CANADA: NDP’s DENTAL CARE PROGRAM PASSES IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

The NDP’s Dental Care bill recently passed in the House with 172 votes for and 138 votes against the piece of legislation. The Conservatives and Bloc voted against the bill, and it has been shot down by Liberals in the past. The bill’s success in the House this time around is likely a result of the NDP-Liberal coalition formed early-on in 2022.

The plan allows every child under 12 who doesn’t have dental insurance to get $650 a year as long as the family makes less than $90,000 in annual income.

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh doesn’t plan to settle for just child coverage. In a Twitter video, Singh said he plans to keep pushing for federal dental coverage for uninsured seniors, people with disabilities and eventually 18 and under youth.

The bill has to pass the Senate and gain royal assent before individuals who meet the requirements can apply.

This is a bill that is surely going to help low-income families who don’t have any kind of dental insurance tied to employment.

The dental bill is packaged alongside further inflationary measures, all together given the official title of Bill C-31, which will include a single $500 payment to financially strained renters.

U.S.A.: FETTERMAN SLANDER OBFUSCATES DR. OZ’S TERRIBLE POLICY POSITIONS

The two Senate candidates in the upcoming U.S. midterm elections in Pennsylvania are Democrat John Fetterman and Republican Dr. Oz.

The two faced off in a debate last week and the spotlight from mainstream media has mainly been on Fetterman’s speech issues, which are a result of a recent stroke the former Mayor had. Many Democrats are echoing Republican sentiments that Fetterman’s speech disruptions are signs he’s unfit to serve on the Senate.

While Fetterman undoubtedly struggled to articulate himself, what should be more cause for concern from the electorate are Oz’s comments on how to deal with abortion. When asked by the moderator about abortion, Oz stated the classic Republican argument that it should be left up to the states but also that he wants “women, doctors and local political leaders letting the democracy that has always allowed our nation to thrive to put the best ideas forward so states can decide for themselves.”

Dr. Oz thinks political leaders should be involved in conversations between women and their doctors on abortion. This comment was a not so methodical way of seeming impartial.

Fetterman may be in a rough place healthwise, but that’s an infinitely better roll of the dice than ensconcing another pro-life fanatic to the US Senate.

INTERNATIONAL: RISHI SUNAK IS THE NEW U.K. PM—OUT WITH THE RELATIVELY OLD AND IN WITH THE NOT SO DIFFERENT

After quitting from the position of Prime Minister, self-described “fighter, not a quitter,” Liz Truss, the Tory who briefly tanked the U.K. economy by planning to cut taxes for her rich corporate friends, is old news as a new Prime Minister has taken the executive helm.

The unelected Rishi Sunak has been put forward by the Tory party as the new PM of the U.K. He is a former Goldman Sachs employee and is exorbitantly wealthy, with his worth being nearly double that of King Charles at nearly one billion dollars. He claimed that his goal will be to undo the recklessness that Truss imparted onto the Kingdoms’ economy in her brief term.

It’s fair to say that his policy approach will be subtle for the time being but there’s no reason to be optimistic about Sunak. Already, the new PM has put off attending the upcoming COP27 climate summit due to “pressing domestic commitments” according to a Downing Street spokesperson.

Ironically, this statement makes Sunak look like he is deeply concerned with the national interest above all else. Despite supporting Brexit, his business record proves the opposite; the firm that made the Sunak family so wealthy, Infosys, is a giant outsourcing agent that took employment away from Britons and found cheaper labour in places like Bangalore. Sunak’s family, including his wife, are still major shareholders in the company.

Furthermore, establishment adjacent media personalities such as Trevor Noah are quick to celebrate the new PM’s being the first person of colour to lead the country, instead of talking about the policies that Sunak and his ilk perpetrate that harm POC in climate-sensitive areas as well as settling for $800,000 in a lawsuit from the State of California a few years back due to the firm was using the wrong type of work-visa to avoid paying taxes.

With all that being said, it’s looking less like out with the old and in with the new and more like out with the relatively old and in with the not so different.

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS: DAVID GRAEBER’S THEORY ON DEBT

The late David Graeber was a renowned professor of anthropology, a best-selling author and was the last decade’s greatest voice on anarchist thought.

Graeber put forward his argument that debt has functioned as a morally loaded form of social control throughout history in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years.

The kernel from which Graeber fleshes out his argument came from a conversation he had with a humanitarian lawyer at a corporate party. Having been involved in the Global Justice movement and Occupy himself, Greaber was interested to chat with a lawyer geared towards global activism.

After explaining that one of the things he’s most proud about is having nearly destroyed the International Monetary Fund, the lawyer then asked him what exactly the IMF was. Graeber launched into an explanation of how the IMF essentially functions as a world debt collection enforcer, that in the ‘80s forced third world countries that had taken loans from rich Western banks that had loaned them their overflowing OPEC money resulting from the ‘70s oil crisis. How the interest rates on these loans got hiked a decade after their being issued to undemocratically elected dictators — who lined their Swiss bank accounts with a great deal of the money — in the third world. How in order to pay these interest rates, many of these countries had to strip their social safety nets causing mass suffering.

The lawyer, presumably aghast by the details, went on to ask Graeber what his opinion on these countries paying off their debt was,

“We wanted to abolish that too,” he replied.

“But… Surely one has to pay one’s debts,” she retorted.

From this stunning moral categorical imperative on the part of the lawyer, the deep historical launch into money and debt peonage that composes Debt unfolds.

Anarchism is often viewed as meaning chaos and therefore violence and social atrophy. In reality, anarchists are just against most if not all hierarchy between human beings, other than immediate filial ones such as the parent-child dynamic.

Graeber was a believer of direct action, the idea that if, say, a well needs to be built to fix a water crisis in a community, instead of waiting to get the permits to start building, individuals will just start building with the sole end of wanting to care for each other.

Graeber felt that the Occupy protests which he participated in were a good example of direct action; protestors encamped on Wall Street were discussing a variety of issues and how to solve them. That is before a concerted effort by former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomber had police raid the encampment in Zuccotti Park officially ending the main protest.

Graeber’s work on the morality of debt being a justification for greatly unjust global power dynamics and his support of egalitarian, anarchist ideals, is an invaluable drop in the bucket of notable left-ideas of the new century.

The word “postmodernism” might terrify you, excite you, or leave you confused as to what exactly it means. Strangely, the irreverence and attacks on stable meaning that were once part and parcel of the postmodern cultural movement are being used by conservatives today.

At one point in history, postmodernism had to its name a vanguard of thinkers whose credo was breaking with tradition, social conventions and metanarratives. Today, the alt-right have found a bizarre affinity with some of the most recognizable postmodern gestures including obscurantism, language games and deconstruction.

Former University of Toronto professor turned global intellectual celebrity, Jordan Peterson, is one of the most highly recognizable members of the alt-right today and has been one of postmodernism’s biggest critics over the last half decade. Himself a Christian, Peterson has launched attacks against some of postmodernist theory’s biggest names such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, calling them everything from dangerous to charlatans.

Recently, a clip went viral online from an interview Peterson had wherein he talks about his belief in God:

“People say to me, ‘Do you believe in God?’ And I think: okay there’s a couple mysteries in that question; what do you mean ‘do’? What do you mean ‘you’? What do you mean ‘believe’? And what do you mean ‘God’?… If we’re going to get down to the fundamental brass tacks, we don’t really know what any of those things mean.”

Ironically, this response comes off like a parody of Derrida’s notion of deconstruction in which no word is positive in itself, and is only given meaning by its differential relations to other words within a closed order. However, despite Derrida’s famous statement that “there is nothing outside the text,” he still believed in an outside world—it’s just that we have to rely on language to represent our sense impressions of it to one another.

However, nothing — save text itself — was given a specific undeterminable privilege in Derrida’s system. Peterson, on the other hand, purposefully creates indeterminability around scripture and his belief of God. He will, though, opine on everything from capitalism being a natural sorting system of the best, to woke leftists ruining the university. In other words, he is postmodern when it’s convenient.

Another figure who fits squarely in the postmodernism meets conservatism camp is former U.S. president Donald J. Trump. Trump displayed the obscenity, cynicism and irreverence for tradition that is characteristic of cultural postmodernity. Yet on the economics and policy front, he upheld the status quo with massive tax cuts for the rich and the continual undermining of the working class while cosying up to evangelical special interest groups.

An odd clip of Trump that emerged during his presidency captures perfectly the contradiction of terms in postmodernism and conservatism despite their recent forms of marriage. Trump is asked by an interviewer what his favorite verse from the Bible is. He replies:

“The Bible is very personal. I don’t want to get into it, I don’t want to get into it… the Bible means a lot to me but I don’t want to get into specifics… I think it’s just an incredible the whole Bible is an incredible [sic], I joke very much so, they always hold up The Art of the Deal, I say, my second favourite book of all time!”

Professor at University of Michigan, Matt McManus, is perhaps one of the only scholars whose work looks at the strange convergence of postmodernism and conservatism in the last few decades. In his work The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism he aligns the strange phenomenon with the emergence of neoliberalism’s political hegemony in the West since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. McManus argues that in an age where there’s no discernible alternative to capitalism, it’s not surprising to see cultural logics centered around pastiche, reference and cynicism take hold over virtually all aspects of life.

Marx’s oft-quoted line that with capitalism, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” has no doubt been prophetic.

The strange dovetailing of postmodern cynicism with traditional values may be proof that our culture today reflects what in psychoanalysis is called fetishist disavowal [Verleugnung] — the “I know but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know” — of “the real conditions of life” that Marx located in his analysis of capital.

Puncturing this disavowal might be the key to an alternative to the current socio-political order.

CANADA: LOBLAWS PRICE FREEZE AND THE NDP’S GROCERY INVESTIGATION

Grocery prices have been soaring for the past year.

