Sales must be very sluggish......

....in sunglasses here.  Same with clotheslines.  Another day of cold and rain dawns in Calgary.  My patio pots are hanging in there, but are mostly leaves; blossoms* crave heat and sun.  It's so wet I have just had to spray with a fungicide.  Fungi thrive in this oppressive moisture.  Could we not have just a wee bit of old-fashioned prairie drought?!   

But what I wanted to talk about was author Thomas Frank's  latest book, 'Pity the Billionaire -- the Hard-times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right'.  Saw him interviewed by Bill Moyer the other night, during which he talked about how it's business as usual in the US -- where the rich are still getting richer and the poor poorer.  The crash of 2008 has changed nothing.  The US is not so much a country as a business, where political power is bought and sold all to the benefit of the rich.  He estimates it costs $100 million to get elected president, a little less to become a congressman or a senator.  And candidates are pretty much exclusively funded by industry and vested interests, taking a ton of causes and issues off the table right there.  He said that after 2008, Obama had a chance to change things with tighter regulations, but chickened out and backed off.  Obama, he said, is a very weak president.  I agree.

He explained how the power brokers and decision makers move seamlessly from white house aide job to lobbyist, thus the fix is always in.  We all know the middle class is disappearing in the US and he attributes this to the demise of the labour movement.  Makes sense.  There is no longer a labour movement in the US.  He also attributes the problem to the two-party system, whereby no other voices are heard.  I did not know that in some states it is illegal to form a third political party.  Can you imagine that in Canada?

In Canada we have many political parties and they can run candidates in every riding across the country.  This makes for a messier, but more democratic, Parliamentary system.  And here, people are not one thing or the other, as in the US.  You may vote one way municipally, another provincially and still another federally.  In fact, who knows the politics of the local alderman or councillor?  I have no clue if our mayor is NDP, Liberal, Green or PC?  And I don't care.

Our current government is taking a big chance muzzling back benchers and shutting down debate because Canadians don't like it.  Canadians will show their displeasure in the next election.

* Had to look up whether it was "bloom" or "blossom".  "Bloom" is the verb, but it means "to blossom"; "blossom" is the flower itself.  From that definition, "blossom" can be either a noun or a verb, which is grammatically known as a gerund.  Don't you just love the English language!