Income of $150,000 needed to live in City of Vancouver-approved “affordable” rental: lawyer Nathalie Baker. This is not a dream. You are awake.

Bookmark this: Indigenous rights are not conditional on public opinion. Just going to keep this one handy as I head to my partner’s family reunion in Manitoba…

Silt C Dam more like: Site C dam facing ‘extremely high probability’ of major construction delay: expert witness. Boondoggle on top of a boondoggle. A boon boon doggle doggle. Stuart Parker:

It’s almost as though the forces of capital are okay with a short-lived left-green minority government blowing its environmental, employment and fiscal credibility shoring up a massive project to provide subsidized electricity to the LNG industry.

The shameless turds in the CTV and Global broadcast and print media empires will brand Site C, “John Horgan’s dam,” the way FoxNews branded Afghanistan and Iraq “Obama’s wars.”

The toadies to capital who run the premier’s office have been dying to seek re-election by proving they are “sound managers” of money and major projects. Manage away, assholes. This mess will destroy your narrative and politically bury you.

That’s the thing about the forces of capital though. They have no ideology other than “make more fucking money at any cost”.

This is what late capitalism looks like…this is the hyperreal: People are donating money to Kylie Jenner to help her become the world’s youngest billionaire. Liz Mars:

Celebrity culture is literally the death of liberalism. Actual activism cannot have faces and names that become brands, or we fail. We fail when we are dazzled by the (seemingly) perfect; she is the enemy of the good.

This is actually one of the more depressing articles I’ve read this month. Fascism is at the gate, the homeless are legion, and this trumpette gets donations.

This is not just shame for those who have donated, but the shame of all those that participate in liberalism and celebrity culture.

It’s this same bewildered frenzy of untethered capital that makes Forbes suggest (then delete) that Amazon should replace public libraries. Or the personalization of environmental catastrophe that began with anti-littering campaigns and continues by saying that banishing straws from $5 iced coffees is meant to save the oceans. They aren’t. Or how socialism is ok for the rich, or for banks, or now for the farmers since capitalism has failed.

How someone like The View’s Meghan McCain can be so put off with sharing resources, you know, like we do with police and fire departments, that it makes her head explode, but this shopping list for the 1% wouldn’t even make her flinch.

It’s why we aren’t on the streets en masse like the French. Precarity dictates that we simply can’t afford it. We just don’t have the job protections like they do in France. It’s also the reason that protesters target private property. The only language capitalism speaks is profit. Quite simply, this is an oligarchy.

Meanwhile, the rich will be eating dinner in the sky above this fishing village cum resort: Dinner in The Sky Vancouver. Some questions. Where do they piss, other than on the poor, and does anyone have a rocket launcher?

Seniors have too much house. Millennials have none. And a business model is born. I thought for a second we were finally getting on with our Logan’s Run type scenario, but they want us to live with the old people instead.

Tax break for Customs House condos in Victoria draws ire. 10 years without property tax? These fuckers are glorified squatters.

Vancouver city staffer’s move to developer prompts calls for cooling-off period. Cooling off, like putting them in a cryogenic chamber for a thousand years?

Tragic: Woman’s death in Vancouver clothing donation bin sparks calls for safer design.

Response:

Yes. Make these bins safer. But let’s talk about why people are so desperate that they need to risk their lives for clothing. These tragic deaths should not be in vain. The conversation needs to be about fixing poverty, not just its instruments. https://t.co/HxHTx6GCVi

— Sean Condon (@seancond) July 24, 2018

Honour Bound: Petition for rent control.

35 years ago today, tenants marched with 50K others through Vancouver as part of the Operation Solidarity demonstrations against 26 proposed laws that attacked education, health care, human rights, workers’ rights, and tenant rights.

One of these bills – which passed – eliminated vacancy control (where rent control was tied to the unit, rather than the tenant). This law had protected housing affordability for renters since 1974.

The BC government of the day believed rent control reduced the incentive to build new private rental housing, and was constraining supply. Three decades later we are wondering: where are all the affordable purpose-built rentals that the free market promised us?