In light of the skyrocketing prices, Loblaws recently placed a price freeze on their No Name products. Loblaws Chairman and President Galen Weston Jr. announced that “to help Canadians hit the brakes on food inflation, we are focusing on what is in our control.” Weston claims inflation isn’t the conglomerate’s doing, but is a result of higher price demands from suppliers. Meanwhile, Loblaws’ second quarter profits saw a 2.9 per cent increase, or $356 million, in comparison to the same quarter’s profits from the previous year.

This excuse is nothing new to frustrated consumers.

Oligopolies like Loblaws claim that supply chain issues are the reason that the prices are the way they are, when in reality it’s an issue of monopolization. It’s also probably not a coincidence that this price freeze comes just as the NDP’s motion to investigate grocery price gouging, A.K.A. “greedflation,” passed unanimously amongst MPs in the House of Commons. This means that the liberal government is being asked in a non-binding way to interrogate large grocery firms through a series of methods.

With the Bank of Canada’s recent interest rate hikes, prices may begin to come down on their own. Still, this investigation is important as it will reveal the issues with not breaking up large grocery conglomerates.

U.S.A.: BIDEN’S NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY PLACES CHINA AND RUSSIA AS THE STATE’S MAIN THREATS

The United States Congress mandated a document which recently emerged from the White House called the “National Security Strategy” (NSS) which continues a near decade long trend of placing China as the States’ greatest threat.

The document presents a popular schism at the moment in light of the Ukraine war, that of the democratic west against the autocratic east. Biden’s document is anxious about China’s power on the global stage and, instead of offering an alternative framework for foreign policy that is less hegemonic and expansive, states that the US will continue to try to compete with Chinese expansion.

In “Part III” of the document, Biden outlines ways to “compete” with China and “restrain” Russia. This is only further proof of the US’s existential need to dominate the globe. Now that the Soviet Union is out of the picture, other imperial countries — that are no doubt problematic in their own right — are framed as the boogeymen that the US is going to liberate the world from.

INTERNATIONAL: LIZ TRUSS RESIGNS, THE UK CELEBRATES

Liz Truss ascended to the executive cabinet as Prime Minister of the UK in early September and, only 44 days into her term, has resigned as the Tories have been in non-stop scandal since Truss’s reckless budgetary proposals that cut major taxes for corporations.

At a time when inflation is high and global supply chains are disrupted, cutting corporate taxes with no plan for reimbursement was sure to send negative press towards the conservatives.

Truss also ran on the promise of approving over 100 new oil drilling licenses, despite renewable wind energy alternatives being less expensive. Notably, some of Truss’s campaign donors included a pro-fracking group as well as a former brexit MEP who claimed climate change was a “religion.”

As the now former PM walks away from Parliament, the UK’s working class can perhaps catch their breath, if for only a moment as speculation of Boris Johnson’s return to the Executive seat is in the air.

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS: ŽIŽEK’S IDEOLOGY

Slavoj Žižek is probably the most well-known “communist” in the western world. His books have sold well across the globe and clips of him regularly bring in high viewership on YouTube.

Ideology is a notion that gains a felt philosophical currency in the canon through the work of Karl Marx, whose famous critique of capital produced the foremost formula for ideology in continental thought for a century: “they do not know it, but they do it.”

Marx’s conception of ideology separates the intended thought behind an action from the reality of the action itself. He does this because when people engage each other in the marketplace they don’t exchange commodities such as money, Coke, couches and whatever else with attention to the heterogeneous processes of the labour that created those commodities, but with attention to the homogenous abstract values of objectified labour time embedded in the commodity, which is manifest in the price.

The Marxist gesture of ideological critique, then, is always to pull the cover away from the gap between idealist intentionality and the material actuality of subjects’ actions.

Žižek both problematizes and rectifies the Marxist theory of ideology by claiming there is literally nothing outside of ideology. Using the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Žižek shows how the symbolic order A.K.A ideology, or the big Other, is needed to establish intersubjective relationships. He rejects the idea that by fully pulling back the covers on the gap between one’s intention and the brute reality of their actions that we can live in a post-ideological world free of exploitation. Rather, we can establish new axioms, or in Lacanese, Master Signifiers, to build an ideological edifice that replaces capital’s hegemony over the symbolic universe.

Whether this new ideology is called communism, socialism, anarchism, or what have you—it will necessarily rely on ideological fantasies to function according to Žižek.

Therefore, the left should embrace the fact of ideology, the ideal-material gap it creates, instead of trying to get past or beyond it.

Cynicism today is not helpful.

In ancient Greece, the foremost cynic philosopher lived in a massive ceramic jar in the streets of Athens. He criticized the largest idealist philosopher of the day, Plato, and preached poverty and action over theory and a lifestyle accustomed to nomos (social custom).

Diogenes as a historical figure is interesting in his own right; even his rebellion against social custom could be seen as admirable in certain respects. For example, he disdained the economic system of slavery in Athens. However, cynicism functions today in a much less active and dialectical way.

Recently, a video emerged of two young Just Stop Oil climate activists throwing soup cans on a famous Vincent Van Gogh painting to bring awareness to the impending climate disaster. In the video, they appeal to the fact that climate change will be felt especially by their age cohort. Many immediately came to the defense of art, politeness and more proper tactics of activism. The story made it to the New York Times, essentially fulfilling the goal of spreading the activists’ message. Meanwhile the painting was hardly damaged as it was covered by a glass pane.

The activists’ actions quickly fomented broad cynicism online. Twitter user @ShellenbergerMD tweeted:

“two activists just threw tomato soup at Van Gogh’s original masterpiece, ‘Sunflowers’ to protest natural gas and oil. With millions at risk of dying around the world from energy & food shortages, this isn’t climate altruism, it’s anti-human nihilism.”

What’s fascinating about this tweet is that this was not meant to be “climate altruism.” Altruism implies notions of selflessness and a care for others. What was clear in the video was that these young activists were speaking about the dismal future prospects that they themselves and their age group are facing down the pipeline.

This kind of cynical judgment on decorum was also seen in the response to Greta Thunberg’s climate activism. Many commentators felt Thunberg was too militant and rhetorical; playing at people’s heartstrings instead of being quiet and polite like a young person “ought” to if they want a seat with the adults in the room.

Cynicism does nothing for our future. We collectively face the prospect of life on earth as we know it ending. The youngest generations alive today and their kids are going to be enmeshed in climate catastrophe, the prospects of which we’re already seeing in places like Pakistan where monsoon rains have caused flooding that has displaced over a third of the population.

The philosophical school of cynicism that Diogenes preached was one of action over thought. If a lick of that sentiment connected with today’s cynics then perhaps kids wouldn’t have to take such desperate measures to get their voices heard.

Fluid capitalism’s mantra is “go with the flow.” The task of critical thinking today is to examine this statement as a command instead of a mantra.

The first self-help book I read as a teenager was called Flow: the psychology of optimal experience by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi. It was one of the first books that blended popular psychology with optimism hacks, what would become a thematic hallmark of the self-help genre from the ‘90s onward. The thesis of the book was that we are at our best when we experience a “flow state,” an experience of engagement in the world that is difficult enough to engage us without anxiety but not so easy as to make us bored. It’s a state where one loses track of the regular passage of time — think of the proverbial “time flies when you’re having fun” — as well as developing an almost kinesthetic sense with the surrounding space and the objects in it. This results in a kind of ecstasy.

What this book revealed was a rather romantic, active and highly idealized picture of how the flow state is grasped and facilitated. However, it’s important to historicize the development of flow-state ideology as many offshoots of it have become pervasive in the theorizing and praxis of capitalist-adjacent institutions in the last 20 years. These would be precisely in-line with what communist philosopher Slavoj Žižek sardonically calls “Western Buddhism.” In the linked video, Žižek makes a joke that expresses a deep truth about what I mean by fluid capitalism:

“This vaguely hedonist injunction, which incidentally is also the reason, I think, why somebody like Dalai Lama is so popular. You should read his books… He always makes this weird statement which is, I quote, ‘the purpose of life is to be happy.’ My God!—my reaction is: hasn’t this guy heard of Freud and so on.”

Žižek strikes an important nerve here: central to the Freudian edifice is a rejection of infantile desire which inaugurates what he calls the “reality principle,” which is basically the lesson of the marshmallow test. The reality principle is something that advertising, the endless drip feeding of content on the internet ranging from pornography to violence, and the ontology of the shopping mall — one of a sterile timelessness that coaxes subjects into a consumptive stupor — all together encourage individuals to forgo.

A lineage of the ideas surrounding fluidity can be traced from the ideologies of our ancient past to the relatively recent theoreticians that center both the concept of fluidity and capitalism.

Daoism, one of China’s three popular religions, is a religion that valorizes infantile pleasure of the maternal presence. The religion’s seminal text, the Daodejing, often describes this maternal realm of being, called the Way, using metaphors of natural water; things like rivers, oceans, reservoirs, streams etc.—basically nature’s patent fluid structures that express an overarching metaphysics of fluidity. Is it a coincidence then, that Freud’s description of the libido, how it builds pressure and releases, gets cathected to and displaced onto objects, is expressed in hydraulic metaphors throughout his work? This is the dimension that fluid capitalism is tapping into to make us consumers who feel as if we are simply following the nature of reality in pursuing desire for desire’s sake, but of course this injunction fits a certain logic that’s coextensive to a service-based economy.

The main theorists of fluid capitalism in the last century were undoubtedly psychoanalyst Felix Guattari and philosopher Gilles Deleuze whose collaborative work Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia was groundbreaking in French society in the ‘70s. These authors argue that capitalism has brought us to the point of being a Control Society which forces us to participate in flows of intensities, floodgates of desire as it were, that open and close based on material positions outside of one’s control. This is in contradistinction to the Foucauldian Disciplinary Society which limits time and space through the authoritative gaze or figurehead. A good example of what Deleuze and Guattari are theorizing in Anti-Oedipus today is the way infinite scroll on social media uses an opt out, rather than an opt in model. A model where users enter an endless flow of content that is monitored and curated to introduce the user to yet more flows of content which in turn influence their behaviors, desires, beliefs and attitudes.

