Socialist historian; author of Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality; president, Alberta Labour History Institute
94 followers 31 following 284 posts
view profile on Bluesky
If you are interested in a book that challenges what you were taught in school, check out my Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggler for Equality. I'm a retired academic historian and social activist and much-read Canadian historian who has ventured into global history. You can get it on Amazon--$29.
And in Canada, they were the ones who fought the doctors and health insurance companies and got us universal single-payer health insurance. They might have succeeded in the US too if it wasn't for the alliance of southern racist Democrats with big business Republicans.
Yes, when my dad finally got a union job, I got to go to the dentist for the first time in my life and what my parents were paying for medications was reduced to zero.
That's what happens when the union movement has been reduced to rubble and labor laws are anti-union. "Right to work" laws are an employer scam. You need anti-scab laws like 3 Canadian provinces have, and enforcement of labour laws meant to prevent employers interfering in organizing campaigns.
All true & the higher the union density, the better the wages & the social wages--gov't programs to redistribute wealth. If you compare wages and social programs in states with higher proportions of union workers to non-union, you see that clearly. Even better, compare the US with other countries.
Troll!
The higher the level of unionization the better the distribution of national income because unions fight for better wages in workplaces and a higher "social wage" for all through generous social insurance programs and other forms of income subsidies. Compare the US with Norway--or even Canada!
Newsom correctly identifies the fascist stuff that is happening. But counting on the courts to hold back the fascist dam is dreaming in technicolor. Fascists ignore courts. It's resistance in the streets that will slow down and then hopefully turn back the thuggery that depends upon apathy.
Let's also remember that the success of neoliberalism, the effort to remove workers' gains versus capital, is proportional to the extent that "union density," the percentage of workers represented by unions, is reduced. It's why the ratio of incomes between top and bottom is worst of all in the US.
US fascination with guns is one of many reasons why I solidly oppose Trump's fascist threats to use economic pressures to force Canada to become part of the US. But we Canadians have an interest in the US passing sensible gun laws: your shooters inspire copycats everywhere.
Trump, who is vaccinated, knows that RFK Jr is a lunatic, but lets him do his damage because the conspiracists who support RFK JR add strength to the fascist coalition that Trump has coordinated: the fossil fuels and health insurance industries, religious crazies, white supremacists, and gun nuts.
That is how he must be seen: a mass murderer, not the foolish quack who could be dismissed before he had power. Vaccines have added many years of life expectancy. Trump, who is vaccinated & knows RFK is nuts, allies with him because RFK's conspiracists add members to the fascist coalition.
That's especially the case when the government, elected or not, attempts a coup against civil society. And that is what Trump and his thugs are doing. There's no legitimacy to ICE, to federal takeovers of cities, to mass firings in necessary programs, or to bullied courts and congresses.
It's not about drugs. If it was, there would be policies to discourage the alienation and poverty that causes people to become drug users. It's not a supply problem; it's a demand problem. But gov'ts of the wealthy won't deal with social problems that turn people to drugs.
That's why V.I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg persuaded the Socialist International in 1907 to warn governments if they went to war, armed workers would turn weapons on their governments. But came the "Great War" nationalism won out & millions died. The Russian Revolution was a revolt against that war.
They have to keep it up and get support across the nation to slow down lunatic Trump and his cavalcade of Christo-fascists.
Not to mention the earlier Justinian plague from the 500s to the 7s. Half of the eastern Roman kingdom died and Justinian's plans to seize back the western Roman empire collapsed. And then indeed the Black Plague halved the population of Europe and devastated Asia as well. But oh, what about autism?
It's frustrating. I'd write off the Cons on this. But the NDP can be persuaded to put it back on the agenda. Heather Macpherson, the likely next leader, is very good on housing issues. They might then be able to pressure the Libs if they get more seats next time& the Libs remain without a majority.
Because he's a white guy feeding white supremacist fears that every non-white is a criminal. In reality, criminals among the immigrants, as in the general population, are hardest to round up quickly. So Trump and ICE are just rounding up random good folks whose only crime is their skin colour.
