PhilPaine.com

Skye Sepp points out to me that the Con­ser­v­a­tive bud­get is not as innocu­ous as I believed. I find his objec­tion entire­ly con­vinc­ing, and here­by change my mind. He focus­es on the “tax-free $5,000 account” pro­gram, which looks very attrac­tive on the sur­face. But, on clos­er exam­i­na­tion, it turns out to be a swin­dle, aimed at neu­tral­iz­ing the pro­gres­sive income tax sys­tem, so that the rich pay less while the poor and aver­age Cana­di­ans pay more. In the pro­gram, Indi­vid­u­als will be able to put only $5,000 a year into accounts to earn tax-free inter­est and/or cap­i­tal gains. In their first full year of oper­a­tion, this will cost the fed­er­al trea­sury only $50 mil­lion in lost tax rev­enue. That’s why it did­n’t leap out of the bud­get with glar­ing warn­ing lights. In fact, it looked rather warm and fuzzy. The small ini­tial sum makes it look like a mea­sure aimed at Cana­di­ans with mod­est sav­ings. The Con­ser­v­a­tives keep repeat­ing that it would “help some­one buy a car” — which is non­sense on the face of it, as you would have to have very large amounts in sav­ings for it to be use­ful for that. Read more »

Fidel Cas­tro with Chilean dic­ta­tor Augus­to Pinochet, in 1977, cel­e­brat­ing the tri­umph of Pinochet’s tor­ture regime. Pinochet ulti­mate­ly faced a mild pun­ish­ment and repu­di­a­tion, but it looks like Cas­tro will get away with his atroc­i­ties.

Cas­tro with Sovi­et dic­ta­tor Niki­ta Khrushchev. Among oth­er crimes, Khrushchev mas­ter­mind­ed racist pogroms and orches­trat­ed planned famines.. Togeth­er, C and K near­ly brought the world to a nuclear holocaust.

Cas­tro with Ethiopi­an dic­ta­tor Mengis­tu Haile Mari­am. Cas­tro’s behind-the-scenes schem­ing brought Mari­am to pow­er, with Sovi­et sup­port. Cas­tro’s admi­ra­tion for Mengis­tu, who start­ed his reign with a blood­bath, was unbound­ed. In May of 1977 the Swedish gen­er­al sec­re­tary of the Save the Chil­dren Fund stat­ed that “1,000 chil­dren have been killed, and their bod­ies are left in the streets and are being eat­en by wild hye­nas … You can see the heaped-up bod­ies of mur­dered chil­dren, most of them aged eleven to thir­teen, lying in the gut­ter, as you dri­ve out of Addis Aba­ba.” [1] Cas­tro enthu­si­as­ticly applaud­ed the action. Mari­am sub­se­quent­ly under­took one of the cen­tu­ry’s larg­er geno­cides, in which many mil­lions died. Cas­tro’s sup­port for this geno­cide con­tin­ued until Mengis­tu’s fall.

Span­ish dic­ta­tor Fran­cis­co Fran­co. Fran­co and Cas­tro were life-long friends and mutu­al admir­ers. Cas­tro mod­eled his speak­ing style and swag­ger­ing man­ner­isms on Fran­co’s. Cas­tro’s “ide­ol­o­gy” was Span­ish Fas­cism (Falangism) until it sud­den­ly became Marx­ism… a “change” that is mean­ing­less, as it involved no change.

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