On the less densely theoretical end of the rhetoric on fluid capitalism are more establishment-type thinkers who preach a kind of pseudo-optimism with a pastiche orientalist spirituality—essentially Žižek’s Western Buddhism. This mode of thinking can be spotted especially in phenomena such as green capitalism. Thinkers of this ilk tend to believe that if the wealthy would just be more compassionate and moral about spending their wealth, society can curb neoliberalism’s structural production of inequality.

Over a year ago, Marxist economist Richard Wolff debated Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks on capitalism versus socialism. Brooks is a best selling psychologist who is exactly the type of popular theoretician who believes in a trickledown capitalist ethics. At a certain point in the debate (59:10), Brooks says the following:

“Neither Richard’s vision nor mine is ever really going to pass in an unmitigated way without problems… We have to get away from this Manichean thinking about our goal-making process in the economic systems… I mean Manicheaism was an actual religion that said that it’s gonna be all black or all white, all good or all bad. On the contrary. Let’s set our sails in a particular direction and do the best that we can… Let’s keep fighting for this better future together… That journey that progress, per se, is a great moral good.”

Brooks’ rhetorical strategy is presenting a seemingly impenetrable ideological pluralism rather than any hard-line binarism as the reason why any ideal vision of the future of our economy necessarily falls short. He claims it has to “sail” in an oceanic plurality of economic aspirations that will inevitably swallow any individual project up. That’s okay though, because doing “the best that we can,” the journey itself — similar to Csikzentmihalyi’s flow state which is about being immersed in the ecstasy of the journey not the destination, he actually uses this exact metaphor in Flow — is also a moral good. Again, is it a coincidence the metaphors used by Brooks to naturalize capital’s political hegemony are closely tied to fluids?

Fluid capitalism is a discourse in deep need of being troubled. It is the product of a Western service economy that has outsourced primary and secondary industry to poorer countries around the globe. It presents this configuration as natural and itself as an all together un-ideological rhetoric. In popular forms it is optimistic and vaguely spiritual, worrying about hacking individual psychologies while obfuscating their relations to historical and material circumstances. In terms of high theory it is presented as revolutionary, as in the case of Deleuze and Guattari, both of whom believed that capitalism’s deterritorialization should be accelerated in order to heat up to a point where the whole economic order will implode.

Even on the gender front, Judith Butler’s concept of gender fluidity has proven to be less recalcitrant to capital than it is, in fact, complementary, as Butler’s approval of Jaden Smith’s iconic non-binary influence in luxury fashion demonstrated.

The only way to defeat fluid capitalist rhetoric is through a steady yet tenacious concentration towards building a broad, cross-national working class coalition. A coalition that demands from its leaders things like climate justice and a massive overhaul of our economic system so as to become more equitable.

CANADA: POILIEVRE’S SOCIAL MEDIA TAKEOVER

Newly elected Leader of the Opposition, Pierre Poilievre, has been engaging in heated back-and-forths with liberal caucus members in the House of Commons for the past month. The populist politician has been playing to reactionary ears with adversarial scapegoats and empty promises of improving the working class’ well-being while actually being on the side of corporate power.

Lately, Poilievre’s popularity has managed to seep into social media, especially YouTube Shorts, where videos with titles like “Pierre Poilievre DESTROYS Liberal” or “Trudeau gets OWNED!” are garnering lots of views; the Trudeau short having netted over a million views.

The issue used to be that no one actually paid attention to Canadian politics, including Canadians, who were always more drawn in by whatever was going on south of the border. However, these House of Commons clashes becoming popular is nothing to celebrate as it’s contributing to the broader conservative “gotcha” genre on social media.

U.S.A.: TULSI GABBARD LEAVES THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY BECAUSE OF TOO MUCH “WOKENESS”

Former member of congress and democrat candidate for the 2020 presidential election, Tulsi Gabbard has openly left the Democratic Party citing transgender issues and abortion rights as constructions of an “elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.”

Gabbard recently went on The Joe Rogan Experience to go into depth on why she “left” the left. The former congress member mentioned that the party no longer works for the people like it did in its heyday alongside people like Martin Luther King Jr. Gabbard speaks in vague generalities but her behaviour is clear: from hopping to Bernie’s campaign in the 2016 primaries, to Biden’s in the 2020 election, to cozying up to Republicans in this latest move—what’s obvious is that Gabbard has an incoherent worldview and is most concerned about where she can find new supporters.

Tulsi Gabbard doesn’t care about the people as much as she does her political relevance.

INTERNATIONAL: IS THE UK’S LIZ TRUSS JUST ANOTHER MARGARET THATCHER?

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s ascendancy to the executive branch early in September has already been disastrous as her popularity is already lower than Boris Johnson’s worst ratings ever were.

A few weeks back, Truss put forward a mini-budget that amounted to a cut of 45 billion pounds of corporate taxes with no plan on reimbursement. This announcement sent the pound’s value crashing down relative to the US dollar. Truss quickly abandoned the plan after receiving backlash from both sides of the political aisle. Now, her credibility is on the line as many conservatives feel she isn’t the right person for the job.

Truss’s unabashed bailout for the wealthy is reminiscent of the neoliberal policies that former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher ushered in decades ago. Though she stayed in power for a long time, Thatcher’s tax policies were met with serious public discontent as the poll tax riots late in her term demonstrated.

Is Truss just a Thatcher wannabe? More importantly, if she is, can the UK afford more corporate bailouts and pressure on the working class as institutions like the International Monetary Fund are warning about the possibilities of a global recession?

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS: A GREAT LIBERAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

As the least advantaged populations are impacted the most in the array of ongoing global issues, it’s worth highlighting one of the most lauded and simple thought experiments on societal justness which comes from liberal philosopher John Rawls.

Original position, or the veil of ignorance, is a way of conceptualizing how just societies should be thought of. Imagine you are placed behind a wall that doesn’t allow you to see who, what, or where you are inside of society. This includes attributes like race, class, abilities, positions of power and any other kind of identifier other than a baseline of being a human being. Rawls posits that if decisions about society were made from behind this wall that causes individuals to never be certain about the concert of characteristics they may have in the society they are crafting, more just policies and practices would be enacted to combat against drawing a “short stick.”

Of course, this is a thought experiment and not likely to be adopted by major political institutions. Nevertheless, it’s a useful heuristic device for thinking through how to construct a just society.

Student debt relief is a no brainer so long as resentful thinking and a crude undervaluing of the humanities doesn’t cloud judgement.

I got inspired to talk about this hot button issue after listening to a debate between Sam Seder of The Majority Report and policy correspondent for Foundation of Economic Education, Brad Polumbo.

To put things into context, United States’ President Joe Biden released the Inflation Reduction Act over the summer which alleviated $400 billion in student loans, resparking the debate around the effectiveness and morality of relieving student debt. Polumbo argues that as a taxpayer he doesn’t want to subsidize people who choose to go into degrees that have a low return on investment (ROI), which he equates to basically any program in the social sciences except economics (which Polumbo has his degree in).

For this reason Polumbo thinks that banks should give out student loans rather than the government because then college aspirants would have to prove to a less beneficent lender that either their plan has a strong ROI, they have a lot of assets or they have substantive collateral of some sort if they want to get loans for a major with a smaller ROI. An implication of this is drawn out by Seder:

“In the world you’re talking about only wealthy people would study art, only wealthy people would study philosophy, only wealthy people would study English, only wealthy people would study civics, only wealthy people would study archeology or study anthropology—our humanities would only be dominated by people who enter college wealthy.”

Polumbo eventually concedes this point, “If wealthy people want to waste their money that is their right.”

Aside from this ultra philistinism, Polumbo is also saying that poor people ought to go into high paying fields i.e. STEM fields. However, if this economization of college is fully realized through banks brokering student loans, this could easily cause a potential flood in the STEM fields and cause a short to long run lack of employment openings in the most paid fields which has been the case for law school graduates in the U.S. going into legal fields.

Another strange sentiment which comes primarily from millennials like Polumbo, often because they’ve had sizable student debts follow them their whole life as the major jump in college expenses happened in the 1980s which job earnings didn’t keep up with, is thinking it’s unfair to relieve student debt for the next generation when their generation had to pay them off themselves. A quick reminder that in Canada the total student debt is $22 billion and in the U.S. it’s a whopping $1.748 trillion. Meanwhile, the U.S. military budget this year was 11 per cent ($755 billion) of the annual budget and education four per cent ($297 billion) of the annual budget.

Millennials had to struggle with exponentially growing student loans which did not keep up with job earnings during their formative years on top of the cost of living only rising and the likelihood of owning a home fading after the great recession. It’s not hard to see why some may be bitter at the idea of the next generation getting help. That being said, this is unproductive resentment and only reinstates the ideology that made those very millennial’s lives so financially stressful.

Completely waiving student loans is the answer, it means more purchasing power for the up and coming generation which will encourage less austere spending habits, stimulating the economy as a result.

How will we pay for it though? Free is never actually free after all right?

In the U.S. case, Bernie Sanders as part of his former presidential campaign outlined how a simple tax on Wall Street exchanges could be enough to fund free college nationwide. Raising taxes on the rich in Canada in a similar fashion is also an option, whether that’s through upping our ludicrously low capital gains tax, which currently taxes only 50 per cent of a capital gain, to returning to a progressively bracketed marginal income tax structure which existed before Brian Mulroney’s major cuts.

The point is, it can be done.

Free college becoming a reality requires less of a stretch on the parameters of what can be done in reality in terms of capital allocation as it does the ideological parameters that dominate a society hellbent on individualism, philistinism and ressentiment.

CANADA: NEW DEMOCRATS LOOKS INTO GROCERY PRICE GOUGING

Grocery prices in Canada have risen 10.8 per cent in the last year, spurring the NDP to call for a parliamentarian probe on potential corporate price gouging. This wouldn’t be a shock as price gouging has already been Trojan horsed using the general inflation by oil industries.

