming and the increase in pollution from China take their toll that huge country is going to be unable to meet its own needs for rice.

It doesn't fit your view of things and you simply dismiss the facts and level a personal attack on anyone who doesn't see the world the way you do.

If imperialistic capitalism - because that's really what you believe in - had been so good for the world we wouldn't have a situation now where 96% of the wealth in the world was sitting in the pockets and bank accounts of 1% of the population. As long as individuals like Gates and Buffett have a net worth that exceeds that of many countries I think it's you, and your worldview, that have a problem.

I'll post more information about the growing food crisis later - when I'm not at work - though for the life of me I don't know why I bother.

You misunderstand

I wrote, among other things:

I've never suggested that Indian farmers move off the land. There are perhaps a billion people in India and if a million move into the middle class and even into health-care that's fine with me too.

By the way, I had a call today from my traveling friend. He told me he just spent over $7,000 on health diagnostics in the UK and when he's in Hong Kong he sees a doctor there and when in Bangkok has an annual physical, because the care is so good. He's not off 'shopping' as you claim,...

...he's actually traveling on business. Half the year he works in the west and the other half in Asia.

As for food shortages, I prefer to defer to the largest anti-hunger organization in the world. Namely, the UN's FAO in Rome. They've been the standard for years and are not in thrall to anyone. According to them hunger is lessening.

Fine, don't admit to the truth

You wrote exactly what I cut and pasted. Do you now deny that?

The only possible implication of those words is that anyone who implied that it might be in a rural peasant's best interests to stay on the land (which is exactly what I did imply) was being prejudicial to their best interests. There is no other logical reading of the passage – period.

If you deny that there is no further purpose for any further discussion – you appear to be blind to the consequences of your own conclusions.

As for the non-sequitur about the FAO, I already covered that. The FAO doesn't deny the shortfall between food production and consumption R/Man so your point is entirely irrelevant - ignore the facts as long as you like - you're the loser in that game because it reflects upon YOUR credibility, not mine.

Moreover, please don’t mention your compromised jet-setting businessman cum shopper cum global citizen cum art lover cum aficionado of medical tourism (whatever you’re calling him currently) any more. I already told you what I think of him and you’re just making his case worse. Air travel for business purposes in 2007 is an evil anachronism. There is no need for it: meetings can be held electronically and any business can be transacted at a remove without the needless pollution and waste of intercontinental air travel - your friend is a wasteful profligate.

Further, anyone who spends $7,000 on diagnostics is either a hypochondriac or an idiot; in the absence of some indicator of disease such self-indulgence as part of annual physical (about which current cutting-edge medical opinion is sharply divided) is a criminal waste of scare resources - especially in a third world country.

In my view, your friend and all the other jetsetters like him should be ashamed - no wonder you were so upset by Monbiot's views on air travel. Guilty conscience or guilt by association I guess. I'll keep the fact in mind though if I ever see you post something about entitlement in the future.

As for your positive spin of FAO data, I've read the 2006 report and it looks to me as if the results for improvement in hunger and undernourishment world-wide are so small as to be within statistical error. Great NEWS!

And

And, if you are still feeling ebullient, here are some graphs to illustrate the points I've been making and you've been ignoring.

http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/j8122e/j8122e01.htm

From the FAO by the way.

Are you SURE you want to hang onto that position?

Tell us more...

realisticman wrote:

“The only reason that Canada and particularly BC clings to the present health system is because of the unions. All the opposition is due to unions afraid of loosing cushy jobs. Meanwhile, we all suffer - except, of course, if you're a union worker and automatically jump to the front of the line!
More outdated class battles led by crusading socialist ideologues that couldn't care less about people as long as the impossible party line is maintained.

By the way GW, did you know that money doesn't buy happiness?”

It seems to me, that there must be more Canadians than mere unionists ‘clinging to’ this model, seeing that Canada as a whole named it the number one national icon. If you look at the composition of our national and provincial governments, it must be pretty darn clear that unions do not have the numbers to call the shots around here.

Define ‘cushy jobs’, as well as those union workers who have them. Don’t you know that the majority would rather not pay union dues? They only get impelled to do so, when and if the employer screws them too far. So forget ‘cushy’.

You can also forget the easy postulate that union workers are ‘afraid’ of losing their jobs. Most unionized skilled workers are in short supply today, and are becoming more so with every passing year. One reason they stay unionized is, that they wish to protect being able to get breaks between work long enough to maintain human status. Where does that leave us? I don’t know. It seems to me, that when a whole class of people are being ascribed motives they don’t have, it tells something about the person who describes them thus. Are you sitting in a cushy position, which you fear losing? What is it, and why do you see unionized workers as the great beast in the Revelations? You are saying ‘we all suffer’ due to them. Then tell us how you have particualrly suffered.

