Spiegel Online has come right out and asked whether America has been transformed into a true oligarchy?It’s an perfectly legitimate question and the answer is plainly “yes.””Inequality in America is greater than it has been in almost a century. Those …
Continue readingAuthor: The Mound of Sound
The Disaffected Lib: Criminalizing Pot Only Breeds Criminals
Well, Duh! A new report entitled “Breaking the Silence” says that the current criminalization of marijuana only supports organized crime. In other words, Steve Harper supports organized crime.Stop the Violence B.C., which comprises do…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: 7 Billion Reasons to Wake Up
7-billion but who’s counting? Apparently a lot of people are counting including the environmental desk of The Guardian a.k.a. Monbiot & Co. They’ve taken the occasion of humanity passing the 7-billion threshold to publish a …
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Muammar Ain’t No Mar
Former, as in “dead”, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi is no more. Libyan authorities report the man who ruled their country for 42-years was shot and killed today.How he died isn’t clear. Some reports claim he was making a break…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Putting a Price on Environmental Vulnerabilities
If a nation’s economy is heavily dependent on imported resources that are in increasingly short supply, should this be factored into that country’s credit rating? It seems to follow that the more dependent an economy on limited resources th…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Hey Liberals – Lick Your Finger, Stick It Up In the Air, Way Up
There was a time you didn’t have to tell a Liberal how to read the winds of change. Of course that was before they (were) moved from Sussex Drive to Stornoway to Motel 6.Change, however, is very much in the air whether it’s in the Middle Ea…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Around the World, People Losing Trust in Their Leaders
See, we’re not alone. Sure we don’t trust Steve Harper but people in many other countries are coming to distrust their leaders too. It’s this loss of faith and overwhelming discontent that’s fueling everything from food price protests…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Will the Anchor Hold?
With each passing day the Occupy Wall Street movement, in New York and elsewhere, grows more resilient. It shows itself to be more than a mere protest, the standard venting over one egregious malady or another, but rather a rejection of an entire…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Harper’s War on Universal Human Rights Continues
It’s Air Canada again. This time it’s the 6,800 flight attendants who have voted down an offer from the airline and will be in a legal strike position on Thursday.It wasn’t long after the flight attendants’ Sunday vote that a spokesperson for Lab…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: It’s the Sound of Cracking Ice
Growing up in Ontario back when it used to have winters, young boys gravitated to frozen ponds, streams and lakes. We’d skate or play hockey or sometimes just marvel at walking across expanses of frozen water. One sound that instantly…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: For Sale – Army Surplus
For sale. Infantry helmet. Only four previous owners, one surviving. Fair condition. Some wear & tear. Original paint. Custom ventilation.
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: The Sun Will Rise and Set in Afghanistan
Of course it will and, as surely as Afghanistan will see another rising and setting sun, so too will it see the resumption of its long-running and unresolved civil war when Western babysitters head home in 2014.The Guardian reports that a British milit…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Do Stock Brokerages Have the Right to Kill?
Why do big investment houses have the right to speculate in ways that can lead to death? Speculation in food, in water. While there are fortunes to be had in creating bottlenecks that restrict access to the very things people cannot s…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: We Need to Talk Turkey in the Muslim World
There was a time we expected Turkey to grovel for a place at the table with the Big Boys. We were willing to consider allowing our only Muslim NATO ally into the European Union but only once it showed itself a deserving supplicant. &nb…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: For Europeans – Poverty and Climate Change Greatest Threats to Mankind
Europeans are awash in economic disaster yet they see the greatest threats their world faces as poverty and climate change.The Eurobarometer poll (pdf) found that the majority of the public in the European Union consider global warming to be one of th…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: The West’s "Frighteningly Simplistic" Afghan Adventure
It’s a solemn 10th anniversary for Western gunplay in Afghanistan. I’ll call it gunplay instead of “war” because wars are normally fought to win and we’ve never been fighting to win in Afghanistan, instead we’ve passed the time mostly bangi…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Steve, You’ve Got Mail. Stop Being Such a G__damned Socialist!
Dear Exalted Ruler, you have mail from the OECD and the IEA. They want you and other world leaders to cut out the billions of dollars you waste each year on fossil fuel subsidies. Yes, your Grace, that means the Tar Sands too.The Orga…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: The Older I Get, The Less I Like Old People
“Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72”- Mark Twain It’s interesting living in the human equivalent of the fabled “elephant graveyard.” My town is a place where the climate is, by any Canadian standard, idyllic. It’s as though there w…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: The Wisdom of the Great – Abraham Lincoln
If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the…
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Not Even the World is "Too Big to Fail" Any Longer
Noam Chomsky has an interesting article published in al Jazeera that reveals the trouble we’re all in so long as we’re under the rule of ideologues like our own Exalted Ruler and what passes today for the US Congress. Here are some excerpts. From…
Continue reading