The biggest grocery conglomerates in the country such as Metro and Loblaws have seen sizable jumps in their quarterly profits in comparison to last year, meanwhile, grocery prices are not coming down with other prices like in the housing market as a response to the Bank of Canada’s raising the benchmark interest rate back in March.

Anecdotally, my partner and I have had to seriously ration our groceries above other costs the last three months to be able to pay all our bills unproblematically. We’re not alone in this. A global climate NGO called WRAP did a survey and found that respondents in Canada, the U.S., Australia and the U.K. said they’re worried about the rising cost of food.

As a response, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh put a spin on Pierre Poilievre’s “Justinflation” calling the mounting prices in places like the grocery industry “greedflation” instead.

U.S.A.: KRYSTEN SINEMA AND THE SENATE

U.S. Senator Krysten Sinema recently spoke at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center. Her speech called for reimplementing aspects of the filibuster, essentially giving more power to the Senate in terms of electing Supreme Court judges and federal judges. She then connected her sentiments to an explanation of how the more structurally democratic Congress is, therefore, more beholden to the “passions” of the time. The Senate, by contrast, muzzles the passions of Congress according to the young Senator.

This is revealing on many levels but primarily because it shows how the Senate is a comparatively undemocratic institution relative to the lower chamber. Although educated mixed race populations tend to be in blue states, they are on average packed into highly populated states with massive cities.

Meanwhile, uneducated, white rural populations are far more evenly distributed across the states. Each state getting two senators in the upper chamber means that Republicans have a statistical advantage in the Senate despite their senators representing far less people than senators for blue states. Wyoming is a red state that has a population 68 times smaller than that of California yet it gets the same Senate representation. That’s a structural issue.

It’s about time that the States’ Senate is relegated to a mostly ornamental position like here in Canada or in Britain. Sorry Sinema, the passions just know better.

INTERNATIONAL: ITALY ELECTS FAR RIGHT LEADER

In international news, Italy’s newly elected prime minister is far right leader Giorgia Meloni whose party, the Brothers of Italy, won a coalition government. The Brothers are a party with historical connections to Italian fascist Benito Mussolini.

In a recent speech, Meloni attacked “financial speculators” for allegedly wanting to know every metric of her selfhood, including gender, age, interests, etc. She then says that the answer to this empty consumerism is the family unit and tradition in a kind of palingenetic ultranationalist solution.

This is something we’ve seen countless times on the far right, it’s the appeal of right-wingers like Jordan Peterson. The rightist critique of capitalism and the postmodern dogma of the enclosed self is formulated in a vaguely fascistic call for conservative revolution. What never figures into this kind of rhetoric is widespread system change, instead it’s placed at the level of the family unit and a return to formal patriarchal tradition.

Italy’s latest election is concerning to say the least.

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS: CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION IN THE MEME AGE?

In January 2021 GameStop was being heavily shorted by big hedge funds and other investors as its stock continued a steady decline, likely as a result of the proliferation of the digital video game economy in the last decade. In an act of memey rebellion, Reddit forum users on r/wallstreetbets and social icons like Elon Musk started to buy up shares in the company, skyrocketing the stock price and making short sellers lose massive amounts of money.

This phenomenon introduces important questions around older notions of conspicuous consumption. The Veblen curve is well known in the field of economics for graphing the effects of conspicuous consumption. The curve demonstrates how certain types of goods, usually branded as luxury goods abound with cultural capital, break the rules of a typical demand curve which says that as a good’s price goes up the quantity of that good demanded falls.

With a Veblen good this dynamic is flipped on its head; the more a good is considered a luxury good, the price rising causes higher quantities demanded for that good. This is a fitting graphical representation of what Karl Marx in the first volume of Capital calls commodity fetishism.

However, when memes can produce the same effect without the good being considered a luxury good, having more to do with its exchange-value as a meme, what then? This is probably unanswerable for the time being, it all depends on if more memey situations affect the stock market in any substantive way in the future, but it’s worth thinking about.

In response to the GameStop short squeeze fiasco, philosopher Slavoj Žižek reminded hopeful onlookers in a podcast appearance on Odd Lots that though this act is revolutionary in the sense of exposing the random, enigmatic gambling aspect of the stock exchange, it is too entrenched in the logic it exploits. Or, as Audrey Lorde once put it, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Video streaming services have not only changed the way consumers take in entertainment but the entertainment itself, encouraging a “pump-and-dump” model on the part of producers.

HBOMax, Disney+, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix; all of these Nasdaq-listed video streaming platforms are dominating the way that video entertainment is consumed. Netflix, the biggest of the lot, has over 200 million subscribers as of May this year.

Streaming platforms allow for an asynchronous, mostly frictionless watching experience available from the comfort of home, making it both more difficult to stop a binge and less likely you’ll buy video entertainment in physical format. On top of that, although cinemas have done better since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, seeing major box office successes in 2021 and well into 2022, producers are now doing exclusive releases with large streaming platforms. This creates a larger delta in terms of where film viewership and ultimately money is being funneled, encouraging more producers to make films meant for streaming rather than the theatre.

In the past, a film had its box office sales during its initial release and a TV show had a scheduled airing on cable. More importantly, they also usually had a subsequent DVD release, which often came a few months or a year after the debut. This DVD release was a secondary source of revenue and therefore something film producers had to keep in mind.

If you made a movie or TV series that did well in the box office or upon airing but not in terms of a physical release, it likely had a lot of hype surrounding it but wasn’t a great piece that viewers would want to physically own for repeated watches. This model encouraged films to be made that seemed to have replay value. That is, they were likely strong films. Additionally, the basically deceased market of brick and mortar stores that sell DVDs, such as Blockbuster which has one store left in Oregon, U.S., facilitated a kind of “third place” for film and TV buffs to interact, discuss, recommend and debate with each other or staff.

Streaming platforms cancel a lot of these aspects, being more congenial to a “pump-and-dump” model. For example, Netflix’s pay structure for films or series that get their licensing fee is an upfront, lump sum payment to the writers, actors, staff and producers in exchange for infinite streaming of their product instead of box office and DVD sales or digital ownership purchases of any kind. While this isn’t necessarily the case, with the Netflix model the burden of making a film that is just as good as the hype that surrounds it is less important as future sales don’t affect revenues nearly as much.

A good example of this is 2019’s Netflix exclusive El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie which rode on the vast popularity and love for the then six years old TV series Breaking Bad. El Camino was a massive disappointment, with actors who didn’t do much to look like how they did in the series to a meandering, half-baked plot; it was a perfect example of a fiscally strategic yet qualitatively unwarranted revival.

This can also be seen in the dime-a-dozen Marvel TV series that are streaming exclusives as well. It’s probably not a coincidence that the Disney+ exclusive series She-Hulk has gone viral a few times now for ridiculous scenes that look like YouTube parodies such as the “She-Hulk Twerks with Megan Thee Stallion” meme.

Essentially, video streaming services have given consumers access to seemingly endless entertainment, cutting out the sometimes pesky aspects of going out to see a movie or when watching a TV show. Annoyances such as waiting in lines or for a specific time that a show is slotted in are becoming things of the past.

All that being said, the costs associated with this may be harder to detect in the short run, including less quality material as well as less of a physical interaction with the mise-en-scène of theater and DVD releases as well as new forms of interpassivity that see large portions of students needing some kind of streaming platform in the background to be able to study.

Video streaming services may be more convenient but the question to ask is if these subtler costs are worth it.

Labour is making a comeback.

From the success of the Staten Island Amazon warehouse union to the several hundred union petitions in Starbucks to the incredible popularity of Workers’ Party candidate Lula da Silva in the Brazilian race for the country’s presidency—labour is making a comeback early this decade.

No doubt COVID-19 has played a role in labour’s return; the pandemic has exposed just how little some employers care for their workers’ well being on top of the global supply chain issues which have hurt the middle and lower classes most of all. Meanwhile some of the biggest shareholders in the world have been seeing record profits.

UNIONS, UNIONS EVERYWHERE: COLLECTIVE BARGAINING IN CANADA AND THE U.S.

The National Labour Relations Board in the United States shows that union election wins in mid-2022 are showing a 20-year high in the country.

Last year The Brock Press got an exclusive interview with Starbucks Workers United, a grassroots organizing committee that formed around the first U.S.-based Starbucks union in Buffalo, New York, on their trials and tribulations — including union-busting tactics on the part of corporate — with getting a contract. This Starbucks’ victory caused a rupture in the corporation and since then the number of Starbucks’ in the country to vote in favour of a union surpassed 200 in July of this year.

Despite Amazon’s $4.3 million on union-busting consultants and other efforts, the Amazon Labour Union is looking strong as ever with President Christian Smalls recently rallying in Times Square. The first successful Amazon union ever is still the greatest achievement for labour in decades in the U.S.

Additionally, the now averted railway strike in the U.S. nearly materialized as a result of the largest freight railroad carriers creating poor working conditions to workers if not laying them off. U.S. railway industries have laid off 30 per cent of their workforce in the past six years at the same time U.S. railroads have engaged in $196 billion in stock buybacks since 2010.

Up the border, here in Ontario things are looking promising as well as seen in The Globe and Mail:

“In Ontario, according to data from the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development, 650 collective agreements have been ratified by union members so far in 2022. The average annual wage increase in those settlements (which encompass bargaining units with 150 or more members) already hovers at 2.8 per cent. In 2021, that same figure was 1.2 per cent, and in 2020, it was 1.4 per cent. More than 2,000 settlements were ratified in both those years.”

LULA’S RETURN

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former trade unionist, served as president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010. He was later incarcerated on shaky evidence of internal government corruption. A massive campaign to prove his being a political prisoner got underway after an article from The Intercept revealed a telegram from the judge of his case to the lead prosecutor that demonstrated a conspiracy to stop Lula from running in the 2018 Brazil primary election.