I know in these columns, I have told a lot of my personal experiences, which in some cases were pretty unique. I expect nothing less of others, instead of cop-outs telling about ‘this friend of mine’. If you have nothing better, it can be excusable in one or two examples, but it becomes tiresome in the long run, and ‘the friend’ is a classic in ‘dear Abby’ and such, whenever people ask about girl- and man trouble.

I did include this strange non-sequiteur about happiness not being able to buy money, in my quote, because I would like to direct you to my comments in the ‘trees and us’ thread, where I have written about how ‘happiness’ as a concept may be related to.

Here we go again!

I suggested that the development of a health-care industry in India was a good thing. You said that it was not. So I asked if you'd prefer that all Indians remain agrarian. I wasn't suggesting that a billion Indians abandon the farm for a career in health-care. Read the writing and understand the gist of it!

The FAO recognizes a shortfall in food but states clearly that hunger is lessening and has the figures to back it up.

World agriculture 2030:
Main findings

World population will grow from around 6 billion people today to 8.3 billion people in 2030. Population growth will be growing at an average of 1.1 percent a year up to 2030, compared to 1.7 percent annually over the past 30 years. At the same time, an ever increasing share of the world's population is well-fed. (FAO)

My friend works in the visual arts field capturing images for use in industry and the arts much like Burchinsky. Does Burchinski bike around the world? No. It cannot be done by video conferencing. Get it? He also has family and a home in Asia. Sometimes he flies, he also takes boats, trains and public transit. He owns less 'stuff' than almost anyone I know and mostly lives out of a suitcase. Is that so bad? His diagnostics were required after flying from Hong Kong to London, a flight he has taken more than fifty times (in economy class) and on arrival he experienced dizziness and fatigue for over a week. He went to various specialists and paid for the procedures ordered. Is that so bad? He wasn't taking advantage of any taxpayer funded system. You say he should be ashamed. Is National Geographic going to stop their photographers traveling and taking pictures? I hope not.

As I said before Dorothy

Quote:

... It was the political left that created Dr. Day, when the Mike Harcourt government gave injured workers a route to jump the queue through the Cambie Street clinic. And, by clinging tenaciously to the status quo to protect their trade union friends, it's the left that continues to create openings for Dr. Day's agenda. ...

http://members.shaw.ca./nspector3/globe301.htm

I'd like a system that allows mine and your parents, grandparents, loved ones and children the same easy access as anyone else and if that means a mixed health-care system with rapid service like there is in France, Sweden and most of the world then so be it. No elites like those Norman cites.

The reason I mentioned money and happiness is that certain people frequently base their arguments on the fact that some people have lots of money and are therefore depriving them from something or other. I agree that some people are paid or have ridiculous amounts of money but I think we can all agree that money does not necessarily buy happiness.

Keep ignoring the facts R/man, that's what you are good at.

HEALTH CARE should be about caring for the ill, the dying and the young - including mothers and infants - to the best standard possible for ALL the PEOPLE of the country involved - irregardless of their ability to pay - it should have nothing to do with catering to the selfish and narcissistic needs of wealthy people who can throw away thousands of dollars on wasted diagnostic services.

Would you like to compare you friends' standard of health care with that of an Indian peasant? Or with that of an injured "Union" member or a retired person here in Canada?

I'll throw down another shovel so you can dig yourself in a little deeper. I'm not the one who should be ashamed. Where is YOUR sense of fairness and proportion?

Furthermore, your rosy picture of what some highly paid bureaucrat says is 'going' to happen by 2030 is pretty much on a par with Nostradamus' predictions...I notice you haven't made any response to FAO data I posted above that confirms exactly what I've been saying and you've been avoiding about food shortfalls.

We are talking about what is happening NOW, about the fact that the FAOs sanguine predictions about what was going to happen - made 20 years ago - haven't come to pass and that our ability to feed a growing population is degrading as I type.

Degrading because of the lies and false promises made by the masters of the universe who now control 96% percent of the world's wealth already. That 1% of the world's population who think it's necessary to waste $7,000 on tests because they're a little tired. Degrading because lackeys like Gordon Campbell think its okay to pave over a couple hundred hectares of the best delta farmland in the world to make it possible to ship more unsafe Chinese junk to consumers already sated and jaded with the hollowness of their consumption-ruled lives.

Not only should he be ashamed, you should be too.

Give me, and the rest of the world, a break.

I don't know what, or how often Burtynsky flies anywhere, but if he's jetted 50 times between London and Hong Kong he needs a good whack upside the head too.

Yep, it is bad, it is actually criminal and if the sense of entitlement of people like your friend makes it impossible for them to see anything other than their own selfish needs to live like an over consuming rat in a self-created maze - well, someone more responsible in the 99% of the world's population is going to have to teach him.