Yes, but let's put Carnegie in perspective too. His biographers prove that he was a ruthless employer who worked his workers 80 hours a week under terrible conditions and paid them poorly. He made a fortune and then late in life worried about the judgments of God and history, tried to make amends.
Trump's much-repeated lies about him having provided water to southern California during the wildfires despite rejection by Governor Newsom--neither happened--continue even after being exposed as impossible many times. Either Trump is just a compulsive liar or he is too demented to know he is lying.
..the president did order the Army Corps of Engineers to release billions of gallons of water from dams at Lake Kaweah and Lake Success, it rushed into a dry lakebed in California’s Central Valley. ..not only was the water unable to flow to Southern California, but it would most likely go to waste.
Thanks. I read the New York Times' item the other day on Switzerland's excellent coop housing. Much the same is true in Scandinavia and from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s we made progress in Canada on both coop and social housing before neoliberal politics caused the federal gov't to abandon housing.
If Donny says they are criminals, he should know. After all, he was found guilty of 34 charges. Why can't we deport him somewhere?
She is ridiculous. And it's hardly "leftist" to see the tired expressions on Trump's face and make note of how often he responds to reporter's questions with answers not only unrelated to the question but unrelated to anything at all. He is unwell, not that he isn't cruel & dangerous when he's well.
Add "affordable housing for all" if you want to break the movement of young people to the right. We have medicare for all, paid leave, and universal childcare in Canada. But sky-high rents and mortgage rates have moved significant portions of the young to the right, as in the US.
Research also shows that where union density is highest, life expectancy increases.
Look at his face as he speaks. The guy is way past it. He's not just lying. He has no idea what he is talking about or what those numbers represent.
He shows up in public with the most fucked up brain and the media bury comments like "you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn’t come out. They have a restrictor. You can’t – in areas where you have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. "
The US isn't a serious country. It's a country that lies about its history so smoothly that almost everyone is drawn in (unlike the USSR where the people knew their media were liars). But there must be enough Americans who want a sane nation who'll rise up against a dictator in dictator's clothing.
Yes, this is a repeat of what happened in Nazi Germany. But a massive citizen uprising can counter Trump. He's a dementing thug whose ass-licking deputies depend on the population responding with the same deer in the headlights reaction as the leaders of the national Dem party. Trump can be stopped.
& in Canada, they provided the impetus for universal, single-payer medical insurance. They founded the New Democratic Party, which forced the Liberal Party, after a half-century of promising universal healthcare, to implement it. The Libs were a minority gov't dependent on the NDP to stay in office.
It isn't that hard. The state of Kerala in India, with 36 million people and a relatively modest GDP, has achieved all of the above through its elected Left Front governments. There are richer states in India, but they are plagued with homelessness, dire poverty, and poor education. Worth a visit.
Glad to be Canadian when I read that list. We still have a long way to go too, but we do have versions of universal healthcare and universal childcare, and we put no legal limits on abortions. No wonder Trump wants to annihilate us and make us a territory of the Trump US, much like Washington, DC.
As an historian, I think there's lots to not feel good about but lots to feel good about: mostly, the solidarity in most societies of the common folk and their resistance against authoritarians. Check out my most recent book: Humans, The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality.
He should ask: "Now that we have a president who recognizes no power other than his own and scoffs at courts and Congress, how can any sane person believe that he is refusing to reveal docs for legal reasons? Isn't it obvious that he refuses to reveal docs because they show him to be a pedophile?
Is he afraid to discover that he might have some attraction to someone of his own sex? If not, wtf is his problem???
Yeah, they died on average at age 30. But they didn't have those vaccine chemicals in their body that today's centenarians do.
It reminds me of a book in which Mexican thieves pray to God to help them as they go off to a heist. I can just hear this crew saying: Dear God. Help us as we cage non-white working people who weren't born in Amurrica. Aid us as we help Israel and Russia commit genocide while starving our own poor.
