COVID-19, Oil Pipelines, and Water

It’s so great that oil is practically worthless now! Now if the governments would just stop bailing out those companies. We don’t need to extract and use more fossil fuels. We already KNOW they are a limited resource. We already KNOW that the environment is utterly destroyed by these processes, polluting ground water and aquifers and land for animals (including human animals) and plants.

We don’t need more pipelines, and more use of government violence to violate ancestral lands, medicine bundles, and the bodies of the matriarchs. We don’t want the RCMP used as a tool of colonial violence against the land and the protectors of the land.

What we want is clean air, clean water, healthy forests, thriving ecosystems, and an abundance of pollinators and scavengers and all the other bits and pieces that make up a healthy planet.

Universal Basic Income and COVID-19

If we already had Universal Basic Income (UBI) in place, COVID-19 would have had way less  economic effect on people, especially poor people, especially renters and students and workers in the gig economy. If everyone had a certain amount of money every month no matter what, we’d all be able to pay our rent and get some groceries during quarantine / isolation / lockdown / social distancing.

Just give every single person in the country, regardless of income or employment status, a certain set amount. The rich would end up paying it back in the their taxes, but at lower income levels, people would have disposable income (thus stimulating the economy, because disposable income and spending are what do that, NOT jobs—jobs are just a means to the money). The costs of this would be balanced out by the fact that we wouldn’t need any more welfare system, no Employment Income Assistance for people on disability or out of work, All those systems would be dismantled: no more welfare fraud lines, no more meetings to prove you’ve applied for a certain number of jobs, no more rent on huge office buildings to house these systems, , etc. And if that doesn’t save enough money yet for UBI, then tax the rich, tax the corporations, and tax the churches. Tax them at the same rates as individuals. It is fucking ridiculous that huge corporations get tax breaks while people on disability can’t make ends meet.