Go on, have a drink! If you are a serious drunk, there is always a reason to have another. (I speak here from  the experience of my own  floridly misspent youth.) If you are happy, drink to celebrate. If you are sad, drink for comfort. If neither, have a drink anyway. Thus, the heart-breaking, poisonous, fundamentally stupid logic of addiction.

But there are  many different kinds of addiction. The ruling class, for example, has long been addicted to a few tired old policy demands that they trot out with tiresome regularity, whatever the current situation. These demands include lower taxes on the rich and their corporations, reductions in government regulation and services and a key proposal- union busting (aka “labour peace,”) to weaken the working class’s self organization and self-defence. These endlessly elaborated policy demands reflect neither original thought nor wholeness of heart.

And like the drunkard’s next drink, these policies may bring short term pleasures for employers, like increased profits, lax regulations and a government shrunk to only provide pro business interventions, but the long term consequences are dire for workers. They lead to a ravaged environment, a coarsened society brutally stripped of solidarity, alienation on steroids, pathological consumerism and profound human loneliness.

Another example of this dreary knee jerk policy reflex from the ruling class and its apologists  was on offer the other day in the Vancouver Sun,  always a reliable showcase for ruling class views. (Full disclosure: I  published in the Sun frequently over the decades, mainly book........

© rabble