This news rippled across the world and saw supporters of Lula’s release in the UN General Assembly as well as from global progressive intelligentsia giants like Noam Chomsky. He was freed in 2019, however he was not allowed to run against President Jair Bolsonaro, a fascist by every metric who has been on record blaming the Amazon rainforest fires on Indigenous peoples instead of climate change. Lula’s inability to run was due to a Clean Slate law which was eventually quashed allowing the former president to run in the primary election this coming October.

Lula is perhaps the closest thing the modern era has to a Nelson Mendala figure. He pulled millions of Brazilians out of poverty and dropped the country’s child malnutrition percentage by nearly half. He put 40 billion euros into public housing initiatives, urbanized favelas, funded a ton of water purification initiatives and dropped the hardest line of any state official during the 2008 financial crisis, that it was the result of “the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes, who before seemed to know everything, and now have shown they don’t know anything.”

Lula is currently ahead in the polls against Bolsonaro as the race approaches its end.

A MARXIAN CRASH COURSE

With all the buzz on labour’s increasing presence in politics, it’s a good time to return to the classic formulations from Karl Marx that provide a robust theoretical underpinning to the feelings of exploitation that underclasses have faced throughout capitalism’s roughly 300-year-old existence.

When Marx says that workers are exploited under capitalism he doesn’t mean that going to work sucks and you don’t believe your boss should make any more than you do. He meant it is constitutive of capitalist enterprises to exploit labour-power in order to make as much profit as possible.

It’s not that difficult to understand:

If a product’s value, let’s say a book, created by labour is equal to 100, the product needs to sell above the price it cost to make it with past products of labour known as the means of production (buildings, machines, tools, etc.) otherwise a capitalist isn’t breaking even. Let’s say that a solidified labour value of 50 goes into the total labour value of 100, i.e. the book, due to wear and tear of machinery as well as the transformation of one commodity into another which would be the paper, ink and processed leather combining into a book. So:

Total Labour (the book) = 100

50 of that 100 comes from the past labour A.K.A fixed costs leaving 50 in value leftover.

However, to get all those past values of labour to form a new one you need a special commodity that is the only one that can do that kind of transformative work, namely labour power which can only come from alive labour. The alive labour needs to get some of the 100 back from the sale of the book in order to fulfill her needs so she can return for another day of work and reproduce her transformative labour-power.So let’s say 25 of the 100 of labour value that is materialized in cash by selling the book goes to her wages, i.e. the price of labour power. So now:

Total Labour (100) = Past Labour (50) + Alive Labour (50) A.K.A. variable costs.

The worker gets 25 in wages and this leaves a surplus-value of 25. This leftover value of 25 is the profit which is still nonetheless the creation of the workers who put their labour power into the production process. In capitalism the surplus-value that alive labour creates is appropriated by the capitalist and ends up doing a variety of things such as expanding the operation or going into the capitalist’s end of year bonus.

Marx’s point is simply that the employer, boss, CEO, board of directors, etc. take the surplus value that was created by alive labour and decide on what to do with it in an undemocratic fashion.

As long as this contradiction exists, socialism, unions and the likes will haunt our economic system as the last couple years have proven.

CEO worship is strange and deserves proper symptomatology.

Twitter users might be familiar with the “nerds defending Elon Musk” meme.

It’s an apt meme which at this point is de facto the best response to any of Musk’s extremely defensive supporters on Twitter. There’s seriously a large group of people who think that any criticism towards Musk’s radical centrism and plans for combating impending climate disaster — with Mars colonies, in case you forgot — are plebeian haters who don’t recognize his brilliance.

Somewhat similar to that meme, Bill Burr had a famous bit where he made fun of Steve Jobs by simply asking what he actually does for Apple that warrants his celebrity other than being an obnoxious taskmaster. Burr’s right, he was pretty much a face and persona that strategically bridged the tech nerd of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with the ‘70s cool rock of an aged Beatles’ fan in service of investor and consumer fascination.

Jeff Bezos, who is unequivocally one of the wealthiest human beings ever, uses his grotesque wealth to do the most obvious things that billionaires would do including 10-minute-long space tourist flights and buying massive carbon-spewing yachts. He doesn’t even have the odd villainy antics of Musk, yet he still has a cult following in the social media hustle culture/manosphere ecosystem where he is treated like a god instead of sublimely boring. That’s the charm of comedian Bo Burnham’s Jeff Bezos song. Bezos is so dime-a-dozen that Burnham gave him a villain’s theme.

All of this goes to show that despite pioneering sociologist Max Weber’s idea that the age of enlightenment brought with it the “disenchantment of the world,” there’s still a surviving archaic want to have king and queen figures in society even when we (mostly) don’t let them rule us anymore. The ongoing mourning of the late Queen Elizabeth II is only further evidence of this.

Historians are fairly divided on exactly when the position of Chief Executive Officer was formed but generally agree it was sometime in the early part of the last century when tech giants like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford created massive corporate organizations around their mass-produced intellectual property.

As we’ve transitioned from an industrial economy in the last couple centuries into the information and service economy of today, the hyperinflated sense of importance afforded to the CEO class is increasingly a performative action as most of them are just owners of property and profits and in terms of work are knowledgeable, experienced managers. To that effect there are still massive critiques that can be thrown the way of a Henry Ford, including collaborating with the Nazis and pioneering the assembly-line setup which ensured higher profits at the cost of systematically forcing workers into low-skill, alienating, iterative positions of work.

Let’s return to the world of tech where Steve Jobs was by all means the greatest example of CEO mysticism. His longtime partner Steve Wozniak has been on record saying that Jobs never knew how to code in contrast to himself or Bill Gates. He was, however, an unmatched performer who understood how to tap into and become the object of a cultural fascination with the burgeoning world of commercial technology. That being said, to expect CEOs to be highly technically proficient would be tantamount to a capitalist technocracy which introduces a host of issues.

A CEO-type position can be a kind of PR manager who even gets paid more than the average worker in the corporation. However, they shouldn’t be an overly paid cult figure who has autocratic rule over company profits. Let’s not forget that Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook with the intention of rating college student’s levels of attractiveness at Harvard. Now he is one of the most powerful human beings to ever exist.

A worker co-op, like the federation of worker co-ops known as Mandrogon located in Spain, could democratically elect a CEO-type worker to the board of directors who has the interest of the workers in mind when they decide on what to do with profits and representation of the organization. It makes far more sense this way and gets rid of the parasitic, cult-like relationship that CEOs have with the public.

A large segment of the employer class will have workers believe either that the existence of a minimum wage or increases to the existing mandated wage have a direct negative relationship to employment and the economy—they are almost completely wrong.

The Fraser Institute is one of Canada’s most well known right-wing think tanks. In a policy report they undertook on the minimum wage, they say the following:

“Most economists would likely agree that high minimum wages reduce employment opportunities for young and unskilled workers. Most would probably also agree that high minimum wages do not necessarily raise the incomes of the poorest members of society. Yet, in spite of this consensus about the economics of minimum wages, the minimum wage continues to be touted by politicians and policy-makers as an effective way to help the poor.”

The trick being pulled here is the idea that high minimum wages won’t necessarily increase incomes doesn’t assume all things stay equal in a firm’s actions. In other words, employers will use adjustment channels to offset the increased wages. This is often true and it’ll be important to circle back to to show how this being the case actually defeats the Fraser Institute’s larger point on minimum wages.

First, let’s see what the overarching data suggests. In one of the most studied empirical overviews on minimum wage effects on employment in the last decade, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) found that the “minimum wage has little or no discernible effect on the employment prospects of low-wage workers.”

The most well known metastudies in the field for the last several decades all show that minimum wage increases have statistically negligible effects on employment.

That’s not to say that the minimum wage doesn’t have effects on the behaviour of firms and workers. It certainly does. In fact, it is a net positive for workers and the economy writ large.

For one, increases in the minimum wage can act as a wage stimulus for the economy. Increasing the purchase power of consumers per capita means more market activity which would benefit employers as well. While on the topic of employers, the CEPR’s overview suggests that a minimum wage increase can be helpful for employers because of the costliness of worker turnover. If the current staff at an organization is making less than the competitive rate on the labour market, employers will be more likely to leave the spot vacant and incur the output costs of that, rather than hire someone at the competitive pay rate and have to increase their current staff’s pay as well.

Increases in the minimum wage means that the new minimum closes the margin between the competitive rate and what current staff are being paid, making turnover less costly and dealing with understaffing to boot. This is an example of an adjustment channel that helps both employers and low skilled, low-paid workers.

Vulgar economists assume that employers can replace a worker who is just as efficient whenever they want. They fail to take in the dynamism of a labour monopsony such as the costs of finding the right worker based on location, transportation, skill, the competitive rate of pay, etc.

It’s this kind of cherry picking when the “laws” of supply and demand should be treated as somehow independent of a historical constellation that we find demagoguery at its finest. Speaking of which, let’s return to the Fraser Institute’s argument against the minimum wage which conveniently uses adjustment channels as a reason why increases in a minimum wage doesn’t necessarily increase the income of the poorest in our society.

The Institute treats the idea that increases in a mandated wage is a posteriori not necessarily true but then, only a few pages later, uses an a priori argument to say that the laws of supply and demand hold for increases in the price of labour necessarily leading to less demand for it — which is statistically negligent apropos all the major metastudies, mind you — on the part of employers:

“It is a well-established fact that the quantity of a good or service demanded declines as its price rises relative to the prices of other goods and services. When the relative price of bananas rises, utility-maximizing consumers will buy fewer bananas and more oranges. Similarly, when the price of labour (i.e. the wage rate) rises, profit maximizing firms will tend to substitute other inputs (e.g. machinery) for labour and reduce their demand for workers.”

The laws of supply and demand are argued as necessarily true for why the price of labour would reduce demand for workers based on a static a priori argument. That the minimum wage, and raises to it, would necessarily mean more income for the poor is said to be not true even though a priori a minimum wage does mean more income for the poor. In developed countries like Canada and the United States, 70 to 80 per cent of household income comes from wages. Based on this, it is not a stretch to say that from a purely theoretical deduction, that is a priori—a minimum wage and raises to it necessarily means more income for the working poor.