That too is democracy. Such a life style is theft personified.

You're not a clergyman are you? Outside of a Church of England pulpit I have seldom heard such nonsense.

West says shut it all down

The End is Neigh again, eh? So West wants to shut down National Geographic. No more mags with pictures of the far reaches of our planet.

Shut down anything other than state health-care facilities. No more Shouldice Clinic for Jack Layton to go to to relieve his excruciating pain. Let the US recruiters come to Canada and poach our nurses with their glitzy presentations in our swank hotels.

Ed Burtynsky, we don't want any more pictures from afar. Stay home and take photos!

Oh, as for Gordon Campbell. West please find the agreement that Campbell drew up stating that the Tssawassen Band are not allowed to do whatever they wish to do but obliged to build on their land. I wonder why the NDP caucus supports this?

Give us a break please. Saddle up the sandwich board and go outside.

Nice Realisticman

Unable to actually justify the obvious conclusions about the bankruptcy of the system that's got us to the point we are in now - and bereft of any evidence to support your 'faith' in that system you revert to as a default - you turn to the only thing you have left: ad hominem attack.

By the way, hernias almost never involve excruciating pain and the BC Universal Health Care system is perfectly competent to treat them in a timely way. I play soccer, I've had hernia surgery, I know.

I could care less what Jack Layton does - like most human beings, he's fallible. At least, however, he doesn't delude himself to into thinking that capitalistic colonial materialism is working for the vast majority of citizens of the world.

That's your problem Realisticman and trying to play silly buggers about jet-setting photographers and the role they play in our cultural and economic life is total nonsense - as you no doubt know. As far as US hospitals poaching Canadian nurses goes that's certainly not my problem - I have nothing to do with the gross mismanagement of health care in this province and country...that's your baby, Man.

Pretty sad my friend. As for the NDP and its position on the Tssawwassen Treaty settlement agreement, (which I happen to have read and I'd advise you to do as well for the answer to your rather naive question) I've been critical of that too.

I'm perfectly sanguine about the land going to the TFN; what I'm exercised about is the fact that the ALR land in question has been alienated without submitting it to due process. Because I care about the future and the sustainability of this economy and because that, in the end, is far more closely linked to our ability to feed the world than it is with how efficiently we can fit into the cogs of a bankrupt system of global economics.

That this was the plan, coordinated with the whole 'Gateway' boondoggle by the Campbell government from the start of his one-man takeover of democracy in this province, has been clear for some time to anyone who doesn't still have the scales on his or her eyes.

Development and noxious growth at all costs - for the simple reason that the whole raison d'etre of this economy is only sustainable if a new cadre of mindless consumers of everything can be created each generation.

The life expectancy of a Chinese traffic cop is 43 years Realisticman - and not because he's likely to get run over - simply because he's dying from the poisoned air he breathes.

Let me know when you have a real answer to the questions every thinking individual should be trying to answer for yourself. And no, no breaks for you and yours - pointing out the bankruptcy of your lies and obfuscations is far more important than your feelings. Time to grow up.

Just Clarifying

Just trying to clear up some of your whacky comments West.

By the way, what we have to do, as I've pointed out before, is get those Chinese into modern cars. As you have no doubt Googled, motorcycle pollution in Asia from their two stroke engines is the main culprit.

You were lucky West. I was given three shots of morphine which did nothing the pain I was in and a friend here had to go back by ambulance and into surgery post-op after excruciating pain. As for Jack, it is good to hear that he supports private/public partnerships. Ralph Nader and the red tory Joe-who went there too, you know.

As for the real answers you're asking for, all I can say with certainty is that everything changes.

Once more, with feeling...

"...the Mike Harcourt government gave injured workers a route to jump the queue through the Cambie Street clinic. And, by clinging tenaciously to the status quo to protect their trade union friends..."

You're not geting this: The reason these injured workers get to 'jump the queue' is that their employer, the government on behalf of taxpayers, does not want them to have an excuse for not returning to work with all possible haste. I suggest you read the management of use of sick time provisions for instance for public health care employees. You will quickly find out, that after missing three shifts, a 'supportive' system will start grinding, its aim to ensure that said workers do not hang around in bed at home one single 'shift' more than necessary. Why? Because they are needed at work, that's why. The taxpayers did not pay for their education so they could be out of commission and not available when needed. A virtual conscription - is that the cushy jobs you were talking about? Those where you can't have a bad day, for if you do, you might make a slip, freudian or otherwise, and since in most cases you do jobs where no one looks over your shoulder to second-guess you, someone could die. This must be the kind of unfair money-grubbing monopoly you are referring to, yes?

I know that money does not buy happiness! I directed you to my post in that reagrd, and instead of reading it, you lecture me on some level I assume is gently adjusted to what you believe my IQ to be. Read the piece, man, I'm doing a better job than you out of telling why money cannot buy the stuff dreams are made of...

