We're so screwed -- economically speaking

Well, if the world economy really does implode at a yet-to-be-determined date in the not so distant future, we can't claim we weren't warned.

And make no mistake, it will. Why? Because apparently we've some how lost our ability to take in new information and form new beliefs based on this new information. I believe they called it “learning” before it completely went out of fashion.

The always interesting, and usually quite right nobel laurete in economics, Paul Krugman, offers an excellent take-down of the alternative reality that the hard right finds themselves stuck in these days.

As he explains, they continue to delude themselves that all is well, despite the fact that their beloved business mavens have been the recipients of the largest and most shocking display of public largesse, um, ever, because their utterly unregulated business transactions blew up in their faces and their first reaction was to go running for the shelter of the welfare state.

Which, to recap, remains a bad thing for individuals, but apparently a good thing for companies and the wealthiest individuals the world has ever seen.

Oh, and he doesn't spare what passes for a left in American politics either, pointing out that the utter lack of meaningful reform by the bought-and-paid for by finance Democrats pretty much guarantees a repeat because, in the words of philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

And, as an added bonus, enjoy Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi's well-deserved drubbing of the Obama administration's craven cave-in to big finance, delivered in the fine form of a first class polemicist.

Perverse Morality?

Valerie Scott, one of the women mentioned in the linked CBC news story about sex trade workers challenging Criminal Code provisions related to keeping a common bawdy house and living off the avails of prostitution that imperil their safety has family roots in Regina. When she was home for a visit last summer, I interviewed her for a story that ran in prairie dog. As with the debate over marijuana, where prohibitionists condemn the violence and illicit profits that the drug trade engenders, the bottom-line is that the reason those problems occur in the first place is because weed and other soft recreational drugs are illegal.

When I spoke with Scott she made a compelling case that, regardless of one's personal feelings about prostitution and the overall commercialization of sex, the current situation is untenable as all it does is put women (and men) who work in the trade at the mercy of psychopaths like Robert Pickton and John Crawford.

Scott is executive director of the Sex Professionals of Canada (SPOC). When I spoke with her last June, the legal action was in the works, and she fully expected the fight would land them eventually in the Supreme Court of Canada. Here's hoping she and her colleagues win their fight.