A convicted rapist thinks he can remove someone who might maybe eventually be charged on what look like made-up mortgage fraud accusations by the Department of (In)justice and then might be convicted of that in court (very unlikely). If she wasn't a Black woman, would this racist rapist do that?
It's an attempt to destroy the powers of states and cities and centralize all policing power in the president's office. He's following the Mussolini and Hitler precedents. Though he's never read a full book, he was reported to be reading from Mussolini's handbook as he ran for president in 2016.
Pedophile Trump only ever promised to release the files during the election because it allowed him to get the votes of the QAnon crazies, people normally too out of it to be voting at all. The election over, and knowing what is in those files, he insists that the info can't be released.
Yes, it's important that the Democrats base their shutdown on support for demands of the American people rather than appear to be simply playing partisan games. They need to convince jaded swing voters that Trump lied to them and, instead of going after "elites," he is at war with workaday people.
Only those planning to assault people carry assault weapons. Their "right" to bear arms is more than cancelled out by the right of everyone else to walk the streets and enter buildings, including schools, freely without fear that some loonytunes, supported by the NRA, will shoot them.
The first sip you take will go to workers' pay and all the rest of what you drink will go straight into the pockets of the billionairie CEO.
Yes, that's the real goal. The president is a fascist and there needs to be sufficient chaos created by the resistance to prevent him from being able to achieve his fascist agenda. The slogan should be "No normal until the Nazi president resigns."
Frankly, it shows he is a Nazi admirer who is copying what Hitler did. Power is distributed across various levels of government so that a centralized dictatorship cannot be implemented. Trump is ignoring every law imaginable to try to centralize power, and is debasing the idea of "law and order."
Great! He should add: "It's disturbing that the president of the United States emulates the precedent of Adolf Hitler in destroying local power in the name of "law and order" when that very takeover of power violates all norms of law and order and removes citizens' defences against unlawful arrest.
They should say they are "disgusted" but more importantly they need to add: "We will join all democracy and equality-loving Americans in the streets to do everything to undermine and then defeat this fascist administration." Instead, they do nothing but fret.
Significant & shows that many Repub voters are swing voters. But the Dems have lost solid supporters to Repubs over years. The lack of Democratic policies to reduce the cost of living for low and middle income earners remains the problem. That party forgets the Brecht line, "first, feed the face."
In terms of his quality of life, Bezos would be just as well off if $188 billion of that $189 billion or more were taxed so that Americans could have universal single-payer medicare. At some point money-making becomes something of a pissing contest for status with no bearing on real life needs.
Kennedy is a conspiratorial nutcase whose own family warned he was unfit to serve. Trump likes him because he appeals to the QAnon crowd and the others who think that all the "elites" are controlling them minus the real elite that is in charge--the corporate profiteers who see Trump as their guy.
Gangster behaviour led by a rapist thug with the brains of a monkey and far less self-control.
What Trump is saying is that he is a dictator, a divine monarch. He doesn't recognize the constitutional rights of the courts, the Congress, the states, or anyone else to determine anything if his small brain, smaller even than his cock, says "let's make that the policy." He needs to be locked up.
True. Hilary Clinton's health policy chief in 2008, interviewed on CBC about her confusing policy, was asked: "Why not copy Canada's single-payer policy?" Response: "That would cut costs by 25%. Most admin and all the advertising would disappear. But the health insurance companies are all-powerful."
Chilling but amazing it's taken this long given all the Cold War lies about how the US was defending "democracy" against "authoritarianism" when it was overthrowing every left-wing and nationalist elected government in sight; and the long-developing income gap that created the alienated Trumpistas.
Gore's right. Universities and media that treat Trump's absolute lies as "a different perspective" on issues are behaving irresponsibly. Trump is allowed to have opinions; he isn't allowed to produce "alternative facts-- hare-brained lies meant to help him establish a full dictatorship.
Until they do that, they will resist policies that offend their wealthy donors. That will strengthen the view of many that there is almost no reason to choose between the two main parties in the US.