I'll second that advice

Just READ the material - all things being equal Realisticman - you're bound to absorb a little something.

And no doubt the excrutiating pain got you some relief without heading to the Shouldice clinic. Or did you have to wait behind a huge line of union workers?

They discuss the Shouldice clinic, by the by, as a 'business case' at Harvard...it's a very popular place for masters of the universe and the people who study them.

Big surprise, eh! As far as I know, Shouldice is an insured provider under the Ontario Health Plan.

SO did you really HAVE a point? Since you still havent come to terms with the reality of the situation in the world (as opposed to the wishful thinking of the FAO) that I've been trying to discuss with you I would appreciate your answer to two questions:

Why are you such a fan of a United Nations organ? Neocons, for the most part, see the UN as more or less co-equal with the devil.

And secondly, why exactly do you think things are turning out so well when every economic indicator and most of the human ones are pointing the opposite way? Where do you get that sunny disposition - God?

Because it sure isn't looking good from where I sit.

By the way

I had to come back here just to see if you'd actually written that phrase about getting the Chinese into cars - modern or otherwise.

We need to start dumping OUR cars now, not encourage the Chinese to continue the down the dismal road we've taken. The environment is on the skids now - adding 500 or 600 million more cars (of any kind) into the mix should pretty much seal our fate.

Good luck with that one too - by the time you've cured Africa's ills and put half of China's population behind the wheel of an automobile that'll pretty much do the future for this place. I think I better start believing in the rapture.

Please Dorothy

You make it sound as though these people would be happier to not have quick health-care so they could luxuriate longer at home. Could be but people in the real world want their pain taken care of ASAP; and why shouldn't non-union workers want and even need to return to work promptly? I have to work because if I don't I start going broke quickly. No union or employee benefits like sick days, vacations and pensions for me.

If you feel that the NDP government brought this provision in because they are tantamount to slave drivers, then even more reason to rescind it.

I frequently raised my friend's situation because West constantly misunderstood and accused him of being a wealthy international shopper. Whereas, in fact, he's a hard-working self-employed cameraman and publisher with clients and family across the world and drives an old VW bus. GWest won't accept his validity for travel at all yet constantly refers to the work of another cameraman. I'll try and ignore him.

You'll not ignore me R/Man

Moreover, you know it. Because it galls you no end that you can’t actually defend your attitudes with real empirical evidence; furthermore, you constantly get yourself in trouble because you prefer the particular over the general. Simply because you have a specific experience of a thing has little or no relevance to the overall situation.

You like your friend and his perambulations because you appreciate his art, which is fine as far as it goes, but you ignore the fact that the thousands of people who live the life style of your friend (for almost any reason and especially for business) are contributing needlessly to the despoliation of the environment for the billions of people who are neither able nor wish to live that way.

The fact you like your friend and think he does valuable work is irrelevant because the style of life he leads harms the greater good far more than it might benefit it. We’ve got enough colour pictures in enough National Geographic’s now – let local people photograph their local scene and leave it at that – a few jobs for the people in the exotic locations your friend presumably shoots would be a greater benefit to them and he can snap all the digital images he likes of the Lake Country – without ever stepping onto an airplane.

We have more than enough pictures by big name shutterbugs, more than enough facile travelogues - we need role models who stay home, run their businesses and their lives from a small footprint. Anyone who has flown 50 times between London and China - no matter what his purpose - is doing far more harm than good. And I'd say that equally directly about Edward Burtynsky if it’s true of him. In fact I wrote exactly that above here. Did you not READ THAT EITHER?

I'll just post it again for you as a direct and comprehensive refutation of what you've just said to dorothy.

As for misunderstanding your friend's situation; that's inaccurate too. I reacted quite carefully using the words YOU wrote to describe your friend and his incessant travel...including his ridiculous and wasteful $7,000 diagnostic fishing expedition just because he can. You now mention that he's a cameraman - as if it made any difference - in some kind of vain last ditch effort to resurrect his sullied honour.

Please, now it's time for you to give us a break.

Thank you, Sir.

"A good whack upside the head." Worth remembering. I hope for our and your sakes that you stay away from airports. It wouldn't be in anyone's interest were you to flip and take any affirmative action. The prospect of a panicked doomsday messenger inclined towards head banging anyone who travels, being loose in a transportation terminal is to be discouraged, to say the least.

With the world jet aircraft fleet now at 18,000 and total worldwide passenger traffic reaching an all time high in 2006, increasing by 4.8 percent over 2005 and cargo traffic rising by a firm 3.6 percent, airports welcomed a record 4.4 billion passengers in 2006.

Someone, somewhere in BC imagines this is naughty and must stop. Weird.

