And then, when we get products that are filled with unsafe and dangerous substances that we outlawed 80 years ago, WE’RE FUCKING SURPRISED OR SOMETHING.

The problem is that as far as we’re concerned it’s totally worth the environmental destruction of countries we’ll probably never go to, in working conditions we’ll never have to imagine, so that we can save a few dollars on something that we’ll discard the next time we clean house. Why? Well, we tell ourselves that white people had to go through shitty living conditions too. Fair is fair! Development isn’t free!

Suffering is just what these people should expect if they want to work their way into the first world!

(Of course, it’s bullshit. By the time they get there, there won’t be anything left.)

It’s all because of a syndrome I’ve decided to call “retroactive entitlement,” where we attempt to justify the suffering of others in the name of some long-discredited puritan work ethic. Because now, it seems, people my age believe that it wasn’t actually really wrong to make white people work in horrific conditions for low wages back then, because it has paid for our current late-model automobiles and the roads upon which we drive them. This is what we as smarter, more moral people are entitled to, by having been the children of the people who suffered.

So look at it this way, everybody whose children have been chewing on cadmium-infested teethers: by ignoring workplace standards, by ignoring health and safety product warnings, and by manufacturing things that are full of dangerous – but cheap! – substances, the Chinese are earning their children’s Priuses. It’s not wrong; it’s progress!

But seriously, if you find yourself giving a shit (because our empathy extends to natural disasters, since we can relate: any day now, the entire Pacific Rim is about to slide into the sea), you can help. Just try to keep giving a shit after the aid-dollars trickle out, OK? (Oh yeah, and how’s that rebuilding of New Orleans going?)

It’s more like an expulsion.

Seriously, if you kid gets suspended from school she at least gets to come back in a few days and catch up on missing homework. If she’s expelled, she has to go to a new school, and start her courses all over again. That is what’s happening here – a new session will begin, all the bills will die, and the committees can’t sit (and produce untimely and damning reports of the Harper government) in the interim.

Harper has expelled the MPs from the house, told them their work isn’t needed, and told them to start over again in a few months, but he hasn’t just given them a long vacation – no, they have to redo their courses at a whole other school come the Spring.

And yet they’re all getting extra credit for attending The Cool Sporting Event (in a purely ceremonial fashion, with lots of photo ops, natch.) Shows where our priorities really lie.

Actually, though, the argument works even better if you talk about lowering the maximum wage. Then we can hire more CEOs, at a lower rate. And two is better than one, right?

Why not? Why, it’s too expensive, of course.

Ignore the fact that it’s actually revenue neutral. You have to ignore that fact, because it’s more important that established insurance companies stay in business. They’re in a FIGHT FOR THEIR LIVES! Do you realize what universal medicare in the US would do? It would KILL INSURANCE COMPANIES! And what’s a few dead babies compared to that?

When told the security certificate against him was being removed, Almrei said “Thanks for giving me the last eight years of my life back. Really, I’m so very grateful that my ruined livelihood and family are miraculously restored as a result of this wrong being righted.” No, wait, that’s not what he said at all…

OH MY GOD.

Wait, what? They made the same amount of profit that they did last quarter? Stop the presses…?

The Toronto-based bank on Thursday reported net income of $1.01 billion during the three months up to Oct. 31, 2009. That’s slightly down from $1.014 billion during the same period a year earlier.

But a number of one-time earnings helped push adjusted earnings to a record $1.3 billion or $1.46 a share, up from $665 million a year earlier. That bettered the $1.30 a share that analysts were expecting, according to Thomson Reuters.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s wrong with the economy. When a large, charter bank is concerned because they only made the same amount of PROFIT as they did last year, but not more.

Quick! Lay off some more tellers!

Welll… unless of course you count the values of handing prisoners over to torture, and then covering it up, and then smearing the civil servant who talks about it while under oath during a Parliamentary Committee meeting (because, you know, he should have lied) and then intimidating others to change their stories. Don’t count that.

You could also count voting against a bill that would help get HIV drugs into the hands of five million dying Africans. But you shouldn’t count that either.

Why not? Because we don’t budge on our values. Once we figure out what they are, that is.