I like Chris Hedges. Continually pointing to all the progress we've lost to the corporate state. Be careful & be aware. Fresh ideas & real common sense. Thanks again Chris. It's sad to note my relatives to the north are just as deep in it as ourselves? There goes my plans of escape. I guess it's now Hello Brazil?

Corporations know no borders--only profits.
Politicians feed off corporations.
You finish the riddle...

As usual from Chris Hedges: so much to learn! The non-loyalty to the American people of the heads of "American corporations" is so hard to make sense of that many Americans resolutely refuse to take it in. In the time after the Civil War, these corporations grew to great power, and while their practices were often greedy and dishonest, they seemed generally to be harnessed to American nationalism--first, to "the Winning of the West," but then from the Spanish-American War on, to promotion of American economic hegemony--a controlling hand for Americans-- everywhere in the world. That harness, never a sacred bond, has now dissolved --as Chris tells us. What's come to the fore is a world-wide elite dedicated to the aggrandizement of their class at whatever cost to all other people and to earth itself as resource system. Perhaps it's a sense of dwindling-resources-in-demand-by-a-burgeoning-world-population that fuels their manic acquisitiveness . To paraphrase Hedges, the planet along with all its peoples seems increasingly in the hands of the richly demented.

To counter this destructive elite, we who are reconciled to out common mortality and quest for meaning must
learn to fend off the ploy of "divide and conquer." How simple-mindedly vulnerable we have proved in the game of the elite as it keeps pointing us into new struggles with "bad guys" and "outside influences"! It's time to wake up, and identify with fellow victims everywhere.

The church is over reacting. If you don't want to use birth control, you can still be able to do that. However,what the healthcare coverage wants is to include all people, including those that work for a Catholic or Christian center in order to be able to get contraceptives. I can see the church's objection to abortion to a certain degree, but birth control is the right approach even for Catholics. The church won't take care of you and yr child if you can not find a job. You have to look out for yourself. A priest told me that is up to you what you feel is best(using a eulogy or story) to get the answer to my question.

I don't think Harper will last. But part of what's going on in Canada is that it's being courted by people who want to make money from it's Natural Resource Wealth. Canada is 30 million people huddled on the U.S. Border. It is being courted by Internationalis t Corporatists who want to control it to sell to the Chinese. And it's being courted by the Chinese and Western Nationalist Businessmen both. But they all overlap...except that in the end we may have a war to sort it out. The vast number of immigrants in Western Canada are Chinese though.....bringing Money and Buying Influence even locally. Bear in mind....that the Left Very Likely won't win any battles long term. The left has a Ghandi Protest Profile of civil disobedience. The Right has an armed to the Teeth, Pay people to sell out and personal privacy penetrative style of messing with people. Even Assange will probably sell out

What is the cure for irony poisoning? Since 1945 the hard right has been trying to scare us with the threat of "one-worlders" bringing us tyranny under "one-world government" (in the old days, a toxic amalgam of red-scare spiced with more than a pinch of race-scare) while then and now working tirelessly for the entities that will, in fact, bring us one-world government, tyranny and all, an equal opportunity oppressor. So, one-world is ok, so long as they think it will be their world?

It’s deeply sad to be a Canadian these days. Prime Minister is busily dismantling everything we treasure--universal health care, and this week it is old age pensions--and everything we stand for--peacekeeping and environmental stewardship. All going, going, gone. I wish I could feel as sanguine about his eventual demise as some of you. He will be replaced by another ‘bot. How can we ever recover?