What's really weird

What’s really weird is that you, again, can’t understand the use of language and metaphor.

Furthermore, I'm no doomsday messenger and my affirmative action amounts to trying to get people to think, to read, to discuss and to understand. Something alas, with you, that has been pretty much a failure.

You've been maintaining how wonderful you think intercontinental air travel is since I first read your pleas and phony arguments here at Tyee. All of which despite the science and the ease with which much of it (like your jet setting friend's travel and business and convention junkets) could be eliminated tomorrow if people who profess to believe in the promise of the future and the welfare of their fellow human beings actually acted as if they did and stopped living the way they do.

Now that is weird - as is your refusal to actually engage on a singel issue and instead revert to attacking me.

OK, I'm not being paid to do this...

Nor is it within my field of expertise. But I will perhaps be helpful if I point out to you, that your shirt has no back... No, just kidding; you are doing something that would result in the same kind of effect, though: You are taking my answer to your voiced surmises and treating it as if I made an original 'complaint'. Not legit, and it shows you are just killing time and looking for attention without having any real insight to offer.

I do live in the real world, where things happen for a reason, and no man is an island onto himself. The good old American maxim about minding your own business and paying your own bills, whereupon all claims to influencing and making demands on your behaviour should be nil, just doesn't cut it anymore, not after a lot of those bills get paid with funny money, which is being churned out with no gold bars or any other tangible commodity anywhere to justify its appearance.

You could go and found your own planet somewhere, and there you could buy your way to everything with whatever coinage you might contrive, but this tired old globe is inexorably headed towards Ragnarok, and we must start to be careful with the provisions. No more markets where the possibilities are endless, because the masses are endless. The great empire of limitless procreation, China, are now doing cross-cultural stuff such as starting to value girl children and taking measues to conserve air to breathe, etc. Contracting or sourcing out has its limits, too, it would seem. we're really going to hit that brick wall, and there ain't no fixes other than taking it and behaving. The Gods will not be bargained with. We have nothing they need, other than respect, and this is precisely what the 'why can't I just buy my own?' crowd isn't showing. Including you. Quit doing the cheap one-upmanship game with people like GWest and myself and get serious.

Ragnarok

Like every generation before, this one too has a number of people, some religious others brainwashed, into believing that the end is neigh. It 'ain't. Not unless the planet is whacked by a very big rock. Doom and gloom cults have always been around and are presently quite in vogue. This too will wane. That is serious.

The end is neigh!

Now that is funny. Perhaps there's hope for you yet.

What's serious is the procliviity of masters of the universe (that 1%) to make light of the plight of the other 99%.

You might find this a little bit interesting:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/vidarbha/index.html

I'm reminded of another collection of phrases that I think may be more apropos of the situation than your Panglossian take:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

And, if you're still not convinced I'll provide you with a lot more. Happily, I know there are lots of other readers who ARE learning something.

Thanks G

Yes, the situation for the Indian cotton farmers is tragic and wrong and it can be corrected as the writer points out, by eliminating the subsidies that US farmers receive for growing cotton. I thoroughly agree. Farm subsidies must be ended. People are dying! We here in Canada should try and encourage the elimination of subsidies to farmers too.

Bu the way, I know you have an interest in civilized Norway. This came in today:
Norwegians boost 737 production with $3 billion order
30-August-07

Norwegian Air Shuttle is spending $3.1 billion on new 737s.

The Norwegian low-fare airline, has ordered 42 aircraft with options for a further 42 on top of an order for 11 placed in May.

Onward and upward!

I'm sorry R/man

Where did I ever say that insanity was limited to American, Canadians, Australians and Brits?

Here's another little thing you might like to read...and remember, it's the colonial US system that YOU LOVE which is more than anything responsible for what's happening and has happened to thd third world.

I live very modestly on a small footprint...you're the one promoting the destruction of the environment and playing silly buggers into the bargain.

Here's some Monbiot...about the mess in your homeland:

How the neoliberals stitched up the wealth of nations for themselves

A cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the economic debate, and
now we are dealing with the catastrophic effects

George Monbiot
Tuesday August 28, 2007
The Guardian

For the first time the UK's consumer debt exceeds the total of its
gross national product: a new report shows that we owe £1.35 trillion.
Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road
bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into
the Mississippi. Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000
people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary
lodgings. As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to
take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the
most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world
war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf
hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of
economic troubles.
These problems appear unrelated, but they all have something in common.
They arise in large part from a meeting that took place 60 years ago in
a Swiss spa resort. It laid the foundations for a philosophy of
government that is responsible for many, perhaps most, of our
contemporary crises.