Gangsters don't read the constitution. They slowly rip it up and replace it with their personal control over everything. While Trump, in part, is a tantruming toddler, he is also, in good part, a rampaging narcissistic warrior with support from leading corporate sociopaths and their chosen party.
Comparisons of Chamberlain at Munich and Trump-Putin miss the point when they talk about "appeasement." Chamberlain LIKED what Hitler was doing because Hitler planned to invade the USSR and weaken global communism. Trump LIKES Putin's invasions and wants to emulate them in Panama & Greenland.
And beyond Latin America, there was Iran, 1953; Congo, 1961; Indonesia, 1965; Ghana, 1966; Greece, 1967; and more. You might enjoy my recent book, Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality.
A bookstore would order it for you. But that may be expensive. You can order the Kindle version from my publisher, James Lorimer via the sales guy, Daniel Campbell, sales@formac.ca. It's just $17 Canadian or about 9 pounds. My book, Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy is available in UK.
They ban the classic book that shows the tragedy of antisemitism and racism more generally through the words of a young woman. And then they claim that they are fighting antisemitism. Yeah, like the Proud Boys and their hero Trump are!
Add to that: End objective reporting of statistics, and manufacture numbers that provide legitimacy to the creations of the febrile brain of the idiot dictator.
Chillingly, almost certainly, both are happening. The whole point of the Trump regime is to declare that all the rules by which government is supposed to play are null and void. The Dear Leader can do what he wants and his appointees, high and low, can do whatever they need to do to satisfy King T.
Thanks. You might enjoy my latest book, Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality, which provides summaries for 300,000 years! It's all based on scholarly work but it's easy to follow. I was a journalist before I became an academic and I research like the latter and write like the former.
Maybe he does know the basics of World War 2. But he supports the losers of that war. He and Elon Musk were very vocal in their support of the neo-Nazi Party in this year's German election. Even more than Trump, whom Vance pegged early as a proto-Nazi, Vance is an authoritarian anti-democrat.
He's lying. Vance made clear in a New York Times opinion piece a year ago that the US should let Russia do what it wants in Ukraine. Vance led the bullying of Zelensky at the meeting with Trump in March. He's the 2025 version of Neville Chamberlain at Munich and like Chamberlain, he's pro-fascist.
It's not just Mamdani they refuse to endorse. It's his policies defending the poorest elements of society against the wealthy exploiters. The Dem establishment want to protect economic predators, hoping that their social liberalism will be enough to win elections. The growing income gap nixes that.
Trump-manufactured figures are lies; real stats that are responded to by firing their providers constitute an effort to persuade the public that only lies are the truth; and the effort to tell teachers and professors what they can say of America's past is an effort to erase the search for truth.
I'd add: manufactured figures are lies; real stats that are responded to by firing their providers constitute an effort to persuade the public that only lies are the truth; and the effort to tell teachers and professors what they can say of America's past is an effort to erase the search for truth.
Makes absolute sense but there's no way that Donald Trump is going to give the equivalent of state status to the most Democratic city in the US.
We all know what he is hiding--his pedophile past. If the files didn't incriminate him, he would be trying to please his base by releasing them. Bondi, a typical Trump cabinet minister who parks their principles at the front door of the White House, let him see the files. He knows what's there.
And because the .1 percent who have most of the money and power can't control her, they call her a communist.
Buying useable used stuff is a good way of fighting back against the notion that increased production, which means increased GHG emissions, is necessary for survival. It also saves you money and frankly there's lots of good stuff in thrift stores.
"Infiltration" often disguises such recruitment. In the US and Canada, during the Cold War, Nazis and fascists were warmly welcomed as citizens while lefties were nixed even as visitors. In Canada, until recently, while I published about that in an academic journal, newspapers wouldn't report it.
Yes, we did much better in Canada because we had vaccine mandates in all provinces that caused many who were skeptical about vaccines to get vaccinated anyway. Unfortunately we now have an anti-vax national Conservative Party and some provincial Conservative governments that are at best indifferent.