What the Fraser Institute has to have poor workers believe is that when it comes to them getting more money in their pockets from mandated increases in the price of their labour, it’s in fact more complicated than an A = A situation. On the other hand, employers reacting to the laws of supply and demand when it comes to the price of labour is in fact A = A; the worker turned to an easily replaceable, homogenous battery for equally efficient labour expenditure. In short, a cog.

This is the misinformed and strategically employed idea of capitalist supply and demand having mathematical laws that assume perfect rational agents, as if they are platonic laws like in physics. What has to be disavowed is that the general pattern of behaviour described by supply and demand curves are always in contention with and subject to a historico-material constellation.

A glimpse at our constellation?

At the beginning of this new decade 2,153 billionaires had more wealth combined than 60 per cent of the planet’s population.

If the majority of economists, who are often the harbingers of this system’s vast inequality, say that poor workers having the right to decent minimum wages means that according to the laws of supply and demand the employer won’t buy their labour, remember not to buy this convenient use of “natural laws” which don’t hold true in reality on a society-wide scale.

Jackson, Mississippi is currently facing the tail end of a water crisis due to massive environmental deregulation in the Reagen era. State Governor Tate Reeves’ suggestion that the privatization of water is an option for handling degraded water supply infrastructure is a worrying sign.

When torrential rains made their way into Jackson’s central water treatment plant, the aged equipment and tanks struggled to handle the significant change in water quality resulting in a drop in pressure throughout pipelines. When pipelines lose their pressure this creates space in cracked or worn down pipes which allows groundwater to enter into the pipe system, causing bacteria and harmful substances such as lead to enter the water supply.

As a result, Jackson went on boil notice in late July which has recently been lifted with a provision from a state health official that young children and pregnant women should still boil tap water before consumption.

The crisis in the predominantly Black capital city is the legacy of white flight and Ronald Reagan’s amendments to the Clean Water Act which ended with a giant rollback of funding to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which pumped federal grants into municipalities to help with water treatment. The rollback left states to fend for themselves against water supply issues including primarily poor populations within cities that have a high number of BIPOC residents. EPA grants suddenly turned to meager federal loans that state organizations had to navigate.

Republican Governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, in the midst of the crisis mentioned that he’s “open to all options” and that “privatization is on the table.” Of course, a public system doesn’t seem to be an option. In fact, the push to make water a commodity instead of a public right is not exclusive to the U.S. The private sector branch of the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation is the single largest funder of water projects in the world. Over 250 contracts have been awarded to private entities to help with water supply and sewage system utilities in Third World countries since the ‘90s.

As of right now, only governments in the UK and Chile have fully handed over their water supplies and sewage disposal systems to private entities.

Chile, which has been influenced by the broader left-wing Pink Tide movement in Latin America with their recent election of a socialist president, was a laboratory for U.S.-cooked neo-liberalism in the late 20th century.

Laissez-faire ideas stemming from neoclassical economics, led by the likes of Chicago School of Economics (CSE) scholar Milton Friedman, were tested in Chile under the brutal Pinochet dictatorship which was backed by the U.S. The “Chicago Boys” were a group of Chilean economists trained at the CSE under individuals like Friedman, who would then go on to be economic advisors in the Chilean government, implementing neoliberal policies on a wide-scale.

Ronald Reagan would take inspiration from the Chilean economic experiment in his set of deregulatory policies leading to issues like what’s happening in Jackson. It’s sickeningly poetic how Gov. Tate Reeves is now offering the private option given this inter-connected history which amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy about the market’s “efficacy” in brokering public health crises.

At the end of the day, water should not be treated like a commodity. When a person has a two-to-three day window before death without it, water should not be commoditized. It should have a progressively funded government monopsony alongside things like education and healthcare—and that’s not asking for much.

As of late, the activity in the condominium market is symptomatic of the utter failure of the government to address the housing crisis.

The condominium became commonplace in the residential market around the 1980s. It is now currently the most constructed dwelling-type in Toronto as well as consisting of more than half of new Canadian homes being built in the province right now. Recent developments in the housing market have only emphasized how condos are increasingly used as an investment and effectively foreclosing possibilities of equitable housing alternatives.

Throughout the summer, the housing market saw a downturn, likely a result of the Bank of Canada raising the benchmark interest rate to 2.25 points in March. Due to this, a large number of dwellings up for sale were either relisted or outright unlisted. The unlisting of condos, in particular, saw a 643 per cent increase from January to June. On top of this, condo rentals saw a record average of $2,806 in Toronto during August 2022. These are staggering figures.

The question that should be answered considering the proliferation of condo construction, an uptick in homelessness among Canadians and home prices in the country more than doubling since 1997, is how could this be acceptable?

This is a rather easy question to answer: property owners are capitalizing on the rising cost of housing.

However, there are more complex sides to this phenomenon worth considering in addressing the problem, given that public housing seems to be off the table for the foreseeable future.

Mathew Soules, professor of architecture and urban design at the University of British Columbia, centres his work around how finance capitalism affects the way dwellings are built, when they’re built and how they function in relation to trends in the market. He argues that condos are built spaces that follow the amplitude of boom-bust cycles and are used to store wealth rather than for use. This accounts for the mass vacancies in a bust cycle as seen in Toronto for the last several months.

Soules mentions in the interview linked above how Toronto is implementing a vacancy tax that takes effect in 2023 which taxes one per cent of a dwelling’s Current Assessed Value when deemed vacant at the end of every fiscal year. This is a step in the right direction but doesn’t go far enough.

One thing Soules mentions is how in the very design of condos you see a kind of standardization that makes them more liquidable assets. In the same way every dollar bill has to look like an exact replica of each other to be exchangeable, condos are increasingly homogeneous in their structure and aesthetics so as to be more easily exchangeable. Another side to this manifest exchangeability which Soules describes, is the way developers of condos are purposefully cutting out the construction of courtyards, hallways and other public spaces in condominium buildings, resulting in extremely tall, slender buildings where an elevator basically deposits you into your unit.

This has to do with making these condos purveyors of liquidity as the labor of social entanglement which often comes from bumping into neighbors in hallways and courtyards disrupts a frictionless experience which is part and parcel of the spatial logic of financialized housing.

While this situation can appear hopeless, if we start from the premise that housing should be a human right, then the condo market is in desperate need of problematization in the fight for housing equity.

Brutalism was a product of the post-war era in Britain, so entangled in the idea of rebuilding in service of a growing public that it would spread worldwide. The spirit of functionality, affordability and ultimately democracy at the heart of this 20th century architecture should be a guiding principle for a forward-thinking culture.

The reinforced concrete that dominated the visual language of wartime bases, bunkers and flak towers during the war would be recast in the vision of a welfare state looking to construct a bright future for its masses. Brutalism would become a global phenomenon representing the radical break from a destructive past. In India, for example, this architecture would coincide with the break from British colonial rule in 1947. In fact, the country’s Palace of Assembly built in 1962 in Chandigarh would become a distinctively brutalist structure worldwide.

Here at Brock, the Arthur Schmon Tower is the school’s flagship building and as brutalist as it gets. Decked out in drab concrete, protruding columnar pillars and sharp, externally visible rectilinear sections with telecom hardware extending out its top—it emphasizes a guiding principle of brutalism: unabashed functionality-on-display over purely aesthetic features.

The Schmon Tower was designed by Gordon S. Adamson & Associates and built in 1968. Gordon Sinclair Adamson, an Ontarian, would come to be well known in southern Ontario for ushering in this post-war modernist architecture that had already infected a large part of the United Kingdom.

The architectonics of modernism had so much to do with progress and breaking with tradition after the unimaginable global destructiveness of two global wars. The more popular modernism emerging after WWII is why relics of this austere architecture can be seen today in the design of libraries, hospitals, governmental institutions, educational institutions, public housing blocs and other publicly oriented buildings. The post-war consensus dovetailed nicely with brutalist design because it focused on rebuilding the social and material fabric of a damaged nation. Up until the 80s, brutalism was the material backdrop to a societal gestalt worthy of imitation in combating the liquid, sterile, standardized, and often anti-homeless postmodern architecture dominating our 21st century.

The late cultural critic Mark Fisher in his quasi-autobiography, Ghosts of My Life, aligns brutalist architecture with the broader popular modernism that has disappeared, only to re-emerge in a kind of postmodern nostalgia-fetish; the formalization of nostalgia that’s part and parcel of what he, following Jacques Derrida’s original coinage in Specters of Marx, calls “hauntology.” He writes:

“What’s at stake in 21st century hauntology is not the disappearance of a particular object. What has vanished is a tendency, a virtual trajectory. One name for this tendency is popular modernism. The cultural ecology that I referred to above — the music press and the more challenging parts of public service broadcasting — were part of a UK popular modernism, as were postpunk, brutalist architecture, Penguin paperbacks and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.”

With the current abundance of a corporate, hypersleek glass and steel look — most horrendously seen in the ever-multiplying presence of garish condominiums in urban centers — brutalist architecture is radical in comparison in that it pushes back against the planned-obsolescence that articulates itself in not only tech products but contemporary architecture.

Brutalism should be looked at as a model for what societal infrastructure should aim for: functionality, longevity and public oriented.

Pierre Poilievre is now the leader of the Canadian Progressive Conservative (CPC) party. Here’s how Poilievre has made use of a populism based on misleading working and middle class frustrations to garner support for his cause.

According to an Ipsos poll, the Alberta-born politician was popular among over half of conservative voters before election results were called, making his new position as Leader of the Opposition following interim leader Candace Bergen, fairly predictable. Bergen stepped to the plate after Erin O’Toole was ousted by his caucus when the current Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, won a minority liberal government in last year’s snap election.

So what’s it about Poilievre’s policy plans that makes him popular in the electorate?

Poilievre has one solution to all of Canada’s problems: the government is stopping Canadians from living in the freest country in the world. His campaign’s website reads like a libertarian manifesto. In fact, his mission statement rejects that he’s running a campaign: “this is not a campaign. This is a cause.”