(conclusion follows)

here's more - may have to be in 3 bits

When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its political project
did not have a name. But it knew where it was going. The society's
founder, Friedrich von Hayek, remarked that the battle for ideas would
take at least a generation to win, but he knew that his intellectual
army would attract powerful backers. Its philosophy, which later came
to be known as neoliberalism, accorded with the interests of the
ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would pay for it.
Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom
and minimum intervention by the state. The role of government should be
confined to creating and defending markets, protecting private property
and defending the realm. All other functions are better discharged by
private enterprise, which will be prompted by the profit motive to
supply essential services. By this means, enterprise is liberated,
rational decisions are made and citizens are freed from the
dehumanising hand of the state.
This, at any rate, is the theory. But as David Harvey proposes in his
book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal
programme has been implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth
not just to the top 1%, but to the top tenth of the top 1%. In the US,
for instance, the upper 0.1% has already regained the position it held
at the beginning of the 1920s. The conditions that neoliberalism
demands in order to free human beings from the slavery of the state -
minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security,
deregulation, the breaking of the unions - just happen to be the
conditions required to make the elite even richer, while leaving
everyone else to sink or swim. In practice the philosophy developed at
Mont Pelerin is little but an elaborate disguise for a wealth grab.
So the question is this: given that the crises I have listed are
predictable effects of the dismantling of public services and the
deregulation of business and financial markets, given that it damages
the interests of nearly everyone, how has neoliberalism come to
dominate public life?

more....

Richard Nixon was once forced to concede that "we are all Keynesians
now". Even the Republicans supported the interventionist doctrines of
John Maynard Keynes. But we are all neoliberals now. Margaret Thatcher
kept telling us that "there is no alternative", and by implementing her
programmes Clinton, Blair, Brown and the other leaders of what were
once progressive parties appear to prove her right.
The first great advantage the neoliberals possessed was an unceasing
fountain of money. US oligarchs and their foundations - Coors, Olin,
Scaife, Pew and others - have poured hundreds of millions into setting
up thinktanks, founding business schools and transforming university
economics departments into bastions of almost totalitarian neoliberal
thinking. The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the American
Enterprise Institute and many others in the US, the Institute of
Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith
Institute in the UK, were all established to promote this project.
Their purpose was to develop the ideas and the language which would
mask the real intent of the programme - the restoration of the power of
the elite - and package it as a proposal for the betterment of
humankind.
Their project was assisted by ideas which arose in a very different
quarter. The revolutionary movements of 1968 also sought greater
individual liberties, and many of the soixante-huitards saw the state
as their oppressor. As Harvey shows, the neoliberals coopted their
language and ideas. Some of the anarchists I know still voice notions
almost identical to those of the neoliberals: the intent is different,
but the consequences very similar.
Hayek's disciples were also able to make use of economic crises. An
early experiment took place in New York City, which was hit by
budgetary disaster in 1975. Its bankers demanded that the city follow
their prescriptions - huge cuts in public services, smashing of the
unions, public subsidies for business. In the UK, stagflation, strikes
and budgetary breakdown allowed Thatcher, whose ideas were framed by
her neoliberal adviser Keith Joseph, to come to the rescue. Her
programme worked, but created a new set of crises.
If these opportunities were insufficient, the neoliberals and their
backers would use bribery or force. In the US, the Democrats were
neutered by new laws on campaign finance. To compete successfully for
funding with the Republicans, they would have to give big business what
it wanted. The first neoliberal programme of all was implemented in
Chile following Pinochet's coup, with the backing of the US government
and economists taught by Milton Friedman, one of the founding members
of the Mont Pelerin Society. Drumming up support for the project was
easy: if you disagreed, you got shot. The International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank used their power over developing nations to demand
the same policies.

emphasis mine - THey have a true disciple in you

But the most powerful promoter of this programme was the media. Most of
it is owned by multimillionaires who use it to project the ideas that
support their interests. Those ideas which threaten their interests are
either ignored or ridiculed. It is through the newspapers and TV
channels that the socially destructive notions of a small group of
extremists have come to look like common sense. The corporations' tame
thinkers sell the project by reframing our political language (for an
account of how this happens, see George Lakoff's book, Don't Think of
an Elephant!). Nowadays I hear even my progressive friends using terms
like wealth creators, tax relief, big government, consumer democracy,
red tape, compensation culture, job seekers and benefit cheats. These
terms, all invented or promoted by neoliberals, have become so
commonplace that they now seem almost neutral.
Neoliberalism, if unchecked, will catalyse crisis after crisis, all of
which can be solved only by greater intervention on the part of the
state. In confronting it, we must recognise that we will never be able
to mobilise the resources its exponents have been given. But as the
disasters they have caused unfold, the public will need ever less
persuading that it has been misled.

I appreciate the thanks by the way

Even though logic and understanding appear to have passed you by, I know others haven't missed the point. In the end there are more of us in the 99% and, when it all comes crashing down on our heads - it won't be me the judges will be coming for.

