That’s not quite true. A firm wants to sell at a higher price to a customer who can afford it but also sell at a lower price (above cost) to one who can’t afford the “regular price” but would buy it cheaper, thus maximizing profit both via margin and volume. There’s nothing socialist about it.

The government’s plan will offer a one-year, renewable residence permit to undocumented migrants. In order to be eligible, applicants must prove that they have already spent five months living in Spain and have a clean criminal record. They have between 16 April and the end of June to apply.

If they have the same labour rights as the rest of Spanish workers this would help boost wages across the board as most migrants wouldn’t be used as cheap labour anymore.

If so - well done.

True, which is why lobbying in Canada works through different channels. Like cushy pre/post-political jobs in the private sector. Supplying gov’ts with “experts” to hire for various roles. We already have a few of those around Carney. But one my fav examples, since I’ve been active in the net neuteality / independent ISP wars since 2007, is Ian Scott who chaired the CRTC, after working as gov’t lobbyist at Telus. But I’ll paste his foray from Wiki because it illustrates the point perfectly:

Scott was born in Montreal, Quebec. After graduating from the McGill University with an honours BA in political science in 1980, Scott joined the Competition Bureau. From 1990 to 1994, Scott worked in the telecom directorate at the CRTC.[4][5] Scott then joined the private sector, working for Call-Net Enterprises (now part of Rogers Telecom), the Canadian Cable Television Association, and Telus as a lobbyist with the title of vice-president of federal government relations.[6] Between 2007 and 2008, Scott also served as Senior Policy Advisor to the Chairman at the CRTC.[5] Prior to his appointment to CRTC, Scott was serving as the executive director of government and regulatory affairs at Telesat.[6][7]

In July 2017, Scott’s appointment as the Chairperson of CRTC was announced.[4] The announcement and Scott’s background drew concerns from consumer advocacy group OpenMedia.ca.[6][1] Scott’s five-year term began on September 5, 2017,[6] succeeding Jean-Pierre Blais in the role.[1] He was succeeded by Vicky Eatrides.[8]

In December 2019, Scott was caught drinking beer with Bell executive Mirko Bibic (then COO of Bell, currently CEO) at D’Arcy McGee’s pub in Ottawa.[9][10] This meeting took place just one week after Bell filed their appeal of the CRTC’s 2019 wholesale rates.

In February 2022, Scott faced calls to recuse from files related to internet competition due to alleged bias, after the meeting with Bell executive resurfaced.[11] The call for recusal was refused by CRTC.

Just farcical.

That’s not to say that corpos don’t organize individual financial contributions to parties too. They do that. They also pay for attending “dinners” and whatnot. But the revolving door method is just as, if not more important.

E: This process is also involved in what policies politicians propose to voters. These days they rately come from union leadership’s laundry list. Instead they come from sets of policies corpos have the capital to develop and … suggest to politicians. Often via corporate-funded think tanks, if not via lobbyists.

E2: By capital I mean all sorts of capital, not just financial. Political, social capital, etc.

I have a better / easier to answer question:

Why do highly-profitable, large corporations qualify at all?

Answer:

Large corporations have lots more capital to deploy into the political system to ensure they qualify. And if one gets it done, the whole class benefits. The result is, even more money from people working for a wage (salary or hourly) are shifted towards large corporate owner. Beyond what they already get over what they pay us.

* When there’s no spare/idle capacity to produce more

Avoiding as much self-dox as possible:

It’s a well known American private (as-in non gov’t, but publicly traded) corpo with a Canadian sub. There’s this R&D tax credit/subsidy that’s supposed to fund novel R&D. You show novel work to the gov’t, the gov’t gives you money. I’m leading the design/dev of this software feature that’s just … a required feature for our system to do what it needs to do. It required some digging into AOSP to figure out how to do it. Something we regularly do since we develop an Android system component. We finish the feature. Lo and behold comes my boss with a corpo lawyer and says - hey look this lawyer here think this qualifies for this R&D program. We go over it. A month later the same conversation repeats before a gov’t lawyer who approves it. We did not discover an algorithm, or create something of any significant novelty, no value beyond saving cost for this corpo. We did something that many other teams do regularly. Turns out, the corpo has a whole team that asks managers regularly to submit “novel R&D work” to get subsidy money and this happens throughout the org like a clockwork. Again, this is a profitable corporation.