Poilievre has been appealing to the last 12 months of inflation which has resulted from global supply chain issues, the COVID-19 pandemic, corporate price gouging and a host of other factors to justify his attack against government overreach. He calls the past year’s hike in prices “Justin-flation,” a term which conveniently places all of the causes of inflation on government policy using Trudeau as a figurehead to take aim at. While I haven’t been impressed by Trudeau’s policy chops for the past few years, especially on the climate front, contrary to the beliefs of Alberta’s Premier Jason Kenney — Alberta being Poilievre’s hometown and a place that has informed his policy efforts to a large extent — things like the carbon tax are not the reason Canadians have been seeing high prices at the gas pump. Notably, there’s a misconception that the proceeds of the Carbon Tax go to Ottawa when the money goes unilaterally to the jurisdiction of which it was collected.

Recently, the Alberta government passed a gas tax holiday premised on the idea that it’s Ottawa causing the rise in prices. This was endorsed in the media by Kenney who said that it was a “back door” way of scrapping the Carbon Tax. Since that tax holiday passed in mid-summer Kenney has had to call on the Competition of Canada’s Bureau to investigate the possibility of mutually agreed price fixing amongst gas competitors, which is illegal under the Competition Act.

It’s not that surprising that gas corporations would raise prices behind the inflation caused by the Russia-Ukraine war and global supply chain issues, among other things. A big gas company like Shell has increased its earnings per share by 26 per cent in the last three years. This isn’t a shock considering gas continues to be a form of energy we have to do away with because of its environmentally harmful emissions so CEOs and board members of big oil companies are going to continue to look for ways to line their pockets with bonuses on their way out.

This is the massively flawed aspect of free market fundamentalism that Poilievre represses. Instead he assumes that, for the most part, the “invisible hand” of the market is a benevolent force that only the government can impede on. In reality, corporations have two inter-related goals: profit maximization and cornering the market before other companies with the same profit model do it first.

Of course, a (not so) hidden dimension of libertarian ideology is that you are only as valuable as an individual as your contribution to the market. The unemployed, then, are often only seen as system leechers, soothed into inability by the government. Early in Poilievre’s career as a conservative MP he created outrage when he said on a radio program that aboriginals need to learn the value of hard work over taking compensation for the historical injustices of residential schools. He quickly retracted the comments and apologized.

However, the ideology he runs on and the engineering of Canadian’s frustrations around real material conditions of scarcity to promulgate this free market ideology, should warrant a critical eye around past comments that seem on brand with his political cause.

As Poilievre ascends to power as the Leader of the Opposition, on the heels of the Freedom Convoy which he ardently backed, his political strategy should be relentlessly exposed for its convenient oversights and blatant government scapegoating.

Airbnb is a lucrative service for landlords, capitalizing on short-term rentals and prices that are multiple times higher than rent. That being said, this investment strategy is only worsening the housing crisis while heightening the possibility of financial bubbles.

The U.S.-based company offers vacation rentals, homestays and tourism-related activities. The service is an online marketplace that takes a commission cut from sales that take place through their website and mobile app. Meanwhile, landlords using the service to advertise their property are realizing that they can sometimes make up to three to four times more by making rental units into by-night Airbnbs.

The ugly side of this can be seen in Brisbane, Australia where they, like Canada, are facing a housing crisis. There was a case this summer where a Brisbane landlord turned their nine rental units into Airbnbs, giving tenants — including families that had been living there for years — notice to prepare to leave.

The rental prices have shot up as a result of rentals being turned into overnight vacation stays in Brisbane, Canada and other countries that are location/vacation hot-spots, and understandably so. When the supply of rentals can’t meet the high demand for them, prices go up.

In Toronto, this has been an issue for years. In 2019 The Globe and Mail put out an article describing “ghost hotels”—units owned by commercial operators solely for Airbnb:

“Recent reports by the CBC have highlighted how some of these commercial operators operate country-wide networks of 200 or more apartments. Activist group Fairbnb estimates that within Toronto there are more than 6,500 homes and apartments operated by commercial hosts, who often have multiple units for rent. Airbnb often portrays its users as homeowners renting out spare rooms, but Fairbnb’s data suggests that commercial operators are close to 42 per cent of the platform’s hosts in Toronto and they generate more than 73 per cent of the company’s revenue in the city.”

There’s another side to the proliferation of Airbnb: the risk of creating market bubbles.

My partner and I went up to Sauble Beach during this past summer break. While in the Bruce Peninsula, we did an Airbnb experience at a farm. Our host told us that his concession has seen such an uptick in Airbnb services in the area that a law was passed through their town council that put a tax on Airbnb income. He then informed us that this tax fully funds the concession’s fire services.

A company based in San Francisco is fully funding fire services in a farming community on the other side of the continent; there’s no saying how much of this kind of reliance on Airbnb income for public utilities is going on around the world.

If that isn’t concerning because Airbnb “seems solid,” then just consider that there are now lenders selling risky mortgages with higher interest rates because borrower’s intend to turn them into vacation homes. The industry term for this is a “debt service coverage ratio” (DSCR) loan, and it’s making certain real estate brokers a fortune.

This may have a similar aroma to the subprime mortgage loans, mortgages with a high chance of default that were aggregated and sold as investments ostensibly as safe as treasury bonds, that helped fuel the 2008 financial crisis. They’re similar in that they appear solid while things are booming, however a bust cycle, depending on the size and reason of it, could make the whole thing go belly-up. In that case what happens to the fire services in the Bruce Peninsula funded by Airbnb taxes? Moreover, if governments finally take action against Airbnb’s grip on their housing markets, perhaps extending a mandate over short-term use as Singapore has done, these DSCR loans could default causing a burst in housing securities.

If this doesn’t happen then the scenario isn’t much sunnier; as housing crises worldwide are exacerbated by rentals transformed to an Airbnb structure, hopeful future homeowners of the middle class will be frugal as they bide their time and save, as will lower income renters who aren’t able to splurge on vacation stays as they are trying to pay the high rent costs month over month. This all could affect the boom of DSCR loans. If it doesn’t, it’s likely because wealthy people are vacationing all over the world and that mostly untaxed point-of-sale Airbnb money is going back into the pockets of commercial operators, vacation-based mortgage brokers and Silicon Valley.

The whole picture is clear: Airbnb is becoming a risky, lucrative tourism operation for the wealthy that harms local communities and further entrenches us in a deeply exclusive, financialized and liquidized global housing market.

Doug Ford, Ontario’s recently re-elected Premier, continues to drain resources from Ontario’s public healthcare system, exacerbating the nurse shortage and wait times, as he conspicuously touts the private “option” as a benevolent additive to our collapsing public healthcare system.

Ford made headlines this summer when he swallowed a bee during a televised interview. What hasn’t received the same amount of spotlight, but was arguably more brutal for the Premier, was when he had to swallow his pride as a swarm of journalists grilled him during a live press conference where he was commenting on Ontario’s nurse shortages.

Ford remained optimistic at the event as he appealed to the globality of healthcare struggles due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the large amount of hospital beds he bought for the province. Meanwhile, the journalists present kept attempting to get Ford to address the culpability of Bill 124 — a wage-suppression bill that capped wage increases to one per cent for three years for public sector healthcare workers such as nurses and healthcare professionals — which his council passed in 2019 when it comes to the cause of the shortages. His answer: hospitals can negotiate wages with their workers when the bill’s mandate has expired.

Behind the scenes, Ford has been at the fore of a ruthless push to the privatization of health services for Canadians. Lobbying in healthcare during the 2020-21 fiscal years were higher than any past year as the office of Ontario’s Integrity Commissioner reports that healthcare has become the most registered sector for lobbyists at 1,137 registrations, which overshadows trade and economic development. Another red herring in the periphery of all this is the consolidation of health services by big businesses such as Loblaws as seen in the parent companies acquisition of Lifemart for $845 million, making Shoppers Drug Mart a private competitor when it comes to healthcare.

In 2019 the New Democratic Party (NDP) leaked a draft bill from the Progressive Conservative (PC) party called the Health System Efficiency Act that spoke of a “Super Agency” in healthcare that would allow the Health Minister to mandate mergers and privatization for any health services. Think of hospitals as giant health service malls with all sorts of different for-profit agencies for different treatments and you start to get an image of what the PCs have been planning. The PCs authenticated the drafted bill soon after the leak. On top of this, Ontario spends the least on public healthcare in Canada.

Back in March of 2022, Ford started to contract private surgery organizations as well as suggesting the idea of private “health clinics” that are essentially hospitals. The precedent has been that private hospitals in Ontario are illegal as per the Private Hospitals Act of 1971. This is being attacked by the Ford cabinet.

What will it look like if we continue in this direction?

Ontario hospitals will have less regulatory oversight as for-profit incentives trump those of the public good. Furthermore, because of weaning budgets, public health facilities are increasingly throwing lab work to private lab chains where testing is less robust.

Anecdotally, I had some tests done this summer by a private lab whose parent company, Labcorp — a U.S. headquartered S&P 500 company — saw a 2020 revenue of $13.98 billion USD.

My experience was noticeably hurried and impersonal, I had my blood taken and instructions of how to perform my tests at home and what they meant done in less than five minutes as the clinic was quite busy. The clinician who saw me was more thorough in explaining why I should sign up for their online “plus program” that allows you to see results for the price of roughly $15 than about my health concerns, of which they understandably didn’t have many answers as they had three test booths and a waiting room of over 10 people. When I declined to sign up for their service I was given an unclear answer about how I’d find my results, accordingly I decided to sign up for their service as I feared I wouldn’t be updated quickly. I was then given a card and a request to rate my clinician well online as I was shuffled out of the clinic.

Increasingly, if things continue this way people will have less health services afforded to them. There is no reason to believe private healthcare will help with issues such as shortages and wait times writ large, quite the opposite. Sure, more efficient services will be available to those who can afford it. However, healthcare is a fundamental right and continuing to fight for free healthcare and funding to public health services in Ontario is paramount as we face a hostile provincial government interested in corporate greed over public well being.