Such abuse is inevitable. Trump dehumanizes migrants and sets quotas for their arrest and caging. Those who are hired to arrest them and those hired to cage them are mean-spirited people who want to suck up to the sociopathic president. It's much like the Gestapo.
Whatcha mean? Trump is a worldly guy. I can just hear the conversation. Putin: Mr. President, once we've absorbed Ukraine, we want you to consider letting us have Georgia. Trump: Georgia? Why not? It's increasingly a Democratic state and I can't forgive Kemp for not finding 11,000 extra votes.
Trump's voters can't see through his constant lies because they don't travel, get all their news from Fox or QAnon, and lack critical skills. It's quite a condemnation of the American education system that the average adult American has a reading comprehension that corresponds to Grade 6.
AOC for president!
That's what the US is turning into--a nation of cages led by sociopaths who demand total obedience and resort to cages when they can't get it.
She should be unseated. While she doesn't give in to every Trump whim, she's onside when he needs the numbers. If she has any principles, she violates them so frequently that it hardly matters.
It may seem surreal. But let's be honest. A fair history of the US that includes Indigenous people, people in US colonies or living under military regimes that the US helped to impose, generally after overthrowing elected governments, slaves and segregation, and McCarthyism, foreshadows Trump.
That's a great summary of the difference between yourself and the fascist president.
Yes, I think that whether it's the Gestapo in Germany, the Pinochet goons in Chile, or Stalin's gulag operators there is a class of brutes who might normally just pursue a life of crime but when given the chance by a brutal dictator to push other people around gladly take it. That's the ICE-men.
No, the idea that formerly oppressed people should be expected to behave like angels towards others when they have some power makes no historical sense. But I think that the people who have that expectation of Jews are unaware of how common such turnarounds are. They aren't necessarily anti-Semites.
Go get him, Gavin. Fight fire with fire.
The related sinister problem with the US is wealth concentration, plus racism, has resulted in so much crime, poverty, and insecurity that people feel unsafe. Everyone puts basic security above abstract democracy. In countries where losing your job never means homelessness, democracy means more.
Don't say why!!! If you don't say, nature is uncontrollable and it's all about God, Danielle will label you "anti-Albertan."
I wonder if access to Russia's Arctic will decrease Trump's obsession with annexing Canada to get at our Arctic resources. Oh, probably not!
Most people in N. America don't even know about the rape of Nanking. So they can't say that Xi didn't "learn the right lessons." Similarly most people here are unaware that 28 million Soviets were murdered by the Nazis. So they don't accuse Putin of ignorance. They do know about the Holocaust.
Newsom is right. Donald Trump is making war on the American people.
Which makes me wonder how much Putin has spent on Trump to influence his decision to hand over the Ukraine to the Russian Hitler.
Putin owns Trump. Russia saved Trump from bankruptcy on several occasions, helped him win the 2016 election, and likely has salacious pictures of him with prostitutes that they've made him aware they will release if he doesn't do their bidding.
"Law and order" campaigns in which police are further empowered are distractions from cuts to the programs that help keep criminality down. Notice that crime rates and imprisonment rates in the Scandinavian countries are puny compared to the US because those countries focus on social wellbeing.
Thinking of ICE. It's a blight on both the US and Canada that we view some people as good enough to do the hardest work but not good enough to become our citizens. So we call them "temporary foreign workers" or "illegals" and let employers treat them like dirt--then we deport them.
They are viewed as dispensable. It's a blight on both the US and Canada that we view some people as good enough to do the hardest work but not good enough to become our citizens. So we call them "temporary foreign workers" or "illegals" and let employers treat them like dirt--then we deport them.
The evidence of that is that the degree of inequality in western European countries, and especially in the Scandinavian countries, is far smaller than in the US. But their economies are in good shape, their social statistics tower over those of the US, and their reported happiness is leagues ahead.
The more Trump gets away with the meaner he gets. All dictators are looking to figure what they can get away with. The tamer the public reaction to official thuggery, the worse it gets. Militant public action is needed to slow him down and then eventually push him into retreat.