Of course it’s performative and the audience of the performance is potential NDP voters as well as LPC and CPC voters. Why do you think this performance is worse than any other campaing method? To me it’s Avi using whatever platform he’s got to beam the message we voted for, whch we think others would find compelling.

On the value of talking to people, I think building popular support for policy is very important. If you get 60-80% of Canadians to want a policy, whoever’s in power would be pressed into implementing it. I think the technocratic approach we’ve practiced over the last several decades where we outsource policy to politicians who we vote for every few years isn’t working too well. In some areas it’s even undermined democracy by creating wide disparities between what people want and what ends up being done by the elected politicians. Cough … voter reform … cough.

Focusing on laws alone did not work too well for the previous NDP. Avi’s looking to create a bottom-up approach where we get policy from people and socialize them to the ones who aren’t as engaged in order to create demand for this policy, offer ourselves as implementer of this policy. But if the demand we created is strong, it wouldn’t matter much if we’re the ones implementing it. Bottom-up democracy as opposed to top-down.

Neither am I. Now go on with your day, you have an hour left before dinner time, you can make a few more posts about China imprisoning its own citizens, who may hold another citizenship they do not recognize.

There are two ways to break a nation-crippling strike. Take an action that benefits the workers or take an action that benefits the corporation (exec/owner). The libs took actions that benefit the respective corporations. They could have instead broken the strike by stepping in on the side of workers which would have made the workers better off and broken the strike. (And earn them a lot of organic votes.)

I’ve never made the argument that the libs are the same as the reformacons and I maxed out my contribution limits to help them take power instead of PP. That doesn’t change that on the labour file they don’t act in my general interest, instead they help my boss. I should tell you a story abt how I explained a Jira epic to a gov’t lawyer so that my employer could get a subsidy. We had record profits that year.

E:

They could have instead broken the strike by stepping in on the side of workers which would have made the workers better off and broken the strike. (And earn them a lot of organic votes.)

BTW, given how popular such action tends to be if you’re not asking yourself why don’t they do it, you probably should. I began doing it over the last few years and it’s cleared up a lot of seemingly confusing things they do.

E2: Also have been on the Trudeau train almost till the end.

To anyone reading this thread, I implore you to read my posting history and then compare it to the posting history of these accounts, Scotty being one of them. The difference should be revealing.

The LPC consistently weighed on the side of corporations in the major labour disputes over the last few years. They’re friends of the working class insofar as - they improve conditions for corporations and … something good is supposed to happen to workers as a result. Which is just anti-worker trickle down economics that’s lead us to where we are today over the decades it’s been practiced. I hoped for some change in direction on labour diaputes with Carney but so far it’s been more of the same.

Didn’t Avi Lewis air this point recently?

You’re supposed to only lightly nudge the markets. These heavy-handed approaches you propose sound like communism.

/s

since they will jack taxes on everything to recoup the lost income

There’s always cutting services we rely on. Or wait, wait, replace them with AI!

Grab a server too then. 😆

As usual a comment in defense of China by @avidamoeba@lemmy.ca. I’m just waiting for the other sock puppets friends that permanently spread identical narratives.

As usual criticism of misinformation is framed as defence of China. Now with added projection about using alts to spread narratives. Anyone in doubt can view my post history and contrast it to the post history of this set of accounts. Unlike them, I don’t post about China every day, but when I do, it’s often to reply to some false narrative from them. Which apparently makes me the sockpuppet. Brilliant stuff as usual. 🥹

Another story about a Canadian citizen imprisoned in China, a country that does not recognize dual-citizenship, fails to mention that he’s also a Chinese-born, Chinese citizen. A Chinese citizen who in this case was prosecuted in China before seeking asylum in Canada and receiving Canadian citizenship, who then was extradited from another Asian country to China years later. This case is supposed to inform me about the safety of Canadians going to China on visa-free travel. Brilliant.

Not necessarily Big Tech’s AI, but “a program” that can automate this part of the PR process. I’m not interested in a program that gives pointless or bad suggestions. I’m interested in a program that can spot pattern X which I always say “this is bad because Y” and print that for me. If it were easy to write a classic program to do this, I would have written it. If that’s easy with LLMs, I’d train my local Qwen or whatever to do it. Not a faceless corpo that runs this on gas turbines, poisoning people around them and lying to me abt how much it costs me.

And Telus - Telus Health.

They seem to be wisening up. This is among Iranian Americans.