*Content Warning: discussion of sexual assault below*

Andrew Tate is the latest pop phenom rendition of an age old grift that serves misogyny couched in self-help “red pills” for alienated young men, and while any reasonable person can detect his toxic rhetoric, the righteous objectors to just him being banned from Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook are caught in a performative contradiction that exposes their complicity.

The pro-Trump former kickboxing champion turned influencer has been on the record saying that women should “bear some responsibility” for being raped and that he moved to Romania because of the Romanian courts’ reputation for being softer on rape charges relative to the rest of Eastern Europe. The latter statement has lead to an ongoing sex trafficking investigation against Tate by the Romanian Directorate for Organized Crime and Terrorism.

Tate’s social media presence saw a domino effect of bans across various platforms in the summer of 2022 as this information started to break into the mainstream. Someone might be wondering how such a person could be so wildly popular for so long without the whistles going off in terms of what they have said in the past; they might expect this kind of person to be a sly and cunning character.

What’s so strange about Tate is that this is not the case at all. Tate is hardly an expert rhetor or frankly intelligent, as was exposed when left-wing streamer Hasanabi confronted him on his claim that women were inferior drivers to men despite what statistics say (there’s a reason insurance rates are higher amongst young men) to which Tate claimed he was being a bummer on the stream. As the clip above shows, Hasan Piker explains that Tate’s appeal to anecdotal evidence in his claim about women drivers has an analogue to the flawed logic that flat earthers use to deny that the globe is round; Tate, shirtless, proceeds to smoke a cigar and tell Piker that he’s ruining the good vibes that the “hot chick” created on stream before him.

Given this, it’s fair to say Andrew Tate gets bristly at the idea of empirical evidence of what reality is beyond the purview of his inflated sense of self.

This is likely the appeal of his particular brand of misogyny for young fans: Tate is so unbothered by his lack of critical self-awareness and almost endearingly unscrupulous when it comes to the precepts that form his world view that he has jester’s privilege amongst older fans who may well still be crypto misogynists and appears like a guru who has it all figured out to young men between the ages of who 12-18 who think Bugatti and assault rifles are cool.

However, what prompts a more interesting conversation is the strange pushback on Tate’s various bans from social media coming from the likes of massive influencers such as Jake Paul who tweeted in defense of Tate saying “I don’t roll with Andrew Tate”… “But I roll with freedom of speech.” The main objection seems to be that, though we can all agree that Tate’s message is extremely toxic, social media choosing to enforce speech policies because they don’t agree with the message is a slippery slope.

This critique is not only short-sighted but carries an underlying message which is congenial to a lot of the red-pill philosophy that Tate himself espouses. For starters, social media is essentially the public square at this point. This is due to policy history which I tackled in a separate article here at The Brock Press on how the current landscape of telecommunication monopolies came to be in North America and subsequently the world in the case of social media entities. Somewhat adjacent to Tate’s right-wing appeal to the revival of violent masculinity — albeit draped in more intellectual language — is public intellectual Jordan Peterson who got into a debate on the issue of media censorship not dissimilar to the Tate controversy on the Kyle Kulinski show a month back, after Peterson was banned on Twitter for being transphobic against trans actor Elliot Page.

In this interview, Kulinski, the show’s host, states that because social media essentially acts as the public square, first amendment rights should be extended to those spaces. He then agrees that Peterson shouldn’t have been banned for his slander of Elliot Page. If large social media entities, such as Twitter, are effectively the global public square, they should be regulated as if they are a public utility, as Kulinski suggests. Any statutory extension of oversight would mean that democratically elected officials and judges — judges being elected by the people in the states and appointed by the government in Canada — could have the final say on slanderous or publicly harmful situations on those platforms such as Andrew Tate’s content or Peterson’s hate speech. Oversight that realistically shouldn’t be at the behest of oligarchical tech corporations.

At a philosophical level this makes sense because the defenders of freedom of speech would let Tate continue to thrive on mainstream social media platforms not because they agree with his views or behavior but on the principle that even harmful ideas should have a place to exist if there’s a market for it. This argument, however, misses the point where algorithmic softwares can often help propagate the most harmful ideas that are allowed to be platformed simply because they’re outrageous. This silos attention to those harmful ideas as more of them, from a critical or supportive angle, comes to the fore as a result of its algorithmically supported (and often instantiated) popularity.

Guys like Tate know how to play the system and constantly bait for attention, even if it’s from the “haters,” “woke mob,” or what have you who want to do a “cancel culture,” because this all plays into the narrative that these ideas are only being suppressed because they’re simply hard truths.

Regulating these platforms and allowing actual public say into how and what should be allowed in the online public sphere would undercut the current ecosystem of outrage, canceling and hyperbolic appeals to freedom. If the “might makes right” attitude that Tate propagates in relation to being a Man is reflected in those who think that the might of clicks and eyeballs on his content make it right for it to stay up, then public discourse is only going to help produce more resentful and dangerous grifters.

The Rogers outage on July 8 that impacted the whole of Canada is the product of the fact that corporate media monopolies run amok. It’s a problem that was made possible by North American legislation stemming from the 90s which are in need of amendments.

In early July, cell services and Interac technology stopped working nationwide as an outage caused by the centralization of Rogers wireline and wireless networks ensued. One network going out caused both to come down resulting in the loss of satellite connection and thus haulting a host of services for users. Since then, Rogers has begun work to physically separate the two networks so they can’t create mutual outages if one goes down. This plan will cost $261 million and it will take up to 18 months to build the infrastructure necessary to split the lines.

However, this will not solve the larger issue surrounding the outage; that being the consolidation of telecommunication services in the hands of a few massive corporations.

Big fish telecoms are a huge issue because they undercut why the emerging telecom industry, in concert with the recently public access internet, were deregulated in the mid to late 90s in the first place.

Key pieces of legislation such as the Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, stipulates that by allowing the merging of broadcasting and telecommunications markets and allowing any communication provider to enter the business and compete with others this would drive up competition. Similarly in Canada the Telecommunications Act of 1993 placed the same emphasis on creating market competition as we switched from a governmental monopoly on telecommunications.

Canada’s Federal Communications Commission, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunication Commission and the courts have seen a reduction of regulation over the last three decades with fewer incumbents and lower barriers of entry into telecom markets. The result: large media conglomerates such as Rogers and Bell, which deal in internet, specialty channels, radio, television, satellite and news stations corner the market and actually drive down competition.

For example, Shaw, another of Canada’s largest media entities, was to be acquisitioned by Rogers before the merger was called into question by Canada’s Competition Tribunal due to the outage. In fact, the reasoning for those two key pieces of deregulatory legislation in Canada mentioned above was the fear of government centralization being too concentrated and not giving users options for when, say, there’s an outage. Both acts amend previous acts from the early 20th century — the Railway Act of 1906 in Canada and the Communications Act of 1934 signed by Roosevelt in the U.S. — as these acts had relations to the railway industry which was another key industry that involved intra-state/province commerce which could easily be manipulated for profit at the behest of other states/provinces without regulation creating a fairness amongst carriers’s pricing.

This was the dynamic that heralded the Communication Act of 1934. A Texas railway was charging more for carriers going outside of Texas than in the state, and in Houston, East & West Railway Co. V. United States the Supreme Court ruled that the Interstate Commerce Commision would have jurisdiction over prices for all common carriers. Roosevelt used this centralized regulatory plan as a blueprint for the Communications Act as a way of making broadcasting technologies accessible between state borders and fairly priced. The precedent that these railway acts set for open access to goods would continue to be the model for telecom services in North America until the above mentioned deregulatory acts of the 90s.

Ironically, as seen in the Rogers outage this summer, the issue of governmental monopoly being risky due to outages and a lack of competitive freedom that lead to the 90s telecom acts have become the leading issues with these massive media conglomerates. Rogers has cornered the market, and as their lack of infrastructural oversight has revealed, the profit incentive did not make for better services.

Additionally, the convergence of telecommunications technologies has dissolved the barriers of television and telephoning. The smartphone acts as a great synthesizer of these once separate mediums and due to this, news is increasingly disconnected from one’s boots on ground culture and is a melting pot of news and entertainment as seen in social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube.

An older family member of mine recently called the internet a “soulless morass” and even though my Gen Z credentials tell me to reject this cynicism, it’s not hard to see why this is increasingly the attitude of older generations. All these media that were once separated are dissolved as the corporate merging of communication services see no substantive intervention, consequently producing hyper commodities in hypermarkets and a non-stop, titillating and incendiary model for news that forestalls meaning making and ultimately history.

Famous French media scholar, often referred to as the “high priest of postmodernism,” Jean Baudrillard, examined this dissolution of mass media in his work. In a chapter titled “The Implosion of Meaning in Media” in his influential book Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard says the following about electronic mass media,

“Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scène of communication, the mass media, the pressure of information pursues an irresistible destruction of the social. Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy…

There is no more media in the literal sense of the word (I’m speaking particularly of electronic mass media)—that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another. Neither in content, nor in form. Strictly speaking this is what implosion signifies. The absorption of one pole into another, the short circuiting of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium and of the real—thus the impossibility of any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between two or from one to the other. Circularity of all media effects.”

While Baudrillard takes his summation of electronic mass media to a fatalistic conclusion, that “it is useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable,” a notion perhaps reflected in Bo Burnham’s Netflix special Inside which is a recent popular cultural text that is obsessed with the indecipherability of literality and parody, meaning and dissolution of meaning and the age old philosophical distinction of appearance versus reality when it comes to the social media age.

With that being said, though his theories are prescient for our age of technical alienation, the situation need not be as fatalistic as Baudrillard makes it out to be. Especially as younger generations are becoming aware of the negative impacts that the internet has had on them. The breaking up of the telecom industries could mean less media synthesizing and dissolution of meaning. This is a problem that only regulation or a public-oriented centralized apparatus of telecoms can mitigate—and should mitigate.