Just one other small offering for your contemplation:

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two
hundred years.
These nations have progressed through this sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency;
from complaceny to apathy;
from apathy to dependence;
from dependency back again into bondage.

Sir Alex Fraser Tyler: (1742-1813) Scottish jurist and historian

Although I have also heard it said

I believe it was by Malcolm Muggeridge - someone I had the great pleasure of meeting several times when he lived on Saltspring Island - that the USA was the only great empire which had progressed from infancy to senility without having experienced the usual period of maturity in the middle....

Those crazy Brits!

Here's a good one. Don't miss this!

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/columnists/story.html?id=41ee984f-15be-47c6-b0bb-226be83114f9

Here's one for you:

Be sure to read all the way to the end!

Tax his land,Tax his bed, Tax the table
At which he's fed. Tax his tractor,Tax his mule,Teach him taxes Are the rule.
Tax his cow,Tax his goat,Tax his pants,
Tax his coatTax his ties,Tax his shirt,
Tax his work,Tax his dirt.Tax his tobacco,
Tax his drink,Tax him if he Tries to think.
Tax his cigars,Tax his beers,If he cries, then Tax his tears.
Tax his car,Tax his gas,Find other ways
To tax his assTax all he has
Then let him knowThat you won't be done
Till he has no dough.When he screams and hollers,Then tax him some more,
Tax him tillHe's good and sore.
Then tax his coffin ,Tax his grave,
Tax the sod in Which he's laid.
Put these words upon his tomb,
" Taxes drove me to my doom..."
When he's gone,Do not relax,
Its time to apply The inheritance tax.
Accounts Receivable Tax Building Permit Tax
CDL license TaxCigarette TaxCorporate Income TaxDog License TaxExcise Taxes
Federal Income TaxFederal Unemployment Tax
Fishing License Tax Food License Tax
Fuel Permit TaxGasoline TaxGross Receipts TaxHunting License Tax Inventory Tax Inheritance Tax Liquor Tax
Luxury Taxes
Marriage License Tax
Medicare Tax
Personal Property Tax
Property Tax
Real Estate Tax
Service Charge Tax
Social Security Tax
Road Usage Tax
Sales Tax
Recreational Vehicle Tax
School Tax
Income Tax
Unemployment Tax
Telephone Federal Excise Tax
Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax
Telephone Provincial and Local Tax
Telephone Usage Charge Tax
Utility Taxes
Vehicle License Registration Tax
Vehicle Sales Tax
Watercraft Registration Tax
Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax

STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY?
Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, and our nation
was the most prosperous in the world. We had absolutely no
national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and
Mom stayed home to raise the kids.

What the hell happened? Can you spell "politicians!"

Tax Reform

Again, you don't apply much catholicity to your reading. One of the main points I make, here and elsewhere, about the problem with market-based globalized nonsense and what we are doing by sacrificing our futures and our lives and the ability of this planet to feed ALL ITS CITIZENS to corporate and governmental hegemony is that the tax system is in great need of reform. As Monbiot pointed out, the media has played its role very nicely in the neo-Liberal take over of the many by the few and the truth by a pack of lies.

I'm so pleased you are now willing to support the concept that a dollar, no matter how earned, is a dollar available to be taxed. Whether it is made by the sweat of one's brow, through the sale of one's house or other capital property, as interest or as corporate dividends or earnings, or because it has been inherited.

As for the size of the British middle class between 100 and 75 years ago...I think you need to go back to your history books. I can also point you toward a fair number of volumes written by George Orwell and J.B. Priestly not to mention H.G.Wells which will soon disabuse you of that load of nonsense.

I'll arrange to send you a sign up sheet so you can join a campaign for real tax reform forthwith. (Just post your email address and I'll get it out to you....)

getting serious

"Like every generation before, this one too has a number of people, some religious others brainwashed, into believing that the end is neigh. It 'ain't. Not unless the planet is whacked by a very big rock. Doom and gloom cults have always been around and are presently quite in vogue. This too will wane. That is serious."

How you do put words in my mouth! I did not say the end was 'neigh', I said we move inexorably towards thermal death, which some have called Ragnarok. Ask any physicist who knows thermodynamics. I also do not belong to a cult, but use metaphor such as the Gods, when it serves to clarify. Your big rock or my Gods - both describe those forces of nature which operate on a scale we cannot match. We err if we believe ourselves to be above and outside of nature, as we are simply part of it and must follow its laws or else. Look where the San Joaquin valley is headed now.

I have problems with your smug rhetoric. It seems to me that getting the last word or besting your fellow debaters must be more important to you than casting light on the issues. Can you not try better to stick to what we discuss, rather than what you think of people personally? I do not mind having my viewpoints debated, but I
question the value of characterizing people as 'brainwashed' in an attempt to be condescending. Do you wish for everyone to go away, so you can have a monologue?

Not only that

But given what Monbiot has to say above here about the Neo-liberal program, its roots and its fellow travelers, there's a probability that that construction ('brainwashed' to be precise) could be turned back against its author to no small effect.
A kind of corollary of the old saw about glass houses.

Furthermore, I’m still waiting for evidence about the status and size of the middle class in Late Victorian and Edwardian Great Britain - I'd be especially interested in hearing about the middle class in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands - not to mention Warwickshire - in comparison with today.

Things are Good

Dorothy, I happen to believe that all's well with the world. People are living longer and environmental issues are considered everywhere, even in Russia now (Chernobyl could not be built today) and gradually in China - although they will have to move quickly. I don't believe that the earth is overly warming, the warmest years in the USA were not in the 90's but in the 30's, and I see people living longer and better fed than ever before. There is presently a widening disparity between the wealthy and the poor and that will bring more resentment. Yet, there have always been huge gaps between the haves and the have nots. The middle classes are growing everywhere. Democracy is expanding, consider eastern Europe and South America over the past 20 years. Sure, all is not perfect but Europe has seen perhaps the longest run of peace ever. There are many serious issues and conflicts across the world and we live extremely well. I remember that in the 1970's there was an overwhelming fear that the western world would be overrun with population growth. We now see that the western world is in population decline and there may well not be enough people to sustain the societies unless there is substantial immigration from afar. Things change but initially panic sets in. A hundred and fifty years ago half a million people were in the cotton trade in northern England. Panic set in when other countries obtained machinery and energy for the machinery and started challenging the jobs of 500,000 workers. It was a gradual decline and protectionism and tariffs were all the talk for years. But really, why shouldn't other had a chance to make a living off of cotton too? Cotton didn't grow in England. Much the same can be said for many things. Coffee originated in Indonesia (Java), now it primarily comes from Latin America. It moved. Rubber production went from Brazil to Malaya. Wheat came to Canada from the middle east and Europe. Jobs and products and produce move around and always have. A recent study showed that ecologically it was far less damaging to the environment to raise lamb in New Zealand for the British market than to raise it there. Taking everything into account, water, land, transportation, etc. Changes are difficult for many to accept and readjustments are often devastating but they have always happened and always will. Innovation and adaptation are the hallmarks of the human race. We in the developed countries will increasing confront challenges regarding our shrinking population and our loosing manufacturing base as developing countries take this on. There's no sane reason why they shouldn't have a chance too. Our technological expertise with advanced education is what we presently need to concentrate on. The sky is not falling.

By the way West, look at the joke again. It's from the USA.

Same comment applies R/Man

That was a joke?

For you it's all just a question of naive faith and baseless belief. But fulsome priase is yours for that little sermonette. Although it reads a lot like a grade five public school essay or something Henry Newbolt might have created. No evidence, plenty of smiles and a simplistic faith in the future; as monbiot points out though, the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands is a critical part of the failure of the system you support - something you totally ignore on the one hand and while pretending it is a 'good' thing on the other.

As for the rest of it - spreading 'democracy' and the nonsense about national efficiencies – PLEASE, READ the Monbiot; lying and twisting figures and economic results is a fundamental part of the whole neo liberal con job R'man. There is no trickle down - there is only bloat up. And you need to wake up - too much time in the sun today with your lady friends when you should have been working - I mean, what's with that - your business will really suffer now, eh?

Anyway, what's the point? Why waste any more time with a man who thinks increases in self-destructive behaviour (especially unnecessary things like business travel and jet-set tourism) are just fine? Such attitudes are hopeless and hopelessly naïve.

Thank God that there aren't too many like you around or we really will be done for. The younger generation is much more likely to see such idle cheerleading for a naked emperor and understand exactly what is going on.

I can almost hear the sound of you reciting the last verse of Vitai Lampada:

This is the word that year by year
While in her place the School is set
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind --
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

Keep that stiff upper lip!

And this...

You obviously haven't studied the science or the facts concerning that NASA report, have you?

Well, don't be at all sanguine about your conclusions on that basis - you better look again at what that story is actually about...because you clearly DON'T have a clue what you're writing and you haven't understood the recording and adjustment error behind it, have you? Read the science and ignore the spin.

You see, R'man, that's the problem - blind faith - blind faith that clings to anything rather than accept the hard reality of the shameful thing you are becoming a part of.

As dorothy says, you want to climb into that high pulpit and deliver a monologue, even though you know in your heart of hearts that it is all just an exercise in self-indulgence and wishful thinking.
Too bad really - because food supplies are getting shorter, our capacity to replace them is shrinking and our concern about the starving is more academic than anything else. To say nothing of the other incipient crisis concerning water.